Examination of Witness (Question Numbers
240-259)
SIR IAN
BLAIR
8 DECEMBER 2009
Chairman: Could I call to the dais Sir
Ian Blair, the former Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police
.
Q240 Chairman: Sir Ian, good morning,
thank you very much for coming to give evidence to our inquiry
on the Government's counter-terrorism strategy. We are specifically
concerned, as you heard in our exchanges with Mr Hayman, about
your experience as Commissioner as far as the response of the
Metropolitan Police to a suspected terrorist incident is concerned.
Could you tell us something about how the process works as soon
as you have an incident of that kind?
Sir Ian Blair: It is possibly
wise, Chairman, if I say a couple of preliminary remarks first.
Obviously I can only talk about the period of time while I was
the Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner and that ended a year
and a bit ago, so I am not familiar with any changes that have
taken place since. Secondly, I do not think it is necessarily
seemly for previous police officers to disagree about opinions
and all the rest of it. Mr Hayman has clearly got his opinions
of his experience and I have got my opinions of my experience.
The difference between the two of us is that Andy would go almost
to every COBR that was called, unless it was flooding or natural
disaster which is not necessarily the place for an anti-terrorist
chief, whereas my experience of COBR was perhaps the four big
ones 9/11, 7/7, 21/7 and the Glasgow bombings, the Prime Minister
in the chair. It is a very different experience from some of the
things that Andy was expressing. My position is that in those
kinds of meetings I believe COBR is extremely effective because
that is bringing the full Cabinet together with a national disaster
pending and there is a very clear distinction, it seemed to me
in those meetings, between operational responsibility for the
police and security services and the political dynamic that was
also having to be dealt with in that room and the communications
with the public and so on. I do not feel the same kind of disquiet
about COBR in my experience in those circumstances as Mr Hayman
has obviously reported, both here and in his book
Q241 Chairman: We will come on to
some specific points that he has made because they illustrate
a number of issues concerning the structure but do you think that
the Government's counter-terrorism strategy can be improved in
any way, either in terms of the overall vision or the specifics
of structure or process? Some have said, for example, that the
difficulty with COBR is that it meets after an event and with
so many other committees also meeting at the same time—presumably
you were there on a Thursday morning at the Home Secretary's weekly
meeting.
Sir Ian Blair: No, that would
be the counter-terrorism chief and specialist operations.
Q242 Chairman: Did you attend the
ministerial meeting?
Sir Ian Blair: No.
Q243 Chairman: But you could if you wanted
to.
Sir Ian Blair: I could if I was
invited and from time to time I would imagine the Commissioner
would be invited.
Q244 Chairman: Is there a case for
COBR meeting outside the emergency situation, that there should
be one co-ordinating body that meets on a regular basis, people
can stand down or be added to that meeting as and when it is appropriate.
Sir Ian Blair: I am not sure I
would agree with that process. COBR seems to me to be about response
to either a pending or an actual emergency of a major category.
I do agree with the issue about training and what Mr Hayman just
said about the attendance of ministers and permanent secretaries
is very important. The position of Jacqui Smith is slightly unusual
in so far as she was appointed as the Home Secretary at about
eight o'clock at night and bombs went off at six o'clock the next
morning; it is a little difficult to get the training in in between,
but I do think it is right that we should be insisting that senior
officials and ministers do attend the training. There are, as
I understand it, three counter-terrorist exercises a year of which
only one involves ministers and I am not sure, in the present
circumstances, that that is enough.
Q245 Chairman: Obviously you do not
know who the Prime Minister is going to appoint as Home Secretary.
Sir Ian Blair: No.
Q246 Chairman: It may be more appropriate
to make that a wider invitation so that other ministers could
attend such training.
Sir Ian Blair: I am sure that
is right.
Q247 Mr Winnick: In a piece in today's
paper, Sir Ian, you again argued that there should be 90 days
pre-charge detention. You lobbied for that amongst politicians
at the time some four years ago.
Sir Ian Blair: Two things: at
no stage did I or any other senior police officer lobby for 90
days. What we actually said was we wished to see an extension
of pre-trial detention in a series of seven-day periods and there
had to be an outer limit somewhere and the outer limit was 90
days. I have explained this many times, Mr Winnick; it was the
police service who came up with the idea of extending detention,
there was a whole series of reasons why we believed it was appropriate
and it would have been, in my view, very odd—in the same
way if you had an avian flu threat and you did not hear from the
chief veterinary officer—in the circumstances of an unparalleled
threat to the United Kingdom since the Cold War that you did not
hear from the police service about what they believed they needed.
Q248 Mr Winnick: How do you explain,
Sir Ian, that whilst you held and continue to hold that view,
because you argue the point as I have said in today's newspaper,
that one of your predecessors who was the Police Commissioner
from 1993 to 2000, now in the House of Lords, Paul Condon, was
very much not only opposed to 90 days but 42 days and in the recent
debate in the Lords argued that even 42 days was discounted and
quite wrong, so clearly there is not a unanimous view among those
who have held senior police positions.
Sir Ian Blair: There are two things.
The 90 days is an outer limit, an outer limit beyond which you
are moving in my view, and many other people's view, towards internment;
that is not a good plan. You cannot just have an empty space out
there, which is of course the European process as we have just
seen in the trial of the people who murdered Kercher. That is
investigative detention which is for as long a period as the magistrates
decide it should be. In the United States were that situation
to arise an individual can only be held by the police for about
48 hours, after that he or she would be declared a "material
witness" and bail would be set at such a level that he or
she could never step outside the jail. Every country deals with
this in a different way. In terms of Lord Condon of course I respect
his opinion but, to be fair, he was not Commissioner during the
unique period after the fall of the twin towers to the present
day, with a threat of a very, very different nature than the one
that the Provisional IRA posed.
Q249 Mr Winnick: Parliament rejected
that view.
Sir Ian Blair: I know they did.
Q250 Mr Winnick: And so did a number
of your predecessors and also of course the former Chief Constable
of the West Midlands force over the policy.
Sir Ian Blair: I understand that.
Q251 Mr Winnick: Do you find it surprising
that you were under fire for the plan then and you gave the impression
when you were Commissioner that you were lobbying actively amongst
Members of Parliament?
Sir Ian Blair: I do not think
that is true, Mr Winnick, you are actually mixing up some things
here. I make this clear—I am sorry to mention the book so
often but it is clear in my book—that I believe that the
lobbying that was initiated by the Association of Chief Police
Officers was in itself a mistake, it was wrong, but for those
people charged with counter-terrorism responsibilities, which
includes the Commissioner and the Assistant Commissioner Specialist
Operations and the national counter-terrorism chief, it is legitimate
for those officers to say "We have a view and this is the
reason why we have that view."
Q252 Martin Salter: Sir Ian, do you
not think it is a bit unseemly for people like yourself and Andy
Hayman, who were in senior positions, responsible for important
parts of our national security, privy to national security secrets
and operations, to actually be allowed to write books so soon
after they leave office, which are—let us be honest—written
for personal gain as well as public interest?
Sir Ian Blair: I used the word
unseemly about disagreeing in public but, on the other hand, many
people write books about their experiences and one of the things
that I said and did was to place the relevant pages of my book
in front of the Cabinet Office and ensure that what I was writing
was consonant with maintaining national security.
Q253 Martin Salter: Thank you. Moving
on to the practice of COBR, as we understood it from our visit
there the other day COBR really came into existence post the 1972
Munich outrage and has developed ever since. I got the impression
that it had been developed by operational practitioners to ensure
that it was as effective as possible and it was difficult for
us not to come away feeling that it was a relatively impressive
operation and it was as co-ordinated as you are likely to get
for the purpose that it was set up to do. In what ways do you
think it could be improved and do you share—I am going to
invite you to disagree with Mr Hayman again—or recognise
Mr Hayman's criticisms of it?
Sir Ian Blair: As I said in my
opening remarks to the Chairman I do not in the sense that the
meetings that I attended were at the highest possible level of
significance and everybody in that room was very conscious that
things were happening which were endangering the United Kingdom,
whether that was the fall of the twin towers or the bombs of July
2005, so I do not feel that. If I have got any criticisms of it
then one of them is something that Mr Hayman did mention which
is we need to be clear about the frequency of the meetings. I
would be suggesting that that is a standard arrangement so that
it is the event plus two hours, then four hours after that or
whatever so that the other meetings can take place. Everybody
sitting in that room, particularly the operational staff, need
to go back and do things, they need to have structures that they
can do things with and if the recalling of COBR is at the whim
of the chair as it were as opposed to a fairly structured process
everybody accepts, then that is unfortunate. There is the occasional
danger, particularly in London, of operational drift upwards.
I remember, I think on 21/7, an earnest discussion going on as
to whether the buses should be allowed to run again and myself
and the Transport Commissioner had already authorised that, and
if people had looked up on the screen they would have seen the
buses moving—it was that sort of day. The area I would like
to expand on, which is in the wide brief that you gave me, Chairman,
about the future of counter-terrorist strategy—
Q254 Chairman: Do not expand on it
too much because we have a number of other questions on that area.
Sir Ian Blair: What I meant was
in terms of overall strategy it comes back to this discussion
about a national terrorist agency.
Q255 Chairman: We will come on to
that in a minute.
Sir Ian Blair: What it means is
that in terms of COBR the question is who is representing the
police at COBR.
Chairman: We are coming on to that as
well. Tom Brake.
Q256 Tom Brake: One point that you
have mentioned, Sir Ian, that you think could be improved on is
the issue of training, and I am wondering if you could elaborate
what sort of training do you mean? Clearly it is very difficult
for anyone to be trained for an event like 7/7 so what picture
have you got of the training programme you advise?
Sir Ian Blair: Actually, Mr Brake,
I do not think it is very difficult because the training process
currently, the national counter-terrorism programme, is a set
of huge exercises, each one of which usually lasts from two to
three days, so in the end the pressure of that place becomes almost
real to the people who are taking part in it. It is actually going
through a scenario in which the individual minister or permanent
secretary does not know what is going to happen next. It takes
quite a long time to set these things up and it is disappointing
if the top players do not come.
Q257 Tom Brake: Can I just ask, are
you advocating for instance that as part of the Home Secretary's
induction plan within the first fortnight of being in office they
should be conducting or taking part in an exercise of that kind?
Sir Ian Blair: I do not think
that can be done in that way because it takes months to set one
of these things up.
Q258 Chairman: Months to set what
up?
Sir Ian Blair: These training
exercises.
Q259 Chairman: Not months to get
COBR together.
Sir Ian Blair: No, not months
to get COBR together, COBR is called in half an hour.
| 
