Clause 3 - Bail elsewhere than at police station
Criminal Justice Bill
6:15 pm
Ms Vera Baird (Redcar, Labour)
I want to support the request for the criteria by which the officer's decision on whether to grant street bail will be taken. As those criteria will be the focus of the guidance, they should be made clear as soon as possible. This is an excellent proposal that is in everybody's interests. It will save police time and free people who might otherwise, at the very least, be massively inconvenienced.
The basis of the decision on whether to keep somebody at liberty or to take them to the police station is very important. I appreciate that there is a certain amount of convolution in the thoughts that I am about to express. At present, once a police officer has arrested someone he must take him straight to the police station—there is no option. Under the Bill, he will have a right not to do that but to release him. If, on the other hand, he decides not to release him, because he has been granted that extra possibility, he will in fact be deciding to detain him. That is why the criteria by which he makes the decision are very important and should be made as clear as possible.
I shall try to exemplify what I mean. In a typical situation in which six football fans are arrested with bottles—or whatever might cause them to be arrested—as long as they remain calm and the bottles are removed, street bail might be appropriate for whatever they have done. I am at a loss to know what the criteria are, so that may not be a good example. If, however, five of them were given street bail and one was detained and taken to the police station, the officer would be exercising an arbitrary power of detention, however nominally, unless the
criteria on which that decision was taken were clearly laid out. It is therefore important that we should see the criteria as soon as we can, and discuss them if possible.
I was interested, although I was not quick enough to mention it at the time, in the power to remove property from a person who had been arrested and given street bail, which was referred to in an amendment that was recently withdrawn. Will the Minister clarify that matter? Notionally, it would be possible for someone to be arrested, some of their property to be confiscated by the police officer, and for them to be given street bail. If there was then an argument about whether that property should have been taken, the subject of the bail would not have any help in formulating his or her argument. I imagine that, in a situation in which property was to be removed, it would be obvious that the matter should be transferred to the police station and that street bail would not be given. However, I would like the police to be given clarification on that issue. Although that is a hypothetical situation, there remains the possibility that someone's property could be removed and that they would not have a legal adviser to hand to assist in recovering it.
The first notice of a person's bail need not specify when he must return to the police station and therefore at what point he might have his property returned. That property could be part of a tool kit that he needed. There is no finite time in these bail provisions, so interference with a person's property rights could occur.