Examination of Witnesses (Questions 280-296)
24 NOVEMBER 2004
Mr Stephen Rimmer, Ms Louise Casey, and Ms Margaret
O'Mara
Q280 Mrs Williams: Do you think it should
be?
Ms O'Mara: You are drawing me
into difficult territory. I do not think the Home Secretary would
say it should be. In terms of taking an holistic view, you are
absolutely right. We would say that the holistic view can be taken
actually at partnership level. It is quite interesting in certain
areas, one area in particular, if I might turn to what we are
doing. We have a Home Office initiative to deal with prolific
and other priority offenders; this is picking out the individuals
whom the localities think are a real problem in those areas. If
you can target those individuals, you can reduce crime very quickly
and those are the people who are a real nuisance and real concern
to the localities. Now, very interestingly, we put out guidance
on that; when we put out guidance to community safety partnerships
in Wales our Welsh colleague said that we had to be very careful
about this because there are certain responsibilities in Wales,
there are various strands to this, not just catching and convicting
people, but prevention. What are we doing to prevent and deter?
A lot of those responsibilities are not responsibilities of Whitehall,
they are responsibilities of the National Assembly. We have to
work very closely in that sort of way to make sure that we are
not cutting across what is being done. In practice in many of
these areas we are all working in the same direction; it is not
that we are going in the wrong direction. Just as with Louise's
issues on anti-social behaviour; a lot of that is National Assembly
responsibility, but actually what we are trying to achieve is
the same thing as I believe the National Assembly want to achieve.
Q281 Mrs Williams: Magistrates however
are local, what if magistrates do not comply with your wishes?
Ms O'Mara: I am not responsible
fortunately for the magistrates, because that is the DCA.
Q282 Mrs Williams: Yes, but in terms
of the partnership approach, is it not? What I asked earlier,
about inter-departmental and your links?
Ms Casey: We ought to be clear
that magistrates at the end of the day are independent; they are
part of the judiciary. How they act in court and reach their decisions
is entirely a matter for them. Having said that, I think the sort
of joining up of the Department for Constitutional Affairs and
the Crown Prosecution Service around certain issues where, for
example—I am going slightly beyond anti-social behaviour—the
community safety partnership decides to run a three-month campaign
to tackle . . . I was talking to Manchester yesterday and they
are going to run a three-month campaign from February next year
and they are already involving the senior court clerk locally
as well as the Crown Prosecution Service prosecutor, as well as
the community safety partnership, normal people and the community.
So everybody knows when the time comes what is going to happen.
A court will open which will process those particular cases during
the course of that three-month campaign. We cannot effect what
they do in court. The DCA can set guidelines, they can set training
schemes, they can work with the court service to empower a magistrate
to know what they are doing and all that sort of stuff, but at
the end of the day the court decisions they make, as you are aware,
are their own really.
Mr Rimmer: Plus of course the
four local criminal justice boards and I think you are getting
evidence from some of them later on. Certainly from the Home Office
perspective, those boards have developed significantly in developing
much stronger links between the key agencies and the sentencing
community.
Q283 Mrs Williams: Do you agree that
the performance targets will be different from the police performance
targets? If you agree, will this help or hinder the effective
role of the police in partnerships?
Ms O'Mara: This is a subject on
which we have had a lot of representations.
Q284 Mrs Williams: That is why I am asking
the question.
Ms O'Mara: I am sure you have
heard it from the police too. I do not think it is a problem.
We have been very careful to try to take everybody with us because
we understood that the police were concerned about this. One of
the points to which Stephen was referring earlier was the involvement
of the police authorities in this process. We have encouraged
every regional director, and that will be true of the director
in Wales too, when they are having their negotiating meetings
with the local partnerships, to invite to that meeting the local
borough commander—in practice I think the police would always
have been there in the past anyway, but we are making that quite
explicit—and also, as you will be aware, a member of the
police authority sits on the partnerships and we have said that
the police authority also ought to be represented at those meeting
because they are in a position to align what is happening with
the police target and with the target for the partnership. We
are also conscious that you can be setting plenty of targets at
borough, BCU level, but those have to add up sensibly in terms
of the force level targets. So the regional directors also ensure
that they hold meetings and invite to those meeting the Chief
Constable, the chair of the Police Authority and the chair of
the CDRPs, or in Wales the community safety partnerships, for
each force area and they can have a discussion as to whether there
is any conflict between them. In practice, we do not think there
is going to be a great deal of conflict, because they are all
working in the same direction. The issue, as I understand it,
certainly in terms of our police performance assessment framework
and so on, is that the targets which are being set there are targets
about improving police performance in relation to what is happening
to the average and we are looking at a slightly different thing
in terms of the community partnerships' targets. We just have
to make sure that people understand that we are talking about
slightly different things. Certainly, having had that discussion,
and we have had it also in the Home Office's crime reduction delivery
board, with the police, with ACPO there, with representatives
of a large number of others, we have had representative from government
offices there too, we think we have come to an agreement now and
people are much more relaxed about what we are doing and not seeing
that we are cutting across, because it is in nobody's interest
to do that.
Q285 Mrs Williams: Please correct me
if I am wrong, but our understanding is that currently the police
standards unit, the HMIC and other central policing units have
relatively little contact with those responsible for partnership
performance in the Home Office.
Ms O'Mara: No; I am delighted
to say you are absolutely wrong. We have been working extremely
closely. I have to admit that I do not think this has always been
the case, so you are right in that sense, but we are working very
closely together now.
Q286 Mrs Williams: I was going on to
ask you, if that was the right assumption, how closely integrated
the monitoring of partnership and police performance will be.
Mr Rimmer: It goes back to what
we were saying earlier, that it would be a legitimate criticism
of the way in which the Home Office dealt in silos, as I called
them earlier, between crime and police performance in the past
that we did tend not to get this alignment around police performance
and partnership performance. I would say that for between nine
months and a year, but certainly particularly in the last six
months or so, we have integrated both in terms of the people with
shared responsibilities for this, the data sets that we are looking
at, the overall strategy by which we are seeking to get alignment
and what matters about all that is that it gets played out to
forces and partnerships in a coherent fashion. Frankly, having
been in the role that I have been in for some time now, if we
were not getting this demonstrably more joined up, we would seriously
have heard a lot more about it from both the policing and the
partnership end. It does not take much to get either of them wound
up about what they see as Home Office mixed messages and incoherence
on this and, because of the processes that Margaret has described,
we are on a much sounder footing than we have ever been before.
Ms O'Mara: May I just add that
one of the ways in which we have had a lot of help from our colleagues
on the policing side is in terms of what you actually do when
something is going wrong because it is not very straightforward.
We can monitor this and we can see figures going in the wrong
direction and then wonder what on earth it is that we should be
doing. We can talk to the staff in government offices, in Welsh
Assembly government and ask what they are doing about it, people
can draw up plans, but where do you go from there? We have had
a lot of help from our colleagues in the police standards unit
who have been thinking about the sort of intervention that they
are working with individual police forces and seeing how they
can build on that in terms of dealing with partnerships, of whom
of course the police are a key partner and how they can adopt
the right kind of approach and the right kind of help to people
when there are real problems out there. We have had real help
in that way. Equally, we have been working very closely with our
colleagues in the police standards unit in terms of all our efforts
to deal with alcohol-related violence. You will have seen lots
of talk about the alcohol misuse enforcement campaign no doubt
and that again has been taken forward with them. We are working
very closely with them in terms of what is happening on violent
crime where Cardiff will be one of the areas where we are really
trying to target action starting this month. We have a number
of areas, BCU, CDRP and community safety partnership areas where
they have particular problems with violent crime. It is not their
fault, often they are tackling it very well, but what more can
we do from the Home Office to help there, working very closely
with colleagues on the policing side to make sure that the kind
of approach that we have there is joined up and not in silos.
You are absolutely right, I was joking in a sense, that it was
like that before and I really, really do believe that we are improving.
Q287 Mr Caton: Going back to the Home
Office director for Wales, I think from what you described that
the recognition of the existence of the National Assembly and
its relationship with the partners has led you in the appointment
of the new director to have a different structure and a recognition
of the need for a different sort of relationship. Having said
that, is the practical role of the Home Office director for Wales
different from that of the directors in England?
Ms O'Mara: There will be differences
in future because the Home Office director in future—and
I am talking about the future because it has not happened yet—will,
for instance, have no responsibility for drugs whereas at the
moment the Home Office director in Wales does have a responsibility
for drugs but working up a different chain. So in future there
will be a difference. At the moment, they cover much the same
sort of area, though even in England Home Office directors cover
different things: some cover community cohesion, some do not,
that is probably the biggest one that is different within England,
let alone what happens in Wales.
Q288 Mr Caton: I guess we think of the
Home Office director as the Home Office's person in Wales.
Ms O'Mara: He is not just that.
Q289 Mr Caton: Is there any sense that
he or she is Wales's person in the Home Office? Do they have any
input into policing policy or crime policy?
Ms O'Mara: They all have input.
It is quite interesting in terms of how we are trying to work
increasingly closely with the government offices, again across
England and Wales, that each of them now has a kind of lead responsibility.
We have one Home Office regional director who is the lead responsibly
on violent crime for instance, somebody else on prolific offenders.
In terms of Welsh issues, it is the Home Office director in Wales
who is responsible for that. It is feeding back to us, saying
"Look, actually we're doing this better in Wales" which
is often the case "Why don't you think about doing it this
way" or, equally, "You must modify your policy because
it is not actually hitting the right spot in Wales". I hope
that we are open to that and increasingly so, but in a sense we
are reliant on that message coming back to us, as well as messages
we are trying to put out.
Q290 Chairman: Taking it a bit further.
From the Home Office point of view, have you seen any changes
in the context and the way that policing is delivered in Wales
since the Assembly came into being?
Mr Rimmer: We are very conscious
that the four chiefs have a developing set of relationships, both
individually with their forces and their authorities and collectively
as a group; this splendid acronym "WACPO", which I like.
We are actually, partly for reasons already covered by Margaret
in terms of getting that degree of engagement with a significant
part of the national landscape, very supportive of that approach.
We do not see any difficulties around that, as long as the parameters
from the Home Secretary's perspective, in terms of his responsibilities
for policing in the context of the full Welsh force, is understood.
I was trying to think in the context of the earlier question around
the impact of directors. This is true of chief constables in a
number of contexts, but when you have chiefs of the calibre of
the four in Wales, who are dealing at a very sophisticated level,
if I may say so, with a wide range of stakeholder networks, then
you take very seriously what they say; it actually gives them
an added authority about the relationship between policy development
and the broader social and political landscape. Now that can play
out in quite significant terms, both because of their particular
responsibilities as Welsh chiefs, but also, as you will be aware,
they will each have significant national responsibilities as well.
Rota policing led by the chief constable of North Wales, a major
project in terms of violent and sex offenders information base
led by the chief constable of Dyfed Powys, those difficult national
responsibilities that ACPO leads have in my view are enhanced
by having people who are very accustomed to having to deal with
a wide multiple range of stakeholders. It is a different context,
but it is a bit like the fact that we obviously have strong relationships
with chief officers in the Met. They again have to manage across
a very wide range of stakeholders in a political as well as a
professional setting and that gives a level of maturity in a broad
sense of that term to the advice that we get. I think the Assembly
relationship with the chiefs adds to that as well and it goes
to the heart of the whole thrust of the reform approach, which
is how to ensure that all these elements, local regional and national,
work together coherently rather than are seen as somehow competing
or in conflict with each other.
Q291 Chairman: May I move on to your
relations, as Home Office officials, with the Welsh Assembly officials?
Do you have any, first of all, and how have they developed and
what are they? Can you define the relationship?
Mr Rimmer: From my perspective,
we have some. I would not claim they were particularly well
developed and they could become more structured. At the moment
they tend to be a bit responsive to particular issues, the most
spectacular of which in recent times was quite a difficult set
of issues around the funding settlement two years ago, which actually
ended up being resolved very effectively at ministerial level
between John Denham, the minister as he then was, and Edwina Hart.
Part of that process was a much more developed set of working
relationships between colleagues in my directorate and officials
from the Assembly. I would not claim that they are as well developed
as some other central government departments that we have. I think
we can do more and we can do it in a more systematic way.
Q292 Chairman: Ms Casey or Ms O'Mara,
do you have anything to add to that in your dealings with the
Assembly or your department's dealings?
Ms O'Mara: We would deal with
the community safety unit, of whom only the director is actually
employed by the Home Office; the rest of the staff are employed
by the Welsh Assembly, though we do refund the Welsh Assembly
for the people who are dealing with crime reduction, which is
only part of the community safety unit. We do deal with individuals
in that unit, right the way down, but on the other hand it would
not be true for me to say that we had contact beyond that unit
very directly, because if we are dealing with people there, then
that is our conduit and our route in.
Ms Casey: Very similar. It is
the David Ahern post essentially that we have worked through;
David and now Jo Jordan his deputy acting up would be the point
of contact and in that way my unit's relationship with that post
is fairly similar to the government office regions really, so
they have the same ups and downs.
Q293 Chairman: In the concordat between
the Home Office and the National Assembly, it says that in practice
in the delivery of police services and in tackling crime and anti-social
behaviour, the responsibilities of the Assembly and Home Office
impinge on each other, which is a fairly obvious but not meaningless
sentence. How is it managed in practice? This is one of the things
that we are specifically looking at, that the Home Affairs Committee
would not necessarily look at if they wanted to look at policing
in Wales. This is a crucial difference between Wales and England
in this regard. How does that work in practice?
Ms O'Mara: I think it is very
much channelled through that particular post. The obvious kind
of issue to think of is drugs, which is a Welsh Assembly responsibility.
We all know what huge impact drugs policy and action on drugs
can have on crime, which is why indeed it was brought out from
the Cabinet Office and put into the Home Office, because of that
synergy between them. That is the kind of area where we would
be looking across and although we are not responsible for drugs
policy, nonetheless, what is happening on drugs will have a big
impact on crime and that is the kind of issue that we would be
talking about. That is just one example, but it is probably the
most obvious one to choose.
Q294 Mrs Williams: Your written evidence
implied that the Home Office sees no scope for the future devolution
of policing functions from the Home Office to the National Assembly
for Wales. Do you think that the recent transfer of responsibility
for the fire service in Wales to the National Assembly makes the
transfer of function in that area of policing inevitable? Do you
indeed see any benefit in the devolution of specific functions,
for instance in the area of partnership?
Mr Rimmer: I think the answer
to the fire service question from our minister's perspective is
no. It does not add or detract from the basic position that the
written evidence sets out. Of course there are arguments for collaboration
across the emergency services that that might suggest, but in
terms of core partnerships, from the Home Office perspective,
particularly around the criminal justice system, without repeating
what is in the evidence, that is the Home Secretary's position:
the coherence of the criminal justice system in particular lends
itself to retaining the current approach. Of course I would say
this, would I not? I do not think our ministers see this in any
proprietorial or theoretical sense at all. They are pragmatic,
they want the communities in Wales to get the same consistently
good quality police service as in any other part of the country
and they have shown frankly, relatively, as great a lack of priority
in looking at the structure of policing for instance per se,
as in this particular issue. By that I mean that they do not have
a preference for getting into issues where they do not necessarily
see the outcome improvements being the main consequence but potentially
more debate, more bureaucratisation. It is a bit like Louise's
earlier response in terms of definitions. I think they just do
not want to get sucked into a debate which will militate against
those deliverables.
Ms O'Mara: I think that actually
we have found that it works in practice. In many ways, the community
safety partnerships in Wales are more fortunate in a sense than
the CDRPs in England because the drugs work has already been taken
within the partnerships. Instead of having separate drug action
teams, you may know that in England what we are trying to do is
to get CDRPs and DATs to join up. That has not been a problem
with community safety partnerships, because they have all been
in the same thing in the first place; one of the things you might
say we have learned from the Welsh. The fact that these are being
done differently has not been a problem at local level.
Q295 Mrs Williams: May I ask you a question
about the structure? What are your views on force amalgamation
and changes to the structure and governance for the police in
Wales? What for instance are the benefits—there may be no
benefits—of reducing the number of police forces in England
and Wales?
Mr Rimmer: The White Paper sets
out a sort of timescale for considering questions around the structure
of policing and that is absolutely an issue where, in ministers'
minds, the analysis is in terms of Wales is the same as in England.
The critical path there is that in January, Her Majesty's Inspectorate
of Constabulary will have made an initial analysis of the issues
that they believe need to be fully analysed and addressed in determining,
as they put it, what level of policing you need above BCU level
to meet requirements above BCU level. The reason I put it in those
terms is that this is not about redrawing a map of England and
Wales in policing terms for the sake of it; ministers are not
interested in that. What they are interested in is whether there
are capability issues which are not being delivered effectively
through the current structure. That is not a rhetorical question,
they have not reached a view on the answer to that and what will
happen once the inspectorate reports is that their initial work,
subject to ministerial agreement, will then go out for consultation.
In the context of Wales, the Assembly, Welsh chiefs and others
will have just as much opportunity to input on that debate as
any other part of the policing landscape. To be honest, beyond
that I should stress that ministers, and it links into what I
said earlier, are actually pragmatically much more interested
at the moment in collaboration than a huge restructuring exercise.
In the context of things like Tarian, where there is clearly
a regional collaborative effort, they are very supportive. They
are at this stage yet to be persuaded that the gains in delivering
those sorts of outcomes are better delivered through major structural
change.
Q296 Mrs Williams: I want to ask about
funding. Does the increased focus on community issues and services
imply additional financial responsibility for the National Assembly
for Wales? If so, does the Home Office capital spend in Wales
or the funding formula require review? When we took evidence from
the South Wales police they expressed concerns about the inadequacy
of short-term funding in addressing policing needs, for example,
short term funding cycles for PCSOs or ring-fenced budgets. How
can this problem be addressed?
Mr Rimmer: As I said earlier,
in principle we are very keen to get as many reductions in ring-fenced
grants and short-term grants as possible and to get not only into
a bigger general grant pot for each authority and force, but also
we are very interested in the proposals from ODPM—and again
it will be very interesting to get the views as the consultation
moves forward on this with the Assembly—about three-year
settlements. This is clearly predicated in response to lots of
authorities and forces and others saying that this year-on-year
short-termism is unhelpful. There is a particular issue around
community support officers because that is a major new innovation
in policing and the commitments that ministers have made on that
are substantial and real and are already clearly making an impact
including in the Welsh forces. Indeed today again—lots going
on today—ministers are announcing a further round of allocations
for CSOs including in all four Welsh forces. Now it would be fair
to say, implied in your question, that actually the sort of infrastructure
underpinning this sort of onrush of funding for CSOs has not been
fully developed and we are genuinely concerned that forces and
indeed CSOs themselves as well as the communities that they serve
are still operating with a degree of uncertainty about their longer-term
future investment. Having said that, following the spending review
the government has been very clear in its commitment not only
to increase the numbers of CSOs over the next three years by 20,000,
but to have as a total pot, the existing 4,000 to 5,000 CSOs on
top of that. So there is a degree of continuity now developing.
What we have got to do, having moved beyond the one-year, next-year
regime around CSO funding, is then to build up a training and
career development structure for people who clearly, as far as
this government is concerned, potentially have a long-term future
as individuals, as well as in terms of that role, for the communities
which they serve.
Chairman: Well, thank you very much indeed.
We are going to have to finish now I am afraid. I hope you will
not mind if we send you a few questions in written form just to
tidy up one or two things that we have not got round to, but what
we have done has been very useful. Thank you very much indeed.
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