Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-39)
21 JULY 2004
MRS NUALA
O'LOAN, MR
SAMUEL POLLOCK,
MR DAVID
WOOD AND
MRS OLWEN
LAIRD
Q20 Reverend Smyth: Is
it your policy that you would like to think that they would come
to you as a place of first call?
Mrs O'Loan: Yes.
I think the majority of complaints that come from police stations
actually come from arrests, people who have been arrested and
placed in police cells. They will be asked if they have any complaints,
and they may reiterate that, yes, they do have complaints. Or
on meeting a Force Medical Examiner they may say to him that they
have a complaint. So that is the reason why a number of complaints
come automatically through the police.
Mr Pollock: It
is interesting, Mr Chairman, that in the three and a half years
we have never had a situation where someone has said, "I
made a complaint to the police," and that complaint was not
passed on to us. That is reassuring because clearly the making
of a complaint directly to the police is given priority by them.
Q21 Mr Tynan: I understand
that a number of complaints are closed because of lack of co-operation
and obviously your Office does a lot of work in order to make
sure that any complaints are taken seriously. In your Report 2002-03
you indicated some research was going to be done as regard the
causes of that. Could you indicate how that research is being
done and what is the result of the research at the present time?
Mrs O'Loan: We
actually restructured our research plan. This is one thing that
we are working on but we are not through to results. We have an
initial awareness, and if I could share with you some of our understanding
as to why people end up in this classification of non co-operation?
It would not be the classification which I would choose if the
choice of classifications were open to me, but the Rules say that
I must classify things in certain ways. We can investigate for
people and they come to a point where they feel that the story
which they have to tell, the problem that they have has been communicated
to the police; that we are aware of it, the police are aware of
it and that something will happen, and they no longer wish to
engage with the process and they withdraw. What I cannot give
you are percentages for each category. Then there are people to
whom we would say, "We need a medical examination of you,"
and perhaps they are not willing to go through with a medical
examination, for a variety of reasons and so they will withdraw.
There are people to whom we will say, "Yes, we will investigate
your complaint," and then they realise that the investigation
of the complaint means that we have to go to people as witnesses,
to whom they may not wish us to go. It will not be that they withdraw
the complaint; they will simply cease to correspond with us. So
there are a variety of reasons why people do not co-operate and,
you are quite right, we do regard it as very important. The way
that we are dealing with it is that we are carrying out post-closure
surveys of complainants to find out what their experience of using
the Office was; not just why they have withdrawn, but how did
they find the staff and all that sort of thing, because we also
want to identify the weaknesses in our own systems—because
I am sure that there are weaknesses—so that we can remedy
them.
Q22 Mr Tynan: Has there
been any indication that the potential of your Office to disclose
information in legal proceedings contributes to complainants withdrawing
their co-operation?
Mrs O'Loan: What
I would say to that is that we only disclose information which
we have under Section 5 of the Criminal Law Act (Northern Ireland),
which has a legal obligation where a serious offence has been
committed, et cetera. So we must, under Section 5 of the Criminal
Law Act. The other situations are where we have information which
may assist the defence or affect the Director of Public Prosecutions'
decision-making process on whether to prosecute, and then we will
hand that to the Director of Public Prosecutions and to the defence
because it will assist the defence, and that really is under the
Criminal Procedure and Investigations Act. We tend not to disclose
because we have very, very strict legislation under Section 63
of the Police (Northern Ireland) Act 1968, which in effect says
that we will not disclose. It was quite interesting when we looked
at the new English Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC)
legislation. The presumption is that they will disclose, it is
completely different federal law. So there are a lot of issues
there. We have been judicially reviewed on several occasions when
we have refused to disclose things, and we have not been found
by the court to have made the wrong decision, thus far. We have,
for example, a very significant judicial review in relation to
that from the Committee for the Administration of Justice about
the situation in Nelson, and we do not have judgment yet—we
are waiting.
Q23 Mr Tynan: On the basis
of your research, are there any changes, operational developments
that have occurred because of the research you have undertaken?
Mrs O'Loan: In
relation to non co-operation?
Q24 Mr Tynan: In relation
to withdrawal of the complaint?
Mrs O'Loan: I think
the thing that we would be most aware of is that we still need
to help people to understand the system, to understand what we
do, to understand what investigation means, to understand that
we cannot just use common sense, as they might say to us, or we
cannot just make assumptions. The process of police complaints
investigation is actually a very technical process and sometimes
people will withdraw because it just takes too long; that is another
problem we have. We have tried to speed it up but there are limitations
on our ability to speed it up. So I suppose what we have done
is to identify what we see as the main issues and we are attempting
to address those. David, you have a responsibility for investigations,
do you want to add anything?
Mr Wood: No, but
getting back to your original question, I do not think there is
strong evidence to suggest that people do not come to us because
of who we might disclose things to. It was a problem with the
police investigating the police in Northern Ireland because they
were the prosecutors perhaps against the complainant as well as
investigating the complainant's complaint, and the files were
then put together to the Director of Public Prosecutions. That
does not happen with our Office, the files do not go together.
Unless there is a requirement for them to go to the Director of
Public Prosecutions they do not go there because it is dealt with
independently and separately. The closure rate is of concern to
us. As Mrs O'Loan has said, there is research being conducted
now and we will obviously await the outcome of that to see whether
we can identify further improvements. We do respond very fast
and we have always responded within two days of a letter coming
to us back to the complainant. We do everything we can to secure
support but at the end of the day it often comes down to people
making a complaint after immediately being released from police
custody, sometimes in drink, and reflection takes place the next
day or the day after. Those sort of complaints maybe will never
change.
Mrs O'Loan: May
I add one final thing, Chairman? There are many people who seek
disclosure from us, including our magistrates, and we have had
to explore what the law means with a lot of legal advice, and
on one occasion I had to refuse a magistrate and was judicially
reviewed, because she demanded my complaints file, that she would
have my whole complaints file. That went to the court and the
court found that the way she had done this, the understanding
was wrong, and it went again, and the end result was that the
interpretation which we had put on it was correct. It may change,
Parliament may choose to change the law, but the law is not a
finely tuned animal in that respect, it is developing all the
time. We had Green v PCA and all those cases coming through very
recently, so it is a challenge for us to get it right.
Q25 Mr Campbell: Mrs O'Loan,
securing the confidence of the police has to be fairly crucial
to the success of your work.
Mrs O'Loan: Yes.
Q26 Mr Campbell: Last
year there was a survey of police attitudes that you reported
in your annual report. What is your view of those findings?
Mrs O'Loan: I suppose
they caused me concern, that is the first thing I want to say.
There was good in that and bad in that survey for us and for the
police. 58% of them supported independent investigation, 56% of
them thought there is less misconduct in PSNI than there is in
other Forces. 43% thought their members should be able to complain
to me. So there is a range of issues coming out of them. 74% were
satisfied with the time that we had taken to deal with the complaint,
64% satisfied with the outcome, and yet—and yet—67%
want more knowledge about us. That was the first thing that we
addressed, the question of knowledge: what are we going to do
about how much police officers know? We had done what we could.
Police officers have a Code of Conduct and the Code of Conduct
is published by the Police Service. It contains in the back of
it an account of how complaints against the police are dealt with,
but this is our account of how police complaints are dealt
with, and you actually have a copy of this. Very rapidly after
the survey results came in we distributed that to each police
officer, and we then worked on a series of measures which were
designed to ensure communication. I suppose we looked at the other
issues around where we need the police, that sort of thing, but
for me the key issue is confidence, you are quite right about
that, and I said that in my opening remarks to you. We have to
get the confidence of police and the only way we can do that is
to engage with them, because we found that we spend a lot of our
time, particularly the three of us, moving around engaging with
police officers. We have five police forces, but mainly we are
dealing with the PSNI, and with three Police Staff Associations.
So we have to deal with them. We have met all the District Command
Units, we have had regular meetings with police at all levels
across Northern Ireland. David and I have a six-weekly meeting
with the Police Federation of Northern Ireland—I think it
is called Litigation Discipline Committee now, but it is the Committee
that deals with our Office. We have had extensive involvement
in police training; we have had 25 sessions this year alone in
police training to try to help them to understand us; in new probationers,
in Phase 4 probationers, in firearms training, in senior investigating
officer training and in the new CS spray training. We very quickly
became aware that one of the problems was that officers said they
did not know what was happening in their case, where a complaint
had been made against them. I think we have made a mistake, because
we came to the conclusion earlier on that we needed to notify
complainants every six weeks where their complaint was, and our
assumption was that officers were given a named person to write
to, they were given information about the process and they would
understand that if you are waiting for the forensic science lab
to come back that takes a little time, if you are waiting for
a pathology report that takes time, and that therefore they would
expect these delays. Also, we have to wait for information from
the Police Service itself and that takes time. I think that was
the wrong decision. I have made inquiries since of Police Services
and I am told that the RUC did not update police officers at all,
unless they went to see them on a particular issue; there was
not a regular update process in the RUC. And there is no regular
update process in most of British Forces. So we have introduced
six-weekly updates to officers and each officer has a named contact
who is the investigator of the case, and we hope that will improve
the situation. I think it is going to be slow. I do not think
it is a one-way thing though, if I may say so, Chairman; I think
that the police and the Police Staff Associations have a role
to play here too, and we obviously seek their support and their
co-operation in playing that role.
Q27 Mr Campbell: At the
start of that reply, Mrs O'Loan, you alluded to a number of the
statistics in the survey, and you said that they caused you concern.
Mrs O'Loan: Yes.
Q28 Mr Campbell: One of
the statistics that you did not quote was that only 13% of officers
agreed that the Police Ombudsman's investigators investigated
complaints impartially. Does that cause you concern? That is 13%,
not 30.
Mrs O'Loan: Yes.
May I just correct you—and I could be wrong again, Chairman—that
I think the question was, "Do you think the Police Ombudsman
is impartial?" Whichever it was, it was 13%, yes, and that
is why I started off by saying that one of the most important
things we have to deal with is gaining the confidence of the police,
because to me that 13% is a typical issue, it is the one thing
that appeared in the Press early on when we were still talking
to the Federation about this. That 13% is a very important
figure. 44% did not know whether we were impartial or not and
44% thought we were not impartial. We were impartial. So we have
a lot of work to do, I have no doubt about that.
Q29 Mr Campbell: But you
do not think the fact that only one officer in eight agreed in
relation to your impartiality is a significant figure?
Mrs O'Loan: Chairman,
I think I answered you by saying that I was very concerned about
this. I did not use the word "significant" but I am
quite happy to use the word significant. I would say to you that
there is a difference between the way that we must deal with police
officers and with our complainants, and that is a difference which
is imposed on us by the system, because the police officers with
whom we have to engage are either suspects because an allegation
has been made against them or they are witnesses. The law prescribes
certain ways in which you must deal with people. For example,
the law does not permit us—nor would I wish it—to
interview my complainants under caution, but the law requires
that if we are investigating a police officer for a criminal offence
we must interview him under criminal caution, or for a disciplinary
we must interview him under a disciplinary process, with a caution.
That in itself engages a whole different set of dynamics. It is
difficult. I think there are many things we can say about that.
All I can say to you is that 18 months ago that figure stood at
13%; it is our intention to revisit it, but we have so much work
going on we will probably come to that later in the policy practice
investigation research, but I am not sure when we will be able
to, although I would hope in the near future. We are working across
a range of initiatives to improve that.
Mr Pollock: We
have no benchmark in terms of what percentage of police officers
would feel that their own complaints and discipline departments
are impartial. I suspect that any regulatory body, inspectorate
or investigation agency, the professionals here that are subject
to investigation, it will be difficult to persuade them that we
are fair. I have to say we were disappointed, we would like it
to be much higher and we will work very hard to ensure that it
is much higher. The key thing is that police officers fully understand
that the process does provide massive protection to them as individuals
and as professionals, and that we will seek to respect their rights
as also with complainants.
Mrs O'Loan: Can
I add one thing, Chairman? This survey disclosed other things
about police officer attitudes. The two findings it disclosed,
that I am about to tell you about, are indicative of the reasons
why police may not regard us as impartial. The first one is that
79% of police officers believe that the public do not have genuine
reasons to complain; the second is that 66% of police officers
who responded to our survey thought that complainants were out
to make mischief. I lay those before you and ask you to consider
the other figures in the light of those two, which I know were
of huge concern to the police and probably to the Police Staff
Associations. I said it had good news and bad news for all of
us. We must all work; we start in a place and we must move forward,
and that is what we are trying to do.
Q30 Mr Campbell: A couple
more questions if you would bear with me, Chairman? I am sure
you would accept—and nearly everyone accepts—that
in both communities in Northern Ireland there is an acceptance
of the principle of some sort of independent assessment of complaints
against police officers, but at the very outset in your remarks
you mentioned the fairly high acceptance level in both communities.
Mrs O'Loan: Yes.
Q31 Mr Campbell: Again,
you alluded to, but did not say, that there was a distinction
in the percentages between the two communities. Why is it that
Protestants are less likely to think that you are doing a fair
and good job than Catholics?
Mrs O'Loan: I am
not going to second-guess what individuals think, I can only share
the figures with you, Chairman.
Q32 Mr Campbell: I was
not talking about individuals, this presumably is a survey of
a large number of people?
Mrs O'Loan: Yes.
Impartiality, 70% of Protestants think I am impartial, 84% of
Catholics think I am impartial, on the latest figures; help the
police to do a good job, 86% of Catholics, 75% of Protestants;
and on fair treatment, 76%, so it is equal on both communities.
I suppose that the reasons why Catholics are more likely to feel
confidence is that there has never before been an independent
system and an independent process through which they could make
complaint, and there is a certain evidence that Catholics were
reluctant to complain in the past. I think the situation with
the Protestant community was a stronger relationship with policing
so that if things went wrong they felt that they could engage
with the police. We are a totally new body. The Police Service
of Northern Ireland is moving through a period of change which
I think is unparalleled across the world, and in that process
the perception—and I am really trying to work out what is
going on here because you asked me to do so—is that Protestants
wonder what is happening to the Police Service, when they have
independent investigation. They have moved, for example, from
51% believing in my impartiality three years ago to 70% now. So
we are working at it, Chairman, I think that is all I can say.
What comment I have made about the reasons people may have voted
the way they did in this independent survey, you just have to
take it that that is my guesswork and nothing more.
Chairman: Yes, and I think
that those figures which show improvement amongst both communities
speak for themselves, and you are to be congratulated.
Q33 Mr Campbell: One final
question, Chairman. Really progressing that on to a logical conclusion,
on the religious breakdown. Most people accept—and in fact
it seems to be a self-evident truth—that Northern Ireland
is a very divided society and also a very politicised one. Would
you accept—and there is no delicate way of putting this—that
if we have a Policing Ombudsman in Northern Ireland, whose spouse
is a DUP councillor, that there would be some difficulty in the
Nationalist community about having confidence in the Office of
that person?
Mrs O'Loan: I do
not think that the DUP have a particular disenfranchisement from
holding any position, Chairman. I would say that I think what
you are probably alluding to—and I will be even less delicate
than you were—that my husband is, yes, an SDLP councillor,
but I am not and I never have been a member of any political party.
I would also say to you that if we took the three major issues
on which your party and I think the Nationalist parties would
be divided, on plastic baton rounds, I have consistently said
that the police must have these and I believe that both the National
parties do not believe that is the right position for me to hold,
but I believe they must have them because I do not think that
police officers should be exposed to a degree of risk, and I think
the baton round is necessary. On Special Branch I have consistently
said that Special Branch has done a very necessary and very important
job in policing in Northern Ireland, and we need a Special Branch.
We need reform throughout our Police Service because everything
needs reform, my Office, all Police Services and even Parliament.
Reform is part of life because if you do not change you die. I
think it is right that we should have a Special Branch and I know
that there are parts of the Nationalist community, probably both
parties would want Special Branch away. On simple things, like
CS spray, I made a statement saying that our police officers had
nothing between their batons and their firearms to protect themselves
and I wanted them to have CS spray. I think I am right in saying
that both the political parties and the Nationalist side do not
want CS spray. I can only say to you, Mr Campbell, without wishing
to be in any way disrespectful, through you, Chairman, that I
am not a puppet or a tool of any political party, I am an independent
body.
Chairman: Mr Campbell,
I do not think we want to get into personalities and I want to
say at this stage, I hope on behalf of the entire Committee, that
those of us who have known Mrs O'Loan over the years doing this
job have no doubt about her integrity or her impartiality. Whatever
else we might criticise about her work, that is not one of the
things. I do not think we should get into personal matters.
Mr Campbell: I wanted
to be clear, Chairman, that Mrs O'Loan agrees—hopefully
she will agree—in a deeply politicised society, if there
are political connections by extension of anyone in a position
as you hold, that it is imperative that that person demonstrates
their impartiality clearly and unequivocally to everyone with
whom you come into contact, in order to try and ensure that event
that political affiliation by extension is precluded from the
equation.
Chairman: Mr Campbell,
I did just say that we would not go any further into personalities.
All I would say, from my years of experience in Northern Ireland,
that to find someone without some political extension somewhere,
by family, by friends or anything else, you will be finding a
very rare person who lives in Northern Ireland. We will not proceed
down those lines. Mr Adrian Bailey.
Q34 Mr Bailey: Over the
last four years your own surveys indicate that there has been
no decline in the proportion of people subjected to unacceptable
behaviour by the police—about 70%. Earlier you said that
some of your findings had been taken up to improve police processes,
but would you not agree that this consistent level of dissatisfaction
indicates that your Office is having a negligible impact on raising
standards of police behaviour?
Mrs O'Loan: I am
sorry, Chairman, I understood the latter part of the question
but I did not understand the first few words.
Q35 Mr Bailey: I will
just amplify. Your own Public Attitudes Report indicates that
from October 2000 to March 2001 and the recent one, that there
has been no significant variation in the proportion of respondents
reporting that they had experienced unacceptable behaviour from
police officers.
Mr Pollock: That
is correct but the factor that we look at more closely is the
overall level of complaints that we are receiving and registering.
There has been a significant decline in the volume of complaints
from 2001 through to our most recent annual report. More significantly,
there has been a decline in the level of oppressive behaviour
complaints—that is more of the serious matters that have
been registered by us—and, significantly, the use of force.
We see that as a very important trend and pattern that is developing.
So, whilst the public survey result cannot be ignored, it is very
much a general perception by members of the public, and it is
one that is quite often referred to, that the public have had
a much greater fear of crime than might actually be the reality.
We cannot ignore the public perception but I think the level of
complaints and the nature of the complaints that we are registering
is showing a very, very positive trend, and there are other more
specific things in terms of what Mrs O'Loan has been able to do
with the Police Service to change behaviour and to work towards
improvements that we feel are pretty significant, and certainly
to have achieved it within three and a half years is important.
Q36 Mr Bailey: There is
an issue about complaints and allegations, but I will leave that
for further consideration. You wanted to come back, Mrs O'Loan?
Mrs O'Loan: I wanted
to come back on the nature of the change in policing policy and
practice. Complaints are reducing; as Tom said, oppressive behaviour
is down. We have made significant change, we know that, because
if you take something as simple as the use of batons by police
officers in Northern Ireland, when we started police officers
were 40 times more likely to be the subject of a complaint about
their use of baton than police officers in the UK; they were six
times more likely to suffer injury than police officers here.
So we began to look at the reasons why because it is not enough
to say that they hit people more often or they are perceived to
hit people more often. So then we looked at how often they were
trained, and issues like that. We discovered, for example, that
a significant number of police officers, unless they do special
training, were only trained once in their policing careers. In
England and Wales police officers in most Forces have to re-qualify
every year or they are not allowed to carry a baton. Once you
put into place training the numbers drop, so the numbers are down
from 419 in 2001 to 148 in 2003. I think that is about training;
I think it is about management; I think it is about supervision;
I think it is about expectations. One of the problems we had was
the use of live fire by police officers and that is down from
21 to five in the last year. That is very, very important because
on each of the occasions on which a gun was fired at somebody
you can have the possibility of a fatality. It is about enabling
police officers in their training to understand the consequences
of using live fire, and I think that has happened and that is
why it is trained. Perhaps even more importantly, the baton rounds:
I have said that police officers should be able to use baton rounds
when they are necessary, but they have not been used in the past
20 months possibly, since 11 September 2002. That is a very significant
change in policing policy and practice. Our situation has changed
too: we do not have as much interface violence, but we still do
have interface violence. The bulk of our complaints come in in
respect of Friday night, Saturday morning 9 o'clock to 3 o'clock,
like any other Police Force in the United Kingdom. That is around
police behaviour, the interaction between police officers, the
way in which people are handled when they are brought into police
stations and all that sort of thing. I am not saying that we have
made the difference, but I am saying that we have made a contribution.
Q37 Mr Bailey: Can I pick
up this issue of training because I believe Mr Wood in the past
has made a remark that, "PSNI are years in training and having
to catch up fast". You have given what would appear to be
a very good example of the way that they are catching up; could
you elaborate on that?
Mrs O'Loan: I will
elaborate and then I will let David speak because I suspect you
are taking what he said very slightly out of context, with the
greatest respect. Training issues in the Police Service of Northern
Ireland, as the Federation themselves acknowledge, fell into second
place to the need to survive. Our police officers are provided
with personal protection weapons and those personal protection
weapons are literally that. So they were trained to use those
weapons to shoot at targets for their own survival. They were
not trained around things like crossfire, ricochet and the effects
of other things, and that was a very serious problem. That has
all changed since we started investigating these things. There
is no doubt that if you have to retrain 13,000 officers every
six months—and in England it might even be every three months,
but in Northern Ireland it is every six months—that is a
huge training burden. But there was other training and we are
very pleased to see a much higher commitment and an ability to
process people through training now. I believe that David Wood
was misreported to a degree and certainly was the subject of unfair
criticism, and I would like to give David the opportunity to talk
about the issue that you raised.
Mr Wood: It was
in the RUC area in years gone by really but because of the pressures
and challenges to police in Northern Ireland training, probably
by necessity, took second place. I would not suggest for one moment
that the PSNI are today or for the last few years behind in training,
they are now catching up fast. But I think it has been catching
up rather than anything else and, as Mrs O'Loan has stated, there
was certainly a paucity of training in lots of areas in policing.
I think in detective training and senior investigators a course
was started about two years ago in PSNI, but I suspect now—and
the Deputy Chief Constable will be able to tell you later—that
all senior investigators in Northern Ireland have the appropriate
training, but that was not the case two years ago. Detective training
too was patchy around Northern Ireland, and it was all areas of
policing policy in fact that were behind in training. They have
had an enormous challenge to catch up. They have a new Academy,
in terms of building, they have the new leadership there and training
has moved on dramatically and they are catching up. As Mrs O'Loan
said, firearms training is now done in a very thorough and productive
way and we take part in all firearms training courses with their
officers, and that is done every six months, although in the rest
of the UK it is every three months. There is a slightly different
context of firearms of course in Northern Ireland but it is still
necessary to have that training. So that is the context and, as
I say, I think now it has been caught up with, but in the past
there was a gap in the training without any doubt.
Q38 Mr Bailey: To what
extent do you think that past gap in training was instrumental
in the level of complaints that you received?
Mrs O'Loan: We
get a lot of complaints about retrospective cases and Parliament
has given me a duty, where the allegation is grave or exceptional,
to investigate; it did not give me a discretion. In those cases
what we find very often is that the people who were doing the
investigations very often did what they could in terms of the
resources available to them, their other workload, the situation
which they were operating and their training. What they did would
not measure up against today's standards but we do not measure
them against today's standards, we measure them against the standards
at the time at which they conducted the operation. So, for example,
we will not make any recommendations for disciplinary procedure
because if an officer has not been trained you cannot hold him
culpable for that, but what we will do (and do) is to say to the
Chief Constable, "In this investigation we believe there
are unexplored evidential opportunities"—we are talking
in 99% of these cases of murder cases—"and therefore
we believe that you would wish to revisit these opportunities
and to see whether you can bring this case to closure for people."
Conversely, we can go back to people and say, "Actually the
case in which you were involved, the death of your loved one,
is one in which the police did as thorough a job as possible."
We have done that and we have gone back to people and we have
had the response, which was, "For the first time in 15, 20
years I am able to sleep at night." I think that is enormously
important because we are a very wounded community in Northern
Ireland, as well as a very divided community.
Q39 Mr Bailey: Finally,
in your survey of police officers 56% thought that there was less
misconduct in the PSNI than in most other Police Forces. What
would be your view of that?
Mrs O'Loan: I find
it slightly difficult to answer, Chairman. I suppose my view is
that sometimes it is very important that you can say sorry, and
traditionally policing across the world did not explain and did
not say sorry. Policing in Northern Ireland has moved into a new
era; the Chief Constable has apologised on occasions when his
officers have got it wrong. I think if it is possible to say,
"Yes, we can get it wrong," then it is possible to believe
that we do get it wrong. But if it is not possible to say, "We
may get it wrong," then you will not be able to say, "We
do get it wrong." I think it is as simple as that; it is
all around the culture and the expectation, and I think that is
changing.
Chairman: We have a lot
of questions left, so we need to keep moving. Could I ask the
Committee members to make their questions brief and perhaps we
could have some briefer answers. I know these are very complex
questions and I am in no way being critical, but we have a long
way to go and another set of witnesses. Mr Tony Clarke.
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