Thank you, my Lords—I have enjoyed this debate. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, for setting out the rationale for his amendments and I thank all other noble Lords who made a contribution. I was particularly delighted to hear that the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, is such a supporter of the traffic police, although I found her relish for car crashes a little upsetting.
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In the case of Amendment 19, the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, is right to highlight the importance of high and consistent standards of police driver training, both to safeguard public safety on the roads and to provide an objective benchmark for police driving during any post-incident proceedings. The new test
allows for higher standards of driver training, as we discussed on the previous set of amendments, and competence will be taken into consideration when deciding whether to prosecute a police officer for an offence of dangerous or careless driving. Therefore, it is necessary to be able to objectively assess whether the officer or instructor has undertaken the appropriate enhanced driver training or has otherwise acquired specialist driver skills.
Clauses 4 and 5 therefore already require the Home Secretary to prescribe the appropriate training in regulations. I refer the noble Lord to new subsections (1A)(b) and (1B)(a) of Section 2A of the Road Traffic Act 1988, as inserted by Clause 4(3). There is a similar provision in Clause 5. The regulations will prescribe the minimum training standards that chief officers, police drivers and police driver instructors should comply with, which I hope goes some way towards answering the question of the noble Lord, Lord Coaker. Specifying the appropriate training and skills in regulations will enable them to be readily updated to reflect changes in the police driver training curriculum and to operational good practice, emerging threats and crime trends, or new technology utilised by either criminals or the police, new case law, and learning from incidents involving drivers.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson pointed out, consistency is important, so the National Police Chiefs’ Council has been working closely with police forces to standardise police driver training across England and Wales. This will ensure that police drivers are trained to a similar standard, depending on their role, and the legal test for police drivers will have a fairer comparator. The regulations will require police drivers to take account of the national police driver learning programme and the authorised professional practice for police drivers, published on the College of Policing website, which allows tactics and skills to be readily updated. I think some of this debate has strayed into police tactics, as well as the rules and regulations.
The regulations are being drafted in consultation with stakeholders, including police driving leads and the College of Policing, and will be made by the Secretary of State in early 2022. The regulations will be subject to the negative procedure. However, I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, that it is important that the public are at least made aware of those, and they should certainly understand them.
In short, the combination of the regulations to be made under Clauses 4 and 5 and the College of Policing’s published authorised professional practice achieve the outcome that the noble Lord seeks; namely, publicly available national standards.
On Amendment 20, the Government’s view is that the proposed introduction by the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, of a reasonableness statutory defence for police drivers is unnecessary. The existing proposed legislation is sufficient to provide police drivers with the protection they need. As the noble Lord said himself at Second Reading,
“Protecting police officers in vehicular pursuit of dangerous criminals is right, but so is protecting innocent members of the public caught up in the chase.”—[Official Report, 14/9/21; col. 1287.]
The state has a duty under Article 2 of the ECHR to protect the right to life. Such a wide defence would not balance the need to give the police the confidence to pursue dangerous criminals on the one hand and the need to avoid doing so in such a way as to create disproportionate risks to other road users. The tiny minority of police officers who drive in an inappropriate manner should be held to account.
I hope that I have been able to go some way to persuading the noble Lord that the issue of national standards has already been addressed through the Bill and elsewhere, and that a reasonableness defence would not be appropriate. I therefore ask him to withdraw his amendment.