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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 332-i House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE THE COMMITTEE OF PUBLIC ACCOUNTS Wednesday 9 February 2005
HOME OFFICE: REDUCING VEHICLE CRIME
dRIVER AND VEHICLE LICENSING AGENCY (DVLA)
Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 115
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral evidence Taken before the Committee of Public Accounts on Wednesday 9 February 2005 Members present: Mr Edward Leigh, in the Chair Mr Richard Allan Mr Frank Field Mr Brian Jenkins Jim Sheridan Mr Gerry Steinberg Jon Trickett Mr Alan Williams ________________ Sir John Bourn KCB, Comptroller and Auditor General, and Mr Tim Burr, Deputy Comptroller and Auditor General, further examined. Ms Paula Diggle, Second Treasury Officer of Accounts, further examined.
REPORT BY THE COMPTROLLER AND AUDITOR GENERAL: Home Office: Reducing Vehicle Crime (HC 183)
Examination of Witnesses Witnesses: Mr Leigh Lewis CB, Permanent Secretary for Crime Policing, Counter Terrorism and Delivery, Home Office, and Mr Clive Bennett, Chief Executive, Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, examined. Q1 Chairman: Good afternoon. Welcome to the Committee of Public Accounts where today we are looking at the Home Office: reducing vehicle crime and we are joined from the Home Office by Mr Lewis Lewis, the permanent secretary for crime policing, counter-terrorism and delivery, and we are joined from the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, the DVLA, by the chief executive, Mr Clive Bennett. Just to make it perfectly clear that we are prepared to give government departments a pat on the back when they do reasonably well, I am pleased to see that you have met your target of reducing vehicle crime by 30% between 1999 and 2004, a clearly significant achievement on which I congratulate you. However, the lower slopes of the mountain are always easier to climb than the higher slopes, so we now have to try to exhort you to even greater and better effort. That is what this hearing is about: to try and investigate how we can achieve even more. Mr Lewis, can I ask you to look at paragraph 3.2, page 19, which talks about the advice given on relative security of vehicles. One of the reasons why vehicle crime has declined is undoubtedly the fact that vehicles are now more secure, but some vehicles are more secure than others. Why is this advice not more readily available? Mr Lewis: Thank you for those introductory remarks. We have been doing a lot of work but undoubtedly we can do more to make the public and the industry aware of the relative levels of car security on different forms of vehicle. We do that ourselves through our car theft index which uses the information known to us through VNC and DVLA to be able to provide information on those makes of car and models of car which are mostly likely to appear as victims of car theft. The industry does it in cooperation with us through the new car security ratings system which is operated by Thatcham and the Association of British Insurers. Last year, we introduced for the first time what are called British insurance car security awards, an award scheme for the most secure cars in each of ten classes with an overall award for the safest manufacturer of all. We are intending to repeat that. We go on looking for ways of promulgating that information more widely because I think it is information that needs to be out there amongst the public. Q2 Chairman: Will you now please look at page 30, paragraph 5.7, which relates to secure car parks? You will see that across England and Wales there were just 132 secure car parks available to hospitals and 125 at railway stations. There is clearly a long way to go. When do you think I can leave my car at a railway station or hospital and expect to find it there when I get back? Mr Lewis: I would hope, without it sounding a glib answer in any way to your question, you would have some greater assurance, simply because of the substantial fall we have seen overall, that it will be there safely when you return. Nevertheless, we want to see further action taken, more intensive action, in relation to hospital and railway station car parks. There is no doubt about that. In terms of hospital car parks, there is now for the first time a dedicated NHS security management service which is focusing the whole of the NHS on this issue and, underneath that, a network of local security management specialists which has been set up. In terms of the train companies, the Strategic Rail Authority already encourages the operating companies to obtain the safer car park award under the scheme and that is something which they see as an integral part of the negotiation for new franchise agreements. The British Transport Police in the case of railway station car parks are very heavily engaged with the industry. Q3 Chairman: I want to go on now to car jacking, which is a growing problem as cars become more secure because car jacking is a particularly frightening thing for people. There is mention of this on page 40, paragraph 7.1.2. Car jacking is a growing problem, is it not? Mr Lewis: Yes. We too worry about that. We worry about all forms of car theft but car jacking, particularly if it involves threats or violence to an individual, is a particularly severe and concerning form of car crime. Therefore, particularly within the ambit of the police service and the national crime squad, we have been using the national intelligence model. That is an area at which the police are undoubtedly looking ever more seriously. Within that, we also want to follow up in some particular ways. It is the case that we do not have hard and fast statistics on car jacking as a separate phenomenon. Q4 Chairman: Why do you not have hard and fast statistics? The NAO have worked out and told me, extrapolating from this small sample, that there may be as many as 10,000 car jackings a year in this country. Does that figure make any sense to you? If you deny that figure, why do you not have better data? Mr Lewis: I am certainly not going to either confirm or deny it because the fact of the matter is that we do not collect figures on car jacking. I am more than willing to look at that. We would need to define what we mean by a car jacking so that we had a consistent definition to see if it was realistic and practical to collect data on. I am not in any way belittling the importance of this. Against the total number of car crimes recorded by a British crime survey at around two million, it is a small number in absolute terms. If you are a victim of car jacking, it can be a very frightening experience. Q5 Chairman: I now want to look at detection rates which I am afraid are still very low for car theft. This is mentioned in paragraph 4.4 on page 26. If you read that you will see that only 6% of thefts from and 13% of thefts of vehicles were resolved by the police. Why are detection rates so low? Mr Lewis: They are too low and we want them to be higher; so do the police. Without under-estimating the importance of your question in any way, it is better to prevent a car being the subject of a theft or break-in in the first place than solving it afterwards. Nevertheless, improving detection rates is a very important issue and it is an issue right across volume crime, where we are working very intensively with the police and other agencies to improve the overall detection rates. There are two ways that offer a real prospect that we may see significant increases in those detection rates. One, which the NAO report does talk about significantly, is the growing use of what is called ANPR, automatic number plate recognition, which is a technology that I have seen in operation which gives those using it, the police and other agencies, instant records of a car that may be appearing stolen or unregistered etc. The other is not such a new technique but a new technique being applied in this way. A growing number of forces are now using DNA technology in terms of car crime, not where a car has been stolen and you do not have the car, but where the car has been broken into. Increasingly, forces are beginning to use DNA technology to see if they can find DNA traces, for example, on a discarded cigarette butt or a discarded drinks holder etc., inside the car. We now have over two million people on our DNA database. Where that technique is being used intensively, we are seeing some significant increases in detection rates. Q6 Chairman: If you look at prolific offenders, paragraph 7.13 on page 40, it seems that a frightening number of offences are caused by prolific offenders, maybe one in ten crimes. What are you doing about it? Mr Lewis: We are doing a lot. Reporting to ministers, this is an area meaningful to me personally. We have set up since September of last year the prolific and other priority offenders programme focused exactly on that. The figures I am about to quote are the best we have. By their nature, you cannot be utterly certain of them but our estimate is that around 10% of offenders commit around 50% of all crime. 5,000 offenders, super-prolific offenders, as far as our knowledge goes, appear to commit somewhere around 8% or 9% of all crime. The prolific offender programme is absolutely targeted on those individuals. It requires each crime and disorder reduction partnership, of which there are some 370 in England and Wales, to identify on average the 15 to 20 individuals who they regard as their most prolific offenders and focus a huge amount of joined up attention on them. Q7 Chairman: Mr Bennett, can you please look at paragraph 6.3 on page 33? You will see there that one in ten vehicle records are not accurate enough to enable the police to trace the registered keeper. Why is that? It sounds very unsatisfactory to me. Mr Bennett: There are three parts to accuracy and the traceability issue is probably the most important one. Since the survey was done, since I sat here last time, we have put in continuous registration as an agency. We know from the work we have done so far that, for example, in London it is now 92% and, because of the tumble in non-registered drivers, from all the information we have we think it is around 90/95%. We are about 5% away. The problem is until we do the next baseline survey we will not have that information but every pointer is that continuous registration is having the effect of marginalising the number of non-registered vehicles and untaxed vehicles and, in so doing, that makes the record that much more accurate for the police. Q8 Mr Allan: Can we look at the public service agreement target set out in paragraph 1.3 and 1.5? You talk about how we arrive at that. The Chairman congratulated you on your success in this area. I do not want to be miserable about it but if we look at paragraph 1.5 your target was to get a 30% reduction and by changing the way that you now do the figures, using the British crime survey figures, you have splendidly and miraculously reached the 30% reduction figure. Had you been using the old form of numbers, you would not have met the 30% target. Mr Lewis: It is true that, using recorded crime statistics from the same period, the figure is lower than 30%. This was one of the reasons for using the British crime survey which you will know my predecessor from the last occasion and our experts believe is more accurate. We introduced a national crime recorded standard which changed quite significantly the way in which the police recorded crime. That introduced discontinuity in the series. Whether you take British crime survey figures or recorded crime figures, they both show a very substantial decline, although you are right that BCS figures show a larger decline. Q9 Mr Allan: Had we taken the recorded crime figures, you would probably find they show a decline of 17%. You would like to add another 8% on to that because of your estimate of the impact of the change in the national crime recorded standards, so it would have been a 25% fall otherwise? Mr Lewis: Yes. Q10 Mr Allan: You have done well on either score? Mr Lewis: Yes. Q11 Mr Allan: One is even better because of the PSA target. Mr Lewis: Indeed. The latest figures show both series continuing to fall. Q12 Mr Allan: Trends can go up and down. Mr Lewis: Indeed. Q13 Mr Allan: You mentioned automatic number plate recognition and you set it out in paragraphs 4.5 onwards. I am curious to understand why so few of the stoppages resulted in arrests. 28 million plates were scanned. 1.1 million were identified as vehicles of interest to the police. 100,000-odd were stopped and 13,000 people were arrested. I would have expected, as a layman, the figures to be higher. You scan a number plate; it flags up as a stolen vehicle. You stop it and the person is arrested. Can you explain? Mr Lewis: ANPR, although it is a hugely exciting development, is still a very new technology which most police forces which use it have only been using for a relatively short period. We are undoubtedly as a police service nation wide still learning how to use it to best effect. I have sat in a control room where ANPR is being used, watching the numbers come up. If you have those cameras at a very busy traffic intersection, they will score hits quite quickly on unregistered vehicles, vehicles which have some mark-up on the PNC etc. You almost literally cannot have a police officer on that street stopping every single one of those vehicles because you cannot have a large number of officers doing nothing but that. Forces are learning how to exploit that technology to best effect and our police standards unit is working intensively with them to do that. Q14 Mr Allan: We assume congestion charge cameras are pretty accurate because they result in money flying around from lots of innocent citizens. Are they used as part of the scheme or are they wholly outside it? Mr Lewis: I do not know. I am not aware that they are but if I am wrong about that I will write and let you know. Q15 Mr Allan: One might assume, if they were, that there should be no stolen cars being driven around London because they should be scanned and stopped on a regular basis. Mr Lewis: We should not see ANPR as a miracle technology but it is undoubtedly a very helpful development. Q16 Mr Allan: Mr Bennett, one of the problems presumably is that there are lots of vehicles flying around about which you know nothing. I was alarmed at there being 950,000 unregistered vehicles on the roads of Britain today. Are they vehicles about which you know nothing? Mr Bennett: Those are the people that we have on our books who have not had any activity on the record for three years, so people who are not paying tax and insurance, and effectively that is the 950,000. Q17 Mr Allan: They are vehicles about which you know something. I am asking about the vehicles about which you know nothing. Mr Bennett: They are included in the 950,000 vehicles on the road which are not taxed or SORN on the record. They are available in some cases to the police when they look but they may not be taxed, insured and so on. We are trying to drive that down. In terms of untaxed vehicles, one of the things the police pick up on, one of the important things about ANPR is that in 75% of cases when the vehicles are going through untaxed they are stopped on the road. 75% of those people when stopped are engaged in some form of other serious crime. From our point of view, the issue of ability to get to that vehicle is very important. There used to be 1.9 million that were not taxed. That has now come down to 1.2 million of which there are about 900,000 that are not on the record and these are the people who just do not conform. They are the people you have to attack with wheel clamping and so on. Q18 Mr Allan: All of these vehicles are driving around with number plates. Some of them are on your database as not having paid tax. Some are vehicles about which nobody knows anything, probably stolen vehicles with somebody else's number plate on. Mr Bennett: Some vehicles are cloned. The report covers something on that. We are trying to reduce cloning. There is a large number of vehicles all the time driving round that are on the database that we do not have records for. There are about 70,000 that are not on at all. Q19 Mr Allan: I was surprised to see 20% of thefts take place from vehicles in car parks. At Sheffield, the station has a secure car park and it is fantastic. I get regular complaints about a hospital site in the city where thefts take place regularly where nothing seems to happen. Whose fault is it? People come to me and say, "I park in a hospital. It is a public service place." Is it the hospital's fault? Where is the problem? Mr Lewis: Government and the Home Office have to take responsibility for the overall national effort to make car parks more secure. That is where the buck has to stop. We need the real support of colleagues in departments like Transport and Health, strategic health authorities and so on to make clear that this is a real priority. I think that is coming and strategic health authorities in particular are now taking this issue seriously and promoting the safer car park scheme. We need to do more to achieve that. Q20 Mr Allan: There may be circumstances where an NCP car park may, because of commercial reasons, have been much more forthcoming than, say, a health authority where this is low down on the list of priorities. Mr Lewis: Yes. The Minister for Policing and Crime Reduction, Hazel Blears, made clear in a general statement of government policy in April last year that, while the government wished to go on using voluntary means to encourage car park operators of all kinds to make their car parks safer and to become accredited under the scheme, she would look at this again in a year's time, take account of all the trends and all the evidence and the government did not rule out taking other steps if they thought they were required to ensure the safety of car parks. Q21 Jim Sheridan: Turning to page two, figure one, subsection five, unregistered motor salvage operators and how they have access to false number plates in Northern Ireland and Scotland, can you give us an overview of how big a problem that is? Mr Lewis: There are two problems within your question. On number plates, we have number plate regulations which apply in England and Wales and they in effect regulate the supply and provision of number plates. They have been hugely helpful. They do not yet apply in Scotland and Northern Ireland. There are historic reasons why that is so. That is now changing and the Road Safety Bill which is currently going through this House will apply those regulations to Scotland and Northern Ireland. We then have the motor salvage regulations which exist everywhere and they too have contributed a great deal but they are not yet operating as effectively as we want them to and as they should. There are some local authorities which do not yet have the register of motor salvage dealers in their areas. There are still dealers who are not registered under that scheme. We are working very hard jointly with the Local Government Association and the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister to make those regulations more universally applied. Q22 Jim Sheridan: There is no legislation that they have to be registered? Mr Lewis: There is. If you run a motor salvage business, you have to register with your local authority under the motor salvage regulations. That is the law. The question is: is everyone doing it and the answer is no, not everyone who should be registering or be registered is doing that. That is why we are working intensively with colleagues and the industry to make sure that those regulations which are clearly beneficial are enforced. Q23 Jim Sheridan: You must have a list of those unregistered? Mr Lewis: It is the classic: you do not know what you do not know because people could be subject to those regulations and we do not know about them. At local level, police forces and local authorities do tend to know. There is knowledge of which are motor salvage businesses and therefore it is possible to try and ensure that those who are required to register under those regulations do so. That is not at the moment universal. It is getting better but it is not as good as it should be. Q24 Jim Sheridan: If the police and the local authorities know where the unregistered traders are, what penalties can they put in place to make sure they do register? Mr Lewis: It is an offence to run a motor salvage business without registering. Therefore, if the police know that you are doing that, all things being equal, we would expect a prosecution to be brought. We also need to ensure that local authorities whose duty it is to maintain the register and ensure that it is active and live, and the police whose duty it is to ensure that there is regular liaison between the local authority and the police so that the knowledge of motor salvage operators who may be trading but not registering is passed on. It is an obligation on them to do their best to make those regulations universally applied. Q25 Jim Sheridan: What penalties are there for those traders who do not register? If the police and local authorities know who they are, what incentive is there for those who do not wish to register for their own reasons? If you do not have a TV licence, you are fined £1,000. What happens to these unregistered traders? Mr Lewis: Because they are committing an offence, the incentive to register ought to be that they want to trade and act lawfully. Many such businesses do exactly that. The incentive ought to be that you do not wish to be prosecuted for breaking the law. That is where we have to do better than we are doing at the moment, in ensuring that those regulations are enforced. Q26 Jim Sheridan: If the police or the local authority go along and say to this unregistered motor trader, "We know you are not registered" the motor trader can say, "So what?" Mr Lewis: He could but he risks being prosecuted. Q27 Jim Sheridan: What does that mean, "prosecuted"? Mr Lewis: It means it is a criminal offence to trade as a motor salvage business without having registered. Under the legislation I think that leads to a fine of quite a significant amount on that business. I would at least surmise that if you are trying to run a legitimate business and you are regularly appearing in local newspapers and elsewhere as having been brought before the courts and fined for trading unlawfully in that respect, that is not a terribly good thing if you are trying to encourage lawful and proper business. Q28 Jim Sheridan: What is the maximum or minimum penalty and how many unregistered traders have been fined that penalty? Mr Lewis: I am now speaking from memory. A note has arrived which tells me that the maximum penalty for trading without being registered is £5,000. Q29 Jim Sheridan: The police go along and say, "Joe Bloggs, you are unregistered. You are committing an offence. Pay a fine of up to £5,000"? Mr Lewis: Yes. Q30 Jim Sheridan: What are the steps after that? Mr Lewis: Presumably, one would hope ---- Q31 Jim Sheridan: It is all hope and should be. Mr Lewis: One would hope that the trader at that point would comply. There is no reason, if the trader fails to comply and the police know they have brought a prosecution, why the police could not bring continuing prosecutions one after another under the regulations. It is not as if you have ceased committing the offence just because you have been prosecuted for it and fined. You continue to commit an offence for as long as you are not registered. Q32 Jim Sheridan: The reason I am asking this question is there is a direct link between car crime and unregistered motor traders. An awful lot of cars that end up in these places unregistered are never seen again and come out as tin cans or whatever. How many unregistered traders have been fined the maximum of £5,000 or how many have been fined anything? Mr Lewis: I do not know. I must therefore write to you with that information. Almost by definition, we do not know how many unregistered traders there may be. To share the importance which you attach to this subject, which I do, those regulations are very important indeed. Where they are being successfully applied - our evidence is they are being applied increasingly successfully - there is no doubt they are having a seriously beneficial impact in reducing the level of serious car crime. I absolutely share your view that the priority for us is to enforce those regulations more effectively. Q33 Jim Sheridan: Are these motor salvage traders visited regularly by inspectors to see what cars are there? Do they keep registration numbers? Mr Lewis: Being registered carries with it a number of obligations: being a fit and proper person to run such a business, for example, allowing the police to visit your premises or being required to allow them to at any time without a warrant and so on. The police in this area tend to be intelligence led. They will visit businesses where they believe that there is some suspicion or some evidence that criminality or dubious practices are taking place. They will not visit regularly businesses which they believe to be well, properly and honestly run. Q34 Jim Sheridan: If a motor salvage operator is registered, partly because as a fit and reasonable person they have to allow the police onto the premises to search the premises, I can understand why people do not want to be registered. Mr Lewis: The reason why you do want to be registered is because it is the law. Let us assume that most businesses want to comply with the law. The second reason is I am absolutely sure that most people who run motor salvage businesses want to be able to say it is an absolutely, properly, decently and honestly run business and part of that is that they are registered under these regulations. Q35 Jon Trickett: The truth is that however much improvement we have seen the criminal justice system has decided not to give any priority to this matter. Mr Lewis: No. With great respect, I do not think it is the truth. If it were true, we would not have had one of the key government volume crime targets over the last three years to reduce the volume of vehicle crime by the 30% figure we talked about at the beginning. In my time in the Home Office which is now two years, this has been a constant priority at the very top of our volume crime agenda. Q36 Jon Trickett: It may be that it has been a priority but for the rest of the criminal justice system, particularly in West Yorkshire where I live and which I represent, we are doing extremely poorly. According to appendix one, 27 out of every 1,000 vehicles are subject to theft from or of the vehicle. The rate of detection is appallingly low relative to other crimes. Mr Lewis: Although vehicle crime has fallen very substantially indeed over the last three years and it continues to fall, it is in absolute terms still too high. Secondly, I agree with you that the detection rate is far too low. Q37 Jon Trickett: There is a poverty of aspiration, because the 30% increase would take you to about 17% resolution of thefts of vehicles, which is one in six. Mr Lewis: We are talking of thefts of and from vehicles. Q38 Jon Trickett: In a place like West Yorkshire that would mean, instead of finding the thieves of three cars out of the 27 which are stolen per thousand, we would find the thieves of four cars out of the 27 per thousand. That is what a 30% increase means in West Yorkshire. That would still leave us with 23 thefts undetected per thousand. We would still be in the highest category. Is it not a fact that a 30% increase does reflect a poverty of aspiration? Even if we got to the average of detections for all crimes, you would be looking at a 10% increase in detections, would you not, but we have not suggested we should get anything like that, have we? Mr Lewis: The 30% target reduction applied to vehicle crime, not to detections. In terms of poverty of aspiration, in the 2000 British crime survey it recorded a total of over three million vehicle crimes in England and Wales. The latest figures we have are about 2.1 million so we have cut the number of vehicle crimes over three years by a third. That is a very substantial reduction. It is not yet in any sense good enough. The detection rate is too low. That is an absolutely shared and agreed issue. Q39 Jon Trickett: It takes a week of police officer time to achieve one arrest in West Yorkshire. It takes 100 hours of a police officer doing nothing else. I am now on table 15, page 27. We are not the worst in West Yorkshire. There are people worse than us. The constabulary has devoted some police officers to do nothing else except intercept vehicles according to this fancy new system you have. It takes them 100 hours to make 3.5 arrests. If a police officer is out 35 hours a week, they are nicking one thief of a car every week. It takes them a week to do one arrest. Do you not think that is more than a poverty of aspiration? It is not very good, is it? Mr Lewis: With great respect, I think we are discussing different things. The figures you are quoting on table 15 are using the new ANPR system. That is very new technology which barely existed two years ago and which we are just introducing in a serious way in most forces, and which we have to become a great deal more expert in benefiting from. I agree with you absolutely. Also, more generally, the detection rates for vehicle crime are too low and we have to improve them. Q40 Jon Trickett: You introduced the ANPR as something which was laudable. I got nicked driving into London. I forgot to pay my congestion charge and quite rightly I was fined. It is very effective technology but the best police force in the country, according to these figures, is the policeman who is doing 100 hours who is pinching nine people for one kind of offence or another because not all are thieves; some are driving eating apples or whatever. How can you possibly justify 100 hours to effect 3.5 arrests some of which will not lead even to charges, never mind to convictions? That is not a defensible position, is it, between you and I? There is nobody else, just you and I, in the room. Let us be honest with each other. Mr Lewis: Of course this is not a position which is good enough. Can I restate, because it is important, that this is very, very new and emerging technology and we need to learn how to exploit it fully and to best effect. Q41 Jon Trickett: You have made that point several times now. At paragraph 4.8, under the circumstances, we are dealing with the largest investment most people make in their lives excluding buying a house, which is a car. It would be hilarious but this is serious. In Lincolnshire, out of the 100 hours that this policeman is devoting to nicking four and a half people, 40 hours are spent driving backwards and forwards by the policeman so he is spending 60 hours apprehending these four and a half individuals. What on earth is going on? Mr Lewis: I am not going to claim to be an expert on the policing of Lincolnshire. Q42 Jon Trickett: You have signed this report, have you not? Mr Lewis: Yes, I have. This is a technology which is easier to use more cost effectively in big city areas in which you have large vehicle flows than in rural areas where you have fewer vehicle flows. You are right on this point. We need to get better at knowing when and where we can use this technology to best effect, not least because it is very beneficial technology not just in terms of vehicle crime but often, when you stop somebody using this technology, you find that you have somebody else in your hands who you may want for a lot of other crimes as well. Q43 Jon Trickett: Even the best police force in the country which is Cleveland still spends 17 hours out of the 100 driving backwards and forwards. I think it is odd, not to say bizarre. Recently, I was approached by an individual who had been able to identify the history of my car. He had taken a photograph of my car and rang me to say, "This car used to belong to X, Y and Z." This was a member of the public. Is it illegal to hold that information? Mr Bennett: I do not know how they would know that. Q44 Jon Trickett: Somebody is bent in your outfit or in the police. Mr Bennett: The only people who get data from us are those who have cause to know, which would be the police. Q45 Jon Trickett: It was not a police person; it was a member of the public. Is it illegal for them to have that information? Mr Bennett: It is certainly not our intention ever to give that information. Q46 Jon Trickett: They had obtained it somehow from Swansea. Mr Bennett: Unless they got it through a viable process, we give data out only to those who have just and reasonable cause. Q47 Jon Trickett: This person had no just cause. If a person with no just cause is able to get hold of the information - and I understand this is quite a regular practice - is it illegal for them to do that? Mr Bennett: It is not legal for them to get it from us. Reasonable cause would have to be justified, for example, if somebody was blocking a car park or making a nuisance of themselves. We would give that detail out but only for the ability to get to that driver. The issue is what the person who receives that data does. I would need specific details. Q48 Jon Trickett: Is it illegal for somebody to get hold of that information? Is it illegal for somebody in your employ to give that information? Mr Bennett: It is illegal for somebody in our employ to give information to anybody except those who have reasonable cause to have that data. We have got rid of employees who have done that in the past. Q49 Jon Trickett: Do you have a list of agencies who are authorised to have that information? Mr Bennett: We have a fairly set list. Q50 Jon Trickett: Would it be possible for the Committee to have that list? Mr Bennett: Yes. Q51 Mr Steinberg: How important is it to ensure that motor car manufacturers are committed to ensuring that cars are very difficult to steal? Reading the report, it seems that they did not regard this as a very important issue. They did not seem to be interested in improving security on cars as far as they have gone at the present time. Mr Lewis: We have seen a sea change in the industry. I was pleased to read in the report that the Home Office has played a very instrumental role in encouraging manufacturers to take the issue of vehicle security more seriously. I think, to parody it slightly, manufacturers believed that what sold cars was their looks, performance and so on. It has become clearer and clearer that people are much more concerned now about security and manufacturers have moved to respond to that in quite significant ways. Q52 Mr Steinberg: With great respect, I think that is irrelevant. It may be that people buy cars because they are flashy or have a good record for not rusting or whatever, but the taxpayer has to pay a considerable amount of money and we all pay high insurance simply because cars get stolen. Should not the manufacturers, whether it is a good selling point or not, be forced to ensure that cars are secure? They say that they cannot go any further with the technology but that seems to be a load of rubbish. Mr Lewis: The fitting of electronic immobilisers is required by EU law. That has been there since 1998. Secondly, the statistics here are very interesting because significantly older cars are stolen much more frequently than newer cars. That is not particularly because newer cars have better security. Older cars tend to be parked on the road often in areas which have experience of high crime levels but nevertheless it is undoubtedly the case that newer cars have much better security built into them than older cars. Q53 Mr Steinberg: What the manufacturers seem to be saying is that they do not particularly want to go any further. They have reached the point where they believe they have done enough. I do not think they have done enough. The technology has moved on. We can put a man on the moon but we cannot secure a car. That seems crazy to me. Mr Lewis: The Home Office does not share the view that we have reached some kind of limit in the ability of manufacturers to make their cars more secure. I do not think we will ever reach that limit because technology will go on improving. I see our responsibility as working with the industry to encourage and promote them to do more in this respect. Q54 Mr Steinberg: There is one behind me, there is one in my pocket and I suspect there is one in virtually everybody's pocket in the room: mobile phones. Nowadays they take perfect photographs. They are presumably very cheap to produce in terms of the photographs they take and how they take them. Why do manufacturers, for example, not put a camera in every car that would take photographs? I suspect it would cost no more than 100 quid or something in the case of a £15,000 or £20,000 car. Why are these sorts of things not encouraged by the Home Office, or are they? Mr Lewis: They certainly are. To give you one example of an area where we are encouraging strongly the industry to go further, without going into all the technicalities, something called Thatcham Category 5 is a technology which does now exist, in a situation where a car has been stolen and is reported stolen, allowing the engine to be automatically immobilised once it has stopped. Therefore, if after a period you try and restart it it will not start. We are working with the manufacturers and the insurance industry to encourage the use of that technology. Q55 Mr Steinberg: When I bought my last car, they were trying to persuade me to buy a navigation unit or something. I know the way to the office from my house. It is about three miles and I did not really need one because that is as far as I travel. Presumably you could have some sort of device in the car that would project up to the thing that is going round? Mr Lewis: I do not believe we can possibly have reached some kind of limit to what is possible to build into a car. Q56 Mr Steinberg: Can you force them to do this? Mr Lewis: No. Government and Parliament can always decide to take powers but at this moment we operate on a voluntary basis with the industry. Our relationships with the industry, the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders and the insurers, are very good. You will have seen reference in the report to the vehicle crime reduction action team on which they sit and which the report commends for the way we have approached this in a joined up way. Q57 Mr Steinberg: If it had not been for the EU, immobilisers would not have been brought in. By legislation, manufacturers were forced to put immobilisers in the cars and that has decreased the number of cars being stolen. Legislation has worked. Mr Lewis: I agree. There is always a place for considering whether you have reached a point where legislation ---- Q58 Mr Steinberg: There is nothing worse than coming out of your house or going to a car park and you look for your car and it is not there. It is the worst feeling in the world. It is worse than losing the wife. I would much rather know that my car was there when I get up in the morning than my wife. Mr Lewis: I am certainly not going down that route. My son had his car stolen recently and he was devastated, so I absolutely understand. Q59 Mr Steinberg: The motor manufacturers will not do it voluntarily, will they? They have to be forced. Mr Lewis: Although I agree with a great deal of what you have said, I think that is unfair. Manufacturers have come a very long way in regarding car security as an important feature. You can tell that by the fact that it appears now in many manufacturers' advertisements. You cannot pick up a new car brochure without it talking about the security and safety features built into that car. Where I agree with you is I do not believe we have reached a limit where we can suddenly say that that bit is done. Q60 Mr Steinberg: The police have a very difficult job but they do not seem to take car crime all that seriously. I have had my car broken into twice in a month. Never park your car in Sunderland. When you see it broken into, you wish the death penalty had been re-introduced. The police never came back to me. I never knew what had happened. If you look at the figures for detection rates, only 6% of thefts from cars are ever found out and only 13% of stolen cars are ever found. It does not seem to me as though the police are all that interested. Mr Lewis: I do not think that is entirely fair, although I absolutely agree that those detection rates are too low. Our energy and efforts over recent years very successfully have gone to reduce the overall number of vehicle crimes. In that, we have been very successful. It does not mean we cannot go a lot further and the police have been very much involved in that. I do not think we have applied the same determination throughout that period to increasing the detection rate where car crimes nevertheless still take place and we have to do better. Q61 Mr Steinberg: Mr Trickett touched on figure 15, page 27, and he was getting rather cross about the fact that where he comes from they have a very poor record. That was about the crimes that are solved but he also went on about figure 15 and the number of police hours it takes. What struck me about this graph was that they have automatic number plate recognition and they are all using the same equipment. Why is there such a huge variation in the pilot schemes? Why, for example, is Nottinghamshire way up in the nine plus area and the City of London is down to under one? You would have thought with that sort of system there would be even results. Mr Lewis: I do not think honestly I can do better here than repeat the answers I gave to Mr Trickett and other colleagues. These disparities are not justifiable. They are too large. What I do want to stress again is that this is very, very new technology. Lest you think we are just sitting here, looking at these figures and saying, "That is jolly interesting", our police standards unit which is the chosen instrument within the Home Office of arriving at best practice is very much focused on this issue and has a dedicated team of people doing it. Chairman: I can assure Gerry Steinberg that nothing has changed. I remember sitting in the Home Office when I was PPSF 15 years ago seeing the then Home Secretary tearing his hair out because the motor manufacturers were not doing anything to improve vehicle security. I bet the same briefing notes are going to the Home Secretary now: "Yes, Minister, it is all terribly difficult" as we had 15 years ago. Q62 Mr Jenkins: Are you pleased with the report overall? Mr Lewis: Yes. I hope you will not instantly take that to mean I am complacent. Q63 Mr Jenkins: You find the recommendations acceptable and you want to implement them as quickly as possible? Mr Lewis: Yes. We are content with all the recommendations and we intend to implement them. Q64 Mr Jenkins: When you were giving evidence earlier on, you remarked on the fact that DNA is now being brought in on car theft etc., but in my part of the world if kids pinch your car, ride around and cause mayhem they tend to burn it out so you cannot get DNA from the car. They are one step ahead. They are always one step ahead, are they not? I had an incident of car jacking in my constituency where this person put a knife to the neck of a four year old lad in the car, sitting next to his dad. They handed the car keys over. The alarm bells went off and the police had caught and arrested him within 24 hours because it was serious; whereas if a car has been pinched it might be 24 weeks. If it is a car that has been broken into, it could be 24 years before any action is taken. So I would say car crime in this country is not a crime any longer. It is acceptable to police forces as just an inconvenience. In fact, most of the people in my part of the world do not even report it. If somebody comes along and puts a brick through the window and takes my CD, and I take it along to the insurance company and I have got to pay the first £100, well then, it is not worth it because it is only going to cost me £60 to get fixed so I do not even report it. I am not going to inform a member of the police force when it is going to cost me more than my excess. Mr Lewis: Two things to say to that. I suppose the first thing to say is that if somebody steals a car by putting a knife to the throat of a four‑year‑old I would want the police force to devote more resources and energy to that than somebody who puts a brick through the windscreen and steels the CD player. Having said that, I do not genuinely believe it is fair to say that police regard vehicle crime as a fact of life. I do not believe they do. I think there is a great deal of evidence that they are getting much better at reducing it though not yet at detecting it. If the ACPO lead on car crime, the Chief Constable of Surrey, were here he would say absolutely firmly to you that vehicle crime is a crime like any other and the police are determined to reduce it. Going back that is why we had a car crime target under the PSA regime. Q65 Mr Jenkins: Let us get this right. New cars are now protected more than ever because if a nice person walks out and sees his £20,000 or £30,000 or £40,000 car going off the drive and he creates hell. So we are looking after the new cars. We are looking after the well‑off in effect, but lower down the scale the poorer people in this country who buy older cars, when they suffer a theft from the car or theft of the car, do you seriously think there is any action taken to recover that car? Mr Lewis: I cannot speak of course for every instance but I believe that there certainly is in most cases and there most certainly should be. Just to say, because I do accept the underlying point you are making, that some of our most effective crime reduction projects ‑ this almost takes us back a little bit to our last hearing ‑ has been focused on those kinds of areas where there are much older cars which are more easily broken into. There is a one project talked about in the report, the Luton Autolok project on an estate in Luton, which was about encouraging and incentivising people to fit steering wheel locks to their cars because you are absolutely right, if you drive a 12‑year‑old car you have as much right for that car to be still in the place where you left it when you come back to it as if you drive a one‑year‑old car. Q66 Mr Jenkins: So you think the police are as enthusiastic in this area? Mr Lewis: Yes, I do genuinely believe that the police take vehicle crime seriously. Remember, the police have a major volume crime target under the way we operate the system. It has come down a great deal but there are still on the last figures over two million vehicle crimes a year in this country. That is a very serious number. Q67 Mr Jenkins: What is the detection rate again? Mr Lewis: The detection rate overall is 9%. Q68 Mr Jenkins: So that is when the police are really trying they get a 9% detection rate? So what do you put it down to, incompetence? Mr Lewis: First of all, I genuinely believe that this is not the easiest crime to detect. When you come to a car where somebody has put a brick through the window or forced the lock to take a CD, it is not the easiest crime to detect. To go back because I do not want to be contradicting what you are saying, that detection rate is not good enough. I think if any senior police colleague were sitting at your table today they would say exactly the same to you. We have to get better. We have to get better at using the National Intelligence Model, at knowing how we detect car crime better, and we have to get better at using the technologies that are now available to us Q69 Mr Jenkins: Can I ask you on technologies then, for instance if someone were to come into the ownership of a red Mondeo, say, year 2000, and drive down the street and pass another red Mondeo, year 2000, and get out and unscrew the number plate of that particular car which was taxed and transfer the number plate and then drove off, would you pick it up in any way because of the theft of the number plate? Would that be registered? Mr Bennett: Of course that does happen, fortunately not very greatly as far as anyone can gather but it does happen, and that is one of the reasons we are looking at, for example, embedding chips in number plates to make sure they are less easy to take off. Although I would say if you try and do that with Transport for London, you might get away with it the first time but they make a note of it when they get a rejection of the fine chase and then they will stop the vehicle the second time. The point is you are getting a law of diminishing returns here. You are right that you can get away with it if you see the plate and therefore realise. The answer in the longer term is to tighten up on plate security. Q70 Mr Jenkins: But today, not at some future time, when somebody takes the plates off the car, drives off, usually into a petrol station, fills it with petrol and then drives off without paying and off they go, there is no way that your vehicle recognition would deal with that? That is a red Mondeo with that number plate. Mr Bennett: That is exactly right, it would not. Q71 Mr Jenkins: It would not pick it up? Mr Bennett: No, not until you then followed up on it and picked it up with that individual. It is when you go for the enforcement of that that you start to find out there is a problem and then create a record and deal with it but the initial thing, no you cannot. Q72 Mr Jenkins: This is why I get people in my part of the world receiving fines for parking their vehicle in London when their car has never ever been in London because someone is cloning the plates? Mr Bennett: Those complaints are critical because they are the complaints that help in the investigation of records, so you are absolutely right it is unfortunate that the public become the mechanism for cleaning up when what we really need to do is deal with the plate security issue in the longer term, but that is a longer term issue. Q73 Mr Jenkins: If my car number plates get pinched tonight, how do I get another set of number plates? Mr Bennett: The number plate regulation has been tightened up considerably so, for example, you would have to go to a registered dealer, you would have to present your V5 registration document and your licence to prove who you are and they would then give you that plate. In the old days that was not the case. The only way you can get a plate now that is cloned is to take off the plate and put it on to your own vehicle leaving the car you took it off with no plate and they would then have the problem. It is much more difficult to clone now because of the tightening up of the number plate regulations. Q74 Mr Jenkins: What would flag up the fact that now there is a number plate running around on a car, and that car is running illegally? How would that get into the system? Mr Bennett: If it had no plate I guess it would get picked up by police, by Transport for London in all the places where you use cameras or visual sightings. If it has no plate, it is going to get stopped or picked up, one would hope. Q75 Mr Jenkins: When my number plates have been pinched, who do I inform or do I just go down to the garage and get another set of number plates? Mr Bennett: You cannot; that is the point. Q76 Mr Jenkins: He is a registered supplier? Would he then inform you that this is a duplicate set of plates that has been issued if one set has been picked? Mr Bennett: You would have to go down and get that new set but you would already have a missing plate and we would tend to issue a new number. If a person came up and said my number plate has been stolen, it has been cloned, we would ultimately issue a new number plate to overcome that issue but, by and large, if you had no number plate you would be caught; if you need a new number plate you have got to go to a dealer to get it. Q77 Mr Jenkins: If my number plate is ABC 123, would I be issued with ABC 123 again or would I be issued with a different number plate? Mr Bennett: If you produced the registration book you will be given that plate. Q78 Mr Jenkins: Again? So there are now two of us running around with ABC 123? Mr Bennett: If you suspect that your plate has been stolen and you are driving around with no number plate, you will get in contact with DVLA and they will issue a new plate altogether to deal with the whole thing and make sure that the vehicle was carefully identified, otherwise you have that problem. Q79 Mr Jenkins: Now I get ABC 124, for instance, and 123 will be logged up in the system as belonging to a stolen plate and the vehicle gets stopped? Mr Bennett: That would be put on to the record and they could get caught later on. That is the point. Q80 Mr Jenkins: How many of these instances do you come up with in a year? Mr Bennett: How many instances? Q81 Mr Jenkins: How many of these people would have to re-register these cars? Mr Bennett: I do not know how many re-registrations under that kind of situation but I can get the numbers for you. Q82 Mr Jenkins: I see you have got nearly a million cars running round unregistered in your system. Mr Bennett: Those are not in the category that you have just talked about. Q83 Mr Jenkins: How do you know? Mr Bennett: Those are cars that are on the database that have not paid tax or insurance but they are not necessarily cloned vehicles. The issue, as you have talked about, is where somebody will copy a number plate. That is where the vehicle becomes --- Mr Jenkins: My time is up unfortunately but thank you, Chairman. Chairman: Thank you Mr Jenkins. Alan Williams? Mr Williams: First of all, can I say as everyone else has that it is a very good report and I am sure you are very pleased with it. If there are any questions that need to be asked they will be asked of Mr Steinberg when he goes home at the weekend. Mr Steinberg: She dare not because she bumped the car on Sunday night! Q84 Mr Williams: Would the area-by-area table in Appendix 1 be very different if we separated the thefts from and the thefts of? Is there any difference? Mr Lewis: The honest answer to that question is I do not know but I suspect that it would not be very different. All my instincts tell me that if we were to split it into those two categories then probably the rankings would not look very different under either set of results. Q85 Mr Williams: Looking at that table, the top theft figure is nearly six times as high as the lowest. Is it taken for granted that variations are for all of these reasons or is there an analysis done of why there are variations between them? Mr Lewis: No, we spend a great deal of time looking at just these kinds of variations and not just in relation to vehicle crime. It is the case that Nottinghamshire, for example, which is the wrong end of this table (though it is improving) has high rates of a number of volume crimes, not just vehicle crime, compared with other areas and that is one reason why a whole series of government agencies are working intensively with some police forces and with crime and disorder reduction partnerships to concentrate on the highest crime areas. It is why the new PSA target is to reduce crime overall by 15% but by more in the high crime areas. For example, the Police Standards Unit, to which I have referred already, works intensively with a number of police forces, one of which as it happens is Nottinghamshire because we want to see a significant reduction in levels of crime in those areas where it is at its highest. Q86 Mr Williams: I suppose just trying to think logically about it, that the untaxed and uninsured cars tend to be perhaps more in the big metropolitan areas where they can get lost in the traffic flows? Mr Lewis: I think this tends to be a general phenomenon which for all sorts of reasons (but the one you say is I think very relevant) which is concentrated in some of the more urban and inner city areas and also some of those cars are used almost routinely for crime. They are passed from hand-to-hand if you see what I mean and are used in other crimes, which is why there is a link. Vehicle crime is about vehicle crime but vehicle crime is often a conduit to other forms of crime as well. Q87 Mr Williams: What scale of fines is available for driving uninsured and untaxed? Mr Lewis: I am sorry but I do not have those figures in my head so with apologies I will need to write to you. Q88 Mr Williams: I am just wondering how far they are a deterrent. I know the odd case I have seen in the newspaper I have tended to think this is very little money for somebody who is driving around uninsured, putting other people at risk and people are not just victims perhaps in terms of injury but deprived of any compensation. It seems to me from the fines that were imposed that it was treated rather lightly but I was not sure whether those were the maximums available. If you could let us have a note on that? Mr Lewis: I will. Q89 Mr Williams: We are told that you had a target to reach 2,000 safer car parks in the Safer Car Parking Scheme by the year 2000. Why is it that at the time of this Report there were only 1,350? Everything else seems to be going reasonably well. What is the difference there? Mr Lewis: We certainly are not satisfied with the number of car parks which have so far secured accreditation under the Safer Car Park Scheme. It is rising month-by-month and as it happens, I will not bore you with numbers unless you desperately want me to, the number for the end of January was higher than it was for the end of December but the real point is we estimate there are some 20,000 car parks in this country and we still at this point only have a small percentage of them accredited under that scheme and it is a major and continuing priority for us to get the car park industry generally ‑ and we have talked about hospital and station car parks ‑ to have those car parks more secure, precisely because we estimate 20% of all car crime takes place in car parks. Q90 Mr Williams: Some of the car parks of course will be very small anyhow and it could be that cost is an element because I see somewhere in the report that the Home Office spent £106 million on CCTV for 1,222 car parks. That works out in my head to £87,000 each. That is a lot of money. Does that include several years' running costs? What would a typical cost be? Mr Lewis: It is a lot of money and I cannot give you an average cost. The original Safer Car Parks Scheme was fairly rigid. It said you have to this, you have to have that, and you have to have the other, and that made sense in a big inner city car park perhaps but, exactly as you said, did not make sense in a very, very small local car park which perhaps had very little incidence of crime anyway but where it would simply not be cost‑effective to install CCTV. The newer current scheme is much more flexible than that. It starts from an analysis of the risk and requires measures to be taken that respond to and are proportionate to that risk. Q91 Mr Williams: Are the two crimes - theft of and theft from - looking very different now in terms of the progress that is being made in preventing them? Mr Lewis: No. Subject to correction - and if I were to get this wrong I would write to you or stand to be corrected - I think we have seen a fall in both theft of and theft from so the two tend to move pretty well in parallel. Q92 Mr Williams: Then there is a third sector of car crime which is not covered by any of your targets, I can understand why because I do not know how you protect against this I suppose, and that is vandalism, and there are 1.4 million cases of vandalism. Is that an emerging situation or is that something that has been there all the time but we just have not had it noted in this Committee before? Mr Lewis: This is a long‑running phenomenon, it is not a new phenomenon and it is not, as you say, part of the target. Nevertheless, it is important and we talked about the effects on people. If you come back and find somebody has run a jagged object along your car door then you are pretty unhappy about that and I think any of us would be. We are doing a great deal to seek to reduce those kinds of crimes as well. They form a key part of the whole anti‑social behaviour programme, for example, which, as you know, is a major thrust of Government policy. Actually to go back to where you started safer car parks are part of that. Well-lit car parks with CCTV, for example, are much less likely to suffer vandalism than car parks which have no protection, lousy lighting and so on. Q93 Mr Williams: What about this issue of wanton, random vandalism. You, like myself, will have read in newspapers of areas being focused on where people come out and find all their tyres slashed. It is not many but is this sort of random activity and wanton destruction a typical feature of vandalism? Mr Lewis: Sadly, vandalism can take many forms. It can take people slashing tyres. It can take people scratching or defacing body work, all of that, and this is not something that is in any shape or form trivial. It is part of a wider phenomenon of society and that is why a very, very major thrust of the Government's policy is to seek to tackle anti‑social behaviour of all kinds. This is a crime ‑ to be clear ‑ this is not trivial. Mr Williams: Thank you very much. Chairman: Thank you very much. Just a couple of supplementaries from Mr Allan and Mr Steinberg. Q94 Mr Allan: Like, I am sure, other Members of the Committee, I spend a fair amount of my time in motorway service station urinals reading the posters on the wall which try and sell me tracking devices and they report these dramatic rates for picking up cars. Can you be confident that if somebody does invest in one of these tracking devices that 100% of the times they report their vehicle going off round country there will be police action? Mr Lewis: No, I cannot. That would be a very bold claim to be confident that I could give you a 100% assurance. Q95 Mr Allan: How high can you give? Mr Lewis: I would absolutely hope that if a member of the public reports to the police that their car has been stolen and it has a tracker device on it that robust action will be taken. I cannot give you a guarantee of that. Q96 Mr Allan: But you are confident that the national programme and the infrastructure which you do oversee have got stuff in place to assist those people who have taken the trouble and expense to assist themselves? Mr Lewis: Yes I would hope so and I would hope that we would be assisting those people who have taken the trouble to assist themselves as well Q97 Mr Allan: Good. The other point I wanted to pick up on was Mr Sheridan's discussion about the salvage operators. It tells us here that over half of the local authorities that were surveyed do not have a register and they are not bothering to do it. When are you going to take action against these local authorities for ignoring your regulations and what are you going to do to them? Mr Lewis: I think this is a serious issue. We have been focused upon it. We have been focused upon it with the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and we have been focused on it with the Local Government Association. We are going to go out again jointly to local authorities and we are going to make clear that this is not optional. This is something that has to be done. It is a legal requirement. Q98 Mr Allan: Have they been given money to do it? Mr Lewis: There is a whole local government infrastructure for new burdens and so on which is meant to give authorities funds to carry out new tasks. That should all have been catered for through that mechanism. I think the Government as a whole would regard this as a very serious issue. We are going to do another survey incidentally in May to find out where we are now and that will tell us. If we find there has been no significant improvement then I think we are going to have to resort to some tougher measures. Q99 Mr Allan: Did you publish the last list and will you publish the new list of shame of those who are not doing it? Mr Lewis: I cannot remember if we published the last list of shame but I am quite in favour of publishing. Q100 Mr Allan: Would you consider publishing it more widely? I think it would be helpful if we could see who is ignoring your regulations and the new survey as well? Mr Lewis: Yes, indeed. Q101 Mr Steinberg: As far as Mr Williams' questions is concerned about vandalism I think these ASBOs do not go far enough. We should bring back cutting hands off if people are caught vandalising cars. That would stop it. I was really dismayed when I read part of the report on page 30 regarding car park operators, seriously, particularly if you read paragraph 5.6 in the second column, this was very disappointing. It seems to me that the car park operators are very keen to take your money off you in a sort of contract where you can park your car and they charge you so much and it is quite expensive to park, but take no responsibility at all for anything that goes wrong in the car park. I think that is totally wrong. I can accept that in a car park that is on an open piece of land it would be very difficult but not in a car park which is purpose‑built and you feel should be secure. Incidentally, I just find that paragraph ridiculous where they say that the car park operators were reluctant to participate in the scheme because operators did not think customers would regard security as very important. I think that is crackers. That is the most important as far as I am concerned. When are we going to get to a situation where these operators who take a lot of money and who must make a fortune out of car parking are held responsible for anything that goes wrong in their car park? They should be forced, as in any other contract, and if they cannot guarantee the security of your car when you are paying good money for parking in there, then they should be held responsible? Why do we not make them responsible? Mr Lewis: I do not think I can do better on this occasion than quote what my Minister Hazel Blears said in April 2004 when she launched the new car park scheme. She said this: "I hope industry will respond positively to the new scheme and make real progress in making car parks safer. The Government has a strong preference for partnership working to make this happen, but our prime responsibility must be to the public and to make towns and cities safer for them, so if we do not see real progress within a year we will have to look at all options which encourage the industry to deliver the improvements in safety that we all want. This includes the possibility of legislation if we were satisfied that the crime reduction benefits outweighed the costs of the legal route." Q102 Chairman: We try to discourage ministerial statements in this Committee not least because you probably wrote that statement in the first place. Maybe it is as easy if you say it out of your own mouth. Mr Lewis: Chairman, why I did think that it was important to quote that is because ministers have put that on the record to the industry. Chairman: I think Mr Sheridan and Mr Jenkins have a supplementary. Q103 Jim Sheridan: As someone who for many years had an old car, I found the best way of stopping people stealing it was to leave your name address and phone number on the dash board and ask them to return it when they are finished. Can I say in terms of new cars, back to the point Mr Steinberg raises about the motor manufacturers themselves and the lack of incentive or encouragement for them to improve security, I think you did say you meet with them on a regular basis. When was the last time that you met with them when this whole question was discussed? More importantly, is there a league table of cars available that tells you which car is stolen more often? That would be interesting for somebody who is going to buy a car. This car will do wonderful things but if it is the car that is most often stolen that may concentrate the minds of motor manufacturers. Mr Lewis: The answer to that very specific question is yes there is. There is what we call the Car Theft Index which is published by the Home Office which we publicise as widely as we can including on the web site and through local police forces which does precisely what you say. It sets out car by car, make by make and model by model the chances of that car being subject to car crime so, yes, we do exactly what you say. Q104 Mr Field: The first question, when did you last meet the motor manufacturers? There was a first question. Mr Lewis: Do let me come back to that. We do meet with the SMMT very regularly, both on a bilateral basis and because they are members of the Vehicle Crime Reduction Action Team which is mentioned in the report, so we have continuing and regular dialogue with them. Q105 Mr Field: He asked when was the last time. Mr Lewis: I do not know that I am afraid. I do not know that literally so I will write and let you know precisely when that was. Q106 Mr Jenkins: Just one question with regard to insurance companies and their involvement because one of the things I always suspect is insurance companies really are not that bothered because all they do is pay out, pay out and pay out and then increase the premiums on the innocent motorists out there to make their profit as well as meeting their costs. What incentives can we provide to the insurance companies to ensure that they inform people with regard to how to keep cars safer because I note in the report it says here in a particular case study 18% of cars are taken because the car owner had left the keys in the vehicle. Would I leave the keys in my vehicle when I want a new car because the insurance company will pay out more than I can get on trade-in? It is one of the ways I can get more money for it. Whenever my insurance company sends me a reminder for paying, that is all it is. They never give me a breakdown of when my car will not be insured like if I left the keys in it or what I can do to safeguard my car and my property. Are we engaging with them? Mr Lewis: We most certainly are. First of all, we do engage with the insurers at every level and I personally meet the Association of British Insurers on behalf of the Home Office on a regular basis. The second thing is there is a very clear incentive on the insurance industry in this respect because they want to pay out less. They want to pay out less to people who have been the victims of car crime, whether their car has been stolen or broken into so they have a very clear incentive to reduce levels of vehicle crime. Q107 Mr Jenkins: They just increase the premiums. What other incentive can we put on them? Mr Lewis: Of course in a sense they will set the premiums relative to the level of risk because that is the whole nature of the industry, but having set the premiums their interest is then paying out as little as possible to claims because they want there to be as few claims as possible so we have a very clear shared interest with the insurers in reducing the amount of vehicle crime. That is why the insurance industry has moved to making significant differentials in car group insurance depending on the car security rating of the individual model. Mr Jenkins: Thank you. Q108 Mr Field: Mr Lewis, could I just ask two points. The interesting information you gave us that the Home Office collects the data on models ‑ Mr Sheridan's point ‑ do you discuss with the insurance companies that they should rate premiums according to your index? Mr Lewis: We certainly have that discussion with the industry. The way they tend to approach it (but in a sense we are pretty well on a convergence course here) is that they put cars into one of five categories. They operate a five‑star system whereby you get five stars if your car has all the security features that they believe are effective and desirable and at the other end one, and that determines whether you go up or down the maximum of two car insurance groups as a result. It is the case that it is those cars which are at the worse end of that which tend to be stolen more often. Q109 Mr Field: Following Mr Steinberg's point then and a way of making the Home Office even more popular with voters, might not you consider putting your five‑star rating on cars as to whether there is a likelihood of the car being stolen? Mr Lewis: Let me take that away and think about that. In many ways we are, I think, in exactly the position you want us to be. We believe that the public should have the maximum amount of information that they can possibly have when they are about to buy a car as to what we know about the likelihood of that car being stolen or broken into. That is precisely what our Car Theft Index intends to do. Q110 Mr Field: In showrooms a label on the different models with the price, repayment basis and all the rest of it, and then your five‑star index would have quite a lot of effect in concentrating the mind in the way that Mr Steinberg wants. Mr Lewis: It is beginning to happen but again I am not going to decry that as a suggestion. I would like to take that away and see if we cannot make something of it. A number of motor magazines ‑ What Car? I know for certain do this now ‑ set out the new car security ratings in their guides to new cars and you will see that increasingly. I think the more we can do of this kind the better. Q111 Mr Field: But your guide will not be their rating on their security, just how effective their security is. Mr Lewis: What I was saying before is you would expect those two to converge if there is any kind of logic to the system. I would like to take away your suggestion. Q112 Mr Field: Might you write to us when you have thought about it? Mr Lewis: Yes. Mr Field: Thank you very much. Q113 Chairman: There was a report on the BBC News today that eight car salvage yards were raided by the Metropolitan Police on Tuesday after lengthy investigations and over the past six months about 150 old‑style E‑Class Mercedes cars have been stolen each month. The men are being held on suspicion of operating a joint operation. Clearly that was organised crime, was it not? With reference to organised crime and the National Criminal Intelligence Service at paragraph 7.3, what progress are you making towards getting the National Criminal Intelligence Service to work more closely with the police? Mr Lewis: That story is the front page of the Evening Standard. I was slightly worried when I saw it that you would think in some way we had managed to orchestrate it for this hearing today. Q114 Chairman: Perhaps you did! Mr Lewis: Perhaps we did but as a matter of fact we most certainly did not! I think it does illustrate two things, if I may say so. First of all, there is an organised criminality element to vehicle crime. I do not want to comment on the details of that story, which I have only read about in the same way you have read about it, but there is undoubtedly an organised criminal element to car crime and we need to tackle that energetically and we need to tackle it on an intelligence‑led basis. I think there is increasing evidence that we are doing that. Chairman: Thank you very much. The point Mr Trickett was making was alarming. He mentioned Lincolnshire ‑ and he did not ask my permission first ‑ and he told us that police officers spent 40% of their time driving around Lincolnshire in order to make an arrest. That is frightening, is it not? I know it is a long way round whichever way you go in Lincolnshire but there must be a more efficient way of running a police force. Q115 Mr Steinberg: There are not a lot of people in Lincolnshire; there are a lot of sheep. Mr Lewis: Since coming into this post I have spent a day in Lincolnshire. I visited Lincolnshire and met the Chief Constable and the Chair of the Police Authority. I still would not wish to pass judgment on the efficiency of Lincolnshire policing, but I just go back to the point that this is a new technology, we have a great deal to learn as to how to operate it most cost‑effectively. Chairman: Mr Lewis, Mr Bennett, thank you very much for appearing before us today. |