Select Committee on Public Accounts Minutes of Evidence


Examination of witnesses (Questions 160 - 179)

WEDNESDAY 25 FEBRUARY 1998

MR FRANK MARTIN, Second Treasury Officer of Accounts, HM Treasury, further examined. SIR PAUL CONDON, QPM, and MR DAVID OMAND

  160.  In fact it is unfair to ask you and I should really have asked Mr Omand.
  (Mr Omand)  These are regulations and terms which apply to the police force generally in the Police Pension Regulations 1987.

  161.  Yes, but why?
  (Mr Omand)  At the time, that is how these regulations emerged from the discussions with the police authorities and with the Home Office.

  162.  Why?
  (Mr Omand)  We are publishing next month a consultative document on those regulations. We have picked up the point which has been made by the Chief Inspector of Constabulary. He has some specific recommendations to improve the definitions of injuries on duty and we will carry that forward.
  (Sir Paul Condon)  Part of the historical rationale was that as well as routine journeys to work, many police officers on many occasions are called to work in an emergency. Last night we ran our mobilisation and, without notice, we mobilised the force to see our preparedness to deal with a major emergency, so you had people called perhaps to a place of work in circumstances where they did not expect to be, so I think the historical argument was that if a police officer, having made plans about a rest period or whatever, is suddenly and dramatically called back to work, through no choice of his own, then his journey to and from work should be considered as part of that on-duty exercise.

  163.  Can I ask the Home Office then, does the same rule apply if there is a major fire and they have to call in extra fire service personnel or if there is a major disaster and they have to call in extra ambulance crews and so on? In their travel period to work, if they have an accident, do they get the same coverage as the police?
  (Mr Omand)  I would need to research that, but our proposals, which we will be publishing next month, will cover the fire service as well. I would need to let you have a note specifically on the differences in the sets of regulations between the fire service and the police.[6]

  164.  One can see that if it is a uniformed policeman travelling to work, he may be a target inevitably because he is in uniform, but a lot of the officers are in plain clothes and, therefore, are not self-evidently targets. I would appreciate again, to save the time of the Committee, since I do not think we are going to get far with this "it is there because it is there" as an answer, would you perhaps give me a longer "because it is there" in black and white from the Home Office?
  (Mr Omand)  Yes.

  165.  Do you have any idea, incidentally, as a result of your personnel computer how often such a situation arises?
  (Sir Paul Condon)  Yes, we do.

  166.  That is great!
  (Sir Paul Condon)  If you were looking for an analysis of injuries on duty, then travelling to and from work does not feature highly in the classification. The prime cause of injury on duty is injury in a police vehicle accident.

  167.  In a police vehicle accident?
  (Sir Paul Condon)  Yes. Whiplash and neck injuries. Part of the emergency response challenge is that we are dealing with 1.7 million emergency calls, we do over 80 million miles around London every year——

  168.  Are you telling us more policemen are injured in their police cars and police vans than are injured in their normal duties other than in vehicles?
  (Sir Paul Condon)  When you break down all the classifications of injury on duty, injury in police vehicles is a highly significant grouping.

  169.  You must have a terrible insurance policy!
  (Sir Paul Condon)  We cover our own risk.

  170.  And you do not have any no-claims bonus requirement!
  (Sir Paul Condon)  If I take the last year in question, 1996-97, the Met had 12,276 injuries on duty. Within that 12,276, 3,280 were actually assaults, the remainder were a whole variety of industrial injuries, accidents and so on.

  171.  I have not taken a note of those figures myself, but could you let us have a copy of your piece of paper which gives the break down[7]? That would be helpful for our consideration.
  (Sir Paul Condon)  Yes, of course.

  172.  Finally, a thought had occurred to me as I was listening to you when you quoted—I think it was to Mr Page—"absence makes your friend work harder" appearing in many police stations, and it did seem to imply that your men are perhaps a little more cynical about their colleagues than you are.
  (Sir Paul Condon)  That was a management initiative. They are not appearing as an impromptu response from colleagues.

  173.  So it is not a reflective piece on their part?
  (Sir Paul Condon)  No.

  174.  Can we look at Figure 12 on page 25? This is the number of working days lost through spells of short-term and long-term sickness by division. We go from, on the left hand side, a loss of 8, to the right hand side, the worst division, where the figure is 31, four times as bad. Which division is 8 and which division is 31 and why?
  (Sir Paul Condon)  8 is Hackney, the top end is the airport. The range is from Hackney at 8, Wembley 9, Brixton 10, Hammersmith 11, Holborn 12. Then at the other end, the airport is the highest, then Enfield with 25, Havering 25, Hillingdon 21. The explanation is partly a product of the age and experience profile at various police stations. We recently introduced a tenure policy which was about trying to get a more equitable distribution of age and service around the Met. The problem with the airport is that historically it has had the highest sickness rate and we do not deploy new officers there because we feel they must have experience of general policing before they go to the airport. So we do not have the youngest, fittest officers deployed at the airport. That skews the sickness record. It is a challenging working environment and at the moment they are carrying a small number of very long-term sick officers which has led to that situation in relation to the airport. What I have done is two things. One, I have set up a special team that is specific to the airport, which involves a doctor, an occupational health adviser, a counsellor, to try and bring that specific problem down.

  175.  What is interesting is that the gulf is large also in the spells of more than seven days, the light green sector, where it is six days in Hackney but the right hand figure, minus the dark green, becomes 29 days, which is five times as much. Why is the longest spell five times as much at the airport?
  (Sir Paul Condon)  It is a product primarily of age profiles at various locations. You only need a small number of officers to be long-term sick to skew those totals. That is the situation. I think, as the NAO report accurately says, 70 per cent of the working units are within the fairly narrow band of performance. The extremes are where we are carrying a small number of long-term sick officers, which is partly accident—you may find you have three or four officers for quite separate reasons who are long-term sick in a unit—but that can skew dramatically their position on this chart.

  176.  Again, could you let us have a note giving us a response to that in more detail1?
  (Sir Paul Condon)  One of the things we are doing in the next financial year is training 2,000 first line supervisors around these issues. We are targeting first those police stations which are at the right hand side to make sure that even if they have got clusters of long-term sick, we are not missing the opportunity to treat that.

  177.  You had better be careful, at £57,000 a time you may get a big increase in your retirements at those stations!
  (Sir Paul Condon)  That is the challenge.

Mr Davidson

  178.  Can I come back to the question of the correlation between long-term sickness and the pending nature of disciplinary action? Did I pick up correctly that you were saying there were only 34 officers over a three year period who come into that category?
  (Sir Paul Condon)  Yes. If the anxiety is, are officers who are involved in disciplinary proceedings utilising the sickness provisions in a way which we feel is not in the public interest—and again, quite properly, we have anonymised cases because many of them are still on-going—my feeling is that it is about 34 officers over a three year period.

  179.  So that if the appeal you have made to the Home Secretary via various routes is picked up, presumably that, hopefully, will alter your figures for future years and presumably you will be able to make adjustments to the targets you set since Jack Straw will help you achieve your targets?
  (Sir Paul Condon)  I think the numbers involved are so small in the context of the larger figures, although they are very important symbolically, they are not statistically significant enough to make the challenge of the 11 per cent move to 12 per cent.


6   Note: See Evidence, Appendix 1, page 28 (PAC 218). Back

7   Note: See Evidence, Appendix 2, page 39 (PAC 245). Back


 
previous page contents next page

House of Commons home page Parliament home page House of Lords home page search page enquiries

© Parliamentary copyright 1998
Prepared 9 July 1998