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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 46-iv House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE Welsh Affairs Committee
Police Service, Crime and Anti-Social Behaviour in Wales
Wednesday 12 January 2005 MR SIMON BOYLE, MR HOWARD MATTHEWS and MS SUE HALL MR OWEN WATKIN and MR IAN MILLER Evidence heard in Public Questions 484 - 598
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Welsh Affairs Committee on Wednesday 12 January 2005 Members present Mr Martyn Jones, in the Chair Mr Martin Caton Mr Huw Edwards Mr Nigel Evans Julie Morgan Mrs Betty Williams Mr Roger Williams Hywel Williams ________________ Memoranda submitted by Gwent Criminal Justice Board, South Wales Criminal Justice Board and Blaenau Gwent County Borough Council
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr Simon Boyle, Lord Lieutenant of Gwent, Chairman of Gwent Criminal Justice Board, Ms Sue Hall, Chief Probation Officer and Chair of the South Wales Criminal Justice Board, and Mr Stephen Routledge, Performance Officer, South Wales Criminal Justice Board, examined. Q484 Chairman: Welcome before the Committee this afternoon. You are aware of what we are looking to, which is basically policing and anti-social behaviour in Wales. Just for the record if you could in turn introduce yourselves and describe what you do it would be very useful. Perhaps we can start with Mr Boyle. Mr Boyle: Thank you, Chairman. I am the Chairman of the Gwent Criminal Justice Board. I would just like to point out that unlike the chairmen of all the other Criminal Justice Boards in Britain I am a non-executive chairman and not a professional member of any of the justice agencies. When you question me my answers may show that! Q485 Chairman: I am sure that will not be the case. Ms Hall. Ms Hall: Thank you, Chairman. I am Sue Hall. I am Chair of the South Wales Criminal Justice Board and I am also the chief officer for South Wales Probation. Mr Routledge: I am Stephen Routledge. I am performance officer for the South Wales Criminal Justice Board. Q486 Chairman: Thank you very much. We are told that the role of the Criminal Justice Board is to improve the delivery of justice and to secure public confidence in the Criminal Justice System. I wonder if you could provide some examples both in Gwent and in South Wales of how your Boards address these issues and how you achieve the aims in practice. Again, if we could start with Mr Boyle. Mr Boyle: That is a very wide question. We have in fact developed a plan with several headline overarching goals and up to seventy-eight different action points in our plan for this year. Each of those is under one or other of the main headings and each main goal one member of the Criminal Justice Board takes overall responsibility for. I do not think you want to go through all these. They all fit with the overall aim of the Board. Ms Hall: Within South Wales the Criminal Justice Board has been focusing up until now on coordinating and improving joined up justice between the key criminal justice agencies and our focus has very much been on increasing the number of offenders who have been brought to justice, i.e. people who have committed crimes, have been detected and whose cases have been processed effectively through the Criminal Justice System to the point where they have been convicted. As part of that we had a whole series of actions. We have been looking in a very rigorous way at how we capture data around offenders who are going through the system so that we can monitor our performance. In the early stages that was a very big task. We have been developing our criminal case management project in terms of improving police systems, CPS systems and the points at which those two organisations come together to ensure that cases are processed effectively. That is one side of our activity and I can go into a lot more detail about that if you wish. In terms of public confidence, we are in the process of setting up witness care units at the moment and looking at the ways in which we consult with partners and communicate with the public to inform the public of the work of the Criminal Justice System and start to receive feedback about key issues for the public. Those are the two broad priorities that we have been focusing on up until now. Q487 Mr Edwards: Good afternoon. Can I refer to the role of the Criminal Justice Board and the way that you determine and agree how nationally set public service agreement targets will be achieved. Are all these nationally set targets relevant and appropriate in the two areas of South Wales and Gwent? Mr Boyle: Some of the national targets give a target for a particular aspect of our activity where in our particular area we are already ahead of it. There are examples of the opposite as well, where we are miles behind, so sometimes there is a misfit between what seems desirable locally only in that sense. There is no big problem, though, in fitting our local subsidiary targets under the national target headings. Q488 Mr Edwards: Could you give any examples of the two types? Mr Boyle: Well, fines enforcement is one. There is a national target and we are a long way ahead of it in Gwent. That is just one. I do not think there is a huge list where we are miles ahead of the national targets at all, but that is one that triggers my comment. Q489 Mr Edwards: Anything the other way round? Mr Boyle: I think the ineffective trials percentage. We have been behind the national target but now in the most recent ones we have come past it, down to 20%, the national target having been 25% during this year. In our case we know we can do a lot better than that. That is still one in five trials with time and resources wasted, which is obviously not acceptable. But we were at 35% ineffective, so we are making progress. Q490 Mr Edwards: Thank you. South Wales? Ms Hall: I agree that it is not actually a big problem. I think the role of Criminal Justice Boards is evolving. In the early days the role of Boards was, I suppose, focused around the national vision of reducing levels of ineffective trials and bringing offenders to justice and I think it is quite reasonable that there are national baselines set which areas start to measure themselves against. But I feel that as we have become more mature as Boards our sort of sense of what Boards can achieve is beginning to grow and I am anticipating, for example, in South Wales when we draw up our plan for next year that as well as the national targets we will be supplementing that with local targets which begin to reflect very particular local priorities. I would also say that just because there are national targets we are not constrained at the moment from setting ourselves more challenging targets and in the same way as Gwent we have set ourselves more challenging local targets in relation to ineffective trials, where we have been quite successful, and also in relation to reducing the number of outstanding warrants. So we do have that opportunity at the moment, but my sense is that over the next two to three years we will see an expansion of the role of Criminal Justice Boards and that then will start to perhaps reflect a greater differentiation between Boards across England and Wales. Q491 Mr Edwards: Thank you. You mention, Mr Boyle, in paragraph 22 that national initiatives are too frequent and risk diversion of local resources from local issues. Can you give us an example of some of the initiatives that you think are too frequent? Mr Boyle: There is an example in the paper which is an example. The effective trial management programme is a national initiative where in some respects, not all, we had already done quite a lot of the work in that programme. I think the point I am making is simply the one I have already made, that if you have a target nationally some of the forty-two areas are going to be in a very different position vis-à-vis that target and may be behind or in front, but if you have too many national initiatives - I can produce a list of them if you like but I have not got it with me. There are other examples. I just gave one in the paper. Q492 Mr Edwards: Do you feel the same? Ms Hall: I can give one very good example for South Wales and that was the implementation of the prolific and other priority offender initiative over the summer, which came at us really extremely quickly. I think it was announced in June or early July for implementation by 6 September, or early September, and over the summer the Criminal Justice Boards had to work with the Community Safety Partnerships to ensure that there were prolific and other priority offender schemes operating in our case in each of the seven CSPs in South Wales. That was something which it just was not possible to do well in the amount of time that we were given, albeit it is an initiative we would wholeheartedly subscribe to and have worked very hard on. So I think it is very important that if there are going to be developments such as the POPO scheme that we are given proper advance warning and given enough time to implement them properly. Q493 Mr Edwards: Thank you. Finally, can I ask you how much scope you feel there is for the consultative and advisory groups to re-focus the Boards' nationally based priorities to more locally based priorities? Mr Boyle: In Gwent we have had three seminars at six monthly intervals, to which we have invited all the members of all the organisations whom we treat as our consultative advisory group. We do speak to them individually and separately about specific issues in between. We have had these three seminars, which have been very constructive. We have had about sixty people there from the criminal justice agencies and these other bodies and we directly run the agenda for the day on the basis of explaining what we are doing and getting the input from all present as to whether the priorities should be adjusted in one direction or another and we find that extremely useful. This is the way we have so far worked in making sure we got local input and picking up local concerns as best we can. Q494 Mr Edwards: Could you give the Committee some examples of what the themes of those seminars were? Mr Boyle: Well, they had banner headlines such as - if I may, I will find the names and tell you in a moment. Ms Hall: I think it is fair to say that consultative networks are not as developed in South Wales as they currently are in Gwent and one of our priorities this forthcoming year is to develop some sort of structure where we can get better feedback from communities and partners. But in itself, as I said in my earlier statement, I would not see that as a problem. I think the national priorities are justifiable national priorities and local issues would come along as additional priorities, if that makes sense. I would not see them being in opposition to each other. Mr Routledge: I just want to say with the confidence and public satisfaction target I think that whilst we have a headline target of improving people's belief in the effectiveness of the Criminal Justice System to bring offenders to justice by 6% we as a Board need to find out over and above what the British Crime Survey is telling us about crime actually what the local drivers of confidence are and I think we are going to look to try and establish a better network, particularly with the public and people who have come into contact with the Criminal Justice System. One example we mentioned in the paper was the establishment of a citizens' panel. I am happy to elaborate as we go on. Mr Boyle: I had forgotten the headings of the seminars. Two back it was simply entitled "Narrowing the Justice Gap" and on that occasion we focused on all the things that go towards making ineffective trials and picked through everything that can go wrong and got people's input into how we should correct the things that go wrong. The most recent one was entitled "Full Steam Ahead". I think you were invited to it probably, if I may say so. In that one what we did was, if you can imagine a sort of bar chart with a hundred crimes and somewhere at the end here is the number brought to justice, we took all the bits of things falling off and got the people in the room to discuss step by step all the things that go wrong and the steps we could take to reduce the bits that fall off and get the final offences brought to justice figure up. We got a lot of ideas out of it. Mr Edwards: Thank you. Q495 Mr Evans: Did you mention that part of your remit is also to look at outstanding fines as well, the level of outstanding fines once they have gone through the system? Ms Hall: At the moment our remit is around warrants, that is in terms of people who have not turned up to court. Does that include fines? Mr Routledge: We have just been recently consulted about the targets for 2005 and 2006 and it is a new target for Boards whereas, as Sue says, before we had just failure to appear at court warrants as a target, which was a local target. It is now a full strand which is coming under the heading of enforcement and within that enforcement there are still going to be failure to appear warrants but yes, that will also include fines. Q496 Mr Evans: You are just taking on this new responsibility now? Mr Routledge: Yes. Before fine enforcement was not a target for the Boards but as at 2005/06 it will be a target for all Criminal Justice Boards. Q497 Mr Evans: Is it too early to say how the outstanding debit is - Mr Routledge: I think in South Wales we had problems with it. Whilst it was not a target for the board, the magistrates' court committee did bring some of the issues to the table for debate. It was below the national target, which I think is 78% for enforcing fines nationally, but we have actually made a lot of improvements and current figures are quite far ahead. So hopefully going forward we have addressed some of the problems that we did have. Q498 Mr Evans: Are you able to say what level below 78% it actually was? Mr Routledge: In the past I would say it was operating at around about 50 to 60%, maybe mid sixties. Obviously it would fluctuate month by month, but I think the most recent figures showed a figure up in the nineties over the last couple of months. So we have actually made a lot of difference. It is a big jump. Mr Evans: Thank you. Q499 Mr Caton: Looking again at partnership and consultation, Mr Boyle, you just suggested to Mr Edwards that he was invited to your consultative group on a particular subject. Actually, according to appendix 3 of the evidence you have submitted, which does list a lot of organisations which are invited to these groups, Members of Parliament are not actually mentioned there; Assembly Members are. Is there a reason for that? Mr Boyle: You are quite right, sir. I apologise. I may have made a mistake but when Mr Edwards I thought he meant he had. It could be it has been omitted from the appendix or you were not asked. Q500 Mr Edwards: I recall getting an invitation to that, yes. Mr Boyle: As you can see, we have tried to have a very wide coverage and we certainly had asked Members of Parliament. I can recall one or other attending one of the seminars - we have had three - but I cannot be sure which is which. Q501 Mr Caton: It is just an omission from the appendix? Mr Boyle: I think you are right. It should be in the appendix. Q502 Mr Caton: Fine. If that is all it is, there is not a problem. Can you enlarge a little bit on how, when you had the consultative group seminar, the board addresses the issues that have been focused on in that seminar. Mr Boyle: I can just explain it to you like this: this time a year ago when we were looking at our plan for the financial year we are in we had about forty-five action points under the main goals, which I mentioned at the beginning, primarily to do with closing the justice gap and increasing public confidence. After we had this seminar we ended up with seventy-eight actions because there were another thirty-odd points that people raised which we felt were valid and needed attention so we added them. Hopefully the number of action points will diminish as we gradually tick them off. Q503 Mr Caton: Thank you very much. Moving to South Wales, you refer in your evidence to the Criminal Justice Board conferences which you hold and you say that apart from the Criminal Justice stakeholders, race and diversity groups and members of the public attend. Can you expand upon who has actually been to these conferences? Ms Hall: I would have to refer to Stephen as I was not chair then. Mr Routledge: Hopefully it expresses in the paper that there has actually been one conference that we have held to date, so not a series of conferences. We have a conference on the launch of the Board whereby we invited key stakeholders and members of the public and we have, as Sue will reiterate, discussed holding another such conference again to reflect on where we are now and to sort of communicate the work we have been doing and also use it as an opportunity to get questions from the public and find out their feelings and opinions on crime. Q504 Mr Caton: So who was invited and attended that first conference? Mr Routledge: It was before my time, I had not actually started, but I am under the impression that it was obviously representatives from each of the Criminal Justice agencies, diversity organisations, other sort of non-statutory partners would have been invited, but over an above that I could not say with any certainty. But certainly I could provide a list of them. Q505 Mr Caton: Could you send that to our clerk? That would be very useful. Mr Routledge: Of course, yes. Q506 Mr Caton: You mentioned a little earlier the South Wales Citizens Panel and you suggested you would be able to expand upon that at some stage. I think this is probably the stage at which you can do that. Mr Routledge: Yes. It is not a totally revolutionary initiative. I think county councils and other organisations have used them before, but I think it is new to a Criminal Justice Board. Because public satisfaction and confidence is such an amorphous kind of subject it is so difficult to tell if we are making gains. As I said, it is about a 6% improvement target. We need to know that what interventions we are doing are actually making a difference and actually improving confidence. So we are doing it as a trial really this year. We had some money available and we decided to set up a panel using a professional research company. They have recruited a panel of approximately between 1,000 and 1,500 people. They have got representation from across South Wales according to gender, trying to make sure that under-represented groups such as the disabled, ethnic minorities or the young, who often do not get represented or have a say, are involved in this. So the panel is, hopefully, fully representative of South Wales. It will need to be replenished as time goes on. Obviously some people will come off the panel and others will come on the panel to avoid stagnation, but primarily the purpose of the panel will be to undertake about three or four postal surveys per year. They will be on a variety of subjects. We have actually just sent out the first one and the results are due back during February. Supplementing the postal surveys, we will also use focus groups if the public are willing to come and meet with us and elaborate on some of the things they have said. For instance, in our first postal survey we have asked if people have experienced crime within the last year and if they have did they report the crime. If they did, what was the response to that, and if they did not - particularly if they did not because there is a lot of under-reporting of crime and a lot of victims and witnesses of crime never come into the system - so if they did not we would like to know why, with a view to obviously making interventions wherever possible. But as I say, it is a new initiative. We have two surveys this year and hopefully some focus groups and we will see whether we continue that panel throughout the course of time. Q507 Mr Caton: Thank you. In section 7.3 of South Wales' evidence it is noted that the Criminal Justice Board and Community Safety Partnerships are working closely at a strategic level. Can you tell us a bit more about how in practice, that is both in Gwent and in South Wales, you work with the Community Safety Partnerships? Ms Hall: There has been a lot of concern, I think both at Community Safety Partnership level and at Local Criminal Justice Board level, that we have not until fairly recently found a way of trying to work more closely together. I think in the early days of the Criminal Justice Board, Community Safety Partnership could not really see the value of what LCJBs were doing for them because a lot of the work we were doing was about the Criminal Justice System and making it more efficient and effective, but that was not work that really was the focus of Community Safety Partnerships' plans. More recently we have begun to recognise that there is a lot of areas of overlap and in particular the prolific and other priority offenders initiative, which requires the LCJB and CSPs to work together, similarly domestic violence and persistent young offenders. All of those areas are ones where we have got responsibilities and CSPs have got responsibilities. The way that we have found through it - and actually it is still trial and error - is that I attend the overarching leadership group within South Wales both in my role as chief officer of probation and as chair of the Local Criminal Justice Board and some of the other members of the Local Criminal Justice Board who are members of that group attend. At the moment we are using that as the conduit to bring issues and papers where we are trying, I suppose, to influence a more consistent South Wales response which brings the seven local authorities together. The one which so far has made most progress is the prolific and other priority offender scheme, where we now do have a South Wales wide steering group which has representatives of all seven CSPs on it as well as other relevant CJS organisations and the crime reduction director from the Welsh Assembly Government also sits on that group. That group is actually chaired by the Criminal Justice Board but involves the CSPs and I think this is a very important development. We are trying to establish something similar in relation to domestic violence and that is currently under discussion with the CSPs. So our strategy at the moment is really doing it in relation to issues which affect both the CJB and the CSPs rather than our initial plan, which was to have some sort of joint group. In the end we felt it was more effective to focus on specific issues and try to work out a way of moving forward. As a result of that sort of early work that we had done last year around this sort of approach we are now finding that CSPs are beginning to invite the LCJB representatives to come and talk to them to try and increase awareness and understanding. So it is early days but it does feel there is more understanding working together over the last six months than there has been in the past couple of years. Mr Boyle: In Gwent, Chairman, we have a similar thing. We have five local authorities, therefore five CSPs, and there is the question of how to link with them. We have not actually done it yet but we have just agreed with the chief officers group in Gwent of the five local authorities that members of the Criminal Justice Board in addition to the Police and the Probation, who are already going regularly, will attend a meeting and try to agree a joint strategy, as Sue has said, to deal with schemes of common interest like the POPOs and domestic violence, so a very similar approach. Q508 Mr Caton: This is not actually to do with the consultation process but it is something you mentioned, Ms Hall, the persistent young offenders. We have had at least one submission where there was some concern that our shift in dealing with a lot of these issues is targeting young people specifically. I know that the Home Office has set you this agenda, but are you worried that young people are increasingly being seen as the problem? If you are a persistent offender it does not matter whether you are young, middle-aged or old, I would have said that you are a problem to society. Do you see any problem with focusing so much on young people, as we seem to these days? Ms Hall: It is interesting actually that the prolific and other priority offender scheme is not necessarily focusing on young people. That is saying that CSPs should identify those offenders who are causing them the most problems and the way those offenders are identified is a combination of using the Police National Intelligence Database and local knowledge. That scheme should not be focusing on the very low level young offenders, who perhaps are not really the ones who should be coming into the Criminal Justice System. This initiative is focusing on people who are getting into trouble, who are being convicted, and actually it can include people up to the age of ninety; it does not have to be young offenders. Q509 Mr Caton: But you identified persistent young offenders as another category, did you not? Ms Hall: Well, persistent young offenders were an initial priority for Criminal Justice Boards in terms of ensuring that anyone who is identified as a persistent young offender was brought to justice within seventy-one days. That is the PYO pledge which was made by the Government and South Wales has been successful in ensuring that those young offenders are fast-tracked. Where developments have, I think, taken a turn over the summer with the introduction of the prolific and other offenders scheme (which is a mouthful) is that the shift is now not just on processing people who have got a certain number of convictions, it is saying who really is causing a problem for the community and what can we do either to deter them, to convict them, or if they have been convicted to resettle and rehabilitate them. In a way it has taken a bit of the attention away from young offenders, if anything, and saying it is wider than just young people around bus stops and hanging around streets. Mr Caton: Thank you. Q510 Mrs Williams: I would like to ask a question on funding. How is the Criminal Justice Board funded? Ms Hall: We receive a budget in South Wales of £115,000 and on top of that we receive the salary of a performance officer. Q511 Mrs Williams: Is the performance officer's salary paid in full? Ms Hall: Yes, indeed. Mr Routledge: At the moment it is paid in full, yes. Q512 Mrs Williams: On top of the figure you have mentioned? Ms Hall: Yes, indeed. Next year we are guaranteed the same levels of funding, although we do not know exactly what yet, but the performance officer's salary will, I think, be paid by - Mr Routledge: Centrally by the Home Office next year. Q513 Mrs Williams: For how long? Mr Routledge: It appears that whilst we were initially employed by the Home Office we have recently transferred, but our line management is by a local agency. So I am actually seconded from the Probation Service and I am now managed by Sue as Chair of the Board. That was a decision which was taken by the Home Office, but the Home Office have said that they will fund the performance officer's salary next year but after that Criminal Justice Boards will be given a lump sum each year and it is up to them what staff they appoint, if necessary. Q514 Mrs Williams: So it is difficult to plan ahead in that sense? Mr Routledge: Yes. Q515 Mrs Williams: You are only able to plan ahead for twelve months or so, are you? Ms Hall: This is a problem which is not unknown to those in the public sector, but we have funding guaranteed for next year. Beyond that, we do not know. We will make the assumption that we will carry on, but we do not actually categorically know that. Q516 Mrs Williams: What is the figure for Gwent? Mr Boyle: For Gwent this year it is £85,000 and we have been told it will be the same next year, plus the cost of the performance officer's salary. But it is worth adding, if I may, Chairman, that we currently do not have a performance officer. The first holder of that post in Gwent left, partly for the reason that it was so uncertain what the future was. We do see this as a problem in Gwent. Obviously all the public service budgets are never confirmed except year by year, but most of the public sector agencies have a vision beyond one year. The Criminal Justice Boards really should have the same longer vision if the Government believes they should continue, because otherwise it is very difficult to recruit and retain people. Mrs Williams: Thank you. Q517 Julie Morgan: I am going to ask about the justice gap and public confidence, but before I do that I wonder in South Wales what you do to involve the elected representatives in the activities of the Criminal Justice Board, because I think we have had a response from Gwent. I just wondered whether you did anything or whether you plan to do anything. Ms Hall: I am going to have to hold my hand up really and say that the Board to date has been undeveloped in the way that we have consulted with partners, with the Welsh Assembly Government and with elected members and we recognise this. We have had actually a huge change of personnel on the Criminal Justice Board. I think every single member of the Board has changed in the last six or seven months, as a result of which we really have refocused and done a lot of thinking about where we should be going as a Board. We have got an awayday next week and one of the topics for that awayday is about participation, community engagement and involving people. We recognise it is a gap and we have not done enough yet on that score. Q518 Julie Morgan: I think the elected representatives would welcome the opportunity to become involved. You mentioned the change in personnel and I think that is a big issue in any groups which try to coordinate, work together and plan. How long are people on the Board for? Is it fixed? Ms Hall: Yes. Your membership of the Board links to your role, therefore the Chief Constable, the Chief Officer of Probation, the Area Director for the Prison Service, the Chief Crown Prosecutor and the Area Director for the new unified Court Service are all on it as of right. Q519 Julie Morgan: Indefinitely? Ms Hall: Yes. All of those organisations have had a change of head over the last year or so and that is why the change has happened on the Criminal Justice Boards. Q520 Julie Morgan: So it is not something that is built into the system in any way, it should be more stable? Ms Hall: Yes. The only thing which is built into our constitution is that the chairmanship will rotate. Q521 Chairman: Can I just come in there. You did mention, Mr Boyle, that you are different from everyone else. How did that come about? Mr Boyle: Chairman, of course I am not as different from everybody else as all that but when the Boards were first formed the four main agency heads in Gwent (the Police, the CPS, the Probation and the Courts) got together for a shadow meeting and one of the items they discussed was who should be the chairman. I believe all the other Boards decided that one of them would, either on a rotating or a permanent basis, but they took the view that they wanted an independent chairman. Q522 Chairman: And you were it! Mr Boyle: Three of the individuals concerned have since moved from Gwent. Having decided that, they then asked me if I would be willing to do so and I accepted on a sort of temporary basis to see how it went. In the meantime, as in South Wales, we have had a new Chief Constable last year, we have had a new head of the Court Service and a new head of the CPS. So I have ended up, to my surprise, being the continuity man to some extent! That is how it happened anyway. Chairman: Thank you. Q523 Julie Morgan: I was going to ask about increasing public confidence in the Criminal Justice System and you have already answered a bit about that. How do you measure public confidence and how reliable are the measures? You have talked about the panel. Mr Routledge: Just to go back, we are measured nationally by the British Crime Survey. We get results on a quarterly basis. There is only one particular aspect on which the Boards are judged against, which is the effectiveness of the Criminal Justice System or at least the perception of the public of bringing offences to justice. So in terms of national measurements there is only one particular target. We have not been given a great steer over and above that of how we measure public confidence by the centre, although I think recently they have taken on board the fact that the Boards are saying what is working in other areas and how can we share that, because it is very difficult to say that something which is working in one area would necessarily have an improvement in public confidence if you introduced it in your area. So over and above that high level measure, as I say, the panel is a way of tapping into public feelings and public opinions. We also look to try and at least evaluate every intervention that we do, so we will undertake evaluation and questionnaires. For instance, when we introduced the video which is mentioned in the briefing paper we evaluated that and as part of a teaching package we will continue to evaluate what people say about that and the questions which are in the evaluation form are linked back to the questions within the British Crime Survey itself. But I think there is scope possibly as well of moving forward and actually conducting professional research, perhaps from Cardiff University in our case or one of the other universities in South Wales, which we have done in the past. With domestic violence we had a sort of evaluation report done by a doctor in the university. So I think there is scope as well for actually getting professionals in and giving us some assistance, but over and above that the Boards are very much left to sort of find their way. Q524 Julie Morgan: Are you sort of implying there should be more guidance? Mr Routledge: I think it would be helpful because, as I say, again it is a very broad subject. Because you bring more offences to justice does that necessarily mean increased public confidence? As you know the discrepancy that everybody is talking about is the fact that whilst recorded crime has fallen for many years, I think for the last seven years, and the chances of becoming a victim of crime are less than ever according to the British Crime Survey people's fear of crime is actually on the increase and I think really reducing that fear is a key aim. But again, how do you measure it? So as a Board we are quite new still and in terms of our measurement of this particular target we are learning, I think. Q525 Julie Morgan: From what you have done so far do you have anything to suggest why there is this disparity between the public's perception and the actual figures? Mr Routledge: National research which was carried out before the confidence target was introduced showed that a lot of public confidence is determined by the media. They do have a large role. That does not mean that they totally determine it, but they do have a large role to play and linked to that we have engaged a professional media company to help us with press releases and radio interviews because that is seen by research as an effective way of improving public confidence. But also I think research has shown that your contact with the Criminal Justice System regularly influences your confidence, so we have got a real sort of focus about improving the way that we service the public. I think also your contact with family and friends as well is another key one, somebody who knows someone who works in the Criminal Justice System. So if we are able to improve internally the staff's belief in what they are doing, their confidence and meaning in what they are doing, I think ultimately that will pay off in terms of what they tell the public and family and friends, etcetera. Q526 Julie Morgan: Thank you. The Gwent Criminal Justice Board has been involved in confidence research you say on your website? Mr Boyle: Yes. Q527 Julie Morgan: Can you tell us any more about that? Mr Boyle: Yes. I will keep it brief and give you the short version. We did a local survey through a professional agency in March which produced a forty-three page report and basically it said that most people in Gwent were confident in the Criminal Justice System in Gwent but the large minority who were reported not to be very happy about it were disproportionately those who had brushed with the Criminal Justice System in one way or another and the ones who were most happy about it were those who had never had any contact with it. Within the forty-three pages, as you can imagine, there were numerous points which we are gradually trying to follow up. Victims and witnesses comes out all the time. I do not think this point has been brought out much yet. Q528 Julie Morgan: That was the next question actually. Mr Boyle: It came out in our seminars that tremendous priority is being given and will increasingly be given to trying to make things easier for victims and witnesses because without them no progress can really be made, and public confidence is very much linked to that as well. Q529 Julie Morgan: So how do you actually measure this victim satisfaction? Mr Boyle: We have not really got a measure yet. Mr Routledge: If I might add, there is a survey called the WAVES survey. I think it stands for Witness and Victim Experience Satisfaction, which is going to be undertaken by MORI. I think they have been in contact with lead people within each of the agencies, particularly the Police, to identify victims and witnesses who have come into contact with the system and who are willing to be contacted about their views. So there is something nationally due to come in, but I do not think we will see the real results of that for about six months or so until it is up and running. Q530 Julie Morgan: The Government is proposing to have a victims' commissioner, is it not? Mr Routledge: That is right, yes. Q531 Julie Morgan: Do you think that may help? Mr Routledge: I think so. Certainly having a victims' commissioner is important. I think the shift particularly is much more victims focused than it has been in the past. It is never going to be nice to be a witness in court but I think the services that we provide need to be much more coordinated. People need to be given more information about their case because often in the past victims and witnesses have never had a central contact point, whereas with witness care units you will have a single person who manages their case from charge to sentence. So there is a definite shift in focus towards victim and witness satisfaction. Julie Morgan: Thank you. Q532 Mr Williams: Good afternoon. Perhaps we could turn to performance management and data. In Gwent we are told that the traffic light system is used for performance measurement. Perhaps you could tell us something about that. Mr Boyle: Certainly. I mentioned earlier that we had seventy-eight actions on our list this year and we use the traffic light system. Red means either the action on it has not started or it is less than 50% achieved. yellow means it is half achieved but less than 80% and green is 80% or complete. Q533 Mr Williams: Is that qualitative or quantitative? Mr Boyle: Some are qualitative and some are quantitative. Q534 Mr Williams: Also in paragraph 21 you say that the credibility of the data is an issue in Gwent. Can you perhaps explore that a little bit for us? Mr Boyle: This is a sore subject because obviously the measure of offences brought to justice is our crucial measure and we have been rather dumbfounded by the fact that the national figures collected up in the centre show that all the trends are going the wrong way, whereas we were fairly convinced we were making progress. We have an ongoing investigation into this. But apart from actually getting it right, there is a very tangled route for the statistics. They have to go through numerous different gates where coding errors can be made. That is what I am referring to there. Q535 Mr Williams: So is there work in progress perhaps? Mr Boyle: Yes, we are still working on trying to get a robust measure which we can totally rely on. I think some of the problem has been of our making in Gwent, frankly. If I say that in Gwent they tend to say I am wrong. Q536 Mr Williams: Ms Hall said that there was a problem, perhaps, when you set up your Board in the beginning. Is there any work which can be done between organisations, perhaps, on these issues which would prevent the same system having to be invented again? Ms Hall: Yes. Certainly we have been talking over the recent days and I think it might be helpful for South Wales to talk with Gwent when the Gwent performance officer is appointed because I think our position is that we are relatively confident in our data and our data is more up to date than Gwent's and perhaps our performance officer can explain why that is so. Mr Routledge: We did have a bit of a lag with our offences brought to justice data. It is a complex process. I think the main problem we had was that Cardiff Magistrates' Court was submitting manual forms to the Home Office, or at least the Police were sending manual forms to the Home Office. Obviously that slowed the process down and meant the data lagged. We had the assistance from the Home Office, which implemented an assisted data interchange link, a grand phrase basically for electronic exchange of the information. So it made it more accurate and speeded up the process. So from a lag of about seven months, which makes it extremely difficult to performance manage, as you can imagine, we eventually brought the data up to date to within two months. There is still scope for ensuring that local systems for collection of data are water-tight and that the checks are done on a regular basis but, as Sue says, we are quite confident that the data in that area is now very good and I would say that with the other data that we gather the systems that we have in place are very strong and we are confident that the data we collect is accurate, if not to 100%. Q537 Mr Williams: So the data is strong when it gives you the message that you would like to hear but perhaps not so strong when it gives you the message that you do not want to hear? Ms Hall: I think it has been because we recognised at the very beginning, as I mentioned earlier, that our systems were not terribly robust. We have put a lot of effort into sorting out our data collection system because if you cannot actually accurately measure something you do not know how you are doing and it is difficult then to focus your priorities and your efforts. So that has been, I think, one of the successes with the South Wales Board. Mr Williams: Thank you. Q538 Mr Edwards: Could I ask you about anti-social behaviour. In evidence to this Committee the director of the anti-social behaviour unit at the Home Office talked about anti-social behaviour prosecutors. We questioned the chair of the North Wales Criminal Justice Board on this, so could I ask the same question of you. Do you have dedicated anti-social behaviour prosecutors in Gwent or South Wales? Has this been a matter which you have considered? Mr Boyle: We have not got anybody with that label in Gwent yet. Q539 Mr Edwards: Has it been considered? Mr Boyle: Not to my knowledge, but we have had a gap in the leadership of the CPS and I think we will be discussing it. Ms Hall: Can I start off by saying that Anti-Social Behaviour Orders are not actually a priority for the Local Criminal Justice Board. That is not to say we do not take an interest in it, but we are not tasked with overseeing the operation of anti-social behaviour. That has been driven very much through the Community Safety Partnerships and the local authorities. However, having said that, we do take an interest in what is happening and we do have a specialist anti-social behaviour prosecutor in South Wales, and indeed an extremely active specialist prosecutor who, as we have mentioned in our evidence, has recently convened an anti-social behaviour legal group to try and ensure that consistent standards of legal advice are offered across the seven CSPs and to provide a sort of network for the prosecutors in each of the seven CSPs to meet, together with the Police solicitor. Q540 Mr Edwards: Is this the ASBO legal group? Ms Hall: Yes, it is. Q541 Mr Edwards: So you see some benefits from that? Ms Hall: It is very, very early days. They have had all of one meeting. They had their meeting, I think, either in December or very, very recently. But it is very clear that there is perceived to be a great need for this group. There is going to be a formal launch of the group in March and I will ensure that invitations are sent out widely for that launch. So obviously we will evaluate it when it has been running a bit longer, but certainly it fills a gap which exists at the moment where prosecutors do not have good networks to fall back on and this, hopefully, will develop good practice across South Wales. Q542 Mr Edwards: There have been new sentencing guidelines on the consistency of magistrates' sentencing in anti-social behaviour cases. Have you got any comment on that? Ms Hall: In South Wales the number of cases which actually go to court for an Anti-Social Behaviour Order is really the tip of the iceberg. The strategy within South Wales is very much about trying to tackle the causes of anti-social behaviour at their root and to try and resolve the problems without actually resorting to court. So in South Wales cases only come to court if all the other measures have failed and I think currently it is only about 5% of all referrals for anti-social behaviour which actually end up in court. Therefore, I am aware that the guidelines exist but I am not aware that they have made a big difference in the way that ASBOs are being dealt with by the courts. Q543 Mr Edwards: How many ASBOs in South Wales have there been in, say, the last twelve months? Ms Hall: Interestingly, as a Criminal Justice Board we do not monitor that information and I was aware that we did not in preparation for today's event and I asked CPS whether they could tell me and even the specialist ASBO prosecutor was not able to give me an accurate figure for the last twelve months. It is between twenty-four and thirty, and I think the reason why it has not been possible to get an accurate figure is because these figures are collected locally, within the local authorities. Now that we have a legal group I would hope that we start to get some more accurate monitoring information coming out. Q544 Mr Edwards: I am sure we would welcome that. Given the high prominence that ASBOs have attracted it would be reasonable that we or the public could be informed about the number of ASBOs. In the Gwent evidence to us you say, Mr Boyle, that you have had twenty-one in Gwent. Have you any comment on that? It does not seem to me that many given the sort of nature of some of the communities in Gwent and some of the problems that we all confront now and again. Mr Boyle: I can certainly comment on that. As Sue has said, it has been regarded not in the same way as the media would have it, as something you slap around everywhere but as a last resort. We are not directly responsible, as Sue has said. It is initiated by the groups, which include the Police, the local authorities and the housing associations. They consider the case at first hearing and they have a sort of toolkit of possible responses, of which an ASBO is only one. All I know is that the courts have dealt with them immediately on the day requested, there have been no delays, and any breaches of ASBOs have resulted in custody in Gwent. So it is tight at that end. The only comment I would make is that I became aware that there were about twelve hundred and something ASBOs issued in the last twelve months in England and Wales. It was reported to be four times the number of the year before. If that is correct, twenty-one in Gwent is actually proportionally high-ish for our population. Q545 Mr Edwards: I am sure you would accept that the public perception is that this is probably a very useful tool. Mr Boyle: Yes. Q546 Mr Edwards: My impression is that the public do not feel very reassured, or certainly not the area that I represent, that they are actually being deployed as a useful tool and I can certainly say from my own experience of clearing up broken vodka bottles on the sports field in Monmouth on a Saturday morning and thinking about the disruption which under-age drinking causes in the community, even a small community like Monmouth, that there might be a few more ASBOs being considered and other of the techniques which have been introduced in recent legislation. Mr Boyle: It is a fair point. The local authority provides a chair of the group which either initiates ASBOs or other remedies. They have a thirty-five page protocol of possible ways of dealing with these things. I cannot answer in detail about Monmouth, you know more about it than I do. To be quite frank, if I could add, Chairman, I think the public were oversold a bit on ASBOs because there are lots of other things which you can do of a preventative nature which must come as a better choice really if you can prevent people from getting into court by other remedies. Q547 Mr Edwards: Yes. My own impression, and I would like to have the evidence, is that they are probably used far more in a place like Salford, an inner-city area, than they are in some of our communities? Ms Hall: If I could answer that, I think there is a bit of a postcode lottery around ASBOs. I think the evidence is clear that in some parts of the country they are used much more frequently than in other parts of the country. I would like just to repeat what I said earlier, which is that the local Criminal Justice Boards are not responsible for ASBO strategy within communities. They are very much part and parcel of the Community Safety Partnerships. Obviously we have an interest and I think we need to find a way of linking in more to the sorts of decisions which are made around ASBOs, but it is very much a local issue rather than an LCJB issue. Q548 Mr Williams: You talk about a postcode lottery for ASBOs. Do you think that is because there are different definitions of anti-social behaviour in different areas as opposed to crime, for instance, which has a legal definition for the crime? Ms Hall: I think there is a number of factors. One is, I suppose, the tolerance within a local community of certain sorts of behaviour and another will be the culture of the Police, the local authority and courts within that area and that varies. In some cases areas will want to move much more to processing things through the courts and having legal sanctions, whereas in other areas there may be more willingness to try other measures first. That is what I think leads to the discrepancies across the country. Anti-Social behaviour itself is actually quite difficult to define. What one person might call anti-social behaviour another person might just think is normal boisterousness amongst young people. Q549 Mr Williams: My Chief Constable! Ms Hall: There is a dilemma and in a way local communities have got to find local solutions to this. Mr Williams: Thank you. Q550 Mrs Williams: On the same topic, clearly you take an interest in the whole issue but is there evidence, do you think, in your particular areas that magistrates in some areas tend to be softer than in other areas, because at the end of the day it comes before the magistrates and they make a decision whether they go for an order or not? Is there any evidence of that in your areas? Ms Hall: I would have to say for South Wales, and I have checked this out again before I came, I am told that where an application is made for an Anti-Social Behaviour Order in South Wales it is almost invariably granted and that breaches are treated very seriously. So we do not actually see any problem with the magistracy in relation to Anti-Social Behaviour Orders. Mr Boyle: I think I may have mentioned before that every ASBO requested by one of the CSPs has been granted with no delay. Of course, evidence has to be produced and the court makes the final decision, but every one that has been requested has been issued. So as Sue says, it does go a little bit back to the Community Safety Partnerships as to how often they actually request an ASBO and they have other options for dealing with things. Mrs Williams: Thank you. Chairman: In that case, unless there are any other questions - Mrs Williams: I would like to ask a question about the relationship between - Chairman: Carry on then, Mrs Williams. Q551 Mrs Williams: I just wanted to follow up what Mr Edwards has asked really. What I am interested to know is, and I am sure the Committee is as well, what is the relationship between the National Assembly for Wales, the Welsh Assembly Government and the Criminal Justice Board? Mr Boyle: Not intimate because, as you know, the Criminal Justice Boards were set up from London, not from Cardiff, and how this will develop in the future I am not quite sure because obviously the Welsh Assembly does have a hand via the local authorities in the Community Safety Partnerships but not directly in the Criminal Justice Boards. Ms Hall: Similarly, when the Boards were conceived and originally set up there were not a lot of points of contact because so much of the work was being done around the Criminal Justice System, which is not the responsibility of the Assembly Government, but as we have now begun to get more initiatives involved, the CSPs, so we have begun to have greater contact with the Welsh Assembly Government, largely through the crime reduction director, that is our main link. As we have said in our submission, we did receive £8,000 worth of funding from the Assembly Government to help with our Citizens Panel, which is an extremely positive move. It is a sort of needs must arrangement at the moment. Where there is a need to communicate that happens, but there is not a sort of ongoing day by day relationship. Q552 Mrs Williams: In paragraph 8 of your submission you mentioned the creation of a strategic group, which involves the CJB, the CSP and the crime reduction director for Wales. What is the purpose of this group and how is it working, or is it too early to say? Is it making an impact? Ms Hall: Since this statement was prepared there have been developments, which I referred to earlier. We did have a proposal that we would have the strategic group but on reflection we felt that it actually made more sense to use the overarching leadership group within Wales as the meeting point for the Local Criminal Justice Board and the CSPs, and the crime reduction director attends the overarching leadership group as well. So we are making use of an existing meeting to do that piece of business at the moment rather than create a separate group, which we had initially been discussing. This was to make better use of everybody's time. Q553 Mrs Williams: Are there any special issues which arise for Criminal Justice Boards in Wales that do not arise for CJBs in England as a result of devolution? Ms Hall: Without any doubt, and I worked in England for many years before I came to Wales. Without doubt it is more complicated in Wales because of the use that is made of CSPs by the Assembly Government for driving down strategy in relation to health and community safety, which means that initiatives can happen within CSPs which are not really paralleled within England and are not reflected in some of the initiatives which come through from the Home Office and from London. So there is more of a balancing act that has to happen here in Wales than happens in England. Q554 Mrs Williams: What do you think in Gwent? Mr Boyle: I have not seen what happens in England in the same way, but I do not think the Criminal Justice Boards themselves actually operate any differently in Wales to England from what I have gathered. But as Sue says, there are twenty-two Community Safety Partnerships and four Criminal Justice Boards in Wales, so there is obviously quite a lot of intensive liaison and scope for crossed wires just in that structure. I am not quite sure what proportion of Criminal Justice Boards to Community Safety Partnerships there are in England. Ms Hall: I think that the issue is less the number of local authorities to Boards, it is rather where the strategy comes from and what the drivers are. It is just more complicated in Wales because of the existence of the Assembly Government. Mrs Williams: Thank you. Q555 Chairman: Thank you very much for coming. It has been a very useful session. Mr Boyle: Chairman, would it be totally out of order to ask you a question, sir? Q556 Chairman: It generally is, but I shall allow it on this occasion. Mr Boyle: I know you have been taking evidence from numerous people. What is the end of the process? Do you produce a sort of report? Q557 Chairman: Indeed we do, yes. Mr Boyle: With a hundred recommendations, that sort of thing? Chairman: I doubt that it will be a hundred, Mr Boyle, but there will be a report with recommendations which goes to the Government and then they have to respond within two months. They may not have to implement the recommendations. Thank you. Memorandum submitted by Ceredigion Community Safety Partnership Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr Owen Watkin, Chairman, Ceredigion Community Safety Partnership, Chief Executive, Ceredigion County Council, and Mr Ian Miller, Joint Chairman, Denbighshire Community Safety Partnership, Chief Executive, Denbighshire County Council, examined. Q558 Chairman: Can I thank you for your written submissions originally and for coming here today for the oral evidence session. Just for the record, can I ask you to introduce yourselves, but before I do can I also warn you that within about ten minutes there will be a division in the House and I will have to suspend the sitting. It is an occupational hazard. Mr Watkin, would you like to start? Mr Watkin: Could I firstly thank you for inviting us this afternoon to give evidence and we are grateful for this opportunity. My name is Owen Watkin. I am chief executive of Ceredigion County Council and also Chairman of Ceredigion Community Safety Partnership. Mr Miller: Good afternoon. My name is Ian Miller. I am the chief executive of Denbighshire County Council and I am the joint Chair of the Denbighshire Community Safety Partnership. Q559 Chairman: Can I ask you who the other Chair is? Mr Miller: Yes. The other Chair is Chief Superintendent Julian Sandham, who is the basic commander Chairman: Thank you. If I can start off with Mr Roger Williams. Q560 Mr Williams: Thank you very much indeed. Perhaps we could explore the issue of national priorities and how appropriate they are to your regions and how you try to harmonize local and national priorities in determining the Community Safety Partnership strategy. Mr Watkin: Thank you for the question. There is a number of elements here. We are enjoined to undertake a crime audit in all areas of Community Safety Partnerships and that will lead to a strategy which is meant to reflect the priorities of our communities. So there is a local issue with regard to their priorities. There are bound to be national priorities. We understand that the Home Office, having published their priorities, require Community Safety Partnerships to acknowledge those and to act towards them. The reconciliation between national priorities and local priorities and, as has just been alluded to, maybe priorities from the Welsh Assembly Government need to be reconciled in the form of discussion at a local level. We have, for example, a letter from the Permanent Secretary of the Home Office of 8 December 2004 referring to Home Office Public Service Agreement targets and there are seven of these. One in particular, the PSA1 is to reduce crime by 15% overall. It depends on the quartile of the Community Safety Partnership with regard to the actual percentage. In order to take this forward what is suggested by the Assembly is that we have discussions at a local level, that is the CSP, the BCU Commander, the representative of the policy authority, in order to create an understanding of what the targets should be. It is intended that those targets should form part of the community safety strategy itself. So if we go back to the beginning of my explanation that although we have local priorities under the current arrangements we have to adhere to the agreement on national targets. So there has to be this discussion and an attempt to reconcile the right targets for each Community Safety Partnership. Mr Miller: If I could perhaps add to that, obviously from the local government perspective we would prefer local discretion and accountability for whatever targets and priorities we set, but obviously we also recognise the right of the UK Government or the Welsh Assembly Government to indicate priorities. But certainly with those that come from the Home Office I think there is the danger that because there are looking at Wales and England as a whole it is quite likely that things which they might identify as priorities across such a large area are less likely to be relevant when you come down to the county level in Wales, and that can even be a problem in Wales. If you set a national target for Wales you might find that that is not necessarily relevant in every area. Just to give one example of that, one of the ten priority areas in crime reduction which has been identified by the Home Office in the letter Owen Watkin has referred to is the theft of pedal cycles. Well, that is just not an issue in Denbighshire and I doubt that it is a particularly significant issue in many areas in Wales. That is just one illustration of the problems that can come from a national approach which adopts a single straitjacket, as it were. We do have then the difficulty of harmonizing between what we want to do locally and what is coming down from above. Obviously we cannot ignore what is coming down from above. We have in the last year or two in Denbighshire consciously sought to align our targets with those that are in the policing plan for the central division in North Wales Police because there seemed no logic in having different targets from those which the Police were working to. But if I could just give one other illustration of something which seems rather unrealistic, I am sure the Committee has heard about the priority and prolific offender scheme and we have moved forward very quickly in identifying the people we are going to target in Denbighshire. But more recently there has been a request that we should set a target for how much crime was going to be reduced in our area by the end of March this year as a result of implementing the scheme. Well, with all due respect to our friends in the Home Office, that is a virtually impossible task. While one can identify how much crime the individuals who have been convicted are committing, or perhaps have been suspected of committing, it is a very difficult task then to say how much crime is going to fall as a result of having the new scheme. Mr Watkin: Could I add a comment. On the national targets, I think we need to be clear what targets we are talking about. There are the Home Office targets, the National Probation Service targets, the Youth Justice Board targets and we have heard just now there may be Local Criminal Justice Board targets. There is a number of performance indicators, therefore, in the field of community safety and crime reduction. It seems to me that it needs to be simplified in order to make sense and to operate much more effectively. Q561 Mr Williams: Also, Mr Watkins, in your evidence you say that as a result of the rurality of Ceredigion you have different needs and priorities and solutions to those set nationally. Perhaps you could give us some examples of those? Mr Watkin: I think it is similar to the lines that Ian Miller has just referred to. We recognise from the crime audit that there are fundamental things which worry people in the community, alcohol-related crime, violence, bad behaviour, and these are reflected in national general issues and targets. The question is, how do we actually tackle them on a local level and at the same time having to meet target improvements? Policing in a rural area, it is obvious to all of us, is a totally different issue from policing in urban areas in terms of distance, sparsity, the number of resources, the number of police available. Also, in the area in which we have become more deeply involved in terms of ASBOs, as you have just heard, how do we deal with these at a local level? So there are issues where we have to try and create the right solution for each CSP in order to deliver and there are bound to be nuances and variations between all areas, as Ian mentioned, areas within Wales because of the different make-up of different areas. Q562 Mr Williams: Rural Wales has particular problems with travelling criminals, we are told. Does your work have a particular emphasis as regards that problem? Mr Watkin: I think, Chairman, they would be reflected in the nature of the crime, that is if we were talking about theft of a vehicle or theft from a vehicle, vehicle interference or tampering, or burglary, that would be the nature of the alleged offence whoever was the perpetrator. I regret I have no information about travelling criminals. Mr Williams: Okay. Thank you. Q563 Hywel Williams: Community engagement is at the heart of both policing and the community safety agenda and in fact you refer to it in your submissions. How do you consult with the community? Secondly, how do you reach the particularly difficult to reach groups? Mr Miller: What we have done in the past in Denbighshire is we have undertaken a survey of young people's attitudes to crime and that threw up some interesting responses from them. Also, we have used things like our citizens panel. We have a citizens panel of five hundred people which we use for surveys on a variety of things and we have taken their views on these sorts of issues as well. Then we did a more extensive survey last year in preparation for our community strategy, which asked about issues and performance relating to a wide range of public services, not just about the county council, and that identified that actually one of the issues that people seem least satisfied with was the performance of the Police. As we have heard from the earlier witnesses, there can often be a disparity between the reality and what people's perception of the reality is in terms of crime and disorder. More recently we have been consulting on our audit of crime and disorder and we circulated that very widely to community councils, voluntary groups, and so on, and sought views on its findings and what we have identified as the priority areas in our draft strategy for 2005 to 2008 and in the next month or two the Community Safety Partnership will be meeting to consider those and finalise it. Obviously as part of that we do try our best to seek the views of groups which represent more difficult to reach sectors of the population. For example, the North Wales Race Equality network is one of the bodies that we have certainly involved in that work. Mr Watkin: In a similar vein, I think perhaps the easiest way of doing it is by proxy in the sense that we are currently consulting on the audit which leads to the next strategy and a document has gone out to bodies which represent communities within the community, that is providers of, shall we say, drug rehabilitation, those who look after people who are vulnerable in society. So we may not be able to get directly to the hard to reach groups but we are making an effort to get as close as possible to those who are in contact with those groups. As I say, they could be, in terms of substance misuse, the voluntary organisations, the people who deal very intimately with these groups, bodies who are linked to women's aid, the young, the elderly and the physically and mentally disabled. We are trying to do it by going to those who are in the best position to know because we recognise that the resource to go actually to the hard to reach groups is beyond the resources available to us. As I say, there is a very wide consultation in order to try and bring this information forward. Also, I think we have to recognise that we have forty-two county councillors who are close to the community, fifty-one town community councils and a number of groups which make the link and they are able to inform us and give us their judgment on issues which affect the hard to reach groups. Q564 Hywel Williams: Might I just ask a supplementary? This is a particular hobby horse of mine and perhaps some of the members of the Committee as well. One of the criteria for evaluation, as we have already said, is an ongoing dialogue with all sections of the community. We talked earlier on about adhering to priorities from central government, from the Home Office or whomever and of course the National Assembly Government comes into this. Specifically I was thinking in terms of Iaith Pawb, which is the strategy for mainstreaming the use of the Welsh language in the activities of bodies such as your own. I did note that the Ceredigion submission does refer to developing bilingual intervention programmes. I just wondered if you could possibly tell the Committee a little bit about that or if either or both of you could tell us a little bit more about the use of the Welsh language. It is a particular interest of mine, which is why I am taking this opportunity to tax you about it. Mr Watkin: I am trying to find the paper which refers to this. We are funding a post which does intervention with young people in the YOT work and the officer involved there went on an intensive Welsh course. We want the language of choice to be available to whoever is involved in these activities and the material for young people we intend to be bilingual. We recognise as a partnership that making sure that we adhere to equality of opportunity in language choice is very, very important and within our resources we are trying to advance that. Mr Miller: Very briefly, there is a range of things that we do and there is something called Crucial Crew, which is an organisation which visits schools and covers a range of things other than community safety, and I am sure they deliver their programmes in the appropriate language. Equally, the schools' liaison officers the North Wales Police have been investing in recently again and I am sure that they also can deal with whichever language is most appropriate for the children. Denbighshire's own policy is of course strongly in support of producing material bilingually and encouraging people to use Welsh if they want to do so in dealing with any issues with the council. Hywel Williams: Thank you. I think that is all that I have got. Chairman: Thank you for that. We need to break now for about fifteen minutes. The Committee suspended from 4.33 pm to 4.49 pm for a division in the House. Q565 Mr Caton: If we could look again at targets and performance and their measurements and going back to some of the points you made about the difference between national and local targets and performance measurement setting. The Building Communities, Beating Crime white paper seeks to institute a new rigorous performance regime for Community Safety Partnerships and the CSP performance targets will be different from the Police performance targets. How will this new performance regime impact upon the Partnerships' arrangements in Denbighshire and Ceredigion and will this help or hinder the role of the Police within the Partnerships? Mr Watkin: Chairman, I think that question goes to the nub of the dilemma really because we have different drivers going in different directions. As I sought to explain before, I think the reconciliation we have to seek is to negotiate targets which are meaningful for the particular CSP. If I could just quote from the letter of 8 December, to which I referred earlier, they say there is a clear relationship between the targets set for CSPs in respect of PCA1, which is the 15% overall crime reduction target, and the target set for Police Forces above Force or BCU level and to that end they refer to Home Office regional directors. I think what they are referring to in Wales would be the Home Office regional director sitting in WAG offices together with the other person to be appointed. You have heard evidence from Miss O'Mara, I think, earlier on in November that there was going to be another person to be appointed. They will facilitate meetings at county force level with Chief Constables, the Police authority and Partnership chairs to ensure the Partnerships' targets and Police targets are in alignment. That, I take it, is the aim of the Home Office but I think there are practical problems which arise from that. One is, for example, the timing of the policing plan for each Policy authority area. The idea in 1998 when we started off with the CSPs was that the community safety strategy would be a building block into the policing plan. Now, unless there is alignment in terms of time that they actually do come together and the CSP plan feeds into the policing plan then there is going to be dislocation. Secondly, we will have to see how it goes - the meetings have not been set up yet; they are to take place towards the end of January and February - to see how we can reconcile these issues. So the target setting I think is an issue. The second bit is to do with the performance management and it is clear that there is going to be, as you referred to, Chairman, a more directed and closer monitoring of the performance of CSPs. So we are moving to new areas now where we have very specific targets linked to the PSAs and a new performance management regime. We have had our own internal regime or system or performance management but I think we are going to see a step change when these new targets are put in place. Mr Miller: Yes, I would echo, Chairman, much of what Owen has said there. One of the things I spotted from the Building Communities, Beating Crime white paper is the duty that is proposed for Police authorities to take into account the local policing priorities identified at crime and disorder reduction partnership level when publishing Force policing plans and strategies. There seems to be a welcome acknowledgement that local policing plans should take account of the priorities which are identified by each of the Community Safety Partnerships. I have to say that the experience in the last couple of years has been the other way around because, as I have mentioned earlier, we have had to align our targets with those which the North Wales Police central division itself was adopting. The only other thing I did want to say about the national targets is that one hopes they are based on evidence of what is actually achievable. It is just a coincidence, I suspect, that in the first seven months of the current financial year crime in Denbighshire fell by 15% compared with the equivalent seven months the previous year. I hope when we see the statistics up to the end of December shortly that we will be maintaining that performance. But as I say, it is just a coincidence and in terms of the targets that we have set ourselves they are not about the totality of crime falling, they are about certain categories of crime, seeking reductions, for example, of 10% in domestic burglary, 10% in violent crime and 10% in vehicle crime. Now we see there is an issue about how you align those sorts of targets which focus on particular types of crime with what is now a push towards a target in reducing crime overall. Q566 Mr Caton: Thank you. Clearly we have got these separate targets for the CSP and the Police and one hopes that an answer might be provided by the coordination that you mentioned, Mr Watkin, in you answer afterwards, but an alternative suggestion for improved Partnership working is that the Government sets common or complimentary targets across all agencies involved in CSPs. That could have disadvantages in reducing flexibility locally, but at least it would be more integrated. What are your feelings about that? Mr Watkin: Perhaps the issue is what are the outcomes that we are trying to achieve and if we can articulate the outcomes that we want - to reduce crime, safer communities, few young people being brought into the Criminal Justice System because there are more social nets to look after them - we could then set our own targets to reach those outcomes. It is not a direct answer to your question, I am posing even another alternative, but if we are outcome-focused rather than driven by input and output targets then perhaps we could find that flexibility, although I have to acknowledge that in the letter from the Home Office they said that the new target gives local Partnerships much more flexibility to decide for themselves where the crime reduction priorities lie, taking account of local circumstances. So they think there is going to be flexibility. I do personally think that there is a huge debate to be had here with regard to what are the targets for MPS, the targets for the Criminal Justice Boards, the targets for the Youth Justice Board, for the Police, and what is the resource and what is the mechanism for bringing all those together? A very important element which I personally think has developed is that we are coterminous in terms of local authorities, LHBs, BCUs and the arrangement for Fire authorities and I think that coterminosity is crucial because that is the way we can bring people together to work far more effectively. I have a feeling that if we are controlled more centrally because of generalised targets then we may lose that local connection, which is valuable and has produced results. Mr Miller: Very briefly, I would refer to my earlier comment that obviously we would prefer local discretion and to be accountable for that, but obviously if there are going to be national targets it makes sense for them to be consistent targets, the same targets for all the bodies involved in this Partnership work. Mr Caton: Thank you. Chairman: We can return to your line of questioning, Mr Hywel Williams. Q567 Hywel Williams: Thank you. It has been very striking when we have had evidence to this Committee that fear of crime is very high, although I think you mentioned earlier on that the actual crime rates are low but the perception is otherwise. How do you tackle fear of crime rather than crime itself, if you can? Is there a magic key? Mr Miller: Well, some of the work that we have done in Denbighshire has involved providing project funding for victim support, particularly to work with elderly people in terms of advising them how to make their homes safer because that is actually one of the groups of the population that perhaps feels most concerned about crime. It does seem to be related to age; the older people are the more concerned they are about crime. That is not to say that young people are not concerned, they are. So I think it is mainly through that, but obviously the main focus of the Partnerships is about reducing crime and disorder, it is not about reducing the fear of crime. The hope is, of course, that through the achievements that we have certainly had in Denbighshire in terms of real reductions in the level of crime (less so in the area of disorder and anti-social behaviour) that will be felt by people as a real impact and will start to affect their perceptions. The other area which has certainly contributed positively there is, I think, the investment that has happened in the last three or four years in terms of various additional sorts of people who are helping to detect crime and disorder or helping people to feel safer in their communities. I am thinking there of things like the community warden scheme that we fund, which is run in Denbighshire by a not for profit body, and in the Police of course they have invested heavily in community beat managers and community support officers, particularly in Rhyl, and I think that has certainly built a level of confidence in those communities. Mr Watkin: As I say, we are currently carrying out the new consultation on the audit, but if we go back to 2002 we asked the public what they felt engendered fear of crime. The factors that cause most fear were they were fearful of poorly lit areas in and near pubs and clubs and in while in the street late at night. This is their description in terms of creating fear. The factors causing most fear were poor street lighting and people under the influence of drugs. As Ian said, it is difficult to tackle the fear of crime immediately because obviously we live in a free country and the media are able to publish openly, but I am sure that having items on the television news and in the papers every day about criminal activities does affect people's perception of crime and their fear. In 2002 people said that to promote safety and reduce crime and disorder they suggested somewhere for young people to go, improved street lighting, programmes to prevent crime, videoing anti-social behaviour, more local employment, more cctv cameras and more sports and leisure facilities. That is what their suggestions were. We have actioned lots of those. Cctv has come in. We have been dealing with ASBOs. With cctv the street lighting has to improve in order to get the image on the cameras, so a lot of that has been handled. But to reduce the fear of crime we have to go in an oblique way to find the circumstances which create that feeling and I think it is by doing that kind of work that we can perhaps reduce people's perceptions. The other thing, of course, is to communicate with people what the true situation is and have good liaison and try to persuade people that they are living in a relatively crime-free or low crime area and it is not as bad as they may be thinking. But we have still got that perception. Q568 Hywel Williams: Have you been able to recruit the local media? The fact that everything is safe and happy is not a headline which will sell newspapers and the fact that it is all awful actually does sell newspapers. What sort of relationship do you have with your local media? Are they open to influence? Mr Miller: If I can take that question first, Chairman. Certainly one of the things the Community Safety Partnership has spent a lot of time in doing is concentrating on getting across the message about what is being done and to be fair to the local media, I think they have carried those stories. But there is a school of thought which says that even stories about the fact that crime is falling actually reminds people about crime and can be counter-productive! I am not aware locally that we have had any difficulties in getting the media to support a positive message where we are able to give one, and of course we are not always able to give a positive message. Sometimes the figures go in the wrong direction and then we have to be candid about that as well. Mr Watkin: Chairman, I can safely say that the papers do report crimes but they also are willing to help us. We had a campaign recently against what were referred to as "boy racers" but we now refer to them as "racers" because we are trying to be more correct and the press did publish a good spread about the action being taken to deal with these racers. In December in the Cambrian News there was a half page spread about the Police putting a person on the ground in villages in north Ceredigion and I am sure that article had a big impact on reassuring people that the Police are doing something positive to meet the people's requests to see more of a police presence locally. Q569 Hywel Williams: Could I just ask you as well, part of affecting the public agenda is just awareness of your own work so what do you do to raise the level of awareness of the Community Safety Partnership itself? Mr Miller: Well, within the council one of the things I often do is remind colleagues of the duty that we are under in the Crime and Disorder Reduction Act to exercise our functions in a way which seeks to achieve that outcome. Just to give you one very recent example, after two and a half years of battling the licensing committee in Denbighshire decided last week to remove the limit on the number of taxi licences in the north of the county. That is something that I had been pushing for personally for a variety of reasons but the Community Safety Partnership, because I had got them interested in it, supported the case for removing that limit on taxi licenses because one of the problems we face in Rhyl is that when the night clubs and the pubs empty you have queues for taxis and you get trouble in the taxi queue. Therefore, by not having a limit on the number of taxi licences the hope is that there will be more taxis available and therefore it might help to reduce crime and disorder. Mr Watkin: I think we need to do more in terms of communication. We have been perhaps concentrating too much on specifics and I think we have a lesson to learn about communities. But as I say, we have positive messages about boy racers. The other issue which I hope will engender interest and show that there is activity within the Partnership is that there is work going on now to introduce an order to ban drinking alcohol in public places in Aberystwyth. That could be a major issue which could show that the Community Safety Partnership with the Police have got the support of the county council to make that order. Hopefully when it comes into effect over the coming months it will demonstrate that there are positive things we can do which affects the quality of life for people. Hywel Williams: Thank you. Q570 Mr Williams: I am also concerned about the role of the media in creating the fear of crime. While we cannot in any way control what the local press or even the national press put out, surely if we do believe that it is a good thing to reduce the fear of crime we should be able to put our own message out in terms of some sort of advertisement. Have you ever considered that to be a good use of money, because Government would advertise if it felt that there was a need to do something to promote health, for instance? Surely promoting a reduction in the fear of crime could also be seen in the same light? Mr Miller: Certainly, and the vehicle that we have used for this message in Denbighshire is Llais Y Sir, which is a monthly newsletter which is sent to every household and we have carried stories in that in the past about how the crime figures have fallen. So yes, we would agree that we should use those sorts of vehicles to get the message across as well. Mr Watkin: Chairman, we have funded the Fire authority to distribute posters about safe conditions, promoting safety in terms of fire. The other issue which we are linking to health in terms of health, social care and wellbeing, and the wellbeing aspect of it, is that we have jointly with the LHB a publication which goes to every household, Bywyd Da (Healthy Life), and in the next issue we intend to put in a significant section to deal with community safety issues, so healthy lifestyles and quality of life are pulled together. Q571 Julie Morgan: I was going to ask about your relationship with the Police. Is there anything that you would like to get from the Police that you are not currently getting, and what do you think they would like to get from you which they might not be getting at the moment? Have you got any views on that? Mr Watkin: Our relationship with the Police on a BCU level is excellent, I do not think it can be bettered, not only on the BCU level, with the Superintendent, who is the Divisional Commander, but also his three inspector divisions within the county. So we act very, very closely with the Police. What would we ask from the Police? Well, we have to recognise the resources they have got and the drivers to which they are subject. Obviously they have got a huge responsibility to undertake and we act closely with them. What do they have from us? Well, we use the resources available by way of grant to help Police with actions. For example, we have paid for two mobile police stations. At the request of the Police we put in cctv in three towns. So we have been able to do practical things to help them. The other issue is with regard to the financial aspect. The split between capital and revenue sometimes works as a disadvantage in programmes, so we are able to do some negotiation with the Police to exchange capital and revenue spending in order to help them to help us. So there is a very good relationship and a growing positive relationship as we work through the strategy. Mr Miller: We, too, Chairman, have a very positive relationship with the Police locally. Just to give a few examples of that, in terms of joint working the Police employ the anti-social behaviour coordinator for Denbighshire. In the last few months we have started attending the joint tasking group, which is the body which sets the priorities for policing activity and that has been very valuable. The county council has been directly involved in that. For their part, the Police come along to four area crime and disorder groups that we have set up in Denbighshire, so therefore there will usually be someone like the inspector or perhaps the sergeant covering a particular area and that allows local people and local businesses who are interested in crime and disorder issues to deal directly with the Police and ourselves in terms of setting priorities for local action. We have undertaken a number of joint operations such as truancy sweeps and an operation at a nightclub which led to its closure. Looking forward to the future, we are actively investigating a proposal to invest in a joint community safety facility in Rhyl in the police station because most of the police station's activities have now been relocated to St Asaph Business Park and if it comes to fruition that would involve locating our cctv control room in the building and also the community safety wardens organisation which I mentioned earlier and possibly our own one-stop-shop and cash office. So those sorts of joint operations and joint working are very positive in Denbighshire and I hope when you see Chief Superintendent Sandham tomorrow he will tell you there is nothing he wants from us because he too, I hope, would share the appreciation of the positive relationship we have. Q572 Julie Morgan: Thank you. Some police officers have expressed frustration that local authorities have been slow to acknowledge their responsibilities under the Crime and Disorder Act and we have had several examples of the Police driving initiatives which are the responsibility of the local authorities, such as cleaning graffiti. I just wondered if you had had any similar problems like that in Denbighshire or in Ceredigion. Mr Watkin: Chairman, the county council cleans the graffiti. We have not asked the police to undertake action on that, we have undertaken the responsibility. Going back a couple of years now, part of the resources we had with the CSP were used to buy machines to clean graffiti and chewing gum on pavements. I have not been told by the Police that they are frustrated that we are asking them to do things that we should be doing. I think the general point of section 17 of the 1998 Act is that everything we do should be directed to reduce crime and the fear of crime and I think there is an issue. A few years ago when this came in the Police were very concerned that we, the local authority, put measures in place to ensure that all our activities fully took account of section 17, which is a very wide responsibility. That is, I think, more of a cultural thing, the way people actually act. A refuse collector seeing incidents can report them. It is a very general thing to do with culture, that the local authority is aware of issues to do with crime. That is something we have had to work at all the time. I have not had specific issues brought to my attention on that. Mr Miller: Just as with Ceredigion, we used some money a few years back to invest jointly with Conwy in a graffiti-buster machine, so we do that, and in fact I think they sometimes use people who have been convicted of offences and on community service to actually clear up the graffiti as well. I think we have not had any significant problems, but in any area where you are working jointly together with other organisations there are always going to be some problems and it is a matter, as Owen has explained, of culture. But I think that is changing over time and one of the things that was a particular spur to even more joint working in Denbighshire was the policing priority area that we had in Rhyl west a couple of years back where the Home Office invested additional resource and we had to work very closely with the Police in tackling levels of crime and disorder there. That has led to a number of valuable initiatives and just one to mention there is alley-gating which has started to come in, in terms of closing off some of the rear lanes and then denying to criminals the access into the rear of houses. I am sure the Police, if you asked them, would say that sometimes we have not been able to progress that as quickly as they would have liked in terms of making the necessary orders, and so on and so forth, but the fact is that it has happened. We learned from that experience and obviously as the scheme has rolled out it moves ever more smoothly. Q573 Julie Morgan: Do you think there is any need to further strengthen the enforcement mechanism of the sort of statutory requirement for partnership? Mr Watkin: Chairman, there is an interesting question which came up in a meeting we had in December which the Home Office had arranged in Cardiff on this review that has come out of the white paper. The question was floated whether there should be sanctions applied to potential partners or bodies which should be partners. I think it has attendant difficulties of what is the sanction. Are authorities going to lose money, for example? If the LHB is not able to fully participate and the LHB is already in financial difficulty is it going to lose any more money for a failure to participate? It comes down to the resources available. For example, the LHB does participate. We have a chief executive of the LHB who is sitting as part of the executive board on the Partnership. MPS are not able to provide the resources that I or we would wish for them to participate fully. So the organisations are stretched already and I am not certain how it could be enforced. What mechanism would there be to enforce an organisation to willingly be involved in a partnership which is an experience we need to develop over time? It depends on a lot of altruism or willingness to participate. Mr Miller: I share some of those concerns. Obviously there is a statutory duty on us to participate already and ultimately that could be enforced through the courts if someone was not complying with such a duty. I guess, as another general observation, there are enough intervention powers affecting local government already. I cannot speak for all the bodies involved in the Community Safety Partnership, but certainly I think we have got our fill of them. But obviously it is always possible to write legislation in a way to create more intervention powers, for example powers of direction for the Assembly or for the Secretary of State. The question which might then arise is if such powers existed and if they were used, what would the impact be? It does raise the concern that Owen was mentioning that if a power was actually used in those circumstances it would mean not just some activity by the body that was subject to the direction but presumably it might also mean having to incur some expenditure and inevitably that means it is money which is going to be taken away from something else. So if you created further intervention powers, enforcement powers, would that mean that other areas would suffer at the end of the day? Q574 Julie Morgan: Thank you. Are there any obstacles that you can define, any further obstacles that could be tackled which are preventing further development of the Partnerships? Mr Miller: I think the point that Owen has mentioned about how for some bodies it is more difficult to engage in all of the Partnerships equally is a valid one because, to take examples, in North Wales, the bodies which cover the whole of North Wales, they have got six Community Safety Partnerships to attend to, things like the Probation Service or the Magistrates' Court Committee, and therefore it is more difficult for them to perhaps engage as fully in it as it is for the county council, the local Police Commander and the local health boards. There is no easy way around that, I do not think, unless you were to move to less local Community Safety Partnerships, and I do not think that is necessarily a good way forward either. For example, it would be very simple if you wanted to have one for North Wales, you could, but would that then necessarily produce a responsive strategy for tackling crime and disorder across the whole of North Wales? Q575 Chairman: Would either of you say that the present situation is a problem in terms of the representation from the other agencies which are supposed to be involved? You have hinted at that, Mr Miller, in terms of the fact that in your locality you have got your Police Chief, yourselves and the local health boards, but the other agencies have problems. Is it actually affecting the effectiveness of your respective Board? Mr Miller: I would not say I could put my finger on hard evidence that it was affecting us in that way. I guess the area where we probably feel more exposed is about the links with the Criminal Justice System, and indeed at our meeting next week we are having the chair of the Criminal Justice Board along to give us a presentation so that we can keep better in touch. I think that is possibly an area where we could develop relationships more. Mr Watkin: Chairman, could I comment. I think we are subject to a plethora of partnerships. We are talking about a very important Partnership here and it strikes me that it is going to grow in importance. In fact the white paper refers to making the CSPs and Crime Reduction Partnerships the instrument for dealing with crime. But the participants in this Partnership have to attend a myriad of other partnerships and it is really having an effect on capacity to attend all these meetings. Therefore, the amount of commitment that even county council departments or organisations, or the voluntary sector can give is affected by the number of partnerships there are in being at the moment. Q576 Chairman: I suspect that is a particularly rural problem, is it not? I do not suppose they have the same problems in the cities, for example? I am just speculating. Mr Watkin: Yes. I appreciate that the requirement to have the Partnerships is ubiquitous. The question is, are the organisations that are in being in those particular areas able to fund or participate to the extent that - Chairman: Exactly. That is a point. We will have to consider that. It is obviously an issue. Q577 Mrs Williams: Both your authorities have designated Communities First areas within your boundaries, have you not? Do you have dedicated police teams for those areas? Mr Miller: Yes, we do. In Denbighshire and in North Wales generally the approach is that they are trying to get a community beat manager in each electoral division. Actually it turns out in Rhyl west we have got two community beat managers and that is a reflection of the relatively high level of crime in that area and Rhyl south-west also has a community beat manager. Then they have got eight community support officer posts just in Rhyl west. Again, I think that is the inheritance of the policing priority area that I mentioned a little while ago. The benefit of the community beat managers is that they have to sign up for five year contracts to stay in the area for five years so that they build a good relationship with the local community and know who the criminals are and things like that. Certainly things have improved in the last couple of years because looking back to when I started in this job three years ago I do not think there was a single community beat manager in Denbighshire. I think many communities report very positively on the experience of having them. Mr Watkin: Chairman, we have two Communities First areas. One is called the upland villages of Tregaron, which is most of the eastern part of Ceredigion, the high area between Devil's Bridge, Ponterwyd, Pontrhydygroes through Tregaron, and it is a very, very sparse and rural area. It is a very extensive area. There is not a dedicated police officer for that area but the Lampeter inspector covers that area and because of its significant size perhaps it would be difficult for the Police to dedicated one person for that. But as I say, we have provided two mobile police stations which can be used to go out to those villages. The other Communities First areas are Aberystwyth west and south, which are compact areas of Aberystwyth. I refer to this article and it is very positive because PC Collum(?) is going to be based in a satellite police station in the Memorial Hall in Penparcau. There is a small room where a police station can be based there and he will have a presence there in that Communities First area. Also, he will go out of there to the villages in north Ceredigion and park his van and walk around and be seen. So it is being tackled not directly as having a dedicated police presence for a Communities First area but it is being done in a different way. Also, I should say that there are community police officers within the BCU as well. Q578 Mrs Williams: Are there plans to improve the situation in the rural areas? It is due to the rurality nature of the first division that you mentioned, is it not? Mr Watkin: Yes. I do not know of further plans the Police would have to increase their presence there, although they are doing their best to be more visible in those areas. Mrs Williams: Thank you. Q579 Mr Caton: What is the nature of the relationship between the Home Office, the National Assembly for Wales, the Welsh Assembly Government and the Community Safety Partnerships? Mr Watkin: With the Assembly we have had a very, very close relationship. David Aherne when he was in the post up to August used to attend our Partnership meetings on a regular basis. Also, his officers attended our meetings. We had a very close day to day contact with them. So our relationship with the Assembly has been very good. We have a more distant relationship with the Home Office. Their circulars come to us and correspondence but we do not have the same type of relationship as we do with the Assembly. Mr Miller: Certainly I would echo that. Our closest link is with the team in Cardiff. I would not say that that relationship has always been a smooth one. We have had a number of problems over the years. Usually they revolve around the grants and whether we have satisfied the conditions and done the plans correctly and things like that. But I think on the whole it has been a positive relationship and perhaps because of distance it was more difficult for a representative from the team to come and attend all of our meetings, but more recently they have now got a post based in North Wales so obviously we are hoping that that person will be coming to our Partnership meetings in future. Also, there is a regional substance misuse advisor in North Wales. So certainly our main relationship is with the team in the National Assembly. Q580 Mr Caton: Mr Watkin, you referred to Mr Aherne. I thought he was actually funded by the Home Office and reported to the Home Office. You are talking about that as a relationship with the Assembly, and I can understand because of where that person was based and the very fact that he was there. What will happen now will hopefully strengthen that relationship. But through that you did have a relationship with the Home Office in fact, did you not? Mr Watkin: I suppose we did, but the relationship on a personal basis was that David Aherne came from the Assembly because he was based there. If I put the two concepts together it was just because there was David coming from Cardiff and he was acting also as the Assembly person. If you step back and think about it, yes, he was one of the ten regional directors of the Home Office. Perhaps it shows that the culture of the Assembly had influenced him in the way he was working. He was a very positive and useful ally in taking the strategy forward. Q581 Mr Caton: Yes, indeed, and it is very important that we have a Welsh voice directly into the Home Office and that is one of the functions of that post, I think. Could you both tell us how you see the current review of local government schemes and strategies being undertaken by the National Assembly impacting on Community Safety Partnerships? Mr Miller: Perhaps I will take that question, Chairman. We both had the letter before Christmas which was seeking views on a suggestion that the statutory requirement to produce plans and strategies should be removed and certainly that is something I support personally. The Community Safety Partnership is discussing the question next week so I had better not commit them to adopt that view, because I think it is part of a wider issue, which is the huge number of plans and strategies that councils are required to produce. It requires a huge amount of effort and costs a lot of money and you do wonder sometimes whether all that investment is worth it. Are the plans and strategies actually read by the central government departments or the Assembly that require them? Alongside that, I would say there is also a big issue around specific grants as well which are intensely bureaucratic in terms of the overheads associated with them. Therefore, local government's general perspective is that it welcomes any moves to reduce the statutory requirements for plans and specific grants, and so on. That is not to say that if the statutory requirement were to go we would suddenly stop producing strategies or business plans, or what have you. Of course we will need them, but they will be in our control, they will not be set by central diktat. We will decide what period they cover, how often we produce them, their content, and so on. I think that would be good and healthy for local government. Mr Watkin: Chairman, we had an opportunity yesterday as the Community Safety Executive Board of looking at the letter. The general view was that it was welcomed because it would take away the requirement for the mechanistic approach to creating plans. But we would have to have our own business plan, as Ian says, or a clear operational plan so that we knew what we were doing. To come back to the issue of targets, obviously we have to have some structure in place to meet those targets and use resources in the best possible way. So they are welcomed and I share Ian's view of support of the Assembly's proposal to reduce the requirement for so many plans. One issue that we did recognise is that there has to be improved data sharing between organisations that are participants. For example, the data sharing protocols have developed significantly, but we still have to go further so that the information flow with regard to all these issues is shared totally between partners, and that involves the health sector as well and the particular issues they have with regard to data release. Q582 Mr Caton: Are there any special issues that arise from Partnerships in Wales that would not arise from Partnerships in England as a result of devolution? Mr Miller: Perhaps I could mention a couple of things. First of all, of course, in addition to Members of Parliament who might take an interest in the activities of Community Safety Partnerships we have the Assembly Members who take an interest and that is something, of course, which our colleagues in England do not have to worry about. Another particular issue that I would mention is the funding arrangements and one of the things that is in the white paper for England at least is the proposal to introduce a single funding stream. At the moment they have the Home Office and the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister funding the Crime Reduction Partnerships in England and they are going to be moving to a single funding stream. Obviously because of devolution we are not seeing the same arrangement proposed for Wales. It looks like we are going to continue to have two funding streams and going back to what I was just saying about the bureaucracy of specific grant regimes that would be a concern for us. It would seem to impose more onerous requirements on the Welsh Partnerships than their English counterparts. Q583 Chairman: You said you were worried about AM and MP involvement. It sounds as though you do not like us looking at what you did. Mr Miller: No, no, I did not say that I was worried about the involvement, I was saying that both Assembly Members and MPs express an interest in the work of the Partnerships, whereas in England of course they only have Members of Parliament expressing an interest. Q584 Chairman: And you are worried about that? Mr Miller: Well, it can be an issue because certainly in Denbighshire we have had a specific request from an Assembly Member to be represented on the Partnership and the Partnership looked at that question and concluded that it could not agree to it because if it agreed to one Assembly Member - and in Denbighshire we are in the unfortunate situation that we are split between three constituencies - we would have the three - Q585 Chairman: It could be a fortunate situation, Mr Miller. You could have three AMs acting on behalf of Denbighshire. Mr Miller: Plus, what would we do about the Regional Assembly Members, because how could we deny them a seat? Then surely if we are going to have the Assembly Members represented, since most of our funding actually comes from the Home Office would not the MPs also want to be represented? That would have over-burdened the Partnership, we felt, in terms of the size of the committee. Q586 Chairman: I actually think in practice you would not have to worry. We have got a lot more things to do than join your Partnership! Mr Watkin? Mr Watkin: I think the big advantage we have in Wales is perhaps not a devolution issue but a structural issue, which is that we have twenty-two unitary authorities. On my reading of the white paper the issues with regard to performance in England may be because of the two tiered local government and the number of district councils which have CSPs and the county council and their relationship. We are very fortunate that we have a single system of unitary authorities which can bring all the forces together in one piece. Chairman: Thank you very much. Q587 Mrs Williams: If I could turn to anti-social behaviour and ask you what is the nature of anti-social behaviour that you face in your areas and would you say that anti-social behaviour could be a priority for you were it not such a high profile and a national target? Mr Watkin: It is going to be. It is going to be a PSA2, I think, from the Home Office and anti-social behaviour is going to be one of the targets. The behaviour that is anti-social is a significant issue that I alluded to earlier on with regard to the fear of crime. We have fifteen current cases being looked at by our ASBO team at the moment and the most common factors of behaviour which feature amongst the fifteen are threats and verbal abuse, drink related and substance misuse, youth nuisance and damage and neighbours. Those seem to be the common areas. Q588 Mrs Williams: In that order? Mr Watkin: I am just reading across a list; it is not the priority order. Those are the subject areas. So the issue of ASBOs is important but I would just like to say that I think Sue Hall mentioned earlier on this afternoon that that is one way of handling behaviour. There are other ways of handling behaviour and I am keen to emphasise that the work of the YOT is to prevent youth crime. So there are measures that we can take with young offenders which do not lead to court orders. I think this is the difference between our area of work and the Criminal Justice Board's area of work because we are at the end of the spectrum that seeks to prevent crime and to rehabilitate people who perhaps are in danger of committing crime, whereas the CJB may be at the court end of that spectrum. So they are significant and important. We are funding an ASBO team and there is plenty of activity going on in that area. Mr Miller: Yes, anti-social behaviour in Denbighshire is a problem and it has emerged as one of the three areas that we are proposing to focus on in the period 2005 to 2008. I guess that reflects the fact that it is not falling as fast as crime. I mentioned that in the first seven months of this financial year crime has gone down 15% in Denbighshire but in that period disorder only went down 1%. So there is obviously a more intractable problem there. It may be to do with the fact that in one sense more incidents are being reported because under the Dyna Ddigon initiative which North Wales Police have started more people are actually taking steps to report anti-social behaviour and other disorder. If I could just move on to how we tackle it then, obviously we have got a range of tools at our disposal and I mentioned in my written evidence that we prefer not to go for an Anti-Social Behaviour Order as the first response. We would prefer to avoid it if at all possible and use the ASBO very much as the last line of defence. That is why in Denbighshire we have had quite a number of these acceptable behaviour contracts as a way of trying to get people to behave properly short of taking them to court for an Anti-Social Behaviour Order. The other thing to say about ASBOs is that we have had the very positive news in Denbighshire that we have doubled the figure that was in the written evidence. There were no fewer than five granted last week to a group of young troublemakers in Rhyl, including one who is only twelve. But unlike some other previous cases where the magistrates have refused requests to name the individuals, on this occasion they granted that request and of course the Police and ourselves immediately published the names because obviously we feel it is important that the public can help in the enforcement of whatever conditions have been set in an Anti-Social Behaviour Order. If individuals are prohibited from going to a particular area or something obviously the Police and ourselves can help enforce it but it is even better if we have got the eyes of the public there to help us as well. Q589 Mr Caton: Do you see any problem with naming and shaming a twelve-year-old child? Mr Miller: As I indicated, we seek an ASBO only if it is really necessary and it is the last line of attack. Therefore, it is not something that we do lightly and if all other mechanisms have failed such as acceptable behaviour contracts, working with social workers, and so on, then - Q590 Mr Caton: You do not automatically have to publish a name because you get an ASBO, do you? Mr Miller: No. It does depend upon whether the courts give permission, although I think there are some proposals afoot which will create a presumption of naming people unless there are very good reasons to the contrary. But I think if these young people - and it does not matter how old they are - have brought it upon themselves by their own behaviour they cannot expect to be shielded from public scrutiny. That would be my view and I think the Partnership also generally shares that view. I know there are different camps on this, particularly when you are talking about people under the age of eighteen. Some people think that young people who have done wrong should not be brought into the glare of publicity, but if these people are causing such a problem to society and to the communities they live in it can actually be a useful tool to control their behaviour. Q591 Mrs Williams: The Chief Constables of Wales tell us that they regard an ASBO as a last resort and consider the overuse of ASBOs as a failure of strategy in tackling anti-social behaviour. Mr Miller has told us what his view is. Could I ask you, Mr Watkin, for your view? Mr Watkin: I would agree with Ian. We have measures such as warnings, advice, mediation, noise pollution measures, signing acceptable behaviour contracts and, as I say, the intervention work of the YOT are measures that would need to be taken into account early on before coming to a decision to go for an ASBO. Q592 Mrs Williams: Could you tell us what work Community Safety Partnerships are doing with both the Police and the Criminal Justice Boards in order to raise awareness amongst magistrates and the judiciary with regard to the new anti-social behaviour legislation? Mr Watkin: We are inviting a representative of the Dyfed Powys CJB to a meeting of our Partnership, I think on 8 February, to begin to explore the relationship between the work of the CSP and the CJB. We do have on a regular basis the papers of the CBJ so we are informed of what is going on there. But I think we have to just go back to the concept of the spectrum of where we are active and where they are active and how we bring these things together, raising awareness with the judiciary and the magistrates and district judges and Crown Court judges. Wearing another hat, I am secretary to the Lord Chancellor's Advisory Committee on Magistrates and my contact with magistrates leads me to be slightly careful about involving individual magistrates in operational matters in which we are involved because they have their own training and development procedures by the DCA and the Lord Chancellor's or the Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs department and I wonder if there is another channel for them to be made of. But if they wanted, we would be perfectly open and willing to share with them our activities with regard to ASBOs and other work that we are doing if they wanted that. We have not had that approach and, as I say, I have got a slight reservation about whether it is our function to engage with the judiciary in the wider sense, magistrates and higher judges. Q593 Mrs Williams: Do you have a view as to whether there are sufficient mechanisms in place to make absolutely sure that magistrates are fully, and I mean fully, aware of new legislation in this field? Mr Watkin: I have not enough information about the training. I know there is a lot of training that goes on within the Bench and within the Court Service for magistrates but I cannot answer that question as I do not know what measures have been put in place to raise their awareness. Q594 Mrs Williams: I asked a similar question of the two gentlemen who were answering questions before yourselves and I think we all heard that they said that every application had been granted, which means in their particular areas, Gwent and South Wales, it did appear that the magistrates were listening to all the evidence and were prepared to grant them. What I am really asking is, is this patchy throughout Wales? Do we have situations where magistrates tend to be softer in some areas? I am thinking in particular of North Wales. Mr Miller probably reads the same newspapers as I do and there are some areas which are reported to be notorious for being soft on such issues. I am interested to know what the situation is in your particular areas. Mr Miller: Yes. Certainly, Chairman, that has been our experience. The very first two Anti-Social Behaviour Orders we applied for were refused and that was a major setback for us because, as I indicated earlier, we only take the step of applying for an order if we think there is a really good reason for doing it in the first place. Therefore, we were very disappointed by the decision the magistrates took in that case and indeed the Police Commander and myself had a discussion with the clerk to the Magistrates' Courts Committee because we wanted to try to understand how we could avoid that situation arising in the future. There are good reasons, as Owen has explained, why the judiciary and the clerks who advise them have to be careful about how they are seen to interact with us on these sorts of issues. But I would say that there have also been other examples, and this is why I mentioned it in my written evidence, where we have not been entirely satisfied with the decisions that the magistrates took. There was a case before Christmas where they did grant Anti-Social Behaviour Orders in respect of two individuals but not as widely drawn as we had asked for in the application. It was a joint application with the Police leading on it. Also, they turned down the request that the name should be published. Going back to what I was saying earlier, in my own view it does have benefits to be able to know who the individuals are who are subject to these orders so that the general public can help in their enforcement as well. Therefore, we have had a rather patchy response. More recently, as I have indicated just a moment ago, we have had five orders granted as a block last week so maybe things are improving. The issues which may arise out of this are, I guess, around the training for magistrates and the guidance that is given to them by the Department for Constitutional Affairs. Of course, one does not want to point the finger too strongly in this direction because, as I say, I am not sure why it is that we have had this patchy response in Denbighshire, but it may relate to those sorts of issues or maybe the quality of the advice they are getting from the clerks. I do not know. But I think there is some evidence to suggest that there is not a consistent pattern even within Wales, let alone perhaps more widely. Q595 Mrs Williams: Could it be - and I am pressing you on this - that there are not sufficient mechanisms in place to train magistrates or is it because it is obligatory rather than compulsory? Mr Miller: I do not know enough about the magistracy to answer that question, I am afraid, Chairman. Mr Watkin: I remember a case, Chairman, where the magistrates in Ceredigion granted eight ASBOs in the early days. They were all appealed to the Swansea Crown Court and the appeals were successful because it was felt that those were the wrong subjects of ASBOs. Q596 Mrs Williams: So there have been no refusals in your area? Mr Watkin: To my knowledge. But it was an early day before finding out - perhaps it is part of the judicial process - it was to do with persistent drinkers in public places in a major town. The judge felt that that was not the subject of an ASBO. But by now, of course, guidance has developed and thinking in terms of ASBOs has developed, so perhaps that occasion will not occur again. With regard to the mechanism, the responsibility for training for magistrates and the judiciary rests with the DCA . Mrs Williams: Thank you. Q597 Julie Morgan: To go on to funding, how does the funding cycle of Community Safety Partnerships impact upon your ability to have long-term strategies? Mr Miller: It impedes them, I think would be the answer, Chairman. Q598 Julie Morgan: It is a problem? Mr Miller: It is a problem. I would say that it has perhaps improved in the last year or so, but certainly every year we have had problems with this and it comes around late availability of the figures for the amount of funding and slow approval mechanisms and lots of detailed questioning about what we are doing, which seems excessive. Just as an example, we still have not had detailed figures for 2005/2006 and we are less than three months away from the start of the year and in our meetings in the next three or four weeks we are talking about how we are going to allocate a budget which at the moment we are not entirely sure what it is. The other issue that causes problems is the capital revenue split. That just seems arbitrary and no doubt it is something imposed by the Treasury on the Home Office, that it has to have this split, but that does create problems then in making sure that you can use the money in the most effective fashion. We have already alluded to the fact that it seems that in Wales we are going to carry on with at least two funding streams, whereas in England they will be down to one. Mr Watkin: Chairman, I would endorse Ian's comments entirely. Also, we have quarterly reporting mechanisms on the expenditure and some things cannot work in a pre-planned every time. It is an excellent idea to have an expenditure profile and to aim to spend a grant throughout the year, but issues do arise - late notification, contracts may be difficult, for example we are trying to put in a cctv system which needs an overlap over two financial years. So there will not be expenditure until the last quarter and the first quarter. It leads to this issue. If we had flexibility on that it would be a help. The second thing is that we are funding posts out of our budget. We are funding posts in terms of a domestic violence abuse coordinator, an ASBO officer, an officer in the YOT and with short-term funding it gives little certainty of the continuation of that work when we know that it is going to continue. Facts tell us that that is going to be a permanent requirement, as the targets will suggest. To have to rely on short-termism on funding is an obstacle, as Ian says. That is our experience. Julie Morgan: Thank you. Chairman: Thank you very much for your attendance this afternoon. It has been very useful. |