here - United Kingdom Parliament

295WH
PACE (Stop and Search)
1 DECEMBER 2010
PACE (Stop and Search)
296WH
[Nick Herbert]
We are keen to ensure that officers strike the right
balance between necessary bureaucracy for the sake of
accountability—which is important—and irrelevant form
filling that wastes the time of the police and the public,
and impacts unduly on citizens going about their business
by asking unnecessary questions.
It is important to understand how policing, and the
bureaucracy that surrounds it, impacts on community
relations. Procedures such as stop and account and stop
and search are most effective when local communities
understand them and support their use. There is a
difference between stop and account and stop and
search, and we must be mindful of ensuring that the
processes associated with them are not confused. Stop
and account is where an individual is asked to account
for their presence, actions and so on, but they are not
searched. It can be one step on from the general
conversations that officers have with members of the
public every day. Stop and search clearly goes further
than that. It is an intrusive procedure and therefore a
cause of more concern among local communities.
Many of the proposed changes to the Police and
Criminal Evidence Act 1984 code of practice A are
necessary to reverse the increase in paperwork generated
by the last Government. In our judgment, that paperwork
hampers police operations and leads to encounters with
the public that are ineffective, bureaucratised and poorly
understood. We need officers on the street to record
only information that is of value, and it may differ from
situation to situation and from force to force. I do not
want to see in place measures that discourage proper
interaction between police officers and members of the
public.
Let me explain the rationale behind our stop-and-account
proposals. The abolition of the national recording
requirement for stop and account will potentially free
up around 450,000 hours of police time, allowing officers
to increase the quality—and shorten the duration—of
these brief encounters, and enabling forces to be more
responsive to the communities that they serve.
I share my hon. Friend’s concerns about the level of
disproportionality in the use of police powers. However,
when the statistics for stop and account are examined
more closely, it appears that it is not used in a
disproportionate manner across England and Wales. It
is also fair to say that there is less concern about the
operation of stop and account than there is about stop
and search. That is why we are removing fully the
national requirement for recording stops and accounts,
leaving local recording to a local decision where a local
need is identified.
Individual police forces know their own communities
better than Whitehall. Increasingly, they will be answerable
to their local communities, as we have set out today
with the introduction of the Police Reform and Social
Responsibility Bill. Those forces should know the extent
to which the operation of stop and account is a matter
of particular local concern. They are best placed to
analyse their own statistics and understand how they
use the tactic and how it impacts on ethnic minority
groups locally, and they should be held to account by
their elected police and crime commissioners, with the
scrutiny of new police and crime panels to ensure the
proper use of such procedures.
The Government understand that stop and search is
a very different tool and is far more intrusive. It is right
that its monitoring and use should continue, both nationally
and at a local level. We are reducing the number of
pieces of data to be completed on a stop-and-search
record from 12 to seven, saving more than 300,000
hours of officers’ time every year as well as reducing the
duration of these encounters for those stopped and
searched.
My hon. Friend expressed concern about some of the
pieces of data that will be removed. However, key
information about each encounter will still be recorded,
including the self-defined ethnicity of the person stopped,
which is obviously the critical information, and we
have made minor amendments to code A to encourage
the further use of mobile technology to reduce even
further the time taken to record each stop and search.
The 12 recording requirements used during a stop-andsearch
encounter will be reduced to seven: ethnicity, the
object of the search, the grounds for the search, the
identity of the officer carrying out the stop and search,
the date, the time and the place. Such requirements do
not prevent police officers from recording information
that they feel would be useful intelligence, but it is not
necessary as a Government requirement for such
information to be held in a stop-and-search record.
Our amendments to the guidance on the use of
section 44 stop-and-search powers follow the Home
Secretary’s announcement on 8 July, which curtailed the
use of this power in the light of the judgment of the
European Court of Human Rights in the case of Gillan
and Quinton v. United Kingdom. My hon. Friend also
raised issues around section 60 stop-and-search powers,
both in terms of the guidance supporting officers’ use
of this power, and the disproportionality figures that
have been reported in the press recently.
Let me assure my hon. Friend and all hon. Members
that there was never any intention on the part of the
Government to encourage the use of ethnic profiling or
unlawful discrimination in the use of this power—far
from it. The original draft of the guidance contained
wording that had been introduced in code A by the
previous Government in 2003 in relation to the police’s
use of section 44 powers. The original draft explained
that all authorisations had to be supported by clear
intelligence and that, on occasion, intelligence could
suggest a possible suspect description that included
characteristics such as race, age, sex and so on. However,
it also stipulated that race should never be the sole
reason for stopping someone under section 60.
The guidance was evidently not clear enough and was
misconstrued. We therefore considered the responses to
the statutory consultation and have redrafted the relevant
paragraphs to include all protected characteristics under
the Equality Act 2010. We have stated clearly that
unlawful discrimination will not be tolerated.
I must, however, warn against judging the use of a
key tool such as section 60 purely on a national statistic.
The figures cited in the press about black people being
26 times more likely than white people to be stopped
and searched under section 60 are potentially misleading
if they are not examined a little more closely. In 2008-09,
76% of all section 60 stops and searches were conducted
by the Metropolitan Police Service in London. Therefore,
to assess the use of that power against the national
population’s ethnicity breakdown is deceptive. We need