Clause 34 - Conduct of disciplinary proceedings
Police Reform Bill [Lords]
6:00 pm
Mr Nick Hawkins (Surrey Heath, Conservative)
I have a couple of points about clause 34. If we had seen it earlier, one of these might have led my hon. Friend the Member for South-East Cambridgeshire and myself to table amendments. We received a briefing from the Police Federation, but unfortunately I saw it for the first time only yesterday evening, which was far too late to table any amendments. The Minister and his advisers may be aware of it. I also seek the Minister's clarification on a problem that I noticed myself.
Let me start with the Police Federation's worries. It is concerned and suspicious about the use of the phrase
''or otherwise participate or intervene in''.
The provision confers a right on the new IPCC and on
''persons as may be specified''
to
''participate in, or to be present at, disciplinary proceedings''.
The Police Federation is concerned that that might be
''a rather underhand way of enabling disciplinary proceedings to be made open to the public.''
If the Minister assures us that that is not what the statute means and that the Government have no intention of allowing these matters to be open to the public, we can rely on the Pepper v. Hart ruling in future cases. However, I share the Police Federation's
concern that police disciplinary proceedings should be no different from in-house disciplinary proceedings in other occupations where the senior manager is the discipline officer.
Having made inquiries in other sectors, the Police Federation could find no parallel example of such in-house disciplinary proceedings being open to the public. In-house disciplinary proceedings are different from employment tribunals or other public tribunals of professional bodies such as the General Medical Council. I sympathise with the Police Federation because, in a previous incarnation before entering the House in 1992, I had responsibility as a corporate lawyer for conducting some in-house disciplinary matters. I am well aware that, within companies and other bodies, such matters are normally confidential in the first instance. Only later might someone take the matter to an employment tribunal so that it then became public.
I said in connection with an earlier clause that matters before an employment tribunal are not always fairly portrayed by the media, which can lead to other concerns. If the Police Federation's suspicions are right that the clause will allow the whole matter to become public, the media might report all the allegations but, if the disciplinary proceedings lead to an acquittal because the complaint was unfounded, the other side might never be reported, as often happens with controversial employment tribunals. In the case to which I referred earlier, huge publicity was given to the allegations against a manager in a subsidiary company of the group for whom I was group legal adviser, but when the case was found to be completely inaccurate and the tribunal comprehensively rejected the allegations, there was no publicity at all. The viewing public and those who read newspapers were given the impression that all the allegations were true, because they were never countered.
We are talking about maintaining public confidence, and clearly if that happened to police officers, it would be a huge concern. The Police Federation's interpretation is that that could be a result of the way in which clause 34 is drafted. I hope that the Minister will say that that is not the intention, but we shall hear in a moment.
The Police Federation's other serious concern about the drafting of the clause relates to the ability of the IPCC to ''bring and conduct'' disciplinary proceedings. There are concerns that the same body may have the power
''both to investigate and to prosecute disciplinary matters.''
The federation rightly refers to what the royal commission on criminal procedure said in 1981, which has been said by many public bodies down the years. It said that
''it is . . . unsatisfactory that the person who has investigated the case should be the person responsible for the decision to prosecute''.
Down the years, many bodies have said that the investigation and prosecution should be in separate hands.
The Police Federation raised those two concerns. My concern when I initially read the clause was that there might be an opportunity for another body that
normally has nothing to do with the police or police discipline to say under the terms of the clause that it has the right to come along and take part in the court proceedings. In recent years and other contexts, we have seen that a body such as the Consumers Association might try to come to the court and say, ''We have locus standi—we have the right to be heard on this matter.''
I hope once again that the Minister will reassure us by saying that the clause will not allow any other body—be it the Consumers Association, the Commission for Racial Equality or any other quango or single-issue lobby group—to intervene in what should be an in-house private procedure. I do not want clause 34 to act as a sort of ''open sesame'' provision and allow vast numbers of bodies to intervene in in-house police disciplinary proceedings. The Minister is shaking his head, which I hope means he will reassure us, but I have at least raised the concerns of the Police Federation and of my hon. Friends and I.