Examination of Witness (Question Numbers
1-19)
CHIEF CONSTABLE
PETER NEYROUD
15 DECEMBER 2009
Q1 Chairman: Could I begin this session
of the Select Committee now and welcome the Chief Constable of
the National Policing Improvement Agency, Peter Neyroud. This
is a one-off session looking at the work of the National Policing
Improvement Agency. This will be followed by an evidence session
with the Home Secretary which will conclude all the remaining
inquiries of this Committee for this year. That will be followed
by a private session on our counter-terrorism agenda with Charles
Farr. Can I start with you, Mr Neyroud, and remind you that you
have a budget of £576 million a year, if you add capital
and other resources. That is a very, very large budget indeed.
What are your benchmarks?
Chief Constable Neyroud: What
do you mean by "benchmarks", Chairman?
Q2 Chairman: If the taxpayer gives
you half a billion pounds, ministers and others would expect you
to achieve something for that £576 million, so what are the
benchmarks that you are given?
Chief Constable Neyroud: The first
and most important part, which is about three-quarters of that
money, is to run a whole series of national services efficiently
and effectively, ranging from the Airwave service, so the radio
service for the entire country, including Scotland, the Police
National Computer, the DNA database, and that is about 80 national
services that we took over when the Agency was created which are
now running better, so we have much tighter timescales for delivery,
better quality of the services, and they are also running more
efficiently. That is the first one. The second one, with the other
part of the budget, is to deliver a series of major programmes
on time, within budget, examples like delivering the Airwave in
the London Underground that I know this Committee commented on
in a previous meeting, and again delivering that on time and in
that case within budget. My benchmarks are about national services,
delivering national programmes. Then the final piece is the national
support to the Police Service, whether that be capability support,
so when forces need advice and support, doing that in a timely
fashion, and doing that in a very efficient fashion over the course
of each year.
Q3 Chairman: We are going to come
on to the individual programmes later with other Members of the
Committee. Are you satisfied that you have released sufficient
frontline capacity for the police as a result of the work of the
NPIA? Can you put a value on it?
Chief Constable Neyroud: I can
put a value on individual programmes. If I may give an example,
which is mobile data.
Q4 Chairman: We will come on to data
devices later but overall are you, hand on heart, able to say
to ministers and this Committee, "As a result of the very
large budget we have, we have actually saved the taxpayer X amount
of money"?
Chief Constable Neyroud: If you
total up the major programmes, yes, there is a significant level
of time saving from better quality technology, better quality
things like fingerprinting et cetera, and better procurement which
saved significantly on procurement nationally for the service
and overall delivered better national services over the course
of the last two and a half years.
Q5 Bob Russell: Chief Constable,
the Policing White Paper, as you know, sets out the Government's
intention to, "ensure mobile data devices are being used
effectively and that there is more consistency in usage and functionality".
Are there any problems that users are currently experiencing?
Chief Constable Neyroud: The problems
are about the systems that forces put into devices. We have rolled
out over 30,000 new devices and there are over 40,000 in operational
use. In fact we are literally ahead of time, so we have delivered
on the promises ahead of time. There were broadly three groups
of force. There were early adopters who had more integrated systems
and were capable of delivering all of the things that were required,
they have realised benefits of at least 30 minutes of added patrol
time out of the integration. There was then a group of forces
who were ready to roll, and that was probably the largest group
of forces, they have also been able to realise significant benefits.
They are still not realising as much in benefit terms as that
first group of early adopters. The lesson of this is not just
about giving cops a handheld device, it is about changing the
way people work. The third group of forces have a slightly greater
problem, their systems are not integrated. It is more difficult
for us to get all of the things that the best group of forces
have got onto the handheld, so in those terms we have got work
to do with them to raise the performance of their system.
Q6 Bob Russell: Has there been any
resistance from any of the police forces to this or is it just
they have not got the equipment that is compatible?
Chief Constable Neyroud: We have
had very, very little resistance. When we did the bidding process,
far from resistance I got quite a lot of phone calls about the
fact that people were not getting the stuff fast enough.
Q7 Bob Russell: If there is no resistance,
what is the NPIA doing to work with forces to resolve them because
you are suggesting the problem is at the user end rather than
at your end?
Chief Constable Neyroud: No, not
the user end, not the frontline officer end because frontline
officers have taken to mobile data very quickly. It is in what
is technically described as the middle ware, for example all of
the—sorry about the jargon—systems that forces have
got like custody systems, intelligence systems, et cetera, making
those work in an intelligent way on a handheld device, that is
where the challenge lies.
Q8 Bob Russell: Would you like to
put a solution to the Committee that we can forward to the Home
Secretary in a few minutes to resolve all the outstanding problems?
Chief Constable Neyroud: The solution
lies in the improvement strategy that we have built, which is
about convergence of police systems and a single national set
of standards and architecture so we are delivering things not
43 or, indeed, a multitude of different ways, we are delivering
things to the same standards in, broadly speaking, the same way.
That will save. There is a figure in the White Paper which is
a realistic figure of over £200 million on police ICT by
converging and working more effectively.
Q9 David Davies: How does the NPIA
feel about the out-sourcing of back office functions of the type
that are currently being undertaken by Avon and Somerset Police?
Are you positive towards that or do you have concerns?
Chief Constable Neyroud: It is
probably best to look—rather than specifically at that one—if
I come back to the bigger picture. Essentially all the regions
are working with us on models to try and find the best way to
deliver both back office and, indeed, front office functions as
well. The Southwest One approach is trying to do that in collaboration
with not just all the forces but also a number of different local
authorities and other partners. The benefit of the system that
Southwest One are going for is the benefit of scale. The challenge
is, of course, as soon as you get that many decision-makers involved
it makes getting progress quite difficult. I think they have found
it quite difficult to make rapid progress.
Q10 David Davies: Can you foresee
other police force areas using the private sector in the way that
Avon and Somerset have to reduce costs and ensure more police
officers are out on the streets? Is that an approach you would
endorse?
Chief Constable Neyroud: It is
an approach we are currently doing. Airwave is delivered under
a service management contract by Airwave, not by us directly.
When I was Chief in Thames Valley we did this, we looked at what
was the best way to deliver something, not whether we should deliver
it in-house or out-house.
Q11 David Davies: Will the NPIA,
therefore, be ensuring that all companies that have something
to offer are given the chance to do it? One problem I have seen
in local government is that when local government puts something
out to tender to the private sector they tend to approach two
or three favoured partners who are well known to all of us rather
than opening the whole thing up to any company that might have
something to offer. How do you propose to overcome that problem?
Chief Constable Neyroud: I understand
the challenge because if you are trying to outsource very, very
large contracts you do need very large firms to be able to do
it, to get the benefits of scale. What we have tried to do in
a number of fields is to create frameworks where we have got not
just major partners but a good range of smaller suppliers working
within those frameworks. We do try and make sure that we have
got that benefit. You will get a huge benefit of innovation—forensic
science being one—from small firms working around the larger
ones and if you can achieve that you do get the best of both worlds.
Q12 Chairman: The Chief Constable
of South Wales has, in effect, privatised her custody suite. Why
is it that the private sector can do things better and cheaper
than the public sector?
Chief Constable Neyroud: I was
the first chief officer to bring the private sector into custody
when I was an ACC in West Mercia, and I did the same in Thames
Valley. The short answer to that is there are significant benefits
from having that particular, very defined service run by a company
like Reliance or G4S. There would be greater benefits if we were
able to do that more consistently nationally. It is currently
the case that there are 11 forces who have got a private contractor
delivering their custody. It is one of things we are proposing
to examine, whether we could get better value for the public by
doing that on a bigger scale. Certainly there is experience in
the matured PECS contracts in the Prison Service that you can
deliver consistent benefits. I think the mistake in the past has
been to work on very short-term contracts and not a proper partnership.
Q13 Chairman: Is not the challenge
for NPIA to watch what the private sector is doing and see if
you can replicate it in the public sector?
Chief Constable Neyroud: It is
a combination of two things. Yes, it is to improve the way the
public sector works and we are doing that with things like Quest
and the Lean approaches to better working, but also to look and
see whether the private sector could deliver it better.
Q14 Mrs Dean: Chief Constable, we
have come across instances where good practice is not spread across
the service, either resulting in good practice not being implemented
properly throughout the Police Service or in forces reinventing
the wheel. One example is in Staffordshire where they used a Webplayer
999 system to playback interviews to people arrested for domestic
violence which resulted in people holding their hands up to the
crime. We found out afterwards that Devon and Cornwall Police
had developed a similar system. I am wondering what the NPIA is
doing to improve the good practice sharing between police forces.
Do you agree that the service is still ineffective at sharing?
It seems wrong to us that they should have examples where you
can really help people but they are not being spread throughout
the forces.
Chief Constable Neyroud: There
are a number of areas where we have driven very hard at this.
The challenge is there is an awful lot of it in the sense there
is a lot of very good practice lurking. The areas we have chosen
are clearly priority areas like neighbourhood policing where we
have very, very strong information sharing and a team that is
dedicated to make sure that practice is shared. The piece of practice
which you have just set out, which is effectively a different
way of using the technology to improve the interviewing, we are
picking up those areas of practice. I suppose the challenge for
us is to make sure they are genuinely good practice and are properly
evaluated. I have not got unlimited resources in terms of evaluation
and it is really important these are done properly. It is not
just looking at whether the technology works, because I think
we have tended to make that mistake of spreading technology before
we have properly evaluated the human factors. With a piece of
work like that there are several things. Firstly, just simply
putting out a practice advice note and making sure that the right
people in forces are aware of it, we have become much better at
that. Secondly, to make sure where it is something that is absolutely
critical to changing practice we have issued a proper guidance
note which specifies, and again learns the lessons out of other
sectors. Thirdly, we are in the process of introducing a thing
called the Police Online Knowledge Area where communities of practice
can use an extranet, intranet, approach to share practice, post
good practice and we can post evaluations not just from this country
but also from around the world.
Q15 Chairman: The point that Mrs
Dean raises is that both Mrs Dean and I went to look at the excellent
work that is being done by Staffordshire Police and the Committee
agreed to write to the Home Secretary and suggest to the Home
Secretary what Staffordshire had done with their forms was pretty
revolutionary. We suggested the Home Secretary write to every
other authority and tell them to do the same thing. To date we
do not know whether this good practice has been taken on board.
It only takes a letter to get this done, does it not?
Chief Constable Neyroud: That
particular thing, we are working to refine the overall forms.
Staffordshire's example, and West Mids not unnaturally because
Chris Simms has moved from Staffordshire to West Mids, we are
working with Chris Simms, it is a combination of the forms and
also the way in which he and a number of other colleagues have
given much clearer direction to frontline officers.
Q16 Chairman: What we cannot understand
is it does not take a genius to know that if it is good practice,
why is it not just being adopted by the 42 police authorities?
Why are people still working on this a year after the Committee
has written to the Home Secretary and said what a good idea this
is? This puzzles us.
Chief Constable Neyroud: This
does go to the heart of the national/local debate as to which
things we are going to hold tight. I do think what has been happening
in the course of the last two and a half years since we have been
created is that it has become clearer where that lies. For example,
on procurement, IT, some areas of practice, there has become greater
acceptance and as long as we consult properly the people are prepared
to do things once. The challenge comes, as we are trying to move
towards a much greater emphasis on local policing, on getting
the balance right. There are still precious boundaries around
operational independence and I am only too well aware of those
as a chief officer.
Q17 Gwyn Prosser: On the subject
of the national versus local debate, when your Agency was set
up in 2007 you took over responsibility for the National DNA Database
in order to bring one standard across the piece, yet we are told
that individual chief constables still have the discretion and
the right to decide what records should remain on the database
and taken off. Is there not a dual standard there?
Chief Constable Neyroud: This
basically relates to the Data Protection Act because I am not
the data owner, I am the data processor, if we look at the technicalities
of the Act. Each individual chief constable is accountable for
the data that their force puts on the database. I am responsible
for running it. What it would take for the standard approach with
my Agency making the decision is all 43 colleagues to delegate
me that authority. It may well be as we move into the proposals
that are about to come into the House for changes to the exceptional
cases that that might be an opportunity to reconsider whether
a single point of approach might be more effective. It would definitely
take that delegation. I want colleagues to clearly own the data
that they have got on the DNA database, the fingerprint database,
the PNC and in August/September next year the Police National
Database otherwise I will not get good quality data on the system.
I do share a view that it is clearly a vulnerability of the current
system that it is done 43 different times.
Q18 Gwyn Prosser: Would you welcome
that move?
Chief Constable Neyroud: I would
welcome it as long as my colleagues are comfortable that they
delegate that authority to me.
Q19 Gwyn Prosser: Is it part of the
Agency's role to recommend and advise the Home Secretary on other
areas where you think you should be imposing on holding a standard
and improving it?
Chief Constable Neyroud: It very
much is and certainly with the Information Systems Approach we
are definitely advising a much stronger national approach as being
a more efficient and more effective approach.
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