Examination of Witnesses (Questions 94-99)
ASSISTANT COMMISSIONER
ROBERT QUICK
QPM
Q94 Chairman: Good morning, everybody,
and thank you very much for coming. Assistant Commissioner Quick,
I imagine you now have a better understanding of the workings
of the House of Commons, do you not, with the amount of time you
spend here?
Mr Quick: Indeed,
and it is growing by the week.
Q95 Chairman: It is very nice to
see you again and thank you for sparing the Home Affairs Committee
so much time this week and, in particular, the Counter-Terrorism
Sub-Committee. I appreciate you are a busy man and indeed we might
touch upon where your priorities are forced to lie over the course
of the questions. I want to keep as much of this in the public
domain as we can, however, clearly there are questions that the
Committee will ask you and, if you are uncomfortable, then please
say so.
Mr Quick: I will not hesitate
to indicate my discomfort if we stray into any areas where I feel
it is inappropriate.
Q96 Chairman: And, if we do that,
then we will merely hold over the questions and we will go into
camera for the last ten minutes or so of the evidence session,
if that suits you.
Mr Quick: That suits me, thank
you.
Q97 Chairman: I think you probably
know everybody by now and I will not bother introducing them.
Assistant Commissioner, can you explain to us briefly the Metropolitan
Police's role in counter-terrorism operations in London and then,
especially, across the United Kingdom please.
Mr Quick: Let me start with the
fact that the Commissioner in law has an overarching responsibility
for counter-terrorism in England and Wales and, accordingly, my
role, as Assistant Commissioner Specialist Operations, is accountable
to the Commissioner for protection, security and counter-terrorism
nationally. The Metropolitan Police have historically been the
force that holds the police counter-terrorism resources to deal
with all incidents nationally in terms of specialist resources.
More recently of course, that has changed, and I will perhaps
say a bit more about that in a moment. The Counter-Terrorism Command
in London, SO15, is the primary police resource for countering
terrorism. It is a very large and complex command. It has a headcount
of approaching 1,500 personnel and is still growing under CSR
funding, and that houses a whole range of specialist officers
with specialist skills in counter-terrorism work, so the Metropolitan
Police are the primary resource and the primary accountability
lies with the Commissioner, and I discharge that responsibility
on a day-to-day basis. More recently, there have been developments
following the attacks in London in 2005 and the introduction of
the CONTEST Strategy, whose origins, I think, are as early as
2003, but certainly its refresh in 2006 led to the availability
of more funding to grow police counter-terrorism resources, and
that has led to a national build to establish large counter-terrorism
units in Leeds, in Manchester, in Birmingham and a slightly smaller
counter-terrorism unit in the South East region, in the Thames
Valley police area, so in effect now we have five large counter-terrorism
units, London, Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham and the smaller one
in the Thames Valley area. They are supplemented by some additional
units which we call "Counter-Terrorism Intelligence Units",
so they do not have the full range of function and capability,
but are focused primarily on intelligence, and there is one of
those in the eastern region of the country in Hertfordshire, there
is one in the Avon and Somerset police area for the South West
and there is one in the East Midlands.
Q98 Martin Salter: What does Special
Branch do now? Surely, setting you guys up was an admission really
that Special Branch was not really up to the job. Now, I go back
to days when Special Branch officers were cutting out photocopies
from The Daily Mirror to find out who was a member of a
trade union and it was really quite low-level stuff, and I am
just wondering why we bother to have Special Branch now.
Mr Quick: Well, it certainly was
not an admission that Special Branch were ineffective. Special
Branch has a wider role of course than just counter-terrorism,
but, increasingly in the last few decades, it has played an increasing
part in countering terrorism. In fact, in October of last year
at the primary decision-making body for the Police Service as
a whole in England and Wales, the ACPO Chief Constables' Council,
agreement was given to develop the National Counter-Terrorism
Network which links together all of those counter-terrorism units
and also links them with all of the four special branches, and
they are actually an intrinsic and important part of countering
terrorism because they are local intelligence officers who of
course have a much greater, granular understanding of their communities
and their force areas, so they have an understanding of the local
context that national or regional units would struggle to achieve,
so they are very, very important to the Counter-Terrorism Network
as a whole. The sort of coalface of countering terrorism is essentially
every police force because all officers and staff have a role
to be aware and to make contributions to a national effort. Then
you have the local force special branches in each force, then
the next level up is the counter-terrorism intelligence units,
the next level up is the counter-terrorism units, the five larger
ones, and at the top, I guess, is the Counter-Terrorism Command
in London, which is the largest of all the CT units and which
answers directly to me.
Q99 Martin Salter: I can understand
that role for Special Branch and I think they are ideally suited
for it in today's world, but is there not a danger of parallel
lines of management here? Special Branch in my patch, for example,
are they answerable to the BCU Commander or are they answerable
to the Chief Constable or do they feed straight into the Counter-Terrorism
Network? How are they managed?
Mr Quick: Historically, it was
the former that you have just described inasmuch as they would
answer normally directly to their head of crime or their head
of intelligence, depending on how the force was structured. What
is important to explain here is obviously that each counter-terrorism
unit, counter-terrorism intelligence unit or Special Branch is
under the direction and control of the local Chief Constable or
the Chief Constable of the force area in which they sit. However,
they work collaboratively with common processes and operating
procedures and, as a result of an agreement reached last year,
we are now developing much stronger national co-ordination of
all of those resources, and again the chief constables have given
the National Co-ordinator for Terrorism Investigation, my Deputy
Assistant Commissioner, John McDowell, a wider remit. His role
title has actually been redesignated now to the "Senior National
Co-ordinator for Counter-Terrorism" to reflect his much broader
role to co-ordinate the whole network operationally and, where
necessary, direct it in operations.
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