My Lords, I am more optimistic about these amendments than the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, and want to help her find some optimism. However, I first pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Paddick. I feel that his speech is historic and will be remembered in this country for a very long time. It must have been so hard to make; we all know that it is hard to speak out of turn in general, but it is particularly hard when you are speaking about your own profession, service, career and friends. I hope that Members across this Committee will share that tribute to him.
I hope the noble Lord will forgive me—he has trailed this already—that in terms of these amendments we have to prefer that tabled by my noble friend Lord Rosser. I congratulate my noble friend on not just his speech but this amendment, which was no doubt prepared with his colleagues and team. This is why I am optimistic. I do not believe that the Minister—the noble Baroness, Lady Williams—is unsympathetic on this issue. There is not really a problem with something like the amendment proposed by my noble friend, not least because he anticipates the potential challenges that might come the other way. For example, there is of course a need to protect privacy, data protection and national security. Any duty of candour would have to be subject to those things, but my noble friend has already done so much of the thinking. The Minister also has the considerable resources and expertise of government, the government legal service and parliamentary counsel at her disposal, but I remind her that the Daniel Morgan review was commissioned by a Conservative Home Secretary, who had been and
gone as Prime Minister before the review was published, with its excoriating comments, some of which I repeated on Monday evening.
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On the duty of candour, the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, is right. We think that one should not have to legislate for duties of candour, and yet, in certain professions in particular, these things are so important that they must be legislated for. It is about making it clear that there is not just a duty to protect the body corporate and the organisation itself but a supervening duty to a wider public interest or the interests of justice. Of course, the noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan, said specifically in her remarks in the summer that she felt that at times the Metropolitan Police behaved as if the review panel was like a hostile litigant and not a review set up by the Minister’s own department—the Home Office—and, by the time it reported, a former Prime Minister.
Frankly, the argument made by noble Lord, Lord Paddick, was devastating. On Monday, when I argued for a statutory inquiry in relation to Sarah Everard, the Minister replied that one of the arguments against me was that rules had been changed and police officers were now under a greater professional duty to co-operate. But the devastating argument made by the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, today—which I was not aware of—was that this has been there for some time and there is still non-compliance.
So I plead with the Minister, first, to think again about the statutory inquiry with powers of compulsion and, secondly, to look at my noble friend Lord Rosser’s amendment in particular, because it is not too difficult to create a statutory as well as professional duty of candour on the police—something like he has proposed. Parliamentary draftsmen will do even better, I am sure, and my noble friend has already done the thinking about the need to think about privacy, data protection and national security.