My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Bailey, has made a good suggestion with this Amendment. He makes the broad point that the police misconduct process takes far too long, and I agree. To be fair, it is not the only misconduct process that takes a long time, but this one is particularly challenged.

I will particularly mention two things. First, time deadlines would be helpful. There are two ways to approach that. One is that there might be an absolute deadline of 12 months, as the noble Lord, Lord Bailey, suggests, and then some independent, legally qualified person looks at the case. That could work. The alternative is to set some deadlines so that, for example, 90% of cases are resolved in one year, which at least would give the system a kick. At the moment, I am afraid the system is not getting any better—rather, it is getting worse—so either something statutory or some kind of guidelines would be a good idea.

On Tuesday I raised the issue of firearms officers, a group particularly affected by this, and that is what I want to speak to here. I have argued that there should be a higher bar before they are prosecuted for murder, but the Government do not accept that at the moment. They have offered anonymity, and we are to debate that shortly.

Part of the problem, particularly for firearms officers, is the incredible length of time in some cases. There have been two cases over the last 20 years that took 10 years: the case of PC Long, who was prosecuted after a series of legal machinations only to be found not guilty 10 years later, and that of W80, where after a public inquiry—basically an inquest led by a High Court judge because intercept evidence was involved in the case—the High Court judge decided that there was no unlawful killing, the IOPC or its predecessor decided that there should be some gross misconduct, the Metropolitan Police disagreed, the Supreme Court ordered that there would be a misconduct hearing and the legally qualified chair of the independent tribunal said there was no case to answer. After consideration by the Supreme Court, an officer had been under investigation for 10 years. That cannot be right.

Some of the problems are to do with the sequential nature of the decision-making in these cases. Officers are often under jeopardy, first from the IOPC and then from the CPS. Then obviously it could go to court and there may be a finding of not guilty, but then—for firearms officers in cases where someone has died—the case can go back to a coroner’s inquest, which can find an unlawful killing verdict, at which point it goes back through the cycle again. That is one of the reasons why some of these problems are arising.

First, deadlines would be a good idea as either an advisory or a mandatory limit. Secondly, I do not understand why some of the people involved in the decision-making that I have described have to do it sequentially, not in parallel. For example, why can the CPS and the IOPC not decide together whether something is a crime or misconduct?

At the moment, not only are there many links in the chain that sometimes come to contradictory conclusions but, more importantly, it is taking too long. I argue that in all this there are two groups of people who suffer: one is firearms officers, the group whose case I am arguing, but the other is the families waiting to hear what is happening. If people have lost someone, they deserve to hear whether or not this is a crime or misconduct, but at the moment that is not happening.

This amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Bailey, is a sensible suggestion and I support it. If the Government do not, perhaps they would like to make some indication of how they intend to improve the misconduct system, particularly as it affects firearms officers in the circumstances I have described.