Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1
- 19)
WEDNESDAY 8 SEPTEMBER 2004
MR CHRIS
FOX, MR
GUY GARDENER,
DR TIMOTHY
BRAIN, MS
JAN BERRY,
MR CLINT
ELLIOTT AND
MR RICK
NAYLOR
Q1 Chairman: Good afternoon, ladies
and gentlemen. Thank you very much for coming to give evidence
this afternoon. This is the first session of a brief inquiry that
the Committee is taking to look at progress on police reform.
The police reform process started towards the end of the year
2000 under the previous Home Secretary at Lancaster House. It
was then followed by a police reform White Paper and legislation
from November 2001. The Committee felt it would be useful to spend
two or three sessions of our time looking at what has happened
in the three or four years since the process started, what lessons
have been learned, what the achievements have been and what the
future direction of reform might be. I should put it on the record
before we start that I was the Police Minister at the time the
police reform White Paper was published in the year 2001, so was
heavily involved at the start of this process. I am sure I can
rely on colleagues not to spare me any criticisms as a result
of that, but I would also encourage those who are giving evidence
to the Committee not to hold back if there are any justified criticisms
of policies introduced at the time. It would be very helpful for
the record if, starting with Mr Naylor, each of the witnesses
could briefly introduce themselves and the organisation they represent.
Mr Naylor: I am Rick Naylor; I
am the President of the Police Superintendents' Association of
England and Wales which represents roughly 1,500 superintendents
and chief superintendents in the 43 forces plus the National Crime
Squad.
Mr Elliott: My name is Clint Elliott;
I am the General Secretary of the Police Federation of England
and Wales which represents around about 135,000-136,000 officers
up to the rank of chief inspector in England and Wales.
Ms Berry: I am Jan Berry and I
am the Chairman of the Police Federation of England and Wales
representing precisely the same people as Clint.
Dr Brain: I am Tim Brain; I am
the Chairman of the Chief Police Officers' Staff Association which
represents all chief police officers in England, Wales and Northern
Ireland in respect of pay, conditions of service, discipline and
related staff matters.
Mr Fox: I am Chris Fox; I am President
of the Association of Chief Police Officers and, as you will gather
from Tim's presentation, we do not deal with terms and conditions,
we do not deal with contractual issues, we deal with policy, policing
operational advice and structures and I represent the senior management
of all the territorial forces and the specialist organisations,
not just police officers but specialist members of support staff,
IT, HR, finance directors, etc.
Mr Gardener: My name is Guy Gardener;
I am the Head of Policy at the Association of Chief Police Officers
and, as such, have been working on coordinating the police side
of reform issues for the past two years.
Q2 Chairman: There are a substantial
number of witnesses. I myself—and I have asked members of
the Committee to do the same—will try and direct the questions
to named individuals and you will understand that it will not
be possible to bring in every individual or every organisation
in on each point, but everyone should get a fair shout during
the course of the discussions. When the Government launched its
White Paper in 2001, they were pretty clear about the problems
they wanted to solve: they said that although crime had come down,
crime levels were too high, public fear of crime was too high
and too few criminals were being detected and convicted and, if
you looked across the country, the performance of police forces
varied significantly between individual police forces and individual
command unit areas within police forces. So, the obvious question
is, three years or so, perhaps four years, after the police reform
process was started, have we made anything better and I ask that
of Chris Fox?
Mr Fox: Not surprisingly in such
a broad agenda, some progress has been made more quickly in some
areas than others, but some of the things I think we have seen
relate to a very strong performance culture being embedded in
the Service. Within the Standards Unit, there is a measurement
of police performance in terms of something called The Police
Performance Assessment Framework which is a very sophisticated
process. So, a mechanism has been developed and is being driven
through into forces. Some forces are, if you like, picking up
and getting up to speed more quickly than others, but, in turn,
that is beginning and has already begun to drive performance in
the right direction and the Standards Unit has already worked
with various forces to improve performance in certain areas. So,
that is a definite plus. I think it is fair to say that there
has been some duplication of effort and that would be one of our
concerns in that some of the new organisations looking at developing
professional doctrine, for example the National Centre of Policing
Excellence, have produced some excellent work as has the Standards
Unit but there are Home Office projects often overlapping with
professional ACPO projects and I think there is something we could
do to rationalise the work and make that more efficient. I think
we would like to have seen workforce modernisation and the development
of leadership training move a little quicker. That has been hard
work and I guess that not surprisingly we would probably like
to have seen that move faster. Some of our innovation has been
a little restricted by some very inflexible rules of funding and
the need to keep numbers of police officers high and so forth,
which has distorted some of the imaginative ideas that are out
there in the market.
Q3 Chairman: We will touch on many
of those issues in questions but, to press you, in terms of what
the Government have said they want to achieve for the public,
can you today say, "We have had three-and-a-half years/four
years of police reform and crime is down, the public fear crime
less and we are catching more criminals"?
Mr Fox: In all, save detections,
we can demonstrate an upward curve of performance. The British
Crime Survey will show crime moving downwards in all directions
in every category over quite a long period. This has been distorted
somewhat by changes in crime recording. So, when you look at the
police numbers as against the British Crime Survey, they do not
always match but they are all moving in the same direction. Fear
of crime has reduced quite significantly in the past 18 months,
which I think is probably the time when the impact has begun to
be felt. Detections have not increased but the detections are
part of a very complex mix and sometimes, to pursue a detection
to the point of being able to write it off as a detection, when
the individual is going to face a two year or three year sentence
in any event for what has been detected, sometimes it is not seen
as good use of time when we could be moving on. We have the offender,
perhaps a prolific offender, we have taken them out of circulation,
there will be no further sanction by pursuing other evidential
trails to prove a detection, so we have not really totally been
successful in detections.
Q4 Chairman: Jan Berry, that is quite
a positive assessment overall of the impact. You represent the
sergeants and police constables with the vast bulk of your membership
put together; how does it seem from a Police Federation point
of view over the same three-year period of time?
Ms Berry: I think from the point
of view of the areas which are being counted, the Police Service
has demonstrated that it has improved in that period. I do not
think that as much investment or time has been given to those
areas which are not quite so easy to count. That is now beginning
to be addressed with, rightly, far greater consideration being
given to community policing and how policing at a very local level
is delivered, and I think that the plans for the Serious Organised
Crime Agency are going in the right direction as well although
we have some concerns about the infrastructure of that. I think
what has not happened in the three years is the investment and
commitment being given to training of police officers. I do not
think we have in place a qualification or accreditation system
that can acknowledge and accredit skills in any meaningful way.
We have the start of it there but I do not think it is there in
any meaningful way, and a lot of things have been put into workforce
modernisation but I do not think that any of those have been evaluated
in any scientific way to be able to demonstrate whether they are
actually improving performance in a meaningful way.
Q5 Chairman: The Government have
already embarked on discussion of a second phase of reform looking
at police powers, structures and accountability. If I came to
the Superintendents' Association, are the things that are on the
Government's agenda for the second phase of reform the issues
you would put highest on your agenda?
Mr Naylor: Yes, they are and we
are very hopeful that the promised White Paper coming soon in
the late autumn will demonstrate that those areas will be addressed.
We feel there needs to be a root and branch look at local accountability
of the police, not just the people who pay the price but also
the public accountability of the police. That is as close to neighbourhood
level as possible and our members do support that; they are quite
willing to go along with that level of accountability and work
in partnership as they have been working in partnership up and
down the country, but to get that far greater embedded in ordinary
everyday policing than it is at the moment, so we are hopeful
in that respect. The Superintendents' Association also are looking
for some indication about the structure of the whole of the English
and Wales Police Service. We feel, probably not supported by our
other colleagues along this bench, that the time has come to look
fundamentally at the 43 police forces as we now have BCUs in the
country who are larger than some police forces. For instance,
we have a BCU that encompasses the whole of the City of Bristol
with approaching 2,000 staff which is bigger than probably 10
police forces in England and Wales. We also have a BCU which is
the County of Cornwall which is probably at its longest axis about
120 miles from border to border, which again is a very large area
under the command of a chief superintendent. So, we feel there
needs to be some sort of understanding. Things may have got out
of kilter and we feel that, through the BCU structure, we can
develop and deliver local policing. However, there needs to be
a structure above that BCU structure but what it is probably not
aligned to the 43 forces we have at the moment. We have put forward
in our evidence to the Government Green Paper that we support
a National Police Force developed on regional lines and we feel
that that would actually help in the seaming up from the local
through what we call level two crime, the cross-border crime,
to the national and international criminal scene and obviously
developing accountabilities along that model as well. We are hopeful
that the Government are going down the right track with the promised
phase two of police reform and we are waiting with anticipation
for the White Paper.
Chairman: Chris Fox talked about performance
culture and we will look at that in more detail now.
Q6 Mr Singh: I think most of my questions
will be primarily directed at Chris Fox but, if somebody feels
very strongly about something, please come in. We have had the
police reform programme now since 2001 and we have had considerable
extra resources. Do you think this is adequately reflected and
included in the crime statistics?
Mr Fox: As I said, the figures
that are produced show a very good trend in crime statistics,
whether it be in fear of crime or actual crime across the whole
piece. The resources that have been put in are sharpening up the
Service to actually become more focused on the things that matter
to the public. What we have seen is that we have had tremendous
success in terms of domestic burglaries and vehicle crime, down
39% and 30% over a period of time, but actually the public are
concerned specifically about the behaviour on pavements, the anti-social
behaviour, the threatening environment that they sometimes feel.
We have ignored that because our target-setting process was very
specific at bulk crime, at those particular issues. So, the mechanism
that is in place now is hopefully more sensitive to that and will,
we hope with the next phase reform, involve local people a lot
more closely in directing police action against the things they
want. The convoluted answer to your question is that I think we
have had success in the areas that we set out our success in actually
to the detriment of other areas that were not on the list, but
we are now moving to a phase where I think we will capture more
areas much more satisfactorily at the place where people work,
rest and play.
Q7 Mr Singh: So, you foresee a continuing
improvement in the crime statistics.
Mr Fox: Always a hostage to fortune,
but we feel optimistic that they can be driven down considerably
further and that is why we are signing up to the next round of
public service agreements to achieve just that.
Q8 Mr Singh: Just to clear this up
because I am still confused between the different picture that
the recorded crime shows and the British Crime Survey shows. Which
is the one that the public should have confidence in? Which is
the one that politicians should have confidence in? Which is the
real one?
Mr Fox: I am not a statistician
but, if we go back to the mid/early-1990s, the British Crime Survey
was used continually to show poor police performance because the
numbers that were in the British Crime Survey were seen to be
much higher than the numbers on police recording. So, we have
reviewed the way in which we actually record crime and we now
record crime based on the opinion of the person who is reporting
it rather than the opinion of the officer who is looking at it.
So, it is recorded and that means that our numbers have gone up
but, in terms of the British Crime Survey, they were already capturing
those because they were interviewing people about the experience
of crime. If the British Crime Survey was saying in the early
1990s that there was a problem in bulk crime and there was a problem
in response times at that point, I think we would be quite legitimate
in now using the same methodology to say, "The British Crime
Survey says that these figures have reduced in all categories
and even in violent crime if you adjusted it for the change in
recording." That is a statistical argument but the gist is
that the British Crime Survey has been consistent. When it was
working against us, we took it on the chin and I think it is fair
that we use it to say that we are making progress. People feel
safer, that is the biggest step forward.
Q9 Mr Singh: Coming to detection,
we have more bobbies on the beat, we have community support officers,
safety wardens and a whole heap of new people out there. We have
CCTV cameras burgeoning out all over the place. Yet, detection
rates continue to worsen and not to improve. What is going on
there?
Mr Fox: I am not sure that they
have worsened; they have in some places but it is different whichever
part of the country you look at. What is going on there?
Huge amounts of effort first of all in professionalising our evidence
gathering and presentation of evidence in court. Courts are very
demanding and we have had to improve our performance in that area
and that is why we have worked with the Crown Prosecution Service
and now we have a joint team between my organisation and the Crown
Prosecution Service to develop proper standards of evidence because
we have found that our newer officers are not as well equipped
as they should be and that is back to Jan's point about professionalising
and improving the performance of staff by training and development.
I think our point at the moment is that I would hope to see a
change in that performance over the next few years but we have
had a massive input in trying to improve the way in which we deal
with the criminal justice system and the ability of our staff
to actually put forward good cases that will withstand professional
cross-examination.
Q10 Mr Singh: As a chief police officer,
is this one of your top priorities in terms of the message that
you give to your force?
Mr Fox: I have to say that it
is not a top priority because the top priority is currently to
reduce crime and detecting crime does not always reduce crime.
You can put a lot of work into a neighbourhood or an estate, town
or village which is about stopping crime happening. So, our major
effort is to take away the causes of crime and stop crime. It
is a second tier. One of the ways to prevent people committing
crime is to catch them and convict them and actually bring them
to book. So, yes, it is a second tier piece of work.
Q11 David Winnick: There is one form
of crime which obviously, as we all know, sadly is not going down
and that is gun crime and increasingly, though the media understandably
gives a great deal of attention and headlines to it, it is causing
increasing worry, not just because of the soldier who lost his
life just returning from Iraq, but hardly a day goes by without
some news of a murder taking place involving guns. Do you have
any views as to how this could be tackled far more effectively?
Mr Fox: You will not be surprised
to know that we have quite a big group of people actually focusing
on that very problem because gun crime, yes, has increased and
the use of the weapon has become more prevalent, but these uses,
these actual incidents, are happening in some very specific communities
and some very specific areas. It is very localised and therefore
we have to try and find out how best to impact those communities
and those people because it is an issue, with great respect, across
the whole of Britain. It is very, very hard-core criminals who
either use weapons at random sometimes or are more likely to enforce
a territorial war around drugs. So, it is about tackling all those
themes. Certainly, we have a lot of action and we have seen particularly
in London, with Operation Trident, and in Manchester with some
of the operations there against the gangs, that it can be turned
round. So, we are now trying to use those tactics in other parts
of the country where weapons are being used.
Q12 David Winnick: Do you think greater
priority could be given by the Government, the Home Office obviously
being the Department, in looking upon this as a crisis point where
far more action needs to be taken by the police and other agencies?
Mr Fox: The central role of Government
in this is bringing all the different departmental work to bear.
I think there is a big onus on us to get to grips with it, but
you need a lot of work in the educational work, in the social
work world and in the youth education world because there is a
culture growing up about the credibility of carrying weapons.
Q13 David Winnick: It is a status
symbol almost.
Mr Fox: Exactly. So, the Government's
role is in bringing all those threads of business to bear on the
problem and I think that is in an embryonic stage but, as I have
said, it is such a localised problem often that you need a very
localised solution.
Q14 Mr Clappison: Very briefly, without
getting into the statistical complexities of the crime survey
and recorded crime, I was a little concerned regarding what you
were saying about your targets and bulk crime because whilst bulk
crime, as you put it, vehicle crime particularly and domestic
burglary, is serious in its own way, would you accept that the
crimes which worry the public the most are the violent crimes
and the sexual crimes where people feel there is going to be an
impact on them which there would not be in the case of a vehicle
crime, very annoying though that might be, and that the police's
priorities need to be in kilter with those of the public? We have
seen some problems in some areas where the public perception is
that the police's priorities are not theirs when it comes to matters
such as motoring offences and serious offences such as violence.
Mr Fox: There are a number of
threads in that. First of all, domestic burglary and vehicle crime
were not chosen out of the blue, they were chosen at a time when
public opinion was appalled by the level of them. If we go back,
we can think of joyriding, as it was called, with pictures of
estates, racing and stolen cars. It was of epidemic proportions.
The focus was put upon that, the principle being that if bulk
crime and crime in general was reduced, people would feel better.
That was wrong. What we have to do is to reduce crime but we have
to also reduce the crime and the incidents that matter to the
people in that area and they will be different around localities.
That is a lesson learnt. The complexity of policing, when you
move on to road traffic, is that there are lots of things that
the police have to do. We have to be able to deal with terrorist
incidents, we do police the roads, we are involved in everything
from lost dogs and stolen property, so that business goes on and
occasionally perhaps it gets out of balance but, at the moment,
we are absolutely sure that we should be keeping our eye on bulk
crime but developing local response and giving local people the
opportunity not only to have their say but to have some sort of
control over what is actually happening locally.
Q15 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: I have two
questions and some clarifications on earlier points that you made.
There a number of organisations now which have been established
and have existed historically to actually help the police improve
their performance, but you referred earlier on to the expression
"embedded competence" and I wonder if you could just
add some meat to that because I would be very interested to know
how many police authorities are really taking on the task of auditing
and self-improvement and how you feel that particular exercise
is developing. You then went on to discuss detection rates and
I was very interested to learn that you link detection rates with
successful cases to the CPS and their, presumably, successful
cases at court. So, could you just tell me whether or not detection
rates have improved as a direct result of gaining more convictions
at court or whether or not they have improved but where you have
failed is to convert your file into a successful CPS file and
then on to court.
Mr Fox: The process of performance
management, if you like improving performance, is almost threefold.
The first is making sure that the whole organisation is focusing
on the things you want to focus on; the second is having some
targets in order that you have some clue about whether or not
you are getting anywhere; and the third is to have a scrutiny
process to allow people to see whether this is being done in the
right way. Has it been done ethically and with integrity? If you
go back four years, you would probably have seen a minority of
forces with some of those in place. You will now see that all
forces have those functions in place to different levels of sophistication
because it is being learnt, but what we are seeing is that now
we have a much more defensible process of measuring police activity,
we feel more confident about making progress. This has meant that
police authorities feel more confident about asking questions.
Previously, a question would be asked and answered with several
different measures. Now we are agreed about where we need to make
progress, so it is much easier to audit. Police authorities are
learning how to do that. I think some of them would say that they
do not have the resources to do what they wish but the Police
Standards Unit is monitoring police performance in every force/every
BCU in the country all the time, so there may not be a need for
it to be duplicated. On detections, the actual prosecution part
is only part of them, but that was our most difficult part. A
detection is counted for juveniles that are cautioned and adults
who are actually cautioned who do not go to court, so they are
counted as detections also and matters taken into consideration.
"Taken into consideration" still means that you have
to have the evidence to be able to prove it if necessary. So,
I majored on the piece about having good investigative skills
to get the evidence, good presentational skills to present the
evidence and good relationship with your prosecutor to make sure
that, when it comes to prosecution, you are agreed about whether
you have the right evidence. That was our weak suit, I think.
Q16 Mr Singh: You mentioned the Police
Standards Unit just then and I would like to know what your experience
of that unit is and also your experience of the National Centre
for Policing Excellence. How effective are they? Furthermore,
is there not a huge confusion now with those two agencies, the
Home Office, HM Inspectorate of Constabularies and yourselves?
Are there not a number of bodies trying to do similar or the same
things and is that not causing problems?
Mr Fox: I think I said at the
beginning that one of the issues that we did see as a concern
was some duplication of effort and we hope that the next phase
is going to rationalise some of that because particularly my members
actually service all those bodies. Most of them are involved in
working and researching for the Centre for Policing Excellence
and we have people seconded in the Standards Unit, so it is in
our interest to get that right. So, you are right, there is duplication.
That is not necessarily confusion, it is inefficiency and we could
do it better. The Police Standards Unit has done, in my view,
an excellent job in defining a mechanism of understanding
police performance and an excellent job in monitoring it. Another
part of their business is actually looking for why people are
successful, why is this area doing well and this area is not doing
well, and trying to transfer the practice. That is the area where
the duplication begins because you will see that we do that as
well. There are Home Office working groups that do that and sometimes
the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit or the Cabinet Office, to take
the street crime action, lessons learnt, there are a number of
people in the same business and we want to see that somehow rationalised
if we can. So, the answer is, yes, there is duplication. The Centre
for Policing Excellence has the potential to be something very
special. I have to say that it is struggling in terms of resources
because its aim was to have a suite of standards, of national
standards. This is the sort of standard you can expect from your
Police Service. No matter where you are, this is how it would
work, this is what you will get and we, as officers, know what
we have to work to to meet that standard. Obviously we cannot
do that all at once, we have to build it up and we have looked
at the police use of firearms and, looking at the data management,
there are five or six other standards/codes of practices being
developed, but it is struggling to move at the speed we would
like because I do not think that it is quite as resourced as it
should be.
Q17 Mr Singh: What is the difference
in the role between the Inspectorate and the Police Standards
Unit?
Mr Fox: The Police Standards Unit
monitors police performance, perhaps in a cold, calculating way.
The Inspectorate looks at that performance in the context of the
area that is being policed. In the context of, okay, the performance
is good or bad, but is the leadership good? Does it have the infrastructure
of information technology? Is it overbalanced in terms of operational
staff to headquarters staff? It puts it in a professional context
and interprets that and offers that advice to the Home Secretary
and to the Chief Constable of the Police Authority to say,
"Here is your performance as measured by the Standards Unit
which you and the Standards Unit have agreed and here is our interpretation
of why it is, how it is and what you need to do to improve it."
Q18 Mr Singh: So, you see them as
complementary bodies and not doing the same thing?
Mr Fox: There is a little bit
of overlap but I think they complement each other.
Q19 Mr Singh: ACPO argues that the
police training organiser Centrex should not have been given responsibility
for operating the National Centre for Policing Excellence. Is
this causing problems?
Mr Fox: I do not think it is causing
problems, it is the position we felt at the time. The National
Centre for Policing Excellence has a two-pronged role. The first
is about those codes of practice and standards which actually
are driving the Police Service. The training agency obviously
needs to train officers and staff to deliver them, so there is
a link. However, that centre has a very operational base as well.
It looks at major crime and major incidents, debriefs them and
offers them advice and expertise when these incidents are happening
in various parts of the country. It is subsumed in a much larger
organisation and subject to the vagaries of that organisation's
budget and we think that it ought to be more operationally based
and setting its own route rather than at the vagaries of a massive
training budget.
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