Contribution
My Lords, Amendment 28 refers to police records in England and Wales and the need for them to be brought under the supervision of the Keeper of Public Records. This was the subject of my speech at Second Reading.
On 7 October, my noble friend Lord Lemos was kind enough to write to me about my Second Reading speech and about this amendment. In his letter, he said that the Government recognise the Hillsborough Independent Panel’s recommendation to place police records under legislative control and the strength of concern that important records must not be lost. However, he also offers us a reason for not including police records under public records legislation: that police hold large volumes of sensitive records requiring clear rules on selection, transfer, digital capability, archive capacity, security access, data protection and institutional responsibilities. It seems that these are the very reasons why they should be covered by legislation and not, as currently, by codes of practice and guidelines, which are not compulsory and contain multiple uses of “should” and “could” rather than “must” and “will”.
At Second Reading, I quoted the chilling words of the former chief constable of South Yorkshire, Mr Meredydd Hughes, who was in a telephone conversation with the family of one of the Hillsborough victims. He said that he could take the records into the courtyard and burn them. He said he was under no obligation to disclose anything and that the papers belonged to him. He may just have been engaging in angry rhetoric, but what has taken place during the period in which these codes and guidelines should have been operated were a number of instances where inconvenient records were destroyed by mistake. Your Lordships can judge for yourselves whether “by mistake” can be taken at face value.
Although there are some shining examples of police forces employing qualified archivists and records managers, there are few of them. Record-keeping is largely unprofessionalised in the police service. More often, filing and dealing with the archives is left to admin staff and officers who are taken off active duty. The command and control nature of police work means that these workers are unlikely to question a command to destroy records. A professionally qualified record-keeper would at least have the status to question that instruction and point out with confidence where it did not meet guidelines, codes or common practices of archiving and records retention. Without putting record keeping in the police forces of the England and Wales on a statutory basis, there is no impetus for them to professionalise their workforce or to take more care not to make these mistakes.
Since 2023, the Information Commissioner’s Office has issued formal reprimands or enforcement notices to at least eight police forces and law enforcement agencies in England and Wales, alongside several individual reprimands or notices, and police forces and law enforcement agencies have been heavily represented in regulatory action. These include the Metropolitan Police, the City of London Police, Greater Manchester Police, and forces in south Wales, the west of England, Kent and South Yorkshire. Most of those have been censured or reprimanded for severe subject access request delays, accidental deletion of body-worn video or unauthorised data messaging app usage. In addition—this is particularly worrying—Northumbria Police deleted material relating to the policing of the Orgreave miners’ strike just weeks before the Orgreave inquiry was formally set in motion. It does not seem that the guidelines and code are working. Why should we wait even longer and see more records destroyed when we can move to a better solution? I beg to move.