Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill — House of Lords, 2021-11-01
Topic: Law and Crime
Brian Paddick (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, in moving Amendment 110ZA in my name I will speak to my Amendments 110ZB, 110ZC and 110B and to Amendment 110A in the name of my noble friend Lady Harris of Richmond in this group We now come to pre-charge bail, also known as police bail, where the police need more time to investigate than the time limits for keeping someone in custody without charge allow. In 2017, in response to concerns that people were being kept on pre-charge bail for too long, particularly journalists under investigation as a result of the phone hacking scandal, the Government used 18 clauses of the Policing and Crime Act to severely curtail the time someone could be held on pre-charge bail At the time, briefed by police practitioners, we told the Government that their changes to police bail were unworkable and that they had gone too far the other way. Some 18 clauses of the Policing and Crime Act 2017 are now all but reversed, relegated to Schedule 4 to this Bill. There clearly needs to be a balance between the need for a thorough police investigation, diligently carried out within resource constraints—which, because of the significant cuts in police officer and police support staff numbers since 2010, have been considerable—and the adage that "justice delayed is justice denied". The irony of telling the police to speed up their investigations while at the same time curtailing their ability to do so will not be lost on the Committee It must be necessary and proportionate for the police to release a person on bail, including the imposition of any conditions of that bail. I know from my own professional experience that custody officers tend to record something along the lines of "I am releasing this person on bail because it is necessary and proportionate to do so" or "because it is necessary to ensure that the person surrenders to custody" or whatever Section 30A of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 says may be a reason for releasing a person on bail. This is simply copied and pasted into the custody record. I was sitting here earlier reading that and realising that perhaps, as a police inspector reviewing detention, I might have been guilty of a similar act of simply copying generic paragraphs out of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984. This is not sufficient and Amendments 110ZA and 110ZB are designed to address this. The police officer should record the case-specific reasons why it is necessary and proportionate to bail the person and the case-specific reasons for imposing the conditions, if any, attached to the bail—not "to ensure the person surrenders to custody" but why the officer thinks this person is unlikely to surrender to custody; for example, because he has absconded in the past, perhaps. If the factors to be taken into account in paragraph 17 of Part 2 of Schedule 4 are included in the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 in a new Section 30A(1B), so should be the requirement to say what it is about this person that makes release on bail necessary. Later in the Bill, in Clause 132(7), courts remanding children in custody will be required to set out their reasons for doing so in writing. This amendment requires the police to do the same when it comes to police bail decisions On Amendment 110ZC, following representations made by the Law Society—from my professional experience I see the merit in some and not others—I agree with it that the if the matter is straightforward, what is called in the legislation a "standard case", a senior police officer should be able to extend bail only to a maximum of six months before the case is referred to a magistrates’ court for independent adjudication, rather than the nine months suggested in paragraph 29 of Schedule 4 to the Bill.