Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)

My Lords, I am most grateful to my noble friend the Minister for his response. I hope he will agree that it would make good sense for us, and possibly the Archives & Records Association, to meet him and his officials, perhaps along with Members of your Lordships’ House who are interested in the subject, to see whether there is some way in which we can get the police records more firmly established as public records and protected, because I am not satisfied, and it is clear that my noble friend Lord Wills and the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, are not satisfied, with the existing arrangements. Neither indeed, I suspect, is the Prime Minister, who wrote to Amber Rudd, the then Home Secretary, in July 2016 saying that “future researchers must have a guaranteed right to access the maximum range of police records and the police themselves must be obliged to preserve their records for public accountability purposes”. I hope that in some way we will be able to arrive at a consensus—there has not been a lot of consensus in the debate this evening—and that we will get to a point where police records are covered properly. But with that, and with the possibility that we can come back to this matter on Report, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.