Today, the Home Office has published its response to a rapid review into police accountability.

This review was announced in October 2024 following the acquittal of Metropolitan Police firearms officer, Martyn Blake, of the murder of Chris Kaba.

Deborah Coles, Director at INQUEST, said: “These new measures undermine the rule of law and the way it applies to police officers, increasing impunity and injustice. All the evidence is that what is needed is exactly the opposite.

The Home Office has once again ignored the experience of bereaved families by parroting the concerns of the police lobby.

At a time when public confidence in the police is, understandably, at rock-bottom, these latest proposals are yet another insult to those rightfully seeking accountability.

Deaths at the hands of the police are not isolated but part of a systemic pattern. These deaths happen within a racist, misogynist and corrupt system that inflicts daily harm on communities across the country. As exposed in the recent Panorama investigation into Charing Cross police station, this toxic culture runs deep. 

Rather than addressing such failings, the Home Office is pursuing one sided measures that will allow these harms to continue.”

Daniel Machover, Head of Civil Litigation at Hickman and Rose solicitors, said: “In two recent landmark judgments, the UK’s highest court set important standards about how we determine police misconduct and wrongdoing following police use of force and requiring that the civil standard of proof applies to unlawful killing conclusions at inquests. 

Today the Home Office said they will change the law to reverse the ruling on police use of force and  consult on changes to inquest conclusions, despite the fact that the Review and the Government do not point to any substantive evidence that change is required.

We repeatedly asked for, and were denied, access to this evidence. Indeed, the Review seems to have given up on even considering such evidence.

It appears that the only voices that count are those of police officers who seem unable to accept the need to be held fully accountable for their use of force.” 

ENDS

This press release was originally posted by INQUEST, here.

NOTES TO EDITORS
For further information and to note your interest, please contact Leila Hagmann on leilahagmann@inquest.org.uk.

Relevant background

In July 2023, the Supreme Court ruled that police officers can face disciplinary action if their use of force wasn’t legally reasonable — not just based on what they believed at the time. The legal case was brought by firearms officer W80 who killed Jermain Baker. They were seeking to challenge the decision of the IOPC to bring gross misconduct proceedings against them. More information.

In 2020, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of R (Maughan) v. HM Senior Coroner for Oxfordshire, that the standard of proof for all conclusions at an inquest, including unlawful killing and suicide, is the balance of probabilities. The coroner or jury may record a conclusion (including unlawful killing) if they are satisfied that it is more likely than not that it occurred. More information.

Paragraph 23 of the Rapid Review explains that despite original intentions to share a draft version of the report with consultees, this was not done. The report states, “We had originally intended to provide these bodies and individuals with a draft version of the Review as part of this exercise, in particular because we had originally and incorrectly anticipated that our conclusions would be influenced to a large extent by statistics concerning trends prior to and post Maughan and W80. This turned out not to be the case, and, as set out below, this has been principally an exercise in evaluating competing contentions on questions of policy, on which we have reached conclusions.”

The absence of both qualitative and quantitative evidence of the impact in practice of the two Supreme Court cases, and the potential for proper accountability and effective learning from the cases in question, undermines the basis on which the Review reached its conclusions.

Baroness Casey’s review into the culture and conduct of the Metropolitan Police in March 2023 found “institutional racism, misogyny and homophobia”. The report of the Daniel Morgan Independent Panel found that the actions of the Metropolitan Police following the death of Daniel Morgan constituted “a form of institutional corruption”.