Examination of Witnesses (Questions 240
- 259)
TUESDAY 12 OCTOBER 2004
SIR KEITH
POVEY AND
MR PAUL
EVANS
Q240 Mr Green: So what changes would
you like to see in the next one?
Mr Evans: As Sir Keith has indicated,
you have gone from the establishment of a performance culture
that dealt with national standards, and I think what you will
see now is a move towards local accountability, in that probably
we will see more interaction with the officer on the beat, working
with other members of community partnerships, to deal with issues
that have local significance—anti-social behaviour, alcohol,
abandoned cars, that type of thing. It will probably depend
on the neighbourhood—as we push now local priorities. I
think you are going to see more accountability at the local level
which will probably be pushed further down the chain of command.
Q241 Mr Green: When we talk about
local priorities, do you mean at force level, at BCU level?
Sir Keith Povey: That is a challenging
question, because the move forward in the White Paper I am sure
is about more local accountability, more community involvement,
more community identification of priorities. I think we are going
into uncharted territory in a way, because how do you identify
that community, and where is the accountability of the BCU commander,
for example, for delivery of priorities identified by that community?
Cornwall is a BCU with a BCU commander. Where is the community
in Cornwall that is going to identify the priorities to which
the local commander is going to be held to account? You have to
go even further down to very neighbourhood policing, inspector,
sector policing. But although most people would sign up to empowerment
of local communities in identification of priorities and holding
deliveries to account, that is fine; the devil is in the detail
and in the implementation of that.
Mr Evans: I have had an opportunity
to go around to many forces, and what I am seeing is a geographic
accountability. I have visited Graycliffe just recently, where
the Chief Superintendent took me around to four different local
community policing teams, right in local community housing, situated
in a number of things where they were really in touch with the
community, met with the community on a regular basis and knew
the community's concerns and did their best to accommodate those
concerns. So in many ways it is happening, that kind of geographic
responsibility, accountability, and meeting with the community
and trying to address those community concerns at the lowest levels
of some organisations.
Q242 Mr Green: You both paint a picture
that in a sense is going to have to become more complex in terms
of setting targets if there are different geographical levels
where they are appropriate. Do you find that target-setting is
actually a driver of improved performance?
Sir Keith Povey: Most certainly,
yes. I would actively encourage target-setting, provided that
you have identified the priorities, you know what the performance
measures are, you know what the targets are to achieve those priorities
and there are not too many of them.
Q243 Mr Green: Do you think there
are too many targets now?
Sir Keith Povey: I do not think
there are too many priorities now. In the Policing Plan coming
out I think there are going to be five, but I did make the point
at one meeting I was at that there are five priorities in the
first chapter, and as you read through the Plan, there are other
targets, targets about ethnic minority recruiting, there is a
target about sickness levels, there is a target about medical
pensions, and if you pull all those together—and I suggested
they be pulled together in an annexe but it was voted down—then
it becomes a little bit less manageable, I think. What BCU commanders
and what chief constables have to do is identify those targets
that are important to their areas and will impact on their communities
and then major on those. If I could just pick up on one thing,
it is this word "accountability" that I think is difficult,
because if you have a neighbourhood policing team that is working
in partnership and in close relationship with communities and
trying to deliver priorities, that is fine. Accountability to
me infers some degree of sanction where it is going wrong, some
ability to actually move people, discipline people, and the rest
of it. That is real accountability. The only person that can do
that within the force is the chief constable, and I think you
need absolutely clear lines of accountability throughout the organisation
from PC through BCU commander, but when we start talking about
accountability to communities, I think we need to find a different
form of words that imply what it is that community wants from
that deliverer, and what it is that deliverer can do, and what
happens when it falls down, when for one reason or another the
targets are not being met.
Q244 Mr Green: Do either of your
organisations actually try and measure the impact of targets on
performance?
Sir Keith Povey: Yes, on a regular
basis. All the targets within the annual Policing Plan are those
targets that the inspectorate activity will look at in relation
to achievement.
Q245 Mr Green: You can disaggregate
that from everything else that may be going on inside a particular
force?
Sir Keith Povey: No. I suppose
that is the strength of the inspectorate. Whereas, as Paul said
earlier, PSU is about statistics, is about targets, is about achievement
or non-achievement, HMIC is about actually applying a professional
judgment to that and putting that whole performance in the context
of everything else that is happening within the force that would
not even show up on the Police Performance Assessment Framework
radar. One simple example: if you look at Cambridgeshire and you
look at what happened in Soham and the massive resource that was
dragged into that, of course, performance went down and targets
were not met, but you need to put all that in the context of what
was happening at the time.
Q246 Mr Green: One final question
is the standard attached to the new PSA target 2 is to maintain
improvements in police performance as monitored by PPAF. Is that
not a bit vague? Can you not say that target has been met even
with fairly trivial improvements?
Mr Evans: One of the targets—PSA
1, I believe—will be a reduction in crime by 15%, which
is a significant amount. What is not happening is identifying
the specific: there will be so much in burglary, vehicle crime
or armed robbery. Basically, it is about the crime that may be
the priority of the local neighbourhood. I think another one of
the targets will be 1.25 million offences brought to justice.
So there continue to be significant performance measures that
must be met.
Q247 Mr Green: What value is added
by this standard then? I take your point that those are specific
targets against which performance can be measured. This standard
just feels like verbiage really.
Sir Keith Povey: I do not set
the PSA target, but there is a point. When you look to maintain
or improve performance, you have to give some clear steer as to
what that means for each individual force, where they want that
to get to, otherwise an improvement of 0.1% would mean that they
had achieved that particular target. I am not sure whether the
National Policing Plan will put some flesh on the bones of that
PSA 2.
Q248 Mr Prosser: I want to continue
with the issue of local accountability at community level and
district level. The Government has set out a number of different
models for its level of accountability. Can you give us your view
of which ones are desirable and which ones are not, and why?
Sir Keith Povey: As I was saying
earlier, I am absolutely signed up to that neighbourhood level,
local level and district level, that forces, BCUs, sector teams,
embrace those communities, identify what the community priorities
are, and set targets to actually deliver those priorities, and
are then called to account when those targets are not met. The
point I was making about accountability is a different one. I
think the complexity of it is—and in Wales, I am sure, you
would have clearly identified communities at neighbourhood level—in
some forces, some of the major metropolitan forces, even in the
Metropolitan itself, with 32 BCUs, some of which are bigger than
forces, how do you actually identify that particular community?
I am not saying it is impossible, but it is a challenge, and it
is a challenge well worth going for.
Q249 Mr Prosser: Are you saying there
might be different models of accountable groups in different areas
of the country?
Sir Keith Povey: Yes, I think
it would have to be like that. You would have different models
to identify different communities, and it could be a geographic
community, it could be a vested interest community, but then what
sort of model would you have to call to account that inspector,
that superintendent, that chief constable? At the force level,
obviously we have police authorities. I think you need some sort
of other board at district level, but again, I go back to something
I was saying earlier, tangential to this: at district level now
you have drug action teams, you have the government offices in
the region, you have the local strategic partnerships, you have
the crime and disorder reduction partnerships, you have local
area agreements coming on, and all those people are within that
accountability framework, then the local criminal justice boards.
I think there needs to be some rationalisation to that, not just
another body to hold these people to account, but surely to bring
a lot of these bodies together in one. Otherwise, you will have
BCU commanders and sector inspectors spending all their time going
to these meetings and being called to account and explaining performance
rather than doing the job that they should be doing.
Q250 Mr Prosser: On that theme, what
is the danger of having too much local accountability, in that
the local police force will start responding to a populist demands
and to try to reassure local communities rather than using the
most effective way of combating real crime? Is there a danger
of that?
Sir Keith Povey: Yes, except that
the community should have a mechanism of identifying the priorities
for their area. Yes, there is a danger of the vested interest
and the person who shouts loudest gets the most resources, but
I think the whole thing—you must not lose sight of the fact,
although you have this local operating—has got to operate
within a framework of corporacy, a framework of corporacy from
the BCU and a framework of corporacy within the force.
Q251 Mr Prosser: What is your view
on possible proposals to replace police authorities with local
agencies with responsibility for safety?
Sir Keith Povey: I think police
authorities are getting better at what they do. At one stage just
a few years ago there were no independent members on police authorities.
Now there are five on each authority. When that was first suggested
there was an outcry. Most police authority chairmen now, most
locally elected members of a police authority, will say that those
independent members have brought a real benefit to the authority.
I still think the concept of a police authority is right. It may
well be that the make-up and the membership of that authority
would benefit from some degree of scrutiny.
Q252 Mr Prosser: In your written
evidence to the Committee you talked about some partnerships being
positively dysfunctional rather than being supportive and helpful.
Would you like to give us some details of that?
Sir Keith Povey: Yes. It is like
the curate's egg. You have a number of partnerships that do work
cohesively, that do share intelligence, that do have joint targets
and that work together, but there are a number of other partnerships
where exactly the opposite appertains. Health, for example; they
have a different agenda and their targets do not synchronise with
police. You get some partnerships where sharing of intelligence
is very difficult. I undertook a thematic inspection three or
four years ago called Calling Time on Crime, which identified
these very issues and in fact made a number of recommendations
about sharing information, about coterminosity. I think the Government
has an obligation here in trying to identify common objectives,
common targets, common performance indicators across the whole
community safety framework.
Q253 Mr Prosser: You also say in
your evidence that there is a regulatory gap in the way police
authorities are governed or regulated. Should there be actual
external regulation of authorities, and if there is, what is the
danger of them losing that independence?
Sir Keith Povey: I passionately
believe that police authorities do need to be subject to some
form of scrutiny or inspection. They operate in disparate ways,
have disparate resources. I am not saying one model fits all,
but although they are independent and have oversight of the police
force, police authorities surely do have some means of accountability.
There should be some means of holding them to account. Bearing
in mind it is the police authority who ultimately are responsible
for the annual Policing Plan within that area, it is the police
authority who are ultimately responsible for ensuring that that
Policing Plan reflects the government priorities in the National
Policing Plan, they should be inspected. If you have a police
authority and a police force, and HMIC are inspecting the police
force, to my mind it would be ludicrous to have anyone other than
HMIC inspect the police authority.
Mr Prosser: You have answered my last
question.
Q254 Mr Singh: Sir Keith, do you
think we would have a more effective police force if it were national?
Sir Keith Povey: No, I do not,
and that is a big political question as well. I am presently holding
a remit from the Home Secretary to actually look at the structure
of the 43 police forces in England and Wales—I know you
are aware of that—and it is a piece of work we are doing
at the moment, but the more you go into that, the more complex
it becomes. If you were starting from scratch, I am sure you would
not have 43 forces, and you would not have forces the size of
Bedfordshire, Dorset, Cleveland, Gloucestershire. So you could
make a case for a force being of an optimum size of 3,000-5,000
but all the evidence that we have gathered shows there is no correlation
between size and performance and outcomes in relation particularly
to volume of crime. So we are coming at it from another angle
at the moment, looking at what the aim of a force is. The aim
of a force is to protect the community, so how good they are,
whether they have the capability and the capacity to protect that
community from serious and organised crime, from terrorism, from
the major, level 2 criminality. If they do not, how can they get
that capacity? Would it require mergers or would it require greater
collaboration? That piece of work is currently being undertaken,
and I am not too sure what the outcome will be.
Q255 Mr Singh: You mentioned Cambridgeshire
earlier on in your evidence, and in relation to that, would a
national police force not have been helpful in that situation
by moving resources around and not impacting on the effectiveness
in Cambridgeshire? Secondly, if we are talking about Soham, information
moving to Cambridgeshire was very poor, was it not? Information
moving from one force to another let the community down.
Sir Keith Povey: Yes, there was
a whole Bichard impact there. Can I park that for a moment and
come back? What did happen in Cambridgeshire ultimately was there
was massive mutual aid coming from other forces, and that might
be the way forward. Most forces, even the bigger forces, would
have had difficulty coping with a Soham, so at some stage there
has to be a movement of resources, but it is a case of is the
pain worth the gain? To actually merge forces is massively disruptive
in relation to performance, finance and human resources. It would
also have an impact on government objectives and outcomes. So
it is a case of trying to get an evidence base that will actually
show that this is an optimum force, this is what a force should
look like if it is going to have the capability to protect the
communities that it serves, and then, on that evidence base, move
to whatever mergers that needs.
Q256 Mr Singh: Would it improve the
sharing of information and access to information at a national
level?
Sir Keith Povey: That is a different
issue. You could even have difficulties within forces of BCUs
sharing information, and I think until such time as we have a
system that is applied nationally, that is backed by technology
that will allow information-sharing on a basis that did not happen
in Cambridgeshire at the time of the Soham incidents . . . If
you look at what is happening in Scotland at the moment—and
Bichard identified it—Scotland have a national intelligence
database system, where the eight forces in Scotland can actually
share their information with no difficulty. PITO are looking at
adopting a similar system called Impact at the moment within forces
in England and Wales. I think that will be about two or three
years off. It is something that the service is addressing but
it is a weakness.
Q257 Mr Singh: You were talking about
local accountability earlier. What would happen to local accountability
in a national police force? Would it exist?
Sir Keith Povey: If you had a
national police force, you would still have local accountability.
The impact on the officer dealing with a burglary and speaking
to the community of regional forces or a national force I think
is zero. That is an administrative function, in a way. There is
also this protection approach. Local delivery is not in any major
way dependent upon the structure of that particular force or that
particular region.
Q258 Mr Singh: So there could still
be local accountability for local delivery?
Sir Keith Povey: Yes.
Q259 Mr Singh: In the Green Paper
the Government has ideas of strategic forces and lead forces.
What are your opinions about those two ideas?
Sir Keith Povey: Again, that is
something that we are looking at at the moment. A strategic force
I see as a force that would have the capacity and capability within
its own resources to deal with all those issues that we have just
discussed but it may well be, instead of going through the upheaval
of getting to that, that you could identify forces which were
particularly good at particular functions and let them take the
lead in that function, supported by surrounding forces, whether
that be within a region or cross-region. Again, we could all sit
here and draw different maps, collapsing those 43 forces into
a smaller number, but I think if I am going to advise government,
it has to be evidence-based. I have to be able to say quite categorically,
and we are actually working with ACPO, with the National Centre
for Policing Excellence and the Association of Police Authorities
at the moment so that we come to a consensus on what the shape
of the structure will be.
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