Source · Select Committees · Home Affairs Committee
Recommendation 45
45
Accepted in Part
Paragraph: 269
Progress addressing ethnic disparity in police misconduct requires consistent monitoring and a future audit.
Recommendation
We take some encouragement from the NPCC’s national review into ethnic disparity in police misconduct and the work done by some individual forces to attempt to close the gap. The follow-up work from this review which has been reported to us in 2021 shows that the NPCC has recognised and accepts the need to prioritise correction of these failings. However, it is essential that progress is consistently monitored and reported transparently across all forces. Progress in implementing the NPCC review recommendations should be subject to an HMICFRS audit after two years.
Government Response Summary
The government welcomes the new Race Action Plan (May 2022), which will ensure consistent publication of misconduct data broken down by ethnicity. The Home Office will also review the police misconduct system with NPCC and IOPC, with terms set in summer 2022, to ensure fairness and effectiveness.
Paragraph Reference:
269
Government Response
Accepted in Part
HM Government
Accepted in Part
The Home Office welcomes the work of the National Police Chiefs’ Council and the College of Policing in developing a new Race Action Plan for policing to address the issues of disproportionality in the police misconduct system. The new Race Action Plan, which will be published in May 2022, will set out a range of measures to improve outcomes for Black people in policing, including developing a clear plan to address the disproportionality in police misconduct cases, and ensuring misconduct data is published consistently and is fully broken down by ethnicity for all forces. In addition, the Home Office will work with the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) and the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) to review the police misconduct system to ensure that it is fair and effective in upholding the highest standards of integrity in policing. The Home Office will set out the terms of reference and timeline for this review in summer 2022. The Home Office agrees that there is a clear racial disparity in the number of officers being dismissed from police forces. However, it should be noted that the police misconduct system was reformed in 2020 to introduce legally qualified chairs to ensure the independence of decision-making at misconduct hearings. In addition, changes to the police complaints system in 2020 has also strengthened police accountability and transparency. The Home Office has also made significant improvements to its data collections to enable greater scrutiny of police activity broken down by ethnic group. The Home Office also supports the actions outlined in ‘Inclusive Britain’ to improve accountability and tackle disparities including removing unnecessary barriers that prevent increased use of body worn video, and supporting the development of a new, national framework for how the use of police powers are scrutinised at a local level.