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

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

HOME AFFAIRS COMMITTEE

 

 

POLICE REFORM

 

 

TUesday 14 September 2004

BARONESS HENIG OF LANCASTER, LORD HARRIS OF HARINGEY, FIONNUALA GILL, SIR IAN BLAIR and GARY PUGH

Evidence heard in Public Questions 73 - 177

 

 

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.
4.	Prospective witnesses may receive this in preparation for any written or oral evidence they may in due course give to the Committee.

 

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Home Affairs Committee

on Tuesday 14 September 2004

Members present

David Winnick

Mrs Janet Dean

Mr John Denham

Mr Gwyn Prosser

Bob Russell

Mr John Taylor

 

In the absence of the Chairman, David Winnick was called to the Chair

________________

Memorandum submitted by Association of Police Authorities

 

Examination of Witnesses

 

Witnesses: Baroness Henig of Lancaster, a Member of the House of Lords, Chairman of the Association of Police Authorities; Lord Harris of Haringey, a Member of the House of Lords, Member of Executive; Fionnuala Gill, Executive Director; Sir Ian Blair, Deputy Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service; Gary Pugh, Director of Forensic Services, examined

Q73 David Winnick (in the Chair): Good afternoon. I am very pleased that you have been able to come and give evidence to this session on police reform. You are all very busy people and we shall listen with much interest to your responses to the questions. I am just wondering if any wish to make an opening statement. We have had your memos. I think we know very well your views, your responses to the questions which will come, so shall we work on the basis that whatever information you want to give us, you have already given us?

Baroness Henig: I would be happy to work on that basis.

Q74 David Winnick (in the Chair): Baroness Henig, you have given evidence before. I think it would be appropriate to congratulate on your being sent to the House of Lords. Someone has mentioned there might be a division.

Lord Harris: My understanding is that there could be a division and because of the bizarre Lords Rules there will not be any indication of timing, but it is unlikely to be before 3.45.

Q75 David Winnick (in the Chair): It will be up to the two of you, I would not want to say anything that would cause you difficulties with Whips. We will definitely have a division at 4 o'clock. If we have not completed our agenda then we will resume about 4.15. We have many questions. If I can start by asking Sir Ian, first of all. What is your overall assessment of the Government's police reform programme to date? Do you take the view that the Government have a coherent vision ‑‑ and I am going to ask the Association of Police Authorities the same question in a moment -- your answer will be very diplomatic, Sir Ian.

Sir Ian Blair: Of course, but I also think true. I think that there is a significant coherence between the two parts of police reform, although it is obviously true the second one is sometimes an adjustment of the first. I would say that the first was about three things. It was about processes and enablers, so we had legislation around the relationship between Home Office, police authorities and chief officers, the development of the extended police family, pay reform, the introduction of the independent Police Complaints Commission, and the performance framework, together with a lot of law reform, which I think is often missed as part of the overall police reform agenda. It is certainly one in which the Met and other police forces have been engaged. We have seen extensions of anti‑social behaviour legislation, finger printing and DNA now being taken at the point of charge, which is very important to us, a practice directive about bail so that offences on bail are dealt with at the time somebody is brought back to court, minimum sentences for firearms, and of course additional resources. So that is the three parts of the first part. Now I think we are heading off into three other things. First of all, a discussion about accountability ‑‑ and I note from the questions you will want further discussion around that.

Q76 David Winnick (in the Chair): There will be questions later on obviously.

Sir Ian Blair: I am quite positive that the discussions and detailed work around accountability is important for a modernised service. Secondly, there is simplification of some of the early parts, so a simplification of performance regime, simplification of police powers, which I think is very important, harmonisation in workforce terms, the workforce modernisation agenda, capacity building around the improvement agency ‑‑ again, I am sure you will want to talk about that ‑‑ and now citizen focus. What would I say about the coherence? I would say that it is definitely there. We, as a police service, particularly the Met, have been very heavily involved in a lot of this work. We see it as based on the four principles of public sector reform as laid down for the rest of the public service with some very great big challenges ahead. This is just focus material that the Home Secretary mentioned this morning, and it is another extension of that and a great big challenge.

Q77 David Winnick (in the Chair): Thank you very much. Baroness Henig or Lord Harris, do you want to give any views about what you consider to be the overall assessment of the Government's police reform programme, whether it has a coherence which you approve of?

Baroness Henig of Lancaster: If I could perhaps respond to that, briefly. I think if you look at the overall vision, and it is a vision that we share, a vision of a modern, high performing, more responsive police service, and a service that is focused on the needs of all our diverse citizens, then I think there is a coherent picture. I think that the reform programme, as Sir Ian has said, is very comprehensive and it is very far reaching. There is a whole number of different strands. There are some 40 to 50 individual projects. I think, therefore, rather than looking at those in isolation one has to fit the pieces into a bigger picture so we share the vision. We may have differences at times on the best way to get there, but we certainly feel that given that we all have different roles in the policing structure we support the fundamental principles and we support the direction of travel.

Q78 David Winnick (in the Chair): Does the APA take the view that there should be some caution about the second phase of reform, that there should be more bedding down in the first phase, Lady Henig, before proceeding to the second?

Baroness Henig of Lancaster: I do understand where the question is coming from. We do recognise the need to maintain the momentum. Our concern is not so much about the speed of change, but ensuring that the significant changes, which have implications for the nature of policing, are properly thought through and tested to make sure they are workable.

Q79 David Winnick (in the Chair): It would be odd if you said the opposite.

Baroness Henig of Lancaster: Provided, therefore, that that is a central issue then I think we are not so much concerned about phase 1 going through to phase 2 because, as Sir Ian said, there are some very important principles now which are involved in phase 2 ‑‑ citizen engagement, workforce modernisation ‑‑ which we have supported and called for change for a number of years. Provided that the changes are looked at thoroughly and are tested then our concerns I think are allayed.

Q80 David Winnick (in the Chair): You, Sir Ian, what about the Met: do you believe that we are all ready for the second phase or more caution?

Sir Ian Blair: No, I am very intent that we should carry on into the second phase. I do not think the first phase was enough. Many of the things that are in the second phase are vital to improving the performance of the police service as a whole and its standing with the community. Just to take a single example, we really do need to simplify the performance framework in the way in which it is being suggested in the public sector agreements for the future we have at the moment too many targets. I think that the way in which the PSAs are now being set out gives a lot more local discretion, which is clearly both the Government's intention and what we have been asking for.

Q81 David Winnick (in the Chair): Thank you very much. If I can ask you, Sir Ian, in particular, about crime statistics since 2001. The detection rate seems to be falling, not increasing; is that not the position?

Sir Ian Blair: It would not be the position in the Metropolitan Police service. The detection rate has been reasonably steady since 2000, is now moving up reasonably fast. I think it would be important, perhaps, for me to give a little support and clarification about what Chris Fox either did or did not say as reported in the newspapers. The clear requirement for the police service is to reduce crime, and that has been the requirement since the first Commissioners laid down the principles of policing, that it was about the absence of crime and the maintenance of public tranquillity first and the detection of offenders later on. We see crime detection as part of, not separate from, but part of crime reduction. I think it is very interesting that if one talks to some of the US chiefs who are so familiar to this debate, like Bill Bratton or Paul Evans, they do not talk about detection rates at all. Some of the detection rates that we are putting forward, like the Met's 97% detection rate for murder is completely unheard of in the US. Some of our detection rates are now dramatically advancing. Domestic violence, for instance, moved up in the last year from 28% to 38% detection. Overall violent figures: 24 to 31% detections. I do not feel that detections are falling. Part of this, in the same way as the crime reduction figures, is the impact of increased numbers. In the end, it is the presence of police or the availability of police that will determine the amount of crime and the amount of detections.

Q82 David Winnick (in the Chair): Sir Ian, I am not suggesting for one moment you are putting a spin on matters because, of course, spin would be totally unknown to the Met, as it is of course to politicians, but in the figures that I have there has, indeed, been a reduced rate as regards detection. Are you denying that is, in fact, the position?

Sir Ian Blair: The figures that I have show a broad sort of standardisation since 2000 and then a significant increase in the last 12 months. There was a significant fall from 1998 to 2000, a really quite significant fall, most which was around the abandonment by the MPS at that stage of what were described as "administrative detections".

Q83 David Winnick (in the Chair): We do agree that there was a substantial reduction in the detection rate between 1998 and 2001. That is not in dispute?

Sir Ian Blair: That is not in dispute.

Q84 David Winnick (in the Chair): No spin or anything else?

Sir Ian Blair: No.

Q85 David Winnick (in the Chair): You totally agree that is so.

Sir Ian Blair: Your question was 2001.

Q86 David Winnick (in the Chair): Now you are telling us that it has started to reverse.

Sir Ian Blair: It has started to reverse, yes.

Q87 David Winnick (in the Chair): But by no means as much as it should be. That is a question.

Sir Ian Blair: Again, that depends. We all know that some of the detection processes in the past were dubious; I do not mean they were illegal, but they were around going to prisons and asking people which offences they were prepared to admit to, and so on. There has certainly been a fall off which has now again been reversed in offences taken into consideration. The key figure is how many people are charged or summonsed and then how many people are convicted in court, which is the offences brought to justice target that the Government is setting. On that, the Met, in common with other forces, is advancing.

Q88 David Winnick (in the Chair): Sir Ian, I would put this to you. If there is a feeling amongst the general public, justified or otherwise, but if there is a feeling amongst the general public that a crime has been committed and the likelihood, a burglary or some mugging or whatever is the position, everyday life in our country has its dangers, and that the chances of the person, the offender being caught, is rather low, that of course inevitably the public feel that their confidence that crime does not pay is not going to be so in practice?

Sir Ian Blair: I think that is a very fair observation.

Q89 David Winnick (in the Chair): It is stating the obvious.

Sir Ian Blair: Nothing that I have said is that detections are not important, but it does seem that we have to make sure that we see detections as a subset of crime reduction and public reassurance because we are now in London at a 30 year low in burglary, to take the example you have used. That means thousands of people every month are not burgled in the same numbers as they would have been before. That is clearly a clue to public reassurance. At the same time, we have to make clear to criminals that they will be caught, and the figures, as you describe it, are not good enough yet, but again the concentration that we are now undertaking around priority offenders, looking at the moment at prolific offenders and taking them out of the system I think is another part of this process, as is the work that Gary Pugh, who I should have introduced earlier, our Director of Forensic Science, is doing around DNA and forensic technology.

Q90 David Winnick (in the Chair): What is your response to the attitude of the average person, law abiding person, who would say: "If only we could see more police around the place. We see them so rarely and when they do come around it is in a patrol car".

Sir Ian Blair: My response to that would be that in London they are seeing more than they have ever seen them before; we have statistics that back that up. Our safer neighbourhood teams are receiving really significant public approbation. We have had them evaluated in Camden in particular, by the University of Portsmouth. As the safer neighbourhoods teams roll out across all of the boroughs of London we will have individual evaluations of public perception before they arrive and after they arrive. We are seeing very, very significant levels of public recognition of these teams.

Q91 David Winnick (in the Chair): I certainly want no special protection for myself, and I am not going to mention the tube station in question, but when I do arrive at the tube station from work from Westminster, over the years from the tube station going home I cannot recall seeing a police officer. If I cannot recall, the sort of time we finish our work here, then obviously I can only assume that there are not plenty of police officers except at that particular time when I am going home. The point I am making: it is not a question of protection for any Member of Parliament. It is the fact that the public are unlikely to have seen anybody. I suppose to some extent it is also the same in my own constituency.

Sir Ian Blair: I would certainly recognise the picture that you have described. I would not recognise it so much now. The Met has grown in strength from 25,000 to nearly 31,000 officers plus 2000 community support officers. That is still a low figure by European standards, but it is a very significant increase. I was just turning to the Camden evaluation. Of the people polled by the University of Portsmouth 70% saw these teams as increasing their feeling of personal safety by day and by night. That is the clue. I think it is fair, and I have made this point in a number of speeches over the recent years, that both the commentators and the police service lost sight of the significance of patrol. There was this famous statistic that the patrolling police officer only came across a burglar every 30 years so why did you bother to patrol. What we failed to understand was the significance of the presence being the reassurance. That is why across the Met and across the rest of the country we will start to roll out these teams, dedicated teams to every neighbourhood. It is putting neighbourhood policing back.

Q92 David Winnick (in the Chair): It is a credit to the Met and the police force outside London that people have such confidence that they want to see police officers and that should not at any time be forgotten or the way in which police officers lives can be at risk as we know from some of the terrible things that have taken place in the last few years. Thank you, Sir Ian. Do you, Lady Henig or Lord Harris, as the case may be, have any comments on the rate of detection?

Baroness Henig of Lancaster: Can I say, one of the roles of police authorities is to raise precisely the questions you have been putting to Sir Ian Blair with their own forces. This is an area that police authority members take a lot of interest in. One thing that has struck me, and Sir Ian did touch on this, is that detection rates for serious crimes are high. Detection rates for murder are something like 90%, violence against the person 50%, which we welcome clearly. The problem appears to lie in areas where there is a much more diffuse range of crimes: criminal damage, petty theft. I think the new way in which crime is recorded has actually affected detection rates. We are now recording much more rigorously all the low level crime, which is actually the most difficult to detect. That area is one that the police authorities are trying to get a handle on and are in dialogue with their police forces for precisely the reasons you have put forward because the public are asking these questions.

David Winnick (in the Chair): They are, indeed. Thank you, Lady Henig. I am going to turn to my colleague, Mrs Janet Dean, to ask a number of questions. I said at the beginning we are going to have a vote at 4.00. We probably will not be able to finish at 4.00, but to the extent ‑‑ I may be as guilty as anyone else ‑‑ if we keep our questions brief and answers brief we will get through a lot more. Thank you very much, Mrs Dean.

Q93 Mrs Dean: Thank you, Chairman. Baroness Henig, could you say what experience you have of the work of the Police Standards Unit and the national centre for policing excellence, and how effective do you believe they have been?

Baroness Henig of Lancaster: Thank you for that question. If I start at the beginning, there was some uncertainty amongst many members in the service around the role of the PSU and how it would differ perhaps from HMIC.  I have to say that has now settled down. I think there is a good understanding now of the respective roles and responsibilities of the PSU as opposed to other bodies. We did say in our written evidence we actually believe that the standards unit has had a major impact in terms of galvanising focus on performance. One of the reasons I say that, and again I say it as a Police Authority member, and I am very pleased that the standards unit has helped to develop some really valuable tools which have been of great benefit to us. I am thinking of tools such as i‑Quanta. PPAF, Policing Performance Assessment Framework, activity based costing. These are methodologies that Police Authorities can actually use to test performance, performance management, in their own forces. To that extent, we feel that the standards unit has actually brought a rigour into that area and has helped us considerably in the role that we carry out across the country. I am not sure the same impetus would have been there to get on and deliver without the PSU. Again, an area, just if I can briefly say, an area where there has been some difficulty, one has to acknowledge this, is over intervention and target forces, which certainly caused some sensitivities to begin with. Again, although the involvement to begin with was a bit ad hoc we now have an agreed protocol about how and when the standards unit engages with forces. That has brought greater clarity and it recognises the need to involve police authorities and we are much happier now with the way the system works.

Q94 Mrs Dean: Do you have concerns about any significant problem of overlap between not only the PSU and the national centre, but the central Home Office, ACPO and HMI and the constabulary?

Baroness Henig of Lancaster: It is a crowded field. One has to be clear there are number of bodies at central level, but nonetheless, I think that there is a lot of hard work going on amongst different agencies. Where there are areas of duplication one of our jobs, certainly at national level is to make representations about that and to try and get clarification and streamlining. I recognise your concerns and it is an area that we are constantly looking at and trying to work to bring clarity.

Q95 Mrs Dean: Sir Ian, do you have anything to add to that?

Sir Ian Blair: I probably do, but only by taking that question on into the suggested national police improvement agency; if you are happy for me to do that, because that in a way is where PSU meets HMIC, meets everything else, is going.

Q96 Mrs Dean: Yes.

Sir Ian Blair: There has been a level of overlap and think what is coming out of debate about the improvement agency is clarity about at least two functions that do not sit in an improvement agency and have to continue.  One is inspection. The way in which HMIC is now developing the baseline inspection across forces for both in terms of performance and strategy is a very helpful process. That is saying to the public: this is what your police force is like. Then there is something about supporting forces or individual BCUs whose performance is well behind the rest. That is a specific action by PSU which is not always going to be fully comfortable but I think is a necessary process. Beyond that, it seems to me there is something around setting a much more clear set of doctrine for the police service and then enabling forces to have the capacity to deal with it. That is where the improvement agency comes in. Where ACPO, and to some extent the APA has started to struggle over the last few years has been the capacity to undertake fundamental, measured improvement while also doing the day job. I think we need to look across to the experiences of Local Government and NHS in setting up some kind of agency that assists. That is why the bit about the PSU cannot be in it. If the bit about where there is a kind of governmental enforcement bit, then I think individual forces will lose confidence in bringing in an improvement agency. I am very hopeful that this will settle something that has for too long been done on goodwill.

Q97 Mrs Dean: Thank you. Baroness Henig, you also support the creation of the national improvement agency. Do you want to tell us why you support that?

Baroness Henig of Lancaster: I support the principle. What is very important for the APA is to be absolutely clear about the role and terms of reference of yet another new body, so there is not overlap or duplication of the sort you have already alluded to. We certainly see scope for and would welcome some rationalisation of the existing landscape that is rather crowded at the moment. The way we are looking at the improvement agency, it may not be necessarily the exactly same way that ACPO is looking at it. What we would like to see is a peer review body, something along the lines of the IDEA, which is made up of respected practitioners from forces and authorities who can go out and spread good practice on the ground and bring about a self‑improvement culture. We do not want it to be a monitoring or regulatory or enforcement body. We want to see HMI continue as the independent inspectorate. Like Sir Ian, we very much welcome their baseline assessment. I thought that was absolutely the way forward. For us, it is a peer review body which we think would be extremely useful, but even more crucial than that we think there has to be genuine tripartite ownership of the agency. It has to be an agency in which the APA and ACPO as well as the Home Office feels some ownership because otherwise we feel it will not succeed and get service buy‑in. It must not be seen as just another arm of the Home Office. Anything that would encourage ministers to let go a little and trust us to get on and run it would be very much welcomed.

Q98 Mrs Dean: ACPO argues that the police training organisation Centrex should not have been given responsibility for operating the national centre for policing excellence. What is your opinion?

Baroness Henig of Lancaster: I think that NCPE does have the potential to have a significant impact on the way communities are policed. The thing about Centrex is that when NCPE is part of it, it is actually governed then by tripartite governance. Again, I come back to that principle, that is something that we very much set store on. We do want to have an input into that to be able to have ownership over the work it is doing. That is where we are coming from on that one.

Q99 Mrs Dean: Thank you for that. Can I turn to you again, Sir Ian. Your memorandum criticises other bodies, such as the Court Service, for showing a lack of urgency in development of a performance culture. Can you give concrete examples of this and how it impacts on the work of the police?

Sir Ian Blair: Yes. I hope it is not so much a criticism as a hope for improvement.  I categorise the other agencies into two parts. You have the criminal justice agencies and then you have the local authorities. In the criminal justice agencies, there is a long history of IT under provision, you know that. There is also a considerable amount of cultural resistance. In that, I take the single example of court results. There have been recommendations for the Audit Commission and others for about 15 years that the results from courts should be sent directly from the court to the national criminal record office; that has never been achieved. At the moment, those results are then sent back to the police officer whose responsibility it is then to inform the criminal record office. The difficulty is, in these days, the police officer is very often not in court himself or herself. It is a very, very laborious process. Another group, the Crown Prosecution Service: again, a long history of IT under provision. We are now moving through the case and custody process so that the case process will be prepared electronically, but at the current time the CPS requires original documents. We have to get away from that process for decision making. I am not saying without original documents for a trial, but for decision making we should be able to see where there is enough evidence on the screen of a computer. There is quite a long way to go in that. There are considerable difficulties I think for probation, particularly in London, to bring together its IT processes. There are currently four areas. They are not joined up in terms of IT provision. I see this in a body that I sit on called The London Crime Reduction Delivery Board where we were particularly trying to follow the issue of diversity through the criminal process, and it was effectively only that that could come up with the answers as opposed to the other bodies. That is a disappointment, but I think we are moving in a much more coherent way than ever before. In terms of other agencies, we have with education authorities and health and housing there is a long way to go before I think they see that as part of a community safety effort. There are individual boroughs where that is working well, but a lot of the time there remains a cultural reluctance around information sharing. I think there are some very good future prospects. The work being done by ODPM around local area agreements, the concept of public services boards, at the moment being piloted in Hammersmith and Fulham for instance, brings all the agencies together with a pot of money and then starts to make that local accountability possible. I think one of the things I would particularly look for the future, in addition to the joint funding process, which is always a difficult set of cats to bring together, is some kind of joint inspectoral process, some way in which the HMIC can inspect the contribution of other agencies, or we could have a community safety inspectorate or something of that nature bringing all that together because the undoubted thrust ‑‑ and we will get on to accountability in a minute ‑‑ the undoubted thrust is below that level. It is at the neighbourhood meeting level, you will all know that as MPs. Getting all the agencies to agree to be held accountable at that level is very difficult. To give you one concrete example is the new dispersal orders in relation to crack houses. We are doing well in London, but the variation between contribution by one borough and another is quite extreme. That is about getting, if you like, their act together in that field.

Q100 Mr Taylor: Could I have a supplementary on the answer just given by Sir Ian. Sir Ian, I was disturbed by what you said about the inability to get results of court cases through to the appropriate recording agency. Were you referring to Magistrates' Courts or the Crown Court or both?

Sir Ian Blair: Both. Crown Courts are better, but there are much fewer of them.

Mr Taylor: Sir Ian, given your position of authority and rank, has it ever occurred to you to register this with the Lord Chancellor?

Q101 David Winnick (in the Chair): The same thought was occurring in my mind.

Sir Ian Blair: I think it has been many times registered. This would not be in any way new information to the Department of Constitutional Affairs. It will take I think a huge amount of pushing for Magistrates' Court in particular to see themselves as responsible for this directly to the national criminal record office.

Mr Taylor: Mr Chairman, might we, when we are in private session, reflect on whether we could register our dissatisfaction.

David Winnick (in the Chair): I am sure, Mr Taylor, we can discuss that when we are in private session next time. Mrs Dean.

Q102 Mrs Dean: Thank you, Chairman. How urgent is the need for a code of practice on police data management? How effectively are the recommendations of the Bichard Report being implemented?

Sir Ian Blair: It is extremely urgent, but I would say there are two bits to this. One is easier, although much more expensive than the other one. The two bits are: getting a nationally coherent intelligence system is a matter of knocking heads together and it can be done, and I know that ACPO with my colleagues will do a lot around that and I know the Home Office is putting a great deal of money in that direction. I think what lies beyond it, though, which is also a Bichard recommendation is this issue about a code of practice for data management. I think that is a huge challenge. What is the scope of that policy from everything, from text through to images, paper and e mail, et cetera? What is the scale of the problem? If you just take the Met, we have a million new crime records a year ‑‑ I would like to get a figure for each year but that is about the number we have. We have a million incidents. We have 6 million intelligence records. The scale of the weeding process and the evaluation process is enormous. The security of data on one side versus the transparency of it, as we have seen in Soham. We have, as we move forward, the issues around exchange with other agencies in that process and I think there is a cultural lack of interest in this by operational cops. I have a very fair understanding about it. Most of the IT systems are very obsolete and they find them very irritating to use. It is not seen as interesting or as important as going back out on to the street to protect the public. It is a big, big one.

Q103 Mrs Dean: Could I ask you further: what are the implications of the Freedom of Information Act on the police?

Sir Ian Blair: Again, this is another enormous set of possibilities. It is going to be a challenge. It is likely to be quite resource intensive, particularly at the start. We have done inquiries with colleagues elsewhere in the English speaking world where the FOIA has been brought in or an equivalent and the first six months were pretty impactive on organisations. We have an exemption for confidential intelligence, matters that are prejudicial to criminal investigation, crime prevention, and so on. There is an overriding public interest here. I think we will have to work very hard. My impression is it will be "big bang" in the first few months and then it will start to reduce, but again, experience elsewhere is that it is less about individuals, though there are some of those, and much more about special interest groups or particularly the media who come and want that information and require it within 20 days. We are doing a lot of preparation in terms of training and a lot of warning to people: this is on the horizon.

Q104 Mrs Dean: Do you have anything to add to that, Baroness Henig?

Baroness Henig of Lancaster: No. As far as the Association of Police Authorities are concerned, because we are a voluntary member organisation, we are not a public body under the Freedom of Information Act, but our intention has always been and will be to abide by the spirit of the legislation even though the APA is not bound by the letter of the law. As far as police authorities are concerned, they are subject to freedom of information. All of them have produced publication schemes required last June based on a model scheme which was developed by the APA and was approved by the information commissioner. We are working with authorities to help them prepare for January when the access rights come into play.  It is less an issue for police authorities because they already are subject to local Government access to information requirements. Of course, by their very nature police authorities conduct much of their business in public.

Q105 Mrs Dean: Thank you for that. Lastly, can I ask how much progress has been made with modernising police training and are sufficient resources being devoted to it: that is Baroness Henig?

Baroness Henig of Lancaster: This is a very, very big area here. It is a bit difficult to know where to come in on it. Certainly, police authorities have a key role to play in ensuring forces annual training plans are linked to policing plans, development plans for individual officers and staff. One of the areas, again, where we have been very involved has been in developing or helping to develop performance development and review systems. A lot of resources, I think it is about 5% of police resources are directed at police training. From where we are coming from, evaluation is the important thing here. We are working with the Home Office and with ACPO to devise and implement the training evaluation strategy for the service, which I think will help to show the great deal of the training that is being undertaken does provide excellent value for public money, but that will also help us to identify where the training is not being successful and what then we need to do about it.

Q106 Mrs Dean: Thank you very much. Do you have anything to add, Sir Ian?

Sir Ian Blair: Yes. I think my answer would be probably we are not spending enough money for training. I am also concerned sometimes that we are over training some members of staff and under training others. Some of the training is essential but deeply repetitive. If we look at officer safety training, we are constantly training officers, and quite rightly so, but it is a very significant abstraction.  For example, I chair a thing called the Training Management Board in the Met and everybody wants more training and I and my colleagues are trying to hold the amount of training. Yet I think we are probably going to have to expand it. What is coming up with the next round of reform, the implementation of neighbourhood policing across London is going to require different skills. We are going to have to train people in how to handle public meetings in a different way than they have ever done before. How do you operate a problem solving process at quite junior levels? It is fine for the superintendent, but these could be sergeants and inspectors doing that kind of training and that kind of intervention with the public. I think we are probably going to have to expand the training remit.

Mrs Dean: Thank you. Thanks, Chairman.

Q107 David Winnick (in the Chair): What about being user friendly, to use the latest statement from the Home Secretary? Sir Ian, do you think that police training should involve more in the way in which police officers can respond so they may appear to be more friendly in their attitudes?

Sir Ian Blair: There are a number of things bound up in this. There are the individual officers interaction with a member of the public on the street, which is broadly, from what we see, pretty good. Where our problem lies, I have talked to the Met, but many other forces I have been in is two‑fold. One is the just amazing rise in the number of public telephone calls into the control centres so that they are almost overwhelmed. Secondly, there is the lack of follow‑up. There is one thing I pick particularly out of the Home Secretary's speech today as reported. It is this business of following up. You see a high level of satisfaction, 82% at the moment in London with the initial call and initial action. Then you see the satisfaction tailing off as the inquiry gets longer term. That is to do with us not coming back to people and telling them what has gone on. We also get tarred with the brush of other agencies: we are the visible face, so therefore a failure by other parts of the criminal justice process as the fault of the police and, therefore, that blurs the satisfaction. In terms of human interaction, most cops are pretty good at it.

Q108 David Winnick (in the Chair): The Home Secretary seems to feel that perhaps police officers could learn from the High Street stores and responding to public. Do you think that is a fair point?

Sir Ian Blair: I think there are obvious centres of excellence in lots of places. We are about to build or we have built and are now about to start the largest control centres for policing Western Europe. I can only hope that they do better than most of the call centres with which I come into contact on a private basis having spent 20 minutes wanting to talk to my insurers recently. I hope we will not get to: if you are being attacked by an axe, press button one, et cetera. That is some of the things we have to deal with.

David Winnick (in the Chair): Thank you very much. Mr Prosser.

Q109 Mr Prosser: Just to link the two issues you have raised about training your officers with regards to public meetings and some of the difficulties of call centres. In a public meeting in my constituency recently there were complaints about not getting people to answer the calls. Quite a senior police officer replied to quite an angry crowd: "Have you tried contacting or 'phoning your bank manager recently". That story hit the front of the Daily Mail. I think you have hit the truth there. I want to ask you about the national policing plans and the relationship between local and national targets. First of all, perhaps to Baroness Henig: what is the practical and real usefulness of the plan?

Baroness Henig of Lancaster: The national policing plan. We welcomed it because we always have seen this as a vehicle for bringing together all the Government's expectations of the police service in one place. Prior to the plan, you had a whole range of different Government strategies and they did not always cohere. Looking at the whole picture and putting everything together in one plan is very useful. We particularly support the idea of it as a strategic framework which then maps out what is a priority at national Government level, or a series of priorities, and then gives us flexibility within that structure to operate local three year and one year plans that fit within that national policing strategy. Provided it is looked at as a strategic document which focuses on a given number of priorities we think it is very useful.

Q110 Mr Prosser: What would you say are its main strengths and weaknesses?

Baroness Henig of Lancaster: I think there has been a development process here. I am conscious of the fact that a former police minister who perhaps was involved in the first plan has now joined us, very nice to see you. The first plan tried to be all things to all men in some ways. It did cover a very large area. The result was the police authorities, in effect, were simply presented with a check list and in a way they wanted to show that they had tackled each and every initiative that was mentioned in their local three year strategies. The second plan moved forward. It was not so all‑encompassing, but nonetheless there is still a lot of concentration on the how and not just on the what in terms of outcomes. Therefore, we would like to see more prioritisation. We would like the document to be more of a strategic document and give us a bit more room to get on at local level with what local people say are their priorities. There is a developmental process I think.

Q111 Mr Prosser: You would like to see those changes perhaps in the next plan?

Baroness Henig of Lancaster: We will wait with interest to have discussions about the third policing plan and those discussions are going to take place imminently.

Q112 Mr Prosser: Sir Ian, do you broadly agree?

Sir Ian Blair:. I think I do broadly agree, although one thing is worth reflecting on is how extraordinary it is that there was never such a plan before. That is an opening statement. I agree entirely and have made clear in a number of interventions that the initial one was too crowded; that is accepted by the Home Office. I think you can see that in the way that the public sector agreements for the future are being designed with a much broader crime reduction target around all crime which I think is then going to allow for local manoeuvrability. The key is to give some room to the local community, and by local I mean really local community, to get some kind of buy in to what the police are doing. The bigger the number of national targets the less room for manoeuvre there is for the local borough commander to actually say, "Yes, I can take that on as well". I think that is really important.

Q113 Mr Prosser: Baroness Henig, you have argued that there should be far more detailed costings in the plan?

Baroness Henig of Lancaster: Yes.

Q114 Mr Prosser: How practical and feasible would it be to do that? What are the dangers of omitting costings from the plan?

Baroness Henig of Lancaster: Our point is that the service has given a long list of areas of work to cover but no recognition that all this work comes at a cost. The Government talks in terms of increasing funding, but the funding announcements fail to take account of the extra demands. We think it would be helpful that those demands were itemised. To give you a couple of examples: implementing the recommendations of the Laming report into the death of Victoria Climbie and the new development in forensic science, such as DNA and NAFIS. These are all crucial areas of work and we support them. We agree absolutely they should be being done. They are highly resource intensive. If that national policing plan is a framework for everything that needs to be done in the police service we have to have some openness about what the costs are because it is not realistic, in a sense, to assume everything is going to be carried out and yet not give the police service the resources to do that. That is our point about costs. It is not realistic to have detailed costings calculated for every element of police work and included in the plan, but we would like some broad headings with costings underneath them and rough costings for new or additional responsibilities. We do think that would be a much fairer way or trying to evaluate the kinds of funding pressures you are putting on to the police service.

Q115 Mr Prosser: Thank you. Perhaps I could bring Lord Harris in here. Lord Harris, what do you think should be the right target, the right balance between national targets and local targets? Do you think we have the balance right?

Lord Harris of Haringey: I think there is a tremendous tendency, and this was certainly present in the first policing plan, to say: if it is not included in the national plan, or if there is not a mention of something in there, that that therefore does not matter. The point of the APA saying, "We want it to be more strategic" is so that there is not the expectation that if something is not there it is not done at all, because there would be a lot of things which were obviously not included. Our argument is the case for a small number of national targets, but that those should be kept to the absolute minimum. In practice, at the moment there are the national targets on burglary, vehicle crime and robbery, then there is the Home Office PSA target of improving police performance across a range of interim indicators. Then there are the targets on increasing the number of offenders brought to justice, defenders target, front line policing targets; all these coming from different sources. That begins to constrain the situation. What you need to have is a mechanism whereby, at local level, targets can be set, perhaps by a strategic police authority, but also that targets can be set by local communities working with their borough commanders. If everything is laid down as a set of national targets there is not that flexibility force‑wide and indeed at local operational command unit level.

Q116 Mr Prosser: You are arguing for local police authorities to have more input into target setting than they have at present?

Lord Harris of Haringey: At the moment, police authorities have had a clear role in setting targets as part of local policing methods; we had that since 1995, but the scope for flexibility is often limited by the fact there are so many national targets. If there is to be any reality to local accountability, if there is to be a sense in which local communities can influence what is happening locally there has to be that flexibility. There has to be scope at local level for what is seen as relevant locally to be achieved force‑wide for police authorities to set a strategic overview. Of course, national Government has its place in terms of setting the national priorities.

Q117 Mr Prosser: Thank you. Sir Ian, the new Home Office PSA target one is to reduce crime by 15% and further in high crime areas by 2007 to 2008. Do you think 15% is an appropriate level?

Sir Ian Blair: I think it is because of the way that crime rates are currently going down, but one of the things for which the service has argued at the moment is that that is okay as a figure but it does not take any differentiation between the kind of crime types the different police services will deal with. One of the options that might be explored in the future is a weighted basket of crime types. Otherwise, if we take a rural force and an inner city force, the inner city force is likely to be dealing with a far greater amount proportionately of violent crime than was going to be seen in a rural force. The bulk of crimes of anti‑social behaviour perhaps or shop lifting or whatever are, on this measure, weighted the same as a murder. I am not sure that is right. In fact, I am sure it is not right. We need to move to that weighted basket which I do not think would be too difficult. I think it can be within that 15%, but it can also in terms of HMIC's baseline view of the force I think it would be easy then to take that piece on. I also think we need to have, in addition to that, really some more straight forward targets around public satisfaction with policing and visibility. If we put those two together with the crime reduction and detection targets I think we would probably be about where the public wanted us to be.

Q118 Mr Prosser: Visibility, if I can just interrupt, is what we were mentioning earlier on, Sir Ian. You are taking that on board I take it.

Sir Ian Blair: Indeed, and have done for some time and have been arguing for it for some time. The important point is to ensure that the measure includes the whole of the uniformed extended police family in terms of visibility and not just a concentration on police officers alone. If we are to have 25,000 PCSOs by the end of 2007/8 they are going to be a significant part of that visibility.

Q119 Mr Prosser: In essence, what the public wants, and I come back to that point, and I think you accept it, Sir Ian, on behalf of the Met, the knowledge that the police are around and actually seeing them, not just reading a press release which they may or may not see.

Sir Ian Blair: Chairman, I am completely with that point of view, but I think we have to say what kind of measure we are going to use. The Met has a measure called "the operational policing measure" which makes clear what proportion of officer and PCSO time is outside the police station. That seems to me to be a measure that we need to be developing everywhere.

Q120 David Winnick (in the Chair): If you are in the police station or outside, if inside the police station the visibility of course is so much reduced.

Sir Ian Blair: But contact with the public is the key point, and to some extent contact with the public can be inside the charge room because they are also part of the public.

David Winnick (in the Chair): Mr Prosser.

Q121 Mr Prosser: Still on the PSA targets, the standard attached to the new PSA target is to maintain improvements in police performance as monitored by the police performance assessment framework. What does that mean? Do you think it is clear enough or is it a bit vague?

Sir Ian Blair: It is probably clear enough to those of us who are inside this rather arcane world of i‑Quanta and PPAF, and so on. It is a developing framework and we have to improve across a number of different processes, one of them is citizen focus, which is going to be measured by public satisfaction. Another one is crime reduction, another one is crime detection. To some extent, yes, I think this is the right way. We have to get away from the variations in performance that we see; I see that in London as well as between London and elsewhere. If I could bring the least well‑performing boroughs up to the level of the middle‑performing boroughs I would be very happy. That is about individual categories. There is no borough that is performing badly across every category otherwise we would have done something about it. You will see one borough that is very good about domestic violence, one borough that is very good about robbery and what we want to do is keep pulling them up and that will be the same across the country as a whole.

Baroness Henig of Lancaster: Can I come in on this one? Talking about PPAF, one of the most significant developments in the last two years has been the development of performance radars. I very much remember the earlier discussions we had over this whole area of: how do you project visibly in a way that people can actually see on the page police performance and the effectiveness of that performance. I have to say that I think the development of those performance radars has been one of the significant moves forward, particularly for police authorities who now look at these radars, they pour over them, they quiz their force about them and they have really proved their worth. John Denham will know that some of us will perhaps have a bit of scepticism about this to begin with. One has to hold up one's hand when one has queried things, but they have really proved their worth. I would want to put in a plea that they have been a very valuable tool for assessing performance and levelling up performance; I must say that.

David Winnick (in the Chair): Thank you. Mr Denham.

Q122 Mr Denham: I am pleased that the radars have turned out to be useful, but can I ask a question that follows on from Mr Prosser's about the PSA target. On the face of it, it looks like a greatly simplified target. Do you yet know how it is going to work in practice and is there a danger that individual police forces, when this comes to be applied to individual police forces will get a very complicated range of local targets which they have to hit in order to help the overall improvement in the standards. Is that likely to happen and is that a good idea or has that just moved the demanding targets from the Government's headlines to the operational level of police force level?

Baroness Henig of Lancaster: If I can leap in ahead on this one. At the moment that 15% is a strategic level target which has been agreed between the Home Office and the Treasury as I understand it. I hope it will not be breaching state secrets that when we had our last bilateral with the Home Secretary what the APA was arguing for was that clearly that target will be a very challenging one and we would want to see negotiations with individual forces as to how they would feel able to contribute towards that target in very much the same way as local criminal justice boards were asked to assess how they could perform against national targets on the criminal justice side. Therefore, I think this overall target needs to be followed up by discussions with individual forces because as well as having a strategic top down target it is absolutely crucial to get bottom up ownership here and to get forces signed up and committed to helping to deliver that. I think we are just at the beginning of that second process, which I would see as very important.

Q123 Mr Denham: Sir Ian?

Sir Ian Blair: I agree. There has to be a lot of negotiation here. One of the pieces that is quite interesting is that it is measured by the British Crime Survey rather than by recorded data, if I have this right. Understanding where you have got to in this field would be lagging anyway. To me, it is what I was saying earlier on, I think the next development is weighting the basket because I am concerned about a perverse incentive to deal with, or whatever it is, relatively minor offences; not saying that they are not important, but I would hate to see those pulling down the effort against more significant crimes.

Mr Denham: Thank you, Chair. I apologise for being incredibly late.

David Winnick (in the Chair): Some questions, really important questions, on police accountability and related matters: Mr Russell.

Q124 Bob Russell: The Government has set out a range of options which it says will increase police accountability at local district level. Which of these options, if any, are desirable?

Baroness Henig of Lancaster: If I can perhaps start by agreeing with the general thrust of the proposals but particularly the fact that the proposals are actually centred at three tiers, which is to say they focus on force level accountability, neighbourhood accountability at district level. I think that is a very helpful distinction. We would share the Home Office's view that it would be helpful to look at those three levels of accountability. We have no doubt whatsoever that there is need for a strategic body at police authority level to whom the chief constable is accountable; he is accountable or he or she is accountable to local communities through the police authority. We are in no doubt that has to be a strategic level police authority. I think there is also general agreement that at the neighbourhood level we need to build on what is already there at neighbourhood level: neighbourhood councils, the extension of neighbourhood groups, that there should be accountability between local groups and what they are asking for and what the local commanders are doing. I think the reassurance pilots are pointing the way forward there. Very, very small local pilot areas which are bringing together neighbourhoods and policing. For me the most interesting question is: what happens in the middle because in the middle of the three‑tier model ‑‑‑‑

Q125 Bob Russell: Would these be the basic command unit levels?

Baroness Henig of Lancaster: You either have a BCU level of accountability or a crime and disorder reduction partnership accountability. The difficulty is that in two tier areas, for example Lancashire, for example Devon and Cornwall you have a problem. You have BCU units that cover more than one district. They might cover two or three districts. So, where a BCU has two or three districts within its remit, it might be easier to work at BCU level. Where, however, you have got unitary authorities, it would be easier to work at community safety partnership level, and that, I think, is something still to be decided, because you want to work on what is there already, and there is a lot there already and I am not sure entirely that it is clear‑cut what the most effective local accountability mechanisms are within particularly two‑tier areas.

Q126 Bob Russell: You have given us a catalogue of practical problems which clearly need to be addressed, but there is a common problem or a common question I would put to whatever level?

Baroness Henig of Lancaster: Sure.

Q127 Bob Russell: Are we looking at a tier, a tier of two or three levels, of quangos?

Baroness Henig of Lancaster: This is a question you have actually put to me on a number of occasions in the past.

Q128 David Winnick (in the Chair): He is very persistent.

Baroness Henig of Lancaster: One can have different views on how police authorities are made up, but I take the fact that over half of police authority members are, in fact, councillors, elected councillors, to be significant, because that, whatever it is, 55%, or over half of police authorities, do stand for election on a regular basis, they are accountable to their electorate and the public is certainly aware which of their councillors sit on police authorities. So I do not take the view that police authorities are quangos ‑ I never have done ‑ I actually believe that they are locally accountable bodies.

Q129 Bob Russell: Is there not a case for directly elected members of police authorities at any level? I can understand why you may feel at local level, but at the moment the Essex Police quango, while it has elected members, is not directly answerable to the people upon whom it services a Council Tax levy?

Baroness Henig of Lancaster: I hear what you are saying on this one. I think it is important to guard against, for example, the risk of turning policing into a political football and politicising authorities; and one of the problems with elections which would be just about policing would be that I think you would have candidates making very extravagant promises about policing and there would be difficulties. I am not saying there would necessarily absolutely certainly be. I think there would be the risk of extremist groups getting elected. I think there are a number of fears that I would have about the sort of model that you are proposing which one has to take into account in deciding on what the most effective way forward is.

Q130 Bob Russell: So are you saying that the new arrangements could lead to unsustainable raised expectations at whatever level?

Baroness Henig of Lancaster: It could. I think what I am trying to say is that from where I am sitting, and I used to be on an old‑style police committee with 36 members and I remember all the debates about the changes that took place and the reasons why those changes took place, and I actually believe that the police authorities which are now coming up to nine years old have actually been a success story. One of the reasons that they have been a success story is that they bring together different expertise: they bring together local council expertise, they bring together magistrates with their knowledge of the criminal justice system and they also co‑opt local people who are independent of the political process but who have a lot of expertise to bring to the table, and that mixture has worked very effectively, and, in particular, what it has meant is that police authorities are very focused on policing issues; they operate politically but they do not operate party‑politically and it has made a big difference in the way in which policing is approached. I actually think they have been very effective and I would not want anything to be changed, simply for the sake of it, which would undermine the great strides forward that I believe have been made.

Q131 Bob Russell: You refer to "the good old days", you refer to the success and you concluded your comments by suggesting there should not be any changes, or at least not substantial changes. That being the case, is that the advice you would be giving to the Home Secretary, to leave alone and build on the success?

Baroness Henig of Lancaster: The message we have put forward is a lot of changes have taken place, a lot of what has changed in the last ten years has worked very effectively and we believe that you should build on what is there certainly, not undermine the good things. Where there is a proven need to more forward and to make changes, by all means, yes, we are very open‑minded, but we are not convinced at the moment that in the accountability field at strategic level changing the composition of police authorities would actually improve police authority performance; and I would particularly, I think, draw attention to the fact that police authorities at the moment have very substantial elements of ethnic minority members. Some 10% of our members are ethnic minority, which is very, very high, I think much higher than you would find if they were directly elected. They also have 30% women members. I think these are a very important strength in terms of diversity and I would not want to lose those advances.

David Winnick (in the Chair): Not represented in the police force itself, but we will come on to that later!

Q132 Bob Russell: You do not feel there is a need for the current membership in general to be able to increase their links with the community because, broadly speaking, police authorities have got the balance. Have I got right what you have just been saying in term of ethnic‑‑

Baroness Henig of Lancaster: I would not want to be complacent. For example, I think we need more younger members. If there is an imbalance, we tend to have a large proportion of our membership perhaps over the age of 35 and we are a bit lacking in the membership in the twenties and early thirties. So I would not want to be complacent in any way whatsoever, but I do think there is a solid record of achievement amongst police authorities and I would not want that to be jeopardised.

Lord Harris of Haringey: Where there is certainly support amongst police authorities for development of the role is what happens at BCU or CDRP level and, indeed, at neighbourhood level, and that may involve a different role for individual police authority members, it may involve the use of locally elected councillors for that area, it certainly involves the communities in that area and it comes back to a point I think we touched on earlier about training: because I have been in local neighbourhood meetings in the Met's area and it is often quite junior officers who are relating to a community meeting and it is important that they have the training and support to enable them to both give the right messages and to understand the messages that are coming back; but that is something where I think we would all recognise there are huge advantages in improving the relationship between the communities and the police authorities and the police services.

Q133 Bob Russell: Lord Harris, are you suggesting then that the police authority should evolve, should expand, should alter its responsibility to bringing in community safety, have a wider remit than just police, as we have got at the moment?

Lord Harris of Haringey: I think you would have to recognise that at local level and at borough level in London and district level elsewhere the critical decisions are about community safety. It is a wider remit, but there is local government involvement in that level and it would be silly if, if you like, the different agencies were operating on different sets of targets. It is about working together.

Q134 Bob Russell: "Joined up Government", I believe it is called?

Lord Harris of Haringey: I believe that is the phrase that is used, and I think we are all for it, are we not?

Q135 Bob Russell: I am tempted to put this question to Sir Ian Blair, but I will put it to Baroness Henig. What is your view of the Mayor of London's proposals that the Metropolitan Police Authority should be replaced by a London police board, chaired by the Mayor ‑ Livingstone, I presume ‑ that the Mayor should appoint the Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner and the City of London Police, Royal Parks Police, should be subsumed in the Metropolitan Police?

Baroness Henig of Lancaster: I am going to pass to my colleague Lord Harris, I think.

Lord Harris of Haringey: The Mayor of London has taken that position. I suspect any elected mayor would say that they wanted to have control. Indeed, I think it was in the manifesto of the other candidates for mayor in the recent elections. The point is that there is an advantage in the tripartite structure. The police authority structure in London is one which is designed to try and ensure that the oversight of London's policing is done in a way which brings together all the different aspects. I rather doubt whether the mayor or his office would have been able to bring about some of the changes and improvements in policing that the police authority in the last four years has managed to bring about, but certainly there would be ‑ the Met is already taking over the responsibility for policing in the Royal parks and there is a great deal of co‑working with the City of London Police and with the British Transport Police. It is a question of what priority you give to organisational changes when there are so many other big issues in terms of London's policing.

Q136 Bob Russell: As we are against the clock, Chairman, I will conclude with my final question. This is to whoever wishes to come in. What are your views on the future of the 43 force structure? Does this cause particular‑‑

David Winnick (in the Chair): Did you want to come in?

Q137 Mr Denham: Yes. Reading the press, though not the press releases, the Home Secretary seems to be encouraging the idea that local communities should be able to trigger certain types of police action if they are dissatisfied. Some of us as constituency MPs probably tend to find that what our constituents mainly want is for people to turn up immediately in a police car, and we are rarely faced with demands: "Could we have some more problem solving policing, please?" Is there a danger of having too much local democracy that the police will come under heightened pressure to have everyone haring around in police cars responding to 999 calls and divert attention from the sort of more problem‑orientated problems, problem‑solving approach that perhaps we as MPs have been educated to want by the police over the last 10 years?

Sir Ian Blair: I would think that the answer is a long‑term process here. I am particularly, and have been for the last five or six years, struck by the Chicago police system in which they have invested massively in just what we have been talking about earlier on, around neighbourhood panels and working with local communities so that each month that local community has a meeting with the police and the other agencies of the city and takes choices about what they want the local police to do in the next month within the constraints of some of the wider city events; and - an astonishing figure - one in six adult members of Chicago's population attended one of those meetings last year, and that is very significant, but that is a long, long‑term process. So my sense is that, if we are going to go that way, we have to expect that it will take a while. I think it is a marvellous system. It has not diminished from their top‑level crime fighting. It has said, "We are going to take things very slowly with the public." The police officers are enabled to say, "These are the expectations you can have of me", not, "You can have anything you like", because that is not possible.

Lord Harris of Haringey: There is some initial evidence that says neighbourhood teams have begun to have that local effect, because people are talking about very localised problems and getting behind it as to how those problems can be dealt, with rather than just saying, "Whiz a police car down and stop those young people doing what it is." It is about how you make sure the young people do not congregate there in the first place, what are the things that can be done to give them something else to do. Those are the sort of dialogues that need to take place in neighbourhood meetings where there are those Safer Neighbourhood Teams in place.

Q138 Bob Russell: Briefly, what are your views on the future of the 43 force structure, coupled with the comment, "Please do not mess with those in East Anglia"?

Sir Ian Blair: I think the Met's view is very limited. The Met is both a national organisation in some of its responsibility and is effectively a regional police force, and we would be putting forward as a view that the advantages of that regional process whereby we can deliver serious amounts of assets to deal with serious crime is very helpful. I think that the Government will wait for the review by HMIC of force structure, but I think inevitably some of this must evolve into change because the ability to deliver Level 2 criminality, or countering Level 2 criminality concerning organised gangs, and so on, is going to have to be stepped up and it is very difficult for small forces to do that in relation to relatively rare events. If I can give you an example of that, if there is a shooting in a night‑club where we get a warning that somebody is going to be wiped‑out in such and such a night club, we have the ability to put armed surveillance behind people, we have the ability to undertake a whole series of operations. If that night‑club is outside London, and it easily can be, it becomes a much more difficult activity with which people are much less familiar. So there is some advantage, but I do not think anybody is going to rush into it.

Q139 David Winnick (in the Chair): It is suggested that individual forces could play a lead role in particular specialities in the same way that the Metropolitan Police currently does with counter‑terrorism. Do you think there is much scope for the development of such elite forces?

Sir Ian Blair: I would say that that is the only other option than some form of amalgamation, or whatever, because we have to go down that route. It is a slow process. It has taken a lot of work over the last decade to establish the position that a national coordinator of counter‑terrorism has been one of the Met's Deputy Assistant Commissioners, and I know that DAC Peter Clarke has spent a great deal of his time outside London in recent months, and that is just one aspect, and the Met is separately funded for that process. So I think there will be some issues around elite forces, but I think that is the way to follow before you start jumping into amalgamations as just a straightforward answer, because we all know that changes structures. Everybody loves to change structures, and we can do all that and we have not improved the service, but there is a key problem around coordinating police action against rare but significant events.

Q140 David Winnick (in the Chair): Of course, all this and the answer you gave previously a moment ago to Mr Russell about the amalgamation of other forces raises the question which, of course, the Home Secretary has been asked a number of questions, as his predecessors, about a national police force. Does the Met have any views on that? I think that is too much of a leading question, but I will turn to Lady Henig?

Sir Ian Blair: The answer really is that the Met does not have a view and should not really have a view in that sense.

Q141 David Winnick (in the Chair): No, that is why I am turning to Lady Henig.

Baroness Henig of Lancaster: I think our view is that one of the distinctive characteristics of policing in this country is that it is locally accountable. It is locally accountable to local communities through the Chief Constable exercised through the Police Authority to local people, and that local accountability, I think, we see as one of the bedrocks of the British policing system and we would not want that to be changed significantly.

Q142 David Winnick (in the Chair): Despite all the dangers, the constant danger of terrorism, the sort of serious crimes which exist up and down the country, your view remains that?

Baroness Henig of Lancaster: I think those issues have to be dealt with in a number of ways. Obviously SOCA is being established and obviously forces need to collaborate together to try and deal with inter‑force issues, but at the same time policing has to be responsive and it has to be local, because people have to identify with their local policing service and they are a very valuable part of helping to bring about effective policing. For me, therefore, the trick is to have police forces which are both able to be strategic and to deal with level two crime and criminality and at the same time to be able to be locally responsive and offer reassurance. I know it is not easy, but I think that is the ideal model for me: because the fact is that serious criminality and serious crime does not just operate at some national level, it operates in local communities and it is part of a local policing spectrum and therefore a national policing force would not actually help matters in that sense. I think local forces are much more effective, if they are doing their job, in actually uncovering the trail of some very, very serious crime.

Q143 Mr Taylor: I shall turn the topic to bureaucracy and the O'Dowd Report, if I may. Perhaps I could make my first question. What progress has been made in implementing the O'Dowd Report on Bureaucracy, how much difference has this made to the ordinary police officer and which major recommendations remain unimplemented and why so?

Sir Ian Blair: I think the O'Dowd Report was a valuable contribution and many of its 51 recommendations have been implemented. Among those, for instance, are an enhanced use of automatic number plate recognition systems, which have led to thousands of summonses and arrests in London, and elsewhere, the upgrading of the live-scan technology around fingerprinting, and so on, and, above all, I think one of the things I would be putting forward, which was part of O'Dowd and also part of the street crime initiative, is the development of video identification. It is an interesting fact that since January the Met has only carried out one live identification parade and the savings in time and costs have been dramatic. But the key to this, I am afraid, is recognising O'Dowd, and recognised by everybody, which is the key, is about IT systems. One can do what one likes about getting rid of rarely used forms and that is okay, but while officers are still in a position where they have to put the same information into a series of discrete information systems, to take an example, a domestic violence call where the officer has to put in a crime report ‑ that is one system ‑ if the person is arrested he has to put the same details into the charge system, has to put a criminal intelligence report into a third system, if there are children in the home you have to put it into the Merlin system, which is about child protection, the Met realise it is going to take five years to bring these together. We are three years down that route. We are still two years off it. At the moment that you can just key the information in and it goes automatically across and populates these different screens, then the bureaucracy battle is won, and the same, I think, with the CPS. As soon as the CPS accept the electronic passage of information to them, then officers will be out on the street as fast as you can say "him".

Q144 Mr Taylor: I find you very, very persuasive on this subject. You and I visited a similar topic about an hour ago. If you can make a campaign out of this, Sir Ian, you will have a lot of political support?

Sir Ian Blair: That is kind. I think the only issue will have to be that this costs a great deal of money and there are few votes in IT systems and a lot more votes in some other things.

Q145 David Winnick (in the Chair): You surprise me!

Sir Ian Blair: The Met spends 10% of its budget on IT at the moment, which is a huge amount of money, and it is still a slow process building our way through this.

Q146 Mr Taylor: Sir Ian, at the time of the O'Dowd Report there was quite an extravagant claim made for how many uniformed officers could be returned from desk work to patrol duties. In fact, it suggested 20,000 uniform officers could be returned from desk work to patrol duties. Has that target been achieved, or anywhere near achieved, and was it realistic?

Sir Ian Blair: I am not sure what the origin of that figure was. It obviously was a pretty ball park figure. I have not seen anything like that, though we are seeing, as I mentioned earlier, the operational policing measure is showing a steady increase in the number of officers. Part of that is because we have got more officers, but part of it is also some other changes, again within the O'Dowd Report, particularly around prisoner handling, where most police stations now, certainly in London, have got prisoner handling teams so that the officer who has made the arrest of a relatively straightforward case hands that prisoner on to a team to just deal with him and then he or she can return to the street. I think I should make one key statement about O'Dowd. He particularly picked up the issue of fixed penalty notices, the delivery of fixed penalty notices to people for a number of offences. They always used to be used for traffic, but now they are used for anti‑social behaviour and they will shortly be available for shoplifting, but they have not stopped officers making the arrest, because they need to make the arrest to gather the evidence, but then they take them into the charge room and at that point the fixed penalty notice becomes another option rather than going through lengthy interviews, and so on, and that, I think, will show quite dramatic changes. Where 20,000 came from, I do not know.

Q147 Mr Taylor: Could I perhaps address my next question to Baroness Henig, Mr Chairman. Can I ask you: what is the role of police authorities in monitoring efforts to reduce unnecessary bureaucracy? Have police authorities reported significant variations between forces in implementing the O'Dowd recommendations?

Baroness Henig of Lancaster: In response to that, it is a core part of our function to ensure efficient and effective policing to make sure bureaucracy is minimised, and we have made sure as an organisation that every authority has a lead member for bureaucracy reduction who leads in holding the force to account. What we do as an organisation nationally is bring our members together for network meetings twice a year to share good practice and to have a sort of assessment amongst ourselves of how things are going and what the general concerns are, and inevitably forces are taking a different line on how they are implementing this; so it is not always easy to make comparisons. Some forces are further advanced in some areas, some in others, but we very much supported the introduction of the National Bureaucracy Advisor at chief officer level, who has visited all forces at least once and has made recommendations to force management teams; and then what we ask our individual members to do at police authority level is to sit in with the force in their discussions in this area and actually hold the force to account for making advances. So far we are very satisfied and there is a lot of effort going into this area.

Q148 Mr Taylor: You may know, we had the President of ACPO to give evidence to us last week, and he suggested that all central initiatives affecting the police should be subject to what he called a "bureaucracy impact assessment". Would you support that?

Baroness Henig of Lancaster: I think anything which will help to identify burdens before they are imposed, anything that will stop extra burdens from being created should be supported, and I think the policing bureaucracy gateway has been in place since 1st September and we do need to ensure that it does its job and that that itself does not become bureaucratic and create more burdens, but anything that will help to identify burdens before they are imposed, I think, has to be supported.

Q149 Mr Taylor: Mr Chairman, with one eye on the clock, I am content to rest my questions there.

Sir Ian Blair: Could I add one tiny point? I do think that what is important about this current drive on bureaucracy is that officers have understood that both senior managers and government are interested, whereas before I think they did not understand that.

Q150 Mr Denham: Continuing with the bureaucracy theme, the pay and conditions agreement of about three years ago introduced special priority payments, competence related threshold payments and new measures for trying to deal with unnecessary use of overtime. What is the assessment now of those three measures, Sir Ian?

Sir Ian Blair: I think I have been taken by surprise. I was not very confident that these were going to be effective, and I will talk about pay, but actually they have been effective. The special priority payments and the competency payments have actually made first‑line policing, which I think was the intention, more attractive. For all of my service there has been the mantra that the officer on the beat is the cornerstone of policing and everyone else is ancillary, but everyone else was also trying to get away from being officer on the beat for their entire service after they have done two years. Now we are finding it difficult to attract people to be detectives. We are finding it difficult to attract people to go into intelligence units. We are not finding it impossible, but it is not ‑ the sort of the rush to get away from beat work is not there, and I think that is quite interesting, and it has actually achieved what I think was being set out to do. The overtime issue I think is much more difficult. There is clearly a work‑life balance issue that we have to address and there are some excessive overtime earners; but, in a way, overtime is the most effective way of delivering policing: it does not go sick, it does not take annual leave, it does not need training, it just eats. Certainly we are finding in the Met a considerable difficulty in reaching HMIC targets about overtime reduction in the face of some of the demands that we have: because if we look at some of the counter‑terrorist demands, it is much simpler to bring somebody in on their day off, or whatever, than to bring somebody up taking them away from the duties they should be doing on borough, and that is a more difficult target, I think, particularly for the Met.

Baroness Henig of Lancaster: Again, I think that these sets of payments did cause a major culture shock for many in the service when they were introduced, and undoubtedly perhaps some officers are still not happy, depending on how the rules on SPPs are being implemented in different forces. Nonetheless, I think there has been considerable success, particularly in the ability to reward officers who are doing difficult jobs (the 24/7 response officers), and where senior management have made it very clear what the basis is for how these payments are being allocated and there have been proper discussions, I think both the forces and authorities have benefited from these introductions. On the overtime, again, this was actually put on authorities to actually negotiate with HMI and with forces to bring down these targets, and again I think it has led to some very challenging and hopefully constructive discussions between authorities and forces, I think it has led to some very important questions being raised by authorities and certainly I think, for the most part, authorities and forces are on track with implementing the targets and I think it has been a very useful way of redressing some of the sort of imbalances that there were in the way overtime was being used. So, yes, I think this whole area has been very effective.

Q151 Mr Denham: Lord Harris, are you confident that no‑one can make a film like "The Secret Policeman" about the Met?

Lord Harris of Haringey: I think you would be very unwise to make any such projection. I think it is interesting that it was not made about the Met. It is certainly the case that following the film the MPA and the Met Senior Management were extremely keen to run some exercises at Hendon Police College to see exactly what was going on there, and I think the introduction of the whistle‑blower processes, and so on, has addressed some of the problems and some of the concerns. I have to say that addressing issues of attitude are not the short‑term ones, it is one where the Met, I believe, has made enormous progress in the last decade, but that is not to say that there is not further progress to be made and it is not to say that there are some individuals who know what they are expected to say, but that is not necessarily what they feel.

David Winnick (in the Chair): If I can interrupt. It just shows you that a politician's word should be taken as true. I said there would be a vote at 4 o'clock. We will be back at 4.15. If there is a second vote we will have to go, but I will ask colleagues to be back no later than 4.15.

(The Committee suspended from 4.00 p.m. until 4.15 p.m for a Division in the House)

Q152 Mr Denham: Lord Harris, you have been answering my question about "The Secret Policeman". Sir Ian, can I go on to you. Part of that film seemed to show anti‑racist training rather sort of bouncing off people. You have done a lot of anti‑discrimination training on racism and other issues. Have you felt you needed to go back and look at the content of your training?

Sir Ian Blair: To some extent we have completed, and had completed before the film was shown, the major issue that came out of "Lawrence", training all of our staff for two days in community and race relations. I have actually taken part in that training at different places and done the days. I think it is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do, because most people are relatively resistant to that form of training, and yet the evaluation shows how much they actually feel that it was worthwhile, but actually in the room they do not like it because it is kind of telling them things that they think they already know and then they go away and think about it. My sense is, and I agree with what Lord Harris said, that you could not dream of answering that nothing like that could ever happen in the MPS because the MPS is capable of most things. But two days after that broadcast I was in Haringey and I had a meeting with the staff, and one of them was the sergeant from central casting. He was sitting there, a huge man with clearly the best part of 30 years service. He simply put his hand up and said, "I want to say something, governor", and I could feel myself thinking, "This is a disaster waiting to happen", and he said, "You could not survive for two minutes in this place with attitudes like that." That is years in the past. Just one anecdote, but it is certainly what I feel. We are not seeing complaints of racism. The kind of activities that we put into Hendon found nothing, no evidence whatsoever. There is a huge way to go, but I feel the Met has made some enormous strides.

David Winnick (in the Chair): This issue came up last week when the Police Federation bodies were giving evidence, and we will come back to it when we resume.

(The Committee suspended from 4.18 p.m. until 4.30 p.m. for a Division in the House)

Q153 Mr Denham: Sir Ian, you made it quite clear in your memorandum that you are not in the Met going to achieve your targets for minority recruitment. You then go on to say, or imply, that you might be able to if the law was changed so that, presumably, you could hold a quota of places to be used for positive action. Can I be quite clear. Is the Met actually arguing for changes in the law that would enable you to use positive action?

Sir Ian Blair: We are only arguing it in one particular area, and it is this. There is absolute determination on behalf of the MPS and the MPA, I know, that there can be no lowering of standards, because if there is any lowering of standards anybody who comes in from that minority group is automatically of a lower standard, however competent they may be, and we cannot go there and we are not going to go there. But we are in the position that this is a very popular profession. We have not advertised now for nearly two years. We have 2,000 people who have already passed through our selection process and who want to join us, and most of those people are male and white. One of the things that we want to do is to hold open vacancies so that qualified minority candidates and women candidates can enter at a faster pace because they have not had to wait so long. At the moment I think that is a difficult area. What we are doing is we are starting to go another way, which is to say we will start to select‑‑

Q154 Mr Denham: Have you had any indication from the Home Office that they would support that?

Sir Ian Blair: We have just had some discussions with the Home Office and with the CRE and the parallel is the Patten reforms in Northern Ireland and the ability to hold vacancies at 50% for Catholics and 50% for Protestants, because the plain fact is that the minority population of London is rising at a proportion all the time. We have recruited more minority candidates in the last four years than the previous three decades, but to get to a 25, 30, 40% population requires, I think, some specific action, and that is the kind of action we have. In the interim what we are going to do is to make clear to candidates who are both waiting and those who are to come that we will prioritise certain skills, and that will be languages for which we are looking and that will be knowledge of certain communities, that will be being a Londoner, that will be perhaps having a law enforcement or an Army intelligence background, so that we are in a way indicating who we want and making sure that those people are advanced, but it is a very difficult area. My impression from some of the research that we have done is that European law supports those kinds of proposals.

Q155 Mr Denham: Just one more question, if I could. Of the 2,000 qualified candidates that you currently, as it were, have in the pipeline, how many of those are from ethnic minorities?

Sir Ian Blair: Very few. That is the point. We still have some coming through all the time, but the main issue is we have a large block of qualified white men.

Q156 Mr Denham: Is your aim then, by demonstrating that the rules have been changed, if you could do it to attract more applicants in the first place, is there not then a danger that people will say you are attracting applicants on the wrong basis?

Sir Ian Blair: I think we are hoping to attract them on the right basis, but, of course, that allegation can be made, but it does seems to me that it is a strategic requirement for the Metropolitan Police to look like London, and at this rate it will take us decades not years to achieve that, and I do not think that is acceptable.

Q157 David Winnick (in the Chair): That is entirely unsatisfactory, is it not?

Sir Ian Blair: It is entirely unsatisfactory.

Q158 David Winnick (in the Chair): The percentage of ethnic minorities in the Met Police, I know nationally, what is it?

Sir Ian Blair: The Met Police is running at 6.7% that is 17% of our intake at the moment. So it is all going in the right direction, but to achieve these targets we have to be well over 50%.

Q159 David Winnick (in the Chair): And you are quite determined to do whatever is possible?

Sir Ian Blair: Whatever is possible within the law we will do.

Q160 David Winnick (in the Chair): The Police Federation last week told us how much they were opposed to colleges?

Sir Ian Blair: I am not opposed to anything that is about qualified candidates. I would absolutely reject taking candidates of a lower standard, because I think that way madness lies.

Q161 David Winnick (in the Chair): On the basis that they are not lower and what you said earlier to Mr Denham, other action is clearly necessary-

Sir Ian Blair: Whatever other action is necessary.

Q162 David Winnick (in the Chair): ‑‑to bring the numbers up?

Sir Ian Blair: Yes.

Q163 Bob Russell: If a young Londoner, male or female, irrespective of race, applied to join the Metropolitan Police today, they had the qualifications, they went through the medical and training, when would they in fact become a police officer; indeed, when would they even be called up to go to police training college?

Sir Ian Blair: It could take as long as 18 months at the moment, because we have got more people than we know what to do with.

Q164 Bob Russell: If that young person was female and black, would that applicant be called for service earlier?

Sir Ian Blair: That is the question that we are debating, and that is what we are trying to get into, that is what we would like to do, to bring people earlier through, because I think it is very, very important. So we are debating that whole process at the current time with the police authority and we are getting every piece of legal advice that we can.

Q165 Bob Russell: So reverse discrimination is being seriously looked at by the Metropolitan Police?

Sir Ian Blair: But only ‑ I have to emphasise this ‑ not in terms of standards but in terms of how long it takes, or rather how long you have to wait. That is what we would like to do, but we are considering it, we are talking it through with colleagues and at the moment we know that that is pushing the law beyond where we can go.

Q166 Bob Russell: Are those discussions with colleagues including the 42 chief constables?

Sir Ian Blair: No, this is just a Metropolitan Police discussion at the moment.

Q167 Bob Russell: Are you aware through your police communications, either formal or informal chats, whether any police authority in the country is practising what I can only describe as reverse discrimination?

Sir Ian Blair: No, I am not aware. It will only be the Met that will be under that kind of scrutiny.

Q168 David Winnick (in the Chair): The position in the Met is undoubtedly different in the problems you face in policing and the ethnic minorities in the Greater London area than elsewhere?

Sir Ian Blair: What we will be looking for, Chair, if we were to get this, is a temporary period of time while this could happen. Just taking Ealing as an example, the phrase "minority population" is a misnomer. More of the population in Ealing are from non‑white traditions than they are from white traditions. It is just as straight forward as that.

Q169 David Winnick (in the Chair): All the more reason, surely, that the police for should represent them?

Sir Ian Blair: Precisely.

Q170 David Winnick (in the Chair): If there was more time I would press the Association of Police Authorities about non‑white or ethnic minorities. We have just been told "ethnic minority" is not the appropriate term of large parts of London, but there is not time, but we will write to you, Lady Henig, if you do not mind, on your views on behalf of the Association about the fact that the 2% nationally, just over 2%, is nowhere near the target, and if you could let us know as soon as it is possible what views you have, and I assume you do have views, in order to ensure that the targets are reached, and the question of quotas or other alternatives which were raised last week and the very informative replies. If you can let us have it as soon as is possible, in the next week ten days, that would be very useful.

Baroness Henig of Lancaster: Yes, I would be very happy to supply that information.

Q171 David Winnick (in the Chair): Can I turn briefly, because we are going to terminate in five minutes.... As far as CSOs are concerned, Lady Henig, do you have any reservations? Your paper seemed to show a great deal of enthusiasm for community support officers?

Baroness Henig of Lancaster: Again, if I can start on this one. This was an area where some of us did have some initial reservations. I think when I was last interviewed by the Home Affairs Select Committee this was one of the areas I certainly remember answering questions about. I and many other police authority representatives went back to their forces and had discussions with the force, because the important issue, I think, about CSOs is what is their role, how are they deployed, how do they work with police officers, and certainly in Lancashire we had discussions around these issues and we decided to bid for a large number of CSOs on the basis that we had consulted our communities, and they actually said that they wanted to see these officers on the streets in Lancashire. The result was that we got an initial tranche of about 70, 72 which were spread across the county, and I have to say that the public has responded in the most positive way to them. The public tells us repeatedly they find them accessible, they find them highly visible; they deal with issues that the public would not necessarily want to go to police officers to deal with. They are actually doing a range of different work to police officers, but, and I think this is important. In Lancashire certainly they are deployed with neighbourhood beat officers. So they are part of a team; they are part of a wider policing family. They also work with environmental wardens and a range of other local authority figures and they have been extremely effective, and I have to say that, certainly in the areas that I represent, the public have not been confused; I do not think the public have been short changed. I do not agree with any of the things that were said, I think perhaps somewhat unfortunately, by the Federation last week because there is a lot of hard work gone in, and not only are the CSOs effective, they get a lot of job satisfaction and there is a lot of diversity in their ranks; and so, for a whole range of different reasons, I see them as a positive way forward.

Q172 David Winnick (in the Chair): Sir Ian, are you quite happy with the scheme now?

Sir Ian Blair: Well, I suppose I would be really because I had a great deal to do with their invention. Everything that we are picking up is showing them to be deeply poplar with the public. In the survey that I mentioned, 90% of the residents of Camden thought it a good idea.

Q173 David Winnick (in the Chair): Is it only the Police Federation?

Sir Ian Blair: I think, to be fair, the Met Federation is beginning to shift some of that ground. There are some outspoken members of the Met Federation, and one of the things I would like to say in public here is that both the Commissioner and I are very unhappy about some of the remarks that are made about CSOs. These are valuable members of the service and I do hope that the Federation goes on to bring them within their own fold. Again, in ethnicity terms, we have got 33% from black and minority ethnic groups and 30% women. We have a very, very small ratio of people leaving, and most of the ones that do leave leave to become police officers. Again, that is another method of bringing black and minority staff into the service. The secondary benefits of the way they are operating ‑ we have now got a report from Accenture Consultancy which is showing very considerable decreases in vandalism, increases in foot-fall in town centres, decreases in attacks on buses because of the sheer visibility, and we have got figures of 85/90% of visibility of CSOs. As long as they work as a combined team, as long as we learn the mistake of the traffic warden service, which was to develop a different service which did not work with police officers, was not commanded by police officers. This is an integrated part of the police service.

David Winnick (in the Chair): It is nice to know that the collective wisdom of the Home Affairs Committee has been borne out. We came out in favour of this scheme a little while ago.

Q174 Bob Russell: Sir Ian, could I thank you for your generous comments about the Community Support Officers. I can only speak as they are in my town. Would you agree this happens in London. It is the fact that they are based in the same neighbourhood day after day, and, secondly, they are not called away when incidents miles away require them; they are there; they stay and people get to know them. Is that what happens with your CSOs as well?

Sir Ian Blair: That is absolutely the clue and it is certainly the clue in our evaluation; it is also the evaluation of the West Yorkshire Police use of CSOs by Professor Adam Crawford. It is exactly that. It is the fact that they do not do anything else than work on the street that is impactive, and the important point now, I think, is to stop these attacks on them which, I think, are very unfortunate and dispiriting, and certainly the senior management of the Met and the Police Authority are firmly in a favour of their development.

David Winnick (in the Chair): One last question, Mr Prosser.

Q175 Mr Prosser: Just a couple of quick questions on IT and science and technology. You have given us a clear view that there needs to be more funding in that direction if we are to overcome the bureaucracy problem, but what are the police priorities in terms of science and technology?

Sir Ian Blair: I will answer the question on IT, but I am at last going to let Mr Pugh have a go.

Q176 David Winnick (in the Chair): Sir Ian has another meeting, I know, and we have to terminate in about two minutes time so I hope answers will be brief.

Sir Ian Blair: Gary.

Mr Pugh: Sir Ian has covered the issues around IT and better use of or improved IT infrastructure. In relation to the use of DNA technology and the progress we have made since the Under the Microscope inspection report, to give you some headline figures, in the Met we enter onto the National Database around 56,000 individuals in a year. Last year we collected 12,000 stains, DNA stains, from crime scenes, which was an increase of 20% over the previous year, and we generated around six and a half thousand matches identifying individuals from that, which again was an increase over the previous years, so we are seeing the results of investment in DNA profiling. The issues raised, I think, were around leadership in terms of getting the visibility for forensics and getting boroughs to engage and to understand the contributions to make. In the Met it is my role at the senior level to provide that leadership. On boroughs we have a forensic manager on the senior management teams and they provide that visibility to make the forensics work. We have also, I think, invested fairly heavily in terms of our own internal processes to make sure that the complexity of this is understood and also that we use DNA effectively, and I think also the turning of DNA matches into detections was an issue that was highlighted by the inspectorate, and again I worked very closely with colleagues in TP and, in fact, their performance review system has a large forensic element in which I actually participate, and we contrast the performance of boroughs not only in the collection of DNA but how they turn those DNA matches into detections. So we are looking at the whole process.

Q177 Mr Prosser: Finally, the leading geneticist, Sir Alec Jeffries, has recently argued that the current use of DNA by the police is not sophisticated enough to make it effective and the danger of false identifications is very worrying to us all. Do you want to comment on that?

Mr Pugh: I think Sir Alec Jeffries was referring to the fact that we do not actually analyse the whole DNA molecule, we use a method in the UK and world-wide which looks at different sites of the molecule. Therefore, if you like, from a scientific perspective it is possible that the DNA profile for one individual could be the same as another. That is a remote possibility given that the statistics involve around one in a billion in terms of the likelihood of that. The safeguards around that, I think, are through the fact that the DNA profiling method in the UK is thoroughly tested in the courts, and in fact there is considerable guidance about how it is to be used and how that information is put before juries. In addition to that, we have a custodial role for the National DNA Database which not only ACPO and the Home Office participate in but the Human Genetics Commission as well. So I think there is significant oversight on the use of DNA profiling, and certainly from my professional perspective public confidence in DNA is key to its continued usage.

David Winnick (in the Chair): The two distinguished leading crime writers in the House of Lords may be looking up the proceedings to read what you have just said, Mr Pugh. Can I thank you very much indeed for giving evidence today. As I have indicated, there will be some questions, particularly to the Association of Police Authorities, on the one or two aspects we have not been able to cover. Thank you very much indeed.