The police station accreditation scheme was introduced in the 1990’s in England and Wales, after solicitors were accused of sending their secretaries down to the police station to sit in interviews with murder suspects. A particularly notorious case was in Cardiff when a secretary/receptionist sent by a solicitor to observe an interview sat through questioning whilst a detective asked a suspect over 100 times whether he had committed the murder and subjected him to constant interviewing without a break.
The Law Society began to develop guidelines, and soon a recognised qualification emerged – the ‘accredited police station representative’. A police station representative attends interviews at police stations where a suspect is being spoken to by police officers under caution about a criminal offence. Its a tough job and very often involves working unsocial hours.
Pay has not increased much since we first wrote this FAQ back in 2000 and most reps earn around £22-25k per annum. Some self-employed reps earn a lot more, but the fees paid for attendance at police stations have not changed a lot in the same time frame and in fact in some cases they have actually dropped because of the implementation of fixed fees.
You do not need to be qualified to be a police station rep, but you must be with a criminal law firm with whom you can undertake the training. The cost is about £500 for the examinations, which consist of a written portfolio of cases you have experienced, written exam for some levels of candidates, and an oral exam. This is a tough test, and the rewards for passing it are that you can undertake police station work (which may or may not be considered a benefit when you are sat at a police station at 2am on a Sunday morning with a particularly unpleasant client!). It takes between 3 and 12 months to complete this qualification. If a solicitor wants to join the duty solicitor rota, he or she has to obtain this qualification at some stage in the same way as non-qualified representatives.
