Recommendation 11

We are surprised by the Home Office’s statement that the IPCO does not have a mechanism for facilitating urgent approvals by Judicial Commissioners outside standard working hours. We therefore encourage the Home Office to engage with the IPCO to see whether an appropriate mechanism - such as an on-call rota - could be developed in order to minimise the situations in which a senior official would take initial decisions in place of an independent Judicial Commissioner. We request that the Home Office writes to the JCHR before the end of six months after the Remedial Order comes into force to set out what actions have been taken by it to ensure that the circumstances in which a senior official would need to take a decision out of hours instead of a Judicial Commissioner have been minimised.