Examination of Witness (Question Numbers
200-219)
MR ANDY
HAYMAN
8 DECEMBER 2009
Q200 Chairman: You went further in
your article in The Times on 27 June, going by the headline
in The Times, you said "COBR: the UK emergency committee
that makes chaos out of a crisis" and you suggested another
approach which is a two-tier system.
Mr Hayman: Yes.
Q201 Chairman: Where the operational
people get together and decide on the way forward and then options
are presented to politicians.
Mr Hayman: That is exactly what
happens; it is a default position when you are in live action.
You have a forum where the operational colleagues sit together
and thrash out what, from their professional experience, they
believe to be the options, and then they come into the main COBR
and present that to ministers. I think that is a really good way
of working because ministers then have got all the information
at their fingertips, they are well informed and they can make
a decision on the basis of that, an absolutely clear demarcation.
What I thought was strange was that that was going on underneath
everyone's noses but it was as if it was the unspoken word, no
one talked about it, and I felt that was a bit disingenuous because
how do you feel if you were not part of that group that met before?
What was discussed there? All I am trying to do here is not to
in any way be difficult, I am just trying to get out into the
open what people find difficult to discuss.
Q202 Chairman: That is an absolute
given but of course the Committee is keen to look at the current
system and see how it can be improved. It is not any criticism
of the overall strategy, your concern is to make it a streamlined
process which would enable decisions to be made quickly and you
actually talk about pulling people away from an event into a situation
where they are basically sitting—Members of this Committee
actually visited COBR last week and we looked at the structure
that had been set up. Your concern is about delayed decision-making,
is it?
Mr Hayman: Yes, the structure
is fine. You have got the back room team who are doing the research
for you while you are sitting around the table, I just would not
want people to get confused as to why they are there. When everyone
really wants to be positive and constructive and get things on
an even keel, people chip in from all angles—I put my hand
up, I probably overstepped my mark and started getting involved
in things that I should not get involved in. What would be helpful
is if there was a two-tier system where ministers, who have got
a very clear mandate, are allowed to be away from that. They have
no fingerprints on the formation of the options and then when
it comes into the main forum which is clearly their role they
have all the information and there is better, informed decision-making.
Q203 Chairman: Is there another model
somewhere else in the world that you think we should look at?
For example, the United States and the National Security Council?
Mr Hayman: I am not briefed on
that, Chairman. The one fear I have got—and this is the
difficulty, this is the real frailty—is that people would
argue there are minutes taken, but actually I have never seen
them and I attended most meetings. There might be notes or bullet
points which is fine, but let us just say something goes badly
wrong and we crawl over the decision-making process. If we have
not got records of meetings and we have a forum where people cannot
remember what they said they were going to do, and indeed they
overstep the mark inadvertently into a role and function that
they are not either trained or experienced to do, or is not their
remit, that is difficult territory.
Q204 Chairman: Is there not an action
list that is written out as and when people say they are going
to implement?
Mr Hayman: Yes, there is a bullet
point action list but minutes need to be sensitively compiled.
Is it not the case when we go back over on public inquiries that
we look at not just the action list, we look at the decision-making
process and the considerations that led to the action. What if
that process and discussion is flawed? For others it needs to
be objectively looked at in the cold light of day, who were not
actually in the hot seat.
Chairman: Yes. Martin Salter.
Q205 Martin Salter: Mr Hayman, I
along with other colleagues visited COBR last week and I have
to say your criticisms and your published criticisms came up.
We were not talking to politicians, we were talking to senior
operational personnel—the police and security services—and
they absolutely rejected your criticisms, did not recognise your
descriptions—we realise you have got a book to sell—and
they did say—
Mr Hayman: That is a little bit
harsh, a bit harsh.
Q206 Martin Salter: I am sure you
are not giving it away. They did say that COBR is being used as
a model for other jurisdictions facing terrorist threats to follow.
If it is so dysfunctional, as you have described, why are the
Australians, the Jordanians and others, people facing similar
threats to ourselves, actually using our model in their jurisdictions?
Mr Hayman: I cannot comment for
others that do not recognise what I am saying but what I do know
is that that is my experience. Yes, I did choose to share that;
indeed, I am aware having talking to former colleagues of a recent
exercise where some of those things I described were played out
again. If people choose not to want to talk about it that is fine;
all I am saying is it was not to sell a book. This was an informed
decision on my part to say other things in that book where I think
if things are going really well we should comment on that, but
if I felt from my perspective constructive observations would
help the process then I have done that. If that gets ignored that
is other people's decision; I just thought I wanted to do that.
Q207 Martin Salter: Do you think
the Australians are wrong to follow?
Mr Hayman: No, no, I did not say
that; I said look at the success we have had, it cannot be that
bad. What I am saying is that if I lay out the fact that I was
there, I experienced it, side meetings—would you be comfortable
if you were part of a main group and you were aware that there
were side meetings going on but you had no vision on that whatsoever?
Martin Salter: It happens all the time
in the real world.
Chairman: That is very helpful. Bob Russell.
Q208 Bob Russell: Mr Hayman, in your
detailed responses to the Chairman and then to Mr Salter and your
book are there any other aspects of how you would improve on the
system that you have not mentioned, either today or in the book?
Mr Hayman: No, I have covered
most of it.
Q209 Bob Russell: When you served
on the COBR committee surely it must have proved useful as a forum—notwithstanding
your criticism—to co-ordinate the governmental response
and share information between separate bodies.
Mr Hayman: Absolutely, and that
is a function it performs as well as it can do. What I am saying
is that there are improvements. People might see those improvements
as being marginal and probably insignificant, but I did not, that
was not my experience. I felt that those improvements would be
helpful.
Q210 Bob Russell: When you have your
reunions with chums who were there with you, who may still be
there, have they all indicated 100% support for the view you have
taken?
Mr Hayman: It is for others to
express that but I have not seen many dissenters privately. It
is always difficult for people to speak publicly, is it not?
Chairman: It is; that is why we are very
grateful to you for coming here. David Davies.
Q211 David Davies: Thank you, Mr
Hayman; I thought it was a very good book actually. One of the
other concerns that you had was over the impact of devolved parliaments
on policing and on the ability of anti-terrorism police if you
like to deal with Scotland and Wales. Would you have concerns,
bearing in mind what you said about the Scottish Parliament, if
the Welsh Assembly also got powers over policing?
Mr Hayman: The toing and froing
that you are referring to there was over one particular operation
and, as it turned out, some of those wrinkles were ironed out
a bit.
Q212 David Davies: I felt they were
ironed out mainly because of personal relationships; that seemed
to be the case you were putting.
Mr Hayman: Absolutely. One of
the reasons why up to now it has been difficult for me to come
here is that the view that I was expressing was not necessarily
totally shared by colleagues over the border. It is for others
to decide whether or not they would be comfortable with devolved
parliaments but I think there is a real comparison here to be
held with police services. I have also made observations, and
it may be something you want to hear about later, but when you
look at the way we deal with serious crime on SOCA or the Border
Agency with immigration, it seems to me it flies completely in
the face that those two agencies have a national remit where they
can travel across the country and not worry about force boundaries
and not have this ridiculous situation where, on one operation
we had, which was an armed operation, before we could go across
each force boundary we had to get authority from the Chief Constable
of that force to allow that to happen. That cannot be right and
with terrorism being of international flavour and with a national
or international footprint we should be breaking those barriers
down. The reason I rehearsed that argument is that the same could
be said for the political and parliamentary argument because,
provided you have got good will and the personalities are right,
it will work, but you cannot have a structure on that, can you?
Q213 David Davies: If, for example,
you had a government of one political party in one place and of
another in the Welsh Assembly or Scottish Parliament then that
could cause problems for policing.
Mr Hayman: Yes, absolutely.
Q214 Ms Buck: Going back to your
criticisms of COBR, I am finding it a little bit hard to follow
to what extent you are recommending that there should be structural
change and to what extent it is to do with processes, clarity
of information and clarification of roles because they are two
quite fundamentally different approaches to the issue.
Mr Hayman: I am not going to come
here and trash something; I do not think I trashed it in the book.
Q215 Ms Buck: It came over as trashed.
Mr Hayman: I wrote it as it is;
sometimes that sticks in people's throats but that is the way
it is. What I am saying is that what is going on informally should
be formalised because why people might not recognise it is because
actually they are making it work. I accept the point that in the
real world, Mr Salter, there will be other meetings going on but
this is not something that you can just put to one side as policy
development; this is the real world where actually they will probably
be making life and death decisions and it is absolutely right
as a minister that you would want to know what the decision-making
and discussion was that was going on in a meeting over there,
that could lead to an operational deployment that actually you
had not had full vision of and sight of. What I am saying is some
of the things that are going on informally to make it work by
the practitioners should just come out from underneath the carpet,
let us just put it on the table and formalise it.
Q216 Ms Buck: It is not the structure
that you are objecting to, you do not find that structure in which
different meetings feed into the decision-making process is the
problem, it is the fact that those processes are not properly
minuted and the advice that they are giving is not laid out in
such a way as to clarify decision-making.
Mr Hayman: I am accused of being
two-faced over this but what I was writing in my account here
was that we have got all these people in the same room, all vying
for position, trying to do the best thing they possibly can which
blurs things, so what happens is informally we have a structured
forum and I think a really good model was when Dr John Reid was
the Home Secretary and there was an operation involving Litvinenko.
What he insisted on doing there was that he did not want to be
involved in the development of operational options, he left that
to MI5 and me to do, we came to him with those options and he
made a ministerial decision. That is what goes on in part informally
in COBR and I think that is great. All I am simply saying is rather
than play games about this why do we not do it, why do we not
formalise that so that people know what is going on.
Q217 Ms Buck: Is it possible to carry
that example forward into emergency planning in the same way that
you might do when you are preparing an operation for which you
have lead-in time?
Mr Hayman: I reckon if you sat
in the room at the time of the recent dreadful floods up North,
I bet you at a similar but much lower level the Chief Constable
would have said what the aim is, which is let us get things back
to normality and save and preserve life. Then he would deploy
other people to develop the operational decisions and take options
as a result of it. That is no different to what I think we are
saying here and we could say in any other emergency.
Q218 Patrick Mercer: Mr Hayman, you
have called for the creation of a national terrorism agency or
something of that ilk; what would that give us that the relatively
new Counter-Terrorism Units (CTUs and CTIUs) do not?
Mr Hayman: Just so colleagues
are aware of my stake in this, I was at the helm when we introduced
those, so for me it was a middle ground between carrying on with
43 forces, some of which are not viable in this territory of operations,
and going into something that was national. Going back to the
point that Mr Davies was making earlier, even with that structure
the Chief Constable has the ace card in his or her pack so if
my successor, if it was reliant on personalities—and it
is reliant on personalities—came across an obstructive,
difficult, Chief Constable colleague who could actually play the
ace card, there is not an awful lot left that that person can
do. The Met constitutionally has got the lead on investigating
terrorism and I just think that constitutionally that is difficult,
if you are relying on something that is just reliant potentially
on relationships. Also, whilst those resources located around
the country can be marshalled anywhere within the country, you
are actually operating a pseudo-national outfit anyway. It goes
back to my earlier point, what we are doing in practice is we
seem to be skirting around the uncomfortable constitutional discussion
which puts people's hairs on their neck up because they can see,
maybe, fiefdoms being threatened. It is actually an informal working
practice that I am arguing should be more formal.
Q219 Patrick Mercer: If you equate,
rightly or wrongly, the three regions in Northern Ireland with
small to medium sized constabularies, with one guiding organisation
above them and in the regions what used to be called TCGs, task
and control groups, which roughly equate to the regional counter-terrorism
units, is that not the model we should be looking at?
Mr Hayman: Yes.
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