CORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 1038-i

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

HOME AFFAIRS COMMITTEE

 

 

Police Reform

 

 

WedNesdaY 8 September 2004

MR CHRIS FOX, MR GUY GARDENER, DR TIMOTHY BRAIN, MS JAN BERRY, MR CLINT ELLIOTT and MR RICK NAYLOR

Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 72

 

 

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

1.	This is a corrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others.
2.	The transcript is an approved formal record of these proceedings. It will be printed in due course.
3.	Members who receive this for the purpose of correcting questions addressed by them to witnesses are asked to send corrections to the Committee Assistant.
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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Home Affairs Committee

on Wednesday 8 September, 2004

Members present

Mr John Denham, in the Chair

Janet Anderson

Mr James Clappison

Mrs Claire Curtis-Thomas

Mrs Janet Dean

Mr Gwyn Prosser

Mr Marsha Singh

Mr John Taylor

David Winnick

________________

Memoranda submitted by Association of Chief Police Officers, Chief Police Officers' Staff Association, Police Federation and Police Superintendents' Association

 

Examination of Witnesses

 

Witnesses: Mr Chris Fox, President, and Mr Guy Gardener, Head of Policy, Association of Chief Police Officers; Dr Timothy Brain, Chairman, Chief Police Officers' Staff Association; Ms Jan Berry, Chairman, and Mr Clint Elliott, General Secretary, Police Federation; and Mr Rick Naylor, President, Police Superintendents' Association, examined.

Q1 Chairman: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much for coming to give evidence this afternoon. This is the first session of a brief inquiry that the Committee is taking to look at progress on police reform. The police reform process started towards the end of the year 2000 under the previous Home Secretary at Lancaster House. It was then followed by a police reform White Paper and legislation from November 2001. The Committee felt it would be useful to spend two or three sessions of our time looking at what has happened in the three or four years since the process started, what lessons have been learned, what the achievements have been and what the future direction of reform might be. I should put it on the record before we start that I was the Police Minister at the time the police reform White Paper was published in the year 2001, so was heavily involved at the start of this process. I am sure I can rely on colleagues not to spare me any criticisms as a result of that, but I would also encourage those who are giving evidence to the Committee not to hold back if there are any justified criticisms of policies introduced at the time. It would be very helpful for the record if, starting with Mr Naylor, each of the witnesses could briefly introduce themselves and the organisation they represent.

Mr Naylor: I am Rick Naylor; I am the President of the Police Superintendents' Association of England and Wales which represents roughly 1,500 superintendents and chief superintendents in the 43 forces plus the National Crime Squad.

Mr Elliott: My name is Clint Elliott; I am the General Secretary of the Police Federation of England and Wales which represents around about 135,000/136,000 officers up to the rank of chief inspector in England and Wales.

Ms Berry: I am Jan Berry and I am the Chairman of the Police Federation of England and Wales representing precisely the same people as Clint.

Dr Brain: I am Tim Brain; I am the Chairman of the Chief Police Officers' Staff Association which represents all chief police officers in England, Wales and Northern Ireland in respect of pay, conditions of service, discipline and related staff matters.

Mr Fox: I am Chris Fox; I am President of the Association of Chief Police Officers and, as you will gather from Tim's presentation, we do not deal with terms and conditions, we do not deal with contractual issues, we deal with policy, policing operational advice and structures and I represent the senior management of all the territorial forces and the specialist organisations, not just police officers but specialist members of support staff, IT, HR, finance directors, etc.

Mr Gardener: My name is Guy Gardener; I am the Head of Policy at the Association of Chief Police Officers and, as such, have been working on coordinating the police side of reform issues for the past two years.

Q2 Chairman: There are a substantial number of witnesses. I myself - and I have asked members of the Committee to do the same - will try and direct the questions to named individuals and you will understand that it will not be possible to bring in every individual or every organisation in on each point, but everyone should get a fair shout during the course of the discussions. When the Government launched its White Paper in 2001, they were pretty clear about the problems they wanted to solve: they said that although crime had come down, crime levels were too high, public fear of crime was too high and too few criminals were being detected and convicted and, if you looked across the country, the performance of police forces varied significantly between individual police forces and individual command unit areas within police forces. So, the obvious question is, three years or so, perhaps four years, after the police reform process was started, have we made anything better and I ask that of Chris Fox?

Mr Fox: Not surprisingly in such a broad agenda, some progress has been made more quickly in some areas than others, but some of the things I think we have seen relate to a very strong performance culture being embedded in the Service. Within the Standards Unit, there is a measurement of police performance in terms of something called The Police Performance Assessment Framework which is a very sophisticated process. So, a mechanism has been developed and is being driven through into forces. Some forces are, if you like, picking up and getting up to speed more quickly than others, but, in turn, that is beginning and has already begun to drive performance in the right direction and the Standards Unit has already worked with various forces to improve performance in certain areas. So, that is a definite plus. I think it is fair to say that there has been some duplication of effort and that would be one of our concerns in that some of the new organisations looking at developing professional doctrine, for example the National Centre of Policing Excellence, have produced some excellent work as has the Standards Unit but there are Home Office projects often overlapping with professional ACPO projects and I think there is something we could do to rationalise the work and make that more efficient. I think we would like to have seen workforce modernisation and the development of leadership training move a little quicker. That has been hard work and I guess that not surprisingly we would probably like to have seen that move faster. Some of our innovation has been a little restricted by some very inflexible rules of funding and the need to keep numbers of police officers high and so forth, which has distorted some of the imaginative ideas that are out there in the market.

Q3 Chairman: We will touch on many of those issues in questions but, to press you, in terms of what the Government have said they want to achieve for the public, can you today say, "We have had three-and-a-half years/four years of police reform and crime is down, the public fear crime less and we are catching more criminals"?

Mr Fox: In all, save detections, we can demonstrate an upward curve of performance. The British Crime Survey will show crime moving downwards in all directions in every category over quite a long period. This has been distorted somewhat by changes in crime recording. So, when you look at the police numbers as against the British Crime Survey, they do not always match but they are all moving in the same direction. Fear of crime has reduced quite significantly in the past 18 months, which I think is probably the time when the impact has begun to be felt. Detections have not increased but the detections are part of a very complex mix and sometimes, to pursue a detection to the point of being able to write it off as a detection, when the individual is going to face a two year or three year sentence in any event for what has been detected, sometimes it is not seen as good use of time when we could be moving on. We have the offender, perhaps a prolific offender, we have taken them out of circulation, there will be no further sanction by pursuing other evidential trails to prove a detection, so we have not really totally been successful in detections.

Q4 Chairman: Jan Berry, that is quite a positive assessment overall of the impact. You represent the sergeants and police constables with the vast bulk of your membership put together; how does it seem from a Police Federation point of view over the same three-year period of time?

Ms Berry: I think from the point of view of the areas which are being counted, the Police Service has demonstrated that it has improved in that period. I do not think that as much investment or time has been given to those areas which are not quite so easy to count. That is now beginning to be addressed with, rightly, far greater consideration being given to community policing and how policing at a very local level is delivered, and I think that the plans for the Serious Organised Crime Agency are going in the right direction as well although we have some concerns about the infrastructure of that. I think what has not happened in the three years is the investment and commitment being given to training of police officers. I do not think we have in place a qualification or accreditation system that can acknowledge and accredit skills in any meaningful way. We have the start of it there but I do not think it is there in any meaningful way, and a lot of things have been put into workforce modernisation but I do not think that any of those have been evaluated in any scientific way to be able to demonstrate whether they are actually improving performance in a meaningful way.

Q5 Chairman: The Government have already embarked on discussion of a second phase of reform looking at police powers, structures and accountability. If I came to the Superintendents' Association, are the things that are on the Government's agenda for the second phase of reform the issues you would put highest on your agenda?

Mr Naylor: Yes, they are and we are very hopeful that the promised White Paper coming soon in the late autumn will demonstrate that those areas will be addressed. We feel there needs to be a root and branch look at local accountability of the police, not just the people who pay the price but also the public accountability of the police. That is as close to neighbourhood level as possible and our members do support that; they are quite willing to go along with that level of accountability and work in partnership as they have been working in partnership up and down the country, but to get that far greater embedded in ordinary everyday policing than it is at the moment, so we are hopeful in that respect. The Superintendents' Association also are looking for some indication about the structure of the whole of the English and Wales Police Service. We feel, probably not supported by our other colleagues along this bench, that the time has come to look fundamentally at the 43 police forces as we now have BCUs in the country who are larger than some police forces. For instance, we have a BCU that encompasses the whole of the City of Bristol with approaching 2,000 staff which is bigger than probably ten police forces in England and Wales. We also have a BCU which is the County of Cornwall which is probably at its longest axis about 120 miles from border to border, which again is a very large area under the command of a chief superintendent. So, we feel there needs to be some sort of understanding. Things may have got out of kilter and we feel that, through the BCU structure, we can develop and deliver local policing. However, there needs to be a structure above that BCU structure but what it is is probably not aligned to the 43 forces we have at the moment. We have put forward in our evidence to the Government Green Paper that we support a National Police Force developed on regional lines and we feel that that would actually help in the seaming up from the local through what we call level two crime, the cross-border crime, to the national and international criminal scene and obviously developing accountabilities along that model as well. We are hopeful that the Government are going down the right track with the promised phase two of police reform and we are waiting with anticipation for the White Paper.

Chairman: Chris Fox talked about performance culture and we will look at that in more detail now.

Q6 Mr Singh: I think most of my questions will be primarily directed at Chris Fox but, if somebody feels very strongly about something, please come in. We have had the police reform programme now since 2001 and we have had considerable extra resources. Do you think this is adequately reflected and included in the crime statistics?

Mr Fox: As I said, the figures that are produced show a very good trend in crime statistics, whether it be in fear of crime or actual crime across the whole piece. The resources that have been put in are sharpening up the Service to actually become more focused on the things that matter to the public. What we have seen is that we have had tremendous success in terms of domestic burglaries and vehicle crime, down 39% and 30% over a period of time, but actually the public are concerned specifically about the behaviour on pavements, the antisocial behaviour, the threatening environment that they sometimes feel. We have ignored that because our target-setting process was very specific at bulk crime, at those particular issues. So, the mechanism that is in place now is hopefully more sensitive to that and will, we hope with the next phase reform, involve local people a lot more closely in directing police action against the things they want. The convoluted answer to your question is that I think we have had success in the areas that we set out our success in actually to the detriment of other areas that were not on the list, but we are now moving to a phase where I think we will capture more areas much more satisfactorily at the place where people work, rest and play.

Q7 Mr Singh: So, you foresee a continuing improvement in the crime statistics.

Mr Fox: Always a hostage to fortune, but we feel optimistic that they can be driven down considerably further and that is why we are signing up to the next round of public service agreements to achieve just that.

Q8 Mr Singh: Just to clear this up because I am still confused between the different picture that the recorded crime shows and the British Crime Survey shows. Which is the one that the public should have confidence in? Which is the one that politicians should have confidence in? Which is the real one?

Mr Fox: I am not a statistician but, if we go back to the mid/early-1990s, the British Crime Survey was used continually to show poor police performance because the numbers that were in the British Crime Survey were seen to be much higher than the numbers on police recording. So, we have reviewed the way in which we actually record crime and we now record crime based on the opinion of the person who is reporting it rather than the opinion of the officer who is looking at it. So, it is recorded and that means that our numbers have gone up but, in terms of the British Crime Survey, they were already capturing those because they were interviewing people about the experience of crime. If the British Crime Survey was saying in the early 1990s that there was a problem in bulk crime and there was a problem in response times at that point, I think we would be quite legitimate in now using the same methodology to say, "The British Crime Survey says that these figures have reduced in all categories and even in violent crime if you adjusted it for the change in recording." That is a statistical argument but the gist is that the British Crime Survey has been consistent. When it was working against us, we took it on the chin and I think it is fair that we use it to say that we are making progress. People feel safer, that is the biggest step forward.

Q9 Mr Singh: Coming to detection, we have more bobbies on the beat, we have community support officers, safety wardens and a whole heap of new people out there. We have CCTV cameras burgeoning out all over the place. Yet, detection rates continue to worsen and not to improve. What is going on there?

Mr Fox: I am not sure that they have worsened; they have in some places but it is different whichever part of the country you look at. What is going on there? Huge amounts of effort first of all in professionalising our evidence gathering and presentation of evidence in court. Courts are very demanding and we have had to improve our performance in that area and that is why we have worked with the Crown Prosecution Service and now we have a joint team between my organisation and the Crown Prosecution Service to develop proper standards of evidence because we have found that our newer officers are not as well equipped as they should be and that is back to Jan's point about professionalising and improving the performance of staff by training and development. I think our point at the moment is that I would hope to see a change in that performance over the next few years but we have had a massive input in trying to improve the way in which we deal with the criminal justice system and the ability of our staff to actually put forward good cases that will withstand professional cross-examination.

Q10 Mr Singh: As a chief police officer, is this one of your top priorities in terms of the message that you give to your force?

Mr Fox: I have to say that it is not a top priority because the top priority is currently to reduce crime and detecting crime does not always reduce crime. You can put a lot of work into a neighbourhood or an estate, town or village which is about stopping crime happening. So, our major effort is to take away the causes of crime and stop crime. It is a second tier. One of the ways to prevent people committing crime is to catch them and convict them and actually bring them to book. So, yes, it is a second tier piece of work.

Q11 David Winnick: There is one form of crime which obviously, as we all know, sadly is not going down and that is gun crime and increasingly, though the media understandably gives a great deal of attention and headlines to it, it is causing increasing worry, not just because of the soldier who lost his life just returning from Iraq, but hardly a day goes by without some news of a murder taking place involving guns. Do you have any views as to how this could be tackled far more effectively?

Mr Fox: You will not be surprised to know that we have quite a big group of people actually focusing on that very problem because gun crime, yes, has increased and the use of the weapon has become more prevalent, but these uses, these actual incidents, are happening in some very specific communities and some very specific areas. It is very localised and therefore we have to try and find out how best to impact those communities and those people because it is an issue, with great respect, across the whole of Britain. It is very, very hard-core criminals who either use weapons at random sometimes or are more likely to enforce a territorial war around drugs. So, it is about tackling all those themes. Certainly, we have a lot of action and we have seen particularly in London, with Operation Trident, and in Manchester with some of the operations there against the gangs, that it can be turned round. So, we are now trying to use those tactics in other parts of the country where weapons are being used.

Q12 David Winnick: Do you think greater priority could be given by the Government, the Home Office obviously being the Department, in looking upon this as a crisis point where far more action needs to be taken by the police and other agencies?

Mr Fox: The central role of Government in this is bringing all the different departmental work to bear. I think there is a big onus on us to get to grips with it, but you need a lot of work in the educational work, in the social work world and in the youth education world because there is a culture growing up about the credibility of carrying weapons.

Q13 David Winnick: It is a status symbol almost.

Mr Fox: Exactly. So, the Government's role is in bringing all those threads of business to bear on the problem and I think that is in an embryonic stage but, as I have said, it is such a localised problem often that you need a very localised solution.

Q14 Mr Clappison: Very briefly, without getting into the statistical complexities of the crime survey and recorded crime, I was a little concerned regarding what you were saying about your targets and bulk crime because whilst bulk crime, as you put it, vehicle crime particularly and domestic burglary, is serious in its own way, would you accept that the crimes which worry the public the most are the violent crimes and the sexual crimes where people feel there is going to be an impact on them which there would not be in the case of a vehicle crime, very annoying though that might be, and that the police's priorities need to be in kilter with those of the public? We have seen some problems in some areas where the pubic perception is that the police's priorities are not theirs when it comes to matters such as motoring offences and serious offences such as violence.

Mr Fox: There are a number of threads in that. First of all, domestic burglary and vehicle crime were not chosen out of the blue, they were chosen at a time when public opinion was appalled by the level of them. If we go back, we can think of joyriding, as it was called, with pictures of estates, racing and stolen cars. It was of epidemic proportions. The focus was put upon that, the principle being that if bulk crime and crime in general was reduced, people would feel better. That was wrong. What we have to do is to reduce crime but we have to also reduce the crime and the incidents that matter to the people in that area and they will be different around localities. That is a lesson learnt. The complexity of policing, when you move on to road traffic, is that there are lots of things that the police have to do. We have to be able to deal with terrorist incidents, we do police the roads, we are involved in everything from lost dogs and stolen property, so that business goes on and occasionally perhaps it gets out of balance but, at the moment, we are absolutely sure that we should be keeping our eye on bulk crime but developing local response and giving local people the opportunity not only to have their say but to have some sort of control over what is actually happening locally.

Q15 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: I have two questions and some clarifications on earlier points that you made. There a number of organisations now which have been established and have existed historically to actually help the police improve their performance, but you referred earlier on to the expression "embedded competence" and I wonder if you could just add some meat to that because I would be very interested to know how many police authorities are really taking on the task of auditing and self-improvement and how you feel that particular exercise is developing. You then went on to discuss detection rates and I was very interested to learn that you link detection rates with successful cases to the CPS and their, presumably, successful cases at court. So, could you just tell me whether or not detection rates have improved as a direct result of gaining more convictions at court or whether or not they have improved but where you have failed is to convert your file into a successful CPS file and then on to court.

Mr Fox: The process of performance management, if you like improving performance, is almost threefold. The first is making sure that the whole organisation is focusing on the things you want to focus on; the second is having some targets in order that you have some clue about whether or not you are getting anywhere; and the third is to have a scrutiny process to allow people to see whether this is being done in the right way. Has it been done ethically and with integrity? If you go back four years, you would probably have seen a minority of forces with some of those in place. You will now see that all forces have those functions in place to different levels of sophistication because it is being learnt, but what we are seeing is that now we have a much more defensible process of measuring police activity, we feel more confident about making progress. This has meant that police authorities feel more confident about asking questions. Previously, a question would be asked and answered with several different measures. Now we are agreed about where we need to make progress, so it is much easier to audit. Police authorities are learning how to do that. I think some of them would say that they do not have the resources to do what they wish but the Police Standards Unit is monitoring police performance in every force/every BCU in the country all the time, so there may not be a need for it to be duplicated. On detections, the actual prosecution part is only part of them, but that was our most difficult part. A detection is counted for juveniles that are cautioned and adults who are actually cautioned who do not go to court, so they are counted as detections also and matters taken into consideration. "Taken into consideration" still means that you have to have the evidence to be able to prove it if necessary. So, I majored on the piece about having good investigative skills to get the evidence, good presentational skills to present the evidence and good relationship with your prosecutor to make sure that, when it comes to prosecution, you are agreed about whether you have the right evidence. That was our weak suit, I think.

Q16 Mr Singh: You mentioned the Police Standards Unit just then and I would like to know what your experience of that unit is and also your experience of the National Centre for Policing Excellence. How effective are they? Furthermore, is there not a huge confusion now with those two agencies, the Home Office, HM Inspectorate of Constabularies and yourselves? Are there not a number of bodies trying to do similar or the same things and is that not causing problems?

Mr Fox: I think I said at the beginning that one of the issues that we did see as a concern was some duplication of effort and we hope that the next phase is going to rationalise some of that because particularly my members actually service all those bodies. Most of them are involved in working and researching for the Centre for Policing Excellence and we have people seconded in the Standards Unit, so it is in our interest to get that right. So, you are right, there is duplication. That is not necessarily confusion, it is inefficiency and we could do it better. The Police Standards Unit has done, in my view, an excellent job in defining a mechanism of understanding police performance and an excellent job in monitoring it. Another part of their business is actually looking for why people are successful, why is this area doing well and this area is not doing well, and trying to transfer the practice. That is the area where the duplication begins because you will see that we do that as well. There are Home Office working groups that do that and sometimes the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit or the Cabinet Office, to take the street crime action, lessons learnt, there are a number of people in the same business and we want to see that somehow rationalised if we can. So, the answer is, yes, there is duplication. The Centre for Policing Excellence has the potential to be something very special. I have to say that it is struggling in terms of resources because its aim was to have a suite of standards, of national standards. This is the sort of standard you can expect from your Police Service. No matter where you are, this is how it would work, this is what you will get and we, as officers, know what we have to work to to meet that standard. Obviously we cannot do that all at once, we have to build it up and we have looked at the police use of firearms and, looking at the data management, there are five or six other standards/codes of practices being developed, but it is struggling to move at the speed we would like because I do not think that it is quite as resourced as it should be.

Q17 Mr Singh: What is the difference in the role between the Inspectorate and the Police Standards Unit?

Mr Fox: The Police Standards Unit monitors police performance, perhaps in a cold, calculating way. The Inspectorate looks at that performance in the context of the area that is being policed. In the context of, okay, the performance is good or bad, but is the leadership good? Does it have the infrastructure of information technology? Is it overbalanced in terms of operational staff to headquarters staff? It puts it in a professional context and interprets that and offers that advice to the Home Secretary and to the Chief Constable of the Police Authority to say, "Here is your performance as measured by the Standards Unit which you and the Standards Unit have agreed and here is our interpretation of why it is, how it is and what you need to do to improve it."

Q18 Mr Singh: So, you see them as complementary bodies and not doing the same thing?

Mr Fox: There is a little bit of overlap but I think they complement each other.

Q19 Mr Singh: ACPO argues that the police training organiser Centrex should not have been given responsibility for operating the National Centre for Policing Excellence. Is this causing problems?

Mr Fox: I do not think it is causing problems, it is the position we felt at the time. The National Centre for Policing Excellence has a two-pronged role. The first is about those codes of practice and standards which actually are driving the Police Service. The training agency obviously needs to train officers and staff to deliver them, so there is a link. However, that centre has a very operational base as well. It looks at major crime and major incidents, debriefs them and offers them advice and expertise when these incidents are happening in various parts of the country. It is subsumed in a much larger organisation and subject to the vagaries of that organisation's budget and we think that it ought to be more operationally based and setting its own route rather than at the vagaries of a massive training budget.

Q20 Chairman: Is the NCPE budget set centrally by the Home Office or is it a decision that is devolved to Centrex?

Mr Fox: The National Centre for Policing Excellence puts its budget proposition in as part of Centrex's. It is seen as part of the Centrex budget bill but the control of it is under the Chief Executive of Centrex. The Home Office will see the proportion that is being directed towards the NCPE but it is under the control of the Chief Executive. The issue really is that it has not grown as projected because of a squeeze on the whole budget and that has reflected very heavily in the work that they do.

Q21 Mr Singh: You just accepted that there is some duplication between the various agencies looking at police performance and you have accepted that there needs to be some rationalisation. Why, in that context, are you calling for a police improvement agency?

Mr Fox: To do just that. One of the parts of the first phase of reform was to implement a national intelligence model in order that every force handled intelligence in the same way, that we improved our performance in analysing it and operationally working from it. We put together a small team to make sure that happened in every force and every force was at a different stage: some had the skills, some had IT that could do it and some did not have the expertise. This group helped each force reach the point on 1 April this year where we could say that all forces are working in this way. What we saw from that is that it is very difficult for 43 forces to make a unified step forward without some assistance because they might not have access to the training they need and the expertise they need, and they might not have access to research. There are lots of reasons. An improvement agency would be that team on a broader base and it would bring together people like the NCPE, shall we say the research, the best practice part of PSU and the Home Office. If, let us say, in a national policing plan, the Home Secretary said, "We want to see neighbourhood policing developed across the country", then perhaps this group of people would focus their minds on the best way to do it and, with each police authority and chief constable, come up with a plan as to how to get that force from wherever they are to where they want to be on a very local basis, so that it becomes part of policing delivery and not part of the scrutiny. So, Inspectorate and performance management is not part of it, it is actually part of getting the job done.

Q22 Mr Singh: I am trying to let that sink in!

Mr Fox: It is a big subject but the gist of it is to focus all of the good things in the best practice work and the expertise that exists in all these different places and focusing it on each force in turn in order that all force service takes a step forward.

Q23 Mr Singh: I think our concern would be if it is just another body and then if it is all the other bodies being set up because that would be a very real concern.

Mr Fox: Our concern would be that, if it is another tier of bureaucracy, it is worthless, if it is rebrigading of existing, it is worthless, and it has to be seen as part of delivering the service. So, the Inspectorate should be asking, if a force is not performing, why has this agency, for want of a better name, not performed to help them achieve? Unless it is something new, I agree with you, we would not want it.

Q24 Mr Singh: Just moving tack slightly, following the Bichard Report, has any progress been made on a code of practice for data management and are you making any representations about the Data Protection Act and the amendments to that?

Mr Fox: The code of practice on data management is work in progress; it is happening; it is a big and complex piece of work but the National Centre for Policing Excellence is working on that now. We will be making recommendations directly on data protection; we are working all the time now with the Data Commissioner to iron out misunderstandings or misinterpretations under the current Act. After Bichard, our focus is on providing an interim protection for vetting purposes to make sure that high risk offenders are part of the vetting process nationally, a longer-term solution to make sure that we have the right IT to do this in a much more efficient way and, in January and February, Sir Michael is coming back to ask those questions as to whether we have done it or not. I should point out that all the recommendations are directed at the Home Office and we are working as sort of professional advisers to Home Office project managers on Bichard.

Q25 Mr Singh: Have any immediate steps been taken? I appreciate that some things happen in the longer term but surely, following the Humberside practice and the Bichard Report, some immediate steps need to be taken and what kind of steps will be taken?

Mr Fox: That is the interim solution I was talking about, which was that basically every force has the data. The knack is having it available for every force to search. So, there is a flagging system on the police national computer that will, if you were to search against a name, say, "This person is worthy of further research go to ..." and you go to a force and use their system to pursue it. So, there is a Heath Robinson process currently but that is to be turned into a national intra-operable data system.

Q26 Mr Singh: So, West Yorkshire Police could now get information from Merseyside Policy, say, about individuals?

Mr Fox: They may have to go manually but there is an automatic flag to say that you need to go there and do that. It does not tell you all the stuff you need to know, you actually have to do something else, which is a little inefficient, but the next stage is about doing it in an intra-operable way.

Q27 Mrs Dean: Can I turn to the national policing plan and the relationship between national and local priorities. Perhaps I could start with Rick Naylor - we will give Mr Fox a rest for a minute - and ask, first of all, what do you see are the strengths and weaknesses of the national police plan and what is the practical usefulness of the plan? When you are answering, can you think about what changes you would like to see in the next plan due to be published in November.

Mr Naylor: Clearly, when the first plan was published a couple of years ago, it was a brand new innovation for British policing to have a national policing plan. So, the Home Office, ACPO and everybody else who were consulted had to start from a blank piece of paper. We were quite disappointed with the first plan: it tended to look backwards; it tended to be a whole list of policing activity without giving the Service itself any form of forward projection, where it should be going or what it should look like when it gets there. I believe that the plan in the first iterance was not well received in the Service; it was hardly read; it tended to be looked upon as a Home Office document. As this document has evolved and is getting better, if you like, as people understand it better and is becoming professional, we have hopes that it will be, in the third plan that comes out at the end of this year, far more user friendly, talking about not just the police's input into community safety but the input of everybody else who works in partnership with the police into community safety. We would desperately like to see it shorter. It is at the moment quite a heavy document to read. We would like all officers and members of police staff to be able to read it and understand where the Service is going and see where they fit into the national picture as well as the local and force picture. We are hoping that it will be shorter, punchier and be applicable to everybody, all the 200,000 people who work in the British Police Force, and they can see where they fit in.

Q28 Mrs Dean: Do you support the view of the Association of Police Authorities that the plan should contain detailed costings?

Mr Naylor: I think that would be difficult to reconcile with what I have just said about keeping it short and punchy. I think there needs to be some reference to resources but on what level, whether that be at the national level or splitting it down even further. If you go into detailed costings in such a plan, you are inevitably going to build in a lot of explanation of those costings and make it a bigger document than it is today. So, from our point of view, we would not like to see that.

Q29 Mrs Dean: In your experience, has the plan had a harmful effect by imposing priorities on local forces without linking these to adequate funding?

Mr Naylor: I do not think that it has had a harmful effect per se. I think it may have skewed performance in certain forces where their local priorities were not in tune with what the national priorities are in the plan. I think that if there is more flexibility in the new plan that is coming out for forces to cater for the local differences across the country, the plan will become more relevant, not just nationally but locally as well.

Q30 Mrs Dean: How much value do you attach to target setting as a driver of improved police performance? Are there the right number of targets? Do they create perverse incentives?

Mr Naylor: I smile because I think everybody thinks there are too many targets! Targets are useful. They focus activity. Having the right targets is a bit of a conjuring act. You have to be able to pitch it right and be able to not only have national targets but local targets that are joined together, so that people can see where they are going and when they get there. We tend to have in recent years target overload. I think the pendulum is swinging back to fewer targets, more specific targets and targets that the public can actually understand, things they are interested in. As has been mentioned already this afternoon, targets around antisocial behaviour which upsets most of the people that come to my members' BCU surgeries and get on the phone to my members. They are bothered about antisocial behaviour, kids drinking on street corners, people using motorbikes late at night and all that sort of thing. It is quality of life issues. So, if you have targets in that area, the public can then see that the police are actually delivering what they want to deliver and I think that we need to just join it up a little more. We are moving in the right direction. It is organically moving as we have gone down the three years and hopefully the next plan will be better than the last two.

Q31 Mrs Dean: The new Home Office PSA target 1 is to reduce crime by 15% and further in high crime areas by 2007/08. Is 15% an appropriate level, in your view?

Mr Naylor: It is very difficult to know what is an appropriate target unless you have a wealth of data. We have heard already that police data is getting better with the (?) data. I think 15% is an appropriate target. If we had said, "Let's cut crime by half", it probably would be a meaningless target because you would not be able to achieve it. You have to be able to achieve a target and, when you have achieved it, you have to set another target to achieve that. It is an onward pressure all the time to perform better and I think 15% in PSA target 1 is a good starting point, but obviously that is going to be reviewed through time.

Q32 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: For clarification, I get the sense that all the targets are imposed from above. Is there going to be a time in your mind when authorities will set their own targets because they are aware of their own performance and their own needs and are you confident that, when they get to that position, those targets are challengeable and will be acceptable as an indicator of absolute competence rather than the situation we have at this time?

Mr Naylor: I think that is the way it will develop through the next phase of police reform. There will be an emphasis on locally based targets fitting into a national framework and that is the ideal that we should be seeking. I think we need to look very seriously at whether police authorities or other bodies will have the expertise to set those targets and then to monitor them. Clearly, there is expertise in the Home Office at the moment and that expertise has been growing over the past three, four or five years and that learning needs to be spread across the country as well.

Q33 Chairman: The Home Office say that there are only two targets set nationally, which is the car crime and burglary under the old regime and then, in some areas, robbery targets, but the others, if there are numerical targets, have been set at a lower level, a police authority level or whatever. Can somebody clarify whether it is actually true that all these targets are set nationally or whether in fact they are not set at police authority or police force level.

Dr Brain: It is not strictly relating to my Staff Association's business but I hope I can comment as a chief constable. Police authorities do set local targets; they should have regard to those targets that are set in the national policing plan and authorities and the constabularies that support them have considerable expertise in trying to work out just striking the right balance between what is an aspiration and what is achievable. So, that does take place now and it does take place however in the context of the national policing plan. I could add that there perhaps are rather a lot of them; I totalled up before I came here: there are 17 PSA targets in the national policing plan, 43 actions for chief constables and police authorities and eight actions for chief constables and authorities in partnerships with other agencies. So, I think the general point is that there are rather a lot of them, but certainly police authorities have a requirement under law to set a local policing plan that contains specific targets to their area, having regard to the national policing plan.

Q34 Chairman: In other words, the contents of your local targets may well be prescribed nationally by the national policing plan but how onerous that target is and how challenging it is is likely to be a decision that is taken at force level rather than national level.

Dr Brain: Also, authorities might decide that there are particular targets in their own area which relate to problems which they have addressed or have had addressed to them through a local consultation process and all authorities are required to engage in a consultation process before setting their local policing plan. So, burglary would be a good example of one that is almost inevitably going to feature in most local policing plans because most areas will have a problem relating to burglary. They will be able to set it having regard to the national PSA target, but it is equally conceivable that a force would want to set something around another area of concern. For the sake of argument, it could be around disorder and antisocial behaviour like my own authority has set an antisocial behaviour target. So, it is quite possible to have some flexibility within the overall scheme.

Q35 Chairman: If the rank and file officer feels they are dealing with a lot of targets, they may not actually all have been set by the Home Office, they may have been set closer to home at force and police authority level.

Dr Brain: It could be but I can only comment today in respect of my own authority which consciously has been very careful to set a few clear priorities because, if everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.

Q36 Mrs Dean: Do either Jan Berry or Chris Fox want to comment on the questions I have just asked Rick Naylor?

Ms Berry: I would like to add something with regard to locally set targets. I think a good example, which might not be in the national policing plan but comes out of an initiative that comes between plans, is very recently the licensing strategy and pro-activity in regards to leisure drinking. There were some targets set for that. That was not part of the first national policing plan or the current national policing plan but it was an initiative that was started during the year. So, I think there are targets which might come from national level but do then have an impact at a lower level and I think that, in general, there is a feeling that there are a fair amount of targets and what I am totally convinced about is that if it is not being counted and if there is no target associated, then the same level of attention is not given to the policing activity.

Mr Fox: I would agree with Rick's analysis of history and where we came to and I would agree with Tim's target. I will not go there but I will just make three points. What we do not see in the police and planning cycle is that we do not see an evaluation at the end. So, we set the plan but what we do not see is a review of which bits worked and which bits did not before we set the next plan. The second one is that we would like to see more "pro-active" and this is again about learning. Each iteration changes and gets better. We would like to see more pro-active. With the information we now have through a national intelligence system, we can actually begin to predict where crime might be going to go as opposed to what we are doing now and what we have to do to stop it. We would like to see that change in emphasis. Thirdly, I do understand the police authorities' view about putting some costs in there because, if you look to the next phase, one of our concerns is that if we are going to allow a lot more local direction of policing activity by people in the place they live and work, somebody has to give an assessment of how much capacity we have to do that. So, that might mean less central and more local but there has to be some assessment of what is possible.

Q37 Chairman: Could I ask a question to each of the three main police organisations here starting with Rick Naylor and Jan Berry. The Superintendents' Association has asked for a more tightly defined and shorter policing plan. The Police Federation have said in their evidence that the problem with the plan even as it is at the moment is that some things they think are important - the reassurance effect of having a police officer down your street and those sort of activities - get neglected because they are not in the plan. After two years' experience of having these, is it possible to have a plan that is both much shorter and more precise and clearer on priorities than the current plan without falling foul of the problem that nobody will do the things that are left out of it? Can Government and the Police Service square that circle?

Mr Naylor: I think it is difficult for the Home Office to write a plan without upsetting somebody because there are so many individuals who are involved in various aspects of policing, whether it be from domestic violence to hate crime to road policing to international crime to terrorism. The policing world is so large. To write a plan that covers it all will inevitably be long. Our view, and our view of the plan, was that it was going to be a punchy document that people could pick up, read, understand and know where they were going in their life; they knew which way to turn out of the police station when they went - left or right - and they knew where they fitted in locally, force-wide and nationally, so it all joined up. It is extremely difficult to do that and, as I understand what Jan is saying, some things if they are not in the plan they do not get done, but that may not be strictly true because you have got a very diverse country in terms of what happens locally and what happens nationally. In some particular areas in the country, things such as prostitution are a problem, but it does not happen in every BCU across the whole country. So you have got to have that amount of flexibility to build that in so that you are catering for what that community wants if it is a problem to them. So it has got to be seen in that context; it is dovetailing into the other plans. I cannot speak for Janet and Clint but it would be very advantageous for the people working for my members in police stations up and down the country if they knew what was in the National Plan - even if it means we have a shorter document that goes with the National Plan - so that they understand they are working down the same route as everybody else.

Ms Berry: I do not know that I disagree with Rick, but I think the purpose of the National Policing Plan should be to provide the overall umbrella strategy for the whole service, but it very much needs to be delivered at a local level and so it is quite right that the local level should look at the National Plan and see where they fit into that. I think one of the difficulties we have had is that policing plan number one and number two, to a certain extent, were very much a shopping list of the things people wanted to be doing rather than a more strategic document. Some of us are at a bit of an advantage because we are beginning to see the draft for the next policing plan and I think some of the lessons are now being learnt and it is becoming more of a strategic document and looking forward into what is being sought to be achieved and how it might be achieved.

Chairman: Thank you. I think we will move on at that point.

Q38 Mr Clappison: Could I turn to the question of accountability? Can I come back to Chris Fox - I know you did quite a bit of batting earlier on - because I know that ACPO has stated support for the general proposition of the new model of local accountability, subject to a reservation about keeping down the level of bureaucracy. Against that background, can I ask you about the Government's most recent proposals on police reform which put much greater emphasis on changes to local accountability mechanisms than the Government's earlier proposals did. Why do you think there has been this change in emphasis and do you think it is justified?

Mr Fox: I guess - and I suppose you would have to ask others why there was a change of emphasis - my interpretation of it would be that to make people feel engaged and to make people take responsibility for the place that they live and work in they need to feel engaged in the safety and the security of it and, therefore, local police officers, local policing, should be something they are interested in and to make them interested in it they need some influence. I would agree with that process. The concern that we have in terms of the accountability line is that it needs to be very clearly understood because that same citizen needs to know who is responsible for the policing service. At the moment, the chief constable and the BCU commander are heavily measured, heavily monitored and the chief constable, in fact, can find himself formally being removed from office if he is not performing to the level required. If there is going to be a line of accountability then it needs to be very clear. Resources also need to be in the control of those people so they can actually have the flexibility to do things. It is making both sides of that conundrum fit: letting people have a control in the direction of policing and making sure we know where the buck stops.

Q39 Mr Clappison: The Government has set out a range of options for increasing police accountability at local and district level. Which of these options, in your opinion, are desirable and which are not? What practical problems would be entailed in implementing them?

Mr Fox: We would like to see a local board approach at neighbourhood and BCU level. We would like to see the Crime Reduction Panels at local level being more engaged and actually having money to spend, but we would like to see the resources for policing an area in the hands of the police authority and the chief constable, because if we do not do that then the infrastructure of policing will become distorted. What I mean is that, with the greatest will in the world, people want to solve the policing problems they have locally. Behaviour on the pavement - it could be anti-social behaviour, it could be theft, it could be drug-dealing, it could be prostitution - can be stopped by local police activity, but actually the cause of it may lie somewhere else in an organised criminal drug network which may be operating from another town or, indeed, another country. To deal with that we need a much more sophisticated policing system but it is not of interest to people who live in this particular area; they just want their problem solving. So that there has to be a more strategic view of the handling of resources and allowing the accountability - the mechanisms, the flexibility - to be sensibly placed (but not so that a series of neighbourhoods begin to make decisions that actually prevent us from dealing with major crime) and having an infrastructure to deal with major incidents.

Q40 Mr Clappison: Could I turn to Mr Naylor now and the question of the representative nature of the police authorities, because I know that your organisation has expressed some views about this? How representative do you think police authorities are of the communities in whose name they act? Should their membership be altered to increase their links with the community?

Mr Naylor: Police authorities, as they are constituted at the moment, I believe, do an excellent job in maintaining efficient and effective police forces. I do not feel that they are that good at transmitting the views of local populations back to the chief constable. We are in favour, as Chris has just been outlining, of more local arrangements for accountability where local problems get dealt with at that level and decisions can be made very close to where those problems are. So it may be through the change of structure, if there is a change of structure in British policing, that the present police authorities, as we have them constituted today, would have to change - if there is a change of structure to police forces as we have the 43 now. We would like to see local accountability. We still believe there is a role for a police authority-type body to make sure that the police forces, of whatever size and shape they are going to be in future, are resourced properly and that their voice is heard at central government, so that there is a seamless flow from the local through to the force/district level (whatever you want to call it) through to the national. That flow should happen in the accountability mechanism as well as in the policing mechanisms, and they should go in tandem, and it should be as simple as possible and as transparent as possible.

Q41 Mr Clappison: Can I turn to Jan Berry and ask her for her organisation's views on this subject of authorities and, in particular, if you think there is a case for replacing police authorities with bodies which would have a wider responsibility for agencies responsible for community safety?

Ms Berry: There clearly needs to be accountability at different levels. I was very critical of the suggestion that independent members should become part of police authorities. Police authorities, historically, were split between being magistrates and local, democratically elected people, and I felt that that was about the right balance. I have had to eat my words, to a certain extent, because I have seen how the independent members have operated at a police authority level. I think they have brought good business sense into some police authorities and they have brought, particularly, experience from a wider perspective into police authorities. However, I do think you need to maintain some level of local democracy. I think you need to retain some level of policing knowledge and that is why I think the magistrates have an important part to play, but I would like to see, maybe, members of the Community Reduction Partnerships or people like that, who could add something to that. I still think you need to call it a police authority, even though it will have, maybe, greater relationship to the local community.

Q42 Mr Clappison: Could I just move on slightly and come back to Mr Fox and ask him, on the big subject of the force structure, what his views are on the future of the 43-force structure and, in particular, if he feels this causes operational problems, particularly in tackling serious crime, across force boundaries - a little bit about which he has said already - or if the existing structure has advantages in terms of local responsiveness?

Mr Fox: I think if we were designing a police service with a blank sheet of paper we probably would not start from here. One of the things that the service has been very good at over the years is re-drawing lines, rearranging the deckchairs, when, in essence, we are now going through a process of reform, phase one, and another phase to come, and what we should be doing is getting absolutely clear in our mind what we want the service to do. When we have done that we should actually design the structure to deliver it - the form of the service to follow the function it is to provide. I think that is a stage further on, and that work needs to be done. It is an easy, apparent and obvious solution to make bigger forces, and you can think of all the potential rationalisations and economies you might make from that. The end result is you still end up with boundaries, you still end up with interoperability issues and it costs money to do it. You have to weigh all these things in the balance to see if it is going to be a good, cost-effective piece of business. That has not been done yet and we would want to see that done to see if it is going to be a good use of money and we are going to actually make the gains we thought. If you follow the argument about rationalisation of structure, that by making bigger forces this is more economic and more effective, you end up with the answer of one, which is Rick's solution. I personally do not think, from what I have seen around the world, that national police forces satisfy local concerns. I think that we have to carefully balance those two arguments. So I would like to see us decide the function of the service, how we want it to work and then look at the best way to provide that. If its business stands up - i.e. we are not going to spend an inordinate amount of money to make a small step forward - then we should look at the structure at that point.

Ms Berry: I would like to come in there. I believe that policing is delivered at a number of different levels: it is delivered out on that street there and it is very personal to the people who are around on the street there, and that is at the neighbourhood level; it is also delivered at a national and international level, whereby, clearly, from terrorist threat, drugs and all those sorts of things, we need to have a policing response, and it is also at a level in between. The difficulty we have at the moment is that the performance measurements and the performance culture within the police service is very much focused at a local level, and so it is at a BCU level or, maybe, at a neighbourhood level where there are targets that people are expected to meet, and one force - although there are not league tables until it appears in the press - is judged against another force about who is doing better in these areas than others. So it is very much focused at a local level and, maybe, even, at a force level, and yet criminals move between forces; the road network in this country goes between forces, and at this moment in time we have no performance measurement that will encourage co-operation or collaboration between either neighbourhoods, BCUs or forces that would capture some of this level two crime that takes place and capture some of this movement of criminals across force boundaries.

Dr Brain: I would agree, obviously, very carefully, with what Chris has said but there are just a few other points to add to it. It is wholly possible to have a strong and innovative national infrastructure for policing - if you like, a national grid - for which forces plug into. There are certain common services that are developed to higher levels than they are at the moment to provide that basic infrastructure; to provide national resilience that is essential but is, essentially, as we have heard from other people on the panel here, around local delivery. So that a local force structure is an equal balance to that national infrastructure. I think, in terms of looking at what you do with 43 forces, there are three things to bear in mind. The first is the cost of any change, because there will be substantial costs in delivering any change, and that has to be weighed in the balance in terms of any possible long-term economies of scale that might be gained. Secondly, there is the distraction that will take place. We have not been in a position where this is new to us; there was an extensive reorganisation in the late 1960s and in the early 1970s, and for the one in the early 1970s it is possible to go and talk to people who were around at that time and you are looking at two, three or perhaps four years' worth of distraction from the main core business. Thirdly, there is the issue of resilience, and that is particularly relevant to my association; the ability to actually command in a very real operational sense. Chief constables are not simply chief executives of large organisations, they are operational heads of large organisations as well. Constitutionally that is what they are. They have, at the current time, the command and control, direction and control, of their forces vested in them. So there is an operational resilience to be taken into account. If we perhaps look at other models, like what has happened in the services recently, where there has been the amalgamation of regiments, that is not necessarily a relevant model because you are looking ----

Q43 Mr Clappison: It is not a happy one, in my case!

Dr Brain: You are looking at the retraction of the organisation itself; numbers are falling, and it makes sense, possibly - I am not a military person - to consider alternative structures in those circumstances. Of course, what we have seen very much in recent years is an expansion in all directions of the police infrastructure nationally. Those are the points I would wish to make on that issue.

Q44 Chairman: Thank you. I would like to ask one question, which is not about the force structure. The Government has put a lot of emphasis on local accountability and, broadly, you have all supported it. Is there a danger that it will backfire? In many of the issues you talk about, for example anti-social behaviour, the police service will say it is a complex problem; you have got to identify the individuals, which means intelligence work, perhaps you have got to take out an Anti-Social Behaviour Order and you may need to work with youth services or whatever. The public's first response is usually that they want a police officer there when the problem is taking place and why did somebody not respond to the 999 call. Is there a danger that by improving local accountability you will actually build up an unsustainable pressure for what might not be the most efficient use of police time and that you will come under huge public pressure to have more police officers rushing around in police cars responding to 999 calls rather than tackling the underlying problem?

Mr Elliott: I think we have tried to allude to this, in the sense that you will have expectations in the public; they have those expectations and they want them met. The area that I think is under some threat, and certainly it is under-resourced, is level two crime. Level two crime affects the households on the estate as much as anti-social behaviour. So, if you are not careful, you end up with a situation ----

Q45 Chairman: Can you just, for the record, explain a level two crime?

Mr Elliott: Level two crime is that crime which is cross-border crime, cross-force crime, cross-BCU crime; it is not local crime. It is between local crime and national and international crime; it is the middle bit of crime. It is the crime that we have taken our eye off recently because we have actually been looking more at national issues and, now, local issues, and this void is coming in the middle. The danger we see is that if we drag down to that level, although we might meet the expectations of the public at that level, some things we cannot meet and that will be level two crime, which will eventually come back on the local people because that is the effect. I think what we have got to try and get across to the public and, I think, to politicians is that policing is not a simple, straightforward matter; it is three levels that we see and all those levels need to be supported and intertwined so that we can tackle it across the piece, not just simply in one area.

Chairman: I would like to take more but I think we need to move on.

Q46 Mr Prosser: I want to ask some questions about bureaucracy. The 2001 White Paper warned that the increase in police numbers would only result in a more visible police force if we can deal with bureaucracy and blockages which keep officers off the beat and in their offices. Jan Berry, how much progress do you think we have made in that direction in carrying out the O'Dowd report recommendations?

Ms Berry: Not a lot, I do not think, to be absolutely honest. I think one of the problems with that is that a lot of O'Dowd's recommendations were reliant on integrated and co-ordinated information technology, which the service is still some way away from, particularly around custody areas. I think we have been waiting for something like ten years (I hate to think how many presentations I have seen) for an integrated case and custody system. It is being slowly rolled out in some forces at the moment, but it is not robust enough to go across the whole country. I will give you an example. If you get arrested in a certain force between five o'clock on a Friday night and nine o'clock on a Monday morning then you will go into the custody suite, you will have your name and details taken and then that will be put into a machine. Then somebody will write those details down and, at some stage in the process, they will go up three flights of stairs and download that into another computer that can tell the court that this person has been arrested and been charged. That is totally ridiculous. We have been promised for years and years an integrated system where you put a person's details in once, and that is a system which then works through the whole of the criminal justice system. So a lot of the bureaucracy that we see still is associated with the lack of an integrated computer system and an intelligence system through the whole of the England and Wales forces.

Q47 Mr Prosser: You are giving me the impression that there is hardly any movement at all in terms of cutting down bureaucracy. Is it not beginning to have an effect on the ordinary policeman on the beat?

Ms Berry: There have been some advances. The Fixed Penalty Tickets, for example, which have been trialled in some forces, have dealt with some of the minor level offences, and that has stopped police officers having to arrest and take people back to the police station. Sometimes the Fixed Penalty Tickets are used as an exit strategy from the police stations so they do not have to go to the court. They have reduced, in some cases, the amount of paperwork that a police officer has had to complete, but on other occasions there are still forces where Fixed Penalty Tickets are there but just in case the person does not pay the Fixed Penalty Ticket they are still having to complete the full file, so you are not getting any saving in that case. There are some good examples around the country where support staff are undertaking interviews in police stations, so the bureaucracy is still there but it might be being undertaken by a different member of staff and not a police officer. However, the biggest advance for a reduction in bureaucracy is not going to be human work it is going to be technology and the advances we can make through that.

Q48 Mr Prosser: If I can turn to Chris Fox or Guy Gardener, what major recommendations have still not been implemented in terms of cutting down bureaucracy, and why is that?

Mr Fox: That is a difficult one because I cannot remember them all. There were a lot but I agree with Jan that the major stumbling block has been the non-appearance of the case and custody system, which has the major impact on operational staff; it gets them back on the street quicker, they do not have to duplicate the recording of information and it actually automates checks on P&C, and so on. That is a major step forward waiting. What has not been achieved? There are a number of our ancillary tasks that we have been unable to move on. We have moved away from escorting abnormal loads because we have got agreements about how to do that, but some of the other things we do have not been taken away from us totally yet; some of the parking management has, sometimes the removal of vehicles has and we still deal with dogs and property, and such like, and we are trying to divest ourselves of activity, but that is not just about bureaucracy. There are some successes: the electronic identification parade process has been a huge, huge saving, from actually trying to hawk yourself around trying to get enough people to stand in a row to be part of an ID parade. ID parades are happening much, much more frequently than ever before and we now have an electronic system which allows them to be done very quickly and under one person instead of half a dozen. We have, also, removed thousands of forms. Some of those were not in existence but every force has gone through every cupboard and every system and weeded them out and thrown them away. However, what I would like to see - which is not a direct answer to your question - is when we do produce guidance from the centre or new legislation we should do a bureaucracy impact assessment on it to see precisely what that means, because (at a particularly sensitive end) the Stop and Search forms that an officer has to fill in have added to the bureaucracy instead of taking it away. So we are taking away chunks and adding it back in.

Mr Elliott: Can I add to that, because I think Chris Fox makes a very good point. Some decisions that are made at the centre do affect bureaucracy and add to it. The decision for the CPS to agree charges now is having an effect on bureaucracy, because whereas in the past a custody sergeant would make the decision on the evidence that was put before him, usually verbally, now in more and more forces the CPS lawyer is demanding a file before charge. That might even necessitate an adjournment of the prisoner, which further creates bureaucracy because the prisoner is dealt with twice for the same offence. So it has doubled up on the bureaucracy. So we should be very careful, I think, about the decisions at the centre and how they do impact on the force, and Chris is absolutely right that a bureaucracy check on legislation and other practices would be really good before we imposed them on the force.

Q49 Mr Prosser: You have made, I will not call them criticisms, but you have qualified the effect of the O'Dowd recommendations and their slowness to come in for various reasons, and other issues have been raised that we are creating new bureaucracy along the side. Does that argument get fed back up the line to the Home Office? Are there channels open to feed that back?

Mr Elliott: We are feeding that back and we are hoping to get a reaction on that. That, obviously, depends on the two agencies' approach - ours and the CPS's approach - to this whole process.

Mr Naylor: After the O'Dowd report the Home Office and ACPO put together a joint committee that has the catchy title of the Policing Bureaucracy Implementation Steering Group, of which I am a member as well. That group has been responsible for quite a lot of innovations, and one of the innovations it has come up with is the actual bureaucracy awards, which were presented at the Federation conference this year by the Home Secretary. That has got every member of every police force up and down the country thinking of ways where bureaucracy can be cut down. So it is not just coming from the top down, we are trying to grow it from the bottom up, so that the people out there on the streets who are dealing with this every day are saying, "Why the heck are we filling in this bit of paper? Why can't it be done by somebody else?" Or, "Do we really need to do it?" So that needs to be grown in the organisation. Another area that was not in O'Dowd but which has been tackled by this group is the bureaucracy that has grown up around RIPA (the Regulation Investigative Practices Act (?), if I have got the title right). The bureaucracy that spawned out of RIPA, going back to what Chris has said about new legislation, was enormous, but through the Policing Bureaucracy Implementation Steering Group we tried to slim that down all the time, so that we do not have to put in a 16-page form now to have a subscriber check on somebody's mobile 'phone and we are actually getting it back down to something that is manageable. So that group is actually the channel to get these issues into central Government to say "Something has got to be done", and where we can get other officials from the Home Office, and other experts from ACPO and elsewhere in the service, to get working on driving down this bureaucratic burden. It is true, it is a bit like draining the bath with the tap on at times.

Q50 Mr Prosser: O'Dowd also argued that if all his recommendations were implemented you would gain the time equivalent of 20,000 uniformed police officers back on the beat. I get the impression we have not achieved that yet.

Ms Berry: We have not seen them, and I have to say that when we read the report we did try and get our calculators out and we were not quite sure how they managed it. In some scientific way I am sure you can come up with 20,000 but it would be true to say that at this moment in time that has not been achieved. I think, further to that, one of the other damaging parts of this is we have talked about case and custody, which is one very good example of the need for technology, but what has happened in the interim when there is not a national solution is that you have got 43 forces which are trying to provide their own incompatible solution that, when you do have a national solution, are not going to work together, and that is equally damaging to the service. It is a waste of money, and that money could be used in far more effective ways.

Q51 Mr Prosser: Is this slowness to bring down bureaucracy a national issue across the board, or is there a variation from force to force or region to region?

Mr Fox: One of the problems we have is that we have to record information. It is what we do. It is the basis of intelligence and evidence and currently that has to be recorded and written by the officer or member of staff who witnesses it and is going to deal with it. So we have a level of bureaucracy we cannot escape from. What we have to do is find the easiest way of doing that, and that is about good use of technology and good use of processes - i.e., not setting things off when we have not thought about the implications. Going back to Jan's earlier point, we need the right technology quickly in the hands of operational staff. That would speed it up.

Q52 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: I just would like to know, really, about the transfer of information from police authorities to the CPS. You mentioned, Mr Elliott, that bringing the charge used to rely on the charging officer and now it may need the endorsement of the CPS. What about the transfer of information? How does it look at the moment? What I have seen is thick files.

Mr Elliott: That is exactly it.

Q53 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: There is a relationship, I understand, between the CPS and the courts which is an electronic relationship, which I understand has improved the efficiency of those two organisations enormously in terms of bringing cases to court. When are we likely to see that type of improvement reflected in that other interface between you and the CPS?

Mr Elliott: This is something we have been promised for - I was going to say 20 years but it may be 25. Certainly there is some work being done on case and custody and the joined up thinking between case and custody in terms of IT solutions. I am getting to be a bit of a cynic on this because the next person - government minister or Home Office official - who promises me a solution, I have said, if it was not delivered soon, would probably be lynched by the service, because we have been promised time and again. There are trials going on around the country and there is a roll-out programme, but I think part of the problem is that it is not proven yet, and the second part of the problem is that there is a fairly high training requirement for this piece of kit. So I am as perplexed as you as to when we are going to see this but hopefully there is a roll-out programme. This is the ninth or tenth promise of a roll-out programme but there is a bit of kit rolling out around the country. The question we have got is whether it is effective enough, whether forces can afford it and whether forces can afford to train on it.

Q54 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: The next question which I think we have got to ask is who is responsible for reading the O'Dowd report and compliance with the recommendations? Who is picking up that?

Ms Berry: There is a bureaucracy group within the Home Office which is reviewing it, which is an on-going process, as I understand it.

Mr Naylor: It reports to the Home Secretary.

Q55 Mr Prosser: Just finally on this issue, we have talked about the Bureaucracy Implementation Steering Group. If we ever come to a time when all the recommendations of O'Dowd have been implemented, do you think we should scrap that bureaucracy group? Or do you think it will continue in existence?

Mr Naylor: I think bureaucracy is a bit like cholesterol; there is good cholesterol and bad cholesterol. There is good bureaucracy and bad bureaucracy. We need to look at it in that way. We have to have bureaucracy, as Chris has said, because that is what we do, but we need to keep an eye on it all the time. I think there will be a need for a body of some sort nationally to keep an eye on bureaucracy. If we do not, if we take our eye off that ball, the chances are it will grow again and we will get to the stage where it becomes untenable.

Q56 Chairman: Three years ago the Home Office commissioned the diary A Day in the Life of a Police Officer, which showed that 47% of a uniformed police officer was spent in the police station and about half of that time on paperwork. If the Home Office did that diary again today would there have been a significant change?

Ms Berry: I think there may have been a slight change in that. I think there is probably less time spent in a police station but I do not think it would be as significant as any of us had hoped for when Sir David O'Dowd's report first came out.

Mr Elliott: In addition to which - the point Janet made earlier - some of the bureaucracy seems to have been moved to other personnel.

Q57 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: Has there been a reduction in overall terms?

Ms Berry: No, the work is still being done but it might not be being done by a police officer now, it might be being done by a member of support staff.

The Committee suspended from 4.00 pm to 4.15 pm for a division in the House.

Chairman: We can pick up where we left off. I am going to turn now to Mr Winnick.

Q58 David Winnick: Ms Berry, we know you have very strong views as an organisation opposed to the convergence of pay and conditions of police and civilian staff but we will leave that aside for a moment. You have set out very clearly all the reasons in your interesting paper, but looking at what has happened in the last few years are you, as a Federation, happy with police pay, the conditions and working practices? How far do you think they have been successful in the last few years?

Ms Berry: Mr Winnick, I do not want to not answer your question but to my left, and to your right, is our chief negotiator for pay and conditions and I think he is probably a better person to answer that question than I am.

Mr Elliott: This is a difficult question to answer, Mr Winnick, because like most people who ply a trade they always want a little more and we always try to justify a little more. I think that the pay discussions of three years ago were quite a testing time for the service. There were parts of the pay deal that we eventually signed that are still not exactly universally accepted as a good move for the service. We are trying to live with that. I think one of the problems with the pay discussions three years ago was that it was intended, almost, to drive change in the service, and I do not actually think that in terms of workforce modernisation you can use pay in that very blunt way. What you should do, and I have made this point several times since, is look at what you want from the workforce, who delivers that, what skills you require and what conditions you place on each individual within that, and then discuss, when you know what you want the workforce to do, what you want to pay the workforce. At the moment it seems that it is somewhat difficult to understand what role individuals, both sworn and unsworn, in the service are designed to play in the larger scheme of things. In other words, nobody seems to have a big plan for five years away; we just seem to be, almost, changing stage-by-stage with no real identifiable aim for the future of policing. This, of course, has its effects on the morale of all workers in the service, that is sworn and unsworn officers. My argument is that everybody could do with a little more, and I think we deserve a little more. In fact, I think we probably deserve a lot more, according to most of my colleagues. At the moment, I think the key issue is what you want us to do and who you want to do it, and then put the pay round that concept.

Q59 David Winnick: Of course, and this will not come as a great surprise to you, I did not expect you to actually say "We have never been paid so marvellously in our lives; we do not want any further increases." I am sure your position in the Police Federation would not have lasted very long. You have been very guarded in your reply and I think my colleagues and I have understood what you have said. If I can turn to Mr Fox or Dr Brain, there is a proposal (and it is not on pay, you will be pleased to know - I am not sure if in your group you are dissatisfied with the pay, but I am not pursuing that) by the Association of Police Authorities that they should take the lead in appraising senior officers, with some input from the constabulary rather than the other way round. Be it Mr Fox or Dr Brain, do you have any views on that?

Mr Fox: I think Tim has probably more to say.

Dr Brain: We are the Association, obviously, that deals with this issue because it directly relates to the conditions of service of chief officers. The first point is that there is a range of chief officers below the rank of chief constable - deputies and assistant chief constables in provincial forces, and commanders, deputy assistant commissioners and assistant commissioners in the Metropolitan Police - that are line-managed by chief constables or their Metropolitan equivalent. As a sound principle of management the chief officer, the chief constable, should appraise those who work for him or her, and that is the starting point dealing with those officers below the rank of chief constable. With respect to chief constables, it was not very long ago that appraisals were not done at all; it was indeed part of the first - and one of the aims of the first - phase of police reform that appraisals should be introduced for chief constables. As a modernising and responsible staff association we were happy to co-operate in a rational and reasoned way in the development of professional development reviews for chief constables. That has been achieved but they have only just completed their first year of operation. The first PDRs have just been completed and the second set of personal development objectives for the year has only just got under way. So it is really quite early days and I think the current arrangements should at least be given an opportunity to develop; let us draw some conclusions from, at least, some years of operation rather than merely 15-16 months. However, there is the principle that these are development reviews for chief constables. It is quite hard for a collective body to appraise an individual. It also implies that there is, perhaps, some kind of subordinate relationship between police authorities and chief constables, and that is not how the tripartite structure is so constituted at the moment. There are different functions within the tripartite arrangement for chief constables and police authorities. If you look at the Police Act 1964 and its derivatives it gives different functions, it does not imply a hierarchy. Thirdly, we do respect the roles of Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary (and the regional HMIs are former senior police officers - invariably chief constables of their equivalent) and they are in a position best to advise individuals and indeed authorities on the development of chief constables. As far as bonus related payments are concerned, which is a new feature for chief officers as part of the recently agreed PNB negotiations, the ability to award an bonus already rests with the police authority. That, we think, is quite proper because, of course, it relates to the delivery of objectives around local policing plans ----

Q60 David Winnick: For senior officers?

Dr Brain: For chief officers: assistants, deputies and chiefs and their Metropolitan equivalent. So that already exists and we think it is a balanced arrangement and, above all, we think that the current arrangements should be given a chance to take root and develop.

Q61 David Winnick: I want to turn to another topic and I am going to turn to the Police Federation. There is a target for ethnic minorities to be in the police force. It was, in fact, along the lines of 7% of ethnic minorities by 2009. Five years away we are far from that target; it remains in the category of a little over 2% - say 2.5%. Ms Berry, you have strong views as an organisation against any further action - quotas, for example - and I believe I heard you explain why to the media. Why are you opposed to action that would, in fact, bring about the target which was set down a couple of years ago?

Ms Berry: I am not actually convinced that the action would achieve the targets. I think that is point number one. Point number two: positive discrimination - or affirmative action, I think, is the American term - is, at this moment in time, unlawful in this country, so there would need to be a change in the law to actually provide for quotas. If there was a change in the law we would need to be satisfied, as a society, that this is the right sort of thing to do. I have spoken to black colleagues who have said to me they would not want to have joined a service through a quota system because, whether it is right or wrong, they perceive it would be perceived that they had got in at, somehow, a lower standard, and no matter what people said they would perceive that. As a woman in the service I had to face comments when I was promoted to sergeant that I only got there because I was a woman, and that is very, very undermining to the individual. So I think that people who come into the service want to believe they are getting there on their own merit and to the standard that is set, and also that they are the best person for the job. What the Police Federation believes very strongly is that the police service does need to mirror the structure of society and at this moment it does not, and we need to put as much energy into that happening as we possibly can. I do not believe, at this moment in time, that the police service has been as committed as it could be to achieving that. For some forces the targets that were set back in 1999 were challenging but they were not that challenging, depending on the make-up of your own communities, but for some areas in the country they were absolutely impossible even when they were set in 1999. If you take the position that we are currently in, for seven forces in particular, where they have particularly challenging targets, they will have to recruit in the region of 80% black and ethnic minority officers between now and 2009 to meet their target. Now, even if that could happen that could well destabilise the whole profile of recruiting in the police service, but I do question whether that number of black and ethnic minority officers are people who actually want to join the police service or whether we can encourage them to join the police service. Your next question might be "So what do we do about it?"

Q62 David Winnick: My next question, actually, was going to ask you, Ms Berry, why it is that the Black Police Association, representing black police officers, seems to take a different line to that of the Police Federation. Should they not know the situation quite well?

Ms Berry: I, too, was surprised because we do have, I hope, a good working relationship with the Black Police Association. In fact several of us here were at a meeting where the President of the Black Police Association spoke this morning, which gave a slightly different slant to what was coming across in the media at the weekend. Without wanting to say what the President of the BPA said this morning, my indication from his announcement was that they want to open a debate about how we can increase the number of black and ethnic minority officers in those forces which are not going to make the targets, and I fully support that. It is quite right this debate should take place - I think that is healthy - but I do not believe, at this moment in time, that there is sufficient need to change the law in order to make quotas for black officers.

Q63 David Winnick: Since you have said that the police force should reflect society as a whole, clearly you will agree (you have not shown any indication otherwise, and I would be surprised if you did) that the present situation is not only unsatisfactory but all the indications are that it is going to remain so for sometime, totally unlike the position, which has changed completely, in the United States.

Ms Berry: I am not quite sure that it has been as successful as some people have alluded to in the United States. That is certainly not some of the feedback that I have received. The other point we have to make is that policing in general is a 30-year career and a generation, at the latest guess, is 25 years, yet we were trying to re-engineer and recreate a representative police service within ten years. I think that, for some areas, particularly those areas where there were a large number of ethnic communities, the target set was probably unachievable when it was set.

Q64 David Winnick: Do you see any analogy - perhaps not - between the way in which the Labour Party introduced, and changed the law to make it absolutely legal without challenge from the courts, women-only shortlists which produced over 100 female Labour MPs in 1997? I am not putting on my Party hat at all I am just trying to clear the position - perhaps other political parties will follow suit, who knows! However, I have not met a single female colleague of mine who has been the subject of a female-only shortlist saying, in effect, "I am not really up to the job. I was selected in this way and, therefore, it was not fair and I am not as good as any man." That is not going to happen, and there is not the slightest indication that any female Member of Parliament feels inferior to a male. If this was done for the Parliamentary scene, is there not some way in which it could also be done, in some respects - obviously not the same, in many respects differently - by a sort of quota system to ensure that the police force reflects society as a whole?

Ms Berry: You have still got to encourage people to come into the police service. As I said earlier, if I take myself as an example, I would hate to think that I got any of my positions for any other reason than I was the right person for the job and the best person for the job. I would not have wanted to have got that position because I was the token woman, or the token black person, or whatever else. I think that would be totally inappropriate.

Q65 David Winnick: I take the point, which you are putting forward as an organisation. On the position of Community Support Officers, Ms Berry, again (or Mr Elliott, as the case may be), clearly you are not over-enthusiastic, to say the least - we have all read your paper. Do you continue to feel that this is a sort of poor substitute for more police officers?

Ms Berry: The role the Community Support Officers are doing, I have no doubt, is an important role to fulfil and there needs to be a patrolling element for policing. For too long the police service was not patrolling in the way that we should have been and it was not providing the investment into community policing as we should have been. So I have no doubt that the role that has been developed for the Community Support Officers is an important policing role. The difficulty that we have established with this is that a suggestion has taken place where we have now got just over 2,000, maybe 2,500, Community Support Officers around the country with announcements that a further 20,000 Community Support Officers will be recruited. This announcement is without any scientific evaluation of the added value that Community Support Officers are providing. I would be the first person to admit - and, like yourselves, I come to London quite often - that from a visibility point of view there clearly are a lot of Community Support Officers on the streets, and I think in the short term visibility does provide some reassurance. However, in the absence of any formal evaluation of the role of PCSOs by anybody else, recently we have gone round to our colleagues around the country and conducted some focus groups on what is happening on the ground with PCSOs. I apologise because the results from some of these focus groups are still coming through and we have not had sufficient time to put it into written evidence. Some of the information coming back from the focus groups is that a lot of our colleagues welcome the work that is being undertaken by the PCSOs because they see it as being valuable work and they see it as work that has not been done by the police for some time. What is also coming through are some concerns that PCSOs are increasingly being used in confrontational positions for which they have neither the skills, the training, the equipment or necessarily the powers to deal with. I think that is a particularly concerning element and one that we, certainly in the early days, registered some concerns that this would happen. If you are on the streets and wearing a police uniform - it may well say "PCSO" on the back but is a visible police uniform - members of the public will expect you to react and be able to deal with that situation. So I think what has come out is that there is a level of confusion by police officers as to what PCSOs are doing and by the public as to what the powers and real role of a PCSO is, and I think that is probably exactly where we thought we would be when the suggestion of PCSOs first came out.

Q66 David Winnick: The Government, as you know, has put forward proposals very recently to extend the powers of PCSOs. I take it, obviously, from your answer, Ms Berry, that at any rate you are opposed to that?

Ms Berry: It is very difficult to say we are opposed to it because I do not believe the PCSOs can be effective without the powers to deal with what is a very complicated and complex job on the streets. I think people underrate and undervalue how difficult that job can be sometimes and ----

Q67 David Winnick: That of a PCSO or a police officer?

Ms Berry: Being a patrolling officer on the streets. There is an expectation that is raised that if you are in uniform you can deal with any situation that is presented to you, and clearly if you have not received the training, the skills and the equipment then you cannot do that. I believe that the role being undertaken by PCSOs is, essentially, a police officer's role and if we need to give them more powers they should be police officers and receive the right training and equipment to do that.

Mr Elliott: This is an important point because I think that there comes a point in time when we give PCSOs some powers and there is very little difference between police officers and PCSOs, and yet the way in which they are actually recruited and trained, and their skill base, is completely different to that required of a police officer. I think in some respects some people look very simplistically at things like ancillary nurses and teaching assistants and try and compare PCSOs with that sort of introduction of a low-level assistance to the main deliverers of a particular service. In the health service and in teaching there is really a much safer environment and a much more controlled environment; in policing you actually are out there in the environment where you have no control and there is an expectation that the person who arrives in a uniform will deal with the situation. The effect is not just on the PCSO, it is on the service for failing to deliver and it is on the service for sending somebody who is not capable of dealing with the incident - and on somebody who simply turns round a corner and comes across an incident and cannot deal with it. So it actually shows the service in a bad light. There is a point, I think, and we are not far away from that point, when PCSOs are actually, in everything but name, police officers, but are actually cheaper, less well trained and less well selected police officers. That has got to be of concern to the public.

Q68 David Winnick: Mr Fox, a different viewpoint?

Mr Fox: Slightly different. I do agree in certain areas. The first is about the evaluation. PCSOs have been very successful in doing what they were originally employed to do, which was long periods of contact time, high visibility on the streets being seen by the public. So if we are going to extend the powers we need to be very careful about the balance because when you use powers you have to follow that up: you have to extend training, you have increased costs of equipment and you have to then start thinking about abstractions for various places. There is a balance where their actual cost and benefit is lost and it would be as well to have a police officer with the full range of powers. So evaluation we agree on. However, what we need to keep very carefully in mind is the impact they have had. Where they are working in teams with officers, in neighbourhoods, estates, towns and villages - totally different places - they have had a very positive impact. I would like to see an evaluation of where they are best used because they are working better in some places than others. So the two issues are: we think they are very good when they are working in teams with officers and we need to be aware of the balance of extending powers so far that they are actually not out there visible and contactable, which is what they were originally designed to be.

Q69 Chairman: The 2001 White Paper said "The record of the police service in developing and installing scientific and IT systems is patchy. Too often different forces have opted for different approaches while new national systems have been delivered late or not at all." That was one of the least controversial passages in the White Paper, I should think. Can I ask two questions? Firstly, Chris Fox: three years on, have we made any real improvements in sorting out the system for procuring IT and scientific services and overcoming the fragmentation that was all too obviously there? Secondly, on DNA in particular, have we made progress in improving what was a very patchy performance by individual forces on implementing DNA technology?

Mr Fox: On the first, I think our improvement in procuring IT has moved slightly. I am on record as saying that we should be much more directive about what systems are for national use and that forces should take them. As an infrastructure of policing the core systems should be taken; they should be procured and funded nationally and forces should take them. That gives us a national infrastructure. We have pretty nearly successfully rolled out the national communications system - Airwave, as it is known. The Bichard Inquiry, obviously, has dictated that we have to have an interoperable intelligence system. So the mindset is changing but you have heard the problems with case and custody, which is an absolutely vital piece of equipment and we still have not got it. I have to say, much of that is out of our control because we are not IT specialists, we are police officers and we need them. So this is a mixed bag of a response but we are not where we should be. The IT has taken too long to come, we need to be more responsive and more fleet of foot because, I have to say, some of the - particularly international - organised criminals have much better equipment than we do.

Q70 Chairman: The information technology organisation, PITO, has 600 staff and a £350 million budget. The Government appears to have attempted to tweak it to get it to work better. Are we at the point where there needs to be a radically different approach entirely to procuring IT?

Mr Fox: You are probably aware there is an independent review that is about to report now, which has been commissioned by the Home Office. That is imminent, and I think it will be a reshaping of PITO's role and responsibility within the market. Going back to an earlier comment, which was about the Crown Prosecution Service and the courts having compatible systems, clearly police IT has to work across not just police boundaries but across departmental boundaries. So somebody has to take a broader look. I think the answer is, yes, it is time for it to be tweaked and be made more responsive. On the DNA front, I think that is good news; I think we have made a lot of progress. We do have some problems where we have duplicate samples. That might sound like inefficiency but, in essence, what it means is that criminals tell lies and when we arrest them they give us different names and details and we take another sample because on our record system they are recorded in their other name. So we then have two of the same samples with different names and it takes a little while to unscramble that. There is that confusion. Our scenes-of-crime staff and our frontline officers are getting much sharper about where to look - and, indeed, the amount of material you need - for a successful identification. This is a good story and it is producing not just the high-profile hits that we see but day-to-day hits on all sorts of incidents, from street assaults to burglaries.

Q71 Chairman: Can I ask you, finally, on science and technology, whether you have any concerns about the proposed public-private partnership that is going to replace the current Forensic Science Service?

Mr Fox: We are part of that consultation process, and we have been assured that the final decision has not been made and there is more consultation to be had. We are pretty much content about the public-private partnership arrangements as they look at the moment, with one very strong recommendation, and that is that the database - DNA is a very personal material which needs high security and control to keep its integrity - remains outside of that arrangement and has a separate public sector governance, not a police governance, but has arrangements which keep it well away from any interference and any lowering of its integrity. Not just because that will cause us problems in court but because it has very sensitive, personal data involved.

Q72 Chairman: The final question, which goes to Mr Naylor. The Government is proposing to abolish the distinction between arrestable and non-arrestable offences. Does that make sense to you operationally, or is it something that gives you concern?

Mr Naylor: It makes sense, Chair, because we now live in a less compliant society, in my personal view. Whereas in the past we used to report people for summons and they used to turn up at court for minor offences - anti-social behaviour, and that sort of thing, on the street - that is now a problem for the police and, obviously, generates more work and more bureaucracy. So to have a review of police powers and to make them straightforward, understandable and transparent, not only to the police but to the public as well, I think would be a major step forward for confidence in the police as well as guarding civil liberties, and people will understand where they stand.

Chairman: Thank you very much indeed, ladies and gentlemen, for a very, very helpful session. Thank you very much.