Police powers - Serious Arrestable Offences (repealed 1.1.06)

The Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 has removed the concept of serious arrestable offences and they now have no application.

Serious arrestable offences

As all offences are now arrestable the previous concepts of arrestable and serious arrestable offences no longer apply.

This has an impact on the various “trigger powers” that accompanied these offences. As with the changes to arrest the use of “trigger powers” will also be governed by the concept of necessity whereby authorisation must only be given where the use of such powers are necessary and proportionate to the needs of the investigation.

However, these trigger powers can only be used for indictable offences (i.e. an offence which can be prosecuted either way or on indictment only).