Macpherson Report: Twenty-two Years On

Sarah Jones Excerpts

Thursday 7th July 2022 Westminster Hall

[Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms McDonagh. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson), the chair of the Home Affairs Committee, on her important contribution today. I put on the record how incredibly important the Home Affairs Committee report is, how thorough and good it was, and how important it is, 20 years on from the Macpherson report, that there is something looking back on what has been achieved and what has not.

My right hon. Friend set out very well what stage we are at, and how much more needs to be done. I am particularly pleased that during the process the Committee managed to talk to young people about their experience at the other end of a stop and search. I was talking to a Conservative police and crime commissioner the other day, who is black, and has been stopped and searched many times. I suspect that most of us in this Chamber have not had that experience because we are white. To understand what it feels like, and how intrusive it can be, I think we need to speak to people who are affected. I congratulate the Committee for thinking to do that—and for ensuring it was done.

We have been talking about racism and disproportionality in policing for decades, certainly since the Scarman report in 1981, the death of Stephen Lawrence in 1992 and then the Macpherson report in 1999. That report was a watershed moment for British policing. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North said, the national figures on public confidence show that there is a significant variation, depending on their ethnicity, in people’s confidence in the police. Confidence in the police was at 74% for white British people, 69% for black African people and 54% for black Caribbean people. The murder of Stephen Lawrence and the campaigning that has been done since has been so important in shining a light on these issues. I cannot not mention Doreen and Neville Lawrence, who have been so instrumental and gracious in the way they have tried to help us all do better when it comes to these big problems of racism.

When the Home Affairs Committee looked at Macpherson, it did find, as has been said, that there has been positive progress in some areas and that the policing of racist hate crimes and the representation of ethnic minorities within police ranks has improved. However, it found that there are persistent, deep-rooted and unjustified racial disparities in key areas. It found a lack of confidence in the police, a lack of progress on recruitment, problems in misconduct proceedings and stark racial disparities in stop and search. Although the Committee found that policing today is very different from 22 years ago and that there have been improvements, there are persistent problems and unjustified racial disparities in a number of key areas.

Macpherson rightly called for police forces to be representative of their communities. At the current rate of recruitment, it will take 20 years until police forces are such. I represent Croydon Central. Croydon is a very diverse borough and although our police force have done some brilliant work with local communities on building trust and confidence—important work, and I praise them for it—the colour of our police officers is still not reflective of the communities that they serve. The unit that goes out and does stop and search in Croydon has about 80 people, and last time I checked there was not a single black officer among them. That absolutely has to change, and change is happening too slowly.

Black and minority ethnic police officers are more than twice as likely to be dismissed from their role than white officers. The report also found that stop and search is more disproportionate now than it was 22 years ago. We know that when it comes to stop and search, the measure of success is whether a knife or something similar is found. When the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) was Home Secretary and reduced the number of stop and searches and made it more intelligence-driven, the incidence of disproportionality fell in that period. It has got worse again with greater use of section 60 stop and search.

[Anne McLaughlin]

Just on that, does the hon. Lady agree that allowing suspicionless stop and search under the Public Order Bill will increase disproportionality rates between the different ethnicities, because now officers will not actually need an excuse to stop and search somebody who might be near a protest?

[Sarah Jones]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right. We both served on the Public Order Bill Committee and it was deeply concerning to note that there has been a large increase in the use of section 60, not just to tackle violent crime and threat of harm but protest without any real consideration of how that will increase disproportionality. That is a real risk. The figures on disproportionality and ethnicity and drug use have already been given. They are really stark, and there is a lot of work to be done on stop and search in that context.

Recent high-profile cases have highlighted concerns around policing. The conduct of officers following the murder of Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman was deeply shocking for everybody. The strip-searching of children such as child Q and the adultification of children, particularly black children, that seems to be commonplace, the failings in the case of the death of Richard Okorogheye and the IOPC report on that and the conduct unveiled in the IOPC’s report into the Charing Cross police station show that there are pockets in policing where progress is not happening fast enough. Those pockets seem to cover large areas, because such problems have not just been seen in the Met police; we have seen similar issues across the country, so all forces need urgently to address the deep and troubling lack of confidence among black communities in policing and the criminal justice system.

I have been working with police chiefs and the NPCC since they set up a big programme of work on disproportionality and racism in policing, and I am pleased that their action plan is significantly better than it was when first drafted. It has been beefed up and has some real legs. I am pleased to see the recommendations in there and the very honest way in which the police chiefs have articulated the problem. They have set out an ambition to identify and address disproportionality in the use of stop and search, particularly in relation to drugs and searches of children. They will have robust accountability and learning processes, based on security and supervision.

The challenge with stop and search and disproportionality across the board is that we can see the numbers but we do not know why there is an issue. We assume things about racism, but there is not proper evidence. Evidence needs to be gathered about the places where people are stopped, the interactions and what happens to people. For example, if someone driving a car is stopped and searched, recording data is now being introduced. That was not the case before, and we know that there is huge disproportionality in stop and search for people who are driving. The evidence is not there for us to pull together and find out what needs to be done.

The NPCC will review the use of the smell of cannabis as grounds for stop and search, because that increases disproportionally. It will also review the use of Tasers, section 60, intimate searches and standardised recording practices. The breadth of what it has set itself to do shows how seriously it takes this issue. It will increase the awareness and understanding of every officer and member of staff about racism, anti-racism, black history and its connection to policing, through the introduction of a mandatory programme of training for all police officers and staff. Of course, we welcome that. It is looking at reducing racial disparities in misconduct cases and the complaints process, and is improving support to black officers and staff. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North highlighted, there are pockets of good practice, but it is not across the board.

The NPCC is looking to trial and test methods for better enabling black people to have their voices heard and raise concerns. It is looking at the criminal exploitation of young black men, which we have talked about, and is working to disrupt the cycle of victims becoming offenders.

The NPCC is introducing a national standard across all recruitment and promotion processes to minimise race disparities. The Home Affairs Committee suggested targets. I am quite a fan of targets, and I have had lots of conversations with police officers about the unintended consequences of them. It is good that the NPCC has gone for a national standard.

All that work is good, but I worry that the Government do not take this issue as seriously as they should. They tend to push it out to individual police forces or to the NPCC, when it chooses to come together. I worried about the introduction of serious violence prevention orders in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 without a proper analysis of what the disproportionate impact will be on young black men. I worried about the extension of section 60 to protests without any proper consideration of disproportionality. We all worried when we read the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report, which the Government commissioned, and the lack of action in it.

I worry that the Government have a habit of waiting for the IOPC or HMIC to look at something and bring out a report, which often takes years, instead of taking action themselves. For example, the IOPC and the inspectorate looked at what happened during lockdown in London, where there was an increase in the use of stop and search. Habits formed around handcuffing people—in particular, young black men—when they were being stopped and searched, which the police are not supposed to do unless there is a threat of violence. What I think happened was that a lot of new, inexperienced police officers came in through the uplift. They were not supervised properly and they learned bad behaviour. They learned how not to do stop and search, because more experienced people were not there to do it. I worry that the Government did not see that problem and intervene to do something about it.

The Labour party has long called for improved anti-racism policies and for tougher action to increase diversity in all ranks of policing. A clear combined plan needs to be implemented by police forces, driven by the Home Office, with proper scrutiny and consequences if action falls short. Racism and bias must be tackled wherever they are found.

After child Q, we all called for new guidance on strip searches, but we still have not seen it. When it comes to the pressing issues of reforming police culture and standards, there are myriad actions that Ministers could choose to take, but they point to inquiries that have been set up and tell us that we must wait for this and wait for that, without taking action themselves. A record number of police forces are in the engage phase, a form of special measures. We need a national overhaul of training and standards. There is much to be done on leadership in the police. We need better leadership development at every rank and a new vetting system. We need to overhaul misconduct cases and new rules on social media use. All of those things would help tackle some of the disproportionality and bad culture in the Home Office. All of those issues could be led from the front, with the Home Office taking action.

A lot of these problems are in the Met. If we look at its ratio of PC to sergeant, we will see that supervision has been cut more than that of any other force, so there are not enough supervisors to make sure that the right cultures and practices are in place for PCs. Surely the Government cannot be happy with that ratio and the lack of support for the raft of new officers. There has been a hollowing out of experience. The Government cannot replace the 21,000 experienced officers they have cut without losing all their helpful experience.

The report is very important. It highlights that progress has been made, but there is lots more to be done. I congratulate the police leaders and the NPCC who are independently pushing new proposals to improve things, but without Government intervention and leadership I do not think we will go fast enough. The suggestion that it will take 20 years to have a police service that is reflective of the communities they serve is a stark example of that.

The policing style in Britain is one of consent. The public have to trust the police for the system to work, and at the moment some communities, particularly black communities, do not. The public need to trust the police. Victims need to get the justice they deserve, regardless of the colour of their skin, and our officers deserve to work in a police force that has high standards and a respectful culture.

Given the chaos around us, the Minister does not have this power right now, but the new Government could choose to drive up standards. They could insist on the recruitment of more black officers, tackle disproportionality and increase professionalism in policing, instead of saying, time and again, as the former Policing Minister always did, that there is an inquiry into this, a report on that, and that we would just have to wait and see. Tackling racism is an active job. As one of the resigning Ministers, the right hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Sajid Javid), said yesterday:

“not doing something is an active decision.”—[Official Report, 6 July 2022; Vol. 717, c. 876.]