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Independent Police Complaints Commission

I totally agree with my right hon. Friend. I was surprised when I found out that that important role in our country had been vacant for so long. I hope that when he comes to the Dispatch Box to reply to the debate, the Minister might explain why that is the case. The IPCC has two roles, police scrutiny and public guardianship. It is charged with investigating complaints independently, and with the fullest scrutiny, but its role does not stop there. Given that it investigates on behalf of all of us, it must communicate and work with the public. In the case of the death of Mark Duggan, it remains to be seen whether the IPCC fulfilled its primary duty to scrutinise the actions of the police on 4 August, but it is vital that the commission does all within its power to convince the Duggan family and the wider Tottenham community that its investigation is thorough, impartial and independent. Without that, we will be back to the bad old days of the Kent report and the police investigating police, and I hope that the IPCC do not take us there. We wait to see whether the IPCC will fulfil its primary duty, but even in the days immediately after Mark Duggan's death it was clear that it had failed completely and utterly in its secondary duty—that of guardianship. Mark Duggan's family were forced to learn of the death of their son and father from watching television. That is beyond unacceptable. Why did nobody from the IPCC contact the family on the day of his death, when it had opened its investigation? Despite warnings from people throughout the community, the IPCC failed to communicate with the family until two days after the shooting, and even then it was unable to communicate anything of substance to them. That is not good enough. Despite employing 15 media officers, the IPCC failed to make an appearance in the media to reassure a sceptical public—certainly in my community—that it would investigate Mark Duggan's death thoroughly, impartially and independently. Its inability to fulfil that responsibility is difficult to explain. There was no direct communication by the IPCC to the affected communities in Tottenham in the hours and days after Mark Duggan's death. Would it have been too difficult to hand-deliver a letter to residents of the affected areas, reassuring them of the investigation, explaining the known facts and appealing for calm and co-operation? No, it would not—but yet again, that did not happen. In the absence of any word from the IPPC, a dangerous vacuum was allowed to open up, and rumours were allowed to take hold in the place of hard facts. That is not good enough. When the supposed facts were released to the media, they were quickly retracted. It was put out that there had been an exchange of fire in the incident that led to Mark Duggan's death, but that turned out not to be true. Why did that happen? Again, that is far from what we would expect of an organisation with the role of public guardianship. To this day, communication between the IPCC and Tottenham residents, as well as with the wider black community, appears sparse at best and unthinking at worst. That has to change. The magnitude of the IPCC's task is immense, and some of the signs leave little hope in the strained community that I represent. Two thirds of people have heard of the IPCC, a number that has barely budged since the body was founded seven years ago, but one third of those think that it is part of the police—again, a figure that has barely budged. Ethnic minorities are even less likely to have heard of the IPCC, and they are more likely to believe that it is part of the police. That is the scale of the challenge awaiting us.