UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 166House of COMMONSMINUTES OF EVIDENCETAKEN BEFOREHOME AFFAIRS COMMITTEE
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This is an uncorrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others.
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Transcribed by the Official Shorthand Writers to the Houses of Parliament: W B Gurney & Sons LLP, Hope House, Telephone Number: 020 7233 1935
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Oral Evidence
Taken before the Home Affairs Committee
on
Members present
Keith Vaz, in the Chair
Mr James Clappison
David T C Davies
Mrs Janet Dean
Patrick Mercer
Gwyn Prosser
Bob Russell
Mr Gary Streeter
Mr David Winnick
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Witness: Chief Constable Peter Neyroud, Chief Executive, National Policing Improvement Agency, gave evidence.
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
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 nearly 40,000 devices to the service now, 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
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
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
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
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.
Q20 Gwyn
Prosser: Just briefly, looking at your long experience
in the force, and particularly when you were a detective superintendent, do you
have a personal view about the
Chief Constable
Neyroud: I have just had the experience of supporting -
as a deliberate attempt to look and see whether we or the Americans do this job
better
Q21 Mr Streeter: Chief Constable, given what you said about your role being to deliver programmes and improve the systems, does it really take the Chief Constable to head up the NPIA? Why are you not a management consultant? Why is there not somebody from Accenture sitting in front of us this morning?
Chief Constable Neyroud: There are several reasons for that. When we set out to create the Agency, one of the things that was a serious determination in the service - and that includes police authorities, chief constables, as well as the Home Office colleagues - was that this Agency would be Police Service led, it would be a sector led service and it would gain the confidence of the service. What had gone before, and in particular in the case of the Police Information Technology Organisation, was an organisation that was not run by the service for the service, it had become utterly disconnected from the service. The one thing that I bring to the piece - that I am very conscious I bring to the piece - is the fact that my colleagues know that I have been where they have been.
Q22 Mr Streeter: I hear that point. What is your expertise though in systems and programmes? Where do you get your training and skills from?
Chief Constable Neyroud: I have been fully trained as a senior responsible owner. I run more major programmes as a senior responsible owner than I should think any management consultant over the course of the last decade. I think, looking at the ones I have run, they have run pretty successfully. I am conscious about the need that I always get technical advice about the technical side, but my experience of running major programmes is that this is not about technical knowledge, it is about understanding the business requirements.
Q23 Mr Streeter: I totally agree with you, thank you for that answer. When we looked into policing a couple of years ago we were told that 70% of data has to be entered into police systems more than once. You have touched on it already today, but has that situation improved significantly in the last two years?
Chief Constable Neyroud: It has improved in some areas but not entirely in others. The system we are building at the moment, the Police National Database, which will go live late summer, early autumn next year, will significantly improve that because you will not need to do some of the multiple entries to see the data because the data will be properly warehoused, so that will help significantly. We have also sought to cut down the multiple entry, part of it is because of the way that forces develop pillared systems which are not integrated. We have tried to work with forces who have had that particularly acute problem in that respect to try and get their systems to integrate better. There has been improvement, it is still quite a significant legacy I have to say.
Q24 Chairman: Continuing on the question from Mr Streeter, you all spent £71.4 million on consultants I understand from a written question put down by the Shadow Home Secretary to the Home Secretary. That is an awful lot of money, is it not, £71 million on consultants, ranging from every single consultant you can think of, including PA Consulting which, of course, famously lost some of the Government's data disks. Did you get value for money for the £71 million? Did they tell you something you did not know about?
Chief Constable Neyroud: The £70-odd million was out of our first year and that was, frankly, our inheritance. What I inherited from previous organisations, including parts of the Home Office, was a pretty shocking over-reliance on consultancy, rather than having a properly set core staff designed to do the business. I have spent the last two and a half years clearing that up. I now have a significant reduction. We have reduced our reliance on consultancy this year alone by 25% and will do the same again next year.
Q25 Chairman: How much have you spent this year?
Chief Constable Neyroud: On consultants we will spend at the end of the year less than £19 million.
Q26 Chairman: That is a very big reduction.
Chief Constable Neyroud: It is a very significant reduction.
Q27 Chairman: Is it because you did not really feel they were giving you value for money, they did not tell you anything that you did not know already, or the expertise you had in your organisation could have told you the same thing?
Chief Constable Neyroud: Several things. One of which was there was a massive over-reliance on consultants by some managers as opposed to making their own minds up. Secondly, there was an over-use of consultants to drive programmes, which I think is a serious mistake and goes back to Mr Streeter's comment because actually if you set consultants off on a programme they do not have a particular interest in concluding it. The other piece which was a serious problem was the level of rates that I inherited, some consultants were earning considerably more than the Prime Minister.
Q28 Chairman: What rate an hour?
Chief Constable Neyroud: I do not know what rate an hour but we are talking about £2,000-£3,000 a day for some of the more specialist ones.
Q29 Chairman: A day?
Chief Constable Neyroud: Yes.
Q30 Chairman: To tell you what?
Chief Constable Neyroud: These were people to deal with things like information assurance. I have stopped that. Every single piece of consultancy in the Agency is now approved personally by me. Every single rate is challenged and reset; every single contractor post is personally approved by me and we work to a very, very significant reduction both in the reliance on contractors and consultants and also on the reasons why we use them. That said, if we are trying to re-cost, for example, the cost of Olympic Airwave I need external consultancy to do that sort of thing because it would be insane for me to bring that type of expertise inside an agency like this in the public sector. There is good consultancy and there is also bad consultancy and I inherited a lot of bad consultancy.
Q31 Chairman: What you are doing is perfectly in line with the Government's new White Paper which talks about reducing the dependency on consultants, the dependency on external support for business improvement.
Chief Constable Neyroud: Absolutely and, indeed, ahead of it I think we have blazed a bit of a trail in making sure that we bring it not just under control but we use consultants for the right things.
Q32 Chairman: How many of these consultants were ex chief constables?
Chief Constable Neyroud: Not very many actually. Most of the consultants it relied on were the big management consultancies and the IT consultancies.
Q33 Bob Russell: I was merely going to suggest, Chief Constable, that you could in fact set yourself up as a consultant to present a case to do away with consultants. The serious point behind my question is was there a culture whereby consultants for self-fulfilling job satisfaction and continuation created a climate where you had to retain them otherwise you would not be able to complete the job?
Chief Constable Neyroud: I suppose it was more in those early stages that the staff and structures I had inherited had become over-reliant on the consultancy to deliver. My experience of consultancies is if you are right and you set the terms right, and you are clear that there is not a continuation of work here, they do you a job and they move on. The challenge is to make sure that any skills and knowledge is passed back into the organisation. That most definitely was not happening. In those terms, yes, it was a problem.
Q34 Patrick Mercer: We have heard concerns during our counter-terrorism inquiry about an alleged lack of IT expertise in the Police Service to deal with the increasing technical security threat. How is the NPIA working to improve this?
Chief Constable Neyroud: I went back and looked at the transcript of this. This is particularly relating to the amount of communication and IT data that people have to work their way through. We have embarked on a piece of work with colleagues from ACPO which is designed to deliver both a triage tool, an ability to try and sort the wheat from the chaff, but also a training package and some standards and accreditation. We have already sorted through some of the best stuff that is out there, but this is an area that is moving so fast that the police service is not keeping pace. Combined with ACPO we are now putting together a proper e-crime and IT data programme which is moving fast, it is not a long-term one, we are going to produce some stuff very quickly for that.
Q35 Patrick Mercer: Sorry to give you a fastball but have you heard the cost of that?
Chief Constable Neyroud: It is not huge because what we will do initially with the triage tool is to procure some open source material and also some material from other parts of the world. I do not anticipate vast costs and we should be able to produce something quite quickly.
Q36 Patrick Mercer: There is commonality with the Ministry of Defence on this, is there?
Chief Constable Neyroud: There is a huge amount of discussion across Government because it applies to a whole range of different Government agencies.
Q37 Patrick Mercer: When you are more certain about your figures, could we have a note?
Chief Constable Neyroud: Of course.
Q38 Chairman: Chief Constable, thank you very much for coming in. At the end of the Home Secretary's session we are going to have a demonstration of a handheld device that is circulating in Kent which is used by the Kent Constabulary which is extremely useful in the fight against the cocaine trade, which is actually not available to other police forces. I do not know how busy you are but if you want to hang on for the Home Secretary, right at the end of his session we will be having a demonstration.
Chief Constable Neyroud: Thank you, Chairman.
Q39 Chairman: It might help you in your deliberations on how to improve the delivery of services. We are extremely grateful.
Chief Constable Neyroud: Chairman, if I may make one final parting thought.
Q40 Chairman: Of course.
Chief Constable Neyroud: I am very conscious that at the moment I do not regularly update you and I think I should. I wonder if it would be helpful, following this meeting, if we put together an update. Essentially you are asking me the questions what have we achieved in the first period of time and I would be very happy to put together something for this Committee which sets that out.
Q41 Chairman: You are clearly a mind reader, that was going to be my last comment. It would be very helpful if you could give us an update every four months of what you have achieved.
Chief Constable Neyroud: That will be a pleasure.
Chairman: Thank you very much.