Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, if she will make it her policy that volunteers should not be used in the operational areas of (a) child sexual exploitation, (b) serious crime and (c) counter-terrorism under proposals in the Policing and Crime Bill.

Our consultation on the reform of the roles and powers of civilians and volunteers demonstrated the demand from forces for flexibility in how they deploy volunteer staff, and therefore we should not make assumptions about the operational areas where volunteers can make a contribution. For example, they can play a hugely valuable role in supporting vulnerable victims. As Victim Support told the consultation: “enabling chief officers to designate powers to volunteers would allow them to assist police officers in supporting victims of crime and improving service delivery.”

Volunteers will be subject to the same tests as police staff before they are designated with powers, namely that the chief officer must be satisfied that they are suitable, capable and adequately trained (that is, the tests set out in section 38(4) of the Police Reform Act 2002), so police forces will not be able to deploy volunteers on tasks they are not capable of performing.

If it is acceptable to confer all the powers of a constable on one type of volunteer, namely special constables, it is inconsistent to object in principle to conferring a narrower set of powers on other suitably trained volunteers. Under this Bill, however, Parliament will retain control of the list of core powers that will only be available to police officers. For example, all powers under counter-terrorism legislation are listed in Schedule 7 to the Bill as core powers of police officers.

These reforms will place the individual decision-making as to which personnel perform which roles firmly in the hands of chief officers, who have the professional expertise and local knowledge to know which powers are needed in their area. It is important that we do not restrict the operational powers of the police, who retain the right to deploy staff as they see fit.