I was pretty pleased with myself for having managed to take a recent Friday afternoon off to go to my youngest daughter’s school Open Day followed by Shrek 2 on the first day of its release. I am always being accused of never doing anything for my children (by my children) when apparently all other parents are perfect in every way.

However, the best laid plans of mice and men and politicians…

All media hell broke loose before lunchtime, as the media woke up, following the publishing of a report on the rise of police stops under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act, to the fact that stops of Asians had risen 302%.

No surprise there! As Vice-Chair of the Stop & Search scrutiny at the London Assembly, I had raised this very issue during the scrutiny itself which reported only a month or so ago. Overall, our findings showed racial bias in the police force led to disproportional stops on black and ethnic Londoners. Stops on black members of the community have risen 30%, stops on Asians 41%, whilst on whites they have risen only 8% over 2000/2001 and 2001/2002.

The Met is committed to improving its record and has been making great strides in the right direction – but clearly from the evidence it still has a very long way to go. The hard-hitting and well-received scrutiny report delivers many useful recommendations on supervision, training, leadership, monitoring and IT data collection which we now expect the Met to implement.

Normal stop and search is exercised at the discretion of an individual police officer and is supposed to be ‘intelligence’ led – the officer having to have reasonable grounds to suspect that an individual is carrying stolen goods, weapons or drugs. However, once an area has been authorised under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act, stops can be carried out by officers on anyone they please without further ado.

Following 9/11 and the heightened security because of very real threats to London, this had led, unsurprisingly, to a rise in Section 44 stops on Asians. Now, whilst the long-suffering Asian community might well be able to deal with a rise in stops as a consequence of this heightened state of alert – the huge scale of the increase in stops of 302% is way beyond the acceptable. We heard evidence during the scrutiny from the Chair of the Islamic Human Rights Commission to the effect that people were being stopped because they ‘looked muslim’.

Nearly 18,000 people have been stopped under Section 44 powers, but this has resulted in only 9 arrests for terrorism and there is no data on whether those 9 arrests led to successful prosecution. It is no wonder that the Asian community is questioning the use of these powers. All of us want protecting from the terrorist threat – but there is also a real need to better protect our communities from any inappropriate use of the necessary but swingeing powers of the Terrorism Act. It is a very difficult balance to get right.

I was still fielding media calls as I left for school Open Day. The last call I took was from a TV station sending an outside broadcast truck to my home especially – as I couldn’t get to their studios in time.

I couldn’t get to their studios in time because of going to Shrek 2 – although I don’t think I particularly made my reasons clear to them! It was to be live TV and it had to be at 6.15pm. I thought that would be fine as the film began at 4pm and ran 93 minutes.

Sitting in the darkened cinema, I realised my miscalculation – 25 minutes of adverts and trailers before the main feature. I abandoned the kids at the cinema telling them to get the bus home and left twenty minutes before the ending to do the interview in the pouring rain in my garden.

Hopefully, they all lived happily ever after…