Select Committee on Office of the Deputy Prime Minister: Housing, Planning, Local Government and the Regions Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 79-99)

17 SEPTEMBER 2003

DAVID BAINES, RHYS GRIFFITHS, PAUL TAYLOR AND DEREK CARTWRIGHT

  Q79  Chairman: Could I welcome you to this session of the Committee's inquiry into social cohesion and ask you to identify yourselves for the record?

  Mr Taylor: Station Commander Paul Taylor. I am I am the Station Commander at Oldham Fire Station.

  Mr Cartwright: I am Derek Cartwright. I am the Director of Operations for Greater Manchester Ambulance Service.

  Mr Baines: I am David Baines. I am the Chief Superintendent, Greater Manchester Police and I am the Police Commander for Oldham Division.

  Mr Griffiths: I am Rhys Griffiths. I am the Senior Divisional Officer and Area Commander for the Oldham, Rochdale, Bury and Tameside areas of Greater Manchester Fire Service.

  Q80  Chairman: Thank you very much. I understand one or two of you want to make brief opening statements.

  Mr Taylor: In the submissions provided to this Committee Greater Manchester Fire Service offers the view that greater emphasis on longer term initiatives is necessary if sustainable inter-community cohesion is to be achieved. Principal considerations are funding streams, availability and duration, greater involvement of the Fire Service at strategic level and far more inter-community engagement. The Fire Service is uniquely placed to assist in this process by virtue of its neutrality and ability to engage across all communities, thereby addressing the fractures that are presently being identified. In response to the Ritchie Report, Greater Manchester Fire Service has seconded a firefighter from Oldham Fire Station to work full time on developing inter-community initiatives. Over the past 18 months he has successfully worked with the voluntary sector, other organisations and singularly within the borough. Many of the initiatives have involved disaffected youths.

  Mr Cartwright: Since the difficulties in this area some two years ago Greater Manchester Ambulance Service has focused on three broad themes. First of all is the work in the community on the ground and this is basically around help in the community of which our staff are very aware. They work in the estates and on the ground in people's houses every day of the year, and that has given us a unique position in that environment to be able to work within that community in terms of drugs, in terms of developing schemes which will bind together the community on the ground. Another area is to develop cultural awareness amongst our staff, and this has been a major piece of work that has been going on over the last two years across Greater Manchester but in particular in challenged areas such as Oldham, and to improve the organisational population to ensure it properly represents the community which it serves in terms of cultural mix. Those are the three broad things to which we have been working.

  Mr Baines: David Baines from Greater Manchester Police. Having taken command of the division in January 2002 I was tasked with the responsibility of looking at the comments within the Ritchie report and implementing them with a change of structure as to how we delivered policing services within the Oldham area. Two key issues were to make officers more accountable to the communities they serve and in particular the distinct communities they serve. A copy of that restructure document has been supplied to the Committee together with our response to Ritchie. Other issues that are key to our approach are the rebuilding of structures both internally within our organisation but also with partners so that we are able to respond to some of the key issues raised by Ritchie, not least with the media, myth busting, dealing with rumour and innuendo on a very speedy basis, and you should have found that in some of your evidence about the number of meeting structures that take place within Oldham and with our partner communities.

  Q81  Mr Clelland: Can I ask you all about your work in identifying and tackling tensions between different communities and how you work with the council and other public agencies in doing that?

  Mr Taylor: Following the riots we identified that we were able to move within communities because we have been regarded as unbiased. Consequently, we found that we had something to offer but we did not know where to turn. The County Fire Officer, Barry Dixon, then instigated the provision of a local liaison officer, fire fighter Jeff Leach, who then undertook to contact the voluntary sector and other providers within the community in order first to identify what role the Fire Service could play. They found that we were able to offer life skills provision and instruction and education within Fire Service premises in a project that was called "Fire Team Experience". It has been such a success that the local providers of funds have taken it upon themselves to invite us to look at a more strategic approach across the Greater Manchester area and perhaps have the provision of funds made to duplicate the efforts that have been made in Oldham.

  Mr Cartwright: In common with other parts of Greater Manchester, but in particular certain areas of Oldham, we have developed some community schemes where there is partnership with the community. We are aware, of course, that there are sub-groups within the community where there are frictions and we have been working in areas such as Glodwick and St Mary's to develop community responder schemes which not only helps to have real impact on the people in that area in terms of life saving activities, but also brings people together in those particular communities, and that has been an ongoing programme. It has been very successful in other parts of Oldham, in Diddle and Delph and it is work that is ongoing. It is not easy and it is not going to be something that is going to be completed over next week but it is a progressing issue that we have apportioned resources to in terms of a community responder manager focusing on that particular project. Also, we have employed a race relations manager who is helping to get into the communities to ensure that we make maximum impact when we have recruiting campaigns so that we can be properly representative of the communities which we serve.

  Mr Baines: It is bread and butter stuff, obviously, for policing, particularly after the experiences of 2001. First of all, to talk about the force, how have we responded to whether we have enough information about intelligence to do with community hate and tensions? We found that we were missing some information at a force level because ostensibly there are two types of race incident that come to our attention. One is the straightforward racially aggravated crime which features the criminal law, and the other is described as a hate incident which can be a perception that without breaching the law somebody dealt with me differently because of either the colour of my skin or my ethnicity. Structurally, we have merged those two systems so that any hate incident or racial crime is reported and recorded as if it were a hate crime; in other words, there is a single reporting system, so we capture trend data both on the criminal offences themselves but also on conduct and behaviour issues that run parallel to it. Does that make sense?

  Q82  Mr Clelland: Yes, but my question really is about how the force interacts with the local authority and other agencies working on these problems.

  Mr Baines: Those issues coming together form the basis of our weekly meetings with the Race Crime Incident Group meeting that brings in housing and education and covers every single incident that is discussed, whether it be a hate crime or a hate incident, so that we are able to bring our collective responses together in partnership terms to make sure that we tackle any emergent trends or the specific incidents on a partnership basis.

  Mr Griffiths: To add to Paul Taylor's comments, as well as the work that is being done on the ground by our community firefighter Jeff Leach, we have at strategic level appointed a community outreach worker in the brigade and we have made great efforts to remove barriers to recruitment and have improved cultural awareness training amongst our firefighters. I also meet regularly with the local councillors who represent Oldham MBC on the Greater Manchester Fire Authority.

  Q83  Mr Clelland: You say that you have worked on the ground. How do front line workers in your three organisations work together on these issues on the ground?

  Mr Baines: First and foremost the thing that followed on from Ritchie was the restructuring of the divisions to match our partner agency boundaries so we adopted the nearest thing that was there with our partners, which was the ward system and the area committees, which ostensibly identified the different communities of Oldham and enabled us to bespoke-tailor our policing service and style to service their needs in a sensitive way. That also enabled us to identify key community beat officers who work in the different areas. I think you met Phil Buckley(?), who is one of those officers, and again there is continuity and consistency in building trust and confidence between the community and ourselves. That was at the front end. In addition, behind that we have an inspector who runs each area and who is the nominated figurehead for policing in their area and ensuring consistent service. We speak almost on a daily basis or incident basis with officers engaging directly with Ambulance or Fire If there are any concerns across our three agencies in dealing with an incident, we normally initiate it because we will take the first call as police. We will raise issues about risk assessment (or there may be a race element included in it), or whether there is anything we need to be aware of so that we can give our operational officers as much information as possible to make them as effective as possible.

  Mr Cartwright: Just to touch again on how the services work together, there are common themes in terms of the 999 Challenges, which all three services support with youth in Oldham and in Rochdale. The more recent one has been about rebuilding the canal boat and that type of thing, working together on projects, and the Crucial Crew type of initiative where we have trained 2,200 young people in Oldham over the last 12-18 months, 10-11 year olds from all communities, in different aspects of each service.

  Q84  Dr Pugh: Can I ask you for a little bit of clarity on this definition of race crime or hate crime? You seem to say that you include in hate crime and race crime two types of things: one where there is a gratuitous insult or attack on somebody because of their race, but you also include in the race crime an incident where there is an element of racial aggravation in a quite ordinary crime, a burglary, an assault or whatever, and those are all put together under the one heading.

  Mr Baines: Yes. We are able to break them down but what is important is that we identify every incident that has a racial element or potential racial element to it. In line with the Lawrence definition of what racism is, if any person perceives it to be racist it is recorded as such. Sometimes those incidents will not be a straightforward breach of the criminal law but they will be an indication, for instance, name-calling that is offensive and affects quality of life issues. Road rage incidents are the obvious one where people have cut someone up and generally there will be, "This person went past and they were mouthing. I do not know what they said but I am pretty sure it had some racial element".

  Q85  Dr Pugh: So if somebody comes to the police station and makes an allegation the allegation may not be substantial enough for it to be worthwhile following up in order to get a conviction but it will still be recorded, it will still be logged and it will still be there in the stats?

  Mr Baines: Yes. To simplify it, where a traffic warden has booked a person for a breach of the criminal law, there may be an allegation such as, "I have been treated differently and your actions were racist", so that would be recorded as an incident.

  Q86  Dr Pugh: And, observing all your statistics, what are the trends at the moment?

  Mr Baines: Up to the riots of 2001, and I have brought documents to show this, we jumped literally from an average of about 40 per month before the riots to 100 in the month before the riots, then through the month of the riots we had 350, and then it dropped dramatically and stayed level at about 100 incidents per month until December 2001. Since then we have seen a significant decline, even though we have merged those two systems together, and we are running now on average at about 40-45 incidents a month, and that has remained constant. The interesting factor is that whilst we have remained constant in Oldham other divisions are reporting significant levels and are reaching the levels that we recorded. Historically Oldham always had at least twice as many racist incidents as other divisions or areas.

  Q87  Dr Pugh: The Association of Chief Police Officer's Optional Guide for the Management of Inter-Ethnic Conflicts emphasises, in addition to the usual tasks, matters like restoring peace, keeping the peace, building peace and doing something called managing normality. What special skills are now required for these new tasks on the part of the force?

  Mr Baines: I think managing normality, depending which area you go into, is a very grey area. There is no formal training in managing normality. It is very much based on a judgmental decision by police commanders on the ground about how you deal with a particular issue.

  Q88  Dr Pugh: What about building peace?

  Mr Baines: Most of that is by the structured response of how we take forward police action in those areas where people are suspicious of police activity and how we build confidence and trust in the police afterwards.

  Q89  Chairman: Can we pursue a little bit this question of racially motivated crime and the higher offence that it causes? It was put to me yesterday by an individual that there was a problem in that you could only really count it as the higher offence if you got a conviction but the temptation was that you put in a prosecution and then just before it got to the court doors the Crown Prosecution Service and the defence solicitor cut a deal, which meant that you withdrew the more serious offence for a guilty plea on the lesser offence. There are two consequences of that. One is that it ceases to go down as a conviction for racially motivated crime and, secondly, as far as the magistrates are concerned, when they are looking for orders for them to make in terms of punishment or accepting their responsibilities, they cannot send them to those people who might be trying to deal with racial difficulties.

  Mr Baines: The figures and statistics I quote are very much as reported and are not affected by the consequence of conviction later.

  Q90  Chairman: No, but there is a criticism of the police that you get these high levels at the start and you get very low levels at the bottom and I was trying to pursue whether you were happy with the way in which deals were cut before court.

  Mr Baines: Talking about deals cut before court, it will be the identification of the facts by either the barrister or the solicitor who is prosecuting a case and quite often they will say, "I am not content that we will be able to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that the racial element perceived by your victim can be proved at court, and I have got an admission and I suggest that you take it". There is a tension between those and indeed most of you will know about Walter Chamberlain, who was the elderly gentleman who was severely bruised and featured all over the national newspapers. When that matter was dealt with at court we actively pursued the issue of racial motivation and it was directed by the judge that there was insufficient evidence that this assault was any more than loutish behaviour and was not racist. There is a difference and there is a tension. Our actions are taken to get as many prosecutions as possible and, where clear racism or a racist element exists, to provide best evidence to allow cause to sentence appropriately.

  Q91  Chris Mole: What feedback are you currently getting about the level of tension between communities in Oldham? Has the situation changed significantly since the situation two years ago?

  Mr Baines: Yes. There will be two levels. We have a formalised meeting where every agency can implement both the formal and the informal level, so there is a cascading down and a receiving back on a weekly basis of what tensions are taking place. Equally, every one of the local authorities has a contact number with myself and a relevant area inspector to make it happen, and if there are issues of tension starting to emerge I will get a phone call, I have no doubt about it. In fact, I have had several this morning relating to two key issues that are starting to raise some tensions in the community, and I have just picked up on one of them to do with the selection of the management team for the Pakistani community centre.

  Q92  Chris Mole: You mentioned local authorities. What about channels of communication with the local communities themselves? What do you have?

  Mr Baines: The local authority have set up via their area committee meetings regular meetings with their communities across the board about any issues of concern. We have negotiated a police presence on each of those meetings that take place virtually on a monthly basis, so the community can come with the less urgent issues about tensions and concerns that take place. Our intelligence network, as far as how we record tensions and what is evidenced in that, operates on a daily basis to every officer, and any information that comes in is reported to us, whether it is actually reported as a racist incident or it is reported that there are tensions taking place. They feed into the system. We have produced a grid or matrix of what tensions exist across the board and we split those into four issues for discussion. One is racist issues that are straightforward racist. Another is crime issues that are affecting communities. Another is economic and the other is political. Those are the four key areas we look at to identify which is the key agency that should lead on any one. Obviously, racist issues and crime issues I lead on. If it is political there is a reference across into Andrew Kilburn, the Chief Executive, for discussion there, and if it is economic it is fed into the local authority, whether it be housing, education, health, so that it can be taken forward to whoever is most appropriate to deal with that issue.

  Q93  Chris Mole: There is a view that in some communities the community leaders tend to be older men. How do you try to communicate with women and younger people?

  Mr Baines: The Greater Manchester Police Authority has a separate section in it which is the Greater Manchester Police Youth Workers, and following the riots they have worked extensively with those groups of hard-to-reach people, with Asian females particularly, and also young people, although it has to be said that it is predominantly young men, particularly in the Asian community. Once the concerns are expressed by the youth worker a meeting is set up via myself with those, so there is an opportunity to get hard-to-reach groups in a full scale, head-on, what-is working-and-what-is-not meeting to discuss what their concerns are, why they think the policing approach is difficult or different. Those meetings take place either in specific youth clubs or specific community sections via specific schools, and have led to a sort of engagement at various levels. What we were finding was common concerns being expressed about policing by young people regardless of race or colour. They were the same issues but the perceptions attached to them were different. For example, if it was in an Asian area, let us take call handling, "You were slow arriving at us because we get a second-class service because you are racist in terms of dealing with policing issues". The same complaints were being made when we failed to respond in a predominantly white area but the comment there was, "You are late because you spend all your time in the Asian area and we do not get the level of policing that we should get". We have actually brought those groups together and allowed them all to have a pop at us, and actually they all agreed that they had got the same issues. There is an issue here about how we deal with young people but it does not have a race connotation with it. It has been evolutionary and has led to 230 or so kids, in conjunction with our partners, coming to Hough End, which is the police training school, and having a day which was serious. It was talking about race issues, drugs, stop and search, their rights when they are stopped by the police but we also placed emphasis on responsibilities, and then we built in fun with it as well. The idea was mixing people from communities who traditionally do not mix because they do not go into each other's geographic area. When they worked well as a team we built on that experience by taking them out on some adventure days—whitewater rafting, ballooning, that sort of thing, that allows young people in different areas from different backgrounds to engage with each other as the basis for some relationships to start to grow.

  Q94  Chris Mole: Can I ask the Fire Service about channels of communication? Which ones do you have and do you find that your perceived neutrality helps?

  Mr Taylor: Our perceived neutrality is of enormous benefit. As far as communication channels are concerned, we have a programme of daily contact with various voluntary groups within the community centres where we operate a referral system that targets those disengaged from mainstream education. We also have a programme of school education including: "Learn Not to Burn" and "Crucial Crew". We have also recently instigated a process of street engagement utilising aspects of Fire Service activity that brings us into closer contact with the public but we had disengaged from. We now travel down streets, the personnel get off the appliances, talk to the community, provide fire safety messages but also deal with other issues such as vandalism, car crime and such like, so on a daily basis the Fire Service is in some way involved and communicating with customers.

  Mr Griffiths: We also contribute to the Crime and Disorder Panel with the police that David Baines chairs.

  Q95  Mr Clelland: Chief Superintendent Baines, you have talked about community policing and the patch responsibilities of some of your officers. How popular is this in terms of building up trust and confidence with the police? Is it working?

  Mr Baines: The community love it. The tension I have got is obviously in not having the consistent presence of those officers at a time when I am trying to manage demand. Ideally I would like to ring-fence them and not move them away from their community beat areas, but if I am short of officers because they are under training, on leave or on a rest day, sometimes in order to fill the patrol vehicles to do a response I have to bring them in and use them. The other tension I have in Oldham is that the age profile of my officers is fairly young, so with that there is extra training. I have fewer drivers and fewer tutor constables, so therefore it tends to be the community beat officers who have that driving experience, skill basis and tutor capability, so they automatically become the only option I have got when I am short of a driver or tutor.

  Q96  Mr Clelland: So it is popular amongst the community but not very popular amongst your officers?

  Mr Baines: There are two styles of officer. The community beat officers are volunteers in the first instance. Their tension is that they get pulled away on other priorities. Indeed, there was a public "Voice on Policing" meeting where the community was saying, "We are fed up of you taking our officers to go into the town centre", because on a Friday and Saturday night it is sometimes a bit like the Wild West and we need to put sufficient officers in there for their own safety. There is a tension between pooling resources and managing.

  Q97  Mr Clelland: How do you see the future panning out in terms of retaining talented officers in the community?

  Mr Baines: Two things have happened. First of all, with the new Chief Constable, he has secured extra funding that will give the force 800 extra officers, 53 of whom are coming to Oldham. That will be a significant increase in the level of resources and, once I have trained them up to driver skills and past their initial training period, it will stop me having to move community beat officers to fill the resource gaps created. That is the first thing: 53 extra officers coming our way. In addition, the local authority have funded public community safety officers. We got 16 from the Home Office funding to start with and they have gone down very successfully and have a second tier patrol capability that fills the gap when we are going from job to job. They have to step in as tension comes down after a particular incident. We had 16 appointed to start with and in the latest bid we got seven, but on top of that Oldham Borough Council have agreed to fund 24 extra PCSOs to work in the various townships across Oldham and that will give me greater visibility of people with policing badges all over, accessible to police radios, and they become extra eyes and ears, not only for criminals but also as recipients of information and engaging with the communities.

  Q98  Mr Clelland: So ideally how long will the community beat officer be within that community? From when he began until he retires or somewhere in between?

  Mr Baines: It comes down to the individual officer. You get some officers who will go in and they will do two years, five years, in some cases they will do ten or 15 years, but it is all down to their aspirations. If they suddenly decide, "There is a new job starting and I want to join the firearms unit", or, "I want to become a detective", there is an issue about career progression, or indeed if they seek promotion, because most of our community beat officers are obviously at PC level. What we are trying to do is create a sort of interim layer, that we have community beat sergeants, and whilst they are taking on some of the respective responsive role we would like to create a smaller geographic area for them to be responsible for, and that is part of the township policing model: a small team of officers responsible for a smaller community rather than policing the whole of Oldham. It is about consistency, it is about visibility and it is about accountability to the communities.

  Q99  Chairman: Do you think they really get enough status for the job they do?

  Mr Baines: Probably no is the answer.


 
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