Examination of Witnesses (Questions 360
- 369)
TUESDAY 13 JULY 2004
MR CRAWFORD
ALLAN, MS
STEPHANIE PENDRY,
MS CAROL
HATTON AND
MR STUART
CHAPMAN
Q360 Chairman: This is a question
for TRAFFIC. You draw attention in your written evidence—for
which we thank you very much—to the imperative need to restore
the number of Customs Wildlife and Endangered Species Officers
at ports of entry. We quizzed Customs & Excise about this
last week, and they were insistent that their current system is
working extremely well, and that they are able to identify who
is likely to be importing endangered species and able to apprehend
them. They cited the case of Mr Humphreys, who is currently serving
a six-and-a-half-year jail sentence for importing rare birds,
I think. On the other hand, we heard compelling evidence from
Paul Flynn that it is possible to walk into Cardiff Airport, see
a signal saying "No Customs Officers on duty", be offered
a telephone number to ring if you wish to report the number of
rare parrots you happen to have in your suitcase, and if you do
that, you get an answerphone service. They were, however, sincere,
I think, in saying that the present system is working well. Do
you really feel that it is a numbers game in terms of officers,
or is it more to do with intelligence, as they were arguing?
Ms Pendry: I think typically it
is both, in this instance. Yes, intelligence plays a very big
role, and to be able to direct your enforcement efforts based
on intelligence is so much more efficient. However, you cannot
leave it entirely to intelligence. Where is the intelligence going
to come from if you do not have officers on the ground, looking
and seeing what is coming into the various ports and airports
that we have in our country? We have only two full-time CITES
officers in the whole of the country, and then we have the team
of experts in terms of the eight officers at Heathrow. If we look
at the seizures data that Customs collect themselves, and we look
at where the seizures take place, we can see that a lot of seizures
occur at Heathrow, a lot occur at Felixstowe, where the other
full-time officer is, and where else? Surely, this correlation
is between the fact that there is not any cover, any CITES officers,
at other international and very important airports and ports.
When there used to be a full-time CITES officer in Manchester,
there was a large number of seizures occurring at Manchester.
We now know that that officer has been taken off CITES duties
and has been redirected, I believe, to looking for cigarettes
and alcohol, and he no longer does CITES work, despite the fact
that he has built up a large amount of expertise in the years
that he was in post, and now we do not see any seizures in terms
of CITES in Manchester. So yes, I believe intelligence is important,
but I do not think it can be done entirely using one intelligence
officer and a team of eight people at Heathrow. I do not think
that is going to give us national coverage. In terms of looking
at the information that the Customs collect as well, that is another
issue we should bear in mind. It is very useful that they do collect
information on seizures; it is a great help for us to be able
to see and try to understand what trends are going on, but they
seem to be somewhat sporadic on the types of information they
collect on each seizure. It is important for us to be able to
have information on where the consignment was coming from and
where the person with the consignment has come from and where
their end destination is, what the flight route they took was,
to try and get from this information some sort of pattern and
trend in terms of the intelligence that can be received from it.
With all that detailed information, which seems to be somewhat
sporadic in their data collection, I think we are missing a trick.
If we look in particular at the Coventry hub for the post coming
in, again, information collected there was very sporadic. Seizures
do take place at Coventry. If a seizure takes place, it is imperative
to write down or make a note of who that parcel came from and
who it was going to, so as to be able to have an understanding
of whether the same person is committing an offence time and again.
But this information does not seem to be collected or passed on
to any other agency for follow-up and enforcement. There is a
gap there.
Q361 Chairman: Do you at WWF have
the same view of this?
Mr Chapman: Yes. I would add another
point to that. In many cases, the impact on endangered species
is almost too late once the item has been seized at Customs. So
there is a responsibility also to educate, particularly the travelling
public before they go on holiday. There is a chance that a large
chunk of this trade could be casual. It might not be targeted
or planned in any way. I must say that Defra has been very supportive
of that kind of work. For the last ten years they have been running
various awareness campaigns. For example, there is a souvenir
Alert campaign jointly funded between Customs, Defra and WWF,
where we warn of the perils of bringing back souvenirs made out
of endangered species and trying to raise awareness on the consequences
of doing so. That said, ivory continues to appear in the top 10
of seizures based on the trinket seizures, and that, of course,
is a species about which there should be high awareness amongst
the British travelling public. Part of the problem is that at
the point of sale in other countries awareness materials may be
low. Somebody going to a market may be told by the seller that
it is fine to bring this item back into the UK. So there is a
need for international cooperation in terms of raising awareness
of these issues, to try and cut off the market before it becomes
a problem coming back into either the UK or Europe.
Q362 Chairman: Where are those brochures
available?
Mr Chapman: This is possibly one
of the problems with this campaign: getting this information out
into the public domain. It is highly unlikely that anyone travelling
through one of the UK airports will see one of these on display.
Q363 Chairman: I have never seen
one.
Mr Chapman: Exactly. That is the
problem. It is getting that message out, and getting a point of
contact where the travelling public will see it. These leaflets
are available; they are available in poster form, in leaflet form.
Getting them into the hands of the traveller has proved difficult.
Q364 Chairman: What about encouraging
travel agents to distribute them with tickets, for example?
Mr Chapman: We have investigated
that. We have tried that as a collaborative way of working. We
got two messages back from the travel industry. One was that they
did not want any negative connotation attached to travel. They
did not want any do's or don'ts linked to travel that could put
people off travelling. So they were reluctant to put this kind
of messaging in, even though—and I can pass these examples
round—the messaging is not in a way that is going to put
people off. It is not gory or dramatic in that sense. That was
the first thing. The second thing was the competitive nature of
the travel industry. They wanted their own campaign with their
own branded company. That proved logistically impossible to do.
We wanted something generic that they could all use, but they
only wanted to use materials that had their own branding, which
proved difficult to do.
Q365 Chairman: What about airlines?
Mr Chapman: We have in the past
had in-flight videos on some airlines. Again, this had to be tailor-made
to the individual airline and again, there seemed to be a reluctance
also to put over a negative message on the airline. But I think
the point at which you have a captive audience is actually when
you are sitting down on the flight, looking at the information
that is in front of you or looking at the TV screen. That is an
opportunity, certainly, for the Government to explore with airlines
in terms of getting this message across.
Q366 Sue Doughty: I would like to
turn to local authorities, because we have heard quite a bit of
comment about local authorities in the memoranda we have received,
in terms of the need for them to understand and then use their
statutory powers, in cooperation with other organisations. What
level of involvement do you have with local authorities? Is it
sufficient?
Ms Pendry: We do try and work
with local authorities, and it is through that work that we have
discovered that they appear to be a bit disjointed from the rest
of the enforcement efforts in the UK. Part of that is basically
because of their structure: they are local. They are set up on
a local basis, with the information that they hold and also the
duties that they carry out with regard to the work that we do,
licensing pet shops, zoos and the dangerous wild animals. These
are all duties that they carry out, and they do so locally, and
the information they hold is local. So when it comes to another
enforcement agency wishing to make use of the information that
they have in follow-up to any investigation they have, it is very
difficult, if not impossible, to obtain this information quickly
and directly, because first of all you have to identify which
part of the local authority is responsible, and there is no uniform
structure of a local authority; each local authority has set itself
up in a slightly different way and divided up its responsibilities
slightly differently as well, and either devolved it down to a
district level or some of it is still done at a general level.
There is a difficulty there, where the information that is held
by local authorities is not shared very easily, if at all, with
enforcement agencies, either with the police or with Customs.
One of the suggestions we came up with was whether there is a
way in which we can centralise that information, a centralised
database that is managed in the same way as the CITES permit system
is managed by Defra, where local authorities can input the information
but other enforcement agencies can have access to it. This would
also help other local authorities, because if you want to register
yourself as a pet shop but you have been banned from keeping animals
and one local authority knows this, what is to stop you going
to the next local authority and applying? How is that local authority
going to check with anybody else to know if they have been banned
or if they have had an application in anywhere else? If there
were a generalised, centralised database that was national, it
would make that so much easier.
Q367 Sue Doughty: You also mentioned
the network of Trading Standards co-ordinators as being key to
improving communication between local authorities and other enforcement
agencies. How do you see it in practice?
Ms Pendry: The only place I have
seen this in practice is in London. It is something I came across
quite recently, and it sparked off the idea in my mind that perhaps
this was something we could again encourage at a national level.
How you would go about that I am still not clear, because, again,
would it be that we go to every local authority and try and encourage
them to have meetings with their local police officer to try and
encourage more and better communication between them on issues
that they share? That is certainly what has happened in London.
Whether that is because it is unique in being such a large area
and they needed these extra lines of communication to try and
establish a better means by which they could progress cases together
I am not sure, but that is certainly something that we are looking
at at the moment, and it is a bit of a new area for us.
Q368 Sue Doughty: Given that it is
new, have you had the opportunity to try it out with any local
authorities or Trading Standards officers?
Ms Pendry: Not outside London
yet.
Q369 Chairman: Unless anyone has
any more questions, that has been really helpful. Thank you very
much indeed. It would be helpful if we could have that little
note about the parrots that came from France that you mentioned,
Mr Allan.
Mr Allan: Of course, yes.
Chairman: We are very grateful to you
for your time and for your written evidence as well as the evidence
you have given us this afternoon. It has been most helpful.
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