Metropolitan Police: Crime and Misconduct

Lord Blair of Boughton Excerpts

Thursday 1st December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blair of Boughton (CB)]

My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, and listened carefully to the issues he raised. I agree with every word he said. I declare that I have lectured extensively, especially in India, on anti-corruption measures.

I served for four years as the Met commissioner, from 2005 to 2008, and always have some fellow feeling for each new commissioner as they arrive. I was in conversation with the noble Lord, Lord Grade, recently as the previous PM got herself into ever deeper trouble. He remarked that the most difficult jobs in British public life were those of the Prime Minister, the director-general of the BBC and the Met commissioner—and not always in that order. I should tell the House that in preparation for this debate I have spoken to Sir Mark Rowley. I speak with his assistance but not for him.

I cannot remember a commissioner coming into office in such inauspicious circumstances. He will need all the help that legislators can give to him. The dreadful murder of Sarah Everard by a serving Met officer has thrown up failures of vetting and intelligence but, above all, the new importance of social media, which allows individuals—apparently in a number of professions—to say disgusting things in private association which they would never dare say in a public arena. This is a really significant departure from even the recent past. Mark Rowley chooses to term this sort of behaviour as a corruption of the profession of policing, and I accept that. Police corruption, however, is not a question of occasional bad apples but a continuous threat.

Lord Condon, now retired from the House, commented that the Met was the cleanest big-city force in the world. Maybe, but police corruption never goes away. The first “trial of the detectives”, as it was known, involved Met officers in a horse-betting scandal in 1876. The Times inquiry of 1969 revealed the existence of networked corruption in the Met CID, encapsulated in the famous phrase, “I am a member of a little firm within a firm”. As the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, said, three years later Robert Mark embarked on a ruthless purge as soon as he was appointed. Hundreds of officers were sacked; many, including some senior officers, were jailed.

The noble Lord, Lord Stevens of Kirkwhelpington, followed Robert Mark’s example, as did I in the early 2000s, including with the creation of an entirely secret investigation unit. Corruption mutates: when I left office, the networked corruption had been broken but the sale of computerised information by individuals was beginning to become a threat. It needs ruthless attention; it needs to be a feature of career aspiration to be in an anti-corruption unit, and that task is not easy. One of the cases I took as an investigator to the Old Bailey, where we had arrested the briber as well as the receiver, had four juries dismissed and the case was opened five times. It needs leadership from the very top, which includes reassuring the vast proportion of decent officers that their honesty and professionalism is understood and valued.

I believe that Sir Mark Rowley will provide that, but he needs some help. In a classic example of the road to hell being paved with good intentions, the current Government took away from chief officers the final decision as to whether an officer should be sacked, except in the most egregious and obvious of cases. Discipline proceedings are now presided over by legally qualified chairs, who seem to have a propensity to reprimand rather than dismiss, to the despair of Sir Mark. As Sir Mark has noted in a recent letter to all London MPs:

“This has led to instances of the Met being forced to retain officers whom we cannot deploy and we believe should not be police officers”.


That this needs to change is a central conclusion of the recent interim report by the noble Baroness, Lady Casey. This will need a reform to primary legislation.

In the same letter, Sir Mark also refers to the Police (Performance) Regulations 2020, which deal with officers who are not in any way criminal but who are just proving to be unsuited to the job. These regulations require three different stages of review and, consequently, three stages of appeal. In a telephone call with me, Sir Mark noted that this means that the numbers dismissed for not being competent are simply vanishingly small. He also noted that even failing vetting does not lead to reasonably instant dismissal. I hope that, in closing this debate, the Minister will acknowledge these issues and agree to bring them to the attention of the Home Secretary.

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

I gently remind noble Lords of the speaking time. If we all run over, it squeezes the time available to the Minister to respond.

Public Order Bill

Lord Blair of Boughton Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 1st November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blair of Boughton (CB)]

My Lords, I refer to my interests in the register. However, my personal interest in the policing of public order long predates my need to be in the register. The first demonstration I helped to police was a march protesting against the Shah of Iran, which shows both the circularity and the differences of history. As the noble Lord has just said, my last major foray into the policing of protest was as the commander of the long policing operation concerning the construction of the Newbury bypass in the 1990s. It was there, of course, where the figure of Swampy came to public notice, together with the tactic of tunnelling as a form of protest.

I am grateful to the Minister for a briefing on the Bill last week. This will not be a long speech because, as I told the Minister, in contrast to the noble Lords, Lord Coaker and Lord Paddick, I am very much in favour of the Bill’s provisions. There are three reasons for that. First and foremost, the current tactics of locking on and tunnelling are extremely hard to prevent and time-consuming to overcome. The current law is inadequate. Secondly, it is now apparent that many members of the public are becoming extremely irate and beginning to take the law into their own hands, which is almost never a good idea and puts the police in both an invidious position and a very bad light. Thirdly, as a citizen rather than an ex-police officer, I am concerned that this form of protest is so irritating that it will damage the fast-growing consensus over the need for action to tackle climate change.

I will follow the passage of the Bill carefully through your Lordships’ House, but I expect to be most interested in the provisions governing injunctions sought by Secretaries of State, over which I have some concern. I return to the building of the Newbury bypass to underline my concern about the need to protect the operational independence of the police. I am disappointed that the noble Lord, Lord Howard of Lympne, is not in his place; I have told him what I am about to say, as some of it is about him.

The site of the Newbury bypass was eight miles long. From Whitehall, the almost complete disruption caused by protesters at the start of the building operations, which lasted quite a few days, obviously looked like an ideal moment for the use of the newly legislated and excellently drafted offence of criminal trespass, which the noble Lord, then Home Secretary, had recently placed on the statute book. On day two, I was very clearly informed of the noble Lord’s dismay, no doubt expressed with his customary courtesy, that I was refusing to use his legislation. No less august a figure than an assistant inspector of constabulary was sent to convey the message in person. He was a bit less than courteous.

I was glad to find that, on the inspector’s arrival, he changed his mind and agreed with me—otherwise, it would have been an inglorious end to my nascent career. I was forcing the contractors—the builders—much against their will to fence and put security personnel around whatever part of the eight miles they were going to start work on first, instead of selecting different sites simultaneously, and thereby leaving my officers to chase protesters all over many miles of Berkshire and Hampshire countryside. They very reluctantly did so. We then used the legislation and very useful it proved, much to the chagrin of one Swampy.

Policing protest is difficult; policing a banned protest is far more difficult, which is why police so rarely seek to have to do so. I think the provision on injunctions by Secretaries of State needs most careful consideration during Committee, because the distance from Whitehall to the ground where the action is happening can be very far.