Latest updates: HMIC report also highlights ‘frequent frustration’ of police forces over lack of notice about changes to Covid rules
Good morning. If you found the endless changes to coronavirus regulations that we’ve had over the last year hard to follow, you were in good company. Today Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services, which regulates the police, has published a report on policing in the pandemic (pdf) and it says police officers also found it hard to keep up with what was allowed and what was not.
Here are the main points.
Many forces expressed frequent frustration at the lack of notice they were given about some changes in the law and guidance. Some senior officers told us they were unable to provide timely and clear operational guidance to frontline officers …
The first set of regulations was made on 26 March 2020 and came into effect even before they were laid before parliament. In the months which followed, the regulations were amended and supplemented a considerable number of times, when lockdown restrictions were eased or strengthened, imposed, relaxed and re-imposed, in different parts of the country, for different periods and with differing intensities. The first set of regulations covered 11 pages; the last set extended to 123 pages. It was hard to keep up with them.
[Police officers’] difficulty was made worse by a widespread confusion in relation to the status of government announcements and statements by ministers. Ministers asserting that their guidance – which had no higher status than requests – were in fact “instructions to the British people” inevitably confused people. In some cases, police officers misunderstood the distinction, and appeared to believe that ministerial instructions were equivalent to the criminal law.
For example, the two-metre distancing ‘rule’ has only ever been in guidance (aside from some requirements on the hospitality sector such as licensed premises and restaurants). The request to ‘stay local’ has never been a legal requirement. The suggested limits on the number of times a person could go out to exercise in a day and for how long were only ever in guidance, not regulations …
Despite these extraordinary difficulties and pressures, a very significant proportion of police work to deal with the lockdown was measured, proportionate and sound.
Related: Some police forces in England and Wales did not follow Covid rules, say inspectors
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