PAUL GOGGINS AND DR STEPHEN LADYMAN

15 MARCH 2006

  Q340  Chairman: The only thing is, Minister, the law makes no differentiation between what is laughingly called recreational drug use and prescription drug use. Does it not seem odd to you that we do not even know how many people are involved who have this kind of problem with drugs in their system?

  Paul Goggins: Yes.

  Q341  Chairman: Is it something that the department has even considered?

  Paul Goggins: I would probably need to go back further than the time I have been in this position to be able to give you a full answer to that question in terms of how seriously it has been considered in the past.

  Q342  Chairman: Could I ask you to give me a written note with the department's views and the reasons why they do not differentiate in casualty figures between those who are using drugs and those who are using drink?

  Paul Goggins: I would be very happy to do that.

  Q343  Chairman: It would not only help us but it would at least give us some clear indication of how the department is thinking. Can I talk to you about safety cameras? The differentiation in the funding, I assume, was driven by the express public perception that safety cameras were an easy means of making money and that is why we have changed the funding and the way they are going to operate. The police have made it very clear that they are concerned that it is going to leave them vulnerable to reductions in funding for speed enforcement. Is that a view you accept?

  Paul Goggins: What we are very keen on is to make sure that the money generated is not just spent on more and more cameras but is spent on a more comprehensive approach to road safety. It is very important therefore that the investment that is made is made in the context of crime and disorder reduction partnerships and things of that kind, so that we get a properly balanced enforcement strategy that reflects the needs of particular local communities in towns and cities up and down the country.

  Q344  Chairman: Have the two of you set down anywhere your agreement on what this policy should mean in real terms?

  Dr Ladyman: Let me go back to your first question. I do not accept the premise that that was why we changed the rules.

  Q345  Chairman: What was the intellectual justification for changing the rules?

  Dr Ladyman: One of the things we wanted to deal with was indeed public perception. Our rationale for changing the rules was that it was clear to us that, in certain areas, partnerships had formed which might be minded to look first for a road camera based solution rather than a better and perhaps more cost effective solution.

  Q346  Chairman: How many and in what ways? You must have some evidence for this. You would not just make an assertion on the remarks of some passing chief constable, would you?

  Dr Ladyman: Why not? I think you make many assertions based on the remarks of passing chief constables.

  Q347  Chairman: As you know, I have a very little brain and am of no importance in the scheme of things, whereas you are of quite different standing.

  Dr Ladyman: The simple fact is that we had, for very good reasons, put in place a funding regime that was intended to make sure that if people wanted to incur the capital and revenue costs of speed cameras they could use the revenue from them for that purpose. Equally, it was clear that, if that regime stayed in place for ever, there would increasingly be an incentive for people involved in that simply to put more cameras in place, to take that as the easy option to solving road safety issues, rather than to think more widely. There were increasing demands on us from the police, from communities, from lobbyists and from other people who take an interest in road safety issues that the money should be able to be spent more widely than that. Having looked at all of those representations, we took the view that they were correct, that there was still a very clear role for road cameras and we had to make sure that there was funding going to be available to continually deploy road cameras where they were the most appropriate solution to the road safety problem. Equally, we wanted to give an incentive to the existing camera partnerships to broaden their membership, so they were not just going to be the police and the people who put up cameras any more; they were now going to be included in road safety teams from local councils, which they were not in some places. Maybe they should also include the National Health Service and the other emergency services which, in many places, they do not. We wanted to encourage them to expand their partnerships. We wanted to encourage them to look at a wider range of road safety initiatives that they might like to deploy, but we wanted to still give them the power to use cameras where those were appropriate, so it seemed to us a natural evolution of the existing system that we should say, in future, camera revenue will go to the Treasury, as for any other fine, but the Treasury will retain this very significant block of money, £110 million in the first instance, that will then be available generally to be deployed as the partnerships feel it is best able to be deployed.

  Q348  Chairman: That expansion of their role is spelt out in detail in such a way that they know what they are expected to do with their money?

  Dr Ladyman: Yes.

  Q349  Chairman: Therefore, you have made it very clear to the Home Office that even any suggestion that the police are not going to get the same money from having safety cameras is quite wrong?

  Dr Ladyman: That is correct. The police will remain a key partner in a road safety partnership. It will be for them to say how much money they need to carry out their enforcement practice for the camera programme that is available in any particular constabulary area and to establish that they are going to get the money out of that pot.

  Q350  Chairman: I am going to come back to you, Mr Goggins, on this whole conception of road traffic officers. I have listened carefully to what you have said and it all sounds ultimately extraordinarily reasonable. Police officers are not going to be required just to do one job; they are going to have multitasking. They are going to be able to do all these different things at once and therefore we cannot isolate the numbers of road traffic officers. Is that the burden of your song or do I misrepresent you?

  Paul Goggins: You put it very well. Increasingly now technology is something that every police officer will have at their disposal and that will result in a number of different improvements, not least in terms of roads policing. We need to make sure that people are constrained within a particular role but are able to fulfil their full role. Roads policing will be one aspect but there will be other aspects to the work that they do as well. That means you are making the best use of the technology because you are empowering those officers to do more than they could have done before, but you are also making effective use of their time because they can perform more tasks than they were able to do before.

  Q351  Chairman: It also means that you cannot isolate who is doing road traffic work, does it not?

  Paul Goggins: There needs to be clear leadership. Again, these are things which Her Majesty's Inspectorate have looked at. There need to be clear systems of monitoring the roads policing policy at the local level. They need to keep their eye on the ball in order to meet the objectives that they set for themselves, but it would be wrong just to think we have these roads police officers here and we have all the other police officers over there. We have made it perfectly plain over a considerable period of time now that we expect roads policing to be integrated into policing as a whole and I think that is a positive step forward. I think it is better in terms of general crime reduction and community safety. It is also better in terms of enforcing the law on the roads.

  Q352  Chairman: You do not believe that there are certainly skills which are required by a dedicated road traffic unit that are not available, no matter how admirable the other skills are amongst other police officers who might routinely be called upon to do this work?

  Paul Goggins: There will be some tasks which are specific and which require particular skills. I am not saying there should be no road traffic officers in the future. Clearly there will be a need for that. There will be a need for good central coordination within police forces as well to make sure that all of this work is properly run, properly organised and directed. I would make the point that a simple headcount no longer tells the story of how effective police forces are in terms of roads policing.

  Q353  Chairman: Her Majesty's Inspectorate said that the use of intelligence and information in roads policing was generally weak. What plans do you have to ensure the police have access to motorists' data which is accurate and up to date? Dr Ladyman, which of your many superb agencies is going to undertake this task?

  Dr Ladyman: There are several of them that are going to be involved in this. Clearly the DVLA is going to be the key player. The DVLA has made arrangements with the police so that we can download the driver database to the police computers.

  Q354  Chairman: Is that working? Too long a pause will indicate a no.

  Dr Ladyman: I am hesitating just to say yes it is working because—

  Q355  Chairman: Because I might come back to you next week and point out very forcibly that it is not.

  Dr Ladyman: Exactly, yes. It is early days.

  Q356  Chairman: So it is not working but God will send it to us in due course.

  Dr Ladyman: It is working in certain areas. The police do now have access to driver information. They know whether people have a driving licence. They have vehicle registration information. What I am not prepared to leap in and say immediately is that every policeman has access to the insurance database.

  Q357  Chairman: Has any policeman? We have taken evidence and it is not always possible for police forces to access the information that you are very confident they can use. Can you assure me that the police do have full access to this information?

  Dr Ladyman: We make it available. It is up to individual constabularies—

  Q358  Chairman: The system you use would have something to do with it. I could say I am making things available if I stuck them on the board in Welsh. It would not necessarily have universal application.

  Dr Ladyman: It is up to individual constabularies to invest in the technology they need to make that information available to their officers at the roadside. What we are doing is making the driver database available, the insurance database available, the car registration database available and, from the end of March when the MOT network is completely computerised, we will increasingly start to make MOT information available.

  Q359  Chairman: As a matter of interest, can all of those databases talk to one another within your own department?

  Dr Ladyman: There are issues when databases have to talk together.