Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, if she will make a duty of candour a legal requirement for all police officers.

The Government takes police integrity and accountability extremely seriously. In February 2020, we introduced a statutory duty of cooperation for serving police officers as part of wider integrity reforms, making it clear that officers have a responsibility to cooperate with investigations, inquiries and formal proceedings when acting as a witness. A failure to cooperate with this duty is a breach of the statutory standards of professional behaviour, by which all officers must abide, and could therefore result in disciplinary sanction.

The Home Office will continue to assess the impact of this existing duty on police co-operation with inquiries and investigations, and the Home Secretary will set out her conclusions on a specific duty of candour for the police later this year in response to the reports of Bishop James Jones on the experiences of Hillsborough families’, and of the Daniel Morgan Independent Panel.