My Lords, in moving Amendment 182 on anonymity before charge, I refer to an earlier amendment which I moved in Committee on 2 November. It proposed substituting “lack of evidence” for “insufficient evidence” when police communicate a decision not to charge. Eight noble Lords spoke in support and I have now had the Minister’s letter of 1 December saying that the Government agree to replace the phrase “insufficient evidence” with revised wording which will be incorporated in fresh guidance, to take effect by next spring. However I am afraid that their suggestion of the words,
“the case failed to reach the evidential test”,
does not quite hit the spot. Frankly, “no case to answer”, would be better but that is probably a discussion for another day.
I am glad that the Government listened to the Committee. I am grateful to the Minister for using her influence on the Home Office. I hope she will do so again, after this debate. The matter is really very simple. There have, particularly in recent years, been a number of instances when the police have released the names of suspects or publicly identified them at a very early stage in their investigations into allegations and complaints, particularly of sexual impropriety. A most notorious example was on 14 August 2014 when the Yorkshire police arranged for the BBC to film and broadcast their entry into the house of the pop star Sir Cliff Richard. Sir Cliff must have gone through hell before it was eventually accepted that he had no case to answer.
There are many other examples. We may remember the wholly inappropriate way in which, on 3 August 2015, a superintendent of the Wiltshire police posed for television cameras in front of Sir Edward Heath’s final residence in Salisbury, encouraging people to claim that the former Prime Minister had misbehaved
with children. The superintendent was launching an investigation on which the Wiltshire police have now spent over £700,000 of taxpayers’ money, with the chief constable of Wiltshire apparently determined to continue his fishing expedition indefinitely.
The method of fishing adopted by Wiltshire police seems to vary between the utterly naive and the patently absurd. I have been told by a former member of the Downing Street staff that they were contacted by one of the investigating officers, who asked, first, whether they had noticed any untoward incidents at any time in the behaviour of the then Prime Minister and secondly, whether they had noticed any young men slipping in and out of No. 10 Downing Street. Surely the Wiltshire police and crime commissioner has a role in pointing out the opportunity-cost of this farce and guiding the chief constable on priorities in the use of limited police resources.
In Committee a number of noble Lords raised this issue of the police being free to name suspects and the Minister is on record as saying that,
“it is absolutely right and proper for the police to have operational independence in deciding whether to name a suspect”.—[Official Report, 16 November 2016; col. 1466.]
My response to that is simple. Searching a house is an operational matter, on which the police must make a judgment. However, to search a house they have to obtain a magistrate’s warrant before they do so. Indeed, the centuries-old requirement for a search warrant forms part of the fundamental protection of our liberties, under both statute and convention, which has its roots in Magna Carta.
The impact of modern social media means that naming suspects is a powerful weapon; indeed, sometimes even a lethal one. I am not saying that it is never sensible for suspects to be named, sometimes even at a very early stage in an investigation. In sexual cases, or cases of fraud, for example, it may be necessary for there to be publicity that will encourage other victims of the alleged offenders to come forward. Indeed, the media have always had an important role in exposing allegations in the pursuit of justice. However, the media have to follow court directions restricting reporting—and they do so.
Hitherto it has been left to the police to make a judgment on whether to name a suspect. However, it has now been shown that all too often the police cannot be relied on to make the right judgment. In their recent decisions on naming suspects they have aroused much public resentment and indignation. This has resulted not only in often irreparable damage to the reputation of innocent persons but undermined confidence in, and therefore support for, the police.
History teaches us the need for vigilance in the defence of liberty. In September 1793, at the height of the reign of terror during the French Revolution, the so-called Committee of Public Safety passed the Law of Suspects, which meant that suspects, once named, could be put under the guillotine without any trial. This continued until July 1794, when Robespierre himself was guillotined. We are a million miles from that. But the road is the same and we must not take a single step along it. It is to halt and, indeed, remedy an unacceptable situation that I am advocating the urgent
need for a check on the exercise of unsupervised police powers to publish the names of suspects. That is why in Amendment 182 I propose that the police should be required to obtain a magistrates’ warrant before publishing the name of a suspect who has not been charged. I realise that my amendment as drafted may not be the full answer, but I am anxious that the Government should address what has become a serious problem. I look forward to hearing the views of other noble Lords and, of course, of the Minister. I beg to move.