Don't copy MPS on skipped hearings, forces told

The inspectorate’s report into the effectiveness of integrity arrangements in the Metropolitan Police Service, overseen by HM Inspector of Constabulary Lee Freeman, rates the force’s vetting, professional standards and anti-corruption arrangements as “requires improvement”.

While it credits the MPS with driving national reform on one route for removing unsuitable officers, it takes the unusual step of actively discouraging other forces from adopting a workaround the force has developed on another.

In May 2024, faced with a specialist investigation unit carrying around 1,600 live cases that June and a hearings function struggling to keep pace, the Met agreed a policy under which it would not hold a misconduct hearing for an officer who resigned during a gross misconduct investigation, unless the case met exceptional criteria and a hearing was judged to be in the public interest. Those exceptional circumstances include discrimination offences and violence against women and girls.

An officer who does not face a hearing is not placed on the College of Policing’s barred list, which is publicly available and checked by recruiting forces. To mitigate the risk, the Met instead updates the officer’s record on the Police National Database (PND) — a system that is not publicly accessible in the same way, although certain organisations can search it as part of a vetting process.

Recruiting force

College of Policing records show 61 such cases since the policy began. When inspectors examined five where a hearing had not been progressed, only four carried a PND entry. In the fifth, there would be nothing to alert a recruiting force that a gross misconduct investigation had ever taken place. Inspectors also found gaps in advisory list recording, with no corresponding PND entry in three of a sample of cases.

HMICFRS notes the Met consulted the Independent Office for Police Conduct, the Home Office and the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead when developing the policy, and that most cautioned against it. Only two of the 43 forces in England and Wales take this approach. While accepting the Met’s position is pragmatic given the volume of cases, the inspectorate says its use should be limited to the shortest necessary period and states that it “would dissuade any other forces from adopting this approach”.

The report is markedly more positive about the Met’s efforts to remove officers whose vetting clearance has been withdrawn. In his foreword, Mr Freeman describes the force as proactive and committed in this area, singling out a case it pursued that, since the inspection, has shaped national policy and opened the way for forces to consider dismissing personnel who lose their vetting clearance.

In HMICFRS’s public statement accompanying the report, Freeman put a figure on that effort, acknowledging the force’s investment in its integrity arrangements “including removing more than a thousand people who shouldn’t be working in policing”, while adding that the Met still needed to do more to ensure the right people both join and remain in the service.

Although the report does not name it, the case concerned the force’s earlier attempts to dismiss officers by withdrawing their vetting clearance — an approach the High Court found unlawful in early 2025 because no statutory mechanism existed to support it. Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley warned at the time that the ruling had left policing in a “hopeless position”.

The defeat exposed the absence of any lawful route to dismiss an officer for failing vetting. The Home Office responded with the Police (Vetting) Regulations 2025, in force from 14 May 2025, which create a duty to hold and maintain vetting clearance and provide that withdrawal of clearance leads to dismissal without notice, subject to an appeal to a three-person panel. The Met confirmed earlier this year that it had dismissed its first officer under the new regime, with a further 84 cases under consideration.

Mr Freeman also acknowledges the robust line the Commissioner has taken on vetting applicants, which departs from national guidance in places to reflect the challenges the force faces. That includes a bespoke decision-making framework under which domestic abuse, hate crime and any sexual offences result in an automatic refusal, with no scope for risk mitigation — a deliberate deviation from the vetting authorised professional practice that inspectors link to efforts to correct historical shortcomings.

Mitigating factors

The report also points to a stark disparity in outcomes depending on where a case is heard. Inspectors found that 55 per cent of cases were determined “not proven” at misconduct meetings, compared with just 13 per cent at misconduct hearings, a difference the inspectorate suggests may stem from meeting chairs placing too much weight on mitigating factors at an early stage. The force is aware of the disparity and was planning further training for chairs at the time of the inspection.

That sits within a wider concern about fairness. A force analysis in November 2023 found the Met was more likely to refer Black and ethnic minority members of its workforce to professional standards, and made 22 recommendations to tackle disproportionality across the misconduct process. By the time inspectors visited, only five had been completed. HMICFRS says the professional standards directorate carries out no formal, detailed analysis of disproportionality across the nine protected characteristics in its investigations and decision-making, and should now do so.

The report sets the two approaches side by side without reconciling them: a force willing to test the law to dismiss officers who lose their vetting, but simultaneously relying on a hearings-avoidance route that leaves some officers investigated for gross misconduct off the barred list and, in a proportion of cases, off the PND as well.

HMICFRS has confirmed it is carrying out a separate inspection of the MPS’s recruitment and vetting arrangements, with that report to be published in due course.