Clause 3 - Bail elsewhere than at police station
Criminal Justice Bill
4:30 pm
Mr Dominic Grieve (Beaconsfield, Conservative)
I, too, welcome you to the Chair this afternoon, Mr. Cran.
The concerns raised by the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) are broadly shared by the Conservative party. It is interesting that we have come to roughly the same conclusion, albeit using a slightly different approach. He made points that we believe should be considered in the context of bail elsewhere than at a police station.
I fully accept that, although our amendments Nos. 10 and 11 would not amend anything that the Minister is adding to the 1984 Act, they would amend the existing Act in several important ways. This might be a good opportunity to revisit the Act and its working,
and to consider some of the areas that, in my experience, can give cause for concern.
As the Minister will have seen, amendment No. 10 is about the circumstances in which a person may not be taken immediately to a police station. I am aware from my professional practice that there will be circumstances in which it is essential—rather than simply necessary—not to take someone who has been arrested immediately to a police station.
In amendment No. 11, I suggest a limit of two hours. I am the first to acknowledge that there may be circumstances in which two hours is too short. I hope that the Minister will regard the amendments as probing. We tabled them to try to simulate debate in Committee on an important issue.
As a general principle, I have no doubt that when someone is arrested, the best place for him to be as soon as possible, from his point of view as well as for the proper administration of the justice system, is in a police station. That is where he will get access to legal representation, where a proper assessment will be made of his condition, where a proper search of his documentation can be carried out, where a doctor can be called if necessary, and where the process of investigation can take place in an environment that is controlled and properly regulated by PACE.
Anywhere else falls outside that. That said, I can think of at least one case in which I was involved in which a man approached a police officer and informed him that he had just stabbed a man and believed that he had killed him, although he did not know where that person was in relation to the domestic premises in which the stabbing had taken place. The police spent some time with the man trying to find out where he had committed the offence. Eventually, they found a corpse. One can well understand that, in those circumstances, the priority was not to get the individual to the police station, but to try to see whether it would be possible to identify the place where the victim lay, with the help of the man who was expressing some contrition about what he had done. That must be a perfect example of circumstances in which getting someone to a police station is a lower priority.
Even if I can concede that the two-hour limit in amendment No. 11 may be too fixed in this context, I wonder about the use of ''essential'' as opposed to ''necessary'', because there should be a rigorous test to decide not to take a person to a police station, for the purposes of the police carrying out the investigation. I see no reason why it would not have been possible, in the circumstances and with the offence that I have just described, even with the word ''essential'', not to take that person to the police station. It would have been possible for the police to keep him, while they went in search of the victim. There will be other similar instances.
Having been prompted by those amendments, will the Minister tell the Committee how the Home Office views that issue? Will he also tell us how PACE has been operating in that respect, and whether there have been complaints about people being detained for too long without being taken to a police station?