Home Office wrong to let police ‘call the shots’ on rogue cops, experts say

The Home Office has come under fire for plans to let police officers “call the shots” in their own misconduct cases, which critics say will further weaken dwindling public confidence in forces.

Last week, Suella Braverman announced senior officers will take over the chairing of police misconduct hearings from independent lawyers, known as legally qualified chairs, whom the government appointed in 2016 to prevent bias.

The home secretary made the change following a review of the police disciplinary process in the wake of the conviction of David Carrick, who committed numerous sexual offences while serving as an officer in the Metropolitan Police.

But experts have told openDemocracy that police chiefs are already failing to discipline their staff and cannot be relied upon to chair the hearings. 

John Bassett, the president of the National Association of Legally Qualified Chairs,  pointed out that neither Carrick nor Wayne Couzens, the Met Police officer who kidnapped, raped and murdered Sarah Everard in 2021, faced a misconduct panel before they were convicted. Both men had been accused of misconduct on several occasions.

“If senior officers are going to take charge of misconduct panels now, they will be the same senior officers who’ve been in position for a number of years when these issues were ongoing,” Bassett said.

He warned that the move would cause public trust in policing – which is already at record lows – to plummet further.

Bassett said: “It will result in a situation where public confidence will go down, because it’ll look like the police are looking after themselves and overseeing their own decisions.”

Lawyers were introduced to chair police disciplinary hearings in 2016, following a recommendation made in an independent review of the disciplinary process. 

The review was commissioned by then home secretary Theresa May in 2014, after a damning report found that the Met Police spied on the family of Steven Lawrence and that corruption may have compromised the investigation into his murder.

Bassett said Braverman’s decision to reverse the policy now suggests the Home Office “wants to go back to a system where the police call the shots”. 

Major-General Chip Chapman, who authored the 2016 review that led to lawyers chairing misconduct panels, told openDemocracy that he recommended that senior officers should not chair disciplinary hearings to avoid “police marking their own homework”.

The Home Office itself said in 2016 that the introduction of legally qualified chairs was necessary “to ensure that decisions are objective and made independently of the police”.

“People have an affinity to other people, because they don't want to see the bad in them. And that’s part of the reason why, I guess some of the things in the Met happened in the last year,” Chapman said.

‘Total reform needed’

Metropolitan Police commissioner Mark Rowley backed Braverman’s plan to have senior officers leading the disciplinary process. 

Last month Rowley accused the independent lawyers of being “fundamentally soft”, which Bassett described as a “disgraceful slur”, suggesting the commissioner was “diverting attention from the real problems”.

Bassett refuted Rowley’s suggestion that senior officers would be tougher on misconduct, explaining that the softening of police guidelines on dismissals in recent years has made it harder to sack officers. 

In 2017, the College of Policing, the professional body which represents the police, introduced guidelines that advised misconduct hearing panel members to “consider less severe outcomes before more severe outcomes”. 

“Always choose the least severe outcome which deals adequately with the issues identified, while protecting the public interest,” the college said.

Police accountability campaign groups have also criticised Braverman’s proposals, claiming the changes are piecemeal and show the Home Office does not grasp the scale of the problem in policing.

Lee Jasper, the chair of the Alliance for Police Accountability, told openDemocracy: “We don’t believe that these Mickey Mouse cosmetic changes are gonna make one blind bit of difference.

“You can’t just change the misconduct system, you have to change the whole system, the whole institution has to be completely democratised and modernised.”

Kevin Blowe, campaigns coordinator for the Network for Police Monitoring, said the reforms “continue to reinforce the notion that the extensive problems within the police highlighted over the last few years are the result of a ‘few bad apples’ and there isn’t a much deeper, structural failure of accountability and transparency for acts of violence and discrimination that are an everyday part of policing in Britain.”

A Home Office spokesperson said: “The government introduced legally qualified chairs in 2016 to bring crucial independence to the police disciplinary system. It is important that we retain that fair and transparent system. 

“However, we also recognise the need for chief constables to have a greater say in the process, which is why we have announced a package of reforms, giving chiefs a greater role in the system including responsibility for chairing misconduct hearings, whilst retaining legally-qualified panel members. We are confident that this approach will strike the right balance.”