Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps her Department is taking to ensure that claims of misconduct against police officers are fully investigated in a timely manner.

The Government introduced legislative reforms in February 2020 to strengthen the police complaints and discipline systems, including measures to improve timelines.

This imposed a requirement on both the police and the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) to provide a written explanation if any such investigation is not completed within 12 months - setting out what progress it has made, why it hasn’t completed the investigation and the steps it will take to bring the investigation to a conclusion.

The IOPC publishes data on police complaints, including the timeliness of complaints handling and investigations by police forces, and the time taken to complete its own investigations. The Home Office has amended its own data collection with the aim of providing more comprehensive data on timeliness. The next tranche of data is due to be published on 12 January 2023.