MPs Move to Strip Police of Immunity From Being Sued
A cross-party amendment from Andrew Mitchell and Jess Phillips, debated on Tuesday, would overturn a 2025 Court of Appeal ruling that made officers immune from civil claims over conduct during criminal investigations. The ruling blocks most claims, including for serious human rights abuses and data breaches, with no exemption for unjustifiable conduct.
The case that produced it is the clearest argument for changing it. A domestic violence victim fled to a secret refuge; Sussex Police put her new address into a file for the Crown Prosecution Service without adequately marking it confidential, a lawyer read it aloud at a bail hearing, and she had to flee again, saying the refuge “no longer felt safe at all”. Mr Mitchell says that if Parliament fails “to close this legal loophole there will be devastating consequences for victims”. Kate Ellis of the Centre for Women’s Justice describes the practical effect: forces can now argue they cannot be “held legally responsible at all for serious mistakes made in a criminal investigation”, creating an accountability gap in which a force that fails to investigate a rapist, stalker or domestic abuser “faces no consequences”. Also relying on the immunity is the Metropolitan Police, in a claim brought by Ali Kololo, a Kenyan woodcutter who served eleven years after a wrongful conviction over a 2011 attack on two British tourists. The government says the home secretary and lord chancellor have commissioned a review into police accountability and that any change “should be considered alongside the wider findings”. A Supreme Court appeal on the same point is listed this month. Sussex Police and the National Police Chiefs’ Council declined to comment.