UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 46-i

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

WELSH AFFAIRS COMMITTEE

 

 

POLICE SERVICE, CRIME AND ANTI-SOCIAL BEHAVIOUR IN WALES

 

 

Wednesday 24 November 2004

MR S RIMMER, MS L CASEY and MS M O'MARA

Evidence heard in Public Questions 250-296

 

 

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Welsh Affairs Committee

on Wednesday 24 November 2004

Members present

Mr Martyn Jones, in the Chair

Mr Martin Caton

Mrs Betty Williams

________________

Memorandum submitted by Home Office

 

Examination of Witnesses

 

Witnesses: Mr Stephen Rimmer, Director, Policing Policy, Ms Louise Casey, Director, Anti-Social Behaviour and Ms Margaret O'Mara, Director, Crime Reduction, Home Office, examined.

Q250 Chairman: Welcome to the Committee. As you know, today we are looking at policing in Wales. Would you introduce yourselves? Perhaps we could start with Margaret O'Mara and work along. Say who you are and what you do for the record please.

Ms O'Mara: I am Margaret O'Mara and I am the Director of Crime Reduction in the Home Office.

Ms Casey: My name is Louise Casey and I am the National Director of the Government's Anti-Social Behaviour Unit which is in the Home Office.

Mr Rimmer: Good Afternoon, I am Stephen Rimmer and I am Director of Policing Policy in the Home Office, responsible essentially for all police issues within the department.

Q251 Chairman: The questions are probably going to be addressed to you in the first instance, Mr Rimmer. We have just had that published today. You will not be surprised to know that we have not read it yet, but we do have policy issues. Could you tell us what the key drivers are of the present policing policy?

Mr Rimmer: The national policing plan which has come out today and the White Paper which you will have seen on police reform which came out two weeks ago form very much the drivers for the development of police service in England and Wales. The plan is an attempt at identifying the relationship between stated national priorities and local delivery through 43 forces and authorities and it has been refined in its third year now from being, what many observers felt in its first year was a rather top-heavy and over-prescriptive set of requirements on the police service, into one which makes much more explicit the relationship between national standards and local flexibility and local priorities. That is very much as well the driver behind the White Paper. As you will be aware, the focus there is on neighbourhood policing in particular and I am sure you will want to come back on that. The emphasis is on the need to focus on the citizen at point of delivery and for the support structures above the front-line police service to be geared towards enabling that delivery to be as accessible and responsive as possible, to connect up the locally-geared policing that this government is keen to see develop further, but recognising the complexities around serious and organised crime and indeed, the counter-terrorism effort which require resources and structures at a force level, at a regional level and national level.

Q252 Chairman: In light of the fact that we have not been able to look at this, can you give us some idea of how you are going to retrieve this flexibility and the balance between national and local priorities?

Mr Rimmer: First of all, on the priorities themselves it is worth stressing that the government does not just pluck them out of thin air. There is a detailed consultation process with forces and authorities and other stakeholders and also increasingly links into ACPO's national strategic assessment. I think you have heard a bit about their work in terms of identifying through that assessment priorities and needs that derive from local intelligence systems. So the priorities themselves, and ministers are always very keen to stress this, are not out of the clear blue sky, dumped on local forces and authorities, they are priorities precisely because, in the government's view, they connect to the needs and the concerns of local people. I will not dwell in any great detail on them, but just to give you a flavour, they are focused on reducing overall crime, on providing a citizen focused police service, on improving detection rates, which has been a particular performance issue for some time, on reducing concerns about crime and anti-social behaviour and on combating serious and organised crime. Alongside that, there are some national requirements around counter terrorism as well, but those are the five priorities. Now, what this plan says, I think, and certainly ministers intend to say more clearly than in the previous two plans is, okay those are the five key priorities and we have an accountability framework to deliver against those priorities and to assess your own performance as an individual force and authority against them, but we much more explicitly build into the planning and performance management framework that this plan sets out some capability for forces to develop their own local priorities on top of those national priorities. Indeed, even within the performance framework, which is set out in the plan, much more explicit scope is given for local priorities. The government is very clear that in some parts of the country, those priorities will be very different from others. Indeed they may vary within forces from one BCU to another. Of course there is a question which the plan cannot answer, because it is not that sort of document, which is: what is the capacity that forces have to deliver local priorities over and above the national priorities? We recognise that there will continue to be a debate around that with forces and authorities and that some will feel that they have relatively little room for manoeuvre potentially to do more than the priorities themselves. There is no doubt that if you link those expectations in the plan to the requirements in the White Paper about neighbourhood policing being above all focused on the needs of the public, to be successful at neighbourhood policing clearly requires being locally responsive and this government acknowledges that. In a particular context, it relates to Margaret's responsibilities around crime. A very powerful signal about that is that the crime target is now a much broader one, it is around overall crime, not specified in terms of the previous regime which focused purely on vehicle crime, robbery and burglary. There is an explicit acknowledgement within the plan that it is for police authorities, particularly, in concert with forces, with government offices, Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships (CDRPs) and others, to work through the best way of hitting that target in a way that meets local priorities as well as national ones.

Q253 Chairman: I think you may have partly answered the question I am going to ask now or expanding on a criticism which is often made about national policing policy being set basically by the agenda of cities and urban areas and perhaps not taking into account the rural problems, particularly those we have in Wales, for example. I wonder if you could perhaps suggest what is different in this plan that would allow our kind of police forces to tackle rural crime rather than the urban priorities.

Mr Rimmer: I shall not repeat what I have just said but there is an explicit recognition about the need properly to reflect local priorities. There is certainly, alongside that, a recognition from Home Office ministers that rural areas can be as concerned about some of the issues around national priorities, not least anti-social behaviour as any other part of the country, but there are clearly issues which will relate to particular communities which ministers are quite clear that local plans need to reflect beyond the national requirements. It was obviously a purposeful move to incorporate within this plan for instance, an acknowledgement that there would be work for forces in taking forward the Hunting Act. That clearly is going to affect some rural forces, no doubt in Wales as well as in England, to a significant degree. What I like to think force authorities find helpful about the plan is that although it does not throw everything into the kitchen sink, as it were, in terms of saying you have to do a combination of all these things to be an efficient and effective force, by flagging up some of the particular issues outside the key priorities, what it is really saying to forces and authorities is that we know that some of these issues, and indeed some that may not be mentioned in here at all, are actually in local terms very important because of particular communities, rural and other, and we want to ensure that you respond effectively to those. Those are not just fine words, because in a sense the performance framework and the reform White Paper puts much, much more centre stage, and I think this is quite significant in way policing has developed in England and Wales, much more centre stage alongside quantifiable data around crime reduction, the whole reassurance and citizen focus agenda in measurable ways, so that you cannot now in effect, be in a fully efficient and effective police force, if you are not responding to the needs of your communities as assessed through that framework alongside reducing crime. Obviously government wants both elements, but I think there was a legitimate criticism of earlier regimes that they tended just to focus on the easier to measure crime reduction elements and ignored the fact that policing is about relationships with the community.

Q254 Chairman: And reassurance.

Mr Rimmer: Yes.

Q255 Chairman: One of the problems that we heard expressed, not so much by the police, who may be buttoning their lip about it, was that a lot of initiatives are coming forward which sometimes can be seen to be contradictory, maybe not in their effect but in their operation. I wondered whether you had anything to say about that.

Mr Rimmer: I would see that in two ways and there be other dimensions. Margaret will have views on this as well because it impacts on their responsibilities. As far as the Home Office itself is concerned, there is an increasingly strong recognition to be more joined up about its requirements on the police service. I think there was a risk, this is my view, I do not think ministers have said this but it is certainly my view, that under the old PSA regime, where some very specific targets were required by different parts of the Home Office, those different parts of the Home Office in engaging with the police service tended to say "We're not interested in what else you're doing, what other pressures you've got, just get on and deliver" whether it was street crime or offences brought to justice or whatever. I think there is a much stronger recognition within the Home Office now that these things have to join up in a coherent way for forces and authorities to be able to deliver them and that we must not send mixed messages. I am sure we still do send mixed messages from time to time, but we are much more conscious of the need to avoid that, not least through the new mechanism we have, so-called delivery managers, which are based out there in the real world, currently only in four cities but the aim is to expand that over time, precisely to bring back to the Home Office the realities of different funding streams, different initiatives, different requirements and ensure that they are brought together much more coherently. So that is at one level. At the broader government level, there is still a major challenge about how government across the peace engages with the police and other key partners. Very deliberately, we have emphasised the importance in this context of the plans for local area agreements which were inspired by ODPM, but the Home Office is a very enthusiastic partner in that because we totally accept that for the police and other crime reduction agencies it can be a very bewildering landscape. This year's plan at least starts a process of requiring forces and authorities to link up their targets, particularly through government offices for the regions, with other partnership bodies. In previous years we did not even start to attempt to make that link and therefore I know some chiefs felt they were genuinely pushed in different directions. I do not think ministers would claim that we have got all of that properly synthesised yet in terms of how it all comes together, but we are much more conscious about it and we are engaging with police forces and others to make sense of it as far as possible in a much more structured and transparent way than we have ever done before.

Ms Casey: I used to work in the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and then moved 18 months ago to the Home Office. One of the most significant developments is actually the stronger and safer the communities fund which is, as Stephen outlined, a sort of joint pot between two government departments and that is a fairly significant thing. The organisation of that across two Whitehall departments of their size is significant. There is a tremendous amount of commitment, certainly at ministerial and official level, to make sure that the experience of crime and disorder reduction partnerships (CDRPs) or community safety partnerships (CSPs) is actually a much more positive one which actually all links together. So what you have is a kind of the police reform White Paper and the police service moving towards citizen-focused policing, what you have is the local government side, through things like the comprehensive performance assessment, looking much more at how people respond to safety, respond to those sorts of issues like anti-social behaviour, but also crime reduction and then what we now have is a mechanism around funding which did not exist before, which is the safer communities pot, as I call it, the safer and stronger communities fund. There are certainly elements which are moving in the right direction. The job is for people always to be pushed to be better, but that is quite a significant move.

Q256 Mrs Williams: The anti-social behaviour action plan and the TOGETHER campaign are just over 12 months' old now, so you will not be surprised to hear me asking questions about the anti-social behaviour action plan and how it has developed. Do you think high numbers of anti-social behaviour orders (ASBOs) reflect success or failure of strategy in tackling anti-social behaviour?

Ms Casey: We are essentially one year into the launch of the TOGETHER campaign and anti-social behaviour orders, as the one-year-on document says, and the whole TOGETHER campaign are around trying to get people to tackle anti-social behaviour and not tolerate it. There is the desire of a housing officer to walk away from a rent arrears case and call it rent arrears, when it is actually about somebody behaving anti-socially and being a neighbour from hell, to use the jargon, or an environmental health officer just dealing with cleaning up constantly and not actually tackling the behaviour that is causing the rubbish to be put there constantly, or a community safety partnership worrying about gating and target hardening rather than the behaviour of the people who are actually causing all the problems. We have been operating in a context for the last 12 months which is quite radical and quite new and getting people to look at how, at a cultural level, you come at this from a scenario where all of those different people actually think about how they tackle this problem, how they tackle behaviour and then within that I actually think the growth in the number of ASBOs is incredibly heartening. You guys put these things through Parliament so you must hope somebody out there actually uses them. Forgive me, I was told not to be controversial or say anything funny at any point and I have already stepped out of order and you are taking notes. Essentially what we have seen over the last 12 months is a massive upsurge in the use of powers, but I think what that reflects really for me is a kind of sense that actually out there things can be done. There is an example in the Rhondda actually where nine times out of ten, they have solved the anti-social behaviour problems which come before them as a community safety partnership by actually visiting, warning and confronting the families and individuals behaving in a way, so they end up with ASBOs, if necessary, at the end of a line and that is really what I am interested in. What the TOGETHER campaign is about is how much action you can take to do this. Of course I am pleased that the number of anti-social behaviour orders has increased because I genuinely thought that there were not enough out there and I have been to too many community meetings where they had had enough, I have met too many members of the public whose lives are a total misery and I thought action needed to be taken to make sure that this behaviour was brought under control. However, it is one of many tools really and I think it is one of an overall strategy locally which is around the fact that culturally we should not let the public have to put up with this as much as they have done. This has been driven very much by the public, MPs and local authority councillors; really that has been what has been pushing this entire campaign. I see that the number of these powers, and I have brought by favourite report with me which I hope you have seen, actually does reflect the massive upsurge in activity, which can only be a good thing, because frankly there just was not enough before.

Q257 Mrs Williams: The Home Office is of course working towards an integrated approach to anti-social behaviour and that is firmly linked with the civil renewal and regeneration agenda, as we know. Can you give us more detailed examples of success in this area, both in terms of internal co-operation within the Home Office, amongst the different units, and inter-departmental strategies across Whitehall really?

Ms Casey: I will deal with regeneration first. I think this is quite an interesting one and it is very interesting to me that very recently I was in Redcar - I know it is not in Wales but it is the one which is at the top of my mind - and this particular estate must have had every single regeneration initiative available to it over however many years, city challenge, single SRB, now we are in neighbourhood renewal. I go there on a very wet miserable day and the woman who runs the corner shop takes me out into the middle of this particular estate where the new build which has just been created is already abandoned and covered in graffiti. There is a row of houses where the landlords are not taking any responsibility at all for the property, nor indeed the tenants that are in it; they are private sector landlords who are just walking away from their responsibilities. The neighbourhood renewal office has actually had to board up one of its windows because somebody smashes it constantly and the people who decide to do graffiti do not need to use a tag, they do not need to put a symbol up, they can just write their name because they really do not feel anybody is going to tackle them at all, they are that confident about it. In the midst of all that I feel that a tremendous amount is being done on regeneration, but unless we tackle the behaviour of the people there, it will constantly undermine where we are at; constantly undermine it. When a school has been improved, improved, improved, all you need is for the front face of the school to have graffiti over it and the parents, when they drop their kids off, are thinking "Well, what's all that about? Why isn't that sorted?" Part of the government's approach is to try to tackle and come at some of the regeneration here, and the reason my unit works so closely with colleagues in the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, is because there is a recognition that some of the most deprived areas, some of the most difficult areas actually need to tackle anti-social behaviour first and foremost. If you look at the neighbourhood renewal areas, and going back to your earlier question to do with the use of powers, you will see that neighbourhood renewal areas over the last 12 months are using more powers than other areas, they have actually now got teams in place which are being funded by colleagues in other government departments. There is a recognition that there are lots of good things, that you can build new houses, you can have millennium bridges, you can do all of these things, but if you do not tackle the behaviour of the minority of people who ruin all of that, then you will never make any progress. We are very, very clear that it is not just about protecting investment, it is about anti-social behaviour hindering regeneration, which is partly why the TOGETHER campaign and the unit were established as a sort of inter-departmental ... It is a bit like running a rough sleepers unit: part of my job is to worry about what other government departments are doing and to have a view on, say, the Housing Bill and the Housing Act and private sector landlords and to take through with the officials in ODPM and working for ODPM ministers why it is so important to make sure that local authorities are given powers to license them, partly around anti-social behaviour. So there is that bit. I guess the other part, in terms of joined-up working across government, is kind of re-living life only on a macro scale. It is not rough sleeping, it is anti social behaviour which is so huge. We do work very closely, for example, the Department for Constitutional Affairs (DCA) have now actually responded to our need to make sure that magistrates' courts in particular are more effective in linking in with communities, dare I say being accountable to communities in some way, probably a controversial thing to say, and certainly making sure that when people come before them, they follow sentencing guidelines. That is a kind of bottom line really and essentially therefore we have been working with the Department for Constitutional Affairs to establish specialist help and specialist ways of making sure that the courts work more effectively.

Q258 Mrs Williams: Is it too soon for you to be able to give us concrete examples of where for instance this magistrates' sentencing issue has improved?

Ms Casey: It is too soon in terms of that. We are certainly getting feedback from magistrates that they are more confident. We have now got the Crown Prosecution Service specialist prosecutors who are doing the links and an early thing I did was meet the Attorney General.

Q259 Mrs Williams: Should it be the magistrates themselves who tell you that they are getting more confident? Surely somebody else should be judging their performance.

Ms Casey: Well they are; the Department for Constitutional Affairs. That is where our unit works with other government department. It is down to the Department for Constitutional Affairs to have the relationship with the magistracy.

Q260 Mrs Williams: I am trying to find out whether you can give us good examples of success in this area.

Ms Casey: Last year, or this year, we worked with the Department for Constitutional Affairs to produce, with the Magistrates' Association, their sentencing guidelines, because magistrates were not sure what to do on breach of ASBOs. We stimulated it, we raised it as an issue, we asked the DCA for help and they then worked with the Magistrates' Association and us to some degree. They have now issued those guidelines to magistrates across the country and we are now seeing, according to DCA, more consistency, certainly when people come before the courts for breach of ASBOs.

Q261 Mrs Williams: Is there any data available on that success story from the Department for Constitutional Affairs? We should be interested in that, because we have been concerned about the patchiness, if I can use a word like that to describe it. Within Wales is what we are looking at now. It is a bit patchy and we should be interested to get some data on that.

Ms Casey: Absolutely; we will go away and see what we have. Government collects endless information and I will see what we have and how relevant it is to what you need and will send it on to you.

Q262 Mrs Williams: That leads me on to my next question. You talk about the Department for Constitutional Affairs and the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and I should like to ask how you work with the National Assembly for Wales to provide an integrated response to anti-social behaviour in Wales.

Ms Casey: Essentially, the anti-social behaviour unit and the TOGETHER campaign work across England and Wales and actually have a very pragmatic approach. We work through community safety partnerships and crime disorder reduction partnerships everywhere. Everywhere receives the same amount of money, everywhere receives the same availability of inspirational support, training, campaigning and all the rest of it and learning tools to tackle problems. In addition to that three of the TOGETHER action areas are in Wales, we ran a specialist academy in March jointly with the then David Ahern, who was the link between the National Assembly and ourselves. Yes, we do. I would not want to say that we do a huge amount more than we would do for anyone else; I do not want to misrepresent it. Of course we work closely with them, of course we have done some things especially for Wales, of course we have three TOGETHER action areas in Wales, but we essentially work nationally for England and Wales, trying to work across all community safety partnerships and allowing them very much really to learn what it is they can do to tackle the problem everywhere.

Q263 Mrs Williams: Is it up to you to take the lead in that, or would you expect the National Assembly for Wales or what was then the government to make a protest to your department?

Ms Casey: It is two-way really. We do not want to publish a report which says nothing happens in Wales, or else you would have me, and you quite rightly should. Therefore we cannot just sit and think "Oh well, we'll let them crack on on their own" and hope that they work through the National Assembly of Wales, just as I would not be happy if the Government Office in the North East told me to stay out of Newcastle and Gateshead and Sunderland and that I could not in any way be responsible for action in those sorts of areas. It is a kind of two-way street, but, Margaret will contest, we do work through government offices and we do work through the National Assembly for Wales. In a way they need to decide how much they want to do. Some of the things they are putting through, some of the commencement around the anti-social behaviour Act is different in Wales and we have to work with that. They are making some of their own choices in their own way.

Q264 Mrs Williams: Could you remind the Committee which minister you would be liaising with at the Welsh Assembly in order to make sure that nothing falls between two stools?

Ms Casey: I could not, actually.

Ms O'Mara: Edwina Hart.

Ms Casey: Yes, we invited Edwina Hart to the thing in March.

Q265 Mr Caton: You have stressed how closely you work with the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. In Wales most of the services that we are talking about are the responsibility of the National Assembly, so one would have assumed that there would be the same sort of liaison with a minister, whose name you do not even know.

Ms Casey: I had forgotten; I did not have it at the top of my head, but as soon as Margaret said it, I knew exactly who it was. We work with different government departments. I have concentrated on the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister because the question that came in was about regeneration. If you had asked me about parenting or schools or young people, I would be talking to you about DfES. I am sorry, I do not want to give the impression that we specifically work only with the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister because we do not, we work with different government departments for different reasons to try to further the work needed on anti-social behaviour.

Q266 Mr Caton: My point is exactly again, if we are talking about education, that that is the responsibility in Wales of the National Assembly. If you are looking to get this joined-up approach to these important anti-social behaviour issues, surely you need the same sort of liaison with the relevant departments down there.

Ms Casey: And we have. We have worked very closely with David Ahern and colleagues at official level - I am an official. We work incredibly closely and it is about getting the job done and it is up to them in many ways; they represent the community safety partnerships, they do some of their own thing, but some of it we would encourage from the TOGETHER campaign such as use of anti-social behaviour orders or injunctions, those sorts of things, as well as making sure that they are listening to what their communities want and then responding to it. We would be pushing really.

Q267 Mrs Williams: In paragraph 30, you mention the development of a national standard for incident recording in relation to anti-social behaviour. However, given the problems of both the definition and measurement of low level crime, is it possible to get a meaningful set of national figures on something as vague and multi-faceted as anti-social behaviour?

Ms Casey: Where we have come since the establishment of the anti-social behaviour unit and then the TOGETHER campaign last October is that essentially there is a good working definition of what anti-social behaviour is. It is when people feel alarmed, distress or harassment to another person. In the anti social behaviour unit we have deliberately kept a very wide approach to this. We have said, yes it is about graffiti, it is about abandoned cars, it is about litter, it is about fly-posting, fly-tipping, but it is also about harassment, intimidation in groups and gangs. In many ways we have felt, certainly from MPs, but also local authority members, particularly community organisations, community leaders and members of the public, that what they want is action to tackle those problems, rather than getting too hung up around definition. That would be the sort of approach that we have taken and even though we have put a framework together in terms of how we might want to define that and we did the one-year count and there are seven strands in the British crime survey about perception of anti social behaviour, I suppose our starting point from the unit is that people out there know what it is and actually what we need to do is make sure that the people who are there to serve them are able to do that as effectively as possible. A lot of emphasis in the campaign and in the work and the action has been around getting those frontline people to see what it is and know how to tackle it and, in many ways, tackle it at the earliest possible opportunity. So when, say, the kids throw stones at a door for the very first time, the ideal scenario would be that that is not a record somewhere, that is not a crime report, it does not escalate to that, but actually people feel able to knock on the front door and say "Do you know what your kids are doing? Listen ..." and to try and deal with things. That is partly what the TOGETHER campaign is all about: it is trying to get people to deal with things, to confront things. Some of our Taking a Stand award winners are members of the public who have taken a stand and in many ways they then go on to do things in their communities that actually mean you are nowhere near the criminal justice system; you are actually managing anti-social behaviour before it gets there. That is very much what we have pushed.

Mr Rimmer: On the national standards, you are right to ask to what extent that is going to bring together a consistent understanding amongst police forces and others about "low level incidents" including anti-social behaviour. All we can say at the moment, and I think we cover this in the evidence, is that the initial piloting has actually gone surprisingly well from our perspective. We thought that there would be major variations in understanding and interpretation from the pilot police forces and actually there has been a surprising, so far, degree of consistency around application. The government has not given any commitment yet to implement the standard definitively. This is a genuine pilot in the sense of assessing how it works out on the ground and there are some issues about ensuring that by doing that, we do not simply generate a whole bureaucracy around incident recording, which has been one of the issues around crime recording, as you will be aware. To answer your question, at this stage it has not been a major problem for the forces and certainly Dyfed Powys is one of them. My understanding is that there have not been major problems about interpretation as to what falls within the standard to date.

Q268 Mrs Williams: You mentioned public perceptions in your previous answer. What exactly are you trying to measure and subsequently improve? Is it actual numbers of incidents of anti-social behaviour or maybe the public's perceptions of it?

Ms Casey: The Home Office PSA target 2 is around public perception of the problem and we are beginning to see that that perception, and colleagues in research in the Home Office are beginning to help us with this, is based on experience, though we are not quite able to say that yet. We know, for example, that last year public perception of anti-social behaviour being a significant problem in their area ran at 21% and that has now dropped to 16%, which means that their perception of the problem is that it is going down. Essentially for me it comes into a kind of greater link and why the police reform White Paper was very much something that I feel we can be quite proud of. Some of that is around better community engagement, around people having a greater understanding of what is going on, actually getting information from partnerships, from the police and from the local authorities to know what is happening. Some of that is around things like leaflets of anti-social behaviour orders, some of it is things like leaflet dropping in an area to tell them you are doing a cleanup, some of it is around people in the local papers standing up and saying that they have done something and that it has worked. For example, Bayside Tenants' Association in Cardiff, the woman there, June, who is one of our Taking a Stand award winners, fought quite hard to get a dispersal order in her area and then got quite a lot of coverage in the papers. There is a lot around trying to connect up with communities, so that they can see and feel and touch what is going on, particularly on an issue like anti-social behaviour, which is something they are obsessed with.

Q269 Mrs Williams: Thank you for that. Is there any scope for an academic, theory-driven definition of anti-social behaviour rather than simply a long list of behaviours?

Ms Casey: Research colleagues from the Home Office have produced a sort of framework which describes four, what they call, sub-sets of anti-social behaviour. You have misuse of public space, which would be abandoning cars, things like that. You have disregard for community/personal wellbeing, which is around noise and rowdy behaviour, acts directed at individuals or people, which is verbal threats, groups making threats and environmental damage, which is graffiti, vandalism and fly-tipping. We have done all of that, but, I suppose, I do not know, maybe, 18 months into the job, we have done more on definition. When I started, I found it very interesting that what the sort of industry out there wanted was for us to go into quite a bureaucratic exercise about actually ... I felt under pressure to produce long documents which talked about definitions and measurements and what they could tick, when they had found it and how they would do it. In a way that did not of cut for me in that a lot of that already exists, definitions are out there and what we needed was to concentrate our energy, particularly in the unit, on getting people to bring the powers onto the statute book that were needed and wanted. So the anti-social behaviour Act was done jointly in many ways with frontline staff and practitioners so they could craft down exactly what was needed and wanted. Secondly we had to make sure that work was put in place. That does not mean to say that we had hit a point where ... I am very clear that working across with colleagues in the Home Office, and I was at the thing this morning where we were talking about what a good strategy would look like, how they would do that, what type of definitions ... Again, I do not want to mislead you; I genuinely think the right point for us to start with last year was to get the Act right and, more importantly, to change people's approach to dealing with this problem. To have come at it from some long academic research exercise would have taken months and actually I think the public were sick of it, MPs were sick of it, local authority members were sick of it and what they wanted was to see action taken, not lots and lots and lots more bits of paper. A strategy does not mean a great deal to the woman who got the dispersal order in Cardiff: the group not being there every night and making her life a misery means a lot and I suppose that is what our campaign is all about.

Q270 Mr Caton: Can we move on to serious and organised crime. Since we have started this inquiry and talking to the police force in Wales, we have heard a lot of very positive comments about Operation Tarian and Tarian Plus. What does the Home Office know about that operation?

Mr Rimmer: The Home Office has been a supporter of the operation since its inception, both in terms of what it is trying to achieve, particularly around serious drug dealing, but also the principle of cross-force collaboration which is a big thing in the White Paper and one that we are very keen to see developed right across the piece. This seems to us to be a very good example of that degree of collaboration, which, in that case, is primarily clearly around the Welsh forces; in other contexts it does link up with some Welsh forces, Avon and Somerset for instance. We strongly support the principle of tackling serious and organised crime through a concerted and multi-pronged strategy which is enforcement-oriented, but also takes into account education, prevention and other issues in the way that Tarian does. It is not the job of the Home Office to assess Tarian operationally in its own context. Our responsibilities and our interests are primarily around overall outcomes and clearly operation Tarian should contribute significantly to some, but it is not our job to say this operation is good or effective or not good or not effective because of the following results. That is primarily a matter for the forces and authorities concerned. Our awareness at the moment and the biggest headline impact of Tarian as we understand it is that so far, as a consequence of the operation, 122 people have been arrested for drug-related offences by the operational task force. That has included the recovery of something like five kilos of Class A drugs, 18,000 ecstasy tablets and the seizure of 1.9m assets. The offenders who have been through the criminal justice process so far have received a total of 82 years in terms of conviction and sentence. It is clearly an operation which has a degree of momentum and impact and, hopefully, forces are able to communicate that effectively to their communities. We support it absolutely for those reasons, but we also support it because we think that collaborative way of dealing with serious and organised crime is absolutely the way forward for forces around the country.

Q271 Mr Caton: How do you think operations like Tarian should be funded?

Mr Rimmer: First of all, there is clearly nothing from our perspective to stop individual authorities which hold the budgets for forces from engaging with their chiefs and with each other about pooling resources. There are clearly potentially issues around, and this is still early days, how the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) is going to develop, but we want there to be some connectivity between what forces are doing in tackling serious and organised crime and what the national agency does and the resourcing issues around that need to be properly addressed. The White Paper talks, for instance, about lead forces in tackling some aspects of criminality and potentially some of that lead could include taking a particular lead on resourcing. What we are increasingly not keen to do within the Home Office is provide ring-fenced funding for specific types of collaborative working. The drive is much more and hopefully we shall see further signs of this in the funding settlement which will be coming out shortly. We are keen to get as much of the money into general grant as possible and to expect that authorities, in reacting to their responsibilities with budget allocation, develop proper collaborative partnerships in taking that resource base forward. There is of course a huge driver in that now with the Gershon agenda as well and we are conscious of a number of areas of activity which are both around outcomes as Tarian is, but also around inputs, around procurement, around pulling together corporate services between forces for instance, where we think frankly we are just at the tip of the iceberg, that there are some individual areas where that has happened, but there could be much more systematic collaboration on resources.

Q272 Mr Caton: You mentioned in that answer the word "connectivity" between the new Serious Organised Crime Agency and operations like Tarian. Has much thought gone in the Home Office to how the relationships will work?

Mr Rimmer: Yes. I should make clear that my responsibilities are in respect of 43 forces and there is another part of the Home Office sponsoring the Serious Organised Crime Agency, and in particular, as you know, there is now already a chairman and chief executive in post and it is very much the responsibility of Sir Stephen Lander and Bill Hughes, and they are already doing this, to consult and engage with stakeholders around how that process is going to work. There is within the police service - and I am sure this includes the police forces in Wales, it is certainly ACPO's general position - a strong desire to ensure that the Serious Organised Crime Agency gets off on the right footing and really adds value at the national endeavour level. Equally, in applying itself to those national responsibilities there is an understandable concern that we do not repeat what some would see as the mistakes with the regional crime squads, when the sense was that some activities were targeted by the regional crime squads and they actually left a bit of a gap between other types of serious and organised crime and what individual forces had the capability and capacity to tackle. So there is a strong desire, both within SOCA and ACPO and other stakeholders to ensure that, although we do not want duplication and we certainly want a clear understanding about relative responsibilities, equally what we do not want in serious and organised crime is a gap starting to emerge again between how individual forces and forces collaboratively operate and the sort of top end of the serious and organised crime challenge that SOCA will be inevitably prioritising, The best way of dealing with that is clearly for continual engagement, both at the strategic level but also at the tactical level, between the new agency and the police service.

Q273 Mr Caton: I recognise what you have just said about it not being part of your directorate. Does the Home Office think that the Serious Organised Crime Agency should include a preventative as well as an enforcement element in its work?

Mr Rimmer: It is predominantly about connecting up information, intelligence and operational capability. I would not want to stray too much into a debate around prevention in that context because I am not sure I can give you a particularly meaningful answer. We will give you any further information on prevention activity. The main focus is around intelligence, information, operational capability, tackling serious and organised crime and in particular, and this is something the Home Secretary has stressed on a number of occasions and which is a big challenge in any new organisation, bringing together the existing agencies including police and customs capability and creating an agency where the whole is more than the sum of the parts; that is a big challenge. This is not about simply brigading existing agencies: it is about an enhanced capability at the national level in terms of operational impact on the threat to this country from serious and organised crime and that is a major challenge in itself and although SOCA will not be fully operational until April 2006, gearing up for that challenge and the impact it will make on existing organisations is a big agenda in its own right.

Q274 Mrs Williams: I am very conscious of the way that the community safety partnerships have developed in Wales. My questions are perhaps for Ms O'Mara at this stage. In order to increase their responsiveness to the public, the recent White Paper outlines new accountability measures for community safety partnerships. Can you outline how this will work in fact in practice?

Ms O'Mara: What we are intending to do is to review the working of crime and disorder reduction partnerships and community safety partnerships in Wales under the Crime and Disorder Act. That review has already begun. It has Welsh representation on it, the Welsh local government association are on it and it will be looking at a number of issues like the accountability of the partnerships, their role, the inspection arrangements for them, the sort of point that was coming out in the White Paper about the scrutiny of what they do, holding them accountable and so on. That work has only just begun. The aim is to bring it to completion in terms of the review by the end of January, so it is a pretty ambitious timetable and the people working for me are working very hard on this. We particularly want to take account of Welsh views. We have a number of workshops across the country; we are running one in early December which will be taking place in Cardiff, so we will get Welsh views particularly in that. I am very conscious that it is always very easy to be centred here and not taking account of what is going on elsewhere.

Q275 Mrs Williams: You mentioned that you propose to have that meeting in Cardiff. Would it be a good idea to have one in the South and one in the North?

Ms O'Mara: Frankly it is just a question of how much we can manage. There will be four over the whole of England and Wales, so that is one of the difficulties. Ideally, if we had more time, I am sure we would like to have done rather more. It is just a question of getting in views sufficiently quickly to be able to assess them and then to produce a report, which will then obviously need to be considered.

Q276 Mrs Williams: We discussed earlier, when Ms Casey was answering questions, the relationship between the Home Office and the National Assembly for Wales with its 60 members. More specifically could I ask how you envisage this will work in Wales, bearing in mind that the majority of the membership of the partnerships is devolved to the Assembly really and not directly to the Westminster government and given that all the partners, apart from the police, are accountable to the National Assembly and not to central government yet?

Ms O'Mara: Very much, in terms of our links with crime and disorder reduction partnerships in England, just as much as community safety partnerships in Wales, we operate in England through the government offices and through the Welsh Assembly government in Wales. It is what is happening on the ground that matters. In some ways it works quite well in Wales simply because people are pulled together at a local level in that way. One of the issues is that at the moment the Home Office regional director in Wales heads up the whole of the community safety unit. We have made various references to David Ahern and as you may know David Ahern resigned at the beginning of August and we are about to advertise for a replacement. The intention then is that the Home Office regional director will be responsible for the regional issues, the issues that respond to the Home Secretary and his responsibilities and there will then be a community safety director in the Welsh Assembly government who will deal with community safety issues which are the responsibility of the Welsh Assembly government. In a sense the two will be separated, but there will be a very close link between them. They will both be seated in the Welsh Assembly government office working very closely together. That is where you will get the real read-across between the two. They will each be dealing with community safety partnerships in Wales, with responsibilities that they are responsible for, but there will have to be very, very close liaison as in practice happens now. At the moment it is under one person; in future it will be under two, but working closely together.

Q277 Mrs Williams: You mentioned that the gentlemen concerned resigned in August. Can you tell us the reasons why a successor has not been found? Three months have gone by and one would expect that you would want to make sure that the system was smooth running. If a person disappears and you do not have a post-holder there, does that give problems?

Ms O'Mara: It runs smoothly in as much as there is an acting director and that is being taken forward by somebody who worked as his deputy. In the sense that we were trying to change the relationship, although we have a service level agreement with the Welsh Assembly government now, we wanted to change slightly the way in which we had formalised the two strands, so that work which was being done for the Home Secretary was coming up one strand as it were and work which was being done for Edwina Hart in this case on community safety was going in another direction. That just means a change and these things always sound very easy to do but it just takes time and different job descriptions have to be drawn up and agreed. In my experience, and I was a personnel director in another government department, you think these things can be done very quickly and I fear they cannot; they do take a while to get sorted out. We are conscious that we do want to get on with it and do it. If I think of other government offices, where we also have Home Office regional directors, you would be saddened I think at the time it sometimes takes to get people replaced, even though you would imagine that could be done pretty quickly.

Q278 Mrs Williams: May I turn to performance? The White Paper also outlines a new intensive performance regime for the community safety partnerships. At what level should national and local targets for CSPs in Wales be set? UK government level, National Assembly level or local level?

Ms O'Mara: May I explain how we have gone about this? Stephen referred earlier on to our overall crime reduction target for England and Wales combined, which is a reduction, of 15% and more in the high crime areas. That would be the top 40 high crime areas, of which there is only one in Wales, which would be Cardiff. As Stephen also explained, in future the target is very broad and it is just literally referring to a reduction in crime overall, rather than specifying individual crime types. What we have done is to look across both England and Wales to the English regions and to Wales and we have calculated what we call a regional performance indicator. It is not a target, but a broad figure. For Wales the figure would be about 17.5%. It will enable us to meet the overall target for the nation as a whole. Then we have asked our directors in the government offices and in the Welsh Assembly government to go out and negotiate with each of the individual crime and disorder reduction partnerships or with the community safety partnerships in Wales what their own figure will be. We have given some sort of broad indication of the kind of ranges in which we think they ought to be negotiating. They will go out and they will talk to the community safety partnerships in Wales. The overall target will be set and within that, there will then be sub-targets, very much local ones, which will be decided on the basis of the audits which each of the CDRPs and the CSPs are conducting. They are finding out what is going to be the real issue in a locality and then sub-targets will be set for that. Now this is a rather more formalised process than we have had before, but it is a much more locally determined one because it is reflecting what the local priorities are. Once they have got those and we have got those targets, those are the targets against which we will be measuring each of the CSPs and CDRPs. I and a colleague have quarterly meetings with each of the regional directors and discuss with them how performance is developing in their particular area and if there is a problem, what they are doing about it, what interventions are necessary, what the local partnership is saying is the problem and so on.

Q279 Mrs Williams: But in Wales the partners have to comply with the policy strategies of the National Assembly for Wales, do they not, which often adopts a more holistic approach maybe to community safety and crime reduction than the Home Office strategies? What role do you think the Assembly will have in setting targets for the CSPs in Wales?

Ms O'Mara: They will not have a role in setting crime reduction targets, because obviously that is not a devolved matter.

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 Majesties 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-or-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.