The Cocaine Trade - Home Affairs Committee Contents


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.






 
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