Federation to lobby for time limits on conduct cases

31 October 2019

The Police Federation is launching a campaign calling for statutory time limits on officer conduct investigations.

Phill Matthews,  national conduct and performance lead, said the Police Federation of England and Wales (PFEW) will be lobbying Parliament for a change in the law to apply a 12-month time limit for prosecuting police officers with appropriate safeguards through its ‘Time Limits’ campaign when he addressed the Post Incident Procedures (PIP) seminar held in Leamington Spa last week.

He explained: “There’s absolutely no time limit on when a complaint can be made or to say how long the appropriate authority can take to investigate.”

Using the analogy of an officer stopping a motorist for speeding, he explained: “That officer has six months to prosecute – but if the motorist complained about the officer there’s no limit to how long it can take for that complaint to work its way through the system and that’s got to be wrong.”

Phill added: “We are talking about things that can potentially lose officers their jobs – that’s the top end but usually matters are less serious – and they take years and years to resolve.”

And he concluded: “We think a 12-month time limit on prosecutions is reasonable and we want to get that into statute and, to back that up, we want to give Police and Crime Commissioners and even legally qualified chairs powers to demand progress or put a stop to prosecutions if they drag on longer than that. Part of that is to enable the speeding and simplification of the appeals process which is often what causes some of the timeliness in a lot of these cases.”

He argued investigating authorities such as the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) and professional standards departments ‘hold all the cards’ and are reluctant to see those powers curbed.

The campaign has been welcomed by Hertfordshire Police Federation chair Geoff Bardell who said that long-drawn-out conduct investigations were putting officers, and their families, under huge pressure for months and sometimes years.

“We are seeing officers suffering untold mental stress and this has a knock-on effect on their families. We all appreciate the need for thorough investigations when there may be allegations of wrong-doing, however, it is unacceptable for officers to have these inquiries hanging over them for such long periods of time,” says Geoff.

“Introducing a time limit of a year seems to be a sensible way forward for all those involved in these cases.”

Seminar delegates also heard from Andy Birks, a former Metropolitan Police officer, who was investigated for a decade and prevented from retiring, before being exonerated.

Freedom of Information requests by the BBC found the IOPC and some forces were taking more than a year to investigate officers. Two thirds of IOPC cases are never proven and the cost to the taxpayer for officer wages while suspended was £13 million from 29 forces.

During the seminar, the National Police Chiefs’ Council’s firearms lead, Simon Chesterman, told delegates Britain had the ‘best trained, most restrained and most professional armed police in the world’.

Advising officers to stick to the Authorised Professional Practice (APP), he said PIPs are about accountability, achieving best evidence and seeking the truth, adding:  “The APP is there to make sure we have a thorough and independent investigation and that the welfare of the officers and the members of staff involved is taken care of.”

Steve Hartshorn, the national Federation’s firearms and Taser lead, built on the seminar’s title, ‘Back to Basics’, by walking delegates through the best practice he had learned over many years representing officers in PIP situations. Delegates also heard from the College of Policing’s Kev Nicholson and Mark Wardley of Straw & Pearce Solicitors, around the separation of police witnesses in a PIP and when it should be done - only when ‘safe, necessary and practical’.

Mark Williams, chief executive of the Police Firearms Officers’ Association (PFOA), also spoke at the seminar reporting that five officers have been pulled back from the brink of suicide by the Welfare Support Programme, a counselling service funded by the PFOA and the Federation.

Hayley Aley, the Federation’s national wellbeing lead, gave a presentation on work to raise awareness of officer wellbeing. Officers, she said, should be given the wellbeing support and tools they need to do their jobs with different levels of support needed at the various stages in their lives and careers.

In another such session, Dr Meng Aw-yong, medical director to the Metropolitan Police, delved into case studies of officers who have experienced major trauma. He revealed that a police officer dies by suicide every two weeks and there are no official statistics regarding the deaths of police staff, veterans, or attempts to die by suicide. One case, an officer who had attended a number of fatal incidents and had delivered ‘far too many death messages’, had ‘never once’ been asked how he was. Following these incidents, he was expected to get on with the job.