My Lords, I thank the Minister for his introduction. As he said, the changes have already been debated at length and approved by Parliament, and we will not oppose them. However, I would like to make some specific points. Perhaps the Minister could address them in his summation.
We do, of course, understand the importance of ensuring, at a time of heightened and ongoing risk from hostile state actors, that the powers we give our police are a match for those people who seek to harm us. We also appreciate the need to give officers on the ground clear guidance, but there must be a balance between allowing the police to do their job and protecting civil liberties. We welcome attempts to keep the public
informed about what the police are doing in relation to suspicionless stop and search. We hope this will go some way to re-establish trust among those citizens most commonly subjected to this practice, namely members of the black community.
We note concerns raised during the consultation process about when the public will be alerted to the use of suspicionless stop and search. The concern is that the term “operationally beneficial” is simply not clear enough to define when it will be in operation. Everyone recognises the importance of police operational autonomy, but can the Minister confirm that this particular concern has been taken into account?
We welcome the new data collection requirement in Code A, particularly given that the ethnicity of 20% of those subjected to stop and search in the year ending March 2022 remains unknown because it was not recorded. However, our key concern remains the extension of police powers to stop and search someone without reasonable grounds for suspicion. We have made our concerns clear that extending these powers now is fundamentally incompatible with the findings of the Casey review and the recent IOPC report, both of which found that progress in tackling racial disparity in stop and search still has a very long way to go.
In light of this, what signal are we sending to these communities in giving the police even greater leeway to carry on that practice, despite the well-documented racial bias still evident in it? Sadly, I suspect that, for many, it says that we are just not listening.
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