Home Affairs Committee Aims To Tackle DG6

It is a step forward that the Home Affairs Committee is shining a light on the problems with DG6 and working to improve the issue, South Yorkshire Police Federation has said.

The Police Federation of England and Wales has been lobbying the Government to amend the Data Protection Act in its campaign #SimplifyDG6. Changes made by the CPS to disclosure rules forced investigating officers to spend at least an extra four hours on every case for redaction, which in some cases has resulted in victims withdrawing from cases as a result of a much slower system.

The Home Affairs Committee has now urgently recommended that the Home Office identify potential solutions.

South Yorkshire Police Federation Chair Steve Kent said: “This is so important. It absolutely boggles me that officers are having to waste their time just to fulfil the mandate of the Crown Prosecution Service; it’s nonsensical. It takes up hundreds and hundreds of hours of South Yorkshire Police Detectives’ hours on a weekly basis because they’re doing stuff which is just totally unnecessary.

“Detectives submit all these files and either nothing is done with them, or they end up not being  necessary because there are different evidential thresholds that are required if somebody’s pleading guilty, or not guilty. But officers are having to provide the same amount of information either way. So what would normally be maybe one or two hours of work turns into six or seven hours.

“It’s other departments’ bureaucracies that are dictating the strain and workloads that our Detectives are under. It’s absolutely crazy. I welcome that the MPs are looking at this now and are starting to shine a light on it.”