Police Accountability

Lord Sharpe of Epsom Excerpts

Monday 28th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for this Statement and I join my right honourable friend the shadow Home Secretary in welcoming its contents. It is true that, for the British consent-based policing model to work, the trust must be mutual. The people must trust the police and the police must trust the system in order to perform their duties effectively. But too often lately both sides have been let down.

I therefore welcome that this Government are continuing the work of the previous Government on accountability. I particularly welcome the work of Dame Elish Angiolini on police culture; having worked with her, I have no doubt at all that her final report will make very sensible recommendations. I am also pleased that previously agreed measures to ensure that officers convicted of certain criminal offences are automatically found to have committed gross misconduct, and the empowering of chief constables to dismiss them, will be beefed up and taken forward. On these Benches we welcome these moves.

However, we are here because of the acquittal of Sergeant Martyn Blake in his trial for the murder of Chris Kaba. This raises several questions, which I would like to put to the Minister. First, I welcome that in future there will be a presumption of anonymity for accused officers. I can only imagine the struggles that Sergeant Blake and his family have been through, and they are still probably living in fear. It was appalling to read that Mr Kaba’s alleged gang associates had put a bounty on Sergeant Blake’s head. Could the Minister update the House on whether there are police investigations to find those responsible for this threat to Sergeant Blake’s life?

I also welcome that reviews will be held of the thresholds for criminal misconduct and inquest investigations, which, as the Statement notes, add

“complexity, confusion and delay to the system”.

But I would go further. Since 2010, British police have shot dead 30 people, an average of 2.1 per year. In the past decade, there have been only 66 incidents where the police have discharged a weapon at all, even though armed police are deployed to around 18,000 incidents every year. In terms of police killings per 10 million people, the only countries with a lower death rate than the UK are Japan and Iceland. Britain does not have a police brutality problem. The stats prove this and campaigners need to acknowledge it. The armed police show great restraint in the face of danger and should be commended as such. Does the Minister agree?

As my right honourable friend James Cleverly noted, training for these roles should form a legitimate part of the defence when criminal prosecutions are brought forward. This is not to argue that officers are above the law. If there are any doubts, they must of course be investigated, but we owe it to them not to create a situation in which, as James Cleverly stated, they are disincentivised from acting decisively. That puts us all at risk. Does the Minister agree?

This is a difficult and sensitive subject. Community cohesion and tensions will inevitably be mentioned in this and subsequent debates, which is right and proper. We have had a summer in which the fabric of our society has been stretched to breaking point in many cases. We in these Houses must therefore be very careful what we say to avoid stoking tensions and exacerbating problems. So I ask the Minister to condemn the comments of his honourable friend the Member for Liverpool, Riverside, who said that the media were using racist tropes to justify Chris Kaba’s killing. They are not.

Any death at the hands of the police is a tragedy, but in this case an officer doing his duty has also had his life ruined. Of course, my thoughts are with the relatives of Chris Kaba, but also with Sergeant Blake’s family. I again place on record my thanks to all the police, armed and unarmed, who put themselves in harm’s way. They are heroes who would rather walk towards dangerous criminals than run away from them. As I said in my opening remarks, I welcome this Statement, but we need answers to the more difficult questions if we are truly to learn anything at all from this tragic case.

[Baroness Doocey (LD)]

My Lords, we welcome the Home Secretary’s emphasis on speeding up proceedings in cases involving police using lethal force. Protracted investigations cause additional trauma to bereaved families, prolong the stress for officers involved and damage wider police morale. We also welcome the equalisation of thresholds for criminal charges to ensure that the police and public are held to the same standards.

These measures are long overdue, because we have now reached a point where police officers feel deeply undervalued, both by the public at large and by many politicians. Low public confidence has led police to believe that the work they do is not always appreciated. Assaults and attacks on police are now a daily occurrence. A recent review found that more than half had been physically attacked in the previous year, with a significant number requiring medical attention.

A police officer’s every move is now captured both on their bodycam and, increasingly, by members of the public, ensuring that their every action and split-second decision is recorded, criticised and documented for posterity on social media. Trial by media raises the real risk that, when things go wrong, the focus is on blaming individual officers, even when the reality points to wider systemic failings. I hope that these measures around the presumption of anonymity and the need to take account of officers’ training and guidance will help alleviate some of these problems.

I admit that I am slightly uneasy about the timing of this announcement, given the danger that it could be taken by some to signal the lowering of police accountability. I am therefore relieved to hear that the Government have made an urgent commitment to toughen up procedures around police misconduct and vetting. By putting national vetting standards on a statutory footing, we can make concrete progress in restoring public confidence. We particularly want to see the rules around officers accused of domestic abuse or sexual offences tightened significantly.

We must remember that the Kaba case is not taking place in a vacuum. Last year, the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, highlighted the continuing presence of racism within policing almost 25 years after a similar conclusion was reached by Macpherson. Data from the National Police Chiefs’ Council shows that black people are five times more likely than white people to have force used against them. It is therefore critical that this accountability review strikes the right balance. It must be accompanied by a clear timetable to implement the existing Angiolini and Casey review recommendations. The public need to be assured that bad officers will always be held to account, that guilty officers will always be punished and that this will be done fairly and transparently. But, at the same time, it is imperative that our police are reassured that if they do the right thing and follow their training, the system will protect them and not be stacked against them.

I ask the Minister whether this review will be open to contributions from all sides. We know that the police have already made submissions, but what opportunity will there be for representatives of, for example, the black community, who are of course particularly invested in the outcome, to contribute?

I have two final points. Polls suggest that more than a third of the public lack confidence in the Independent Office for Police Conduct—IOPC—while barely one in five black people think that it is impartial. This is not good enough, nor is the fact that IOPC recommendations are almost always out of date by the time they are published because it can take years for individual case proceedings to conclude. The proposal for a lessons-learned database is extremely welcome in this context. Nevertheless, a recent independent review made 93 recommendations to improve the IOPC. What steps are the Government taking to implement these recommendations?

Finally, reports as far back as Scarman in 1981 point to the need to urgently address the lack of diversity in policing, to better reflect the communities the police serve. The Home Secretary said in her Statement that she wants to introduce neighbourhood policing, so will the Government commit to ensuring that such reform is used as a platform to address this lack of diversity, so that people in all communities believe that the police are on their side?