As police forces face up to the reality of impending budget cuts, ministers have stressed the contribution increased efficiency can make.

Home Secretary Theresa May has said that one quick way of cutting the burden of bureaucracy on officers was to getting rid of the ‘stop and account’ form.

But has the form already been binned? This was what one Labour MP seemed to suggest yesterday.

The Claim

Speaking during Home Office questions in the House of Commons on Monday, David Hanson pressed Policing Minister Nick Herbert on what Mr Herbert called the Government’s “commitment to scrap the stop form.”

Mr Hanson said: “I welcome the right Hon. Gentleman to his position, but I might just advise him that we did actually stop the stop form in the Crime and Security Act 2010.”

Analysis

The Crime and Security Act amended legislation from the 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence (PACE) Act, and in doing so reduced the requirement of information to be recorded when members of the public were stopped.

For instance it repealed parts of the previous act relating to the required information to be recorded when officers stop and search members of the public.

Details required under the 2010 Act were: date, time, place, ethnicity, object of search, grounds for search and identity of the officer carrying out the stop and search.

However while the Act may have been passed by MPs has it actually been able to have any effect yet?

It appears not.

Full Fact contacted the House of Commons Information Office who told us that though the bill received royal assent on 8^th April,  some provisions have not yet come into force.

A list of legislation from the previous Parliament not yet commenced was provided to the House of Lords on 14 June.  Included are the sections of the Crime and Security Act in which the stop and search requirements are covered.

However, if looking specifically at the stop and account form, rather than stop and search matters become a little less clear cut.

Even before the Crime and Security Act received Royal Assent, ministers, including Mr Hanson talked of having scrapped the stop and account form, referring to measures which came into effect at the beginning of 2009.

Yet in a speech on Tuesday, the Home Secretary said that the ‘stop and account’ for would be scrapped in its entirety, while other stop and search procedures would be cut down.

Full Fact contacted the Home Office for clarification, who told us that information from stop and account was still recorded albeit not on the old forms, but even the reduced amount of information would no longer be required.

So it appears that both sides are right in a sense. Changes implemented by the last Government largely did away with the form, as the information was recorded in different ways, yet the current Government will scrap the need to require the information at all.

As Simon Reed, National Vice Chair of the Police Federation explained: “The last Government did away with the form but they introduced a slightly different way of recording the encounter.

“If officers stopped someone in the street, forces either used a paper receipt or they could enter brief details in a PDA and send the information via a computer or they could get onto their radio and just have interaction logged on the radio.

“Now the current Government say if the police stop someone in the street they don’t need to record that encounter in writing.”

Conclusion

It appears that Mr Hanson was technically inaccurate in claiming that Labour had scrapped the ‘stop form’ in the Crime and Security Bill, simply because this bill does not appear to have come into force and appears to have cut down rather than scrapped recording requirements for stop and search.

The previous Government did take measures to drastically cut form-filling, for stop and account but whether this can be considered scrapping the form is matter of interpretation, given that details were recorded, albeit in a reduced form, and not necessarily on a form.

Nevertheless it appears that if the new Government does deliver on its pledge to abandon the requirement for written information from stop and account, it will have more of a case for having scrapped the form in its entirety.

Patrick Casey