The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) has published its end-of-year figures for 2025-26, and the headline numbers paint a picture of a watchdog under growing pressure from the forces it oversees.
The IOPC received 7,088 referrals during the year, the highest total since the body was established, and for the first time managed to complete more than 7,000 referrals in a single year. Independent investigations rose by 31 per cent, from 241 in 2024-25 to 316 in the latest period. Of those, 134 related to allegations of police misconduct, 81 concerned deaths or serious injuries following police contact, and 101 were triggered by complaints from members of the public.
On the face of it, completing 245 independent investigations sounds productive, but that figure is broadly unchanged from the previous year despite the significant jump in new cases taken on. The obvious question is whether the gap between intake and completion is sustainable, or whether a fresh backlog is quietly building.
Deputy Director General Steve Noonan pointed to efficiency improvements, noting that the average time to assess and complete a referral has fallen from over eight days to 4.3 days. That is a welcome improvement in triage speed, but speed of assessment and quality of investigation are very different things. The IOPC says 73 per cent of its independent investigations are now completed within 12 months and 32 per cent within six months. Those figures represent only a marginal improvement on the prior year, achieved during what the IOPC itself describes as a period of “structural reorganisation”.
The IOPC also tightened its own definition of “completed”, now requiring that a report be fully reviewed, decisions finalised, and evidence sent to the appropriate authority before a case is counted as closed. That is a more honest measure, and credit is due for adopting it, but it also makes year-on-year comparisons less straightforward than the headline figures suggest.
Perhaps the most striking numbers relate to complaint reviews. Requests from members of the public for an independent review of how their police force handled a complaint rose 24.3 per cent, from 2,455 to 3,051. That increase tells its own story about public dissatisfaction with internal police complaints processes. The IOPC’s casework team completed 3,500 reviews during the year, up 61 per cent, clearing a backlog that had built up following legislative changes that shifted the system from an appeals process to a review process.
Noonan described the casework improvements as “a standout success”, and the throughput numbers support that. However, volume of reviews completed says nothing about outcomes. The critical question for anyone who has navigated the police complaints system is whether these reviews are actually leading to meaningful change in how forces handle complaints, or whether the process remains, for many complainants, a bureaucratic exercise that produces little accountability.
The IOPC says it is engaging with forces through its “Right First Time” initiative, aimed at improving complaints handling at force level so that fewer reviews are needed in the first place. That ambition is laudable, but the 24 per cent rise in review requests suggests that, for now, public confidence in police forces resolving complaints fairly remains low.
Record referrals and rising complaint reviews are not signs of a system working well. They are signs of a system under strain, where public trust in policing continues to erode and the demand for independent oversight grows year on year. Anyone with experience of dealing with the IOPC will know they are not a truly independent body and the real measure of success is not how many cases it closes, it is whether the people at the heart of those cases feel that justice was done.
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