Extending and professionalising the role of the appropriate adult

Abstract

The ‘appropriate adult’ has received relatively little attention from academics and even less from policymakers. That said, when the United Kingdom's Labour government was displaced in 2010, it had just completed, in March 2010, a three-year review of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE), which included proposals for extending, professionalising and further reviewing the appropriate adult scheme. Under the new coalition government, the review of the provision of appropriate adults is continuing. It is, therefore, timely to assess the merits of the existing proposals and consider which further issues should be taken into account by the ongoing review. This article makes this assessment with reference to the existing literature, including the previously unpublished results of a survey of professional appropriate adults and their coordinators. The article argues that a number of appropriate adults support the extension and professionalisation of the role and, in practice, have already extended their role, in a manner akin to Marx's (1988) concept of ‘creep’. However, the main priority for the new government should be to clarify the definition of the role.

Keywords:

• appropriate adult
• suspect
• police
• PACE
• juvenile
• mentally vulnerable

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the National Appropriate Adult Network for allowing her to distribute the questionnaire and the delegates who completed it. She would also like to thank Professors Trevor Bennett and Mike Maguire for their comments on this article.

Notes

1. At the time of an evaluation in Scotland in 2002, there were 441 appropriate adults of which 70% were social workers and remainder came from a variety of other professions including nursing (Thomson et al. 2004).