UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 319-iii

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

NORTHERN IRELAND AFFAIRS COMMITTEE

 

 

DEVOLUTION OF POLICING AND JUSTICE

 

 

Monday 25 January 2010

Committee Room 30, Stormont, Belfast

 

CHIEF CONSTABLE MATT BAGGOTT CBE QPM,

ASSISTANT CHIEF CONSTABLE DREW HARRIS

and DEPUTY CHIEF CONSTABLE JUDITH GILLESPIE

Evidence heard in Public Questions 110 - 147

 

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee

on Monday 25 January 2010

Members present

Sir Patrick Cormack, in the Chair

Rosie Cooper

Christopher Fraser

Mr John Grogan

Mr Stephen Hepburn

Lady Hermon

Mr Denis Murphy

Stephen Pound

David Simpson

________________

Witness: Chief Constable Matt Baggott CBE QPM, Assistant Chief Constable Drew Harris, and Deputy Chief Constable Judith Gillespie, Police Service of Northern Ireland, gave evidence.

Q110 Chairman: Chief Constable, could I welcome you most warmly. We are delighted to see you. We are delighted that you have brought Deputy Chief Constable Judith Gillespie and Assistant Chief Constable Drew Harris, both of whom we know from previous sessions. We are grateful for the assistance they have given in the past. We had many meetings, both public and private, with Sir Hugh and developed a very constructive relationship with him and hope to be able to do the same with you, although this Committee's life, of course, is very limited. Thank you for coming this afternoon. We are making as our final report to Parliament an assessment of devolution since 2005, obviously focusing very much on the controversial issue of the devolution of policing and justice. Just by way of introduction, perhaps you could tell us how you are settling in, what advice Sir Hugh gave you when you took over and how you have defined your priorities in your new role.

Chief Constable Baggott: That is very kind. Thank you very much indeed for that very warm welcome. I genuinely look forward to working with the Committee over the forthcoming months, and hopefully years as well. It is really good to be here. I knew it would be a testing and interesting job as Chief Constable, and both of those are true, but it is an enormous privilege. I have taken every opportunity to say what a privilege it is to be wearing a green uniform, to be taking forward the very rich and courageous legacy of colleagues from the RUC who are still with us, but also having a chance to shape PSNI on the back of some incredibly effective work by my predecessor, Sir Hugh, and also colleagues who are sitting with me. Every day that goes by I feel more proud to be here and more privileged to be in the position I am in. I mean that genuinely. Over the last four months I have particularly enjoyed many private and quiet conversations with people, sometimes in their front rooms, sometimes in community groups, sometimes in big meetings, District Policing Partnerships and with the Policing Board, and I genuinely think there is a hunger for something that will be truly unique in the world around the role of policing and what policing can deliver across communities and across divides. In spite of the recent change in the security situation and the tragedies that have befallen my colleagues, particularly Peader Heffron in the past few weeks, I remain very optimistic because of the energy and overwhelming consent and reassurance that the PSNI has been given, particularly at very local level within the communities that really matter. I think Sir Hugh's advice to me would be "listen". When I first arrived I was asked the question, "What do you know about Northern Ireland to make you fit to be the Chief here?" and my answer to that was, "Probably not a lot, but I know a lot of people who do know the answers". There is an enormous amount of expertise and advice, some of which has come to me very quietly, very privately, from within the PSNI itself, sometimes it has come from communities and sometimes it has come from politicians, but I know there is an enormous amount of advice which has been freely and willingly given and I really do welcome and respect that. I will make my mistakes, but if I make mistakes, which I will and already have done, it will not be through lack of integrity in trying to do the right thing, it will be simply because maybe I have not listened hard enough and quick enough to understand how to present things. In terms of where we are going, I think we are in an enormously exciting time of change, not just because of the whole debate around devolution, I will leave that to one side, but as the PSNI I would probably say that to some degree now that PSNI is established and there is a high degree of confidence in what we stand for and what we are doing, the shackles are being released. By "shackles", what I mean is being tied to a fixed establishment, for example, of 7,500, being able to shape an organisation of the right people in the right place so that we can, if you like, employ different skills at different parts of the organisation which may not need policing skills and so liberate money. We have a policing plan that the Policing Board have embraced, which I believe very strongly is focusing on the right things around tackling the issues that really develop confidence: serious harm; personal policing; the really consistent relationship building policing that people yearn for and have a hunger for; and deal with the things that matter for the vast majority in their daily lives, such as alcohol abuse, antisocial behaviour, road safety, get the basics absolutely right. None of that takes away from the policing with the community plan which I think has delivered terrific progress around empowerment, problem solving, partnership and accountability. All of those are very important. Now we have got the freedom and some of the shackles are coming off our job is to absolutely deliver a PSNI identity and a PSNI standard of the things that absolutely matter, and the policing plan has been shaped to do that. I think the policing plan has some quite radical things built into it already, or will post-April. For example, coming off a single crime reduction target when we know that less than half of the people here report crime in the first place we shall be encouraging greater accessibility to policing and greater conversation. If that means we have to record more crime then we should embrace that. To some degree the targets we have had have not necessarily been about encouraging the relationship and the activity, and that is changing. This year, through the survey work, we will have a target to increase crime recording and reporting rather than decrease numbers. There is an interesting change in direction around the plan which is a very clear mandate. There have been two words said to me that I did not expect in the conversations that I have had, but I absolutely welcome. From all sides of the community people have said to me, "Many of us feel quite inspired by what your colleagues are doing locally". Individual people are doing great things and stepping out from the traditional role of policing and having those conversations. I did not expect to hear the word "inspirational" being used, but people have said to me, "We want the PSNI to be truly inspirational in the integrity of the uniform". That was a very interesting one for me. That is about taking forward the things we are doing well already but making them more consistent. Secondly, people have said to me, "We would like to have more of an identity as the PSNI". I have asked people what they mean by that and what they say is, "An identity is something people instinctively know" and the word people kept saying was "personal". "Deal with the serious crime, deal with security, deal with drug dealing, deal with ATM thefts. They are the things we shouldn't be asking you to deal with, you should be dealing with them as a matter of course because these are the things that cause great misery. Deal with child protection, deal with the things we shouldn't have to ask you for and be better and better at that and benchmark yourself against the best". The identity bit is, "Get as personal as you can in the 500,000 moments of truth you deal with every year, which are the incidents". There are two phrases we have introduced which are not in the policing plan. One is, "If it doesn't feel good it probably is not and you need to change your structure and processes" and, "If you think you are being radical, you are probably not in changing some of that". Finally, Chairman, there are dilemmas ahead. We will tackle the serious harm, the personal and the local concerns, and we will become more consistent on that. The other thing we have to bear in mind is that ultimately value for money and, in relation to the Policing Board, holding ourselves even more accountable for securing effective policing in a time of recession is something that we have to have a more business edge to do. I do not mean that we just transfer commercial disciplines straight into what we do because there are differences between the two. I think our share price is confidence as opposed to finance. We are being very self-critical now in looking at some key functions, for example how we manage transport, to see whether we have got money tied up in ineffective processes and bureaucracy that quite rightly we should be using either to invest back into operational policing or preparing ourselves for - whether devolution takes place or not - an economic climate which is likely to be more restrained into the future.

Q111 Chairman: Thank you very much indeed for that. That is a very encouraging opening statement, for which we are grateful. Before I bring in colleagues, could I just make one point. You referred to Constable Heffron and we were all appalled by that ghastly crime and would ask that you convey the good wishes of the Committee to him when you next communicate with him. I understand he is making a slow but good recovery. He has our prayers and good wishes.

Chief Constable Baggott: Thank you, Chairman. I shall make sure I pass that on to both Peader and his family.

Chairman: Thank you very much indeed.

Q112 David Simpson: Can I also put on record our appreciation for all the work that the PSNI do. It is a job like our job, Chairman, where you will never, ever reach public expectation no matter what you do. Certainly being a politician today you will not. I would like to pass on my thoughts and prayers to the Constable and his family. I had the privilege at Christmas time of visiting Stephen Carroll's home to visit Kate again in Banbridge. It was not a good day for her, that particular day, and she was definitely feeling very low. However, she has been a remarkable lady through all of that and the recent times of the two soldiers as well. In relation to policing and justice, we know there is a lot of heavy discussion going on today and everybody talks about this pinnacle time in Northern Ireland, but I think we have a pinnacle time every day of the week in Northern Ireland. The public and media are certainly concentrating on it. In relation to policing and justice, what impact, if and when it is devolved, will the policing and justice powers in Northern Ireland have on your operations? Secondly, the financial package that was proposed by the Prime Minister, do you believe that is satisfactory?

Chief Constable Baggott: Thank you very much. I will start with the last one first. I think the financial package is satisfactory and I have been very clear about that publicly. It gives us space and stability to make some of the changes we need to make in the way we work. So streamlining the bureaucracy, making the changes to the criminal justice system we need to make, giving police officers more discretion, it gives us space to do that. It also gives me clarity around what the operational budget will be rather than having to worry about hearing loss and pensions. The other part of it, which I think is a very important guarantee particularly in the changing security situation, is access to the Security Fund and to the Treasury. I would certainly seek to keep that open so that if we do have problems or difficulties we take a pragmatic view of the Security Fund itself. I should say that none of the financial stability that we seek to have takes away from the increased collaboration that we have with our colleagues in the Garda. There is some very important work being done taken forward by my Deputy at the moment on that. Enhancing collaboration in our working with other agencies too carries on regardless. Yes, I do think the financial stability is very important. Secondly, devolution will make the conversation more local about partnership and about how do you reduce crime in neighbourhoods. I have always been a greater believer that policing is so much more than law enforcement. Policing is security; security is health; policing is education. On the work I have done on neighbourhood policing nationally there have been over 40 connections between good policing and good security linked into health, education, quality of life, economic regeneration. I think those debates are best had here. I do believe that with devolution will come a greater understanding and a greater conversation, and some dilemmas about where do we spend the money in the future but that still has to be worked through. I do believe those conversations need to take place very much locally. I am a supporter of devolution. I think we will need some clarity coming out on the role of the Policing Board. I do believe that where a lot of things that happen at the moment may be duplicated for very good historical reasons, there will need to be a clearing of the landscape. We sat this morning at an audit and risk meeting. Who now audits me against the standards and the plan? Is it going to be the Policing Board? Who exercises due diligence and scrutiny? There are big debates to be had still but, for me, as Chief reporting to the Policing Board in their role to secure effective policing, I see that conversation very much being focused on my accountability to the Policing Board.

Q113 David Simpson: Apart from the finance and the political decision to go ahead with it, do you envisage any other obstacles?

Chief Constable Baggott: I do not, other than an understanding of what is operational responsibility and operational independence. We do need to have a very clear understanding that Ministry of Justice will be responsible for partnership, for the working of the processes, dealing with re-offending, for some degree of conversation with me about the money and the prioritisation with the Assembly, but I do firmly believe that we still need a tripartite between the Policing Board, the Assembly and an operationally responsible Chief and Chief Officer's team who can cross the political divide if necessary. I do believe that the policing plan is representing that very well. My job is absolutely to reduce harm, to deal with the serious and to deliver local policing completely objectively based on the evidence of what needs to be done rather than being swayed by politics be they local or national.

Q114 Stephen Pound: You will be aware that a lot of people from different elements are talking about the protocol for the post-devolution architecture and some people are saying that in effect this recasts Patten. Did you want to say anything on the record about that because this is a subject that a number of us are being individually lobbied about?

Chief Constable Baggott: I think it is the emerging picture. It is something that very much has to be worked out between political parties. My concern would be that, firstly, we need to maintain and defend the operational independence of the Chief Constable to make decisions based on harm and need, but also to make sure we have clarity about the role of the Policing Board and external scrutiny. The conversations around what makes effective policing need to be had in probably one place, albeit that the financing of that and the relationship in partnership with health, education and the justice process itself needs to be managed from the Assembly. We do need to have clarity so that we do not get into confused conversations about who is responsible and accountable for what.

Q115 Stephen Pound: Is the protocol publicly available?

Chief Constable Baggott: I do not believe it is.

Q116 Rosie Cooper: Could I ask you for your current assessment of the threat by republican and other terrorist groups currently?

Chief Constable Baggott: Certainly, and if it is okay I will invite my colleagues to come in as well. From my perspective it is severe. That is an obvious thing to say, but we have had a variety of attacks on the very nature of the institutions that will lead us into devolution and police: a bomb attack outside the Policing Board; landmines; and even last night a firebomb attack on a police station where colleagues are trying to bridge the divide by increasing their personal policing; the attack on my colleague, Peader Heffron, because he is a Catholic, because he is involved in Gaelic. These are very real attacks on the future of peace. Their nature and variety is of great concern, as is the willingness to engage in this when the vast majority of people are saying, "Our priorities", and it is interesting that the priorities of District Policing Partnerships and every survey says, "What we want is stability. What we want is personal policing. We want to deal with drugs and antisocial behaviour" and actually the political structure above that is something that will be managed in a different place. What we want is local policing of the people by people like Peader Heffron. It is severe and it is concerning, but we are putting an enormous effort into challenging it. I would invite Drew to say a few words around this as well.

Assistant Chief Constable Harris: Just on the statistics, in 2008 there were 15 significant incidents that we would attribute to dissident republicans and in 2009 there were 22. The difference is not numerical but the increase in ambition and also the increase in intensity and scale of the attacks. You do not need to be reminded of the murder of Constable Stephen Carroll or the murders of sappers Azimkar and Quinsey in March of last year. We have seen that pattern carry on in terms of the attempted murder of police officers at Forkhill, the attack on the Policing Board and, indeed, most recently the attack on Peader Heffron. The threat sits at "severe". It was increased to "severe" in February of last year and that is very properly where it is in that attacks can be viewed as being highly likely. The Police Service remains the most prominent and likely target for attack and our officers are very much aware of that. We take a lot of steps to make sure they are properly briefed, receive the proper equipment and proper training with which to cope with this threat. My own department, the Crime Operations Department, works very closely with the Security Service but also very closely with An Garda Síochána and we have had a number of very successful operations throughout the year. Some of the successes that we have do not really make it into the public domain, or if they do it is in quite an oblique fashion in terms of people charged for other crimes who also have been charged with acts of terrorism. There is an awful lot of activity going on on the ground to thwart the efforts of dissident republicans and approximately 50% of the money I would spend in my department, of all my resources, goes on coping with the national security threat posed by dissident republicans. In respect of loyalists, both the UVF and UDA - mainstream UDA - have completed major acts of decommissioning. There are still some splinter groups out there that have not decommissioned on the loyalist side, the South East Antrim UDA and very small groups such as the Orange Volunteers, but a very significant amount of material has been decommissioned by both UDA and UVF. What has to happen next is that those organisations, in effect, decommission themselves and start to collapse down their own structures and organisation. That is hopefully the next step that we will see in respect of loyalist paramilitaries.

Q117 Lady Hermon: Going back to the Orange Volunteers, we are well aware of the really serious threat from dissident republicans but this group, how large is it, how dangerous is it and why have we just recently seemed to have had a spate of threats to execute various individuals, including journalists, who I obviously would not name? I am very concerned about the Orange Volunteers.

Assistant Chief Constable Harris: In respect of the Orange Volunteers, it is a loose affiliation of likeminded individuals mostly driven by sectarian hatreds and bigotry, in effect. It is pretty much a loose coalition, almost telephone kiosk terrorists in that they phone these warnings in. A lot of it is, in effect, sectarian hate crime but it is directed for political purposes. We have had success against them this year but a threat still exists because they have an ambition to attack others, so we do view them with some concern. We have put work into dealing with that and have had success in terms of managing that threat.

Q118 Mr Grogan: As the February deadline approaches what is your assessment of the level of weaponry that is still out there with terrorist groups, be they dissident or otherwise? Is there a lot still out there?

Assistant Chief Constable Harris: There have been major acts of decommissioning by the main terrorist groups, the Provisional IRA, UVF and UDA, but in effect the ceasefire was in 1994 and a lot of this material in its widest sense has either been dispersed and we have collected it through other means or it has been dispersed and lost. It is very difficult to put an estimate on what still exists out there. What is of concern to us is that still there is the availability of firearms and we can see that on the island of Ireland as a whole in terms of pretty serious weaponry making its way to Dublin into the hands of criminals there, and if it arrives in Dublin it can obviously come through to ourselves. Obviously making sure the criminal gangs and terrorist gangs do not get their hands on weaponry is a long-term objective of this organisation, plus An Garda Síochána and the Security Service. We do put a lot of effort into making sure that we carry out thorough investigations as to where weapons are being procured from. This is a European problem and we work a lot with our colleagues in both Europol and the Serious and Organised Crime Agency in forwarding movements of weapons. It is a difficult problem but we are very aware that supply routes can be opened up by criminal gangs and that we have to do all we can to thwart that particular threat.

Q119 Mr Grogan: If I may return to the issue of devolution. You referred to the protocol and so on, which has not yet been published. Have you signed it off? Are you happy with the current draft? Who would you see on non-operational matters as you primarily having discussions with on strategy or resources? Would it be the Policing Board or would it be the Scrutiny Committee here?

Chief Constable Baggott: It would be the Policing Board because it is their policing plan. They are responsible for securing effective policing. In time I am sure they will develop the means to hold me even more accountable through scrutiny and audit and be part of that. I invited the Policing Board to become more involved in the strategic management of the PSNI, not blurring the boundaries between our accountability to them but in terms of taking even more immediate advice around, "Are we doing the right things? Does it feel good?" I want to have a more inclusive approach with the Policing Board but being absolutely secure in terms of our accountability to the Board itself. I understand the protocol is a work in progress, so in relation to my signing off the answer is no but, there again, I would not necessarily be expecting to sign it off because I am not elected, I am not a politician. To some degree the accountability of the police is too important to be left to the police. I am quite a firm believer in that. Later on I might give some very strong advice about how words are defined within the protocol.

Q120 Mr Grogan: It is a tripartite agreement, is it not, between the police and the other bodies so you would sign it off?

Chief Constable Baggott: I am unsighted on the current level of Policing Board involvement in that protocol.

Q121 Mr Grogan: I think there is a phrase in the current draft that says the Chief Constable would be the chief adviser on police and security matters to the Minister of Justice. Would that be a phraseology that you would be happy with?

Chief Constable Baggott: I think there is a role for the Chief Constable being an adviser and that relationship is probably well managed in the word "advice" because that is a different word from "accountability". If the Minister of Justice wanted to take professional advice on how well partnerships are developing, for example, and what partnerships should be concentrating on and how to improve the criminal justice process, and do we move to devolving some restorative justice, then I would expect to be a professional adviser on those matters.

Q122 David Simpson: We have a lot of young recruits, young men and women, who never lived through the Troubles. Obviously we have older officers who would remember what it was like. With the level of threat and the constant reminders of the incidents that have happened, how are the young officers coping with that? What is the morale like?

Chief Constable Baggott: I am going to invite Judith to come in on this in a moment because Judith is probably better positioned to talk from knowledge. Coming here and being here for the four months, at graduation ceremonies and induction ceremonies where mums and dads and partners come in for the very first day where they sign the forms, they come together, are greeted by myself and my colleagues, I have seen an enormous enthusiasm. The figures on recruitment are certainly holding up and I would even anticipate a surge of good people wanting to stand up to be counted. I think there is a difference between words like "morale" and "commitment". Morale is a very difficult word to pin down. I joined the Metropolitan Police 33 years ago and I was told on my very first day that morale was the lowest it had ever been. The word "morale" is one we use a little bit too freely in the Police Service. If you were to ask me, "Have you seen commitment, courage, passion for policing?", I have seen it in huge abundance and none of that seems to be changing.

Deputy Chief Constable Gillespie: Thank you for the question. It is important to note that the average age of our student officers now is a lot older than it would have been when I joined the RUC when very often people were joining straight from school. Of course, I joined when I was eight!

Q123 Chairman: We will expect an invitation to your 18^th birthday!

Deputy Chief Constable Gillespie: The average age of our student officers would be in their late twenties, 27-30, which means that they are joining with some experience of the university of life, which I think is a very important quality for our police officers to have to understand some of life's difficulties when they are attending, for example, domestic violence situations, et cetera. It is both a challenge and an opportunity that many of those folk have not experienced the Troubles at their worst. As the Chief Constable has said, right from the outset we give advice on the first night that our student officers, with their families, come in: "You are now a member of the police family and you need to think about your habits and routines both on and off duty, and you need to start thinking about that now". That families' night happens some weeks before they actually come into the organisation. We give very clear advice about what our student officers put on their social networking sites, for example, because we know that is an area of vulnerability, about who they tell that they are joining the police, just thinking about the routines they create, and also looking forward to the future and what policing will demand of them in terms of the standards of behaviour that this organisation expects both on and off duty. We have also developed bespoke DVDs to educate our own officers and staff, because it is not just police officers who are under threat but police staff as well, in terms of what to look for when you are checking under your vehicle, very specific advice about the types of under-car booby traps that are available. I would stress the fact that this is not necessarily just a challenge for us, it is also an opportunity with people coming in with a fresh way of thinking, looking at problems in a different way and determined to deliver a community-based policing service. That is an opportunity as well as a challenge.

Q124 Lady Hermon: Congratulations to you, Mr Baggott, on your appointment as Chief Constable and successor to Sir Hugh. Many congratulations to Judith Gillespie as well who when she last appeared before us was not the Deputy Chief Constable. We are always delighted to have Drew with us in any capacity. I am moving on because time is passing and we have a number of different topics that we want to cover. We do appreciate the time that you have given to us against a very busy schedule and the demanding workload that you all have. I am moving on to organised crime. As I am something of an addict of the radio, Radio Ulster or whatever, and that includes the Stephen Nolan Show, I have become increasingly concerned about drugs. We have heard about Ballymena and other towns mentioned as well. Could I ask you first of all about human trafficking. Is that a growing problem in Northern Ireland? Who are the women and perhaps children who are being trafficked? Is it from Eastern Europe? Could you enlighten the Committee on that particular area?

Assistant Chief Constable Harris: Human trafficking was first detected with the Pentameter 2 Operation. With Pentameter 1 in Northern Ireland we uncovered no instances of human trafficking, but that changed with Pentameter 2 in 2008 and since then we have had a steady number of cases. Indeed, the most recent case has involved the trafficking of a child into Northern Ireland.

Q125 Lady Hermon: For what purpose?

Assistant Chief Constable Harris: For the purpose of prostitution. The situation continues to get more and more serious, in effect. We have had people trafficked from Eastern Europe and also from Africa and South East Asia. We do face a significant problem. I think Northern Ireland and the island of Ireland are targeted collectively by these groups. We have had success in terms of detecting groups and bringing them to justice. The latest case was in Wales where a couple who were running a series of brothels across the whole of Ireland and into England and laundering the money back into South Africa were detected and were recently convicted and received substantial jail sentences for their part.

Q126 Lady Hermon: That is very good.

Assistant Chief Constable Harris: We have had successful prosecutions. We work very closely with An Garda Síochána and also the Serious and Organised Crime Agency to get that global reach on investigations. The problem we face is pretty much the same as in the rest of the United Kingdom in terms of the number of incidents. We can only suspect that this problem will continue to grow because we are seen as an affluent part of the world and, therefore, a target for human trafficking gangs. These brothels have often turned up in areas which have been purely residential and afterwards people have collectively thought, "Yes, we saw suspicious behaviour. We saw different men arriving constantly at different times of the day and night and we should have reported that to the police". Also, individuals who have gone along to a brothel have reported their suspicions around what they have found in those circumstances. It is a new problem to Northern Ireland, a new problem to Ireland. We are working in partnership with other law enforcement agencies but also with those groups who support the individuals that we rescue from trafficking. We do have a reflection period of some 45 days and have worked with Woman's Aid and other groups to support the victims through that period, hopefully towards co-operation with the police and then on to prosecution. We have been successful in obtaining the assistance of victims in terms of delivering prosecutions. A lot of this is driven by fear and by debt bond. There have been some very awful stories that have come out of these circumstances. We do not underestimate the problem at all. It is frustrating for us in that so much of our effort goes into national security when we still have all this organised crime and a rising threat from organised crime to deal with. That is a particular frustration because there is real harm being caused. We have put a lot of effort into this and have redirected some of our resources. We have specifically trained officers up in the skills on this and built up good relationships with the other agencies involved - UK Borders Agency, SOCA, An Garda Síochána and Europol. It is an area that we have taken very seriously and it is a completely insidious crime, it is terrible.

Q127 Lady Hermon: Is there a connection between paramilitaries, whether loyalist or republican, and this sort of human trafficking? Is there any evidence of that?

Assistant Chief Constable Harris: On one occasion there was evidence of loyalist paramilitaries being involved in providing the house, in effect, and on one other occasion dissident republicans also being involved in providing a house and almost oversight of it, for a fee of course. It is pretty much internationally focused in terms of organised crime gangs moving people into these islands in their totality.

Q128 Lady Hermon: Are the organised crime gangs operating outside the island of Ireland, or not?

Assistant Chief Constable Harris: There is globalisation and a supply route for people to move into the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland, so people are passed on. We find that victims have been sold on, in effect, two or three times and go through a series of movements, usually into Eastern Europe and are then transited by road across Europe into these islands, either into the Republic of Ireland or across into Great Britain and then move across into Northern Ireland after that.

Q129 Lady Hermon: These very vulnerable people who are being trafficked, presumably there must be a threat to their families back home if they run off or put their hands up and run into the nearest police station? There must be some sort of deterrent to stop them coming forward to be rescued, if you like.

Assistant Chief Constable Harris: There can be an element of that and sheer fear of the people who are holding them and the grip they have on them, and the organised crime group. It depends on the strength of the first crime group, the crime group that moved them on. You hear of Triad gangs, for instance, in South East Asia being involved in this and they have a very strong grip through fear in poorer communities. You find that when it is young people it is the people who have maybe been orphaned or have not got a lot of family connections. In effect, they go missing and nobody really misses them. They are carefully selected. It is a level of evil on all counts. Our fear is that there is not enough public awareness of it, that people in our society do not really believe it is happening in Northern Ireland or there is some other reason for it, they cannot believe what is happening within the island of Ireland and, therefore, do not have an awareness in terms of reporting it to the police. We are constantly trying to reinforce the message that they may be seeing suspicious behaviour which could be indicative of a brothel and they need to tell the police.

Q130 Stephen Pound: I want to deal with the GB read-across. You have talked about Eastern Europe.

Assistant Chief Constable Harris: Yes.

Q131 Stephen Pound: In London, and Mr Baggott will be aware of this, many of the victims were Central Europeans, ie from Poland, Lithuania, and many of the traffickers tended to be Romanian or South Balkans, Albanian. Is it that same sort of pattern?

Assistant Chief Constable Harris: We have only seen one group from Lithuania, a Lithuanian and a Pole. There has only been one instance and that was a Romanian crime gang who appeared to be involved in that. Other than that, movements have been pretty much around South East Asia and South East Asian individuals facilitating that and controlling brothels here and the madams, the alpha females who were controlling the brothels, were South East Asian as well.

Q132 Stephen Pound: I wish that you had been listening to the tape of this earlier, Chief Constable - in fact, you may have been for all I know - when we were asking about the survey that was done last month on police satisfaction, the PSNI, which on the surface had some worrying things in it: 87% down to 80%. Barry Gilligan said, "Don't worry, Chief Constable Baggott's gonna sort that out".

Chief Constable Baggott: Thanks, Barry!

Q133 Stephen Pound: I have to say all of our witnesses have been extremely complimentary about you, particularly in the area of personal policing.

Chief Constable Baggott: Thank you.

Q134 Stephen Pound: I appreciate that a lot of your answers have been specifically directed at a restoration of public confidence, but is there anything you wish to put on record as to how you feel you can turn around those figures, not just the 87% to 80%, but 56% thought the police were doing a good job which was down from 64%? Although you have some good figures, and we can play with the numbers, the trend at the moment is not in the right direction.

Chief Constable Baggott: Yes, and there have been three successive falls in confidence and satisfaction. Part of that is against the backdrop of a worsening security situation and probably political uncertainty. I do believe that confidence in policing is very much affected by the overall atmosphere. If I had been a resident here during the last year and seen a series of outrages and murders then I think I probably would be starting to feel pretty uncertain. Inevitably that plays into the figures irrespective of people's own experiences because the survey is not just about users but "what do you think" and that is often based on what you read or what people tell you. The other thing we need to move in fairly quickly on, which will be in the review of public administration, is creating even more effective partnerships which can jointly tackle antisocial behaviour, re-offending and serious harm in a much more consistent way. At the moment I think the 29 partnerships are relatively small, so if they had to deal with the overall impact of re-offending, for example, people get released from prison and what does the support and monitoring and supervision look like, and that must involve police, health, probation, there is a strategic element to that which is very difficult to do if your partnership is too small. There are some issues about partnerships. Do I think confidence and satisfaction will rise? Yes, I do because I think the next phase of the PSNI's life is moving from policing of the community as a sort of broad-brush empowerment, problem solving, into some very clear programme plans around how we are going to hold ourselves accountable for the quality of every encounter we have with a member of the public in Northern Ireland. Let me give you a flavour of that. We are currently working through a process of putting around 600 police officers back on to the streets who have been asked to work in administrative roles because of the rigidity of the way the service has been run. I mean "run" in the sense of being stuck to rigid establishment numbers and not having the freedom or carry-forwards that we needed. That will take place over the next six months to a year. We will get numbers out in time to match the withdrawal of the full-time reserve that is taking place at the moment and then that will carry on. It is important that those numbers are used to deliver a much more consistent service. The way we are doing that is we are looking at the whole way in which we manage calls for assistance and in the next few months we will produce a set of very clear promises to the public here. We are not going to call it a policing pledge. We will take some of the best of the policing pledges of the past and give it a Northern Ireland flavour. We will have neighbourhood policing in every neighbourhood and how we do it will be dependent on the security situation but we will have accessible police officers in the right numbers to make a difference. We are currently mapping our neighbourhoods and rather than having a variety of interpretations of that there will be a PSNI standard set out in a series of promises that if you want to contact your neighbourhood police officer you can, a neighbourhood police officer will not be abstracted for other duties. We will set out a very clear standard. I think that will take the best of what we have got and make it more consistent. We are defining half a million calls a year, looking to see whether we can turn those into a much more personal encounter. Rather than saying, "Sorry, we don't visit because you are a victim of this crime and you don't fit in with the crimes that we visit", we will be much more flexible about that. If someone needs a visit from the police and they want one, we may well schedule the response and say, "It's not an emergency, when will it be convenient for you?" providing we can do that within a security framework. We will use our Blackberries and our mobile data and all that technology to make our service much more personal. All of that is what I have been invited to do by my own colleagues as well as by the public. That is not say it is not happening, but we want to make that more consistent. The bit we are going to do which will take a little more time is in order we can assess where communities have confidence and where they do not we are creating a call-back arrangement where will be calling people back monthly. We will seek to publish that data openly. If certain communities are dissatisfied in the service we will ask the question why: have we given the local commander enough resources; are we doing the right things. Rather than a yearly survey we are going to be holding ourselves more accountable. That will come right down to the individual constable level. If Matt Baggott deals with a dozen calls in a month, or whatever it might be, and we ring a dozen people back and say, "How did Matt Baggott do?", that will feature in Matt Baggott's appraisal. The evidence of what we are actually doing will shape the way we promote, hold people accountable and assess their overall performance in the future. I do not think we need to fear that because we have enough significant quality and commitment to celebrate what we do, and hopefully that will help us to celebrate as well as look at where we are inconsistent. That is the sort of approach we are taking, much more businesslike.

Q135 Christopher Fraser: Given the confidence with which you talk about the future and those very positive moves you are making, would you go as far as to say that not having devolution has actually hampered policing in Northern Ireland?

Chief Constable Baggott: I think devolution should be a confidence-builder. I come back to the point that it makes people have the conversations about what is important, and not having that ends up with a series of different insights and perspectives. I do think overall it will help. I would not want to put a figure on whether in the next year or so it will absolutely enhance confidence because there are some difficult conversations to be had. There are a series of workings out of who is responsible and accountable.

Q136 Chairman: There are some rather difficult ones going on at the moment.

Chief Constable Baggott: I think there are.

Q137 Mr Murphy: Mr Baggott, despite intensive investigation in both jurisdictions, to date no-one has been brought to justice for the terrible murder of Paul Quinn. Are you able to give us any progress on that case today?

Chief Constable Baggott: Perhaps I will invite Drew to cover the specifics of that.

Assistant Chief Constable Harris: We wrote to the Committee last year in respect of that and, indeed, there have been no further developments. All significant leads and, indeed, all leads have been pursued either by ourselves or our colleagues in An Garda Síochána. On their behalf we carried out a number of arrests and people were interviewed in the serious crime suite and An Garda Síochána conducted their own arrests as well. It was very much a parallel investigation and we explored every possible avenue in terms of significant leads to try and identify the individuals involved and bring them to justice, but have been thwarted in our efforts. At present I do not think there are any further leads or significant lines of inquiry left to pursue so, while the investigation is not closed, at the moment we are at somewhat of a stalemate.

Q138 Mr Murphy: We have also raised this with Commissioner Murphy and his team. My first impression of meeting with Commissioner Murphy, after he crushed my hand, was if he was the arresting officer I certainly would not resist arrest. Have you met with Commissioner Murphy?

Chief Constable Baggott: Yes, I have. We have had some very good meetings. I met with him in Dublin in my first week here. We had met even before at an organised crime conference and followed that up with some informal meetings between the two of us, and I have been down to Dublin again. Before Christmas he brought his whole command team up and we had half a day together. We are now taking forward a major piece of work looking at enhancing our co-operation even further in 15 strategic areas which a Deputy is leading upon. We are at a point of some extremely good progress with our colleagues in the Garda. We are very much of one mind around dealing with the security situation and serious harm. What we want to look at is making sure that we do not just keep the status quo on that, we want to push forward even more. Perhaps Judith will say a few things on that area.

Deputy Chief Constable Gillespie: Two weeks ago I met with my colleague, Martin Callinan, one of the Deputy Commissioners for the Garda, to take forward the strategy for co-operation between PSNI and An Garda Síochána. It has to be said that we have a unique working relationship that we have built up over many years, a relationship built on mutual trust and respect, but what we are now moving towards is a written strategy trying to define the future of where we would like to go in the next three to five years. We have agreed some broad areas that we will work together on, some specific goals, and those areas are operations, investigation, intelligence, legislation, security, IT and communications, training, human resources, equipment and emergency planning. Those are very broad areas but the idea would be that our subject experts on both sides of the border would work up specific goals and objectives to achieve over the next three to five years in those areas. Whilst the working relationship is excellent obviously there is always room for pushing the boundaries and moving forward and challenging the status quo, in particular perhaps around some difficult areas on legislation that in the past we have been unable to push forward on. I am very hopeful that there will be some tangible progress over the next three to five years in the lifetime of this strategy.

Q139 Mr Murphy: We were informed this morning that a senior Garda officer was being seconded here in Belfast for 12 months. Is that something the PSNI are doing in reverse? Have you officers seconded to the Garda?

Deputy Chief Constable Gillespie: We have in the past had officers seconded to An Garda Síochána and this time around we are not seconding a superintendent but I would be hopeful in the future that we would have future secondments. The superintendent in question will be coming up within the next five to six weeks to work in our Community Safety Branch. Approval in principle has just been given by the Minister in the Department of Justice and the detail of that has to be worked out over the next five to six weeks, but he is to start in six weeks' time with our Community Safety Branch.

Q140 Mr Murphy: We understand that radio communications are now possible across the border?

Deputy Chief Constable Gillespie: Yes, that is right. We now have secure radio, which is a significant step forward. The last time I gave evidence I was talking about that particular matter and it is now complete, I am pleased to say.

Chairman: I want to bring in Mr Hepburn and Mr Fraser and then we will go briefly into private session. There are some quite dramatic developments taking place outside this room as well.

Q141 Mr Hepburn: What factors do you take into consideration when you decide whether to conduct forensic analysis in-house or actually give it to the forensic facility over at Carrickfergus?

Chief Constable Baggott: I will let Drew talk about the specifics but I can let you know where I come from on this. We have had some of these high level discussions. I want two things coming out of this. The first is success in relation to the speed and timeliness of our submissions and making sure that is very effective. The second is value for money and there are some challenges that we will be making of ourselves, for example on the sending off of drugs for testing, and is there a way we can do that with smaller quantities in-house without losing the forensic integrity, so are there cheaper ways of conducting this. These are not judgment calls on my behalf, I do not know the answer to this, but effectiveness and cost are the two questions I would be asking about. Drew will have some insight into how it currently works.

Q142 Chairman: Could I just say before he does come in that we have visited the Forensic Science Laboratory and also took formal evidence last week. We were very impressed by the quality of the work. We know that Deputy Chief Constable Gillespie has been, but we hope that you will go at an early date and see for yourself what they are doing because it really is work of a very high order indeed.

Chief Constable Baggott: Yes, indeed. Sadly, I had to cancel my visit because of the unfolding events of the day around Peader Heffron. Unfortunately, I had to cancel it but that date has been rearranged now. It is only a question of time, it is not a question of intent.

Q143 Chairman: We understand.

Assistant Chief Constable Harris: In respect of our relationship with the Forensic Service of Northern Ireland, we are their principal customer and they are our principal supplier in terms of forensic science support. We work very closely with them and I think we have the advantage over some of our counterparts in the rest of Great Britain in that we have a single relationship with one supplier for the majority of our forensic science investigation. Specifically, areas which we still retain would be around fingerprint examination, footprint examination, but also phone examination and e-crime, which is the examination of computer hard drives in particular. There is a lot of investigative work which now flows into particularly phone examination and e-crime examination. We have built up our own expertise in respect of that and as this has developed our expertise has developed incrementally. From an early stage occasionally you would come across computers and phones but they are now present in all major crime investigations and give us very significant leads in terms of evidential work that we can do and consequently we have resourced this part of our major crime investigation. The great majority of this we would take on ourselves. It is only the most complicated investigations which we would forward on to the Forensic Science Laboratory. Very often you come across a phone, which is a pretty simple device, and, therefore, well within our capabilities. Depending on the type of phone and how often we come across it, if it was beyond our capabilities we would use the Forensic Science Laboratory. There are so many of these that to put them all to the Forensic Science Laboratory without a significant uplift in their resources would completely flood their workplace and also the same would be true of e-crime in terms of researching hard drives. We are in negotiation constantly with the prosecuting authorities as to how much examination is required of hard drives to actually prove the requisite offences. One of the examinations of hard drives is obviously around indecent images of children. How many images actually constitute the charge? Some of these computers have hundreds of thousands of images on them and instead of exploring all of that we want to get to a place where we can take a sample of probably many thousands of images, upwards of 20,000 images. We are constantly looking at the amount of work we need to do to prove the charge, but we are at a criminal standard of proof so there is an obligation on us to apply the very highest standards and to be exacting as to any material that we recover.

Q144 Chairman: There is another point I would make without asking you to comment at the moment because the Chief Constable has yet to visit. This is not casting any aspersions on what you do in-house at all, but we were greatly impressed by the independence and integrity of their work, by the high quality and calibre of their young scientists and the training they had received. At the end of the day there is no substitute for utterly impartial objective scientific evidence. We just ask you to reflect on that when you go and see them.

Chief Constable Baggott: I certainly will. I would not disagree with that at all. The ambition I would have is to use that independence and excellence in relation to the serious and complicated to try and speed up some of the justice processes at the moment. If we can take out the non-contentious and deal with that in a quicker and speedier way, whether that is through spectrometry of drugs or in-house, that is the trick in terms of value for money. Certainly I know enough of it by reputation to endorse what you said, Chairman.

Q145 Mr Hepburn: Just to move on to the issue of budgets, has the increase in the dissident threat had any effect on your thinking in forming the next financial year's budget?

Chief Constable Baggott: Yes, it has in the sense that part of the package for devolution has had to be the assurance that we are capable of meeting quickly an increased risk and threat and sustaining that into the longer term. Clearly what we have built is a greater infrastructure, be that forensic, technical, sheer numbers, and I have increased slightly in the last week or so Drew's capabilities to deal with that emerging threat. We need to sustain that. If there is a way of dealing with it in a quicker and more effective way I do not want to have to create a business plan that will take a year or two years, I need that resource now. Access to the Security Fund is critical. The second issue is I need to be able to negotiate, whether through the NIO or devolved structure, a sustained street presence. It would be very easy to drop the budget and suddenly lose 400 or 500 police officers, but I need a public order capability and I need to deliver personal policing, which is the backdrop of confidence building, and I need to sustain that into the future. In terms of budget, I am anxious that we do not get drawn into an expectation that we will deliver an over-ambitious set of efficiency savings and I think we need to be made an exception. I am not saying that we do not need to become more efficient and do not need to work within a budget, but developing a policing service over the next two or three years needs sustained effort and sustained resourcing, particularly in a security situation. We have been doing some quite hard and focused talking about the level of efficiencies that I shall be expected to make next year and the year after, and I think we need to stick to that.

Q146 Christopher Fraser: You talked earlier about the withdrawal of the full-time reserve. What conclusions have you reached on that phasing out or retention of full-time reserves given that the Police Federation have expressed strong public opposition to phasing out and there is talk of an enlarged part-time reserve?

Chief Constable Baggott: Thank you very much. A very difficult decision because speaking out publicly might inadvertently give the impression that I do not respect entirely and very fully the commitment and service given by full-time reserve colleagues. You can easily slip into talking about enhancing the business of policing but I am very mindful of the fact that there are individual colleagues here, some of whom have served for a long time. I need to say that. Nothing I say here should be interpreted as disrespectful of their value or worth over many years. I arrived in the middle of a judicial review, so to some degree I had to pick up the pass, and rightly so. I implemented a security review, which is very thorough, to look at where we are in terms of technology, training and need. I looked at that alongside the strategic review which was the piece of work conducted in the summer which identified many hundreds of police officers working behind desks. The decision that we came to at the end of that was we would be better investing the money that we currently spend on the full-time reserve, bearing in mind that they have a variety of different roles, in releasing fully trained, fully paid, operational police officers from behind desks under a very speedy process. That would give more street presence and more capability than spending the money on retaining the full-time reserves. It was a purely objective decision, again on which all the Chief Officers were absolutely unanimous that it was the right thing to do. That is the first issue. The second issue is we also need to reconfigure where we have our people, using assistant investigators and releasing police skills. If I had retained the full-time reserve, which is an historical way of dealing with security, we would not have been able to reconfigure the way in which the PSNI actually operates and does its business. The third issue is I cannot go to the Treasury and ask for more money when a strategic review has shown there are hundreds of police officers being paid to do administrative tasks which should be done by police staff, or they are servicing ineffective processes. I have worked with the Treasury long enough to know the questions they would ask. To ask for more money to retain a full-time reserve when you are sitting with twice as many people behind desks is not a compelling argument. There is a real world about that which I need to be cognisant of as a Chief. The other issue is in reality the severance agreement reached under Patten is only available now. There are no signs that I can ring-fence, it is not in my gift. The messages are very clear that severance will come to an end in April 2011, retraining will start in June 2010 and now we are in the middle of a recession I cannot see that severance being ring-fenced into the future as a matter of personal choice. Some of the confusion around this has been, "If the Chief were to choose to ring-fence severance into the future, would you like to stay?" but this is not in my gift. These are decisions that have been made. We looked at all of this in the round and I am firmly convinced that the decision to release operational police officers, and to allow people to leave with a relatively generous severance package, albeit some do not receive a huge amount of money, we should be very cognisant of that, is the right decision to make. I do not know whether you want to say anything, Judith?

Deputy Chief Constable Gillespie: Many full-time reserve colleagues have joined the regular PSNI. Almost every squad of student officers passing out, or graduating as we now say, includes a number of full-time reserves. Secondly, we have recently advertised for 60 civilian detention officer posts, again to release regular police officers back out into visible policing roles. Many of those posts have been applied for by full-time reserve colleagues and also assistant investigators, which Crime Ops are now employing, and across our Professional Standards Department some of those posts have been taken up by full-time reserves. It is important that we do not lose the experience of working in the Northern Ireland environment that many of those officers have. I should stress that they have applied for and gained those posts through a merit selection process. There is no question of full-time reserves going out one door and coming in wearing a different uniform the next day, they have come through a merit selection process and gained those posts on their own merit.

Q147 Christopher Fraser: You mentioned earlier that the intake is higher in age in terms of the people coming into the force. Is that because they cannot find employment elsewhere and this is an easy option because you are recruiting or do you have any data that proves this is a first career option for people, which goes back to your reserve point about people coming into the main force?

Deputy Chief Constable Gillespie: Obviously any employment pool is a factor of the economic context in which we all work, but many people are coming into this organisation as graduates on masters degrees, indeed a small number with doctorates. It is not like they have tried lots of other employment opportunities and the PSNI is the avenue of last resort. In most cases we are the avenue of first resort, an employer of choice. Some people will go through the recruitment process not once, not twice, but three or more times to get through the process to get into the organisation.

Chairman: We will have to move on to the private session now. Thank you very much for the public evidence session.