Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
SIR HUGH
ORDE, MR
ALISTAIR FINLAY
AND MR
DAVID COX
6 FEBRUARY 2008
Q1 Chairman: Sir Hugh, could I once again
welcome you to the Committee. We are delighted to see you and
thank you for coming over. I understand that you have to catch
a plane and therefore need us to finish by six o'clock and some
of the Northern Ireland Members are in precisely the same position
and I imagine will be on the same plane, so that we will do. We
have two divisions, one apparently at 4.28, at which point I will
adjourn the Committee for 20 minutes and no more so that we can
then get straight on. If we are not able to have our private session
today then we will do it when we come to Northern Ireland in a
week or two's time. We are very grateful and if you would like
to introduce your two colleagues we can begin.
Sir Hugh Orde: Certainly. Assistant
Chief Constable Alistair Finlay. Alistair runs really all the
historical enquiries matters for me and public inquiries and indeed
we are now moving towards inquests as well. David Cox, a colleague
of mine from Steven's team, now retired, leads the Historic Enquiries
Team on my behalf.
Q2 Chairman: Thank you very much.
Was there anything that you wanted to say by way of introduction?
Sir Hugh Orde: Very briefly. First
of all, thank you for the opportunity. Northern Ireland at the
moment is at an interesting place and policing it is quite an
interesting task, but we face a number of unique challenges. Only
yesterday we had to raise public awareness of the very real threat
from distant Republican terrorism—domestic terrorism, for
want of a better description, a unique feature of Northern Ireland—and
we are responding to that of course now without military support.
At the other end of the equation we are dealing with many, many
historic matters, which is beginning to put an increasing burden
on my organisation and, I would argue, my ability to deliver a
more effective policing service with less resource. It has got
to the stage, I think, where it is entirely appropriate that the
Committee looks into this because it is an issue that I do not
think will go away in the short term and will continue to cause
issues for policing for the present until perhaps there is a wider
solution that is looked into.
Q3 Chairman: Before we begin on those
subjects could I pick up the point that you made about Northern
Ireland being an interesting place at the moment and the warning
that you had to issue—the very serious warning—yesterday.
It came to my notice yesterday that it was being said that the
situation in South Armagh is so difficult at the moment that your
officers are requesting the use of helicopters; is that true?
Sir Hugh Orde: At the moment,
as you are aware, we no longer use military support at all—Operation
Banner is over. What we have done is put in an additional police
resource, a territorial support group who are dedicated to supporting
their colleagues at the front line. If we needed helicopters I
have one helicopter, which is a standard police helicopter which
we do use across Northern Ireland—there are no areas we
do not use it—for operational policing and support purposes.
I am not at the stage where I would look to borrow helicopters
from the military—that is the only place from which I could
resource them and that would have to be under military aid to
the civil power—and I am not in that position as we speak.
Q4 Chairman: Do you think you may
be in that position in the near future?
Sir Hugh Orde: I do not see it
personally but we have to monitor this on a day by day basis.
The threat level, I am on record for the last three months for
saying my concerns are that we are reaching a higher level of
threat—that is from a very small group of people disenfranchised
across the piece but does not mean less dangerous. These are not
people fighting for some cause, these are people who do not understand
the end game and are hanging on to power using the tactics they
have always used, which is terror and fear, and we, together with
our colleagues and An Garda S-«ocha«na and the security
services, are more than capable of dealing with them, but we do
think it was right to raise public awareness because again it
is an opportunity for the public to add support to that effort
to finish these people off once and for all.
Q5 Chairman: Are you now getting
that degree of support from the wider public that you did not
enjoy relatively recently? When we came over on our first inquiry
you were lamenting the lack of it; are you now getting more or
less what you want?
Sir Hugh Orde: It is mixed, frankly;
I did not expect it to be anything less at this stage. We are
seeing increasing levels of support from people who historically
would not have supported us. Has that led to a flood of information
around the most dangerous end of the business? No, it has not,
and I do not expect that to take place yet—the conditions
are not there. Sadly, I fear it may be some other serious event
which pushes people more down the line of talking to us and I
would hope to be able to pre-empt that a bit by people talking
to us earlier, but there are places where people still find it
very difficult to engage with police officers.
Q6 Chairman: We have of course had
one very terrible event shortly before Christmas, the Quinn murder.
Are you content with the amount of information that you are getting
on that?
Sir Hugh Orde: That is of course
an investigation outwith jurisdiction. It is one of those difficult
cases where the crime was in one country and much of the investigation
is in another country. I met with Fachtna Murphy, the Garda Commissioner,
last week with my head of crime. I am absolutely confident that
the cooperation between the two services is 100%; anything we
need to do we will do. I do think that there are some interesting
legal issues that have been thrown up that we are now looking
into, should An Garda S-«ocha«na want to arrest people
within our jurisdiction. That is partly because of Schengen and
of course the Republic are not signatories to the relevant parts
of Schengen, so we may to look at those issues, but in the broad
sense our cooperation is absolute and we have guaranteed that
if they need help in the investigation we will give it, and we
have done to date.
Q7 Chairman: The Committee did meet,
of course, with the Commissioner and with you a couple of weeks
ago in Northern Ireland—and we were in Dublin too—and
we were very impressed by that degree of cooperation and I am
sure on behalf of the Committee I can congratulate you for what
you have been able to do with the Commissioner there. If we could
move on to our investigation, beginning first of all with historic
enquiries. Would you like to tell us the scope of your investigations
conducted by your Enquiries Team and the extent to which any of
the investigations are required to comply with human rights or
other legislation? If you could give us a broad picture.
Sir Hugh Orde: I will ask David
to give the detail in a broad sense, Chairman. All I would say
at the beginning is that the Historic Enquiry Team was a police
idea, and it was an absolutely genuine attempt to try and bring
some form of closure to all the unsolved murders which, as you
know, number some 2000 plus. It is different for policing—again
it is a unique feature of the police family, if you like, in Northern
Ireland. We realised at the beginning that this would not bring
many people, if any, people to judicial closure, but what we have
found is that certainly it has given far more information to families
and victims' families than ever before, so I think it is a very
positive thing and of course now we are at the stage of delivering
outcomes unlike any other process that is trying to deal with
the past. David, if you would like to go into a bit more detail?
Mr Cox: The Historic Enquiries
Team was set up, as the Chief Constable says, to try and address
a number of cases from the past, but we quickly entered the world
of terminology because when you start meeting with families you
realise quite quickly that they do not understand the concept
of the past; this is a very real issue for people who lost loved
ones during The Troubles and they have had no resolution, and
in many cases—in very many cases—no information at
all about what happened. When we set up the team there was no
template for such a team and in fact we did not really know the
scale of what it was we were going to undertake and initially
our research showed us that there were 3,268 deaths attributable
to The Troubles between 1969 and the signing of the Good Friday
Agreement in 1998. So that was the scale of the task and it also
quickly became necessary to decide that we would look at all those
deaths because we set ourselves up as a family-centred operation
to try to answer the questions that families raised, and simply
because statistics show that certain cases that the police dealt
with are shown as "detected" does not mean that the
families in those cases have the answers that they want. So we
undertook to see all families if they wanted to engage with us.
That would mean 3,268 cases, and that occurred in 2,516 incidents.
So that scale of enterprise is quite unique.
Q8 Chairman: How many was the team?
Mr Cox: When we initially set
up we had a staff of about 80 but as we have evolved and become
further into the task we have had to grow, for a number of reasons,
and we currently stand at around 180.
Q9 Lady Hermon: Where are you actually
based? Can families come and visit you at separate premises?
Mr Cox: Yes, we are based at a
site that is not a current police station but it was police premises—it
was an old clothing store which has been refurbished; it is just
outside Lisburn off the M1 and it is readily accessible and it
has been host to a number of meetings with families.
Q10 Chairman: Mr Cox, how many of
the 180 are serving police officers?
Mr Cox: A very small number; we
have about four serving police officers, although we are due to
grow with a couple of seconded staff coming in from the Metropolitan
Police.
Q11 Chairman: How many are retired
police officers?
Mr Cox: More or less the remainder,
apart from some civilian support staff. We recruit largely from
agencies and they are usually detective officers with more than
30 years' experience, who have retired, who come back to work
for us, which—and perhaps we will come back to this later
on—is another issue because we have a huge turnover of staff.
With people living away from home in the week, coming to Northern
Ireland, living in lodgings, going home on a Friday, we tend to
find that after about a year or so many of them leave, so in the
first year we had a 40% turnover in staff, although last year
it was a little better at about 29%.
Q12 Chairman: And you have a ring
fenced budget?
Mr Cox: We have, sir. With the
support of the Northern Ireland Office there was a £34 million
project fund set up. It is not purely for us, the Police Ombudsman
can also access that, as can the Public Prosecution Service and
the Forensic Science Service.
Q13 Chairman: If that is the case
and if there are only four currently serving officers with two
more to be seconded why is this such a burden, Sir Hugh?
Sir Hugh Orde: A number of reasons.
It is a burden that is worth having, frankly. It is not the biggest
issue around dealing with the past—it is the public inquiries,
frankly, that is a huge amount of work—but it is a burden
in the sense of records, recovery, storage, all those sorts of
things, a large amount of that falls to ordinary PSNI staff. For
example, our archive management, we have now physically searched
every single building and every murder file which we think we
can find we now have in very secure accommodation, which of course
David's people have to draw from. So there are some crossovers—our
vehicle fleet, we supply vehicles, accommodation, as mentioned,
and we are looking to increase the accommodation, which again
will probably have to be borne by my budget because I cannot take
any out of David's budget because he needs it to run the number
of people we are running, which reflects our commitment to deliver
to families. So it is part of a growing dealing with the past
which collectively is having the impact rather than individual
bits.
Q14 Chairman: One final question
from me. Are you tolerably satisfied that your archive is up to
it, that you have sufficient documentation to enable you to conduct,
in most if not all of these cases, a reasonably thorough enquiry
and one where you would feel yourself, Sir Hugh, as a highly professional
policemen, that you can say, "Yes, I am content with the
quality of that information"?
Sir Hugh Orde: I will ask David
to deal with detail but the reality is that we have found what
exists. Is it complete? Answer, no. What I was slightly surprised
about, the amount we recovered is substantial. There are almost
no cases, I think it would be right to say, David, where we have
no information recovered, plus a lot of open source information
and material. Would you like to go into detail, David?
Mr Cox: We have recovered documentation
in over 98% of all those cases, those 2,516 cases, and when we
do not get the full police file we go to other sources; we go
to places such as the Public Prosecution Service and get papers
from there, the Public Records Office. We have a team that goes
through open source material, as we call it; we have agreements
with UTV and with the BBC and with the newspaper libraries to
get documentation of the day back, so that we can meet families
and explain what information was about at the time.
Q15 Mr Murphy: That is actually part
of the point I intended to raise. However, could you perhaps develop
a little further the quantity and quality of the evidence of the
cases you are currently investigating, just to give us an idea
of whether you think that it is good enough to ever secure any
prosecutions?
Mr Cox: There are 1,026 cases
now open within the HET system. Our review process has finished
in 500 of those cases but that does not mean we regard those cases
as closed because, as I said, we work to a standard of answering
the questions that families put to us and in many cases these
are not legal questions, the worries that families have are basically
around could this have been prevented, was there a proper investigation,
down to the saddest of personal questions, did he have his dinner
before he was killed? We have had all sorts of questions. We are
working with over 600 families and we have logged 4000 issues
that have been raised with us, and minimally around police work
actually so we do a much wider scope. In terms of the evidence
that has been recovered we look for documentary evidence and we
look for physical evidence. We have upgraded the PSNI's fingerprint
computer system and we have searched an additional 12,000 marks
which we recovered, which were not available under pre-existing
technology. So what that will bring us we are not sure; we have
to do this on a case by case basis and it is not really until
we have finished each case that we can say what is the value of
the evidence that we have recovered. We have a large number of
exhibits. I suspect you are probably thinking around the recent
Omagh trial issues, are they useable in court? Again, that is
going to have to be a judgment in each individual case.
Q16 Chairman: Do I infer from that
that you do have a DNA database?
Mr Cox: We have access to the
DNA database. What we do in each case is an assessment of what
evidence we have. Again, funding is limited and DNA examinations
are very expensive. One of the tasks that I give my managers is
to assess whether there is value in doing these expensive tests
if, for example, the integrity of the exhibits—by which
I mean we cannot prove them to the court's satisfaction—is
not there then obviously we would not spend the public money doing
those tests because they would not take us anywhere. But a lot
of the publicity around Omagh is focused on the DNA but that was
a particular technique—low copy number DNA. There are other
DNA techniques which may be available; it just depends really
in each case what is available to us when we do that thorough
examination.
Q17 Mr Murphy: Is all this information
now securely kept on one site?
Mr Cox: Yes. What has happened
is that it has been stored at the PSNI central store and then
as cases come forward for examination by the Historic Enquiries
Team—and we bring forward 40 cases each month, which is
what we are required to do to hit our project timescale—the
exhibits, the papers and anything else related to the case is
brought over to our secure site and stored in our secure store.
Q18 Chairman: Do you digitise these
records or is this all paper that we are talking about?
Mr Cox: It is all on a computer
database.
Sir Hugh Orde: But it is all paper.
The other point that is worth mentioning is that there are some
murder files which are this thick because the harsh reality was
that at the peak of The Troubles the officers were dealing with
such an immense number they physically could not do what we would
expect them to do today. I think one of the other spinoffs to
looking at these issues is that we judge the performance in the
context of the time. It is very easy to look at this and to say
that this was awful, when actually the reality was looking at
470 murders in a year the Metropolitan Police could not have coped
with that, frankly, to the standards we now run. So we are very
conscious of that. What is interesting, as David said, the families,
providing they understand and we give them the information about
what the investigating officer was trying to do and how many cases
he or she had, they appreciate the magnitude of the task in front
of the investigating officers at the time.
Q19 Chairman: Is there any disparity
in the relevant amount of information you have as between the
two communities, as one used to call them?
Sir Hugh Orde: Not that I have
seen.
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