My Lords, the contribution of the noble Baroness, Lady Redfern, emphasises the potential value of police volunteers and the role that she described. The difficulty is that we are debating several issues almost simultaneously—and she may almost have been anticipating the next group. The specific point that the amendment moved by my noble friend Lord Rosser relates to is the provision to enable those volunteers to use CS spray, PAVA spray and other specified weapons.
The concern that a number of us have, which is why it is important that we debate this and understand exactly what the implications are, is that this is a significant extra step. Having police volunteers who advise the public or patrol with a uniform in various areas to help create a visible presence, we can all understand and would value and welcome. The point at which you give them the power to use force against fellow citizens is actually an extremely significant change, and it raises all the issues about the level of training that they will receive.
The noble Baroness, Lady Redfern, talked about the training that is provided. Obviously, that is valuable, although I suspect that five weekends of training are probably what you need to learn all the other functions before you get on to what is essentially the power to use violence against other members of the public. There are issues around accountability and how all these things are managed. Before we take the step of saying that people who have volunteered and have had some training, albeit a comparatively small amount, can be allowed to use CS spray or other weapons against other citizens, we have to think about it extremely carefully.
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That is the reason for my noble friend’s probing amendment—to get to the core of this and to try to understand why it is thought that the specific power to use weapons is an important element of this. Personally, I would be very keen to increase the use of volunteers, although there is of course the route of becoming a special constable. The description given by the noble Baroness, Lady Redfern, sounded almost coincident with the requirements for a special constable: a certain degree of training, which she specified; and the
commitment to do, I think she said, half a day a month or whatever—that is perhaps slightly less than the special constables do in most of the schemes I have seen but it is very similar. We need to think about whether we should be talking about special constables, who have a particular legal status and go through a particular process and so on but are still volunteers and still give their time freely in support of the police, or creating another category of people who volunteer and are then given really quite intrusive powers—the power to use violence against other members of the community. That is why we need to debate this and consider it very carefully.