Baroness Doocey (LD)

My Lords, in moving Amendment 398 I will speak also to the other amendment in my name, Amendment 399. Systemic flaws in our training infrastructure leave front-line officers underequipped and the public at risk. Training should be the bedrock of policing excellence, not a Cinderella function that is both underfunded and undervalued. In Committee, the Minister asked the House to wait for solutions in the Government’s White Paper. That document has now arrived but, instead of solutions, it proposes to streamline training, and even scopes a reduction in essential public and personal safety training. In the real world of policing, “streamline” is too often code for cutting corners. At a time when one-third of our officers have less than five years’ service—the most inexperienced workforce in decades—reducing the frequency of safety and de-escalating training is a dangerous recipe for increased injuries and risk of misconduct. The White Paper offers licences to practise and digital passports. These are bureaucratic distractions, not real reform. We risk burying officers under accreditation paperwork while they struggle to build chargeable cases for complex modern crimes such as cuckooing, stalking and online fraud. Most concerning is the shift towards learning on the job within everyday operational work. For an inexperienced force, this too often means picking up bad habits from equally inexperienced colleagues. Furthermore, by absorbing the College of Policing into the new national police service, the Government are asking the police to mark their own homework. No organisation can objectively evaluate its own systemic failings. An independent statutory review should be non-negotiable. We cannot keep adding new duties into the statute book—respect orders, offensive weapons laws and the rest—without a concurrent independent assessment to check whether the training system, last audited nationally in 2012, can actually deliver them. Amendment 399 addresses another critical gap by placing a statutory duty on every police force to provide regular, high-quality mental health training. Mental health calls now constitute 15% to 25% of all police demand, yet too many officers lack the specialist training to manage them safely. The amendment seeks to establish a national minimum standard aligned with “right care, right person”, requiring every officer to complete initial training within six months of assuming front-line duties, followed by refreshers every two years.