UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 74-iHouse of COMMONSMINUTES OF EVIDENCETAKEN BEFOREHome Affairs Committee
THE COCAINE TRADE
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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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Any public use of, or reference to, the contents should make clear that neither witnesses nor Members have had the opportunity to correct the record. The transcript is not yet an approved formal record of these proceedings.
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Prospective witnesses may receive this in preparation for any written or oral evidence they may in due course give to the Committee.
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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
Tom Brake
Ms Karen Buck
David TC Davies
Mrs Janet Dean
Patrick Mercer
Gwyn Prosser
Bob Russell
Martin Salter
Mr Gary Streeter
Mr David Winnick
________________
Witnesses: Assistant Chief Constable Mick Matthews, Gloucestershire Police and ACPO Lead for Cocaine, and Mr Chris Pearson, Metropolitan Police Intelligence Bureau, gave evidence.
Q1 Chairman: May I refer everyone present to the Register of Members' Interests where the interests of Members are registered. We welcome Mr Pearson and Assistant Chief Constable Matthews to this session of the Committee's inquiry into the cocaine trade. If I may start with you, Mr Pearson, what is the profile of the typical cocaine user?
Mr Pearson: There are two types of cocaine user very prominent in the
Q2 Chairman: The term "celebrity cocaine user" is used quite a lot in the media. How much of police resources is directed towards them? Do you think there is a distortion in the eyes of the public about the very few who are very famous who perhaps use cocaine?
Mr Pearson: I would not say that I have witnessed the police target celebrities and famous people as such. The police will often target a nightclub or a particular venue where they are acting on intelligence where it is known to be distributing cocaine or to have cocaine sold within its premises. That is really when they become a target of law enforcement, as it were.
Q3 Bob Russell: Mr Pearson, I do not want you to think I am an authority on this subject. How typical is polydrug use, which I am advised is a combination of alcohol and cocaine powder and crack and heroin, and what problems does that cause for policing?
Mr Pearson: I would say that it is very common, particularly cocaine and alcohol. The most common reason young people take cocaine is for the user to buzz longer, to stay awake longer, in order to compensate for the depressive elements of alcohol. So they will often use a lot of cocaine alongside alcohol consumption. Yes, they will also turn to other stimulants, such as amphetamines and ecstasy and ketamine and drugs like that. I would say it is very common. Also, with the more problematic market, people are taking crack cocaine with heroin and that is called speedballing.
Q4 Bob Russell: As I understand the term polydrug use, what specific problems does that cause for policing over and above other issues of illegal drug substances?
Mr Pearson: Powder cocaine gives young people the ability to stay awake longer and to drink longer and, therefore, commit more alcohol-related crime.
Q5 Bob Russell: Mr Matthews, the Home Office and ACPO in their written submission state that all forces have seen a substantial rise in the use of crack cocaine, which is in contradiction to the British Crime Survey figures. By how much do forces estimate crack use has risen and is there any variation between the forces - urban, rural and so on?
Assistant Chief
Constable Matthews: First of all, the reference
to increases was based on seizures and evidence that was arriving on the
doorsteps of
Q6 Bob Russell: What about urban and rural?
Assistant Chief Constable Matthews: There are no real differences between urban and rural, if I am honest with you. I think it is available wherever you go in the country. We are finding seizures in a range of locations now from temporary caravan sites to housing estates to nightclubs, so it is available.
Q7 Gwyn
Prosser: Recently I visited
Assistant Chief Constable Matthews: First, I will be honest and say that they are rolled out nationwide. A vast number of forces now have the capability to use the kind of equipment that you probably saw in use like Ion Track. It is seen by forces as a crime-reduction tool; it is effective in that we regularly seize powders as a result of the use of the tool. As such, it is day-to-day business really rather than something that needs to be rolled out.
Q8 Gwyn Prosser: Are these tools primarily designed to protect and enforce law or to disrupt the actual dealers and the users in a particular city centre?
Assistant Chief Constable Matthews: I think that is at the heart of the matter. Obviously, they have a variety of uses; for instance, they can pick up explosive scents. At the heart of this is how much it deters somebody. A recent survey by the Kent Police showed that over 70% of people who were going to nightclubs would be deterred from trying to carry a drug into the nightclub if they saw the police deploying that sort of equipment. Equally, over 60% felt that it would be safer to go into that nightclub having seen the police deployed in that fashion. I think firstly it does act as a good deterrent; secondly, it gives some kind of reassurance to law-abiding people.
Q9 Gwyn Prosser: On the night we were out, of up to 300 Ion tests there were ten arrests. Are you in a position to say whether that would be typical of the proportion of detections?
Assistant Chief Constable Matthews: That would be round about typical, yes. Generally speaking, when you deploy the machine, the result is around about 5%.
Q10 Gwyn
Prosser: I was also impressed by how affable
and accepting these young people were, although lots of them had had a bit of
alcohol to drink. They accepted the idea
of queuing up, being detected and going in, but that was
Assistant Chief Constable Matthews: If I give an example first of all. Two weeks ago I was in Gloucestershire, my own county force, where a knife arch was deployed with a queue of people going through it. The one person who started to kick up in the line and did not want to go through it had a knife on him. One feels straight away that kind of system is working. I asked people in that queue, "How do you feel about being searched by the police on a night out going into a nightclub?" and every single person said to me, "It makes me feel safer to be here. It makes me feel safer to go out". I do not know whether the Metropolitan Police has the same view. That is my view of this in general.
Mr Pearson: I have nothing further to add.
I think that is pretty much a reflection of the position in
Chairman: The Committee will be visiting one of the nightclubs in central
Q11 David Davies: I think this is excellent work that is gong on round the nightclubs, but what about people driving back afterwards? We are very strict, and rightly so, about alcohol. What about people who may have sniffed cocaine and be driving a car? What can we do to detect that and then prosecute them?
Assistant Chief Constable Matthews: I am very glad that you asked the question because I would not want the committee to believe that the kind of technical equipment you saw deployed on your visit was the only operating location we would use it. For example, it is commonplace up and down the country now for forces to deploy the technology known as ANPR (automatic number plate reading). When that flags up a vehicle that is seen to be worth stopping, very often now we will deploy the hand-held device in the vehicle to satisfy ourselves that the occupants of that vehicle have not been in contact with controlled drugs. Again, we do make arrests as a result of that type of deployment.
Q12 Mr
Streeter: The Committee learnt some weeks
ago that for every gram of cocaine produced in this country, either an acre or
a hectare of rain forest is cut down to produce the darned stuff in
Assistant Chief
Constable Matthews: I suppose our job is around
public safety and ensuring that people who are breaking the law are brought to
justice. Nonetheless, I think it is
equally suitable for the Police Service to point out when the use of drugs is
creating havoc around the world. I found
it interesting that the Vice-President of Colombia spoke at the ACPO Drugs
Conference the year before last in
Mr Pearson: If I could add to that, I think the police would certainly support such a campaign. It was the shared responsibility campaign that the Vice-President of Colombia was doing his presentation on. If we could support that and perhaps get other agencies involved, such as Greenpeace, they could promote the message properly.
Q13 Tom Brake: May I ask Mr Matthews a few more questions about the Ion Track devices? Do you know what percentage of forces uses these?
Assistant Chief Constable Matthews: There is a range of devices available to the service. ACPO's current records show that 26 forces have the capability at the moment out of the 43 for which we are responsible.
Q14 Tom Brake: Have you, in fact, recommended or would you recommend that all forces deploy this technology or similar technology?
Assistant Chief
Constable Matthews: Yes, that would be an ACPO
position. Of course there is a cost that
comes with the technology. The average
machine ranges between £25,000 to £30,000 to purchase and one machine in a
large force would not be sufficient. For
example, I think
Q15 Tom Brake: I am aware that they can be programmed to detect a number of drugs. Does that mean a number of drugs at the same time and does that cover the range of all drugs or most of the drugs that are in use currently?
Assistant Chief Constable Matthews: Whilst I am not an expert on the device, my understanding is that depending on which device you are using, they do have the capability of detecting more than one drug at one time.
Q16 Tom Brake: As far as you are aware, that includes all the key drugs that are currently in use?
Assistant Chief Constable Matthews: I think it works by detecting anything that gives off a vapour that can be sensed by the machine.
Q17 Ms Buck: Crack houses: how effective do you think the antisocial behaviour legislation has been in enabling faster and more effective closure of crack houses, which are an absolute blight to communities, as I know very well from experience?
Mr Pearson: It has been effective. I
think it has also been very popular. In
Q18 Ms Buck: They are quite separate markets, are they not?
Mr Pearson: Yes. A crack house generally is somewhere people convene to smoke crack and not just to buy it. They are unlikely to want to hang around on street corners for any time smoking crack.
Q19 Ms Buck: What are you able to tell us in terms of the trend to confirm what you are saying? How many crack house closures were happening a year before the introduction of the 2004 Act and how many do you think you are now able to close? If you do not have those figures, perhaps you would be prepared to write to the Committee with them?
Assistant Chief Constable Matthews: I can certainly give you figures in terms of the closure of crack houses. You did ask about how effective the legislation was. We are seeing some problems in terms of how the courts are interpreting the use of the legislation. The legislation refers to being able to require an immediate closure and then within 48 hours requiring the courts to endorse that with a closure order. However, a number of respondents, as they are known, because they are not defendants under this legislation, are going to court and stating that they have not had sufficient time within 48 hours to consult with their legal advisers, and courts are adjourning sometimes for two, three or four weeks at a time. This inevitably leads not only to the movement of drugs where the individuals concerned can get back to the location and move drugs around, et cetera, but continues to cause a problem within communities, especially when the communities have been witnesses and have brought the matter to the attention of the police. There is an issue there about which ACPO are concerned. In terms of closures, we have the details up until September 2008, since the legislation was brought in, and a total of 1,757 crack house closure orders were issued during that period of time.
Q20 Mrs Dean: Can you explain in simple terms the "street level up approach"?
Assistant Chief Constable Matthews: Yes. In simple terms, it is an ACPO-led initiative but it is a partnership initiative including our colleagues from SOCA. The idea was that we start to link from the street upwards the chain, the connection, of drug supply, so seizing drug users, getting from that information who the drug supplier was locally and from the drug supplier who the importer was. It has been quite a successful way of doing business because it has opened up channels for exchanging of information; it is making sure we are all harmonised in terms of targeting individuals; and it is producing increased intelligence, although it is difficult at the moment to determine exactly what that increase looks like and work is going on to try to put a figure on that. In a nutshell, that is what it is.
Q21 Mrs Dean: Can you give us an example of where it is different from what has been used in the past? Could you explain whether it is really a new approach or that is just how it has been done but a new name for it?
Assistant Chief Constable Matthews: The subtle different from the past is that it is a joined-up approach. In the past probably the Police Service has been as guilty as any of the other law-enforcement agencies of operating in isolation. Clearly we now recognise the huge value of operating with our colleagues from SOCA, UKBA and others to have a joined-up approach. Indeed, only in the last two years we created the UK Drugs Nexus Group and that is a multi-agency strategy group designed just to focus on how together we can target the drug supply from importation all the way through to user.
Q22 Tom Brake: Just on that point, I think the Committee would probably be surprised that the police have apparently recently decided the best way to deal with this crime is to talk to the users and then go further up the chain. Probably most Committee Members would have thought that was what you were doing already. It is a fairly straightforward approach. I wonder whether there are perhaps any other examples that you can think of where similarly the police need to be adopting a joined-up approach in relation perhaps to tackling other crime because it seems so straightforward that that is what you should be doing.
Assistant Chief
Constable Matthews: I think we have always
sought to have a joined-up approach but the reality is that this is about being
able to use the assets of other agencies as well as our own frankly to get a
bigger bang for our bucks in terms of the investment we are making in
this. We operate on an intelligence-led
approach at the end of the day. We seek
not to react to crime; we try to be proactive around it. In terms of using this type of approach for
other crimes, we do that. It is as
simple as that. Organised crime groups
are operating up and down the
Q23 Patrick Mercer: Assistant Chief Constable Matthews, may we take this a little further? Since the introduction of the Proceeds of Crime Act in 2002, how many cocaine-related assets have been seized by yourselves?
Assistant Chief Constable Matthews: I was warned that this question could come up. The ACPO position is that it is not measured purely in terms of cocaine. Basically, under the Proceeds of Crime Act we will target organised criminals. Your average organised crime group is into just about anything from robbery, thieving, counterfeit, prostitution to drug supply. Therefore, when you capture one and you go for a seizure, you take what you can get through the court process. It is very difficult to determine from there what would be down to Class A supply alone.
Q24 Patrick Mercer: I do understand that and I accept that entirely. Is it true that the Treasury gets half of all the assets seized?
Assistant Chief Constable Matthews: Yes, that is true. 50% goes to the Treasury but I am advised that is intended to be reinvested by the Treasury back into supporting policing activity in the long-term.
Q25 Patrick Mercer: All right, but how can it be true that you are reinvesting the proceeds to benefit communities?
Assistant Chief
Constable Matthews: The other 50% is divided up
between the Police Service, the courts, the
Q26 Patrick Mercer: But if less than half has been retained by the local community, how does that statement stack up?
Assistant Chief Constable Matthews: Personally, if you are asking my honest opinion, we would like to get 100% back.
Q27 Chairman: I wonder whether we are actually winning the war on drugs. As you know, there are figures that show
there is an estimated 35 to 40 tonnes a year entering the
Assistant Chief
Constable Matthews: It is a shocking figure,
Chairman. Another figure that
I think is equally relevant is that in the last 18 months police seizures
in the
Q28 Chairman: Is that seizure in terms of tonnage or value?
Assistant Chief Constable Matthews: I do not know the exact figures of tonnage or value. I do not have those in front of me.
Q29 Chairman: I have figures for what is going in which indicate to us that we
are not winning the war on drugs. We
have SOCA, the police and all these other agencies, the UK Border Agency, all
giving evidence to us today, but we are still the second highest user of
cocaine in the whole of
Assistant Chief Constable Matthews: Yes.
Q30 Chairman: That must be a cause of concern for you?
Assistant Chief Constable Matthews: It is a cause of extreme concern. I can tell you that it is not difficult to find it wherever you go on the streets.
Q31 Chairman: What has happened to Mr Halliwell? He stood down as the drugs czar some time ago. We are trying to find him. We would be grateful if you could help us find him.
Assistant Chief Constable Matthews: We can probably find a location for you.
Q32 Chairman: Were you disappointed that Mr Halliwell was not succeeded by another drugs czar? We had someone who co-ordinated all this policy appointed by the Government, he then stepped own and now we have no-one co-ordinating.
Assistant Chief Constable Matthews: What I would say to that is that it is always useful to have a single point of contact. However, ACPO divides itself into a number of committees, on one of which I sit, which is the ACPO Drugs Committee, and part of our role is to co-ordinate UK policing activity, which we do and do successfully.
Q33 Martin Salter: Mr Matthews, can I go back to the Proceeds of Crime Act? It is very easy for the police to say "Give us all the money", you are good at that, but given that you are often pursuing the same group of people time and time again who re-offend and re-offend, and that we have a complete lack of resources for effective treatment programmes, particularly in urban areas like London and Reading, which I represent, is there not a powerful case for some of this money from the Asset Recovery Agency to go into drug treatment programmes so that we do not have quite so many addicts running around committing acquisitive crime in the first place keeping you all very busy?
Assistant Chief Constable Matthews: Most of those in drug treatment programmes are people who are serious drug addicts, normally heroin and crack cocaine addicts, and as such they cause us the majority of problems in terms of crime in this country. Their habits are so bad that the volume of money that they have to come by by dishonest means to pay for their habits, £600 a night habits, clearly speaks for itself in terms of the impact on the community, the harm that does and the stretch in police resources that then comes from that. Personally, and I am sure ACPO would agree with this, I would support anything that would enhance the capability of assisting those individuals to come off drugs. If that meant using some of these assets seized to be diverted in that way, I would not have any objection.
Q34 Martin Salter: Surely there are three elements to any effective drugs programme. There has to be education, enforcement and treatment. Perhaps sometimes we put the ball too much in your court and not enough emphasis on treatment, which is actually going to reduce drug-related crime more effectively than constantly putting resources into enforcement. Is that so?
Assistant Chief Constable Matthews: I would say that one of the most successful schemes operating at the moment is the prolific and priority offender schemes up and down the country; that is obviously a combination of police, drugs workers and probation. We have found that to be a really effective joined-up way of dealing with the problem because it carries all three of those elements. Most forces have a limit on the number that they can manage at any one time. If we could expand those schemes through the diversion of some of this money, that would probably be a popular thing for the forces.
Q35 Mr Winnick: Mr Matthews, picking up your response to the latter questions of the Chair, we all agree that cocaine is a highly dangerous drug and it would be most desirable if no-one took it, but as long as there is a demand for it, are you really telling us that this war is going to be won and can be won? The answer really is "no", is it not?
Assistant Chief
Constable Matthews: Certainly the war cannot be
won by policing alone. You cannot police
this problem out. It is a problem for the
Q36 Mr Winnick: As long as demand exists, the gangsters and all these other criminals involved will ply their trade at every possible opportunity. It is really a question of how demand can be reduced. That is the crux of the matter.
Assistant Chief Constable Matthews: Without any shadow of doubt, I concur with that. I was talking to somebody in the cells only two weeks ago who was arrested for possession of cocaine. When I asked the question "Why do you do it? Why do you take it when it could be dangerous for you?" he said, "You know what? It costs about the same as two or three pints of lager and I get a bigger buzz out of it". There is your demand.
Q37 Chairman: If you could help us track down Mr Halliwell, we would be grateful. We have been trying to do so for a few weeks and we cannot find him.
Assistant Chief Constable Matthews: We will certainly do so.
Chairman: We may write to you again requesting some statistics and other information. We are most grateful. We know that you are both extremely busy. Thank you very much.
Memorandum submitted by HM Revenue & Customs and
the
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr Brodie Clark, Head of Border Force, and Mr Mark Fuchter, Deputy Director Border Force, UK Border Agency, gave evidence.
Q38 Chairman: Mr Clark and Mr Fuchter, thank you very much for coming to give evidence to us today. Mr Clark, if I could start with you: the UK Border Agency, which is supposed to protect the borders of this country, let in 45 tonnes of cocaine last year. This must be something of an embarrassment to all of you.
Mr Clark: I do not think we are at all embarrassed by the work that we deliver at the border and the performance over the last few years has been excellent in terms of dealing with the seizures of illegal drugs coming into the UK. We have certainly achieved and exceeded the targets that are set for us in terms of our seizure operation and we have developed enormously the links and relationships with other law enforcement agencies in terms of addressing and working with the issues of harm around both cocaine and heroin coming into the UK.
Q39 Chairman: Do you think you are therefore going to do a better job than HMRC because clearly many of these problems are inherited? We now have one joint operation, which is headed by yourself. Do you feel that this is going to be as big a priority for yourselves as it was in the past, more of a priority than, for example, illegal immigration? Where does the cocaine trade end up on the checklist that you have?
Mr Clark: I sense two issues there, if I interpret that right, and one was around the capability of the new Border Force in terms of pooling Customs and Immigration resources together. I have no doubt at all that we are already recognising clear evidence from that pooling together of a much larger workforce, so 4,000 from Customs, 4,000 from Immigration, and our workforce of 9,200 people at the border with a much greater flexibility in terms of dealing with people and goods, the powers to deal with both, and we have now trained over 3,000 staff in the skills relating to the disciplines of the other agency. That capability has been hugely enhanced, therefore, as a consequence for the Border Force. In terms of targets and priorities, Class A drugs remain one of our uppermost concerns and considerations.
Q40 Chairman: "Uppermost" sounds like quite a wide band. When you meet the Home Secretary, in terms of banding, where would it be as far as the list is concerned? "Uppermost" sounds quite vague.
Mr Clark: Forgive me for using that word then. It is one of the key performance targets that on a very regular basis we report on to the Minister, Phil Willis, and to the Permanent Secretary, Sir David Normington. It is amongst the top key targets for delivery of the UK Border Agency.
Q41 Chairman: Top three maybe? Top two?
Mr Clark: There are a number of key priorities for the UK Border Agency. The issue around seizure and intelligence and working with other enforcement partners in respect of Class A drugs is one of the high level targets.
Q42 Chairman: Mr Fuchter, you have 9,200 officers responsible for securing borders - 9,200 people who could presumably ring you up at any time and ask for instructions. How many of those are actually targeted towards the cocaine trade as opposed to illegal immigration?
Mr Fuchter: As a generality, most of our targeting effort is actually based on criminality itself, the sort of indicators some of which I hope you saw yesterday: the profiling and targeting that is going on. It is looking more at criminality. We do target flights and other routes that are high risk for cocaine. We cannot give a number for that because that number will vary over time. We do not allocate resources in a ring-fenced way to do with any one particular commodity.
Q43 Chairman: Mr Clark, have there been any tensions as a result of the merger between these two organisations, obviously under you as the new Head of the Border Force?
Mr Clark: These are two organisations with very long and fine distinguished histories and cultures. We have moved those two organisations and produced a high level of integration over the last 12 months, which is delivering more effective outcomes. There are personal histories that people have had with the legacy organisations, of course, but very clearly both parties to this integration recognise the sense of creating the one organisation, recognise the value that is coming from that, and are keen to move forward and deliver the new organisation and a higher level of performance.
Q44 Tom Brake: Mr Clark and Mr Fuchter, does it worry you that some of your own officers believe that you have downgraded the work of drug seizures to focus instead on ensuring the queues are reduced, and that is reflected, they would suggest, in your UKBA leaflet which sets out your priorities, which makes lots of mentions about cutting queues but very few references to drugs?
Mr Clark: It does worry me if that is the perception of officers.
Q45 Tom Brake: What are you doing to address that?
Mr Clark: I am continually making very clear the message of what our priorities are and how we are delivering against those priorities. Queue lengths are important in terms of dealing properly and responsibly with the travelling public into and out of the UK, but the issues around criminality, particularly serious criminality linked with Class A drugs, are more important concerns. That message coming from me is clear and has always been very clear. There will be times at ports when there is pressure on them to manage queues, but that is not in any way to denigrate the requirement for delivering against Class A drugs seizure targets.
Q46 Tom Brake: Mr Fuchter, can I ask you if you have any specific responsibility perhaps towards officers who were Customs Officers in terms of addressing the concerns of clearly some of them about the priority that is now given to that work?
Mr Fuchter: I have policy responsibility for drugs and a range of other prohibited and restricted goods that we have brought into the Agency to integrate in the way that Mr Clark has described. I do not actually see the fear. I get feedback that officers on the ground are integrating quite well; they are going through each other's training courses. We are getting some benefits at a very low level. I do not know whether you would have seen anything like this yesterday, but we are having people picked up at the primary checkpoint who are of interest for Class A drugs. What I take from that is that we will be in a better position for our targeting effort.
Q47 Martin Salter: Gentlemen, I am worried that we might have initial overload here. HMRC transferred its responsibility for criminal investigation and intelligence work on drugs to SOCA in April 2006; we had day-to-day responsibility for operational enforcement from HMRC to the UK Border Agency in April 2008; UKBA has come about comparatively recently, which came out of BIA, which then came out of IND. I understand that detections that are not adopted by SOCA may be investigated by HMRC's referred investigation team. Is there not a danger - and you would not be human if you did not recognise the dangers here - that there could be gaps in the system and important investigations could fall through those gaps if not picked up by either UKBA or SOCA?
Mr Clark: I think, in terms of the reshaping of the organisation, that it is very clear in terms of outcomes and performance that that is the right way to go. I think the joining of Customs detection with Immigration has been good and it is improving performance and capability and flexibility and resources that can work on some of the key high risk issues for the UK. The picture has not finished yet. The referred investigation team has got to come over from HMRC into UKBA. That will happen on 9 December and that will then give UKBA the capability to investigate a range of the issues arising from drug seizures at the border. Then there has to be, and there already are, a number of agreements and MoUs in place with other key law enforcement agencies to recognise where one area of jurisdiction stops and the next begins. I think the relationship, for example, between ourselves and SOCA is improving constantly and is at a very positive stage at this point, and we continue to build and develop that through an MoU in terms of who deals with the outcomes from seizures and how particular levels of seizures are managed. I understand the risk and UKBA is alive to the risk and UKBA continues to work at narrowing gaps or looking for gaps and identifying areas where the fullest focus might not be there and we will work to mitigate that.
Q48 Martin Salter: You say that the amalgamations have improved performance. Can you give us some examples of where it has done so to justify that statement? For example, have performance indicators risen, have targets been met?
Mr Clark: In the course of last year, which was the very first year of beginning that integration process, the performance delivery - and I choose for the sake of this conversation issues around commodities and seizures - in every respect equalled or exceeded the performance of HMRC on the previous 12-month period. Now, that was a year against which there was a huge amount of change taking place as well within the UKBA and where we were going through the process of training 3,000 staff in the skills of the other side of the house, as it were. I think in those circumstances that has been a very, very good performance, and part of that is clearly attributable to the flexibilities and the capability coming out of the increased and more flexible workforce.
Q49 Martin Salter: Would you expect seizures to continue to rise as you become more efficient?
Mr Clark: There are a number of issues around that. We are doing more work overseas. As you do more work overseas, less of the
commodities come into the
Q50 David Davies: Mr Clark, when we visited Schiphol last month we were told that they intercept something like 30% of all the hard drugs coming in and that the average in other European airports is 14%. What do you make of those figures?
Mr Clark: I think it is very difficult to know what you have seized and detected balanced against what has successfully come into the country. I do not have figures on that and am not able to make a comparator with what the Dutch presented you with.
Q51 David Davies: Do you think that those figures are feasible? Is it possible that Schiphol is finding more than twice as much as other airports, including Heathrow? Have you been over there to see what they do? Are they doing something different from us or more of it perhaps?
Mr Clark: I have not been over and examined their commodity work in respect
of drugs and may, as a consequence of this, seek that opportunity. If those figures ring true, then there should
be something that we should clearly be learning from the Dutch and their work
at both Schiphol and presumably
Q52 David Davies: One of the things they say they do is to target very much based on nationality and on planes. I think there is another question on this in a minute, so I am not going to go further on that. I might come back to that.
Mr Fuchter: If I go back to the point about Schiphol and the percentages, I think it depends on the context. I did want to make the point that we work quite closely with the Dutch through a couple of EU for a. There is a Customs Co-operation Working Group under the Third Pillar. We are exchanging information with them on a daily basis anyway and we do undertake joint exercises and there is one ongoing at the moment under the auspices of the World Customs Organization about cocaine in air traffic. We do not see a huge difference in those percentages but it can depend on whether you are talking about one particular route or the totality.
Q53 Mr Streeter: Mr Fuchter, you gave us a written submission. Of course you used to be part of HMRC, which we are all familiar with as running the tax credit system in this country that gives so much distress to our constituents, as well as benefits of course occasionally. You state in your submission that you are taking "a targeted, risk-based approach to intervention that is intelligence led". There is quite a lot of jargon there. Are you not saying the same thing three times over? Can you unpack that for us, please?
Mr Fuchter: Probably, and I apologise for the jargon. That is typical of our jargon. Look at that paragraph in the round. A wide range of goods is covered by EU and
Q54 Mr
Streeter: Frankly, having seen the operation
yesterday, it is hard to think of what more could be done than is being done,
so I do accept that point. This is a
specific question. We were told in
Schiphol, and again it was referred to yesterday at Heathrow, that involvement
in cocaine smuggling is rife amongst baggage handlers and certainly was at
Schiphol. Obviously a chain is as strong
as its weakest link. What is the
experience at Heathrow or in the
Mr Fuchter: The high level picture is that we are alive to the fact, I would not say just with baggage handlers, but we accept that there can be a risk with any employees in an area like a large airport and we have had some cases over the years. We are well aware of what has happened in the past. It is rather difficult to say too much in the public domain and I would not want to accuse the baggage handlers per se, but we are aware of cases that do look to bring drugs through so that they do not have to go through official customs controls.
Q55 Mr
Streeter: Just moving on to Mr Clark,
earlier you touched on targets. Of
course we do not know what we do not know, so we do not really know how much
cocaine enters, but SOCA has estimated that 35,000 to 45,000 kilograms of
cocaine enter the
Mr Clark: It is the target we have and have inherited from HMRC. We will go through, in the course of the next few months, a conversation around what that target might be for 2010-2011. If and as our capability is improving, then we would certainly want to stretch in terms of what we can deliver on seizures at the ports. I think there are a number of questions, however, that I alluded to earlier on about where one wants to make the interventions and where one wants to make the seizures. We are increasingly looking at a much more international approach to that and an overseas approach, and we have Operations Airbridge and Westbridge running, both in Jamaica and in Ghana, which are both very key, or have been key, in terms of a source for illegal drugs coming into the United Kingdom. We think that has had very good outcomes and results. Within the UKBA, of course, we also have an international arm to the organisation, which is one of the other benefits of joining this up together. We have 3,000 staff working overseas.
Q56 Chairman: We will be coming to the overseas section in one moment.
Mr Fuchter: May I please add that there is another dimension to that answer about the quantity of drugs, if I may. Back in 2005, when we were preparing ourselves for the formation of SOCA, we had a debate within Customs along the lines of what targets should we set for ourselves. Alongside the targets for seizures of powder - heroin and cocaine - that you see from our targets, you will also see some high level indicators around support to SOCA and other law enforcement agencies. The strategic approach we took then was deliberately to say that alongside those seizures we will make interventions and undertake checks on behalf of SOCA in particular but other agencies, particularly counter-terrorism, if they approach us.
Q57 Chairman: Did you just tell this Committee that you set your own targets?
Mr Fuchter: No. We proposed those targets and they were accepted.
Q58 Chairman: Who sets your targets?
Mr Fuchter: They are set by the Treasury. The Treasury certainly accepted that proposal. The proposal coming from us was that we needed to ensure that our border interventions continued to support SOCA.
Q59 Chairman: The Treasury sets your targets. What role does the Home Secretary have in all this since he is responsible, in effect, for policing the cocaine trade? Does the Home Secretary not get involved in setting your targets?
Mr Fuchter: I think at the time those targets would have been cleared with the Home Office certainly, yes.
Mr Clark: Can I try to clarify that? The Home Office has got responsibility for drug-related issues. We are currently in conversation with another part of the Home Office in terms of looking at the targets that would be suitable and appropriate for next year, looking at both outputs, outcomes and the strategic background to that, and they will then be signed off by the Home Secretary.
Q60 Chairman: So at the beginning of the year the Home Secretary will send you a letter, "Brodie Clark, your target for seizures is X and if you get it, you will get your bonus; if you do not, you will not get your bonus." Do you get a letter like that?
Mr Clark: I kind of wish it was that simple really, but it is of that kind, yes.
Q61 Bob Russell: I am still trying to come to terms with the fact that the Treasury is setting the targets, but perhaps we will re-visit that one. Mr Fuchter, your written submission states that figures on cocaine seizures, prosecutions and convictions do not take account of UKBA's upstream activity - another term I have learnt today. Can you please provide us with figures also assessing your upstream activity?
Mr Fuchter: To be honest, we cannot give you the entire picture. We do know that since we have been engaged in Operation Westbridge in Ghana the government authorities there have reported to us that they seized something like 690 kilos of cocaine as a result of our support, but that is about a contribution, so that is not a seizure that we have made and we do not score it against those targets, and similarly with Operation Airbridge in the Caribbean.
Q62 Bob Russell: In football terms, that is a non-league result, is it?
Mr Fuchter: You could say that. Actually, we think that is particularly valuable because it is a very good point at which to take out the drugs, even if it is another agency taking that out because we are committed and we have to collaborate as much as we can.
Q63 Mr
Winnick: There is a particular problem, is
there not, Mr Clark, in the way in which these drugs are smuggled into
Mr Clark: I am sorry, Operation Airbridge is an operation that we run in
Q64 Mr Winnick: When your organisation is not in a position to stop that, the fact is that people are found, are they not, carrying drugs in various parts of their body?
Mr Clark: The three main ways in are through some kind of freight entry into
the UK, or a passenger or tourist bringing it with them as part of their
baggage, or individuals putting it inside their body and seeking to bring it
into the UK in that fashion. Freight is
by far the greatest entry point of illegal drugs into the
Q65 Mr
Winnick: I have been looking at the annex to
the memorandum which you have submitted jointly with Revenue and Customs and
you have illustrated some cases. For
example, we are told that in 2008 UK Border Agency officers arrested four
passengers attempting to smuggle 20 kilograms of cocaine which was taped to
their bodies as they disembarked from a P&O cruise liner in
Mr Clark: People seeking to strap drugs to them or put them inside their bodies does happen. It is a way of bringing drugs illegally into the country. It is not accounting for the biggest volumes of drugs coming in, that comes in through freight, but the work that happens at ports and airports is designed largely to deal with the tourists coming in who are behaving in that sort of way, and we have increasingly rolled out technologies that help our staff, whether that is in the form of x-ray capability, whether that is in the form of particular pieces of x-ray machinery that can look inside the body, and we are increasingly deploying sniffer dogs. We now have 40 to 50 sniffer dogs that we deploy at particular ports at particular times. I would want to link it up to the expression that was used earlier about intelligence-led and targeted because we cannot be at all 3,000 ports at the same time. We have to target in line with the intelligence, the information and the material we get from other agencies, and indeed from ourselves.
Q66 Mr
Winnick: You mentioned Operation Airbridge
as working with the Jamaican authorities.
Is
Mr Clark: Operation Airbridge has been a huge success and has stemmed much of
that drug movement from
Q67 Mr Winnick: Would you like to mention one or two of the countries which are also main culprits?
Mr Clark: I think the source countries tend to be South American; that is
where the cocaine comes from. You will
have heard that many times. There are a
number of routes from
Q68 David Davies: I wondered to what extent you feel comfortable, to use a phrase, in stereotyping people. Obviously it is not something you want to do too much but, on the other hand, there does seem overwhelming evidence that certain nationalities are more involved in this crime than others.
Mr Clark: You will have heard some of this on your visit yesterday. I do not think that the source and the illegal activity associated with drug trafficking necessarily fits with particular nationalities. The organisers may well do and the countries of origin are quite clear, but the ranges of nationalities that are detected at the border coming through are many.
Q69 David
Davies: Let me just play Devil's advocate
with you for a minute. There are some
people who might suggest that political correctness and a fear of being seen to
be racist or stereotyping is preventing you from targeting people who are more
likely to be involved in drug smuggling than others. Although you may talk about a range of nationalities,
is it not the case that people might well have a British or an EU passport but
will be two or three generations removed from the countries which are causing
us a problem?
Mr Clark: Being politically correct is of course important, but that does not get in the way of a proper intelligence-led and profiled activity in which we target people coming into the United Kingdom, and my staff know that.
Q70 David Davies: Do you collect records of the IC Code (that is the code that the authorities use to determine ethnicity) of those who are arrested for smuggling drugs and, if so, would you be willing to let us have those figures?
Mr Clark: The nationality of those ---
Q71 David Davies: Not the nationality, the ethnicity?
Mr Clark: I do not know the answer to the question. If we have that, we will.
Q72 David Davies: When the police arrest somebody, they make a note of their ethnicity. Do you do that?
Mr Fuchter: In terms of seizures, we do not collect the ethnicity; we will collect the nationality. With arrests for criminal investigation, the ethnicity certainly used to be recorded; I am sure it still is.
Q73 Chairman: I think on the form that we were shown yesterday - and to explain
to those who were not at that meeting, the Committee visited Heathrow Airport Terminal
4 to look at your operation there - for a voluntary inspection there was the
question of ethnicity, but of course you target according to flight origins, do
you not? You know there are certain
countries, and you mentioned
Mr Clark: We do have targets, yes. Indeed we target. Part of it is for countries where we have intelligence that would suggest that ---
Q74 Chairman: I think what Mr Davies wants to know is whether you have profiles of certain people who you are more likely to want to stop than not. We understand the flights issues, but as for profiles, for example looking at this Committee now, if you were deciding to search one of us, would you have a target that would make one more likely to be searched rather than another?
Mr Clark: Yes, indeed we do, Chairman. We do have profiles in that sense and we need to advise our frontline staff what they are looking for, and that is based on the intelligence that we glean and that is turned into the kind of package and targeting process that frontline staff can deliver on our behalf.
Chairman: We will not ask you which one of us you would want to search!
Q75 David Davies: Are you able to write to us with details then of the ethnicity of those arrested for drugs smuggling?
Mr Fuchter: That information is currently held by HMRC. I assume that is available.
Q76 Chairman: Any information of that kind would be very helpful to the deliberations of the Committee. Thank you very much.
Mr Fuchter: Just to make a point though, there is nothing in the immediate characteristics about any Members of this Committee that would influence our targeting either way.
Q77 Bob Russell: That is disappointing!
Mr Fuchter: It is where you have been, where you travelled to, who you may have connected with, et cetera.
Chairman: A very diplomatic answer, Mr Fuchter.
Martin Salter: Could I just advise you that David Davies has got Eastern European
connections and therefore should be your number one target given the
trafficking routes through
David Davies: And Chinese ones as well.
Martin Salter: Exactly.
Chairman: Mr Davies' antecedents should be left on one side. Martin Salter; we know you are from
Q78 Martin
Salter: Yes, therefore a target. Your joint submission states that you are
looking to extend European co-operation building on the success of the
Airbridge and Westbridge models. We
recently had a visit to
Mr Fuchter: Firstly just to remind you that we are working closely with SOCA so
SOCA will be doing more overseas than we are, but as well as extending the
bridge-type model and project if we can, particularly with other like-minded EU
Member States who may want to collaborate with us - and that is the point we
mention there - we will do things like offer training overseas. We did train, for example, Brazilian customs
to enforce cocaine controls at their outbound controls at some of the
international airports there. We will
collaborate with other EU Member States on specific projects. For example, we recently sent deep rummage
teams to the EU border in
Q79 Chairman: Mr Fuchter and Mr Clark, thank you very much for giving evidence
today. On behalf of the Committee,
whenever we have sought meetings - we went to visit
Mr Clark: Thank you.
Witnesses: Maria Eagle MP, Minister of State, Ministry of Justice, and Mr Ian Poree, Director of Commissioning and Operational Policy, National Offender Management Service, gave evidence.
Q80 Chairman: Minister, good morning, I apologise for keeping you waiting; the subject matter of the inquiry is of such interest to this Committee that we have had to ask additional questions of witnesses. How many users of powder and crack cocaine are there currently in our prison system?
Maria Eagle: Chairman, can I say it is a pleasure to be here even if we have had to wait for a few minutes, it is nice to get a bit of a rest now and then! If we look at the numbers on the basis of those who have used crack or cocaine up to a year before they come into prison, which is the basis upon which we collect the figures, the figure for adults for crack cocaine is 35%, for young offenders it is 15%.
Q81 Chairman: Please go a little slower. In the prison system at the moment 35% of those in the prisons are cocaine users?
Maria Eagle: No, have used cocaine for up to a year before they come into prison. There is a difference between the kinds of substances that are abused in prison and what was done before they came into prison.
Q82 Chairman: Who have used it in the past.
Maria Eagle: Have used it in the past, up to a year before.
Q83 Chairman: How many for young offenders?
Maria Eagle: 15% for young offenders - that is crack cocaine. The figures for powder cocaine for adults are 23% and 35% for young offenders. We can produce for you tables of figures which give you the full picture of that survey work that we do.
Q84 Chairman: That would be very helpful. On entry into prison over half the people entering have used cocaine?
Maria Eagle: If you add up ---
Q85 Chairman: That is all I have done. My mathematics is not perfect but I know it comes to over 50%.
Maria Eagle: Yes, that is right. This is on the basis of a recent study surveying prisoners when they come in.
Q86 Chairman: That is a very, very high figure indeed, is it not?
Maria Eagle: It is.
Q87 Chairman: As of today, do we know how many prisoners actually use cocaine, either powder cocaine or crack cocaine, in prison?
Maria Eagle: It is very, very few.
Q88 Chairman: But do we have a figure? "Very, very few" is very imprecise.
Maria Eagle: On the basis of our random mandatory drug testing statistics we can say that 0.2% of the positive findings are positive for cocaine of some type and that is about 100 people. That number has not changed since 1997 and we do not consider that we have got a problem of cocaine abuse in prison, which is not to say that some of our offenders who are in prison did not use cocaine before they came into prison, either powder or crack.
Q89 Chairman: You are not unduly worried that there is a lot of cocaine
circulating within prisons in
Maria Eagle: No, not unduly worried, no.
Chairman: Thank you.
Q90 Martin Salter: Presumably, Minister, we have a serious problem with drugs being passed into prison but I would not have thought that cocaine would be the drug of choice for somebody locked up; I would have thought people would not be looking for stimulants and would be far more likely to be looking for things to make them fuzzier than cocaine does. Have you got any figures in terms of the amount of heroin, for example, or other Class A drugs that are being discovered? You have given a figure for low incidence of cocaine use but there is a relatively high use of drugs in prison today, is there not?
Maria Eagle: Yes. We have various ways in which we might count that. The random mandatory drug testing is the best way of actually detecting drug use because you have to grab somebody and test them and if it is positive for a banned substance then that is the basis of your numbers about what problem we have. We can say that random mandatory drug testing figures have been falling over the years and overall in this last year 7.7% were positive for some substance. That had fallen from 24.4% in 1996-97 and it has been on a downward path.
Q91 Tom Brake: One of the earlier witnesses talked about some users having a £600 a night habit; I am not sure whether that was cocaine, crack cocaine or other drugs but, clearly, if they need to raise that amount of money this is driving crime. Do you have any feel for, perhaps, in what percentage of crimes that are committed someone has a cocaine dependency, excluding the very obvious ones about drug smuggling and possession?
Maria Eagle: There is clearly some sort of relationship between drug use and crime. The Home Office Drug Interventions Programme shows that a high number of those arrested for acquisitive crimes, such as burglary and , test positive for use and the majority of those arrested for acquisitive crime (73%) are using heroin or cocaine at least once a week, they are habitual users, and 26% who were arrested for committing acquisitive crime reported taking heroin or cocaine weekly. There clearly is a link but I do not think it is completely obvious what the causation is and whether it is the drug use that causes the crime or the crime that then also has some more complex interaction with drug use. Certainly, given those sorts of numbers, it is not surprising that we have a lot of people in prison who have had or have a dependency problem of one kind or another.
Q92 Mrs Dean: Minister, could you tell us what treatments for cocaine dependency can be accessed through the criminal justice system?
Maria Eagle: I am glad to say that you can access a full range of treatment in the community through the Probation Service's work, either being managed in the community on licence or community orders, for example, a full range of community drug treatment is available there: the offender substance abuse programme, the addressing substance-related offending programme are available in the community. In addition, in prisons there is a comprehensive drug treatment programme in place which addresses all drug misuse. Specifically for cocaine you would be looking at clinical support for those withdrawing from cocaine use and psychosocial interventions which are provided through our Counselling, Assessment, Referral, Advice and Through-care Services (known as CARATS for short), one of which there is in each prison that will provide that kind of psychosocial intervention. Then we have a range of accredited drug treatment programmes which are designed to address drug misuse in general, some of which are more suitable for cocaine and crack cocaine dependency than others. I would just like to say very briefly we do have an issue in our prisons. The courts send people to prisons for very varying lengths of time; if we only have people on remand for a short period or somebody for a very short sentence that severely limits what kind of intervention we can offer. If we have somebody sent to prison for a long sentence that gives us more possibilities, so we do try and design interventions which enable us to at least offer some help to all of those people depending upon what kind of substance misuse or drug they are involved with, what the length of their sentence is and their circumstances. We have a full range of interventions available.
Q93 Mrs Dean: Are you able to give us numbers for referrals to cocaine treatment across the National Offender Management Service, completion rates of treatment and success rates after a year? Do you have those figures?
Maria Eagle: Yes, we do have those figures but subject to some caveats in respect of the fact that many of the people who are accessing these services are engaged in polydrug misuse and so you cannot necessarily completely isolate cocaine or crack cocaine from other substance misuse. 44% of entrants into prison treatment programmes reported crack cocaine or powder cocaine as one of their two main drugs of choice. In the longer higher intensity programmes, the therapeutic communities and 12-step programmes, that number goes up, so 72% of those entering therapeutic communities, 65% of those entering the prison 12-step programmes. In the community the treatments that I referred to, the offender substance abuse programme, addressing substance-related offending, it is a much lower number. Those reporting crack cocaine were 19% and 7% reporting powder cocaine use. Again, we can provide you with full sets of tables.
Chairman: That would be very helpful.
Q94 David Davies: Is prison therefore more effective in helping people get off drugs than community-based approaches?
Maria Eagle: There is broad equivalence. We do have quite good completion rates.
Q95 David Davies: Can I just come back to things you said earlier on? You said that it is harder to get hold of hard drugs in prison and you have said that when you have got people on remand it is a shame you cannot do more with them even though, presumably, if they come off remand but are found guilty they go back into the community, so everything you have said to this point would lead me to believe that you believe that prison is actually more effective than community-based sentences in helping people with drug problems.
Maria Eagle: Not necessarily. It is important because people are coming in and out of prison, whether it is because they are remanded or given a community sentence or remanded and then sentenced to a long prison sentence. We need to make sure that there is proper through-care from the one setting to the other and that is increasingly what we have been trying to do. In that sense, Mr Davies, if I might say, there is more equivalence between the outcomes and between the different settings than you might originally have thought.
Q96 David Davies: You said it is harder to get hold of hard drugs in prison than it is outside.
Maria Eagle: It is, of course.
Q97 David Davies: You also said it was a shame you cannot do more to help people who are in on short sentences.
Maria Eagle: That is because of the length of time; you can only do so much in three or four weeks with somebody.
Q98 David Davies: Exactly, so you would rather see longer sentences to help people more?
Maria Eagle: Longer sentences could be more effective at tackling for the longer term that substance abuse problem that an individual has. If you look at what the National Treatment Agency say, they say ---
Q99 Chairman: Are you saying in answer to Mr Davies send them to prison for longer and that will help them with their drug problem and that is better than a ---
Maria Eagle: No.
David Davies: I am on your side here.
Q100 Chairman: That is exactly what Mr Davies is asking.
Maria Eagle: No, I am not saying that that is the only way of helping people with their drug problem.
Q101 David Davies: But it would help people?
Maria Eagle: It would enable us to help them in prison but if we have through-care that puts them into community services that are just as effective then it does not matter where the setting is that they get that help as long as they access the help.
Q102 David Davies: I believe you think I am being hostile, but I am not, I am actually on your side here.
Maria Eagle: I am just trying to be clear.
Q103 David Davies: I am sort of agreeing with you and I am just helping you to put this on the record, something which you and I agree with, that if somebody goes into prison and is kept there for a longer period of time than is currently the case, and we do not throw them into a cell and leave them to it but we help them, we help them with their drug issues and other things as well, we have got more of a chance of rehabilitating those people and turning them around. That is a statement of fact, is it not?
Maria Eagle: As long as they get help for their addiction problems in whichever setting they are, whether they are in the community or whether they are in prison, ---
Q104 David Davies: But in the community they have got more access to hard drugs, you said that earlier on.
Maria Eagle: It depends upon the support they get in the community. There is no reason why it cannot be just as effective.
David Davies: But the community is awash with hard drugs.
Chairman: We need to move on; we take your point.
Q105 Mrs Dean: Regarding the figures that you are going to let us have, the percentages are very interesting and we need those but what we could also do with is the actual figures of people who are going into treatment throughout the National Offender Management Service, the numbers who are completing it and also the success rate. If we could have that in some detail that would be helpful.
Maria Eagle: You can certainly have that in some detail, we will send you the tables. I can give you the headline figures if that would be helpful. The overall completion rate for accredited drug treatment programmes commenced in prison is 74%, the completion rate for higher intensity things like therapeutic communities and 12-step programmes is slightly lower, as you might imagine, 50% and 62%, and the completion rate for drug rehabilitation requirements in the community has gone up to 47% from 28% back in 2003.
Q106 Gwyn Prosser: Minister, there was a clear pledge in the 2008 drugs strategy covering the issues you have just been discussing with Mr Davies, that is recognising that there is a need to manage better offenders during the time of transition between custody and the community. You have spelt out about half a dozen or more different programmes that are in place, but how confident are you that at that vulnerable time when someone is released after a short prison term - and by your own admission you would not have had much time to correct matters in that time - that those ex-prisoners are getting the sort of drug treatment they actually need?
Maria Eagle: More confident than I would have been if you had asked me a few years ago and that is partly because we have been making up the deficit that we have had in the past around clinical treatment. The integrated drug treatment system which has been extended across the entire prison estate now makes arrangements for much better clinical handling inside - equivalent to clinical handling you get outside - so I am much more confident that through-care means that people can access the appropriate levels of treatment that work for them, given their own particular circumstances, their drug misuse and dependency problem that is individualised, they can do it whether inside or outside prison. I am much more confident now than I would have been a few years ago because the Health Service now in charge of drug treatment in prisons has raised the game in prison to the level at which you saw it outside prison.
Q107 Gwyn Prosser: Briefly, on this issue of short sentences and the discussion you have just had there is a growing pressure to actually abandon short sentences, is there not, in particular with regard to women for some other reasons? What is your view of that?
Maria Eagle: I am wary of it although I am not saying that there are not some merits to having longer sentences in terms of effectiveness.
Q108 Gwyn Prosser: I am not talking about extending someone's sentence in order to give them drug treatment, I am talking about actually abandoning short sentences.
Maria Eagle: I would have to have more of an understanding of what you mean by that because there would be a worry about courts and magistrates simply up tariffing. There are some unintended consequences to that. I am not saying it should not be examined but there are some unintended consequences.
Q109 Gwyn Prosser: I am talking about the criminal justice system adjusting so that sentences of two months, three months, six months, nine months are just abandoned and other forms of community enforcement are put in their place.
Maria Eagle: Or alternatively everybody gets a 12 months plus sentence, which is not necessarily what you might want.
Q110 Chairman: What is the answer to Mr Prosser's question because it relates to Mr Davies' question? What you told this Committee is that there is a large range of programmes in prison. The Committee is getting the impression from you that you think there ought to be an abandonment of shorter sentences, that they should have longer sentences so they can benefit from this wonderful treatment they get in prison.
Maria Eagle: No, that would not be an accurate reflection of my own views on this or the Government's views. The thing that I perhaps have not got across fully enough to make the Committee understand my position is that the equivalence of treatment and the through-care we have now from outside prison into prison and from inside prison back outside the prison into the community is such that I believe the treatment capacity is there, and that people can access it whether they are inside or outside in the community. I do not believe that just ending short sentences and putting people into prison for longer would make us more successful at dealing with people's drug dependency problems.
Chairman: Thank you, that is the point we wanted.
Q111 Mr Winnick: Minister, is there any evidence that making treatment a condition of bail or a condition of sentence is more effective than otherwise?
Maria Eagle: I do not know of any evidence that it is more effective but it can be effective. In part, of course, prisons do provide an opportunity for drug misusers to address drug misuse in a very structured environment and perhaps their lives were not so structured outside of prison, so for some people that helps, but I do not think I am aware of evidence that shows that it is better.
Q112 Chairman: On the question of bail and bail hostels and in respect of the weekend's reports of somebody being murdered in one of your bail hostels which was run by the firm ClearSprings, is there going to be an inquiry into that?
Maria Eagle: There has been an internal inquiry into the failings that led to that particular incident and, as a result, in terms of the contract with ClearSprings there have been some enforcement and rectification arrangements put into place to make sure that the failings that ClearSprings demonstrated in that particular instance are very unlikely to be repeated.
Q113 Chairman: They are keeping their contract, you are satisfied that they can carry on doing their job effectively?
Maria Eagle: In fact the contract is being re-competed in the not too distant future so that, of course, will be taken into account, the quality of the work that they manage to produce.
Chairman: Thank you for clarifying that.
Q114 Mr Streeter: Minister, I want to talk about sentencing in a moment, if I may, but first of all is it part of the Home Office's responsibility to reduce or try and reduce the number of people in this country taking cocaine?
Maria Eagle: I am not a Home Office minister, I am from the Ministry of Justice. My job is to try and look after people once they are sent into the prison system.
Q115 Chairman: Does that mean you do not talk to the ministers at the Home Office and say "I am the Minster for Justice so it is nothing to do with me"?
Maria Eagle: That is not quite what I said, Chairman. I did not say it was nothing to do with me.
Q116 Mr Streeter: Can I put my question again? Is it part of the Government's responsibility to try and reduce the number of people taking cocaine in this country?
Maria Eagle: To the extent that we are committed to reducing reoffending, and we are, that has got to be a key part of it.
Q117 Mr
Streeter: This is certainly not an attempt
to trip you up. It has come to our
attention as a Committee that for every gram of cocaine taken in this country
an acre or a hectare of rainforest has to be destroyed so that the drugs can be
grown in
Maria Eagle: I am happy to take that away and come back to the Committee with some response to that.
Q118 Mr Streeter: It is a serious point; thank you. Drugs mules that we have been looking at, both in Schipol and in Heathrow, people who swallow cocaine in pellets to bring it into this country, what kind of sentences are usually handed down to them and why do you think they have not been more effective in stopping people from doing this dreadful thing?
Maria Eagle: They are being quite effective partly because they are deterrent sentences that are handed out for that kind of behaviour. Many of these people are women, of course.
Q119 Mr Streeter: Yes.
Maria Eagle: But not only. There are deterrent sentences handed out and, again, we could provide the Committee with statistics on this. It is always difficult when it is an illegal trade to be clear how many of these people you are actually catching and so there are always caveats around statistics about whether the incidence is going up or down, but we believe that from many of these places the incidence is going down, in part because we are doing a lot of work in the countries concerned and part also because of the deterrent sentences that are then handed down and have been publicised better in the countries of origin.
Q120 Mrs Dean: Could one of the other messages that we try to get over to recreational users, particularly celebrities, be the fact that the mules are actually putting their own lives at risk in transporting the cocaine into this country and other countries for those recreational users to take?
Maria Eagle: Yes, I will certainly take that point away and respond to the Committee on that as well once I have consulted my colleagues.
Q121 Bob
Russell: Minister, this is the
Maria Eagle: That piece of research, which has got relatively small numbers but has had quite interestingly positive results, was funded by Home Office and Department of Health money and Committee Members will have seen what the Secretary of State for Justice had to say about it in his piece reported in the newspapers. It is an interesting piece of research but we would like to look further at it.
Q122 Bob Russell: In addition to trend-setting Darlington it is also happening apparently in London and Brighton, so we have got three sophisticated communities where this is being trialled. I was wondering whether perhaps we might have a report at some stage on its success or otherwise.
Maria Eagle: I am sure we will because these trials are always evaluated and we do believe in evidence-based policymaking when it comes to this and other issues, so the outcomes of these relatively small-scale pilots at present will need to be taken into account in policy development.
Q123 Bob
Russell: Just as a slight addition to that
question, if medical pilots currently underway were to identify an effective
drug replacement for cocaine, would the Government support the introduction of
a methadone equivalent programme for cocaine use, and perhaps we could have a
pilot in
Maria Eagle: At present my understanding, Mr Russell, is that there is no such recognised effective alternative and so we are speculating about whether or not one might be found in the future. Clearly it is harder to deal with cocaine and getting people off cocaine than sedative drugs for that very reason, but if one such were to be found we would want to look at what the implications of that were. My understanding at present is that there is not one and, therefore, it is speculative to consider it.
Q124 Chairman: You have not had any contact with the previous drugs czar - your department.
Maria Eagle: I would have to check on what contact there might have been, Chairman, and come back to you in respect of that. I do not want to mislead the Committee but I am not aware of it off the top of my head.
Q125 Chairman: Do you think there ought to be a drugs czar, someone who will cut across all the government departments to be able to co-ordinate the Government's approach? After all we have an enterprise czar, we have czars in other areas, and would that not be helpful because the cocaine trade crosses many government departments does it not?
Maria Eagle: It does and the criminal justice departments generally, whether it is the Home Office, Ministry of Justice or the Attorney's Office, and departments like Health have pretty sophisticated cross-departmental working arrangements at present to try and deal with issues that do that like the one the Committee is considering today. I am not myself pro or anti czars as a concept; if they can add something to what is already there it is worth considering but I am not convinced myself that in this particular instance it is a cut and dried case because we have pretty close working relationships in any event.
Q126 Chairman: Do you have figures which you could send the Committee - I am sure
you do not have them here today - of the number of people in prison in England
and Wales who are there because they are part of the cocaine trade rather than
users, how many are foreign prisoners and whether or not the Government has a
position on whether they should be transferred back to their countries in order
to serve their sentence? To give an
example, someone coming from
Maria Eagle: We would certainly have figures in respect of those who have been sent to prison for trafficking. We might not be able to identify those who have trafficked cocaine as opposed to other types of illegal drugs, but we would have the overall numbers and I can certainly get you figures in respect of the numbers of foreign national prisoners in the system. Whether I can tie that up with the offences they have committed I will have to take some advice on, that might be slightly more difficult, but I am very happy to send the Committee all of those numbers that we have got.
Q127 Chairman: At some stage before the inquiry ends I am sure Members of the Committee would like to visit one of the prisons to look and see what they are doing as far as rehabilitation and drug treatment is concerned, and if you have any suggestions we would be very happy to receive them.
Maria Eagle: Indeed, and we would be very happy to facilitate such a visit, Chairman.
Chairman: Thank you very much, Minister. Mr Poree, I am sorry you have just been sitting there but is because the Minister has been ably answering all the questions, but thank you for coming and sharing your time with us. Thank you.
Memorandum submitted by SOCA
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr Bill Hughes, Director-General, and Mr Neil Giles, Senior Responsible Officer, SOCA upstream cocaine programme, SOCA, gave evidence.
Q128 Chairman: Mr Hughes, Mr Giles, good afternoon, thank you very much for coming to give evidence to this Committee today, indeed we did not expect to see you back quite so quickly.
Mr Hughes: Always a pleasure, Chairman.
Q129 Chairman: Thank you very much. No
doubt you have seen our report into SOCA which we published just a few days ago
and you have probably studied very carefully recommendation 11, the
expectations of the public, the public requiring, as this Committee requires,
evidence of seizures as opposed to the amount of money that is currently spent
on SOCA. Just clarifying a number of
facts, Mr Hughes, in your report you say that drug seizures in 2008-09 amounted
to 85.1 tonnes of cocaine. Are those
drug seizures within the
Mr Hughes: Worldwide.
Q130 Chairman: Worldwide. What is the
figure for what you have seized in the
Mr Hughes: Can I just explain, Neil leads on the programme activity number 9 which is the UK Control Strategy work on "upstream" cocaine interdiction.
Q131 Chairman: Excellent. It is just that
what concerns us is that we have seen figures which show that the amount of
cocaine entering the
Mr Hughes: No, let me pick up on that. First of all, the reason that we do the work we do is because it is upstream interdiction and we are picking that up on behalf of the UK Control Strategy. The reason for that is because there are three main areas of vulnerability for the traffickers.
Q132 Chairman: I understand that.
Mr Hughes: You do not understand otherwise you would not have asked the question.
Q133 Chairman: Mr Hughes, I just want to know the figures. May I just ask you the question that I want
to ask you? What are the figures for the
amount of cocaine seized by SOCA in the
Mr Hughes: I do not have those figures to hand at the moment, I can get them for you and send them to this Committee. The point is when you asked the question ---
Q134 Chairman: Do you not have any idea of an estimate? You are the Chief Executive of SOCA, you are
before the Select Committee, do you not know how much cocaine was seized within
the
Mr Hughes: I have not got it in front of me. It is not one of those figures I can necessarily recall.
Q135 Chairman: Mr Giles, can you help us, do you know how much cocaine was seized
in the
Mr Giles: I do not, Chairman, but I can find out fairly easily.
Q136 Chairman: May I suggest, Mr Hughes, that when you put some figures in your annual report you do make it very clear that the figures that you are referring to, the 85.1 tonnes of cocaine seized, is a worldwide figure and not exclusive to the United Kingdom?
Mr Hughes: We make that very clear and you made the point just now. The 45 tonnes dates back a long time ago to
an estimate of what we thought was coming towards the
Q137 Chairman: Mr Hughes, we understand that; we need figures and facts so that we can put it before Parliament.
Mr Hughes: I can get those facts for you and will do.
Chairman: If you could let me have those facts in a letter by
Q138 David Davies: Yes. Mr Hughes, I have been very impressed by SOCA officers whom I have met around the world but I still have a difficult question for you and that is this: when you make a claim about the amount of cocaine you have seized to what extent have you actually been solely involved in seizing it and to what extent are you saying "Okay, we have been involved but it might simply have been sending a fax or passing on a name", the national police force of that country did all the rest of it and you have marked down whatever they got as part of your total. That is what concerns me. The supplementary to this is that there does not seem to be any sort of independent agency monitoring what you say; every police force in this country is monitored by a police authority day-to-day but nobody seems to play that role with SOCA.
Mr Hughes: Let me take the second part of that question first because the HMIC
inspect us, we are also subject to NAO inspection - an audit of what we do and
a report to the Home Secretary to whom we are politically accountable in every
department. We brief ministers regularly
on what we do, so those issues are the accountability issues. The point that you are making about what we
do overseas, what we are doing overseas is something that I cannot disclose in
a public session. We have made an open
invitation for you to come and be briefed in camera on what we do overseas; I
am not prepared to say what we do here.
When you say how does this work, that is the point, I cannot go into
that in detail but our officers whom you have seen - and if you have been to
Q139 Chairman: One other figure that would be very helpful in the letter that you
kindly will send tomorrow is the amount of cocaine entering the
Mr Hughes: No, that is not true.
Q140 Chairman: Exactly. It would be very helpful if you could let me have that - do you know that figure now?
Mr Hughes: We do not know how much cocaine is coming into the country. The figure you are quoting is an estimate
from some years ago from the
Q141 Chairman: Do you have a current estimate?
Mr Hughes: We do not know what is currently coming in. What we are working on is the availability and you see this from the work we are doing on purity and on price.
Q142 Chairman: I will come to purity and price in a minute.
Mr Hughes: That is what we are working on.
Q143 Chairman: Mr Hughes, this is not a debate, these are questions that we need in order to ---
Mr Hughes: It is a very complex issue.
Q144 Chairman: I am sure it is and some of us are able to deal with complex
issues, I can assure you. The issue is
that we need to be clear on our facts.
Do we have a current estimate as to the amount of cocaine that entered
the
Mr Hughes: No.
Q145 Chairman: So nobody can tell us.
Mr Hughes: No.
Q146 Chairman: The figure that we are using of 45 million could well be the wrong figure.
Mr Hughes: 45 tonnes. 35 to 45 tonnes is an estimate based on how much is
produced in
Q147 Chairman: We do not actually know what the cocaine threat is because you do
not have a reliable set of figures as to what is entering the
Mr Hughes: No, because it would be impossible to do that.
Q148 Chairman: Let us turn on to the next point that you have alluded to which is in your submission to our inquiry into SOCA which, as I said, we have just concluded. You have said that high street prices and reduced purity can be attributed at least in part to your success and the success of SOCA. What evidence do you have that higher prices of cocaine and a reduction in purity is driven by what you have done?
Mr Hughes: I do not think we actually said that; what we said was that the work that has been done on interdiction has driven up the price that people are paying for it now, the wholesale price. What we have also done is reduced the availability because talking to our informants and listening on telephone interception, the availability of cocaine is very difficult to come by in this country. From what we have done there has certainly been an impact upon the availability of cocaine to organised crime in the UK; that is what we have ascribed to the work that we have done in partnership with all of our partners overseas and in the United Kingdom. That is what we think has happened. The availability of cocaine on the streets - or something masquerading as cocaine - is a different issue altogether because that is very heavily cut and it contains very small amounts of actual cocaine, and that is one of the issues that comes up in the price/purity question which you want to come onto.
Q149 Chairman: That is the question: it is becoming less pure and more expensive.
Mr Hughes: Exactly.
Q150 Mrs Dean: Mr Giles, SOCA states that, as at 31 March this year, it had "over 340 operations, projects and enquiries in hand, the primary focus of approximately half of which was the cocaine trade". What proportion of these 170 cocaine-related projects involves active operations as opposed to information mapping?
Mr Giles: I am not sure I define the categories in quite the way that you have but the figures quite clearly at 1 April this year were that we had 88 full operations which we would call investigations, but please bear in mind that everything we do has an intelligence requirement associated with it; we collect intelligence to improve our knowledge from everything that we do. Of the remainder some 24 were project lines - gathering information to grow our knowledge towards drug activity - and 61 were single strand inquiries.
Q151 Mrs Dean: What were the single strand enquiries?
Mr Giles: They tend to be a single question in relation to a person or a group of people or perhaps a product.
Mr Hughes: The sort of thing: is this guy involved in cocaine trafficking? Go and find out.
Q152 Mrs Dean: In how many of those would you then find out they were involved in cocaine trafficking?
Mr Hughes: If we do then they move on to be in an operation where we look for a criminal justice outcome or some other outcome which will take them out of the cocaine trafficking trade.
Q153 Mrs Dean: They might be counted in that category in another year.
Mr Hughes: Yes, they may move into an operational area or be part of a project approach where we are picking up themes and different people and different groups have come in and linked in some way perhaps through transport or other arrangements.
Q154 Mrs Dean: But they will not be double-counted in the same year.
Mr Hughes: No.
Q155 David Davies: Mr Hughes, I am genuinely not trying to be difficult here.
Mr Hughes: I am not taking you to be difficult.
Q156 David Davies: I am on your side, believe me. I have a simple question, the answer to which will either be yes, no, or I am not certain but I will write to you, and it is this: if the Colombian police went up to the SOCA contact in Colombia and said "We are suspicious about this person who has lived in the UK; could you find out any information you can about them that may be on the police national computer", and that information is then handed back to the Colombian police. Subsequently that person is arrested by the Colombian police with one tonne of cocaine. Will that one tonne of cocaine be counted as part of your figures of cocaine seized throughout the year?
Mr Hughes: If there is more than us doing simply what you suggest, yes.
Q157 David Davies: This is the point. How much more would there have to be?
Mr Hughes: First of all it is unlikely that the operation would start in the
way that you have described because the intelligence usually comes from us and
not from the Colombians. On that basis
then we would work in a joint partnership to understand how that cocaine is
being trafficked. If we can find the
location where it is being produced in
Q158 David Davies: What happens if you say to your Colombian contact "We are a bit suspicious about this person". The Colombian contact then goes off and finds where the stuff is being produced, runs an operation and has that person arrested with one tonne of cocaine; will that one tonne count on your figures or not?
Mr Hughes: The Colombian contact will do it in partnership with us, in which
case that would be a joint operation and in which case we would count
that. If it is a single operation where
they go off and seize cocaine and all we have done is been involved, as you
describe, in just providing a
Q159 Tom Brake: Mr Hughes, is it you who ultimately makes the decision whether to count it in our figures or not?
Mr Hughes: We have criteria which we have agreed with the various inspecting authorities, with the Home Secretary and the Home Office about what we count as down to SOCA or not down to SOCA.
Q160 Tom
Brake: So you have in effect a checklist and
if you meet these criteria then it automatically becomes a
Mr Hughes: We would count it in those circumstances if it fits those criteria, yes. That is one of the things that we are audited upon.
Q161 Mr
Streeter: Just turning to other issues, we
are aware that there are well-known routes for cocaine coming into this
country,
Mr Giles: We are aware certainly that the cocaine traffickers do all they can
to develop new tactics to get by us and we are as close to that intelligence
picture as we can be. Obviously
Mr Hughes: What we have seen there are Venezuelan and Colombian groups
starting to emerge in some of the countries of
Q162 Mr Streeter: We all support the intelligence-led approach that you are advocating and deploying. Of course that means that if the serious and organised criminals become aware of our patterns, our methods, our intelligence platform, the whole thing is compromised. Are you aware of high level attempts, of them trying to bribe senior figures either in SOCA or in UKBA? I did ask this question at Heathrow yesterday and I was not quite sure of the answer I got, but does that happen, are approaches made even if they are rebuffed and reported upon?
Mr Hughes: We are aware that serious and organised crime has tried to infiltrate SOCA. They are interested in the information that we hold and the methods by which we gather that intelligence. Overseas it is one of the reasons why we work with carefully selected units of law enforcement because of corruption being endemic in certain parts of the world, and we have steps which again I am not prepared to go into here to deal with those issues. The whole point around that is that we are working towards all of the officers in SOCA being at what we call "developed vetting level" which is for reading top secret so we can share information and make sure the information does not get leaked. It is one of the areas where we have a very strong professional standards and counter-corruption department and a security department that looks all the time so that we do not lose information.
Chairman: Thank you Mr Streeter. The
Committee is very keen to know of circumstances where cocaine is prevented from
coming into the
Q163 Bob
Russell: Gentlemen, in view of earlier
exchanges can I say that I appreciate the work that SOCA officers do in this
very murky world, both at home and overseas and others with whom you work. Mr Giles, what proportion of those
trafficking cocaine into the
Mr Giles: Mr Russell, Chairman, I am bound to say this is a difficult question to answer because it depends where you are in the supply chain. Colombian traffickers dominate and control ---
Q164 Bob Russell: That was my second question, how many are Colombian?
Mr Giles: It is impossible to delineate in quite the way you would like because they control different aspects of the trade. If you want to buy cocaine inevitably you are going to have to do business with a Colombian at some point in the supply chain.
Q165 Chairman: In terms of the British criminals, in answer to Mr Russell's question, is it not possible to estimate the number of British criminals involved in the whole show basically, not parts of it?
Mr Hughes: We have done work on mapping, as you are aware, where we have identified about 8,000 persons of interest to SOCA. Most of those - probably about 40% to 50% of them - are engaged in drug trafficking of some sort and many of those, because it is not just one drug ---
Q166 Chairman: Was this the famous list, Mr Hughes, where some people were found to have died or is this a different list?
Mr Hughes: This is the mapping list of persons of interest to SOCA and there is another mapping list as well that we have done with our colleagues in the police service, people who are actively involved in serious organised crime. Why would we be interested in people who have died?
Q167 Chairman: SOCA has published a list before ---
Mr Hughes: We have not published it, this is what we are working on.
Q168 Chairman: SOCA published a list and some of those criminals were no longer with us. Of the 8,000 of interest, are those British criminals?
Mr Hughes: They are people impacting on the
Q169 Chairman: In answer to Mr Russell's question you have 8,000 of interest.
Mr Hughes: Overall in terms of serious organised criminals, and that list is
being added to. Of that probably around
40% are involved in drug trafficking and some of that will be cocaine but they
get mixed up with all other drugs as well.
To answer your question though, originally Colombians would get very
involved all the way into the
Q170 Bob Russell: It is 8,000 in round figures, of whom about 40% are British.
Mr Hughes: Involved in drug trafficking.
Q171 Bob Russell: One assumes then that in excess of 40% are Colombian.
Mr Hughes: No, it does not work like that.
Q172 Bob Russell: It was a simple question and I thought I was getting a good answer but now I am getting confused. I will put the whole lot in one package. How many are British criminals, how many are Colombian and what other nationalities are involved?
Mr Hughes: We do not know how many are Colombian, we do know that about 40% of
the 8,000 persons of interest are engaged in drug trafficking and some of that
will be cocaine. The cocaine side in
terms of
Q173 Bob Russell: But it is predominantly British and Colombian.
Mr Hughes: Yes.
Q174 Bob Russell: And a smattering of what other nationalities?
Mr Hughes: There would be everybody involved in all of that because we also
deal with the Spanish and the Dutch and others in
Q175 Bob Russell: As far as this country is concerned it is predominantly British.
Mr Hughes: Coming into the
Q176 Tom Brake: Mr Hughes, can you give us any examples - without breaching confidence obviously - of where SOCA-provided intelligence has led to the arrest of high level traffickers in other countries abroad?
Mr Giles: If I may, we realise that we have most impact when we identify high
value traffickers upstream and pursue them and take accountability to their
doorstep, so we do that whenever we get the opportunity from the intelligence
that we gather. Since I have been
looking after this upstream cocaine programme we think we have identified 36 of
the highest value traffickers and of those 14 have been arrested by partner
agencies and are the subject of some sort of proceedings or are in prison, 75
are dead because the trade they are engaged in is a dangerous trade and there
is internecine fighting between various groups.
Of the remainder six are currently on target with our colleagues abroad,
which leaves 11 yet to be taken into investigation. That is where we are at with those of most
value to the
Mr Hughes: That is just in
Q177 Tom
Brake: I was going to say are they
exclusively in
Mr Giles: Yes, it is. If I can link that to another issue, certainly elements of casework undertaken in Colombia by Colombian partners last year resulted in the seizure of well over $100 million worth of assets, numerous cars, helicopters, watches and businesses. These were cases that we had a very close partnership involvement in.
Q178 Tom Brake: Can I also ask you whether, if you identify someone that you believe is a high level trafficker and you have got in your view evidence that points to that person very definitely being a key player, do you have powers to insist that the Colombian authorities take action or do you have to hand it over to them and say "We think this person is a high level trafficker, we think you should go and arrest him", but it is down to them whether they decide to act on it?
Mr Hughes: Perhaps it is best if I answer this. We have a very strong working relationship
with President Uribe's government and his counter-narcotics, anti-narcotics
officers. We have a protocol and an MoU
with them about how we operate jointly in
Q179 Tom Brake: Can I ask you whether there have been circumstances in which you have recommended action but they have said "We do not think this is the right time, we want to pursue other lines of inquiry"?
Mr Hughes: I am not aware of any. That would be a matter for them as a sovereign country anyway to decide upon that aspect. I am not aware of that, that has never happened as far as I am concerned.
Q180 Tom
Brake: One final very quick question. Obviously we have talked a lot about
Mr Hughes: Our relationship with
Q181 Mr Winnick: Our report into SOCA, Mr Hughes, made the point that there is a budget of £430 million a year for your organisation. As far as assets are concerned it is £21 million that you have seized since SOCA began. You can confirm that is the position.
Mr Hughes: It is something like that figure, yes, plus there are also confiscation orders made plus there are also restraining orders which have yet to pass through the civil action claim form yet, so there is still lots more to add to that yet.
Q182 Mr Winnick: The Government's paper Drugs: protecting families and communities lists asset recovery as one of the priorities. Are you reasonably optimistic that this figure of £21 million will be substantially increased?
Mr Hughes: It will. You will recall our
last discussions on this here at this Committee. One of the areas that we are looking at
particularly is to demonstrate where we have prevented money from being taken
out of the
Q183 Mr Winnick: It is of course a huge sum, £430 million a year budget. No one, Mr Hughes, underestimates the position as far as criminal activity is concerned, everyone recognises - I am sure everyone in this room as well as outside - that it is very complex, very difficult and it is longstanding, but would you accept that to some extent at least SOCA is on probation?
Mr Hughes: We have moved on beyond that. You referred to your report, which of course contains some inaccuracies which I will be writing to you about, in which you talk about the Cabinet Office and the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit review of extending our reach, which you describe as a criticism of SOCA or a review of SOCA. It was nothing of the sort, it was a review of how the UK deals with serious organised crime and actually when you read the report it validates what we have been doing in SOCA and they want to see us do more of it, particularly overseas, and that is what we are looking to do if we get the resources to do it. In terms of our budget, if you talk to the Home Office you will find that we are seen as offering a very cost-effective approach in terms of law enforcement and so we are working on the basis that the money that is given to us by taxpayers we intend to spend very wisely and carefully, we have been making efficiency savings every year and intend to continue doing that.
Q184 Mr Winnick: Clearly not everyone is satisfied, including this Committee, about the work being carried out by SOCA but you are full of self-confidence yourself.
Mr Hughes: I am sorry?
Q185 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.
Q186 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.
Q187 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.
Q188 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.
Q189 Chairman: To prevent it coming in in the first place, that is exactly what the Committee feels very strongly about.
Mr Hughes: Exactly.
Q190 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.
Q191 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.
Q192 Chairman: It will happen next year, but in the meantime I look forward to
receiving by
Mr Hughes: Thank you.
Chairman: That concludes the evidence session for this morning.