Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-79)
MR GEORGE
MUIR, MR
DAVID FRANKS,
MR IAN
DOBBS, MR
ANDREW HAINES,
MR KEITH
LUDEMAN AND
MR ROBIN
GISBY
19 APRIL 2006
Q60 Clive Efford: Can I just follow
up on CCTV because my experience of CCTV is that my local monitoring
station is as big as this room and it is a room full of TV screens.
The idea of 24-hour monitoring is just a myth, is it not? You
have got two or three people looking at 40 or 50-odd screens.
Is not CCTV a limited tool and are there not regulations about
the use of CCTV that require a certain size image of anybody who
has committed a crime before you can go to any sort of action
against an individual? I do not know who would like to answer
that, but I think it is a very limited tool in my experience.
Mr Haines: There are some limitations
to it but the evidence is there for our own eyes. We have seen
significant reductions in crime and we have also seen significant
reductions in passenger fear of crime. If you look at CCTV in
control centres, you are right, if you walk into a control centre
where there is a bank of 50 TV screens, it can be quite mind-blowing.
Having worked alongside the professionals who work in there day
after day, they get very, very attuned to picking up hot-spots
and being able to notice differences. There is technology being
developed that is meant to be intelligent CCTV that will trace
unusual movements. Thus far when we have tested it in procurement
processes it is not as good as salesmen tend to suggest. It is
something we look at closely because, you are absolutely right,
if you could get something that could target risk locations or
risk activities then it would make it an even better tool.
Q61 Chairman: Why do we not ask Mr
Gisby that?
Mr Gisby: Which of the many questions
would that be?
Q62 Chairman: Mr Gisby, if you have
got these big stations and we know that most of the big crime
is happening on big stations, what would your attitude be to that?
Do you have a problem with your existing systems?
Mr Gisby: We use them in a number
of ways. We do monitor them. We have in London, as it says in
the papers, 2,500 screens and one person can look at three or
four screens. Do I have 600 or 700 people looking at the screens
all the time? No I do not. We monitor them where we expect trouble.
We advise jointly with the police where there might be trouble.
However, it is one of a number of things. We have a lot of police
community support officers provided by the BTP and we have a lot
of our own staff across the stations as well.
Q63 Chairman: What do you call a
lot across 17 stations?
Mr Gisby: We have a couple of
hundred round London and all our stations are manned fully all
the time, 580 staff across 17 stations.
Q64 Chairman: Do you pay for those?
Mr Gisby: Yes. So it complements
other things that we do on the station. We use it reactivity,
obviously following up incidents and prosecutions. When we have
had an incident reported it is very effective in helping us. We
also use it proactively just for managing crowds. It is also very
useful to us in the ebb and flow of things across the network.
We can see where we have got hot-spots, and if we have got certain
incidents we can react to those as well.
Q65 Clive Efford: How many of the
people who are monitoring the screens are in radio contact with
the British Transport Police or any other enforcement officers?
Mr Gisby: They would be on each
station jointly with the Transport Police where they are based
as well as through the station management structure. We can provide
a back-up note on that if you require.
Q66 Clive Efford: So where cameras
are monitored as opposed to the ones that are on the carriages
if an incident is reported, then the person monitoring the screens
can focus in on that particular area and then play their part
in dealing with the situation?
Mr Gisby: Yes. I think we should
be clear here though, the vast majority of the usage of this equipment
is reactive, to follow up after incidents that are reported elsewhere
which have occurred because a number of complementary systems
have not worked—people on the platform, staff here, police
there, support officers elsewhere, the deterrent effect of CCTV
and other things. That is mainly where they are used. I would
not like this Committee to go away with the idea that we have
across the industry large numbers of people in real time monitoring
people across stations and proactively nipping events happening
in real time at the time. It is not like that.
Q67 Clive Efford: If an incident
is reported on one of your stations, is it then immediately brought
to the attention of the people monitoring the CCTV cameras so
that they can play their part in recording any incidents that
might take place?
Mr Gisby: Yes and that can happen
very quickly. It can also, depending on the quality of the image,
the cameras and the co-ordination with BTP, take some time, hence
my comment earlier that further investment in this area and further
co-operation and liaison in this area is about sharing in real
time and quickly the information we are already gathering. I would
not put up an awful lot more cameras in my 17 major stations.
What I am interested in is quick, real time processing, sharing
that information with other authorities and other CCTV networks,
and some of the stuff to which Mr Haines referred, which is more
computer-based image recognition equipment so that we can get
to the heart of the matter quicker. I am sure the Chief Constable
will talk about it later, but if you go to the video editing suite
of the BTP, it can take an awful long time to go through an awful
lot of images in order to get patterns of behaviour and to capture
people. I think you will remember that after the incidents last
summer the images at Luton were produced fairly quickly. The images
which obviously helped come from our cameras of previous work
there took some weeks to find because 17,000 tapes and images
were taken away in the first couple of days. It takes time to
go through that stuff, whether you are dealing with very major
incidents or relatively minor ones. That is probably where more
of the investment should go now so that people can respond more
quickly.
Q68 Clive Efford: Is there an issue
about the quality and the size of the image before any action
can be taken?
Mr Gisby: With the investment
that is going into digital equipment and so on, it is moving in
the right way. You are seeing the end result of some years of
frustration, I think, within the industry and elsewhere about
the degree of evidential definition you do finally need to get
for a conviction. It is quite a challenge to get sufficient evidence,
particularly given where some of these events happen, the lighting,
the dress of the person, and so on, simply to get a conviction,
but I think with the information and images we are getting now
that is getting much better.
Q69 Clive Efford: Can I ask Mr Dobbs,
you pay for TravelSafe officers who are deployed by the British
Transport Police. How effective have these been as compared to
fully trained police officers and community support officers in
preventing crime on railways?
Mr Dobbs: They have proven to
be very, very effective. We originally gave an undertaking to
introduce just over 30 officers and we have brought in 56, so
we obviously believe that they have a very—
Q70 Chairman: Are they identifiable,
Mr Dobbs?
Mr Dobbs: They are dressed in
very distinctive uniforms. They do not try to look like policemen
but they wear hats, jackets, trousers, they are smartly dressed,
and they are out there to make sure that anti-social behaviour
does not fall on to railway property and on to trains. They are
very flexible. We can put them in different combinations in different
places at different times, again based on risk.
Q71 Clive Efford: What are the significant
differences between them and community support officers?
Mr Dobbs: That is a question that
I am not qualified to answer. I will have to give you a reply
on that afterwards. I do not know the answer to that.
Q72 Clive Efford: What powers do
they have? Do they have the powers to stop someone and ask to
see their ticket or remove someone from a station or do they call
the police in those situations?
Mr Dobbs: They have limited powers
but they do not have the power of arrest. If that is required
the Transport Police officers back them up. They are deployed
by the Transport Police as a means of gaining intelligence and
also getting out there on the trains and having a very visible
presence.
Q73 Clive Efford: Do they have an
accreditation under the Railway Safety Accreditation Scheme?
Mr Dobbs: I do not think so.
Q74 Chairman: Mr Haines has something
to tell us.
Mr Haines: I was only going to
help my colleague out because it is a bit of an incestuous industry
and I introduced the TravelSafe officers in a previous life. They
were the precursor to the community support officers. If you like,
they were the pilot.
Mr Gisby: So you know the difference
between them and the CSOs?
Mr Dobbs: There is not a lot of
difference. I do not believe they are accredited. The accreditation
is much more an initiative by the British Transport Police and
most operators are still reviewing the merits of that.
Q75 Clive Efford: Do they give the
public a false sense of security by deploying officers with fewer
powers or are they effective in dealing with anti-social behaviour?
Mr Haines: My experience of both
TravelSafe officers and community support officers is that they
are more readily available than police officers, you can deploy
them more quickly, and they are easier to recruit.
Q76 Chairman: Are they cheaper?
Mr Haines: Per head yes, but that
was not the driver originally. It was a shortage of British Transport
Police officers that drove us down that route at the time. We
had vacancies at local police stations which they were struggling
to recruit to in the south-east of England in particular.
Q77 Clive Efford: Do they have to
undergo CRB checks?
Mr Haines: Very much so. They
are recruited alongside the British Transport Police who are involved
in the process.
Q78 Clive Efford: Is it not likely
to create confusion in the eyes of the public if you have got
private security guards which are yours, TravelSafe offices, community
support officers, railway enforcement officers and police officers,
if there are so many enforcement officers for them to deal with?
Mr Gisby: I think you are looking
at a number of proposals over the last couple of years to come
forward and solve this problem. You are looking also at a possible
restructuring of the Transport Police and moving perhaps towards
a more focused force. I think there will be an evolution here.
Different operators and ourselves have all come at this in slightly
different ways. There has been an overlap to that as a response
to what happened last summer and so on. I believe there is a role
for a body of men and women that are not as expensive to train
and maintain and as specialist as the Transport Police themselves,
but fit somewhere between what one might call straightforward
railway station staff and a higher level of security staff but
not going as far as a fully-fledged Transport Police officer.
Whether that is a CSO coming a little downwards from a fully-fledged
constable or it is the rail industry moving a little further forward
into more measures of hands-on security—
Chairman: I think we need to ask the
police about that, Mr Gisby.
Q79 Mr Wilshire: Mr Gisby touched
on the point that concerns me. I would like to ask all six of
you would merging the British Transport Police with a different
police force make your railway stations safer?
Mr Gisby: No. Absolutely not.
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