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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 46-v House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE WELSH AFFAIRS COMMITTEE
POLICE SERVICE, CRIME AND ANTI-SOCIAL behaviour in Wales
THURSday 20 JANUARY 2005
MR KEVIN WONG MR JON TREW Evidence heard in Public Questions 599 - 689
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Welsh Affairs Committee on Tuesday 20 January 2005 Members present Mr Martyn Jones (in the Chair) Mr Martin Caton Hywel Williams
________________ Memorandum submitted by Nacro Cymru
Examination of Witness Witness: Mr Kevin Wong, Assistant Director, Nacro Cymru, examined. Q599 Chairman: Welcome this afternoon to this session of the Welsh Affairs Committee. We are looking at policing and anti-social behaviour in Wales, and would obviously like your views. Can you introduce yourself, please? Mr Wong: I am Kevin Wong, the Assistant Director for Crime Reduction at Nacro Cymru. Q600 Chairman: In a statement made last year in October, Chris Stanley, Head of Youth Crime at Nacro, said: "There is little research available on the effectiveness of ASBOs in tackling young people's behaviour, yet the Government seems intent on encouraging local authorities to dish out more by competing in ASBO league tables, regardless of the long-term results." Do you think the high numbers of ASBOs reflect success or failure of strategy in tackling anti-social behaviour? Mr Wong: The problem we have at the moment in some ways with anti-social behaviour is that as those seem to be the only kind of measure that the Government is relying on as some kind of progress in tackling anti-social behaviour, I guess from our point of view, in terms of working in disadvantaged communities and working with offenders and young offenders, ASBOs have become a proxy measure. If you look at a piece of work that was done by the West Midlands crime reduction team, they trawled through the different safety policies in their areas to identify what activities would be covered by anti-social behaviour under the umbrella. They came up with 26 different types of activity ranging from drug-dealing to messy gardens, to litter on the streets, to criminal damage. The problem with all of this is that maybe the Government needs to re-think what that applies to so that we have clearer measures; instead of using ASBOs as a kind of proxy measure, to look at real things you are dealing with and the real crime reduction outcomes that you are looking at. Q601 Chairman: Has Nacro thought about any definition of anti-social behaviour? Would defining an incident or number of incidents be better than the number of ASBOs? Mr Wong: We have not actually come up with a definition. There obviously is not one within the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, and there seem to be three different definitions knocking around anti-social behaviour. Most social landlords have a definition for ASB. What I come back to is that probably the Government should more clearly define what the activities are that constitute anti-social behaviour, and that would give a better measure at that level. Q602 Chairman: In your written evidence you mentioned that there are considerable geographical variations throughout Wales. Mr Wong: Yes. Q603 Chairman: Can you give any examples of that? Mr Wong: If I look at my papers here, the Government figures are that between January 2004 and June 2004 in the Greater Manchester area there were something like 155 ASBOs that were made. A comparable neighbour to Greater Manchester is Merseyside, which only had 27 ASBOs. That is quite a significant difference - six times the number of ASBOs. They both share common areas of problems in crime and deprivation. The number of ASBOs does not necessarily show that problems are being dealt with; all it shows is that you have 155 ASBOs. I was talking to the anti-social behaviour co-ordinator for Liverpool, who is responsible for that, and their take on anti-social behaviour orders is that they should be a measure of last resort, and that having loads of ASBOs is not a measure of success at all. In fact, conversely, their view was that it was a measure of failure, and that all the other interventions that could be put into play have not worked. Chairman: That coincides with some of the evidence we have had from police forces in Wales, and seems a sensible way forward. Q604 Hywel Williams: Good afternoon. In the statement in October, Chris Stanley said, "the naming and shaming" of young people does not address "serious underlying youth offending". Why do you think that naming and shaming is not successful? Mr Wong: The first thing about anti-social behaviour orders and the naming and shaming thing is that for many young offenders, they almost treat that as a badge of honour, to be named and shamed. It almost reinforces the negative perceptions of themselves. The reality is that generally within the community most community members know the kind of people they are in any case, so it does not necessarily do anything about that. It plays in a kind of populist way to it, but it does not necessarily deal with the history of problems that that young person may have. What Chris Stanley was trying to say is that we need to think about identifying a more sensible way of dealing with anti-social behaviour, not just in terms of enforcement, which is where ASBOs come in - and we do not disagree that there needs to be enforcement - but we should also look at the measures put in place for prevention and rehabilitation so that you are covering the ground across the whole range of activity of that person's involvement. Q605 Hywel Williams: In the broader sense, apart from what happens to the individual who has an ASBO and might take that as a badge of honour, as you were saying, are you worried by stigmatisation of groups of young people? Mr Wong: Yes. Q606 Hywel Williams: That would be a concern. Mr Wong: Yes. It makes it more difficult for those young people to feel - our experience of working with young offenders is that the critical thing is to try and find as many ways as possible to integrate young people who are offending or who are at risk of offending back into the community and mainstream society. Naming and shaming just highlights who they are, stigmatises them and makes it more difficult to make the transition back to normalisation of behaviour and being part of society. Q607 Hywel Williams: A very long time ago now there was a study of youth culture in the sixties which proposed the amplification of the theory that if you name people and draw attention to their behaviour, that then encourages others to join in because there is a notoriety that is attractive to young people. Mr Wong: Yes. Q608 Hywel Williams: Do you see that sort of developing in respect of ASBOs? Mr Wong: I think it does. I said before that in communities where perhaps there is little provision, where young people may find it difficult to have self-esteem or feel good about themselves, the thing that happens is that they fall into delinquency, and by having an ASBO it is a badge of honour because it is some kind of achievement, however negative. It is not an achievement for the rest of society, but it is for them. It does not necessarily do anything to address the long-term consequences of their behaviour. Q609 Hywel Williams: Thinking broadly about ASBOs, do you see elements of what is sometimes called "model panic"; that in the papers people are concerned with looking at league tables and that that is slightly divorced from what is going on on the ground? Mr Wong: The interesting thing about anti-social behaviour is that it has almost become a kind of one-stop crime for a whole range of things. I do not know whether it is about trying to simplify a range of different offences but, as I said before, the range of things that anti-social behaviour covered at one stage was about 26 different activities. All those different activities detailed within that study have criminal offences linked to them, so in some ways you have already got an offence linked to that activity, and therefore, if you prosecute, you prosecute only that offence and you do not prosecute for anti-social behaviour as such. We are almost dumbing down the whole issue of crime by branding a whole range of crimes as anti-social behaviour. It may be something that people can more easily understand, but it therefore fuels that sense of concern about crime because you are lumping so many things together. As I said before, if the Government is trying to make sure that agencies have an impact on anti-social behaviour, they should break it down and say what those things are so that it is reducing the number of young people causing annoyance and it is reducing the amount of drug-dealing on the streets and reducing the level of graffiti, because those are tangible things you can lock on to. If you ask anyone what anti-social behaviour is, different members of the public will define it differently - from kicking a ball in the street to dealing in drugs. Q610 Hywel Williams: I have some elderly people living near my constituency office who complained about people leaving the pub at night, which is anti-social behaviour just as kicking a ball is. What can the Government, the police and other agencies do to address these issues of problems of anti-social behaviour? It is a tall order. Mr Wong: Yes. In most places there are services and interventions that are being used to address that range of activities. We have promoted an approach of looking at a whole range of interventions which address those sorts of things. It looks at addressing vulnerable groups, specifically high-risk groups, and the kind of activity and behaviour of individuals, but by looking at interventions in relation to prevention and enforcement, and also in relation to rehabilitation. There is quite a good study by the government office in West Midlands which tries to pull those things together. It looks at how a range of measures can work across that kind of matrix with young people. Q611 Hywel Williams: In the evidence you have concerns about breaches of ASBOs resulting in custodial sentences for young people. Can you expand on that? Mr Wong: Again coming from government figures, in 2001 there were 114 persons in breach of the courts following imposition of an ASBO. There were 322 ASBOs that were breached in that year. In 2002, 212 people were imprisoned out of 403 ASBOs that were breached, so just over 50 per cent of individuals who breached their ASBO were in prison. Our concerns are that ASBOs were made in the first place, many of them, not in relation to criminal offences; but the penalty for breaching an ASBO is imprisonment or a fine. There is a sense in which it is almost a criminalisation of that activity which was not criminal in the first place. Our other concern is that something like 65 per cent of ASBOs are taken out against young people. I do not know the exact figures but if we look at the breaches I suggest that quite a high proportion of those breaches are by young people. Q612 Hywel Williams: I am sure people have concerns about people who are fined for things like not having a TV licence and are imprisoned because of non-payment of fines. You are suggesting that there is something similar going on here, criminalisation of behaviour that would not otherwise lead to imprisonment. Mr Wong: Yes, I would say that. It is interesting; a recent study produced by the National Association for Probation Officers made a list of case study examples. One of the examples cited was an 18-year old youth who was subject to an ASBO, I think in Manchester, where one of the conditions of the ASBO was that he was not to congregate with three or more other youths. He was subsequently arrested for breach of the order because he entered the local youth club. The grounds on which he was arrested were that there was a congregation of three or more youths on the premises. In fact, it was a youth club that had a good reputation for working with young people, and on that evening there was a session scheduled for working with young people and how to deal with anti-social behaviour. That is one example of a number that suggest the breach is disproportionate to the offence or activity engaged in. Another example in the same study was of an 87-year old man who, amongst other things, had been forbidden in an ASBO to be sarcastic to his neighbours since July 2003. He was found guilty of breaking the terms of his order on three separate occasions, and is currently awaiting sentencing by the judge. I would suggest that this person may have mental health problems, but that does not seem to have been picked up or dealt with. These are examples where the use of ASBOs is somewhat indiscriminate, but, more importantly, breach of that is a very severe penalty. Q613 Hywel Williams: It is shades of Monty Python - get out of ----- Mr Wong: I guess we would be keen to ask the Government to review the use of ASBOs and also the breaching of them, in more detail. Q614 Hywel Williams: Probation officers, I know, would not consider breaching someone on a probation order without a great deal of aforethought. Mr Wong: Yes. Q615 Hywel Williams: Are you suggesting people are breached for ASBOs after less serious consideration? Mr Wong: It seems to be, yes. Some of these cases seem to suggest that. What we would advocate, in terms of how to deal with anti-social behaviour and over-use of ASBOs in enforcement, is to undertake a more gradual or staged approach to dealing with that problem. An example we cited in our written evidence was work that Devon and Cornwall have done in terms of developing a staged approach to working on anti-social behaviour, where there is an escalation of activity according to seriousness and according to where people have fallen down, but also what follows from that is a de-escalation of activity as well; so where things are working well, you carry on in the same way. ASBOs are made for a minimum of two years. I do not know how many have been reviewed to see whether behaviour has changed, because then the ASBO could be revoked, or you could down-tariff the infringement, but we do not have enough resources to do that. It would be interesting to look at that. Q616 Hywel Williams: Social workers tended to revoke people's supervision orders as a positive step. Mr Wong: Yes. Q617 Hywel Williams: You say in your evidence that you would like to see more use of division of education as part of the breach. Can you give examples of existing practice? Mr Wong: Yes, the things we would advocate as prevention is trying to find ways of identifying those people that are most at risk of offending or causing anti-social behaviour, and finding ways to engage them and divert them from that activity; but also, importantly, to re‑direct them back into mainstream services. The Crime Survey suggests that a young male who is disengaged from a mainstream service like education and is excluded from school is twice as likely to be an offender than someone who is not, and similarly young women are four times as likely to offend if they are disengaged from services. We feel that it is critical to identify the risk factors which encourage that kind of vulnerability and behaviour and look at developing protective mechanisms to avoid that and, where possible, to find ways to re-direct people and get them back into mainstream services. There has certainly been an increase in school exclusions over the last few years and it would be interesting to track that against increasing activity and see if there is some correlation. Anecdotally it seems that there may well be a correlation. If they do not engage with services, they are more likely to be at risk of offending. Q618 Mr Caton: Moving on to the reassurance agenda, on page 2 of your submission you emphasise the necessity for consultation and engagement with young people and other hard-to-reach groups. Does Nacro reach and engage with those groups and, if so, can you give us some examples of how you go about it? Mr Wong: We run a number of youth diversion and youth inclusion projects. Where possible, we identify at-risk young people. We do our best to tailor our services to young people and engage in a dialogue about the kind of services they want and the activities that would suit them. We then try to deliver those services and cost and review the process. In our service delivery we do what we can to ensure user participation in the design of services as a way of making them more appropriate to young people's needs. Similarly we would do that with offenders and BME communities, black and ethnic minority communities. Q619 Mr Caton: You also mention concerns over the use of fear of crime surveys, and in particular their potential to further increase fear of crime. You have called for clearer guidelines. What guidelines would you like to see introduced and who should be producing them? Mr Wong: At the moment the Government has, as one of its public service targets for the next three years, reducing fear of crime. They intend to use the British Crime Survey - the crime questions within that - as a way of showing that measure of reduction through reduction in crime. From the academic research on fear of crime, if you track the responses to the British Crime Survey over the last twenty years about fear of crime, the level is not significantly up or down over the period, regardless of how high the levels of reported crime are. Fear of crime, you could argue, was invented in about 1980, which was the first year when the fear of crime was in the British Crime Survey. Our concerns are that measuring of fear of crime may have methodological flaws. One of the questions in the British Crime Survey was: "How safe would you feel being out alone in your neighbourhood after dark?" First, it is a hypothetical question - "how safe would you feel?" That is important because it is not asking you about your experience of being outside in your neighbourhood after dark. Then you have this kind of generic thing and one person's idea of it may vary from another's. The question does not actually ask about crime at all. It does not ask how likely it is they feel they will be a victim of crime in their neighbourhood after dark. "After dark" is rather vague because it could be four o'clock on a January afternoon or eleven o'clock in the summer. There are methodological problems with it, I guess. While accepting that there needs to be some way of measuring that, our concerns are that the current measure is methodologically flawed. The other thing we learn from academic research is that what you are measuring there is an emotional response from the person, which is quite difficult to gauge. The emotional response may not actually reflect what someone feels about crime all the time but may just reflect what someone feels about it at that moment in time. We would advocate a more positive way of approaching reducing fear of crime by looking at behaviour, which is something you can measure more easily. You can ask people to reflect on that in a much more reliable way than asking them about emotion. The measure of impact on reducing fear of crime could be that more people go out at night; that more people will go to the local shop and buy more goods. It is about quality of life and about people able to do things they feel they were not able to do last year. That is a much more positive and more robust way of measuring change and the impact of Government policies and the impact of services delivered by police and local authorities, rather than looking at that emotional response. Q620 Mr Caton: Has Nacro engaged with the people who produce the British Crime Survey to make these points to them? Mr Wong: Last year we ran a seminar where we tried to look at broaching the whole idea of fear of crime. We had a discussion about that and had somebody from the Home Office there. We also had a couple of academics who have done research into this area there as well. We would like to look at working with the Home Office and others to develop these more positive measures, which in some ways reassure the public much better than saying, "we have reduced fear of crime by X per cent". It is a much more tangible thing, so that people feel more able to go out. We have not had the resources to do that, although this is something that we feel is important. Q621 Mr Caton: Basically, the guidelines should be produced by the Home Office but with co-operation of other agencies. Mr Wong: Yes. Our concern is that the Government or Home Office might be on a hiding to nothing if they are going to try and reduce the fear of crime, but if the methodology is flawed. As I said, if you track back, looking at British Crime Survey fear of crime questions over the last twenty years, there has been no significant change in how people feel about whether crime is going up or down. Q622 Mr Caton: You welcome in your submission the important role played by the All Wales Community Safety Forum as a means of co-ordination and strategic development across the 22 Community Safety Partnerships in Wales. First, on a point of clarification, is this the same as the All Wales Crime and Disorder Forum established by Keri Lewis of Bridgend County Council? Mr Wong: It is. I think it has been re-named but it is the same body. Q623 Mr Caton: Unfortunately in his evidence to this Committee Mr Lewis informed us that this forum is no longer operational as a result of lack of funding. What is the case for re‑establishing it? Mr Wong: We think the forum would be able to take a multilateral, multi-agency view about policy on criminal justice and safety across Wales. It could look at co-ordinating innovation within Wales but also we would be able to co-ordinate responses about how community safety is being delivered and therefore try and influence UK Government policy but also have that same role with the Welsh Assembly. It is a way of funnelling information together and also developing policy ideas and innovation, and co-ordinating that across the whole of Wales. Sadly, as Keri Lewis has indicated, there has not been any funding to support that and make it happen, but we would be keen if possible to find ways of getting something together to support that. Q624 Mr Caton: You identified the need to strengthen the relationship between voluntary and community groups and community safety partnerships. How could this be achieved and are there examples of better practice in some of the CPSs than in others in Wales? Mr Wong: Our experience of working with them is that not in all cases but in many cases the voluntary community sector will not necessarily engage as part of a strategic partnership of community safety partnerships, whereas they are often engaged in delivery and may be operational, but they do not seem to have a voice at the top table, as it were. The benefits of having that are communicating with communities and hard-to-reach groups, which the VCS sector has a closer relationship with. We have been working with Manchester local authority, where we set up the Manchester Community Safety Network, which effectively have different tiers to them, but there was a seat at that strategic table for the VCS sector. There was a network and resources were put into co-ordinating and acting as a conduit for passing information and ideas from that strategic group to a whole range of community sector agencies and voluntary sector agencies in Manchester. There is an ability there to have that two-way dialogue of communication. Whenever the strategic partnership wants to consult on something, that particular forum spreads the information out and pulls it back in again so that responses come back to the strategic group. Every quarter they run a forum where voluntary and community sectors can get together and engage with the key statutory players from the strategic partnership and be consulted on a range of issues, but also they suggest ideas as well. That is the kind of model that we feel would be appropriate. Obviously, it would be proportionate with the size of the area and the level of local activity, but some kind of mechanism for allowing consultation and engagement to happen would seem to be sensible. Q625 Mr Caton: Are there any community safety partnerships within Wales that are even moving in that direction? Mr Wong: We are not aware of that kind of network arrangement. I could be wrong, but as far as we know there is not. Q626 Mr Caton: One local authority chief executive who we took evidence from last week pointed out to us that there is an increasing plethora of partnerships, which potentially pose a problem in terms of staff capacity and resources. Do you think there is a real danger of creating another forum along the lines of what you are talking about in Manchester? Mr Wong: Hopefully not. In relation to the kind of partnerships that perhaps the chief executive was talking about our experience is that most of them have members at the statutory centre, so the voluntary sector is not necessarily engaged in that. I am suggesting a kind of solid parallel body within the voluntary community sector that can feed information in. There may need to be a rationalisation of the plethora of partnerships because you often find the same people sitting on different partnerships. For example, you have the same people on the drug action partnerships that are on the community safety partnerships, and often they are running from one meeting to the next and you see the same faces there. There are ways in which that can be rationalised. The agendas could be organised in such a way that people are brought in when they are needed, and you therefore do not have to have so many bodies. Q627 Mr Caton: We can probably seek written evidence from Manchester as part of this inquiry. In your written evidence you refer to section 17 of the Crime and Disorder Act 1988 and state that the implementation had been variable because of the perceived lack of teeth. Do you think it is necessary to strengthen further the enforcement mechanism of the statutory requirement for partnership, for example along the lines outlined in the Civil Contingencies Bill? Mr Wong: I have to be honest with you that I am not too clear what the provisions are of that Bill. Q628 Mr Caton: It is basically financial consequences if agencies - if partners do not act as partners. Mr Wong: The problem often with section 17, looking purely at local authorities, which are subject to section 17, is that in some places there is a perception that the section 17 responsibility lies just within the community safety part of the local authority, and that the role of social services and education - that their contribution is not particularly well met. At the moment there are not any sanctions as far as I am aware. If you do not do it properly, no‑one is going to say "you have not done it properly". The only possible sanction is through the performance assessment of local authorities. The Home Secretary does not ask for how local authorities are performing in relation to section 17. One thing that could be done to support the section 17 work a bit better may lie in the obligations on responsible authorities. Currently, under the Crime and Disorder Act 1988 the local authority is the responsible authority, and they have to form partnerships and be a major player in dealing with crime and disorder. However, in terms of their responsibility for partnership, they do not specify within that legislation that they have to have social services, education and housing there. Often it is left just to the community safety part of the local authority to do that, and it is often difficult for them to get that message across, across the whole of the rest of the local authority. Another thing to do is to look at the kind of legislation which covers other activities within local authorities, like environmental health and planning, because it almost seems to be a diametric opposition in section 17 between planning regulations, so when planners make decisions about whether to grant permission to build a nightclub or pub somewhere, currently their obligations to consider that application do not take into account the community safety implications of that, and they would actually be wrong in applying legislation to do that. Q629 Mr Caton: I can see that we could improve things by identifying the various departments in local authorities that should have a part to play in this, but do you think if any of those departments, or the local authority as a whole, fails to comply, that there should be some form of sanction? Mr Wong: I think there needs to be some form of sanction. I am not too sure what it would be, but there needs to be some sanction. At the moment, as I said, there is not ----- Q630 Mr Caton: The worry is that once you introduce sanctions then the relationship between partners could be compromised. Mr Wong: One notable example when that did happen a couple of years ago was that the planning part of a local authority in England gave permission for a club to open for longer hours or something like that, and the police took out a court injunction against the local authority on the ground of section 17. There was an intention there obviously between those partners in the same partnership, but at the moment there is not enough clarity about sanctions and roles to enable that kind of proper working. Q631 Hywel Williams: I have been reflecting on what you were saying about fear of crime. It is such a subjective thing, an individualistic thing. Mr Wong: Yes. Q632 Hywel Williams: Is there any value to us at all in your opinion in having a measure of some things? Mr Wong: From our point of view we are not sure whether there is a value necessarily. One example that you might want to ruminate on is that it is odd that we have a performance measure linked to something that we cannot properly measure, so we have a performance of a target to reduce the fear of crime. If you look at other areas of social policy, we do not, for example, have any kind of policy or measures about reducing the fear of being ill or the fear of being run over by a car - yet we do have the fear of crime. It is worth thinking about that and therefore asking if it is logical to spend a lot of time and effort on something that we cannot properly measure, and should we not be thinking about fear of crime but about the quality of life and the ability of people to have a freer life and more choices. That goes back to what I said before about having positive measures that can track improvements in people's lives through their behaviour and the things they are able to do. Q633 Hywel Williams: I live in a slightly dodgy area of South London when I am in London, and I feel slightly uneasy about going out at night, since I have a slight fear of crime; but when I get back from the House at seven I go to the 24-hour shop to fetch a loaf, and I might feel a few prickles on my back. They do not seem to coincide, do they - the actual behaviour and ----- Mr Wong: Not always, no. Q634 Hywel Williams: What would be a quantitative measure - "how often do you go out and would you feel worried about going out?" Would that be a suitable proxy for this thing we are trying to measure and trying to reduce? Mr Wong: We would say that it would be, or it could be a proxy measure. Coming back to the whole notion of reassurance, you can celebrate the fact that the local shop is getting more customers because people feel they can go there at night, for example. What seems to be clear from the survey evidence is that it does not matter what you do about crime itself. At the moment we are living in a situation where we have the lowest levels of most crimes for ten years, and yet people do not feel any safer - or the fear of crime measure has not got better. There needs to be a slightly wider and broader thinking brought to bear. It may be a simple thing, but the whole notion of fear of crime was imported from America and surveys done there, because in some ways social policy-makers felt they could not do anything to reduce crime and said, "let us reduce fear of crime instead". That is even harder to do as a tangible outcome. Are we therefore not putting the resources into what really needs to be done instead of chasing something that we never can properly address? Q635 Hywel Williams: I can imagine that fear of crime could be quite useful if there is a lot of crime about - the fear might keep you away from it, like you have a fear of crossing the M1 on foot! Mr Wong: Being concerned about crime means - why should you not be concerned about crime? You ought to be because that means that you therefore take the proper measures to protect yourself so that you do not go to dodgy areas at night. In fact, it is quite a simple thing - if we did not fear being knocked over and we just walked blithely across the road. In some ways it is a curious measure. Our concern is that there is too much emphasis laid on that. If we set as a public target the need to reduce fear of crime, are we actually increasing the public's perception of the fear of crime by saying that we need to do something about it? In some ways the Government may be making a rod for its own back. Hywel Williams: That is a very interesting, challenging view of the accepted wisdom. Thank you very much. Chairman: Thank you, Mr Wong. It has been a very useful session. Memorandum submitted by Victim Support
Examination of Witness
Witness: Mr Jon Trew, National Officer for Wales, Victim Support, examined. Q636 Chairman: Welcome, Mr Trew. We have met before, but for the record can you introduce yourself and explain your role? Mr Trew: My name is Jon Trew. I am the National Officer for Victim Support Wales, which is the umbrella organisation for the Victim Support charities in Wales. I have been in post now for two years. Our umbrella organisation is set up with support from the Welsh Assembly, though most of the services that we deliver in Wales are funded with a significant grant from the Home Office. Q637 Chairman: Your aims in your written statement are apparently promoting the development of strong and safe communities; reducing the fear of crime; and encouraging confidence in the criminal justice system in Wales. Can you provide some practical examples of how you go about that? Mr Trew: We can do this in several ways. Victim Support Wales does that by supporting each of the local services that deliver services. If you were burgled, if you were attacked or a victim of crime, when you report that to the police then you are offered the opportunity of support from Victim Support, which is delivered through volunteers. The other area of service that we offer is the witness service, where in every court in Wales there are volunteers, who are managed by a co-ordinator in that court, who will look after you basically, and encourage you and ensure that you do not end up sitting in the same room as maybe the defendant's family and friends; that you know where to find the toilet; that if you want to go home early, you will be able to know what the verdict is. We also do pre-court visits - if somebody is nervous about going to court we explain where the judge and jury sit, who will be talking and that kind of thing. The witness service has been rated very highly in terms of customer satisfaction in surveys. Those are the two services that Victim Support offers generally. There are some specialist schemes, but those are the two major areas: the victim service and the witness service. Each of those is delivered through local offices, which are then organised around local criminal justice areas. There is Victim Support South Wales, Victim Support Gwent, Victim Support Dyfed/Powys, and Victim Support North Wales. Each of those is a separate charity in its own right, with its own management committee. Victim Support Wales, which I am the National Officer for, is the umbrella body. We seek to co-ordinate and promote good practice between each of those groups and organise Wales-wide training, promote the rights and voices of victims and witnesses Wales-wide, and get money at the end of the day, to raise funding - Wales-wide bids and that kind of thing. Q638 Chairman: In your written evidence you suggest several future priorities. Can you say what they are and whether they have been driven by a national or a local agenda? Mr Trew: We do have an advantage in Wales in that we have the Assembly. The majority of the work we do initially would seem to be driven by the Home Office, but in fact being a victim of crime affects a large area of your life. It can affect your health, your education or your housing - and those are all devolved issues. That is the advantage that we have in Wales, basically. We can liaise closely with the Assembly, as well as working with the Home Office, in terms of national initiatives. The priorities that I have written in the report are the priorities for Victim Support Wales, as the umbrella organisation, rather than listing each of our local charities and their priorities. At the moment, my particular priority is to increase the level and amount of training courses that we have available - serious crime training courses - for our volunteers in Wales. We are particularly looking to increase the number of volunteers that are trained to support people bereaved by homicide. Although homicide, thankfully, remains a small number of people killed in Wales every year, the needs of those people bereaved are much larger than the effects of other crimes. For example, recently there was a young man in Cardiff who drove a car at another young man coming out of a nightclub, and he knocked him over and killed him. There were about 15 witnesses - various friends and the two young people involved in it. We offered support to those young people and their families. That was quite difficult because there was a large number of them at one time, and it was not really appropriate to have the same person offering support to people on both sides. Although there is a small number, the actual requirements, the number of volunteers and number of trained volunteers can be quite large. There will perhaps be no work for them at all for months on end; and then suddenly there will be a lot of work. Q639 Mr Caton: In the section of your report about Victim Support in Gwent, you mentioned that the National Audit Office report on Victim Support identified the need to reach those who do not report crime, those who are reluctant to attend police stations, those from diverse sections of the community, and those who are unwilling to be seen. Was this report based on the situation in Gwent, or is relevant to the whole of Wales or indeed the UK? Mr Trew: I believe it is relevant to the whole of the UK. If we look at the British Crime Survey 2000, there are 13 million crimes recorded and only half of those reported to the police. Even when you consider that a large number of those were families and cars and small minor stuff, there are still major crimes that are being committed that are not being reported to the police. As a result, it becomes difficult for those people to access support from Victim Support because our usual method has traditionally been through the police, by giving us the victims' home details where we are able to contact them. Q640 Mr Caton: Gwent Victim Support is addressing this, clearly, by raising their profile and opening new branches. What about the other Victim Support groups that you mentioned? Do they recognise this as a priority, and are they addressing them? Mr Trew: One of the problems, and an advantage, of Victim Support is that many of our offices are located in police stations. This is a two-edged sword. It means that the members of staff there develop good working relationships with the police, which is essential. Often, police officers will pop in and say that it would be helpful if they could contact a particular person straight away, and that kind of close working relationship. What it does mean is that those people who are not confident about our criminal justice system, who do not have the same level of confidence in the police, are less likely to access our services if they are located in the police station. For us, as a voluntary organisation, most of the offices located in police stations we get for free or at very minimum rents. I think in some of the police stations we get free use of the telephone or the photocopier, and if you are talking about a not very rich voluntary organisation like ours, having to spend an extra £4,000 a year for rent for an office premises and on top of that heating and lighting, buying a photocopier, getting the phones in and paying for those - it is beyond our means for lots of areas. It is a medium-term aim of the organisation to get all of our Victim Support branches out into amenity shop-front type accommodation, as we have done in Abergavenny where we have just opened a new drop-in branch. It does have cash implications for us, which we simply do not have the money for at the moment. Q641 Mr Caton: Are you undertaking or intending to undertake any evaluation of the steps that the various areas take to reach the harder-to-reach people? Mr Trew: One of the problems with getting those people is how we do it. In Gwent we are comparing the number of what we call self-referrals that they had when based in the police station. At the end of the day, it does not matter how much evidence we have; if we do not have the money to move into new premises, then it remains useful and interesting. Q642 Mr Caton: Have you discussed the possibility of help from local authorities? Mr Trew: Many local authorities do help us, some a lot more than others. Even taking that into consideration, it is very difficult when you have a resource that is free, and from an organisation such as the police, which we have good working relationships with generally, to go and spend that money on something different, on a resource, when you could spend it on extra staff and new computers, where there are a lot of other competing demands for our resources, in terms of IT infrastructure. We are at the moment looking to access the secure e‑mail from the police, but unfortunately the hardware we have does not allow that throughout Wales, although we can do it in certain areas like Dyfed/Powys, but in areas of South Wales that is not as immediately possible. Q643 Mr Caton: I wondered if accommodation was something that local authorities could directly provide almost on the same basis that the police do now, but do you think that there might b similar resistance to a local authority's connection with you as there is with the police? Mr Trew: I would guess not so much. Ideally, we would like shop-front high-street accommodation, so that people can drop in and sit down. We have set up various outreach places where we have gone into community centres once a week, but what tends to happen is that when somebody is a victim of crime they want to go and see somebody then and there, not make an appointment to see somebody in a week's time. If they have a need to talk to somebody, it needs to be then and immediate. That is the problem that we have in terms of accessing local authority accommodation, which has usually meant a room in a community centre one or two days a week, rather than a permanent location. The other issue we have with that is, obviously, the records we have, on which the names and details of witnesses and victims are very sensitive. There are issues about shared buildings with other groups that may not make it as secure. Q644 Hywel Williams: You refer in your written evidence to the scheme that you have in Dyfed and Powys around people who are bereaved because of road traffic accidents. Mr Trew: We call it a road death scheme. Q645 Hywel Williams: Can you tell us more about that? Mr Trew: Yes, certainly. One of the issues we started off with is that the police would refer people who were bereaved as a result of their relative or loved one being killed in a road traffic incident. We were set up to support victims of crime, and in many of those cases it was not certain whether the death was as a result of a crime or not; one of the police officers we spoke to said he believed we are talking about 85 per cent of fatalities involving some sort of illegal act. Sometimes, charges are not pressed and sometimes it may take several weeks for the police to decide whether they will press charges, or whether any crime had occurred, because they need to look forensically at the site. It seemed not the right thing to do then not to offer support to those people who were bereaved until we discovered whether a crime had occurred or not. One of the other reasons that we set the project up in Dyfed/Powys is that there were people who we had trained to support people bereaved as a result of homicide, and fortunately Dyfed/Powys is not a high-crime area and has a low homicide rate. It is a bit like fire engines; you have to have them there, in readiness for an event, but often they are not used. One of the ideas of setting up the Road Death Scheme was that those volunteers could use the skills that they had developed and learnt and keep them in readiness, so that when there was a homicide they would be ready and able to use them. The money for running the scheme comes from the Home Office, and it is a pilot. We do have plans and would like to expand the service to being Wales-wide. The other reason for it being done in Dyfed/Powys is because of the high proportion of road fatalities compared to the population, and that has a lot to do with motorbikes and narrow, windy roads, ice and that kind of thing. We do have proposals to convince the other chief constables in Wales to go to the National Assembly and Home Office and ask for further funding to expand the scheme Wales-wide, because we do think it is very important. There does not seem to be anybody else offering that service. Q646 Hywel Williams: That is what I was going to ask you. There are organisations that support people when they are bereaved, like CRUS. Mr Trew: Absolutely. Our job is not to compete with CRUS at all. Our job would be to refer people on to CRUS. One of the things CRUS say is that they are not really set up to support immediately after a road death; their group is a long-term self-help group about coming to terms with being a widow or a widower. We would refer people on to them. They readily agree that they are not set up to provide an emergency service in the way that Victim Support does. We also work with some of the groups that have a more campaigning role, for instance Brake, the charity for road deaths. We have worked closely with them and supported their campaigning role. We work in partnership with them. What I would say is that when somebody dies on the road, there may be other issues that they need support over, and Victim Support is a way of referring them on to appropriate organisations. It may well be that there is a young child whose father or mother is dying, and we would look for organisations such as Wish, or something like that, which would be able to support a child or young person. They might have, for instance, financial problems as a result of losing the breadwinner in their family, so we would look to identify people that could give them money or budgeting advice. That is the idea behind it. We do not aim to be a specialist agency, but to refer people on to more specialist agencies. Q647 Hywel Williams: How many people are killed on the roads in Wales, do you think? Mr Trew: It is 158, I think. Q648 Hywel Williams: I am thinking of the implications if you expanded it through Wales. It would make quite a workload, would it not? Mr Trew: It depends. One of the things is that lots of people have close, caring family units, and they do not really need Victim Support; that is what their family does. Their family comes round and offers the support that we would do. On the other hand, I can think of another young woman whose family live abroad, and it was just her and her husband; her husband died and there was nobody else for her to talk to. I think that 150 is not a huge number for us. If we were to take on, as has been suggested, people involved in life-changing injury, then we would be talking about an amount of work that we would possibly having problems dealing with. It may not be 158 cases; it may be only half of them require support from Victim Support. Q649 Hywel Williams: Can we go on to the relationship with the police and other partners: how do you work with the police in Wales? Does this relationship differ from one force to another? Mr Trew: We work very closely with the police. We are probably one of the closest agencies that they work with. Many of our branch offices are located in police stations. Some of our members of staff are former police officers. We have police representatives on our management committees. We get on quite well with them. However, there does have to be a certain amount of distance between us because there are some victims and witnesses who have had a bad experience of the police, and we have to demonstrate to them that we are a separate organisation and independent. If they have a complaint against the police, we will advise and support them in taking that forward. The way that we are set up is to mirror the structure of the police. We have moved from a structure where we were based around local authorities, to being based around police authorities. There is Dyfed, Dyfed/Powys, North Wales, South Wales and Gwent. That indicates how important it is. Q650 Mr Caton: Clearly, you do mirror the police forces in Wales, except in Dyfed and Powys, which are separate. Is there a reason why you have not gone for a Dyfed/Powys area? Mr Trew: Yes, because it is huge. Dyfed/Powys is physically such a large area that the amount of - we looked at whether it was possible to have an area manager covering the whole of Dyfed/Powys, and the amount of money that it would cost us in terms of travel and the time it takes them to travel from one office to another was not feasible for us. It was cheaper to keep them separate, although they do work together in terms of when they have meetings with Dyfed/Powys police. There are also schemes like the Road Death Scheme where they work together, but it simply because of the size. Q651 Mr Caton: They pride themselves on having a lower crime rate in the Dyfed/Powys area. Mr Trew: Yes. You are right, that it is one of the safest places in Britain to live. Another advantage is that it is big and there are not any motorways in it either. Q652 Hywel Williams: Are there ways in which you could improve your relationship with the police? Mr Trew: I would say the biggest problem we have to do with the police is in relation to the Data Protection Act and referrals. Our original agreement with the Home Office was that all victims of crime would be automatically referred to Victim Support apart from people bereaved by homicide, rape and sexual assault cases and domestic violence. In those cases, those people would have to give prior agreement for their information to be passed on to Victim Support. What would happen then is that Victim Support would contact those people and say, "would you like support?" It is not that they will get it; we would gain permission. However, with the introduction of the Data Protection Act, there was a lot of confusion about what information could be passed on to Victim Support. There were significant differences in terms of police authorities. Some carried on and passed on details to Victim Support of all victims of crime, apart from the three that I mentioned earlier. Others, for instance in Gwent, said, "we are only giving you the whole of the details and addresses of victims of crime only with their prior permission". That does not sound too difficult, but it caused a huge drop in the number of referrals, particularly in Gwent, of victims' details being passed on to Victim Support. Inevitably, that meant that the police officer who was called out to a crime would forget and when it came to filling in the form would say, "do they want Victim Support now? If I say 'no' there is no come-back." I believe that that happened in quite a significant number of cases. The other issue is to do with when, if you are asked - if you are a victim of crime and you report back to the police and they ask you if you want Victim Support, do you say, "no, I want you to catch the person"? It is a bit like going into hospital with your leg hanging off and they say, "would you like physiotherapy?" It is not appropriate at that time. It may well be that in a couple of weeks' time or a week's time when you are feeling down or uncertain, or as in my own circumstances when we were burgled recently - my daughter would not go to bed on her own, and my son became quite obsessed about checking that the back door was locked - it is only at that point that you think perhaps you do want somebody to talk about it. At the initial point, when you are angry, if you are asked whether you want victim support, it is not the best time. The number of referrals, particularly in Gwent, have fallen off dramatically. The other difference is that where there was no response, for instance the police officer forgot or anything like that, some police authorities passed their names and addresses on to Victim Support, and others in South Wales did not. There is a wide variety in the range of responses. They even vary within each police authority, depending on the relationship with the local office and station. It depends on whether we get those referrals or not. Q653 Hywel Williams: Can I ask you about your relationship with other partners working in crime prevention and the criminal justice area. What are your relationships like with these? Mr Trew: In terms of other voluntary organisations one of the things I am trying to do as the umbrella organisation is develop recognition agreements with other voluntary organisations. For instance, one of the things we have done is having meetings with Women's Aid for instance, where we will make an agreement that when we come into contact with victims of domestic violence we will make them aware of the services that Women's Aid offers. We are not talking about being competitors; we are working in partnership and recognising the speciality and expertise of other organisations. For instance, one of the things we have agreed with Women's Aid is that every woman that comes into contact with us who is a victim of domestic violence we will make aware of the service of Women's Aid, and in return, if the women are going to make a criminal injuries compensation claim, they will refer those women to us, because we are more expert and skilled in that area; or that if they go to court they ring the witness service and then we can work together and provide a better service to victims of domestic violence. In terms of community safety partnerships, each of our local services meets with those and has relationships with those. We are also working closely with the CIJBs, the local criminal justice boards for each area, who will certainly have a bigger input into the way Victim Support works in the future, because there are plans that the funding that Victim Support got through the Home Office and our national office will be devolved to each of those local criminal justice boards, and they will be able to fund work on the witness service individually, so there may be different levels of support from different areas, which is a challenge for us. Q654 Chairman: You have just mentioned the problems of referrals since the 1998 Act, which is obviously a problem for you with data protection; but you did say that certain police forces are treating it in different ways. You could describe that as confusion amongst the police forces. Can you tell us a little bit more about that and how we can possibly get best practice throughout the forces on that issue? Mr Trew: There are moves by the Metropolitan Police with Victim Support in London to do bulk referrals, which is where their computers are connected directly to Victim Support's computers via a secure e-mail system; and they refer all victims of crime to Victim Support, apart from a handful which they would not, for security purposes such as prevention of terrorism. That would include virtually every victim of crime. The theory behind it is that if you buy a fridge from Comet, for example, and it does not break the data Protection Act for comet to give your home details to the carrier, to TNT parcels to deliver the fridge, why should Victim Support, which is meeting the Government's responsibilities under the Victims' Charter, not be considered in the same way? It started at Christmas but in the Metropolitan Police they are referring all victims of crime directly to Victim Support, and then in cases of victims where domestic violence is an issue or rape and sexual assault or people bereaved by homicide, Victim Support would then get in touch with the local police station to find out whether there are any particular sensitivities about contacting those victims, such as if it is a case of domestic violence and the perpetrator might still be living in the house. We would be advised by the police about the best method of contact with the victim in those circumstances. We do not know of the outcome yet of whether or not that is successful. To be fair to the police, on a senior level that seems to be supported, but I think there may be some resistance among lower ranks, and basically a lack of understanding of what data protection actually means and an understanding of the principles of data protection, in terms of it being for the benefit of the individual, rather than a list of regulations that have to be followed by rote. Q655 Chairman: I understand there are discussions going on between yourselves and ACPO and various other bodies, including the Home Office, as to how it is interpreted generally. Have there been any results of that discussion? Mr Trew: A circular was sent round to the chief police officers which said that people should have to opt out rather than opt in, that police officers should be saying to victims of crime that police pass on your information to Victim Support - "do you have any objections to that?" In practice, that tends to be rather cumbersome to a police officer - "do you want victim support, then?" That turn of phrase and the subtleties involved in that are not what happens after an emotionally stressful crime incident. There is also a letter from the Data Protection Commissioner who says that he does not believe that information being passed on to Victim Support, people's details, in order for them to offer support, breaks the Act. Q656 Hywel Williams: Are there any different aspects of your work in Wales, as compared to the work in England as a result of devolution of powers to the National Assembly? Mr Trew: Yes, definitely. Welsh areas work a lot closer together than victim support areas do in England. We meet at the Wales Managers' Forum, on a bi-monthly basis, and we are in regular contact with one another. We share good practice and I believe we are streets ahead than victim support in England in terms of sharing good practice. If somebody develops a particular health and safety policy or comes out with a new initiative, we tend to help one another more because we meet more often, and we are co-ordinated through Victim Support Wales. We have a national training officer for Wales, and as a result the take-up of training among Victim Support volunteers in Wales has increased dramatically; every single one of the courses now that we have for our volunteers who is delivering the service has a waiting list, and that is because of our ability to work on a Wales-wide basis to promote and get that information out; whereas when it was done on a UK-wide basis people did not get the information and people could not just ring up for a chat to find out whether that particular course suited them, or where it was. When I first started this job, there were serious crime training courses that we were running, which were being cancelled. As a result of our work in Wales, we are streets ahead of England. We are also working and collaborating with the National Assembly on the domestic violence strategy. We are working with the Welsh Assembly's forum on domestic violence quite closely. Q657 Hywel Williams: As a matter of interest, do you do any work on the Assembly's language policy Iaith Pawb? Do you provide a service for people in Welsh at all? Mr Trew: I will be absolutely honest with you that when I first started there was not any. In fact, because of the problem of having an office in England that does not understand the fact that within Wales Welsh should have equal status with English - they seemed to feel it was on the same level as maybe producing stuff in Punjabi or Urdu, as a minority language - we had a volunteer in North Wales translating leaflets herself and producing them herself. Obviously, it was not satisfactory. One of the things I have done is to make sure that we have a bilingual logo, for a start. We did not even agree on what "Victim Support" was in Welsh; I think each individual area had their own version of it. That took some time, to agree a standard Welsh translation for lots of the names of services that we offer. We have, as a result of that, and with help from the Welsh Language Board, developed a Welsh language policy, and with funding from the Diana Fund we have translated three of our worksheets that are targeted at young victims of crime. One of the things you have to do as a voluntary organisation is - we cannot suddenly change all our leaflets all at once, and we decided that the most important thing was the stuff we did for children and old people, with the advice of the Welsh Language Board. We first produced the worksheets for children who are victims of crime bilingually, so the children can choose to do it in English, in Welsh or both, which is what happens to lots of children. Children of friends of mine speak to their parents in English but their written work is more fluent in Welsh. With the help of Ysgol Bro Mynydd just across the road from us in Cardiff, which has trialled it and done it as a test, we have been able to implement that in Wales. That is one of the initiatives we are looking at, and we will continue to do so. Again, that is down to funding. I have to get the money for that specifically for Wales. Chairman: Thank you very much, Mr Trew. Memorandum submitted by Gwent Police
Examination of Witness
Witness: Chief Constable Mike Tonge, Gwent Police Force, examined. Q658 Chairman: Welcome to the Committee. I am sorry we had to break off last time to vote in the House of Commons. Once again, can you give your name and title for the record? Chief Constable Tonge: I am Michael Tonge; I am the Chief Constable for Gwent Police. Q659 Chairman: When we finished before, we were about to start on the reassurance agenda. You mentioned that you have the support of relatively few community officers in Gwent. Can you tell us what use you make of the extended policy family in Gwent - community officers, CDMs and that kind of thing? Chief Constable Tonge: I certainly can. I can talk about what we currently do and talk about the stage of planning for next year and where we intend to go with that because it is a critical piece of work to the police service, and it is certainly crucial to my future vision of policing in Wales. As we presently speak, I have 50 community support officers, which are funded through the first two tranches of the scheme. I have just been given permission to recruit another 36, which will take my total PCSOs up to 86 for Gwent. Just to remind you, I have 134 wards in Gwent. In addition to that, there are 13 neighbourhood wardens employed by Newport Council. I have 187 special constables and volunteers that support my ward officers. We talked last time about me having 66 ward officers, that is police constables dedicated to various wards across Gwent. What I want to do for the future is to build up my uniformed involvement with local communities and partners in local communities to try to make a difference to safety, crime reduction and long-term problem-solving. From next year I will have in the region of 150 constables based in the local communities, in wards, working in support of policing in those areas. Each one of those will have special constables, PCSOs and volunteers attached to them, to make use of certainly volunteers' resources at no extra cost to help support the ward constables in their work. Q660 Chairman: What would you say is the value of these new forms of policing at all the various levels of the extended police family - as it has been called - and are there any downsides to it? Chief Constable Tonge: There are. There is a lot of confusion, I think, in the public's eyes regarding what a PCSO can do and what a police officer can do. My force is one of those forces that trialled the powers of detention for PCSOs. People have to understand that a police community support officer is there really to provide reassurance, visibility and to deal with low-level nuisance and disorder, and nothing more than that. If we used them in a wider role, two things would happen. First, their very strength, which is that visibility, we would take away because they would end up in court processes and will be abstracted to do other things. They do not have the training for that, neither are they necessarily skilled to take that role on, which will lead to letting the standards down. We have to be very clear how we use PCSOs. The other shortfall is that because funding of PCSOs is short-term funding, that has an impact on the quality of people who put themselves forward, because if they do not have job certainty, some will be reluctant to apply to join. We have to be clear how we use PCSOs. If you want someone to take arrests and make professional judgments on more serious things, it has to be a fully-trained and equipped police officer. We have to reinforce with the public the distinction between the two. Q661 Chairman: Have you detected yet any change in the fear of crime since you started using PCSOs particularly? Chief Constable Tonge: Yes. I looked with interest when I applied for the job here in Wales, because if you look at the crime levels in Gwent and then you look at the fear of crime in Gwent, the fear of crime is quite low considering the levels of crime in some of the areas. That is the starting-point. I think we have to look at the reporting. We do get some sensational reporting of things, not just in Gwent but in general, by the media. In our service on fear of crime at the moment we have seen a 3 per cent reduction so far this year, but we surveyed members of the public and our own staff in relation to the impact of our PCSOs, and I am pleased to say that the PCSOs have won over even some of the sceptical staff within our own organisation, because they see the value of them. They do provide visibility and they do relieve our very busy police officers of some of the mundane more routine types of work. The fear of crime is falling in Gwent, even though the levels were lower than one might expect compared with other areas. With the reassurance strategy and the neighbourhood policing strategy that I want to implement from April next year, we should make some further progress still. Q662 Mr Caton: Moving on to the community safety partnerships, you emphasise the importance of partnerships throughout your paper. Can you tell us what level of influence the local partnerships have in setting priorities at basic command unit level and for the force as a whole? Chief Constable Tonge: That is an interesting discussion topic because we are seeking some clarity from the Government on this at the moment. Regional government offices have been asked to look at the aggregation of targets that are set at local level. I think it is very important for community safety partnerships to work closely with police and other partners to look at specific problems in their area. Having assessed the scale of their problems and having to be clear in terms of who is responsible to try and address some of those issues that affect that problem, they can thereby set local targets. If we look at the level of crime in Newport, for example, and the wherewithal of all those partners, then the targets set in Newport are likely to be more searching and stretching than they would be here in Monmouthshire, where the levels of crime are lower. It is important to allow my local commanders to work closely with local authorities to understand the real nature of their problems and how they can address them. The only issue there is how they will all aggregate over the force level and the national level in terms of long-term crime reduction targets. I think we can be more relaxed, and the Government should be more relaxed, as to how we achieve say a 15 per cent reduction in crime over three years, rather than trying to be specific about what categories of crime each local area addresses. Q663 Mr Caton: Which of the partners in Gwent pull their weight in the partnership and which do not? Chief Constable Tonge: There is a review going on to look at this at governmental level, and your Committee is looking at it. In my view, in the short time I have been in Gwent, we have some pretty effective partnerships. I mentioned last time and since our last meeting together the greater improvement in trying to bring the strategic group together on a pan-Gwent basis to look at how we tackle some of the problems. In the past, from my reading of the situation, health has not been the most thrusting department, and there is a renewed commitment within the Welsh Assembly Government and within the local health wards to try and address some of those concerns. For example, so far this year we have seen some improvements in drug referral and drug treatment availability in Gwent, but health I believe could do more. As far as the individual community safety partnerships are concerned, it is fair to say that some of them are excellent in some areas and some are weaker. They all move at different rates. I have appointed someone to work with me at headquarters now to report into this pan-Gwent meeting to try and highlight best practice. If Blaenau Gwent are particularly good in one area, how can that help Torfaen, Caerphilly, Newport and Monmouthshire, and vice versa? That is critical in terms of sharing best practice. Q664 Mr Caton: What would you like to get from the partnership that you are currently not getting? Chief Constable Tonge: I said at the last hearing that for me partnerships will only work if you have commitment from the partners at the strategic level and an agreement in terms of targets and who will deliver what. Only then, can you have true accountability for delivering against that. If you look at some of the partnerships since the Morgan report, very often people have nodded and said, "yes, we agree with this", but unless you are hard-edged and hold people to account in relation to achieving the target, then very often all we get is talking shops rather than committing resources and achieving targets. We have to become more robust on that, particularly when it comes to people like health and engaging them. Targets have to all work together collectively to improve the quality of life in an area. Sometimes our departmental plans from ODPM or Health drive people in different ways and give conflicting targets, so anything that can bring that together can help. Q665 Mr Caton: What if you turned that question around and asked your partners what they would like to be getting from the police in the partnership which they are not currently getting? Chief Constable Tonge: One of them is that they would certainly expect a lot more than we are able to deliver. That is always a frustration for me. It is like a military general: if only I had some more troops and an extra battalion, by God could I make an impact! There is always frustration there. If you look at the Licensing Act, it is fine and there are a lot more new powers, but I need police officers to exercise those powers. Capacity is certainly one of those things. In other areas, if we get competing objectives, then there is some difficulty. One might be for instance the effectiveness of, say, a Crown court. If a judge has an effective trial before him, we may end up with six sets of witnesses and police officers waiting to get on. I would like to see the offices out there being operational. The judge might want them all there to make sure the business is done. Sometimes therefore there are competing priorities. The major frustration would be where you have competing priorities and our capacity to deliver against other people's agendas. Q666 Mr Caton: We will probably be coming back to licensing later, so I will concentrate on the community safety partnerships. Thinking about their role, are there any structures or procedures that could be improved to facilitate good working relationships between tiers of government, the police and other agencies in delivering successful partnership initiatives? Chief Constable Tonge: Other than the ones I have mentioned, which are about ensuring true joined-up government with shared objectives across the board - and we have seen some improvements in that, I have to say, but there is some way to go, particularly with health - the sharing of best practice across areas and a commitment by people at strategic level to joint activity. If I think of emergency planning or things that go on at a strategic level across the whole of the Gwent Force area, the chief executives need to be on board and signed up to that. That is not quite the case yet. Q667 Mr Caton: At the moment, the police have certain targets, and the community safety partnerships have other targets. One suggestion for improved partnership working is that the Government sets common or complementary targets across the agencies. Do you think that that is desirable or feasible? Chief Constable Tonge: I think it will improve things. One of the stumbling blocks at the moment is some of the micro-management, and I can give two specific examples. Going back to crime reduction, if the Government just said, "look, chief constable, I want to see Gwent achieve an 18.5 per cent reduction in crime over three years, I could go ahead and deliver that with my CSPs by then targeting specifically the problems they have in their area. What is happening currently is that CSPs are asked to list against ten crimes specific targets, for example stealing pedal cycles. In certain areas in my force that is not a problem, but setting a specific target to achieve that in my view is not the best way forward. We have a national intelligence model and we should be intelligence-led. We test and co-ordinate our resources to address specific problems. If we are given more leeway to allow us to exercise our professionalism and tackle those things, that would be more helpful. Q668 Mr Caton: Earlier on in our inquiry we spent a day in Cardiff looking at how police were working there, and we saw how South Wales dedicated police resources to the Communities First areas. Do you do the same thing in Gwent? Chief Constable Tonge: We do more than that. I have 43 Communities First areas across different categories. What I want to do is see dedicated resources to all our wards and all our areas. Communities First areas have got some money there; it is chief executive led and local authority led, to improve quality of life in dealing with those areas - but I want to do that across the whole of Gwent. That is a decision that was made, and we have 66 there at the moment. That will help the whole of the population, rather than just those in the Communities First areas. I have to say that Gwent Communities First areas exist, and there are some good practices going on in Gwent. They have become very much engaged with the police in looking at how they can make a difference in those communities. I would cite that as best practice. Not every local authority area in my force with Communities First areas approach it in that way. Some of them take a more single-minded view, using the local authority initiatives in that area rather than embracing a much wider partnership audience. Q669 Mr Caton: Is not the whole idea of Communities First to target resources on communities that most need it? Chief Constable Tonge: Yes. Q670 Mr Caton: It sounds as though you have a more blanket approach. Is that not going to dilute what you can put into those particular communities that are most in need? Chief Constable Tonge: No. I think I am a stage ahead of South Wales, which has given dedicated resources to Communities First areas. I have given dedicated resources to all areas, and those areas that have specific problems from next year will have not just one ward officer working in that area but will have more; we are going to put the number of people needed commensurate to their crime levels, deprivation and demand. You will find the busier wards in Blaenau Gwent and the busier wards in Newport having perhaps five constables and a sergeant in one of those wards rather than one covering a ward in Monmouthshire. We do priorities, depending on demand. I am pleased to say it is not just the Communities First areas that will reap the benefits of that; it is the whole of the force. Q671 Mr Caton: Have you been able to measure concrete benefits either in the Communities First initiative or any other communities you are working in? For example, have police relations improved? Has there been a measurable impact on crime levels? Chief Constable Tonge: Again, it is a bit patchy, to be honest, in terms of how that money is being used on those local authority areas. We have our crime statistics broken down into our local sector levels so that we can look at the impact in those areas. We can also assess the impact of the joint initiatives that we have. It would be wrong to say that the Communities First areas, in every instance, have shown substantial increase commensurate to the budget local authorities put in. Q672 Hywel Williams: I would like to ask you about the division of powers between the National Assembly and central UK Government. What is the main difference between the chief constable of a force in Wales and one in England? Chief Constable Tonge: There are a number of subtle differences. First of all, obviously, when you are looking at partnership activity and trying to use police resources to tackle things in a holistic way, a lot of those partners are now controlled and run by the Welsh Assembly Government, so necessarily I have to work with them. It is another body that I have to relate to. I have to say, as a chief constable coming to Wales, I have been very impressed at a number of things, first the identity of Wales, the country and region, where four chief constables and police authorities work very, very closely together. We have a plan on collaboration and activity of collaboration that I have not witnessed in any region in England. We are well ahead of the game on that front. The other positive thing is the relationship you are able to have with the Welsh Assembly Government. It is more accessible. I just think of yesterday as an example. It is just pure coincidence, but I spent an hour and a half with Edwina Hart, the Minister for Social Justice and Regeneration, and an hour with Sue Essex, the Finance Minister. That is not something I would be accustomed to as a chief constable in England going to the House of Westminster. The relationships are a lot closer; you can get to the top; leadership is less remote - but it is an extra hurdle. There are some frustrations with it. Most of my strings are pulled by Westminster but if I am going to be impactive as a chief constable I have to work with the Welsh Assembly in areas such as fire, health and other issues. Q673 Hywel Williams: It is interesting that you say you can essentially pop down the road and see them, which is what other witnesses have also said. Chief Constable Tonge: Not just seeing them to have frank discussions with them, but relate to things in matters they understand. If you look at the thrust of the Home Office strategy for policing, this idea of forming relationships at the local level and addressing problems - the people at the Welsh Assembly Government that I speak to tend to understand the issues that pertain to Wales, in a way that is not always the case at the Home Office. Q674 Hywel Williams: You would say that your dealings with the Welsh Assembly Government have had a direct effect on the way the force works and on actual policing. Chief Constable Tonge: Yes. Whilst there is not a direct accountability such as for policing, there is an accountability because we do not exist in a vacuum and have to work with these people. If you look at the funding and support we have had traditionally in the past from the Welsh Assembly Government, which continues today - things like Tarian - the drugs strategy - we have got to work with education and we have got to work with health, so there are lots of pluses there. Q675 Hywel Williams: With whom do you communicate in the Welsh Assembly who has the influence? What is the focus of that relationship? Chief Constable Tonge: In terms of my major pillar, it would be Edwina Hart, in terms of taking the lead on these issues. I have regular meetings with her, and she has regular meetings with the Police Federation, with the Police Authority Wales members. There is a good dynamic there. Clearly we have to work with the Transport Minister, the Environment Minister, the Finance Minister, on all sorts of initiatives. Recently within the last two months I have shared platforms with the Environment Minister and I have worked with the Transport Minister, in terms of road safety issues; so there is a very good dynamic across the whole spectrum of the Welsh Assembly Government. Q676 Hywel Williams: Do you see a difference between the emphasis from the Home Office on crime reduction and the National Assembly's focus on welfare enhancements? Chief Constable Tonge: There have been some differences, if you look back a couple of years; there were certainly substantial differences between the thrust and emphasis that was placed on things, but there has been a coming-together. If you look at the Together strategy that the Home Office has, together with the partnership strategy that the Welsh Assembly Government now has, there is a coming together and they are trying to tackle local issues, so there is less of a tension than there was before. Going back to the point that your colleague made, if you look at dealing with local issues and aggregating them on a Welsh basis, then we have probably got a lot more in common with the thrust of the Welsh Assembly Government than we have with Westminster. Q677 Hywel Williams: In relation to funding, there is an increased focus on community issues and services: does this increased focus imply additional financial responsibility for the National Assembly of Wales - additional funding from the National Assembly? Chief Constable Tonge: Yes, I think there would be. Q678 Hywel Williams: Should who is calling the tune be paying the piper? Chief Constable Tonge: Yes. I am concerned now as a chief constable in Wales about how we are affected by the funding formula and the recent settlement. At the moment, we are trying to settle our budgets for next year. Wales has had a 3.75 settlement in terms of funding increase from central government in grant. England has averaged 4.86, so we are a good percentage point behind there. If you look at the council tax issue here in Wales, there are some concerns about the Welsh Assembly Government's ability to try and fund some of the shortfall in funding. With all the things that we are trying to achieve, with the raised public expectation, with me wanting to do more on visibility and reassurance, it is difficult to achieve all that with limited budgets. The sorts of things we are trying to do on reassurance include visibility, accessibility, and putting people back on the streets, has huge cost implications because the public still expect you to answer all the 999 calls and mobile phones. We have had a thrust to try and improve that, but to have that without any budget is a very, very difficult thing. Q679 Hywel Williams: Would you say that the Home Office's revenue spent in Wales or the Funding Formula requires review? Chief Constable Tonge: Yes. I am not so naïve as to think there is a perfect funding formula because there is not. There is not a lot wrong with the current funding formula. You could argue that there should be more for rurality and less for urban areas, but if you look at the pressures on the Government in terms of delivering funds to public services, there has to be a formula that helps the distribution of funds. My tack would be that there is not enough money being spread around within that funding formula. It is the total amount of money that needs to be increased. I am going to find it hard to deliver all that I want to do in Gwent next year with the funding settlement I have got, and the funding formula can be blamed for that, but actually there is not enough money in the system for policing. Q680 Hywel Williams: It is a global issue. The South Wales Police expressed concerns about the impact of short-term and centralised funding, which it argued was inadequate to deal with the Force's local and long-term problem-solving requirements. Do you agree with this? Chief Constable Tonge: Wholeheartedly. There is nothing worse than not knowing from one year to the next whether you have funding available, particularly if 83 per cent of all our budgets are on people. If you are employing people and they do not know on 1 February whether they will have a job on 1 April, that is no way to deal with people. The other thing to watch is that it makes it very difficult for long-term planning. There are not many organisations that employ the amount of people that we do and are responsible for delivering a public service like we are, that wakes almost at the eleventh hour every year to see how much they will have next year and make long-term plans. It makes it difficult to recruit quality people, if you are not able to give that certainty. Another trend we have seen recently with direct grant funding or red-circle funding from the Government has been - and PCSOs are a good example - the funding is given 100 per cent in year one, then 75 per cent at some later stage, then 50 per cent, going down to nothing. Again, that puts direct pressures on you, and you cannot recruit people - it is tough. Chatting to the Finance Minister of the Welsh Assembly Government yesterday, she certainly gave a commitment that the Welsh Assembly would never do that; if they were going to ask you for something, they would fund that in full, and retain that funding there. I wish that was true across the board, because that makes my job very difficult if that is not the case. Q681 Hywel Williams: Another investigation this Committee has undertaken is on the difficulties of short-term funding and the tailing off, tapering off. That has been identified not only by the police by most other public servants. How do you think that this should be addressed for the record? Chief Constable Tonge: Again, I go back to the point of target-setting. Education is a good example here. If I were given a budget and held to account for performance, with some large-scale performance indicators like an overall reduction in crime and increase in satisfaction and confidence - let me manage that budget. At the moment, I have no capacity to vary the nature of the people I employ. If I reduce the numbers of police officers I will lose money pound for pound for direct grant, so I have no flexibility. There are lots of roles I could look at to ensure I have more uniformed police officers with their powers outside in public, by looking at some of the roles that at the moment police officers are engaged in who do not use their powers in that job; and I could employ someone else long-term to build you the professionalism to do that job. I would like to see, if the Government wants account on policing that the account should be the number of operational staff that I employ as police officers - and I have no problems with that. In education, giving authority budgets back to the people you hold to account and given the things you want to hold them to account for, is the best way of managing it - with the micro-management we have at the moment and in effect sometimes not managing my organisation and other people doing it for me. Q682 Mr Caton: Looking at structure, you mentioned financial pressures. One way of releasing more money for front-line policing might be to look to cutting the number of chief constables and senior management in police forces by amalgamating forces. What is the case for keeping a separate force for Gwent? Chief Constable Tonge: You have to examine what you are trying to achieve. I think the strength of the current strategy and future strategy of government is to ensure local people are held to account for service delivery. Now, you could argue that we are designing the map of policing - or in fact designing the map of anything in 2005 - the maps developed over the years might not be the best structure. However, if you look at the present position, the four police forces in Wales - the chief constables are accountable to their local communities and not remote; they are accessible in the way the Welsh Assembly Government is. The quality of service they deliver is generally better than that delivered by police services in England. In my experience, if you start to tinker with structures, everybody's energy goes into those structures, the changes; and what happens in the short term is that all the quality of the service to the public, i.e., the public service side of it, starts to go by the wayside. You only have to go back to before I joined the job, the amalgamations around the early seventies. It took until the mid eighties to get people to start thinking outside "I used to be with this police force"; people's energies and efforts go into the amalgamation. If there is no clear requirement to change what is already working very effectively, I would simply resist changing the current structure of the police forces to map on to the finance service or the ambulance service, or whatever it might be, without a clear business case for doing that. I am reluctant to tinker with structures that are currently working quite effectively. If you went to one force for Wales, that chief constable would certainly be remote and find it very difficult to relate to the chief executives, the local people, and be accountable. What we are doing is collaborate on lots of areas where we can make cost savings, on back office stuff, on training, on looking at cross-border crime, like Tarian. In improving those areas, I think Wales is well set to continue to deliver a much better service than our colleagues in England do. With that as a backcloth and an opportunity for the future, I would not see any reason to tinker with what works at the moment. Q683 Mr Caton: I take your point about the single police force for Wales, and that is reinforced by most of the evidence we have taken, but we have also taken evidence that suggests Gwent is the anomaly being a smaller police force, and that it could easily be amalgamated into the South Wales Police Force. Chief Constable Tonge: I do not think the Chief Constables for South Wales or myself agree with that. Q684 Mr Caton: That is confirmed by our evidence. Chief Constable Tonge: Yes. I think one chief constable did mention something along those lines. You only have to go - it is a pity you do not have the opportunity to go on patrol in the Rumney Valley and speak to the people who experience being policed by South Wales Police not too long ago about the quality and the local reassurance that they now get that has been increased by Gwent. The difficulty would be for the Gwent population, if you amalgamated with South Wales that, clearly Swansea and Cardiff would be the major sources of policing need, and it would be a concern for the people of Monmouthshire and the outlying areas of Gwent if resources were sucked in to address the problems in the cities. I would certainly not support it and I know Barbara Wilding, Chief Constable for South Wales, would not support it. I think the Chief Constable for North Wales also agrees that the present position is the best position. Q685 Mr Caton: Can you not see any benefits in reducing the number of police forces across the whole of England and Wales then? Chief Constable Tonge: Yes, I can see some instances where that might be the case, but you have to evidence why it is. There is an opportunity, which the police service has at its grasp at this moment in time, to look at collaborative arrangements. There is no doubt that local policing structures, the BCU structures that we have at the moment, are very effective and work. We need to look at the tier above that. For instance, if you have a large-scale public order incident or you are policing a football match, we need mounted resources; we need specialist resources. How do we do that? If you look at the three southern forces in Wales, we are already looking at joint helicopter support. We have joint training initiatives; we have Tarian working across the M4 corridor. There are lots of opportunities to collaborate and minimise costs, to re-invest then in frontline local services, and that is what we are doing here in Wales in a way that no other region in England is doing at the moment. Q686 Mr Caton: Do you think responsibility for the police service in Wales should be transferred to the National Assembly? Chief Constable Tonge: I could give a comment on that, but I think it highly unlikely that that would happen at this moment in time. I think there would be some benefits, but also we would have to watch for some of the pitfalls that would accrue from that. At the end of the day, if you look at the situation in Scotland, the geography is slightly different. I cannot exist on a day-to-day basis without support from maybe Somerset and Gloucestershire; our boundary is the Severn Bridge and link us very carefully. If there was any move to policing being run by the Welsh Assembly Government, we would have to look very, very carefully at the arrangements we have with support and policing in England. With that as a caveat, my mind is open. Q687 Chairman: Last July the Government brought out a white paper on accountability of police forces - Building Safer Communities Together. It proposed that perhaps there should be locally elected boards for police authorities. What is your view on that? Chief Constable Tonge: Again, I ask the question: why change what was only changed not too long ago and which is starting to work very effectively? I have had the pleasure of experiencing working with three police authorities, and I have to say that the injection of independent members who come from business and different professions has improved the contributions of policing, of police authorities. In terms of the wider criminal justice system, we are trying to improve the productivity and efficiency of the system and the way it is held to account by the public. The magistracy have provided, in my view, quite a positive input into police authorities. I have some concerns about moving to directly elected bodies for a number of reasons. You only have to go back in history to look at some of the reasons why police authorities were changed in the first place; it was because relationships because political; relationships with the police sometimes became a little too close. There needs to be an independence and a skill and experience to hold the police service to account, and I think that is best served by a mix of independent magistrates and elected bodies. The first chief constable who gave evidence to the Committee I think mentioned the days of rotten boroughs. I have to say I am too young to remember that, but it is why they were changed in the first place. Q688 Chairman: You are open-minded about whether the National Assembly should have a role. Chief Constable Tonge: Yes. Q689 Chairman: What is called 24-hour licensing is the ability of local authorities to decide what the licensing should be in a particular area. What is your view on that? Chief Constable Tonge: If we get on to the topic from the media's angle, there are some positives. Let us start with the positives that are in the Act. They are bringing local authorities into decisions regarding the conduct of licensed premises in their area, and they are the people who are accountable to the local community on these issues. If they find a local landlord, or a pub or a club that is not being run in the way that it should be, the local authority, the elected people are there to try and deal with the quality of life in that area. That is a positive. I have a number of concerns about what that means for me. At this present moment in time, I am able to plan daily, weekly, monthly or yearly in terms of when I have my resources on duty. That is because I know when the licensed premises, in the main, will cease to serve liquor both at the throwing-out times round pub closing times and the same with clubs - so between ten-thirty and midnight I will have a lot of uniform visibility in my towns and city centres to try and reassure the public and impact on behaviour and crime, and to intervene and make arrests when necessary. Moving that to a much more varied situation will cause me to have to have the flexibility to have resources on hand at times when I need not have them. For instance, now, between three in the morning and seven, I can police Gwent with very few resources, because the demand is not there. If I cannot predict that, that means I am going to have to put more resources on there. I can only move them from somewhere else in a 24-hour clock, so it probably means in the short term I will have fewer resources available during the day. In terms of the conduct of licensed premises and the culture we have in Great Britain now, I think we need to learn the lessons that we learned from football policing, if we cast our minds back to the seventies and eighties and the football grounds. If you look at the regulations that were brought to bear on that, where we put a responsibility on football clubs for policing inside the grounds and the immediate environs of the football ground, initially that meant they paid for the policing costs. However, I have to say that the clubs started to get their act together. They employed stewards and trained them. They looked at what they had inside the football grounds. They put in seating in and made proper areas. They changed the environment in which fans were in the football ground. Instead of standing in large numbers, they changed the environment. They put in CCTV and they had the responsibility. Essentially, football violence is a very small problem inside football grounds. It is still a problem elsewhere. If we look at a lot of our promotions at the moment and a lot of the attitudes of the licensing trade, the brewers, the marketing and media campaigns, it is to pack people into clubs, sell them cheap alcohol and promote cheap alcohol - you only have to look at Bacardi advert - the railway station at a quiet time - the train goes, get out the ice, pour out the vodka and have a celebration. I would hate to be a resident in that area, and I am sure you would. It is full of promotions at the moment, and if you look at the culture inside pubs and clubs, it is binge drinking - "let us drink as many vodka shots as we can". I think we have got to put some responsibility on the licensing trade to get their act in order. They should have their own inspectorate like football grounds have, and they should set the standards. Licensees need to know their responsibilities and carry them out themselves, and where the evidence shows it, the principle of "the polluter pays" should be brought to bear on some of the major city and town centres. They should have some responsibility for picking up the costs of the problems in their area. We are not a café culture like in Tuscany or Paris where we do not see shop-keepers going into work on a Monday morning and finding vomit or urine or whatever it might be in their shop doorways. That is the reality, and that is the reality my staff face every Friday and Saturday night. Policing gets sucked in to deal with the problems that revolve around licences. I think we need a joined-up approach to try and shape the culture of responsibility for licensed premises, look at the costs that will put the responsibility for their place in the way that football grounds do, and try and get responsibility for educating young people about the risks of alcohol and binge drinking. You just have to look at accident and emergency departments and the long-term liver damage and the sort of problems there. As a country we need to get a hold of the culture we see on our streets in 2004 and 2005. Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. That is the end of the session. |