Examination of Witnesses (Questions 560
- 567)
TUESDAY 1 DECEMBER 2009
MR BILL
HUGHES AND
MR NEIL
GILES
Q560 Mr Winnick: I said not everyone
shares your full confidence in the work of SOCA but clearly you
yourself are pretty satisfied with what has been achieved.
Mr Hughes: I am very pleased with
what the 4,000 officers in SOCA have done since we started but
there is still a lot more to do and we are not resting on our
laurels.
Q561 Mr Winnick: That goes without
saying.
Mr Hughes: That is always the
case, everybody has more to do to improve. We are funded by the
taxpayer; therefore my intention is to give the taxpayer value
for money and that is what we are seeking to do.
Q562 Mr Winnick: When you said "we
have got a lot to do" I took that very much for granted.
Mr Hughes: There you are then;
I rest my case.
Q563 Chairman: Mr Hughes, you mentioned
additional resources that you might need to combat this very serious
level of crime that you have to deal with. How much would be the
additional resources that you require?
Mr Hughes: That is a pretty open-ended
question Chairman. If I give you an example—and the question
came from Mr Streeter referring to West Africa particularly—we
have been looking at where our liaison officers are around the
world, and they are not just people who sit in embassies pushing
paper, they are actually embedded in law enforcement agencies,
so they are very important and complex jobs that they fulfil.
If we want to put a new liaison officer into a country, using
the FCO guidance this will cost us in excess of £300K a year
to do that, so to put more officers into West Africa what we are
looking at is, for example, sharing that load with our French,
German, Dutch, Spanish and indeed Portuguese colleagues in parts
of West Africa where there are still colonial influences. That
is what we would look for and in extending our reach, as I said,
if we can do more overseas they see a value in that.
Q564 Chairman: To prevent it coming
in in the first place, that is exactly what the Committee feels
very strongly about.
Mr Hughes: Exactly.
Q565 Chairman: Just to reiterate
what Mr Russell said, we do say in our report that of course the
role of Parliament is to scrutinise, we cannot just say everyone
is wonderful and everything is going well otherwise there would
be no point in having committees in Parliament.
Mr Hughes: Just now and again
it would be nice though, Chairman.
Q566 Chairman: We do state very clearly
that we are impressed by individual officers we have met abroad
but these are important matters that do need to be dealt with
and that is why we are extremely grateful to you for coming here.
We will have to visit you and have an off the record briefing
as you offered us.
Mr Hughes: That is what I think
would be important, Chairman.
Q567 Chairman: It will happen next
year, but in the meantime I look forward to receiving by midday
tomorrow the information I requested. Thank you very much for
coming.
Mr Hughes: Thank you.
Chairman: That concludes the evidence
session for this morning.
| 
