5 Reform of the IPCC
38. Both Nick Hardwick and John Crawley agreed that
ultimately it should be the police's responsibility to handle
complaints adequately from the public and more complaints should
be investigated and resolved satisfactorily at a local level.
Nick Hardwick told us that the ideal scenario would be for the
police to provide better service in the first instance, negating
the need for complaints, and ultimately, appeals to the IPCC.[67]
However, he doubted the value of the IPCC acting to improve the
standard of police service, suggesting that this role would be
best performed by devolving power and responsibility to individual
forces:
The most effective way to deal with a PC or PCO who
has provided a poor service is their supervisor, their sergeant
or their inspector saying to them, "This is not an acceptable
performance or standard of conduct for people who work for me."
... If you can get that happening; if you could hold the supervisors
and inspectors accountable for delivering that, accountable for
the performance of the people they are responsible for managing
then that is the way to get the kind of cultural changes we have
talked about ... A critical responsibility of supervisors and
managers, inspectors and sergeants, should be precisely to get
that conduct correct.[68]
Mr Hardwick suggested that up to a point the IPCC
had been successful in persuading the police to prioritise the
complaints process but the IPCC is best suited to a persuasive
role, rather than directly attempting to improve forces' systems
itself.[69]
39. John Crawley suggested it was in the IPCC's interest
to improve the performance of forces' complaints systems, saying
that the workload faced by the IPCC was hindering efforts to improve
its handling of complainants' concerns:
There should be a progressive reduction in the number
of appeals to the IPCC so that it is not handling such a huge
volume of appeals. The way to achieve that is for police officers
to do better investigations and for more complaints to be upheld
by police officers ... the appeal system, with the pressure of
volume of it, can then become a better quality system that will
meet complainant concerns more effectively.[70]
40. Mr Crawley doubted that the "persuasive"
role the IPCC had adopted would be wholly effective without reform
to the complaints system. He pointed out that forces have no incentives
to improve their handling of complaints, as the appeal system
is a "no-cost option" for the police: "first, the
chances are that it will not be upheld by the IPCC in any substantive
way, and secondly it does not cost them anything financially".
He contrasted this "no-cost option" with the workings
of the Financial Ombudsman who has the power to fine financial
organisations for inadequate complaint resolution and suggested
a similar system for the police.[71]
41. John Crawley
suggested fining forces for poor performance in this area. While
we believe that this would be inappropriate, his overall premise
is correct—efforts must be made to incentivise forces to
improve their performance. We recommend that Her Majesty's Inspectorate
of Constabulary (HMIC) place a stronger emphasis on complaints
resolution and the performance of the PSD in their inspections
of forces. This would provide a direct incentive for forces to
improve their performance in this area. The police's main target
is improved public confidence in their performance; it therefore
seems misguided that greater emphasis is not put on an area of
police activity which plays a major role in shaping public perceptions
of the police.
42. We have also received interesting suggestions
for longer-term reforms to the Commission which may help tackle
some of the inherent structural problems of the organisation.
We have heard repeated evidence that the IPCC is too close to
the police and has not yet established an independent, corporate
identity separate from the police complaints service. John Crawley
believed that the reason for this could partly be traced to the
"positioning" of the IPCC within the Home Office's sphere:
The proximity of the IPCC to the Home Office and
its nexus of police bodies is not just a matter of perceived lack
of independence and objective distance from the management of
policing but of the context within which a civilian oversight
body has developed and determined its priorities. It has led to
the IPCC becoming far too closely integrated into the wider policing
sector rather than the (alternative of the) wider complaints ombudsman
"sector".[72]
To solve this problem of the IPCC's "integration"
into the policing sector, Mr Crawley proposed moving the IPCC
away from the Home Office "sphere" and into the remit
of the Ministry of Justice. He cited the presence of two other
relevant bodies, HM Chief Inspector of Prisons and the Prisons
and Probation Ombudsman within the remit of that Ministry. He
believed that this action, "could help create a nexus of
... bodies concerned with individual rights within and across
the criminal justice system".[73]
43. More generally, John Crawley doubted that combining
the investigation of high-profile incidents with the handling
of basic complaints was a model that was necessarily working.
While he stopped short of recommending such an approach at present,
he suggested that if more incremental reforms did not improve
the performance of the Commission then policy-makers should consider
reforming the structure of the IPCC. One option would be to split
the IPCC into two distinct sections, forming a separate agency,
perhaps as "a special wing of HMIC", focused entirely
on conducting full criminal investigations into allegations of
serious police misconduct or corruption, while a "beefed-up
and separate Police Ombudsman Service", would work closely
with forces' PSDs to drive reform of the basic complaint system.[74]
44. Both of
these suggestions—the transfer of the IPCC to the remit
of the Ministry of Justice, and the separation of the IPCC's current
functions into two distinct bodies— may have their merits.
However, we believe that the problems which exist in the IPCC
are not so endemic as to require such radical structural changes.
We draw the House's attention to these proposals as a point of
debate and for future reference if the IPCC's performance continues
to disappoint its users.
67 Q 68 Back
68
Q 69 Back
69
Qq 67-71 Back
70
Q 41 Back
71
Q 43 Back
72
Ev 17 Back
73
Ibid. Back
74
Qq 35 and 56 Back
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