Examination of Witnesses: (Questions 40
- 59)
TUESDAY 30 OCTOBER 2001
SUE KILLEN,
VIC HOGG,
ROSEMARY JENKINS
PAUL HAYES
AND KEITH
HELLAWELL
40. But the fact is that in the last year or
so they were doing what we had asked them to do.
(Keith Hellawell) Yes, that is correct.
Mr Watson
41. Mr Hayes, thank you for coming to speak
to us just three months into your job; a daunting task. Could
you sketch out to us why it was felt that we needed an organisation
like the National Treatment Agency?
(Paul Hayes) As I understand it, what the NTA exists
to do is to provide more treatment, better treatment and more
inclusive treatment. The history of treatment in this country,
particularly over the last few years, has been one of success.
We are able to demonstrate through the national treatment outcome
research study, that treatment is effective and an awful lot of
work has gone into improving the organisation of treatment. The
time had come, particularly with the Government channelling very
significant additional sums of money into the treatment arena,
to assure ourselves and Parliament, the public, that best value
was being gained from that additional investment. The NTA exists
to improve the way in which treatment is managed in order to ensure
that it is as effectively delivered as possible.
42. What do you feel you are going to add to
the drug treatment field which was not already there in the first
place?
(Paul Hayes) We are going to add clarity. We are going
to build on the excellent practice which is already available.
We are going to sharpen things. We are going to help local commissioners
to commission more effectively, to make sure they understand the
treatment needs of their population and the whole population,
not just those people who historically access the services. They
can then build treatment services which respond to everybody's
needs, not just white, male opiate users, but users of stimulants,
people from black and minority ethnic communities, young people,
women. We shall also be helping them to manage those services
more effectively, we shall be equipping them with consistent management
information so that they can performance manage the services they
commission and we shall be trying to make sure that the whole
process of the commissioning of services through drug action teams
and their local joint commissioning groups operates much more
smartly. We shall also be helping to make the whole treatment
field evidence driven. In the past, too often it has been characterised
by belief systems rather than evidence. One of the key strands
in our work will be to make sure that research underpins everything
we do. We shall be initiating research ourselves, but more importantly
we shall be working together with other people to make sure that
the research efforts complement each other. The research effort
within the Department of Health, within the Home Office, within
various universities, the research initiated locally by DATs and
by other people is sometimes not co-ordinated as well as it might
be. We shall be working to ensure that it is co-ordinated better
and that we also distill from that research what is best practice
and then disseminate that to the field. If there is a better mousetrap
out there, people will know that it exists and we shall be able
to get information about that out to them in language which they
can understand. We shall also be working to improve the consistency
of service delivery across the country. We shall be working to
develop standards of service delivery so that we can assure ourselves
that the best practice identified by research is actually being
implemented and then accrediting services, the people working
for those services, the methods of intervention which are being
used, to assure ourselves that the practice in Carlisle is very
similar to practice in Gwynedd and that both of them actually
match the practice which the research was undertaken into so that
we can assure ourselves, the people who are commissioning the
services and most importantly the people who are using them, that
it is likely to have an impact. Another strand of work we shall
be engaged in is workforce planning. Like many other areas of
the public service the drug treatment field suffers from a difficulty
in attracting suitably qualified staff and in retaining them.
There will be three strands to that work essentially. We shall
be working in partnership with other people, with people within
the medical profession, allied professions such as criminal justice,
social services, to make sure that staff working within each of
those professions are sufficiently skilled to work with drug misusers.
We shall be working within the existing drug treatment field to
enhance its professionalisation so that the people working within
the field are appropriately skilled and we can demonstrate that
they are competent to undertake the tasks asked of them. We shall
be working with their managers to improve their skills and we
shall be working to try to attract more people into the field.
The other strand of work we shall be engaged in is performance
managing, as commissioners of local services, to ensure that the
whole system in each area works as effectively as possible. Up
to now the provision of treatment in this country has tended to
be somewhat episodic. We need to build a treatment system so that
when people enter it, their pathways are actually managed to achieve
the best effect, so that they do not pass from agency to agency,
falling through the cracks in between, for ever being assessed
and not much being done. We shall be working with services locally
to make sure that an integrated treatment system is developed,
building on work initiated by the Department of Health. We shall
also be working with people locally to ensure that the pooled
treatment budget is spent to best effect, that other treatment
monies are also spent effectively and that people have appropriate
information available to them to performance manage that process
locally and to give information to us and other key partners such
as the Home Office about how the whole system is working.
43. On the performance management, do you feel
you have sufficient teeth to act where you find poor performance
or is it really that you will just be exposing poor performance
and you will not be able to make any changes?
(Paul Hayes) We shall try to be both. There are levers
to be pulled. We are not certain yet exactly how we shall use
the pooled treatment budget and it may well be that we shall be
able to manage that budget in such a way that we reward good performance
and penalise bad performance although other areas of government
have gone down that track and not all the experiences have been
positive ones. We need to make sure that we do not actually wind
up penalising communities and service users rather than poor commissioners
or poor service deliverers. We are certainly prepared to look
at ways in which we can do that. We do have access to other levers.
We can call upon the various inspectorates to which the people
providing services are accountable. We can call on the support
of the local media. We can call on the support of Ministers if
necessary. Several levers are available to us. Time will tell
how appropriate they are and whether or not we need new ones.
Certainly we shall then have discussions with the Home Office
and the Department of Health if it turns out that our teeth are
not sharp enough.
44. How are you going to link it with the Health
Development Agency and the National Institute for Clinical Excellence?
(Paul Hayes) We need to establish links with a range
of bodies and they are two. We also need to establish links with
the royal colleges, with the agencies within the criminal justice
system, etcetera. That has been part of the work we have been
undertaking over the last three months. I have to say that has
not been developed to the point of arriving at memorandums of
understanding or any formalised process as yet, not least because
we have been fully occupied dealing with matters we have inherited
from the Department of Health and trying to recruit the key staff
of the agency to enable us to be up and running as quickly as
possible. We shall be working very closely with a whole range
of bodies, including the two you mention.
45. Do you know what the timescale on that is?
Are you talking to them now or due to talk to them?
(Paul Hayes) I have a meeting with NICE next week.
We have staff seconded from the HDA so that those contacts are
already there. There is a range of organisations with which we
need to work very closely.
Mr Singh
46. The findings of the British Crime Survey
2000 showed that the use of cocaine has grown in all age groups
including 16 to 18-year-olds, the use of ecstasy has remained
stable but is growing amongst men aged 25 to 29 and is higher
in 2000 than in the previous survey. Before 2000 cocaine was more
prevalent among the unemployed but in 2000 its use was as common
amongst those with a job as without. Transform have said to this
Committeeand I do not know who Transform are but I presume
they are noteworthy if they are included in my brief"UK
drug policy has been an unmitigated disaster"; ACPO Sub-Committee
on Drugs said, "the results are not coming through";
the Independent Drug Monitoring Unit said, "There is overwhelming
evidence that current drug policies do not work". Is the
government policy on drugs failing completely? Is it as bad as
that?
(Keith Hellawell) Not at all. We have to remind ourselves
that we have a ten-year strategy which was published in 1998 and
that lays out very clearly what needed to be done over the coming
ten years if we were to make a difference. That difference will
be made incrementally in all the four areas of work in schools,
in the community, through treatment and in reducing the supply
of drugs to this country. We have had a very short time, in order
to get all the building blocks in place in the first two or three
yearsand in my published annual reports and plans you will
see that there is a substantial amount of process measurementin
order to introduce these systems or provide the treatment or recruit
the people or get the police stations involved in arrest referral
schemes. If you look at that first phase of activity, it is very,
very, very positive. Even in some of the areas where I did not
anticipate that we would have any positive outcomesoutcomes
rather than process managementcertainly in schools and
certainly in treatment intervention within the criminal justice
system and in treatment intervention generally, we are beginning
to see some benefits. We used the years 2005 and 2008 as milestones
for measuring how beneficial all our activities are. If the question
wasand it was notwhether all of these activities
made a substantial impact on the drug taking of people within
this country, the answer to that question would be no. But it
was never anticipated that it would in the early years. The critics
are using that. I was very pleased that the politicians did not
expect that and I did not know whether they would and that is
short-term results and using the fact to say "Look at what
is happening, it is all getting worse". You will see in my
early reports that I anticipated the rise in cocaine. I anticipated
it back in 1996. If you look at some of the research there has
been from Manchester University in relation to heroin, they are
talking of the take-up rate of new heroin people, not the ones
who are in the system that we are trying to catch, but new people,
is actually slowing down or levelling off. If you want emotive
things or headline things, thousands more children are now receiving
drugs education than were before, thousands more people are now
in treatment than were before. We have the most comprehensive
treatment intervention programmes in the criminal justice system
of anywhere in the world and that is beginning to pay dividends.
Our re-focusing on class A drugs, particularly by Customs, by
the intelligence agencies and by the National Crime Squad, is
making a bigger impact than we had ever made. Way offshore, because
my view was that it was too late when it got here; way offshore.
There are several initiatives now in the system which are beginning
to bear fruit.
(Rosemary Jenkins) You particularly mentioned cocaine.
The Committee has heard that the treatment in general is very
successful in helping people get off drugs, but we are aware that
the numbers of people coming into treatment to have their crack
cocaine problems sorted out are much lower than those who are
coming forward to have help with their opiate problems; only about
six per cent coming in to treatment for cocaine. There is an underlying
reason for that which is that the evidence on how to treat cocaine
dependence is much weaker than the evidence on how to treat opiate
dependence. There is a lot of good evidence around the use of
methadone so it is clear there are good treatment procedures which
can be offered to people which is not nearly as clear when one
is looking at cocaine. For that reason we have decided in the
absence of published evidence to bring together a group of people
in the early new year who do treat people who have crack cocaine
problems, to explore with them what they do, what their best practice
is, where they have success and then we shall work with the National
Treatment Agency and I am certain the National Treatment Agency
will pick up the findings of that work in order to spread around
the rest of the treatment sector approaches which we feel are
likely to work better than perhaps we know at the moment.
47. To reduce the prevalence of drug taking
was one of the strategy targets..
(Keith Hellawell) Yes.
48. Given the British Crime Survey figures,
and I understand what you have said, is there any point at all
in government policy focusing on reducing the prevalence of drug
taking? Would it be better to concentrate on reducing the harm
that drugs do, treating people who have drug problems and hitting
suppliers as hard as we can?
(Keith Hellawell) The answer to that question is yes
and that is the purpose of the strategy. I am sure you have read
these documents, but the strategy says that we want to reduce
the harm, damage and danger that drugs cause to individuals, their
families and the communities and it is a preventive strategy.
If you look at the change, people talk about the changes in Europe,
this was the first strategy to have a balanced approach and was
regarded by the international community as such away from either
the very hard line or the very soft line. All of these come together
and the main impetus over the last three years has been to train
teachers, get more teachers in school to have clarity about what
they are going to do, to have an inspection system through OFSTED
which has clarity about what is happening in schools and huge
amounts going into treatment, because we will reduce the prevalence
of drug taking by providing treatment for someone. If they do
not have to access the criminal justice system, we are going to
reduce the demand. The balance of the strategy was and still is
to reduce the demand as well as take the profit away from people
who are benefiting from it. People sometimes overlook this. If
I am addicted to heroin, I shall be involved in doing all sorts
of things to feed my habit. I shall try to get you involved if
you are a friend; I shall probably give you some. There is also
my dealer on my back and he is going to give me a bad time if
I do not pay my dues. I am going to be a sub-dealer for him. I
have seen hundreds of these individuals; in my time in office
I spent at least three days a week in prisons, in treatment centres,
out in the community listening to people, so I am talking from
three and a half years of experience speaking to thousands of
people with problems. If we can provide treatment to an individual,
and give him the support which we are now bringing in through
housing support, through further education, through employment
and all of those mechanisms which are in place and have been put
in place in the last three years, then we can take him out of
that. By taking him out of that we are taking away his need for
those drugs and also his encouragement of other people to get
involved in order that he can continue to support his habit. The
strategy itself is very, very well balanced and balanced towards
prevention and intervention.
(Sue Killen) One point is worth making on the BCS
which is that it is based on what was happening in 1999 and the
strategy only started in 1998. I am not saying things would be
markedly different if we had the figures for this year, but it
is important when you are looking at a ten-year strategy that
you do that. One of the things we find frustrating, which I am
sure you will, is that if you are going to track something over
ten years, inevitably you end up looking back because that is
when you have the trend data. Having set up a ten-year strategy,
we had to get research studies in place to start building up trend
data and judging how we are performing against that is quite problematic
because you are looking backwards. We are looking at things in
two different ways: firstly, the evidence base on treatment is
the strongest one we have. Paul mentioned earlier on the national
treatment outcomes research study. This showed most definitely
that if you get people into treatment, five years later you still
have massively reduced drug use and offending. If we can expand
the treatment part of the strategy and get people effectively
into treatment, then that should start to impact on those trend
numbers. If I am sitting there and I am doing an assessment for
the Home Secretary, which is in effect what we are doing at the
moment with the stocktaking review of how we are doing against
the strategy, the linchpin in it is that pro-active spend. In
SR2000 we got a really dramatic increase in the amount of money
which can go into drug treatment, into the pro-active side of
the drug strategy. We have the NTA, we have Paul in place now
to make sure that money is spent effectively and our expectation
would be that that then would begin to impact on the numbers.
What I cannot do at the moment is give you the trend data to show
that, so it is easy for people to criticise us. That strong evidence
base on treatment is really important. We have other figures which
we can show you that the introduction of drug testing in prisons
has led to a 50 per cent reduction in the number testing positive
and that is the result of the treatment regimes they have put
into prisons. Keith is right. We have 90 per cent of schools now
with effective education policies. We also have a lot of projects
which we have trialed. We have shown they work in a small way
and therefore we have rolled them out much more widely. I would
put in that the arrest referral schemes, drug treatment and testing
orders. It is early days and we have only just started to get
the evaluations, but what we do know is that if we can get drug
misusing offenders into appropriate treatment, the right treatment,
the kind of treatment Paul wants to deliver, then we shall get
reductions, not just in their drug use but in their offending
behaviour and that will start to feed through into the statistics.
We have also done projects with young people, particularly the
vulnerable young people whom we need to target. Positive Futures
was a really good scheme which we ran. We trialled it in 24 areas.
We can prove that was successful and we now have the money to
expand it to 50 areas. The overall message is that yes, we look
at the trend data, but we also have to look at individual project
evaluation and roll them out as soon as we know they are working.
I would say to you exactly what I would say to the Home Secretary:
we know there are areas where we need to do more and they are
the ones we look at as part of SR2002. Top of my list I would
put more emphasis on young people. It is a very difficult area.
If you are dealing with people who have a multiplicity of problems,
you are having to pull together at local level a multiplicity
of players. It is not simple. We cannot come up with one single
project which is going to solve this. It is all about the kind
of thing Paul was talking about when he talked about the drug
action teams. It is frontline workers at local level pulling together
to provide the right support that these young people need. We
need to do more of that. Rosemary has mentioned harm minimisation;
a strand where we know we need to do more. The Home Secretary
mentioned that. Lots of people criticise us. They place statistics
as they want. I would say to you that if you want to come and
see really effective drugs projects, which we are trying to spread
much more widely, in your constituencies or wherever, we are very,
very happy to arrange that.
49. I can see you are a believer.
(Rosemary Jenkins) I accept what is said about the
trend data, but we have interesting figures on numbers in treatment
or entering treatment. When these started flowing into the treatment
services in 1998 what we could see very clearly in the two years
of figures which we do have between then and the latest figures
in September 2000, is a rise of 16 per cent in those two years
of people coming into treatment, that is 16 per cent more people
getting the advantage of the course of action which will help
them.
50. On drug testing in prisons, is it true to
say that what has happened in prisons is that people serving time
in prison have actually abandoned cannabis because of the policy
and gone onto hard drugs which disappear from the bloodstream
faster than cannabis, so are not picked up in the testing any
more?
(Sue Killen) No.
(Keith Hellawell) No, that is not true. There has
been an overall downturn in the number of those people who are
testing positive in prison for all drugs. Cannabis was the most
widely used drug. We know cannabis stays in people's blood longer
but it was and still is I suspect the most used drug within prison.
Whilst people have said that, our evidence from testingand
it is a universal system of testing in all our prisonshas
indicated that there has been an overall downturn in those testing
positive for drugs. May I put forward some reasons why? It is
not just because more people are being tested and they are frightened
of being found. It is because the prisons now have a regime to
assess people and help people when they go into prison to deal
with those problems. It is because many prisons have provided
drug-free rooms and incentives to be drugs free. It is because
we have given people support who want to remain drugs free to
keep them away from those who would put them under pressure to
get involved in drugs. If you look at any other prison system
in the world, they are quite amazed that we have achieved that
reduction in such a relatively short time. That is great credit
to the prison officers and what is happening in prisons. The other
interesting feature is that the prison governors used to have
to do a ten per cent mandatory test. We gave them discretion within
the new strategy to allow for them to focus their testing on areas
where they felt concerned and also allow the prisoners themselves
to ask to be tested to prove that they were drugs free. The self-initiated
testing demand is going up like this because you are getting the
balance changing from trying to beat the system to meeting the
system in terms of "I'm drugs free and I'm proud of it and
I want to prove I'm proud of it". The penalties within prison
have been changed in line with that philosophy of prevention.
The other thing which is often overlooked is the programme of
rehabilitation. We are one of the very few countries in the world
which has such a comprehensive support for prisoners when they
leave. For eight weeks after they leave it is the responsibility
of newly appointed prison staff to link within the community to
provide them with housing, with education if necessary, with employment
and continued treatment if that is necessary. This is an initiative
in this country. It is one which is highly acclaimed throughout
the world and those workers who are persevering under difficult
conditions feel let down when they see newspaper headlines that
it is all a failure, it is a waste and it is a total mess because
they are making a difference.
51. Going back to the ten-year strategy, has
any interim evaluation been made? If so, can we expect the publication
of a report at some stage?
(Keith Hellawell) When we did the strategy I was anxious,
because I only intended to stay three years, that at the end of
those three years we evaluated openly both my post and the strategy.
Because of the election, the strategy is being evaluated now.
(Sue Killen) We are doing what we are calling a stock-take
review and it has several purposes in effect. We are looking at
the targets because we said we would. We said we would take a
really hard look at progress against the targets, whether we had
the balance right at this particular point, so we would go back
to Ministers anyway. In addition, SR2002 now gets under way so
it is important that we do a thorough review of the strategy so
we can look at funding lines for the next spending round. That
process is going on at the moment and will more or less run to
the SR2002 timetable. The normal expectation is that at the end
of that the Government will publish something which outlines the
decisions they have reached.
52. It has always puzzled me to find that drugs
strategy is with the Home Office. Is that because we see drugs
as a problem of crime rather than health? Now that Keith Hellawell,
our czar, has gone, what is the co-ordinated mechanism between
the courts and health?
(Sue Killen) It might be worth giving you a bit of
history here. I find it surprising that I am now in the Home Office.
I was on secondment to the Cabinet Office to co-ordinate the whole
strategy and the system we had before involved far more departments.
My old team in the Cabinet Office has now moved to the Home Office.
That actually gives much better clarity. We were in a situation
before where responsibility for drug action teams who deliver
the strategy at local level was in my unit, whereas the drug prevention
advisory service full of experts who provide that support in the
field to the DATs was in the Home Office. The whole lot has been
brought together and the Home Secretary has responsibility for
driving forward delivery of the whole strategy. When you took
evidence from him last week, we were seeing that he is extremely
keen on issues such as harm minimisation and the whole range of
the drug strategy. In a sense it does not matter where we are
so long as we have the right responsibilities to drive the whole
thing forward.
53. Can we be reassured that you are in the
right place?
(Sue Killen) Absolutely. I would emphasise that the
five of us here are people who deal with each other all the time
anyway. I, for example, am on the board of the National Treatment
Agency with Paul. Rosemary and I trooped around the country doing
a huge consultation exercise last year on setting up the NTA.
What we have are cross-departmental teams and we do this between
us because it is the only way we can.
(Rosemary Jenkins) The whole strategy has moved to
a criminal justice agenda and away from health. The thing we have
to remember clearly is that many of the activities which are rightfully
happening within the Home Office, drug treatment and testing orders,
referral schemes, are there to get people into treatment but the
end result is actually a public health measure. It does not really
matter which department is running it. We have spent the last
three and a half to four years working closely together over measures
like that and shall continue to do so.
Chairman
54. May I just ask about targets? Whose idea
were these targets? Mr Hellawell, are you owning up?
(Keith Hellawell) Yes. I am quite proud of the idea.
Having been a chief constable for almost ten years, I have had
responsibility for a substantial area where the performance indicators
which were set for us were indicators of process and they were
indicators which meant we could achieve and improve but it would
not make any difference in the community. As a chief constable
I spent one day a week out in the community and I was not duped
by figures which showed we were doing well, when in reality it
was bad out in the street. I was determined that when I came to
do this job, we would see some positive outcomes from this. It
is interestingmaybe I should have done it, but I am not
a politicianthat if I had used the old idea of process
measures, I could be saying to you now that on all these measures
we had achieved our targets. I would have thought that you are
certainly sophisticated enough to query whether that had actually
made any difference. That is why for me those targets were extremely
important.
55. Are they a bit ambitious?
(Keith Hellawell) Yes, I suppose they are. The idea
of the old targets on availability, for example, was more arrests
by the police service, and that was quantity not quality, more
seizure of drugs by Her Majesty's Customs and Excise, which was
quantity not quality. I stood up for three or four years as a
chief constable with the Head of Customs and said, tongue in cheek
quite frankly, that we were doing well because we had seized more
drugs and arrested more people. Towards the end of that I felt
less comfortable with that because I saw in the communities that
the position was getting worse. I did not have the power to do
it, I had to influence Ministers, but I was determined that we
ought to have some positive outcomes. The performance indicator
in schools was the percentage of schools which had drugs policies
in place. I asked both the schools inspectorate and educationalists
why we can achieve 100 per cent coverage of schools and not make
any difference to the drug taking habits and experimentation of
children. I was keen in all of these areas that what we would
achieve were outcomes. Now, your point about where they came from.
There was substantial resistance both from the civil service,
the agencies and Ministers to introducing targets, for understandable
reasons. Much more comfort with process measures. It is fair to
say, certainly in the ministerial committee I worked to then,
we put forward a convincing argument that if we wanted the agencies
to engage then we would have to set some targets for them. They
would have to see that the results of their activities were making
a real difference in the community. The only precedents we had
were the Americans and the Australians who had actually done a
great deal of work on this. Whilst we did not adopt their measures
in full, and there was substantial consultation within agencies
and a reluctance to engage with me, those came out as a compromise
at the end of the day where some research had been. I saw them
certainly as aspirational and the three-year review was a good
time to measure ourselves and see how much progress we had made
and see how realistic they are as time moves forward.
56. On what were the targets you set based?
(Keith Hellawell) They were based on what we feltand
it was not an individual decisionwe were likely to achieve.
To give you an example, on the ability ones I pulled together
all the people, and they are now in a formal committee, and asked
whether, if we continued in the way we were, we would really make
a difference to the availability of drugs on our streets. I am
delighted to say that they said the answer was no. We can put
some superficiality on it: maybe we can get ten per cent more,
if we have more resources maybe 15 per cent more, but we are not
going to make a real difference. We did this in all of these areas
to find out how we could make a real difference. That is why we
have the advice and guidance in education, why we set the targets
to increase the treatment and have some consistency through the
creation of the National Treatment Agency and also the policy
on foreign policy, moving beyond the shores to do that. Where
did the actual figures come from? There was no statistical analysis.
What we did back in 1999 when those were government targetsoften
they are put as my targets; people have distanced themselves from
themwas decide on the basis of research we had, and you
have already heard some of that is pretty frail, and we would
supplement that by further research in bringing forward base data.
I anticipated, indeed promised, in my annual plan for 1999-2000
that base data would be delivered by the year 2000. Some of those
have not yet been delivered because of the complexity, not because
people are not doing their job.
57. Is not the danger with ambitious targetsand
as you know this is a government which likes targetsthat
you set yourself up for failure?
(Keith Hellawell) That was one of the issues which
politicians were clearly concerned about. Across those targets
which we have, and the review is going on at the moment, there
is a realism about achieving not all of them but some of them;
the treatment one, for example. The Government have now backed
all of the strategy with money. I chaired two cross-cutting financial
reviews and the money was given to support the strategy. It was
not a matter of providing money for treatment it was actually
recruiting people to do it because they were not there. The speed
at which that will be achieved is the speed at which we have people
coming on stream who are trained to deliver the treatment. The
money is there to support that. We will see a flat period and
then we shall start to see some climb.
58. Are you confident that we shall achieve
all or most of them?
(Keith Hellawell) No, I am not confident at all about
achieving all or most of them. What I do believe is that the targets
were necessary. With the knowledge we had at that time, rather
than to pick them from the air, to base them on the only two other
countries in the world who had set targets and these were the
base targets they had set, was sensible and reasonable at the
time. We are now looking to see how realistic they are in the
light of delays in recruiting people.
59. Might we find the downward revision coming
up in the near future?
(Keith Hellawell) No, that is not part of my work
quite frankly.
(Sue Killen) I can only repeat what I said before
and the Home Secretary said in his memorandum to you, which is
that we are having a really good review of the targets and the
strategy at the moment and that is ongoing.
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