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CORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 1038-iv House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE HOME AFFAIRS COMMITTEE
Tuesday 26 October 2004 MS HAZEL BLEARS MP, and MR STEPHEN RIMMER Evidence heard in Public Questions 297 - 382
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Home Affairs Committee on Tuesday 26 October 2004 Members present Mr John Denham, in the Chair Mr James Clappison Mrs Janet Dean Mr Damian Green Mr Gwyn Prosser Bob Russell Mr Marsha Singh Mr John Taylor David Winnick ________________
Memorandum submitted by the Home Office
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Ms Hazel Blears, a Member of the House, Minister of State, and Mr Stephen Rimmer, Director of Policing Policy, Home Office, examined. Q297 Chairman: Minister, thank you very much indeed for joining us this afternoon and also Mr Rimmer. I think you have been in front of the Committee in the past so welcome again. As you know, the Committee has been carrying out a brief inquiry just to update ourselves on progress on police reforms, a process launched in 2002‑01. This is the last evidence session in that inquiry so thank you very much for coming. I wonder if I could start, Minister, with a fairly general question. We have had three years or so of police reform so far. What would your assessment be of what has worked and, more importantly, what has not worked? Ms Blears: Good afternoon, Chairman, members of the Committee, I am absolutely delighted to be here. I think this is the first opportunity that I have had to come and give an account and discuss our progress on police reform with the Committee and I am very much looking forward to this afternoon. I have made myself aware of the previous evidence sessions that you have had with a range of people and I am delighted that the Committee has chosen to focus on police reform at this particular juncture because I think we are at a very important stage. As you rightly said, we have been embarked on a continuing process of police reform now for the last few years and I think that it is right to have an assessment of where we are, what has gone well, and perhaps not what has gone badly but what has not gone as fast as we would like it to. I would like to draw that distinction because I think the whole of the reform programme is proceeding in the right direction but there are certain areas which have proceeded apace and other areas which still need quite a bit of a push. So if I could start off by saying I think that the first stage of the reform programme, led very much by yourself Chairman, was really about embedding performance within our police services. I think at that time there was a huge variation in the performance of different forces in different parts of the country and there was a need to raise performance generally, but also a pressing need to raise performance particularly in the high crime areas where members of the public were more likely to become repeat victims and were facing really serious problems of crime and disorder. I think that drive to embed performance is one of the things which has been the most successful and has given us very firm foundations from which we can move to the next stage of police reform. In highlighting that I want to draw attention to the establishment of a performance management system and a performance framework for the Police Service, which I do not believe was in existence previously, and the introduction of the Police Performance Assessment Framework (PPAF) - and I am sure you are just as familiar with the acronyms as I have become in the last few months. I think that is a significant step forward for the service, but underpinning that framework was the need to have some really good, consistent, real-time data and information to drive the performance management framework, and therefore I think the introduction of iQuanta, which I understand now has something like 2,500 registered users through the Police Service, where police authorities are able to draw down data not just at police force level but also at district level and at Basic Command Unit level, is a hugely important lever for driving that performance. We have launched recently on that performance agenda a public‑facing web site so the public now can begin to get access to information about how well their service is performing and again that is a driver for change. The things that I think have gone particularly well are the performance framework, the data that underpins it and the drivers there and secondly for me the embedding of the National Intelligence Model. That is a huge change for the Police Service and has helped to change the focus from a reactive, responsive service, simply reacting to crime after it has occurred, to getting in front of the curve and starting to be a service which anticipates the problems, which is intelligence‑led, which can target its resources at the hot-spots which cause the most problems, and which can systematically produce an intelligence product that can then be used at every level of the service. I think the task to get the National Intelligence Model up and running in 43 forces was immense and I would certainly like to pay credit to the Deputy Chief Constable in Thames Valley who has been instrumental in driving that forward. All 43 forces are now compliant with the National Intelligence Model but I think we have more to do in that field as well. The other thing I would highlight is the introduction of the police performance monitors which we have published again in the latest version just recently in September. That again is information where people can see how their force is doing, not just in absolute terms but in comparison to their most similar forces. I think the premise of comparing as much as we can like‑with‑like has been very important because if we had simply had a league table of 43 forces right across the land then I think, with some justification, the forces could have claimed that they policed in very different circumstances and therefore it would be difficult to have that direct comparison. Moving to the most similar forces model has been very useful indeed and the pictorial representation in those monitors again enables people to see at a glance how that performance is playing out at a local level. There are a number of other things that I would highlight from the first wave of reform - increased focus on science and technology, forensics, DNA, and again there is more to do there. The things that I would say we would perhaps need to move faster on include workforce modernisation. I think we have made a start in terms of establishing community support officers. We have 4,000 of them out there patrolling now and they are hugely popular, but I am sure we will come to that. Also we have started to introduce the detention and escort officers. I think we have more to do on redesigning the systems so that we can get more civilians doing some of the work that is currently still done all too often by fully warranted police officers. We have funded a range of work on modernisation pilots out there to the tune of about £13 million. Q298 Chairman: I think we will get into some of the detail of that. Ms Blears: I think that workforce modernisation needs a bigger push. Detection is an area that we need to focus on and do much better in. I think we need to push on the front‑line policing measures and responsiveness and customer service culture, and I am sure we will come to that, and clearly there are issues around the national sharing of intelligence, which has been highlighted by Bichard, about how we share data across the service. Those are the areas that I would highlight that we need to push on. Q299 Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. It is good to hear so much positive achievement. Why exactly are we now about to embark, as we understand it, on a second phase of police reform? What is the aim this time? Ms Blears: I think the aim of the first phase, as I have said, was to try and improve effectiveness and drive the performance of the Police Service. I think the aim of our next phase of police reform is not simply about performance per se and certainly not about just the service; it is starting to say that the Police Service is but one contributor in trying to build safer communities and that there are a range of other partners out there, other influences which we can bring to bear on preventing crime with early intervention, and also on helping to make sure that we are effective in capturing and convicting the right people, but also the issues around re‑settlement and rehabilitation. There are a number of different agencies which have a significant part to play if we are going to make our communities generally safer and better places for people to live in. The second phase of police reform is about having a much wider partnership approach with local authorities, with the National Offender Management Service, with social services, and with education through early intervention. So there is that thrust. The second thing for me, which is hugely important, is trying to instil a customer service culture more within our Police Service and that means a real push on minimum standards, call handling, feedback to complainants, keeping victims informed, keeping witnesses informed, and a real sense that the Police Service is there to serve the public and to involve the public in setting some of the priorities for our Police Service. All the research we have done shows that people really do not feel that they have enough influence about what the priorities should be, particularly at local level, and yet there is a huge appetite for them to be more involved. So the second phase is about more of a cultural shift in terms of responsiveness, partnership working and hopefully more emphasis as well on prevention. Q300 Chairman: Thank you very much. We will come back to some of those points. Can you tell us briefly when we can expect the new White Paper? Ms Blears: The White Paper at the moment is with DA Committee and for discussion across government and that will be taking place over the next couple of weeks. We hope to be in a position to publish the White Paper in the early part of November. Q301 Chairman: Fine, thank you very much indeed. One of the things that the Government has recently taken pride in is the record number of police officers. I think there are 140,000; is that right? Ms Blears: 140,000. Q302 Chairman: A lot of MPs were lobbied last week by police authorities who basically said if there is a cap on council tax rises to low single figures we will have a £350 million shortfall and that might well have a consequence on the number of police officers. What is the Government's assessment of the position? Ms Blears: What I would say to the Committee is not simply to take this year as an isolated event in the funding of the Police Service because I think it is important to be aware of the context, and that is significant real terms increases in investment over the last three to four years, in fact a rise in support for policing of 21% in real terms over and above inflation. So there has been significant extra input into the policing service. That, quite rightly, is why they have been able to achieve these record numbers of not just police officers but also, as I say, the extra 4,000 community support officers that they have got patrolling the streets now. The position that we are at this year builds on where we were in relation to funding last year. Last year we were able to maximise the police grant as much as we could. We took £140 million last year out of other Home Office funding to maximise the police grant available to police authorities and, extraordinarily, we set a flat rate increase of 3.25% to try and ensure that those forces who would have seen a significant decrease actually had some protection. This year we are in a similar position in that we are seeking to maximise the amount of grant that we can put into the police grant. We have not finalised that yet and I will be making a statement about that in November about this year's police grant settlement. The APA have done their survey of what they say are the costs. They have characterised it as a standstill budget and they say that they need 5.7% growth in order to carry on as they are. Those figures are currently being scrutinised quite closely, as you can imagine, by my officials and indeed by Treasury officials as well to see if they are a true reflection of the pressures that there are in the service. I do believe that with a good level of police grant, which as I say we are seeking to maximise again this year, together with a reasonable level of council tax increase, and provided they meet the efficiencies which we have set for all the forces of 1.5% cashable efficiency savings and 1.5% non‑cashable efficiency savings, then with that increased productivity, a decent level of police grant settlement and a reasonable council tax, that those three elements should enable them to carry on providing what is some of the best policing that we have ever seen in this country and to continue with those record number of police officers and the extra CSOs. Indeed, I do not think we should forget that the numbers of police staff in our services have gone up quite dramatically now. We have got over 210,000 people actually involved in fighting crime as we currently stand. At the moment I certainly do not accept that we will be in the position that the APA has painted but obviously, as Members will know, at this time of year when we are coming up to a funding settlement then it will be inevitable that people will seek to make their best or, one might say, worst case scenario in order to maximise their case. Q303 Chairman: When will you be indicating what the capping rules on police authorities will be? Ms Blears: The position that we were in last year was that the criteria for capping clearly were set by ODPM. It is not a matter for my Department but there are, quite rightly, discussions that take place between myself and Ministers in ODPM about the whole of this area in terms of criteria and what steps should be taken. Last year I do not think those criteria were set until after the budgets were made and I fully understand and appreciate that that did cause some police forces significant difficulty. We were able to give them some indication about budget levels and I am delighted that those discussions resulted in precept levels coming down from what in some cases were proposed levels of 28%, 29%,30% to 12% or 13%. I was pleased that that had the effect that we were able to put that downward pressure on the precept levels, but I am fully aware that the late setting of those criteria did cause difficulties, particularly for those three authorities which ended up being in that position. Q304 Chairman: You will be setting them well ahead of the budget? Ms Blears: I am unable to give the Committee that undertaking today but what I am able to say is I am aware of the difficulties that that caused and I am making representations clearly to government as a whole about that issue. Q305 Chairman: There is obviously a lot of work to be done on the budget. Can you guarantee, Minister, that any police authority that complies with the capping regime will be in a position where it will not have to have any reduction in the number of police officers? Ms Blears: Clearly the decision about deployment of officers is a matter for the chief constable and it is for him or her to decide what is the appropriate deployment in order to meet the needs of his or her organisation. Therefore, what I can say confidently is that with a reasonable level of police grant, which I am hoping to achieve, with a reasonable level of council tax, which I hope the police authorities will be able to achieve, together with the efficiency savings, there should be no reason why within that combined total they should find themselves in any worse position than they are at the moment, and that means being able to continue to provide the levels of policing to their community that they are currently able to do. Any member of the APA would probably have said to this Committee, as they have said to me, that they are now in a position to provide the best policing that they have ever known. They are keen to be able to continue to do that and I am confident on the basis of what I have set out to the Committee on the three components of their funding that they ought to be able to continue to do that. The specific deployment, whether it is police officer support, a member of police staff or a community support officer, is really an operational matter for the chief constable. Q306 Chairman: Can I press you on that very last point.. That appears to open the door to the possibility of a fall overall in the numbers of police officers if chief police officers were to shift away from that. For the last few years Government has essentially blocked police forces into increasing the number of police officers in the way the grant has been used. Are you saying that it is more acceptable to Government now for a police force to draw a different balance between the number of police officers and CSOs or support staff than it was a few years ago? Ms Blears: No I am not in relation to police officer numbers and I think myself and the Home Secretary are very clearly on record as saying that we expect the number of police officers to be maintained at the record numbers we now have of 140,000 officers. You will know that we have the Crime Fighting Fund which provides a mechanism for ensuring that those police officers did increase and we are delighted that that has been the case. It is proposed that the Crime Fighting Fund will now be part of the Neighbourhood Policing Fund where there will continue to be mechanisms in place to ensure that those record police officer numbers are maintained. We propose to add to those through the recruitment of extra community support officers but we do not propose that police officer numbers should decrease from where we are now. Q307 David Winnick: I have listened, as I am sure my colleagues have, to what you have stated but the fact remains that last Wednesday when the West Midlands Chief Constable was meeting MPs in the region (and there was a lobby obviously in various places around the country) unless you are saying it was "Wolf, Wolf" the Chief Constable and his lay colleagues were quite convinced that there was going to be a shortfall unless there was an adjustment to the figures, obviously an upward increase. How seriously are you taking the remarks being made by police authorities? Ms Blears: I am taking those remarks that are being made extremely seriously indeed because not only am I aware of the lobby of last Wednesday, I have also had a number of colleagues and Members of Parliament speak to me personally and collectively about their concerns about the future of police funding. Q308 David Winnick: So you are not saying it is "Wolf, Wolf" and you do accept that there is some substance to the representations that are being made to us? Ms Blears: As I understand it, the figures that have been developed have been on the basis of the possibility of a 3% increase in the police grant, the possibility of a 3% limit on precepts and then the calculation has been made about what that gap might be. Clearly there are a number of not quite imponderables but things that have not been decided in those assumptions that the ACA and ACPO have made because they have assumed a level of grant, they have assumed a level of precept increase and they have said in these circumstances it is possible that a gap could occur. What I have said is that I have not yet decided and the Home Secretary has not yet decided what level the police grant will be. Clearly the criterion around precepts has not yet been determined so those are uncertain elements in the assumptions that the ACA and ACPO have made. On that basis I am not dismissing their concerns because if those assumptions were to be the case and their figures were to be robust it could be that there would be difficulties. All I am saying is that it is a little bit premature to have drawn up those figures on the basis of a situation which is not yet clear and not yet in the public domain. I am anxious not to dismiss them because I know they want to carry on providing a very good service. David Winnick: It may be premature but once the door closes, once the final settlement has been made, it is too late. All the more reason, Minister, that I do hope that you and your colleagues ‑ and I understand the negotiations with the Treasury, and all the rest of it, not being asked to sign a cheque ‑ will take these concerns very seriously indeed. The lobby last week was not for the fun of it. Q309 Mr Clappison: When you are looking at the sums on this will you remember as well please, Minister, that some authorities did better than others out of local government re‑organisation and police funding. My authority, Hertfordshire, did not do particularly well. The residents of Hertfordshire have seen the police precept go up considerably and they have heard from the police authority which has done its sums, taken into account efficiency savings, and what it is predicted to get at the moment from government, and they are one of the authorities who are predicting a very substantial fall in officers unless they can get more funding. Will you look at authorities like that in the home counties, authorities such as Hertfordshire, because they need funding as well? Ms Blears: I am very conscious of the range of different needs that there are in different police authorities. I would just remind the Committee that last year when we took the exceptional decision to have a flat rate increase of 3.25% rather than implementing the formula in full there were a number of authorities who benefited significantly from that and they were not necessarily those places in the high crime areas. Indeed, in many of the high crime areas like the West Midlands, the Metropolitan Police area and the Greater Manchester area they lost out significantly because we were unable to implement the formula fully. There were some winners and, unfortunately, some losers and what we are keen to try and do is to get back to a system of floors and ceilings so that we can at least implement some of the formula so that we can ensure that our resources are directed to the areas of need. I am sure, Mr Clappison, that you would want to confirm that those areas which have a great deal of crime and repeat victimisation do need to be addressed and do need resources to do that. Q310 Mr Clappison: If we are being told about the record numbers of police officers, which is in contrast to what happened in the first of the Labour Governments when police numbers fell, I think my constituents are entitled to feel that they will receive adequate policing in their area and they will not be left out of the picture and see themselves left to languish. Ms Blears: I am delighted to confirm, Mr Clappison, that in fact Hertfordshire Constabulary have now got 365 more officers than they had in March 1997. Mr Clappison: That is on changed boundaries. Chairman: For the record, all Members of the Committee would like to make a bid on behalf of their constituency on the funding of the local police authority but I think we will move on to the next question, if we may. Janet Dean? Mrs Dean: I am tempted to say that Staffordshire also needs to maintain its record number of officers. Chairman: I would not if I were you! Q311 Mrs Dean: But I will go on to my question. Minister, can you say how do crime statistics since 2001 reflect the impact of police reform, and of the extra resources that have gone into policing? Ms Blears: Certainly I think the increased performance of all the forces is really well reflected in the statistics from the British Crime Survey. If we look at that, from 1997 we have seen an overall fall in crime as recorded by BCS of 30%, we have seen a fall in burglary by 42%, which has a massive impact there; a fall in vehicle crime of 40%; a fall in violent crime by 26%; and a fall in robbery, where we had that huge spike of street crime, now down by 24% in the ten top street crime areas over the last couple of years, which shows the impact of targeted intelligence‑led hot‑spot policing and where the implementation of the National Intelligence Model that I talked about is actually feeding through into those target crimes. If I think about the impact on victims, which is obviously very important to all of us, it is half a million fewer people getting burgled, a million fewer people having their cars robbed or stolen, and nearly half a million less victims of violent crime since 1997, so it is beginning to feed through. Clearly there are still areas of concern to us. If we look at the increase in recorded violent crime, that is partly due to a change in the recording system but also I think due to the impact of alcohol‑fuelled violence, the binge drinking that goes on in our towns and cities at the weekend, and that is of concern to us. Gun crime went up dramatically a couple of years ago. That has now stabilised although there was a very small increase in the latest figures that we have seen. What it says to me is that the trends in crime are changing to some extent in that we have really borne down on the acquisitive crimes of burglary, robbery and vehicle theft, and now we are more into the crimes of behaviour, if you like, the violent and yobbish behaviour that is out there, and we need to almost transfer some of the practice that we have had on acquisitive crime into those areas of low‑level violence that are now of real concern to the public. Q312 Mrs Dean: One of the areas of concern is the continuing decline in detection rates. Could you tell us why you think there has been that continuing decline? Ms Blears: It is a small decline this year. It has actually gone down from 24% to 23% in terms of detection rates and the sanctioned detection rate has gone down from 19.1% to 18.8% so it is small decline but I think it is very important. Indeed, if you look at the National Policing Plan, the latest version of which is out for consultation, the issue of detection is actually highlighted there. If I look at all the other indicators for policing they are all very good news indeed. The one bit that stands out for me is around detections. Part of this is due to the introduction of the shadow charging scheme with the Crown Prosecution Service where the Crown Prosecution Service are now in the police stations working side by side with the police and some of the fairly weak cases which would have gotten through the system in the past are now being weeded out at a very early stage by more rigorous intervention from the Crown Prosecution Service, so that is causing a dip on our sanctioned detection rate. What is interesting is that where those pilots have been in place for a little time now, once they have gone through the dip they start to go back up, so once they have got their systems in place then the intervention of the shadow charging system is actually shown to be a very good thing. I think there is more we can do on a higher standard of investigation generally across the service and we have had the National Centre for Policing Excellence working on an evidence‑based process about how you investigate crimes in a more rigorous way. We need to use forensics far more than we have done. If you look at the conversion rate, where you get a scenes of crime officer to go and look at the burglary your conviction rate goes up from something like 23% to 48%, so there is a massive leap where you are using DNA, taking fingerprints, and really looking rigorously at that investigation. The Police Standards Unit are now developing some good practice around investigating crimes which they will be promulgating to forces in the next few months and that is about better investigation, better use of forensics, using better case preparation and case building, and making sure you get your evidence right at the earliest possible stage. I can tell the Committee a little bit about the IT but I am sure we will come on to that later in terms of the Case and Custody Programme which ought again to make us robust in our investigations. The final point I would make on detections is that sometimes there has been an argument do you do crime reduction or do you do detection. I think you have to do both because a huge deterrent to crime is the fact that you will get caught and there will be some sanction. So it is not the case that you do either reassurance or you do catch and convict the criminals; the best forces are now doing both. Q313 Mrs Dean: Have changes in recording methods had an impact on the statistics regarding detection rates? Ms Blears: It could be that the introduction of the new recording system has had an impact because the biggest area in which the change in recording systems has made a difference is in low-level violent crime. People will have seen that has gone up quite dramatically. Things which were never recorded as a crime now are because they are recorded from a victim's point of view rather than, if you like, the objective assessment of a police officer. That has gone up dramatically. It is those crimes that are more difficult to detect, the pushing and shoving that sometimes goes on in a drunken encounter. If you look at our detection rates for the most serious crimes like murder then our detection rates are 92%. If you look at serious drug offences our detection rates are up there in the 80s. If you start to look at low‑level crime then our detection rates come way down because of the nature of the incident that has happened. I think the introduction of that recording scheme has probably made it more difficult because there are more of that category of crimes which are traditionally harder to detect. Q314 Mr Singh: Minister, in the assessment of police performance you have got to involve the Police Standards Unit, HM Inspectorate, the National Centre for Policing Excellence, the central Home Office and ACPO. Is there not an awful lot of duplication? Ms Blears: I do not think it is necessarily as much duplication as it sounds, Mr Singh, although I think there is probably an element of duplication. I have tried to approach this by saying what are the functions that each of those organisations carries out and to try and make sure that they do not overlap. All of them have played a very useful part in developing the police reforms programme and in developing performance and effectiveness but I think the time is right to take a fresh look at what it is they are doing and whether they are doing it to best effect? You will be aware that we have proposals for a National Policing Improvement Agency and we will see whether or not that can bring some rationalisation to the landscape of organisations that we have got out there. In my view, HMIC has got an absolutely crucial role in inspecting our forces and I think that the baseline assessments that they have done for the first time, published in April this year, are a significant step forward in trying to give a starting point for assessing performance across our forces. In terms of the Police Standards Unit, I think its almost unique contribution is around the field of intervention and engaging with forces where things are going wrong. They are currently engaged with a range of forces and what is interesting is that the reductions in crime in the forces that the Police Standards Unit are engaged with are almost double the average reductions of crime in other forces, so you can see that once you get engaged with the Police Standards Unit then because of their really sharp focus on your performance they can help to drive improvement. The PSU's strength is in that intervention. They are starting now to do some operational work and the alcohol misuse enforcement campaign over the summer was co‑ordinated by the PSU together with BCU commanders (I think 90 of them across the country) and that has been hugely successful. We are hoping to do something similar with the Police Standards Unit around violent crime which is the area that we now need to move into. HMIC is doing its inspection role. The PSU is doing intervention and driving that good practice and NCPE, whose original role was to try to develop some evidence‑based practice, has done some excellent work around developing the codes. We have now got codes on the use of firearms and the use of less lethal weapons. They have done the Professionalising Investigation Project which will feed over into increased detections and they have issued guidance around the best way to approach missing persons and the best way to deal with domestic violence incidents. They have started to build that evidence base. I think there is probably some overlap between the operational spreading of best practice that the PSU are now beginning to be active in and the development of the evidence‑based best doctrine from NCPE and I think that that interface is possibly becoming duplicated. I do not think it is duplicated yet but it could possibly get there. In terms of the HMIC role, I think its work is complementary to the hard data that comes out of the Police Standards Unit. HMIC give you a qualitative view of how the forces are performing, the PSU give you the number‑crunching data, and I think that combination of both viewpoints is very important in getting a holistic view of how our forces are performing. We do have plans for the National Improvement Agency which we hope will bring together some of these organisations. That is still subject to discussions with ACPO and the APA. We want it very much to be owned and led by the service so as to have that culture of self‑improvement. I think the area around developing the evidence base and spreading best practice is probably the most fruitful area for the Improvement Agency to get involved in. Q315 Mr Singh: It is clear, Minister, that you know the difference between those bodies but are you as confident that they know their different roles? You mentioned the National Improvement Agency. Is this not yet another body being involved with performance assessment of the police? Are we not duplicating again? Ms Blears: No. If I can say, Mr Singh, almost the opposite is the truth. I am conscious that we have a whole range of organisations out there and what I want us to try and do is to bring together the elements of those organisations that could properly sit within an Improvement Agency, which should be about driving best practice. It should also be about trying to achieve coherence across the 43 forces. There are some things which the police do differently, which is a good thing because they are responsible for needs and local priorities, but there are some things which the Police Service as a whole should be doing together. These were nowhere more clearly highlighted than in the report from Sir Michael Bichard about intelligence, about data sharing and about the use of forensics. I think in trying to get that as a norm across 43 forces the Improvement Agency can help drive that forward. However, I have no intention of having the Improvement Agency and still having this myriad of different organisations. If we are going to have the Improvement Agency, which I really think is important to us, then we have to make sure that we absorb some of these functions into that Improvement Agency so that we are not servicing the bureaucracy when we should be spending our resources on making a difference and getting that drive for improvement right across our forces. I am very pleased at the reaction from ACPO and from APA that they see a need for this too. They also see a need for a rationalisation of the bodies that are out there. Q316 Mr Singh: What progress have you made with the creation of this Improvement Agency? Ms Blears: We originally had a paper from ACPO themselves. I think it was the chief police officers' original initiative to come forward with this idea. That is a good sign that they are going to own it and drive it forward. We have since then put a bit more flesh on the bones. We have had a couple of meetings of all our tripartite partners to try and get some clarity about this. We will be saying something around the Improvement Agency in the White Paper and then clearly we would have to see whether we could set up maybe something in shadow format at the earliest date we can to try and make sure that we are maximising the ideas that are out there. One of the most disappointing things for me is when I see some excellent practice in a force that I go and visit and I go to the next force and it is not being implemented there. That is a source of huge frustration. The sooner we can set something up the better, and it may well be that we can do that without the need for legislation, at least in a shadow form, as early as next year. Q317 Mr Singh: We have had evidence that the National Centre for Policing Excellence has not yet made much of an impact. Sir Keith Povey claimed that it has not had the necessary resources or political support. Is that true? Do you think it was a mistake to make the centre a department of Centrex? Ms Blears: I certainly do not think that it has not had political support or resources. As I say, I think the concept of setting up an organisation whose main aim was to develop an evidence base of good practice was absolutely the right thing to do. That is very much the thinking in the National Improvement Agency because the police service, like some other of our public services, sometimes did not have a proper rigorous evidence base for what works, and people would try a range of solutions and some would be more effective than others. I think it takes us far too long to decide what works and then to implement it. I certainly do not think there was a failure of political will at all. In terms of it being part of Centrex, I think it was important that the evidence base should feed into the development of training materials because if you are developing concepts around what works, for example in investigation what does a good investigation look like, the next question logically to ask is what skills do your officers need in order to be able to investigate properly. How long should they have, for example, in training on statement‑taking? What kind of training do they need to use forensics really well? I do not think it was a mistake in those terms to connect it to the body that was developing our training materials. I would hope very clearly that if those functions were to be part of the National Improvement Agency then there would continue to be a link to the development of the skills and competences that our officers and our police staff will need in order to do the best job for modern 21st century policing. Q318 Chairman: Over the last three years the Police Standards Unit has moved quite rapidly from support of individual police forces to co‑ordination of national policing operations. There was the street crime campaign, the summer alcohol campaign, and you mentioned the possibility of future work on violence. What safeguards are there in the system to prevent the Police Standards Unit effectively becoming the operational leadership of the national police which delivers the priorities of the Government rather than the Police Service? Ms Blears: I think the safeguards in the system are probably 43 chief constables who clearly are responsible to their police authorities for providing an effective police service in their communities and therefore the Police Standards Unit does not have a role to dictate operational priorities. What I am pleased about is that they have been able to co‑ordinate those operations. I think there is a distinction between imposing and directing operations and being able to co‑ordinate them together. If I think about the alcohol misuse campaign which is probably the biggest operational role that the PSU has played so far, that is relatively recent, that is only this summer. I talked to Chris Fox, the President of ACPO, and he has been very pleased that his chiefs have been able to work with PSU in terms of bringing together the good practice there. It has been a real collaboration rather than an imposition and direction. The Police Standards Unit have called people together, the BCU commanders have come together and some of the front‑line officers out there and we are about to publish a document called the Lessons Learnt from the campaign, which again will be promulgated quite widely across forces. We are having a big conference which I think ‑‑‑ Q319 Chairman: Can I press on the point, certainly some time ago ACPO would have aspired to playing that role itself as the place that should co‑ordinate national operations of that sort. Are you telling us that ACPO is now content that the leadership and co-ordination of that type of operation has moved to the Home Office from the Police Service itself? Ms Blears: No because I do not think you should characterise it in terms of the leadership. That is why I have emphasised the word "co‑ordination" because I think it is different because in many cases it will be ACPO and members of ACPO who have the detailed, on-the-ground, operational policing skills, information and ways of operating that will help to inform what we can do at the centre. I think what you see here now is perhaps evidence of a maturity in the relationship and a change from simply the centre dictating to the service to seeing where can the centre add value to what it is that they want to do. I think that is a very important distinction. Q320 Mr Green: You mentioned training a couple of minutes ago, Minister. One of the uniformly bleak sets of evidence we have is about training. The Police Federation, ACPO and the APA have all expressed different concerns about cuts in the funding of Centrex. The Federation made a series of criticisms about training saying that it is insufficient, it varies too much between forces, and it is disproportionately targeted at the higher ranks, and ACPO in particular criticised the lack of adequate funding for NCPE. How do you respond to what seems to be a consensus that something is going wrong in the training area? Ms Blears: As in every area of the police there is a huge raft of work going on in terms of training, skills, qualifications, competences and I will nip through a few of them just to set the scene for you. The first and probably the most significant part of the work we are doing is on the initial police learning and development programme. That is modernising the probationer training schemes that are out there. That for me is the most important because unless we get the probationer training right then the culture change that I talked about in terms of police reforms then phase two is not going to happen because it is when people first come into the service that you are setting their standards, their ethos, their skills, and the nature of the encounter that they have with the public, so that is hugely important to me. The second area is really around leadership. I do take the point that the Federation have made that we must be very wary of not defining leadership as simply about the top cadre of service because I personally think that leadership is important for every single person in the Service. Again if we are talking about changing culture and getting police constables to be leaders of neighbourhood policing teams in their local areas they are going to have to manage community support officers, possibly wardens and members of the extended police family. They are going to have to interact with the community in a very different way and they are going to need leadership skills as much as the top cadre of the service. I will come to the final answer in a moment. I think that we need to instil a learning culture right from the top to the bottom throughout the Service and to include police staff at every single level. Again, much of the training and qualifications have been available on the police side with not necessarily the same access for police staff. If we are about having a move much more towards engaging our police staff we need to do that. In terms of Centrex funding, they had funding last year of around about £90 million and they are down to £74.8 million this year. I have been quite heartened by the fact that they have been able to deliver on all the priorities that we have set them by achieving a whole range of efficiency savings in there. I acknowledge it has not been easy for them to do but they are still maintaining the vast majority of their programmes on a significantly reduced budget. I genuinely do not believe that the quality of what they are providing has suffered as a result of that. They have had to go through a reorganisation. They have had to look at every line of their budget and really press for productivity and efficiency out of that but they have managed to do it. So far I am reassured because this is not an area that I would want to see reduced. If anything, I think we need to press more on training, qualifications, career pathways, and making sure that everybody in the service feels valued. I genuinely think that on Centrex's current budget they are managing to still do the important priorities we have set them and as we move probationer training away from the residential model much more into a community‑based training programme then I think we will start to see a real step change and culture change in the skills that some of our young officers have. Q321 Mr Green: I think it is very interesting if you think there was waste in Centrex before and that it can be run better on a lower budget. I am sure that is true of many areas of government. A significant point on the probationer training, which you have mentioned, Sir Keith Povey told the Committee that the reduction in the training programme from 15 to 12 weeks was a direct result of budget cuts. Is that right? Ms Blears: There was a really rigorous analysis of all the elements of the probationer training programme about what could be done in a residential setting, what could be done in the community, and what parts of that probationer training programme could be undertaken later in the programme and do not need to be done immediately in the initial part. There was an agreement that the probationer training programme residential element could be confined to 12 weeks and, in fact, in future that residential element will be significantly smaller. I personally visited one of the forces that was doing a pilot of a different kind of probationer training where the probationers were out on the streets virtually from day one, obviously in a very protected setting, with tutors, with supervisors, but they all said to me that they found this a really good experience because they joined the police force to be out there doing the job. For many of them, particularly for the women that I met who had families, not having to do residential training was a significant advantage because it was a much more normal pattern of their daily lives. I do not accept for one moment that changes to the probationer system have actually damaged the initial training that is available because it was a proper analysis of what needed to be done at what point, and I think there was consensus that that could be done in a 12-week period rather than a 15‑week period. Q322 Mr Green: What about one of the points we have not addressed which is the inconsistencies of training between forces which has been mentioned in evidence. Are steps being taken to iron those out? Ms Blears: I think this is a really important point, Mr Green, because if we are going to devolve more training at a local level, which I want to do because I want forces to take responsibility for doing this in their own communities, I want them to involve local people in the recruitment and the assessment of police officers, what we have also got to ensure is that there is quality assurance right throughout the system. It may well be not identical training because it will be done in different places but the core elements have got to be to the same high standards wherever they are. There I do see an important role for Centrex in making sure that we have that quality assurance that the products are developed so that they meet those very high standards and that all the people coming through our training are properly skilled with the competencies that they need to do neighbourhood policing in particular, but in a very different setting now in the 21st century than it was in the 1950s and 1960s, so I think that quality assurance role will be extremely important for them to do. Q323 Mr Green: One final specific point made by the Federation who say that the vast majority of their officers ‑ they have done focus groups ‑ think that CSOs in particular have not been given sufficient training before they are put out on the streets. Do you think that reflects the reality? Ms Blears: No, I do not. Again clearly it is a matter for chief constables as to what powers they designate the CSOs with and what the appropriate training and equipment is in relation to the job that they want them to do, but certainly my experience ‑ and I am not sure that my focus groups are as detailed as the Fed's; in fact I am sure they are not - from every single visit that I have been on as a Minister while I have been doing this job is that I have received an overwhelming mark of approval for the community support officers, not just from the public, although the public really really do welcome them, but also from front‑line officers themselves. I spoke to a front‑line officer at the Federation conference, of all places, who said to me that he had now got some community support officers helping him with the tasks that he was charged with and he did not know how he had ever managed without them. He really felt that they were doing an excellent job, they were fit for purpose, they were trained and skilled to the extent of the job that they had needed to do, and they were making a significant impact, particularly on reassuring the public in his area. Q324 Mr Clappison: Could I move on to ask about the National Policing Plan. What are the key changes you would like to see in the next National Policing Plan in November? Ms Blears: As members of the Committee will know, the Policing Plan is currently out for consultation with all of our stakeholders. I hope that there is a sense ‑ and these things are always developing and this is the third version of the Policing Plan that we have had ‑ that we are moving forward. As I tried to explain on police reforms, the first phase of police reform was very much about what the Police Service did and making them more effective, and the direction of travel for police reform is about how do we get our other partners to maximise their contribution here, particularly local authorities, who have got a big role to play in building safer communities. Again, I hope there is a sense in the National Policing Plan that we are beginning to have more of an emphasis on not only what the police do but also about working in partnership. One of our priorities is around targeting prolific and priority offenders. That actually says "take action with partners". So we are beginning to see that sense of the police as a very important component and leading the fight against crime but not exclusively responsible for it. That is one of the big changes in the National Policing Plan. The second big change for me is to try and make sure that we are more, in the jargon, "outcome focused". Rather than telling the police how to do it, what we are setting out is what we would like to see happen and then try to provide flexibility for the Police Service to decide for themselves how they get there. That is a significant shift for us away from micro‑managing from the centre towards saying "this is what we want you to do and you are going to have to work out how you get there together with your local authority partners, with people from the Probation Service and the Prison Service, and the other people who are important in the criminal justice system, the magistrates, the courts and the CPS, and so you have got to get out there and do that." That is a big shift. One of the best illustrations of that is around the next PSA we have got, which is to reduce crime by 15%, and in the past we have set specific targets around vehicle crime, burglary, and robbery. In this plan in our PSA target we are genuinely trying to say, "Look, we need a 15% reduction in overall crime but for you in Hertfordshire that might be a different mix than it will be for you, Mr Denham, in Hampshire or Mr Winnick or Mr Singh in wherever your forces are." Q325 Mr Clappison: Are there going to be some targets set at a local level then, for example at a basic command unit level? Ms Blears: One of the main performance frameworks is around local priorities and, as you will know, we have got seven domains in PPAF now and the seventh one is around local authorities. We have asked the APA to take the lead on trying to develop what kind of indicators there could be at local level because clearly police authorities are key to setting those local priorities. At the moment they are working on some methodology but it is quite technical and what we do not want to see is a huge lot of bureaucracy in trying to monitor 43 different sets of local data on a regular basis. We are working on that but we are not there yet on how we can get them to draw on that data. Q326 Mr Clappison: If something does come out of the other end of that process, out of the technical changes of the various bodies to which you have referred (and I will not attempt to emulate you in your mastery of the jargon but I understand why you have to have these different names) will there be something for local people at a local level which they will understand which will measure up to what they regard as important locally? Ms Blears: Yes there will. We want there to be some coherence between the targets of the basic command unit and the Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnership because that is the key relationship at local level. Very often the most effective partnerships are where the BCU commander knows the chief executive of the local authority who knows the chief executive of the primary care trust and they can get something done together. What we want to try and see is whether we can get some indicators that are broadly the same across those partners which ought to be a real incentive for joint working. In far too many cases, not just in policing, the indicators are divergent and you do not have that same pressure. The other thing that we are working towards, and it is mentioned in the Policing Plan, is the possibility of local area agreements, and that is working with ODPM to try and get to a position where we might say to a local community, "Look, these are the outcomes that we want you to deliver. Here are the funding streams all coming in together (which would be hugely welcomed by people in the field) and here is the one reporting mechanism about what you have done." That is a bit of an ideal position to be in. Most local authorities and BCU commanders would be delighted if they had a local area agreement. We have just launched in the last couple of weeks 21 pilots of local area agreements where we are going to do exactly that, where the partners of the CDRP and the BCU and the primary care trust all come together and agree that. What is important is that they must, as you rightly say, translate that for local people into what does that mean for me? What are my priorities in my neighbourhood, in my district? How far are you meeting them and what part are partners playing to try and make sure that that comes together? Q327 Mr Clappison: Her Majesty's Inspector of Constabulary have said that in the plan "national priorities should be few in number, to prevent them being devalued, but sufficiently specific to maintain focus and drive measurable improvements." You have referred to the headline target of reducing crime by 15%. Do you think the other targets which you have set in the new standards for the Public Service Agreement for the Police really reflect what the HMIC are saying about having a specific target which maintains focus? The second target talks about reassuring the public and reducing the fear of crime and anti‑social behaviour. The Public Service Agreement standard refers to "maintaining improvements in police performance, as monitored by the Police Performance Assessment Framework". Are they not a little bit vague? Ms Blears: No, I do not accept that at all. What we have tried to do with the latest version of the National Policing Plan is to slim down the number of national targets and indicators that there are. We have now got five key priorities here around building a citizen‑focused service. That is the responsiveness to the local people and the issues I talked about: call handling; getting a customer service culture into the service; prolific and priority offenders and reducing crime; violent and drug-related crime; concerns about crime and anti-social behaviour; and then serious and organised crime. We have tried to squeeze it down to the top-level things. In previous versions of the plan there were something like 57 indicators; we have got that down to 15 performance indicators in the plan now. I still recognise there are a number of measures underneath that but we are genuinely trying to lift the burden on the Police Service so they are not completely bound up in a web of different targets. If we come to the PSAs, which are part of our commitment over the next three years, the first one is pretty hard - to reduce crime by 15%. It is a pretty tough target and they have all got to play their part in it. I think the second one, which is reassure the public and reduce the fear of crime, is actually indicative of the shift that I tried to explain to you. It is not just about measuring what the police do. It is about seeing what is the effect of what the police do on the public. It is looking at it through the other end of the kaleidoscope, looking at it from the public perspective and being able to measure it through our surveys about confidence, about satisfaction, what was your contact like with the police, what is the fear of crime like, because one of the problems we have struggled with is that crime has been coming down dramatically and yet people's fear of crime and anti‑social behaviour has not been coming down at the same rate. It is now coming down but not at the same rate. There is something about that perception gap that we really need to close. That is about not just being effective, although that is part of it, it is also about the nature of the encounter that you have. Are you doing the reassurance? Do you have a physical presence? What are you like when you deal with the public? Do they get feedback? Do they feel that the system is working for them, particularly around some of our black and minority ethnic communities? Do they feel confident in the Police Service? I think that PSA, too, is about trying to look at the situation from a different perspective but in order to do that you have got to be a pretty high-performing force because if you are not then you will not be able to pass those tests in terms of the indicators about satisfaction. Q328 Mr Clappison: I have one final point on that without getting into a debate about crime statistics. Putting it in the context of crime coming down since 1995 as measured by the British Crime Survey, which you prefer I think, do you feel that you are doing enough on the difficult areas which are causing public concern? You talked about reassuring the public. I think in the list you gave of the five priority areas you did not specifically mention, for example, gun crime, which is undoubtedly causing public concern and disturbing the public who cannot possibly be reassured? What about a target for that given that it has gone up so very significantly in the last five years, in fact a doubling? Ms Blears: Gun crime is mentioned in the National Policing Plan. I would just ask members of the Committee to take it in context. It is still a very small part of violent crime in this country and an even smaller part of overall crime. We did see a significant increase in 2001‑02 when it went up by 35%. If you look at recent figures there was a very, very small increase of 3% and we feel that we are really beginning to stabilise gun crime. Something like 75% of gun crime is concentrated in London, the West Midlands, Liverpool and Nottinghamshire and the operations that we have got there are making a real difference. Operation Trident in Manchester, or Stealth, all of that work, the Multi‑Agency Gang Strategy in Manchester, the people I met last week who are doing that. What I would say to you, Mr Clappison, is that we have tried in this National Policing Plan not to have a plethora of targets for the Police Service. We have heard their pleas that they want less targets at national level but that does not mean that we let up on the pressure to improve. They have said to us less targets at national level and that is exactly what we have tried to do. Q329 Mr Clappison: I understand that, but where something is so very, very serious and it has gone up so much, what about a target for gun crime to get it back somewhere like it was five years ago? Ms Blears: We genuinely feel that the work that is going on is making a significant impact on gun crime, and that we do not want to burden the service with a whole range of targets. We were accused at one point of possibly having a huge shopping list of priorities for the police service. Clearly, they will want to address the things that are important in their communities, because they have responsibility to do that; so where this is a specific issue, I have no doubt they will continue to concentrate on it. The whole purpose of having the overall target to reduce crime by 15 % allows forces with specific issues - and it might not be gun crime; in some places they have said to me that they have a specific problem with prostitution. Not everywhere has a problem with street crime and robbery; it is concentrated in particular areas. It will free up the service to be able to say to a chief constable, "you have a problem around this area; you now have the flexibility within your system to address that." Q330 Mr Prosser: Minister, I want to ask you some questions about accountability. The Government has set up a number of options to make police more accountable at local level and district level, and you have mentioned some of those already; but do you think there might be a danger of having too much accountability to the extent that it might raise public expectations too high, to unsustainable levels, levels that cannot be met; and that we concentrate too much on reassurance policing, to use the jargon we have just used, addressing perceptions of crime and diverting away resources from areas where they could more effectively combat real crime? Is there a danger of too much accountability? Ms Blears: My answer to that, Mr Prosser, is that I do not think there is. All of the research that we have done in connection with our police reform proposals has shown us in a very stark way that local people really do not know who is responsible for what in terms of policing. They really do not understand how the system and how they can get involved and have a say in setting the local priorities. They do not really understand who the members of police authorities are, or their job. All the evidence is that crime and disorder reduction partnerships are not visible and not accountable in the system. I think there is a pressing need to try and make sure that he whole of the system is much more transparent and open to local people. At the end of the day, this is a public service, paid for by the taxpayers of this country, and I think they are entitled to be able to see exactly who does what, what their performance is like, and how they can call each part of the system to account. What I am really trying to achieve - and I have said it in relation to police reform and the national policing plan - is a system of accountability that looks outwards to the users of the service, rather than always looking inward to the centre, to the Home Office, or even upward to Government. That is quite a big transition to make, to get accountability on the streets, rather than necessarily through a system of accountability that is managed at the centre. That is what we are embarked on now. If you think of some proposals around neighbourhoods, what most people really care about is what happens in their street, in their local play area, in their housing estate, in the school where their children go, and that is what motivates and drives them. I think there is a real opportunity to get local people involved at that level, not dictating to the police what they should do, but working in partnership with the police, in a problem-solving way, saying, "we have these problems on our estate; how are we as a community, including the police, the local authority and people from the health service, going to start solving this together?" That accountability, where a police officer has to come back to you every couple of weeks, and look you in the eye and tell you what he or she has been able to do, or perhaps has not been able to do, is pretty strong. I can go on and deal with the district level and the police authority level if you want me to. Q331 Mr Prosser: Do you think there is a place in a traditional police authority for a unit or body which would have wider accountability for those bodies with responsibility for safety in the community for instance? Ms Blears: One of the things that I am very keen to do in relation to the police and plan for police reform is to widen out our focus, not just on the police but on to the wider community safety agenda. That is why I am very keen to look at the operation of the crime and disorder reduction partnerships, which at the moment have a range of bodies on them that can make a significant impact on crime reduction. I do not want to stray too far into White Paper territory, but I am very keen indeed that we have mechanisms to look more broadly than at the police input, and get a real sense of joint working. If you think about the links between drug addiction and acquisitive crime, something like 70 % of acquisitive crime is driven by drug addiction. People who provide our substance misuse services tend to be in the NHS in many cases, and yet making sure they are connected to the system is hugely important. We have just made PCTs responsible authorities to the crime and disorder reduction partnerships; they are just beginning to take on that role. If you think about prolific and priority offenders, something like 5,000 of the most prolific offenders are responsible for about a million crimes in this country, and if we can intervene early in their lives, before they become a career criminal, we have a chance of making a big step change. That means you have to involve social services and the education services, to make sure children are not excluded. You are absolutely right that we need to look broader. I am not entirely convinced that is a role at police authority level, but certainly strengthening that crime and disorder reduction partnership level is absolutely key. Q332 Mr Prosser: We have seen reports in the press that there could be a possible merger between the inspectorates constabulary and prisons and probation service. Can you comment on those reports? Is there any truth in them? Can you guarantee that at the end of any such changes we will still have a continuance of a free-standing, independent inspectorate of constabulary? Ms Blears: First, it is right to say that there is a proposal to try to move towards a single criminal justice services inspectorate. At the moment we have five inspectorates, which on anybody's counting is probably too many. In principle, the Home Secretary and myself are agreed with that in the long term, but we think that clearly it will be some way down the line. I think it is important that we have a clear focus on inspection of our police services. Although I would not say to you that we would have a free-standing inspectorate service within that single criminal justice system, it will be important to have a clear focus on what the police service does. Probably something like 50 % of what the police do is part of the criminal justice system, and something like 50 % of the other things they do is much more aligned with local authorities, which is the point we were making. If we were to move to a single criminal justice inspectorate, I would want to be very conscious that part of our inspection of the partnership process meant being closer to some of the inspection that goes on in local government through the CPA. HMIC are currently developing some proposals around grading, which may well be similar to the gradings for local authorities, so it will not be a simple transition because I do not think the police are just about the criminal justice system; they also have an early intervention and prevention role. It is important to have a clear focus on inspecting our police services, but we are agreed that a move towards a single system for the criminal justice as a whole would make sense, because again you are looking at it from the perspective of the users, who have to make their way through the police, the Crown Prosecution Service, the magistrates' court, the Crown court and the prison service; so there is a logic to having a single inspectorate at that level. Q333 Mr Prosser: The Chief Inspector of Constabulary came before the Committee and reaffirmed his view that there was a gap in the system in that no-one was overseeing and inspecting police authorities. How would you fill that gap - with a single all-encompassing inspectorate? Ms Blears: I do think that police authorities should be inspected. All of the other parts of our organisation are subject to scrutiny, inspection and recommendations for improvement, and I do not see why police authorities should be immune to that. Some of our proposals are about strengthening the role of police authorities. If we are going to give them more powers, then I am very interested in making sure they exercise them to best effect; and therefore they need to be inspected. Clearly, there may well be a role for the Audit Commission in terms of police authorities, and we would need to explore that. I understand HMIC and the Audit Commission have just done a joint inspection on the North Yorkshire Police Authority, so that is one of the early models that we might look at and get experience from that. Q334 Chairman: Do you have any concerns about the constitutional principle of what you are suggesting, Minister? The HMIC is the only inspectorate that has a royal warrant, and police officers are the only people who can arrest us. Do you have any reservations about putting the inspection of that service under the service that is inspecting the probation service for example? Ms Blears: I do not per se, just simply as a matter of history, tradition and protocol, whatever; but I would be concerned to protect, clearly, as I have said on many occasions. Police officers have a unique role in our constitution and our country in terms of their attested status, the fact that that goes to their responsibility and integrity; and that is an important thing for us to hold on to in this country - it is very valuable. Q335 Chairman: You do not think that needs to be reflected in the inspection system? Ms Blears: I am just taking the point you made about ensuring that that integrity and that independent role is properly reflected. I do not see that that means you have to stay with the status quo. Clearly it would be an important issue to make sure that the public have confidence in an inspection process which is not diluting or transgressing the important status that police officers have. It is almost like the role of a solicitor, who is not only representing his or her client but is also an officer of the court, and there is an extra level of accountability there. It is just the same for our police service too. Q336 Bob Russell: Minister, looking to the future of a 43-force, if indeed it is 43, in your evidence this afternoon you referred to the police being more effective, with greater productivity and efficiency savings, can you remind me precisely what efficiency savings the Home Office has carried out? Ms Blears: I think we are subject to the same strictures we have placed on police authorities, in terms of having to make efficiency savings of 3 % over the spending review period, which is the same issue that we have asked the authorities to deliver on. Mr Rimmer: We are now in the process within the Home Office of moving towards a 30 % reduction in administrative costs over the next two to three years, which is a major challenge for the department. Q337 Chairman: It may be the last time we see Mr Rimmer! Mr Rimmer: I hope not! Q338 Bob Russell: Minister, the reason I asked that question is that we hear a lot from head office about efficiency savings, more productivity and more effectiveness, and I am just intrigued to know exactly what head office was doing. Quite often, head office is the last place where you get these pronouncements carried out. The hesitance in the response and the words we have just heard indicate that perhaps head office is not necessarily practising what it is preaching. Ms Blears: Mr Russell, I would hope to correct that. Mr Rimmer did tell you that we are seeking a 30 % reduction in head office staff, and that is a significantly higher request than we have asked any of our police authorities to achieve. Therefore it is the case that we are seeking to bear down on administrative costs at the centre quite dramatically. Q339 Bob Russell: Last November the Government issued its Green Paper and floated the idea of large and strategic forces at regional level and lead forces, which might develop particular specialisms. What is the Government's current thinking? Ms Blears: We have said from the outset that we are not interested in huge structural change for its own sake. We do not have a blueprint in my desk drawer showing a whole series of amalgamations of forces. I have been concerned to see the function we are asking of our police forces, and seeing whether they are capable of delivering that in their current configuration. That is why we have asked HMIC to do a review of force structures on exactly that basis. Do our forces have the strategic capability to deliver not just on local policing, but also crucially on what we call level 2 crime, the cross-border crime that does not recognise administrative boundaries; and is there a need for some of our forces to be brought together in order to deliver that capability? I have also looked at the issue around lead forces taking responsibility for specific functions. The City of London now has lead responsibility for looking at financial crime and serious fraud, and we have given them some funding to be able to do that. I am told that Thames Valley has the lead for dogs, horses and diving. I am not quite sure how they acquired those functions, but they take the lead for that. One other issue that comes to mind is making sure we have the capacity to deal with child abuse on the Internet. You would not expect every local police force to be able to do that; but it is not a local issue, it is global in terms of paedophilia. Again, we need to look at whether we should collaborate or whether we should have lead forces that are able to help their colleagues take on some of these important roles. HMIC will be reporting to us in January on the results of their survey about strategic capability. Q340 Bob Russell: I asked one question and got about half a dozen answers there! Is the future 43-force structure a high priority, or a low priority? Ms Blears: I think I have to answer you, Mr Russell, by saying that I have tried to take an approach to this does not pluck the answers out of the air but is based on evidence. What are we asking the forces to do in order to be able to cope with good neighbourhood level policing, in touch with its communities. We are then going on to deal with cross-border crimes and groups of criminals, some of which are involved in drugs or distraction burglary, who do not recognise boundaries. We are then having to deal with some of the more serious crime issues that we have. Unfortunately, because criminals are ----- Q341 Chairman: Minister, I think we would like to know whether we are going to see a lot of change. Ms Blears: The answer to that is that until I get the HMIC report in January that sets out for me the necessary strategic capabilities for the forces, I do not regard structural change for its own sake as a high priority. Q342 Bob Russell: You mentioned Thames Valley. Do we know if Thames Valley went off on its own to become specialist in those fields, or did other chief constables ask them to specialise in horses and diving? Ms Blears: I am not aware how that came to be the current position. I presume that if they do provide lead services, they are supported by other forces; otherwise, they would not be in a position of providing them. Q343 Bob Russell: Do we know which force is going to take the lead in dogs? Ms Blears: At the moment Thames Valley seems to be doing a very good job. I am not sure if they have any plans to change that. Q344 Bob Russell: If we do have police forces that take lead authorities, what about the funding and accountability? Would there not be a chief constable who wants to become a bit of a hero and want to take on lots of these duties, but another chief constable who wants an easy life and who would be happy to get shot of them but keep the money? How would you arrange for that? Ms Blears: Clearly, if there were proposals for forces to take on significant responsibilities in a collective way, then they would either have to persuade other forces to subscribe to those services so that there would be a real check on quality, because people are not going to spend their hard-earned resources on a product that is not worth having, and we would need to see whether we needed to establish any new accountability mechanisms. Thinking about some of the cross-border issues here, in the old days we had regional crime squads, and for some good reasons they are no longer with us. But if a team were to be set up to monitor that kind of cross-border drugs activity, we would need to make sure they had some clear-minded accountability to ensure that their operations took place in a proper framework. It is early days about exploring some of these issues. All I am saying is that collaboration and lead forces can sometimes be as effective as merger and amalgamation, and I do not want to go down the merger route if we can achieve the same results through people helping each other with their expertise. Q345 Bob Russell: Would lead forces report direct to ministers? Ms Blears: That is a matter that has not been decided. At the moment, as you know, we are in the process of setting up the Serious and Organised Crime Agency, which has some parallels with taking on these complex and specialist roles. That will be a non-departmental public body; its objectives will be set by ministers across government, and it will report to its own board, but clearly the Home Secretary will have a role. There are different accountability mechanisms according to the functions we want people to carry out. At the moment we are only exploring the possibility of lead forces. These are very important issues you raise that we would need to explore. Q346 Bob Russell: Would there not be a danger that a lead force would become so directly associated with the Home Office that there would be a feeling that perhaps policing in the provinces was being directed from the centre? Ms Blears: I think almost the opposite. We are saying that there is a huge amount of resource, intelligence and skills out there in our police services. We are encouraging them to share that expertise rather than to be directed from the centre. If I give you one example that was mentioned to me in Suffolk on forced marriages, the people there said, "if we had a case like that, it happens so rarely for us that we would have difficulty finding out where to start". If you went to a force where that was a fairly common occurrence, they would be able to help you enormous in setting up systems and making contacts, and telling you how to deal with that issue. Q347 Bob Russell: Coming from Essex I am tempted to make a comment about forced marriages in Suffolk, but I will avoid that. If we do have lead forces, is there a danger that this could lead to a skill void in other forces because the experts with a particular specialism may transfer to a lead force, which would be to the detriment of the other forces in that area? Ms Blears: We are very keen to increase the skill levels of all of our work force in the police service, and that is not just police officers; it is police staff as well. Rather than denuding areas of skills and expertise, if you work in a joint operation very often you take back with you increased skills and knowledge because of the collaboration you have been involved in. We anticipate not necessarily permanent structures of lead forces, but people coming together to work on operations. If a gang of serious drug dealers is marauding up and down the M62, how can we get to Greater Manchester to work with West Yorkshire? How do we get a team really concentrated on this? When they go back to their forces, I would hope that they would have acquired some more skills and competences to be able to enrich their forces rather than denude them of it. Q348 Bob Russell: Minister, you have now moved from a lead force to forces sharing experiences. With the greatest respect, there is a world of difference between a force becoming a specialist and several forces sharing experiences on one or two operations. There is a difference, is there not? Ms Blears: There could well be a difference, and it could well be a matter of degree, but I do not think it is either/or, that you have one force that solely concentrates on something. I am very keen, as I have said before about the improvement agency, that we start to spread good practice. Wherever we have expertise, we should be learning from each other, not saying that we keep that expertise to ourselves and keep it close, but that it should be much more of a service for the whole of the country. Q349 Chairman: Two years ago Sir David O'Dowd said the savings in bureaucracy could free up the equivalent of 20,000 police officers. How many thousand police officers have we freed up in the work done on cutting bureaucracy in the last few years? Ms Blears: I cannot give you a specific figure on the number of police officers, but what I can tell you is that we have made significant progress on trying to cut the bureaucracy in the system. Something like 7,700 forms have now been made obsolete across forces. All 43 forces now undertake video identification parades, and the feedback I have is that that is hugely welcome. It means you can do ID parades in a matter of hours, rather than the weeks it used to take; and that has a significant impact on detections and convictions. We have the introduction of Airwave now, and 72,000 police officers and staff are using Airwave. There is much better communication, and Airwave as you know, Mr Chairman, is not just capable of voice communications but is also capable of data communications. That is an area we need to press on. I have been out in North Wales where they are using mobile data - Palm Pilots - to be able to send information directly back to the station rather than having to record that when they are out on the beat. In Stafford they have similar issues there. Q350 Chairman: How do you measure the outcome of this in terms of police officer time freed up? I accept these are all-important contributions to freeing up officer time, but how do you measure the progress in terms of equivalent extra police officers we have got, because we have got them out of the police stations and away from the paperwork? Ms Blears: In two ways. For the first time we have done activity-based costing, in the last year. That has gone through exactly how a police officer spends his or her time - what they do in a typical day of the week. From that, we have been able to draw together a measure of front-line policing. It is the first time we have ever had data on this in the police service. We have now seen that across forces the amount of time spent on front-line policing is on average 63 %. We believe we can drive up that proportion to 73 % by cutting bureaucracy, re-designing the service, getting more civilians involved; and that would give us an extra 12,000 equivalent police officers at the front line. The reason I cannot give you an assessment now is because only for the first time have we started to get that measure of front-line policing so that we can now assess the impact of some of the measures I have outlined to you - not all of them. Q351 Chairman: On the basis of information you have now, can you tell us which is the worst and which is the best force in the country, in terms of freeing up officers from bureaucracy or at least making most use of front-line staff. Ms Blears: I would say the average figure is 64 %. Mr Rimmer: Gwent is the lowest at the moment and Bedfordshire is the highest at 70 %. Gwent is 54 %. Q352 Chairman: Everybody else is within that. Ms Blears: Yes. I have actually got all your details here with me! Q353 Chairman: Where would a member of the public go to look up this information? Is it on the website? Ms Blears: I am not sure that it is yet on the website. It is a very early measure. Q354 Chairman: Three years ago the Home Office did the Diary of a Police Officer project to see how police officers spent there time. Is it now time for the Home Office to repeat that exercise? Ms Blears: The Diary of a Police Officer has become incorporated into the activity-based costing we have done. We have turned what would be an anecdotal story into hard evidence. I think that is a very useful thing for us to do because it will enable us to drive the figure up from 63 to 73, which will get us the extra 12,000 officers out there; so we have gone from a diary into something that is hopefully more useful. Q355 David Winnick: In regard to special priority payments, they have been described as divisive and not working as they should be, and are moreover unpopular. Do you feel the criticism is somewhat unjustified? Ms Blears: I think it is very early days really. Although they were agreed some time ago, they were only actually paid last December for the first time, so it is a bit premature to decide that they are divisive. The evidence is that they embed themselves or will be, but they are being used usefully to try and award people in front-line posts, in those posts where it has been difficult to recruit, and to make a public statement that these posts are tremendously well valued. There is a project going on at the moment in Surrey force, where they are reconfiguring the whole of their basic command unit to try and increase the number of civilians doing jobs and release officers for front-line policing; but one of the ways they have used the special priority payment is to reward the lead police constable. I was talking about PCs having leadership responsibilities, and they have used the special priority payment to recruit the police constable who is then prepared to leads a neighbourhood team of CSOs and wardens. Increasingly, as the system beds in, the forces will use them in a more innovative and imaginative way, to reward people at the front line, so it is far too early to say they have not worked. Q356 David Winnick: But you are going to assess it at some stage in the near future, are you? Ms Blears: Yes. We did an early assessment, and as a result of that we increased the threshold of the special priority payments that could be paid up to 40 % of the total amount of the force because there was pressure on us to do that from forces that wanted to include more people in the system. We have asked them to let us know their criteria so that we can start to see whether they are being used in the way all of us want them to be used, and that is to reward those front-line people doing the most difficult jobs in the service. Q357 David Winnick: Minister, did you see The Secret Policeman? Ms Blears: Yes, I did. Q358 David Winnick: What was your reaction? It was presumably, to anticipate your answer, the same as ours, I suppose. Ms Blears: I said at the time that I was appalled. I was shocked, and one of the worst things for me was looking at the training school and the fact that people who came out with these totally unacceptable views and attitudes, and horrendous ways of treating other people, actually felt they were safe to do that in the police service. They felt that it was okay, that they could get away with that and that somehow they would not be challenged. To me, that was the most telling part of the system, and it doubly galvanised me into making sure we try and create a climate and culture in which nobody who has those attitudes feels the police service is a place for them, and that they are safe in expressing those kinds of views, which are completely anathema to everything we believe in in a proper police service in this country. Q359 David Winnick: The programme dealt with trainees, recruits, some of whom I understand fortunately have been excluded from the police force. How far do such attitudes linger in the police force as a whole - what might be described as police canteen culture? Ms Blears: I think that in recent years we have made significant progress. One of the reasons we were so shocked is because I genuinely think it is not the norm. The police service does inevitably reflect society - we recruit from the general public and inevitably will have some recruits who come in with some of these attitudes. The test on us is whether or not we have robust enough systems to make sure we find them, and that we are then able to exclude them from becoming police officers in the first place. I do not for one moment deny there will be some people with racist attitudes that come into our police service, but we have to re-double our efforts at every level of the service - not just recruits, but also supporting trainers so that they can challenge the things that are out there. Q360 David Winnick: Will disciplinary action be taken against those police officers who come out with the same sort of remarks if there are such police officers, which you accept however few they are - and let us hope they are few - but if they came out with the same sort of remarks as shown on the programme The Secret Policeman would they be disciplined? Ms Blears: Absolutely. The Association of Chief Police Officers has made that crystal clear; that there is no place for people with those attitudes in the service. They will be disciplined. Also, ACPO has taken the step of saying membership of the British National Party is inconsistent with being a police officer, in terms of carrying out their duties. We have introduced a really rigorous recruitment test that in 2003/4 has found 1208 recruits who failed on the diversity element of that recruitment process; and despite the fact that they might have passed on every other element and are excellent, if they fail the diversity threshold they are out. There is no place for them in the police service, and we have excluded them. Q361 David Winnick: Are those people applying to join the police force actually asked, "are you a member of BNP?" Ms Blears: There are proposals now to introduce that into the application form. It is very recently that the chief officers have taken this decision to say it is inconsistent with being a police officer, and there are now proposals to put that in the application form so that people will be asked about that. In the course that they undergo, they are tested on their attitude to diversity in seven different situations, so it is a pretty rigorous test of their attitudes. David Winnick: On a policy of excluding fascism and racism from the police force in our country. Q362 Mr Clappison: I support you entirely on excluding the British National Party, but can you tell us a little more about what the diversity test means? Ms Blears: We try and have a range of situations for recruits to be placed in so that we are able to test their attitudes. My understanding is that it is not just about race; it is about attitudes to older people, people with disabilities, and attitude to gender. We want to make sure that we get recruits in the service who respect everybody with whom they are dealing, irrespective of where they come from and their gender, their disability and their sexual orientation, so that we have a good police force. Q363 Mr Clappison: Are they expected to demonstrate certain attitudes as part of that testing? Ms Blears: There is a test about how they deal with people and the nature of the encounters they would have with people. I have not personally sat through the assessment centre, so I am loath to give you the detail about the actual role-play. Much of it is role-play, which explores how you respond to particular situations. Q364 Chairman: Can you provide an outline of that? That would be useful. Ms Blears: Yes. Q365 Mr Green: What question do they ask about BNP membership? Do they ask, "are you now a member?" or "have you ever been a member?" Ms Blears: I have not seen the question, but my understanding is that it will be: "Are you a member, or have you ever been a member of the British National Party?" because they are saying membership is incompatible with being a police officer. Mr Rimmer: To be clear, although this was ACPO policy, the Government has now put forward to the Police Advisory Board, which makes amendments to employment regulations, a specific proposition which the Board has accepted, to have a regulation barring anyone with membership not only of BNP but of similar organisations; so there is a fairly broad test in terms of inappropriate and racist organisations. That is being put into regulations because it could clearly be challenged in the courts. This is not now just ACPO policy, it is something we are proposing to put on a legal basis. It is BNP and similar organisations. Q366 David Winnick: We do not want Hitler lovers in the police service. The aim of the Home Office, Minister, is to have black and ethnic minority people within the service - a 7 % target up to 2009. However, the Metropolitan Police Service considers that that target is totally unrealistic. What about more positive action in order to achieve the target? Ms Blears: First, let me make it clear that we have made significant progress in recent years, not just in terms of police officers but also police staff and support officers. Q367 David Winnick: When you say "significant progress", as I understand it the figure overall is 2.5 %. Ms Blears: 3.3%, but in the last year we have doubled the number of recruits from minority ethnic communities. I entirely accept that the numbers are far too low, but they were, dare I say it, even lower until fairly recently. We are making some progress. Q368 David Winnick: I am sorry to interrupt! Your fluency is excellent, Minister, but we have to pause - and that is praise not criticism. Is the target set by the Home Secretary going to be reached by 2009? Ms Blears: All I wanted to just make clear was that for the majority of forces, they will meet their targets. The Met has a specific problem because it is such a large force, and the distance for it to travel is so much greater. I am conscious of that. If they were going to be on trajectory to meet their target, they would have got 4 % this year - I hate to say these words, on trajectory to meet target. They narrowly missed that and were at 3.3 % this year[1]. I am increasingly conscious that I do not want to set them completely impossible targets, because if targets are going to be useful, they should be realistic but stretching. I think we should have another look at the targets we have; but that does not mean for one moment that I think we should not really keep the pressure on here, because it is an overwhelming imperative that our police service should be representative of the community that we serve. The Met does some good work, but I do not want to have a target that is so unrealistic that it undermines their commitment to wanting to press on. That is a fairly complex position to be in. Also, I do not want to just have a target that is not going to be met and everything is a failure, because we are making significant progress. If you look at the numbers of support officers in London, half of them are from ethnic minority communities. That is not a panacea, but quite a lot of them will transfer into a regular service, so it is another route through. The second issue I have asked them to look at is how we go and recruit for what is called genuine occupational qualifications under the race relations legislation. If people need a particular language in order to talk to their community, we can press on with that, but at the moment I am not convinced of the desirability of moving towards a change in the law that would provide for quotas, for positive discrimination. I do not think the National Black Police Association are convinced of that either. Certainly ----- Q369 David Winnick: They are, Minister, because as I understand it - and you will obviously correct me if the organisation has changed its mind - the information I have is that the National Black Police Force Association has proposed alternative action. Are you rejecting that outright? Ms Blears: No, there is a difference between affirmative action and positive discrimination. We have been trying in the service to positively go out and encourage people to apply. For example, in Birmingham they have a double-decker bus that goes out to some of the communities where people from a whole range of different ethnic backgrounds are living, and a real recruitment drive. The Met has had a couple of big recruitment fairs, particularly led by people from a range of communities who are Met police officers, going out and encouraging people that they live and work with to come into the service. All of that positive action is going on, and it is bearing fruit because we are getting more and more people coming through. There is then another big step, moving from positive action into positive discrimination, which would require a change in the national law and would then take us into the realm of quotas of people being awarded positions on that basis. That is hugely controversial. The National Black Police Association said we should have a debate, but they are not convinced that quotas are the right route to go for, because they clearly want people who come into the service to be respected on their merit in terms of the contribution they make. Q370 David Winnick: However much one talks about the difference between positive action and affirmative action - and there are differences - at the end of it all there does seem to be a difference between the views of the Police Federation and the National Black Police Association as to how far action can be taken, either by targets as now, or more firmer action, whichever words one wants to use. If, at the end of the day, it is clear that the targets are not going to be met, either in the Met or outside, particularly in places like London and Manchester, where there is a sizeable black community - and in some boroughs in London it is no longer a minority - would the Government consider the possibility of taking action along the lines that have been sometimes advocated - be it positive action or affirmative action - a change in the law in effect? Ms Blears: At this stage we want to explore whether or not we have really used the existing legislation to its best effect. Have we taken every single step we can within the limits of the legislation? I am not satisfied that we have done everything we can. That is why I have asked them to explore things like language. Are there attributes people have so that we can draw them through the service? What can we do to support people who are already in so they do not leave more quickly - because quite a number from ethnic minority backgrounds leave after their first couple of years' service? What is going wrong there? We should have proper exit interviews with them. They should have mentoring, buddying, and support through the service. There is more than we can do before we get into the realms - which has huge difficulty - about positive discrimination, rather than that extra action to recruit people and support them through the service. At the moment I am not convinced we have to be in a position of changing the law. Q371 Mrs Dean: Minister, what assessments have been made of the career break system for police officers? Ms Blears: At the moment there are 776 people on career breaks. It has been a policy approved and taken through the various machinery that we have for this kind of thing. I understand it is only one person of chief superintendent or above who is on a career break; so the vast majority of police officers are police constables. They can have a career break for up to five years. They are not paid during that career break, but their rank and their pay point is preserved for them for when they come back to the service. As far as I know, the system is working pretty well. It provides people with the ability to go and get other experience. Quite a lot of the career breaks are in the Met in London, clearly because of the size of their force and the opportunities open to them. The vast majority of the 776 are police constables. Q372 Mrs Dean: What systems are in place to keep officers up to date with the new developments whilst on those breaks? Ms Blears: Clearly this is a matter for the chief constables, because they are responsible for managing them. They can get refresher training and keep up to date with some of the science and technology that is coming along so that they can make a contribution when they come back into the force. It is a matter for the chief constables to manage the career break in an appropriate way. They are responsible to make sure they are available to give evidence - as I understand that might have been a cause of concern to the Committee - and making sure that their absence does not have a damaging effect on the operation of the force in general. You make a very important point, Mrs Dean, about refresher training and making sure people keep up to date. We invest a lot of money in training our police officers, and we want to make sure that that investment is not wasted. Q373 Mrs Dean: Has it been successful in keeping people in the police force? Ms Blears: I do not have details of a specific evaluation of the 776 career breaks that we have had so far. If I can find out any further information, I will gladly send that to you. Q374 Bob Russell: Why has the Government announced the recruitment of a further 20,000 community support officers before completion of a proper evaluation of the effectiveness of the first 4,000? Ms Blears: Let me say that there has been a number of evaluations of the introduction of community support officers. In fact, we have had 27 local evaluations of their impact in the forces where they were initially recruited. That has shown us overwhelmingly that they are popular with the public, and also that they are having a significant impact on reassurance and the job they were initially designed to do, which was being out there and a visible uniformed presence patrolling the streets. Interestingly, with the introduction of the national reassurance policing pilots we have had in the last year or so, we have begun to get some more evidence of the impact of police community support officers. The reassurance pilots are in 16 areas up and down the country. It is a new way of policing and very much about neighbourhoods, communities, engaging local people, the panels - getting local people to set their priorities. I visited a whole range of those pilots, and many of them are neighbourhood teams of police officers and PCSOs. It is interesting that in Leeds city centre, when they introduced the PCSOs, robbery came down by 47 %, so that physical reassurance on the street was important. Vehicle crime came down by 31 %. I am not saying that all of that is attributed to the PCSOs, but it happened when they were deployed on the streets of Leeds as part of that reassurance. Similarly, we have a number of reassurance pilots in the Met district. I visited Enfield and I have been out to Bexley, and something like 60 % of residents felt safer in the areas where community support officers had been introduced. In addition to the local evaluations, we now have a national evaluation underway. We will have an interim report by December of this year and a full report by next summer. It is a very extensive evaluation, looking at surveys before and after, and looking at the impact. It is a big cohort. I just think that the introduction of community support officers has been hugely welcomed out there, on the ground and in the streets. They are doing an excellent job, and very, very often they are doing it together with their police officer colleagues. It is this combination that is so valuable to us. Q375 Bob Russell: Do you regard therefore police community support officers as being an integral part of the uniformed police family? Ms Blears: Yes, I do. When community support officers came in - and you, Mr Chairman, were hugely instrumental in taking that - I could say brave and courageous step, but brave and courageous in political terms has certain connotations! Q376 David Winnick: That will bring him back into government. Ms Blears: At that time it was quite a departure from a traditional way of looking at policing in this country. I have said, and the Home Secretary has said that they are here to stay. They are doing a good job. We want to make sure they have powers commensurate with the job we are asking them to do, which is primarily to tackle low-level anti-social behaviour, and provide a visible presence. I see them very much as part of the extended police family, together with some of the wardens operating in our communities, and the civilians who are releasing our officers to do their jobs on the front line. This is about getting a proper range of skill mix in the service so that the officers who are fully warranted and who have the whole set of powers are able to be released to do some of the things that only they can do. Q377 Bob Russell: Why then do you think the Police Federation have not embraced them into their membership, to the extent that I understand some community support officers are seeking membership of trade unions - the Transport & General Workers' Union - and so on? Ms Blears: At the moment the community support officers are classed as police staff and they are therefore eligible to join the trade unions, and many of them are in Unison. That is a really good thing, that they are being represented. We think that working with the trade unions and the Police Federation is a very important part of how we run our business, so I am delighted that they are represented by a whole range of trade unions, including the T&G. In terms of the Federation's approach to CSOs, when we introduce any big change in any organisation, inevitably there is some concern and sometimes resistance. People want to know what they will be doing - "will they be diluting my role; will they be trespassing on the things that I do?" This is about managing change, reassuring the police officers that rather than undermining them, they are there to help them. As I say, my experience is that PCs and sergeants in many cases wonder now how they managed without them because they have really been absorbed into the team. The Fed are now doing their focus groups, looking at CSOs, and Mrs Berry in her evidence said that she thought the CSOs were doing a useful job in terms of the patrolling that they were out there to do. It takes time for people to feel comfortable with something that is a radically different step - but I am sure we will get there. Q378 Bob Russell: Minister, what is your response to Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabularies recent report of a future strategy for the civilianisation? How much scope is there for a unified system of pay and conditions within the police service? Ms Blears: What we want to try and do with our police reform process is to get a more unified service as far as we can. At the moment we have a very, very strict demarcation between police officers and other people, and that does not just apply to their pay and conditions; it has also in the past applied to access to training and qualifications. The very fact that they were called civilians painted a picture for us that there were uniformed staff and civilians. They then went from being civilians to being support staff, so again they were seen as not quite second rate but in a subservient role. Now they are police staff, and I am delighted about that because I want to see the police staff having access to senior leadership roles and proper career pathways, personal development, training and qualifications, and being valued as a really important part of our system. Valuing one part of the system does not mean you devalue the other part of the system, and that is what we all have to learn; that valuing the CSO is not devaluing the police officer in the same police staff. We are all trying to do the same thing, which is to fight crime and make our communities safer places for people to live. Q379 Mr Singh: Minister, science and technology is going to be hugely important in the fight against crime. What are the Government's priorities for science and technology in terms of policing? Ms Blears: We have our first ever science and technology strategy now, so it is good for government to start with a strategy, is it not? The challenge is to make something happen from it. There are three priorities for us. In fact I have a copy here. There are three big issues for us. The first one is being aware of the nature of the threats that face us, both in terms of criminology but also terrorism, and making sure we are fit to respond to that; and secondly making sure that we use intelligence in a proper way. It reaffirms what I was saying before about turning the service into a service that anticipates problems - horizon scanning - sees what the next thing is that is coming. A huge driver behind street crime was the introduction of mobile phones. Something like half of all our robberies involve a phone, and something like a third of them were phone only. We have to think of the next thing the criminal wants to acquire. Is it the laptop or the DVD or portable player? We constantly need to be thinking ahead, so it is a matter of using that intelligence. The third thing we have to do is make sure that we share information in a better way, and I think that is now an overwhelming priority for the service, whether in terms of Bichard or at a local level. Those are our things, but the practicalities are making use of our DNA database in a better way. We now have 2.5 million entries on the database, including my own. Again, where we make matches with crime scenes, then our detection rates go up dramatically. We have to make sure we make use of the livescan fingerprint units. We have 198 of those in forces up and down the country, where you can get immediate results from fingerprint scans, and a video ID. ANPR, automatic number-plate recognition was piloted in a number of forces, and we are about to roll that out nation-wide, using the netted off parts of some of our speeding fines and traffic measures in there. If you look at ANPR, the arrest rate is something like ten times what it would be for an officer not using ANPR. This is smart, intelligent policing. You can see I am excited by it, because it means the police are using the tools at their disposal to make a significant extra impact. We are on the road now with science and technology and have to press on with this. For DNA we are one of the best in the world. Sometimes we follow America for lots of things, but actually we have a better DNA database than anything they have got out there. They come to look at ours, which I think is great. Q380 Mr Singh: The HMIC concluded that call handling will be a weakness for the police. What is wrong with the way the police currently handle calls? Ms Blears: This is a really important area to highlight, and this is a big driver behind what will be a big theme of our White Paper, around customer service culture, responsiveness, call handling. A lot of dissatisfaction of the public depends on that very first encounter when they contact the police; and if that is a bad experience, that translates into what they feel about the police service as a whole. Therefore, getting minimum standards around what people can expect - and hopefully better than minimum standards - that that is the least you can expect in terms of the way you are dealt with, the nature of the first contact, the feedback you get, how calls are graded, the response to emergency calls and the response to non-emergency calls. We said in the five-year plan that we want to see the introduction of a single non-emergency number that perhaps gives you access to a wider range of services than simply the police service. All those issues around call handling go to the heart of what people really want out of their police service. A couple of our forces have been doing some good projects. In Staffordshire they have looked at their 400 top users, regulars who use their services, and they have looked at what are the important issues to them. Just by some small changes, they have increased satisfaction enormously. People want somebody on the other end of the phone who can deal with their problem, as opposed to being pushed from pillar to post - a simple issue like that, or promising to come within a certain time, even if you cannot come straight away, saying, "I am not coming straight away but I will come within this time", and doing it. That has a huge effect on people. Lancashire are doing a similar kind of thing. It is a very important area for us. Q381 Mr Singh: Is that the basis for what the Home Secretary has called the "Copper's Contract"? Ms Blears: Very much so. This is about people at local level knowing how they can contact, what the response will be. In North Wales on Friday they launched a website, and if you put in your postcode, what pops up on the website is a picture of your beat officer, together with his or her e-mail address, and mobile phone number. You can immediately contact them. That is just fantastic and exactly the kind of thing we want to see up and down the country - who your officers are, how you contact them, how they get back to you - with some proper standards about the nature of your relationship with the police service. Q382 Mr Singh: I understand HMIC are doing automatic inspection of call handling. Does the Copper's Contract not pre-empt the conclusions of that inspection? Ms Blears: They will feed into each other because we have said that we want to develop the standards over the next few years, because clearly there will be a lead-in time to develop these. The Police Standards Unit is also looking at some work around best practice in these areas. Again, it is the usual story, that some forces are doing very well, but it is not across the board. As we develop those standards - we have said they will come into effect in November 2006, and all of that thematic work and the Standards Unit work will feed into that. At the end of the day, hopefully we will get some standards that, again, instead of just being imposed from the centre, are owned by the forces because they think it is important to be accountable to their communities out there. Chairman: Thank you very much indeed, Minister. [1] The police service strength target of 4% for minority ethnic police officers was narrowly missed at 3.3% Minority ethnic police officer strength in the MPS stands at 6.6% |