Police Integrity

Mark Reckless Excerpts

Tuesday 12th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

I welcome the shadow Home Secretary’s support on a number of the issues I have addressed today, most significantly the implementation of the Leveson report recommendations, the code of ethics and action on retired officers. She asked two key questions. First, on the national register, the College of Policing will look at how best to address the issue in terms of its general work with police officers and others on standards and development. I expect that there will at least be a list of those officers who have been struck off, and whom one would not expect other police forces, here in the UK or elsewhere, to take on. It is for the College of Policing to decide the form in which to publish that list, and it will consider that matter very shortly.

Secondly, the right hon. Lady said there were a lot of overlapping organisations, and she mentioned the HMIC and the IPCC. HMIC does not investigate individual complaints against individual officers; that is the job of the IPCC. HMIC has a different role. It looks at the efficiency and effectiveness of police forces; it looks across the force, not at individual complaints. Those two bodies do two different jobs.

The right hon. Lady referred to the changes and comments we made during the passage of the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011. We have indeed put more low-level complaints to the individual forces, but the point I am making today is that we want to ensure the IPCC can handle all the serious and sensitive allegations made against police officers. Last year, just 330 out of 2,100 such cases were independently investigated or supervised and managed by the IPCC. I think it should be able to look at all the serious and sensitive allegations against police officers, which is why we are looking to transfer resources from police standards departments in police forces to the IPCC. We will look at any manpower or funding implications and ensure that the IPCC has sufficient resources to be able to deal with all the cases we feel it should be dealing with.

The right hon. Lady asked why we do not just scrap the IPCC and set it up again with a different name. Today, I have set out the key issues of substance that will make a difference to the ability of the IPCC to do its work. The question that she has to answer is whether she is interested merely in rebranding something, or whether she is genuinely interested in agreeing with me on what the IPCC needs to be able to do its job properly.

[Mark Reckless (Rochester and Strood) (Con)]

The Home Secretary has probably done more to reform the police than any Home Secretary since Robert Peel. Many police officers are concerned, however, that their profession has come to be held in less respect. Does she expect the College of Policing to be the basis, through professional standards, on which the police can reclaim their self-respect?

[Mrs May]

I expect that the College of Policing will make a real difference. I believe setting up a professional standards body for the police that will set standards and take on many of the ACPO business areas in looking at those standards, as well as dealing with the ethics of policing for the area that it covers and with the training and development of officers, will give a boost to officers in terms of their professionalism and the regard in which they are held. I am pleased that Professor Shirley Pearce, former vice-chancellor of Loughborough university, is the chairman. We also have a very energetic chief executive in Chief Constable Alex Marshall, and I am pleased that members of the police force at all ranks are part of the college, including members of police staff. It is important that it covers everybody.