To ask His Majesty’s Government how they plan to respond to the report of His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services on vetting, misconduct, and misogyny in the police service.
I thank the noble Lord for his Question. This report contains extremely concerning findings about policing culture and vetting processes, which are falling short of the standards expected and damaging public confidence in the process. Forty of the recommendations in the report are for policing itself to adopt, for chief officers and the College of Policing respectively. Chiefs have committed to addressing the recommendations in full and the Home Office will consider and respond to its three recommendations in due course.
I thank the Minister for the reply, but today we learned from the police inspectorate’s report of extraordinary failures in the vetting of applicants to join the force. Is it true that at a time when confidence in the police is being undermined, hundreds, indeed thousands of officers are on our streets who are guilty of serious offences? How has that happened and when was the Home Office aware of it? Is it acceptable that officers with convictions for robbery, indecent exposure and domestic abuse, and links with serious and organised crime, have been accepted? How is it possible that we read of unwarranted stops of women by officers as a result of the so-called booty patrols? This is happening now. It is not historic—it is not “Z Cars” or “Dixon of Dock Green”—so the need for action is urgent. What are the Government, with the police, going to do in practice? The time for reviews is over. It is action that is needed, is it not?
It is, and I agree with the noble Lord entirely that it is completely unacceptable to have those people in our police forces. The fact is that the chiefs need to take immediate action to ensure that vetting is prioritised in their forces and the public can therefore have confidence in them. It is the responsibility of the individual police forces; they are responsible for their own vetting decisions, which they should take in accordance with guidance from the College of Policing. Frankly, I agree with the noble Lord: it is incredibly disappointing—worse than disappointing —that, despite some progress, previous warnings about vetting have not been acted upon. Chiefs must make clear to the vetting units the high standards they expect from them. There is no excuse for poorly recording the rationale in the vetting decisions.
My Lords, this is yet another devastating report on the police service—devastating particularly for female victims, who will be wondering whether they can trust the officer who arrives when they call the police, and devastating for the majority of decent hard-working police officers, who have again been let down by successive Conservative Governments and their own senior officers. Every single time there is mass recruitment in the police service, more of the wrong people slip through the vetting net, and police misconduct, corruption and criminality increase. It happened in the mid-1970s and in the mid-2000s, and it is happening again now. Will the Government tell the police that quality is more important than quantity, and will they give police chiefs the legislation they need to enable them to deal effectively with corrupt officers?
I am not entirely sure I share the noble Lord’s analysis of the quality problem. The fact is that a new online application process has been introduced, replacing an old assessment centre system called SEARCH. The new process operates according to national guidelines and it has been reasonably successful so far. Some 83,500 candidates were invited to complete the assessment; 58,000 have had their results marked and 42,500 have been successful—that is 73.55%. It is not just online; all the candidates have to pass each stage of the recruitment process, which includes assessment centres, vetting, medical assessments and fitness tests—there are lots of face-to-face aspects of the process. I am not convinced that an uplift in numbers affects quality.
My Lords, when asked about these matters the noble Lord says repeatedly that police vetting, discipline and recruitment must be left to chief constables themselves, but should there not be a legislative framework for this? The Government are very ready repeatedly to legislate for extra police powers but not for what the public deserve, which is a rigorous legislative scheme for recruitment, vetting and discipline.
That is the way the system is currently set up. As I say, the Home Office is not trying to absolve itself in this regard, but the fact remains that the vetting processes, which vary to some extent across forces, are the responsibility of chief constables.
My Lords, I remind Members of the House of my previous service in senior positions in a number of police forces in this country. The report in the newspapers this morning will fill all of us with concern—indeed, dismay. The findings of the inspectorate report are horrific. There will be many factors behind this, but I ask a question on one factor only: the need for staff training to develop leadership. The Home Office disbanded the Staff College—and this is nothing to do with the College of Policing—some 12 years ago. It was not re-established, and it badly needs to be so. Do His Majesty’s Government have any plans to re-establish the Staff College?
My Lords, in his first Prime Minister’s Questions last week, Rishi Sunak chose to close the session by bragging and baiting the leader of the Opposition—to braying from the Tory Benches—saying that there are 15,000 new police officers on our streets. When he did so, how much did he know about the scale and nature of this—that hundreds, perhaps thousands of those people may have passed through flawed vetting processes?
As my noble friend will be aware, and as we debated extensively earlier this week, police and crime commissioners, along with chief constables, are responsible for setting out individual forces’ ways of dealing with and performing on these matters.
I ask the Minister gently about the decision to get rid of police officers during the first eight years or so, from 2010 onwards. Now that the Government have changed their policy, there is a need to get a lot of police officers in as quickly as possible in order to tackle crime. Does the Minister not think that those early decisions, in Budget after Budget, to take money away from police recruitment were terrible mistakes?