Your power, your say

Stop and search is one of policing’s most powerful but also one of its most heavily scrutinised tools.

Used well, it can literally save lives by taking knives and other deadly weapons off the street. It can disrupt drug supply chains, recover stolen property and assist in identifying the vulnerable during moments of risk. Used poorly, it erodes the exact kind of community trust needed to make policing by consent actually work.

The College of Policing is now asking for help to work out how best officers can apply these powers over the course of the next decade. A national public consultation on updated stop and search standards has opened and will run until early next month.

The revised Authorised Professional Practice, the first significant update in more than a decade, will be published in early 2027 and will set the national framework for how stop and search is conducted, recorded, supervised and reviewed across all 43 forces in England and Wales.

This is not a box-ticking exercise. It is a genuine opportunity for frontline officers, supervisors and others to shape guidance that will directly affect how they do their job. That means that taking the time to be a part of the process is wholly worthwhile.

Professional standard

The updated APP is child-centred and addresses disproportionality affecting children, young people and other vulnerable groups. It strengthens safeguarding requirements and places greater emphasis on the quality of the encounter itself. It looks not just at whether a search takes place, but also how it is conducted.

The revised guidance places clearer expectations on communication throughout. Officers will be expected to explain clearly why a search is taking place and to treat individuals with dignity and respect throughout. This must be done to a professional standard against which performance can be assessed.

Reinforced expectations make clear that any use of force must be necessary and proportionate, and that handcuffs must never be used routinely. When they are, there must be clear justification.

The APP has also been restructured by rank and role, with practical examples designed to support officers at every level in making confident, defensible decisions. One of the persistent criticisms of existing guidance is that it is too abstract to be useful in the moment. If the revised version is genuinely more practical, that is of direct professional value.

Press coverage of the proposals has not always been accurate. The revised APP does not restrict the use of stop and search. It does not require officers to obtain permission before conducting a search. It does not add criminal liability for searches that turn out to be negative.

What it does is set clearer standards for how searches should be conducted, documented and supervised. It asks officers to ground their decisions in articulable, defensible reasoning.

The issue has already become politically charged, driven in part by media coverage that has not always reflected the detail of the proposals. Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp has described the proposed guidance as “yet more woke nonsense,” warning it could “put lives at risk” and urging the College of Policing to abandon the consultation entirely.

The response from the College was measured: its objective, a spokesperson said, is solely to ensure a vital tool for policing is used as effectively as possible to keep the public safe.

One provision that has attracted significant media attention concerns searches initiated on the basis of the smell of cannabis. Under the proposals, officers relying on the smell of cannabis would be required to complete a series of checks before proceeding. These include linking the odour to a specific individual, assessing the likelihood of finding drugs, and considering whether a reasonable observer would view the search as justified.

For some, this has been presented as an unreasonable bureaucratic burden. Frontline officers with experience of cannabis-smell searches will have their own views and the consultation not only gives them a place to express themselves but to do so in a way that they will actually be heard.

Chief Superintendent Andy Sidebotham, Head of Uniformed Policing at the College of Policing, has said: “This updated guidance is about backing officers by giving them clearer national standards, stronger professional confidence and practical support, while continuing to strengthen fairness and public trust.”

Insufficiently explained

Three major investigations directly informed the revised APP. The first was the Criminal Justice Alliance super-complaint on Section 60 powers, submitted in 2021. This raised concerns about the disproportionate impact on black communities, low arrest rates and a lack of transparency in how the without-suspicion search power is used.

Then there was the HMICFRS spotlight report on disproportionate use of police powers, also published in 2021, which remains the most comprehensive inspection-based assessment of the evidence base. Its central finding was that disproportionality is real, persistent and insufficiently explained by forces. The revised APP is, in part, a response to that challenge.

The third investigation that informed the new APP was the 2022 strip search of Child Q. The case prompted widespread concern about the use of police powers involving children and accelerated calls for stronger safeguarding requirements. The revised APP’s emphasis on child-centred practice reflects lessons drawn from that case.

The HMICFRS report identified a further pattern: only nine per cent of searches were intelligence-led, while self-generated searches – those initiated by something an officer saw or heard at the scene – accounted for 55 per cent.

HMICFRS found that self-generated searches were more likely to be disproportionate and less likely to produce positive outcomes than intelligence-led searches.

None of this means that individual officers are acting in bad faith. The pattern reflects systemic issues in training, in supervision, in recording, and in the absence of consistent national standards. Addressing those systemic issues is exactly what the revised APP is designed to do.

The question the consultation puts to officers is whether the proposed approach is the right one. It also invites views from staff, partner agencies, community organisations, and members of the public – particularly those with personal experience of stop and search. However, officers are the people with the most operationally relevant evidence of all.

They know what the current guidance does and does not help them with. They know where the practical gaps are. They know which elements of the proposed changes are workable and which are not. They know what supervision looks like in practice versus what it looks like on paper.

If that knowledge does not feed into the consultation, the revised APP will be shaped by inspection reports, academic research, civil society submissions and political pressure.

All of those are legitimate inputs. None of them replaces the view of the officer who conducts stop and searches week in, week out, in conditions that no guidance document can fully anticipate.

How to take part

The consultation document and online questionnaire are available by following the link here. If possible, take the time to read the draft APP before responding.

Stop and search will always be contested. The power to detain and search a person on the street, on the basis of suspicion rather than evidence of a crime, sits at the sharpest edge of the relationship between policing and the public.

No revision to the APP will change that fundamental tension but it can give officers a clearer, more practical framework for exercising that power. It can reduce the inconsistency that allows weak searches to generate complaints and strong ones to go unrecognised.

It can provide supervisors with better tools for identifying and correcting poor practice. And it can give communities greater confidence that when an officer stops someone on the street, there is a meaningful professional standard against which that decision will be held.

Whether the revised APP achieves those objectives will depend in part on whether the people best placed to assess it – the officers who use stop and search every day – make their voices heard.