Part 2: Police Complaints, Discipline and Inspection Chapter 1: Police Complaints Section 14: Definition of police complaint
For the purposes of the current legislation, a complaint is defined in section 12(1) of the 2002 Act as a 'complaint about the conduct of a person serving with the police'. There are various restrictions as to how such a complaint can be made and who can make it.
	Section 14 replaces this definition with 'any expression of dissatisfaction with a police force'. This means that where a member of the public raises an issue that does not directly relate to the conduct of an individual officer or member of police staff it will be considered a complaint for the purposes of Part 2 of the 2002 Act. (Schedule 3 to that Act sets out how complaints made against the police should be handled.) This could include a purely customer-service related complaint or a complaint about an issue of policing policy.
	In the current system, complaints can only be raised by: (i) a member of the public who claims to be the person in relation to whom the conduct took place; (ii) a member of the public who claims to be adversely affected by the conduct; (iii) a member of the public who claims to have witnessed the conduct; or (iv) a third party acting on behalf of any of the above. These current arrangements are closely replicated in the new system for complaints about the conduct of a person serving with the police. In the case of other complaints, the complainant will have to have been adversely affected by the matter about which dissatisfaction is expressed. For example, this excludes complaints about incidents that people have simply seen on the television being treated as complaints for the purposes of Part 2 of the 2002 Act.
	Schedule 4 to the Act makes a number of consequential amendments to Part 2 of the 2002 Act to reflect that complaints under the new definition will not always be complaints about the conduct of a person serving with the police. These include an amendment (paragraph 2 of Schedule 4) to the description of a complaint in section 10 of the 2002 Act which sets out the IPCC’s functions and a number of changes to provisions relating to the handling of complaints in Schedule 4 to clarify that the complaint may not always relate to the conduct of an individual.
	In the current system, certain complaints can be classified as relating to a 'direction and control matter', as defined at paragraph 29 of Schedule 3 to the 2002 Act. This includes complaints relating to operational decision making about deployment of resources and strategic decisions about how policing powers should be exercised. Such complaints are treated differently to complaints about the conduct of an individual – in particular, there are limited appeal rights. Paragraph 45 of Schedule 5 to the Act amends Schedule 3 to the 2002 Act with the consequence of removing 'direction and control matter' as a separate category of complaint. In future, complaints about those matters will be captured in the new definition of complaint provided for by section 14 and will be treated exactly the same as any other complaint.