Independent custody visitors are the most frequent monitors of police custody across the UK, over 1,300 volunteers making unannounced visits to police custody, week in, week out (some visits have happened on Christmas Day and New Years Eve), whatever the time of year to check on the rights, entitlements and wellbeing of those held in police custody.

Each quarter, we ask the scheme managers (in local PCC offices and their equivalents) to send us reports on areas of good practice from custody, areas where ICVs have had an impact (check us out on insta @custody_visiting or follow us on LinkedIn if you don’t already to see examples) and areas of concern.

The Q1 returns had an unusually and unacceptably high rate of 25% of members reporting that ICVs were experiencing delays in getting into custody, so I thought we would share with you what the rules are, why that’s a problem and what we did about it!

Firstly then, why does it matter if the volunteers are delayed, well, not so they aren’t stood out in the rain and cold, or at the moment in the very hot Summer with no hat (although that’s important!) but because for monitoring to be effective, visits should be unannounced. This cannot be underestimated both in terms of being able to see an accurate picture of what is happening in suites (the good, the bad and, well, you get the idea), but also to ensure functional and credible independence from the places that are being monitored.  A key part of that independence is being able to have access to detainees whenever visits occur. This could be at night, during the working day, weekends or any other time, but monitors must (by deem of OPCAT Article 20c for those of you who like a bit of Human Rights) have access to detention spaces and those held there.

Secondly, delays are not permitted save but in exceptional circumstances by the Home Office owned Code of practice for Independent Custody Visiting, setting out the rules and regs for this area of monitoring. The Code of practice states the following on delays to custody suites for ICVs:

“ICVs must be admitted to the custody area immediately. Delay is only permitted when immediate access may place the visitors or another individual within the custody area in danger. A full explanation must be given to the visitors as to why access is being delayed and that explanation must be recorded by the visitors in their report”.

So, it was back to the reports for us to find out what the reasons were that immediate access was being denied, was it that there were risks or were there other factors at play?

Here are the results of the reasons given for delays/abandoned visits:

As you will see from the above graphic, none of the reports are due to the only specified reason in the Code for causing delays to visits but due to comms, lack of staff or no explanation given.

We totally understand of course that custody is a busy environment and that staffing is often an issue (particularly at the start of the summer season) and we are not blind to the pressures that custody staff are often under. We get great feedback from forces on the value they place on the ICVs in their area, helping highlight things they may have missed and providing important checks and balances, so we are sure that the delays are not due to any desire to stop monitors, perhaps just that there has been a slide in the understanding of the rules of the Code, changes in staffing and so on.

We are incredibly lucky here at ICVA HQ (just kidding, we are tiny and don’t have an HQ unless you count our home offices, not to be confused with the Home Office), in that we have great relationships with our stakeholders, and in this case, particularly importantly the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC). We work with the NPCC custody lead and his staff officer on a variety of custody issues and have a fortnightly meeting with reps from the NPCC, Home Office and others so that emerging concerns or good practice can be shared and acted upon quickly.

Schemes will work locally with forces to ensure that where delays have happened, to make sure this isn’t an ongoing issue, but due to the wide spread issues in this area, we raised it with the NPCC and they agreed that a reminder of the Codes contents would be helpful for forces and together with ourselves sent a letter out to all forces that very same day to remind them, a copy of which you can read here. This is also super helpful for ICVs and schemes as a reference document if they run into issues.

Now this isn’t us just boasting about how quickly Team ICVA take care of business (although maybe a tiny little bit as this was super quick, even for us….) but also to say a massive thank you to the NPCC, who took our concerns seriously and wrote to all forces, reminding them that the ICVs are not an optional extra, but a statutory function and a key area to feed into public reassurance. Monitoring of custody is incredibly important, and we are confident that the reminder will be helpful to get rid of these issues. We will of course monitor the monitors, and make sure that there is a reduction in the delays over the coming weeks and months.