BELATED moves are to being made to overhaul the hugely controversial stop and search powers after an independent study found that police officers held “unconscious bias” against minorities and children in the majority of cases.

The new proposals would apparently mean that forces across England and Wales will not be able to search people simply on “gut instinct” and will instead have to record the reason and explain it to the potential suspect.

Critics of the draconian powers argue that the use of stop and search is more about racial profiling than legitimate cause, criticisms that appear to be borne out by the statistics which show that young black men remain many times more likely to be stopped by police than their white counterparts.