Stop and Search

Lord Sharpe of Epsom Excerpts

Tuesday 20th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord German (LD)]

My Lords, we on these Benches look at this Statement in respect of whether it will produce the outcome the Government are seeking, which is, of course, a reduction in knife crime. Regrettably, I believe this Statement is one which ramps up the rhetoric that strong-arm actions will put an end to knife crime. That rhetoric needs to be tested against the evidence to see whether it works.

Police stop and search is an intrusive power that is used disproportionately against visible minorities. You are seven times more likely to be stopped and searched by the police if you are black than if you are white, if suspicion is required; and 14 more times more likely to be stopped and searched if no suspicion is required. The proposal in the Statement from the Home Secretary is based on suspects of violent crime and talks about the implications for the black community, but there is a danger that these figures can be easily misinterpreted. There is a difference between a few people committing a large number of offences and a large number of black people being involved in violent crime. I suspect that the reality is the former. Perhaps the Minister could confirm that when referring to the figures in the Statement.

More than that, the Government’s own research suggests that stop and search is not an effective deterrent in reducing offending. Operation Blunt 2, from 2008 to 2011, demonstrated that ramping up stop and search in order to reduce knife crime has little or no effect, but Operation Trident in the early 2000s demonstrated that where police and the black communities worked together to reduce black-on-black shootings, there was a significant increase in prosecutions and a reduction in the number of offences. Also, the Government’s own evidence, which they chose to look at in respect of the use of stop and search, produces at most a static response, but often, it shows that simply increasing the use of that power is unlikely to reduce crime. That was the Government’s own evidence in the research they commissioned.

On the one hand, we have the noble Baroness, Lady Casey of Blackstock, pulling in one direction, as mentioned by the noble Lord Ponsonby, in wanting stop and search to be based on collaboration, listening and engagement; and on the other we have this Government pulling in the opposite direction, by increasing the number without that necessary collaboration. So, do the Government believe, against their own evidence, that if stop and search goes up, crime will come down? Have the Government considered the lessons learned from Operation Blunt 2? Secondly, do the Government agree that if a community views police activity as unfair, public trust and police legitimacy are weakened?

Finally, how do the Government intend to ensure, as the Statement says, that “every community” is

“able to trust in stop and search”.—[Official Report, Commons 19/6/23; col. 570.]?

How is that going to be brought about? How can it be brought about without the necessary collaboration which was part of the Casey report? I would be grateful if the Minister addressed those issues, because without that certainty, it is more likely that the rhetoric will fail and we will not enable the desired outcome which all of us want, which is to achieve a reduction in knife crime.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Home Office (Lord Sharpe of Epsom) (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lords, Lord Ponsonby and Lord German, for their remarks. I defer to the extensive front-line knowledge of this subject of the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby; I know he does a great deal of work on this. I shall make a few general remarks and then address some of the questions that have been posed.

It is not just my view but the view of the police that stop and search is fundamentally about saving lives and keeping the public safe, and that, where used proportionately and judiciously, as the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, said, it works, and I will attempt to provide the statistics that prove that. For example, since 2019 more than 40,000 weapons have been seized through stop and search and 220,000 arrests have been made. The 2021 inspectorate report concluded that the vast majority of stop and search decisions are based on reasonable grounds. That is potentially thousands of lives saved and countless violent incidents prevented.

The noble Lord, Lord German, referred to Operation Blunt 2, which I think he said took place between 2008 and 2011. In 2010, this was written, and I agree with it:

“If serious violence can be prevented, then police officers must be empowered to conduct blanket stop-and search-operations which target the most likely individuals. Yes, it is a draconian power; yes, its use should be limited. But there are circumstances where such powers are absolutely necessary”.


That was the noble Lord’s colleague, the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, writing in the Daily Mail in 2010, and I agree with him.

To those who claim that it is a disproportionate or racist tool, I say that we must be honest about what this means for victims. Black people are four times more likely to be murdered than white people, and they are more likely to be victims of knife crime than young white men—that is the disproportionality that we are focused on stopping. It is important that we look at the matter with a cool head and on the basis of the evidence.

The emerging picture based on London suggests that, when we adjust the data to consider the proportion of suspects in an area and its demographics, rather than considering the data for the country as a whole, the disproportionality of stop and search falls away hugely. My right honourable friend the Home Secretary referred to this as

“a more sophisticated approach to calculating disparity”.—[Official Report, Commons, 19/6/23; col. 570.]

I urge noble Lords to consider and reflect on those facts, while acknowledging that more work needs to be done on the methodology.

Of course, it is right that the powers are used in a responsible and measured way, which is why engagement with communities has to be respectful, as both noble Lords noted. It is right that the powers are subject to the highest levels of scrutiny. We now see very few complaints about individual stop and searches. Training on legal and procedural justice has improved, and we have seen confidence levels increase.

As outlined in the Statement, the Home Secretary wrote to all chief constables, and one of the things she asked of them was to be “proactive” in publishing body-worn video footage. That will obviously protect officers who conduct themselves properly, but it is also designed to instil greater public confidence, which is the linchpin of our model of policing by consent. The Government are looking carefully at strengthening local community scrutiny.

Transparency is of course vital, as is community engagement. We want every community to be able to trust stop and search, and we want to present a clear picture of the stop and search landscape that shows the good work being done on the front line. The Government will amend the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 Code A to make clear when the police should communicate when suspicionless powers are used in a public order and Section 60 context. Suspicionless stop and search must be used responsibly, but we cannot do without it.

We are also mandating data collection on stop and search, to which I referred, as part of the annual data requirement for the government statistics bulletin that is published every year. We collect more data on stop and search than ever before, and this is posted online, enabling police and crime commissioners and others to hold forces to account for their use. Disparities in the use of stop and search remain, but they have continued to decrease for the last three years.

I said that there will be a more sophisticated approach to calculating disparity in the Metropolitan Police Service, which is where about 40% of stop and searches take place—I note the noble Lord’s point about various regional disparities in methods. I do not know the precise answers to his questions about regional engagement, but I will endeavour to find out and report back as soon as I am able.

I do not have the statistics to hand on body-worn video, and in fact I do not know whether the data is collected—I certainly hope it is. I would like to look into that further and report back to the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby. The fact is that there is broad cross-community support for this in principle, especially for searches for weapons, but we acknowledge and stress that this is contingent and fragile. So, to that end, this transparency is absolutely necessary.

I was asked about the serious violence strategy and the various programmes and what have you that the Government have put in place. The Government made £110 million available this financial year, 2023-24, to tackle serious violence, including murder and knife crime. This includes funding for a network of 20 violence reduction units, delivering early intervention and prevention programmes to divert young people away from a life of crime, and bringing together local partners to tackle the drivers of violence in their areas. VRUs follow a public health approach and have reached over 215,000 vulnerable young people in their third year of funding alone.

There is further investment in our Grip hotspot policing programme, to which I have referred from the Dispatch Box before. It operates in the same 20 areas as VRUs and is helping to drive down serious violence by using data processes to identify the top serious violence hotspots. Those two programmes alone have prevented an estimated 136,000 violent offences in their first three years of operation.

We invested £200 million over 10 years in the Youth Endowment Fund, which provides funding for over 230 organisations that have reached over 117,000 young people since it was set up in 2019.

Finally, we have introduced the serious violence duty, which requires public bodies to work collaboratively, to share data and information, and to put in place plans to prevent and reduce serious violence within their local communities based on a public health approach to tackling the scourge of knife crime. Objectively, it is not right to say that the Government have not updated their serious violence strategies and processes.

I remind the House that serious violence reduction orders are being trialled; they have been since April. For the edification of the House, six SVROs have been issued—five in Merseyside and one in the West Midlands. Four of those are live in the community and two will become live when the offenders are released from prison. Officers will now proactively stop and search those with an order, deterring them from carrying weapons and making it more likely that they will be caught if they persist in doing so. It is obviously too early to assess the success or otherwise of this program but anecdotal evidence so far from the Merseyside Police would suggest that it is proving a very useful tool.

I am proud of this Government’s achievements on policing: we have a record number of police officers, more than ever before; 100,000 weapons have been seized since 2019; and crime is falling—in fact, serious violent crime has fallen by 40% since 2010.

As I have said before from the Dispatch Box, percentages are a very dry way of looking at this. We all have to bear in mind the points I made in my opening paragraph of remarks that this is really about individuals. The fact is that the disproportionality around stop and search should be borne very carefully in mind when we look at the proportion of those who are most badly affected and most likely to become victims.

I hope that I have answered the main questions. If I have not, I will come back to them.

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

My Lords, I live in a street in inner London which is well known to the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, as he went to school via it. On Thursday night, I chaired the selection of the impressive Festus Akinbusoye, the police and crime commissioner of Bedfordshire. He knows only too well how you can achieve from an ethnic minority in the police community. On Friday, I had seven police cars and ambulances outside my house, dealing with a machete attack in the house next door. The police dealt with the case in an exemplary manner but, as the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, identified, there is the risk of alienation. From the pictures I have, not one of the policemen dealing with that case was non-white. Is it really surprising, when it comes to stop and search, that there is alienation among the ethnic communities, when one faces that sort of position? Could my noble friend the Minister identify what efforts are being made to improve the diversity of police forces across the United Kingdom?

[Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for his question, and I am delighted to hear him describe the police’s activities as exemplary. I have three points to make on this subject.

First, the police themselves, in particular the Metropolitan Police, have said that they need to do a good deal more in this regard, and I certainly trust them to do that. The Metropolitan Police, under Sir Mark Rowley, should be given time to make the changes we all want to see.

Secondly, I emphasise again that young black men are disproportionately more likely to be victims of serious and violent crime, but the 2021 report by the inspectorate concluded that the vast majority of searches were conducted on reasonable grounds. It is for the police to make sure that their powers are understood and to explain themselves carefully. The expanding use of body-worn cameras, to which we have referred, will go a long way to help that. As I said earlier, we should all accept and acknowledge that community support is there in principle, although it is contingent and fragile. These measures will go a long way to solidify that while trust is being restored.

Finally, I am pleased that my noble friend has mentioned Festus Akinbusoye. He is an excellent PCC, and I am sure that he will become an excellent MP in due course. He has long been a supporter of mine, and it is a great pleasure to return the favour.

[Lord Davies of Brixton (Lab)]

My Lords, I hope the Minister will agree with me that the all-too-common stereotype of knife crime being simply a black issue is dangerously counterproductive, and that when the Home Office says that stop and search works, it is a statement that is more in search of a headline and, in practice, needs to be heavily qualified. The figures show, I believe, that stop and search on its own is a blunt and ineffective tactic. What we need to do is understand better the root cause of this sort of crime and the reasons why some of our young people feel that they need to carry a knife. There are many causes, of course, but I would suggest that lack of faith in the police is an important one, particularly among those who suffer from this type of crime. In large part, this is driven by what the Independent Office for Police Conduct found to be the “disproportionate impact” of stop and search on black, Asian and minority ethnic communities. When making a Statement about suspicionless stop and search, how can the Minister fail to make any reference to the well-evidenced racist and discriminatory use of it when we know that this leads to less, not more, confidence in policing?

[Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)]

My Lords, I am afraid that I disagree with the noble Lord in his assertions. Earlier, I gave statistics on the number of knives that have been removed from the streets and the number of crimes that have been prevented because of stop and search. I will give some more examples. In Manchester, the chief constable, Stephen Watson, has said that a 260% increase in the use of stop and search over a defined period correlated with a 50% reduction in firearms discharges and a fall in the number of complaints. I think that there has been a concerted effort to improve; my right honourable friend the Home Secretary said this the other day in the House of Commons. We need to improve the way in which stop and search is applied but also understood; to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, it has to be applied judiciously, proportionately and legitimately.

On the proportionality side, I go back to my original comments. Young black men are disproportionately likely to be the victims of crime. There are disparities in the use of stop and search—they remain and we acknowledge them—but it is positive that they have continued to decrease from nine and a half times in 2017-18 under the 2011 census data to 4.9 times in 2021-22 under the 2021 census data. I also referred to the changing methodology in collecting these statistics, which brings the numbers down even further. However, as I say, that methodology is very much in its initial stages. We will work more on it and will, I am sure, hear more about it.

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, was not the exhortation by the Home secretary to chief constables an example of the Executive getting involved in operational matters? It seems to me completely straightforward that it was. Is that not wrong in terms of the way our policing should work?

[Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)]

No, I do not think it was. She has written to all chief constables and asked them to provide strategic leadership and direction when it comes to the use of stop and search powers. That is not operational. She asked them to ensure that every officer is confident in the effective and appropriate use of all stop and search powers, including the use of suspicionless powers. That is not operational. Investigating instances where somebody is obstructing or interfering with the use of these powers and, if necessary, making arrests is not operational. As I have also said, she asked them to be proactive in publishing body-worn video footage, which will protect officers who conduct themselves properly and will also lead to instilling greater public confidence.

House adjourned at 8.08 pm.