The work of Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Constabulary

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE    To be published as HC 548-i

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ORAL EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE THE

HOME AFFAIRS COMMITTEE

THE WORK OF HER MAJESTY’S CHIEF INSPECTOR OF CONSTABULARY

TUESDAY 26 OCTOBER 2010

ZOË BILLINGHAM and SIR DENIS O’CONNOR

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Home Affairs Committee

on Tuesday 26 October 2010

Members present:

Keith Vaz (Chair)

Nicola Blackwood

Mr Aidan Burley

Lorraine Fullbrook

Dr Julian Huppert

Steve McCabe

Alun Michael

Bridget Phillipson

Mark Reckless

Mr David Winnick

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Zoë Billingham, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, and Sir Denis O’Connor, Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary, gave evidence.

Q1 Chair: Sir Denis and Ms Billingham, thank you very much for coming to give evidence. I think, Sir Denis-I may be wrong-that this is the first time you have been back since your confirmation.

Sir Denis O'Connor: Indeed. I have had other exposures, but this is my first time back here.

Q2 Chair: Indeed, you have had a lot of exposure, and that is one of the things with which I would like to start. Whenever you are exposed-to use your statement-it seems to me that you point out failings in the police service, which is part of your job that perhaps ought to have been remedied in the past. Do you feel that, in your capacity as chief inspector, you are picking up a lot of issues that should have been dealt with in the past?

Sir Denis O'Connor: That is true to a degree. When you look at the police service using the best of your professional knowledge from the outside in and then reflect back on how the public experience policing every day, you see that it takes you to a slightly different place in terms of the questions you ask and the things you look at. In all of the things that we have looked at, whether it’s G20 and adapting to protests, the leaks inquiry, or the everyday responsiveness of policing, we have found a general willingness to do things, but there is always a difficulty with particular issues. We always endeavour to find, as we did, for example, with antisocial behaviour, both the shortcomings-the ability of police IT to deal with repeat callers, for example, which is a very good reference point for problems down the line-and where people are doing things well. We always try to point towards not just sadness, as it were, but the possibility of things getting better.

Q3 Chair: That always seems to happen on Radio 4, but how many inspectors do you have?

Sir Denis O'Connor: I have myself and four other HMIs, who have the royal warrant.

Q4 Chair: On the radio today you issued a statement on police authorities, in which you said that, of the 22 authorities that you looked at, four are doing their job okay and the rest are not up to scratch. That is quite a serious indictment of the system that we have at the moment. Surely someone should have been advising the Home Secretary or providing advice to those police authorities, in a way that is different from that which has previously been provided, on the way in which they conduct their duties. Ms Billingham, I understand that this is your report.

Zoë Billingham: Yes, it is. We found that seven police authorities are performing rather well. The four to which you have referred are the authorities that are doing the things that we think, looking forward into the future, all police authorities need to be good at. The report that you are talking about was issued today, and it is a summary of the 22 inspections that we have carried out. Each of the inspection reports for each of those police authorities has been made public and has been made available to the police authorities themselves. The police authorities have acted on the clear messages that we’ve identified in those reports. We did that inspection work over a period of some time, and today’s report is a summary of the key findings from those 22 inspections, which we hope will inform police authorities moving forward so that they focus on the issues that we think are important in the new financial environment.

Q5 Chair: We will come to that in other questions. Sir Denis, before the comprehensive spending review you made several statements on the effects that a 12% would have on police budgets. The cuts, of course, are now going to be much bigger than that. Are you still confident that there is waste in the system and that that waste may be dealt with and reorganised without redundancies? Will the police in this country be able to conduct their duties in the way in which the Government and the public want, or are there going to be problems ahead?

Sir Denis O'Connor: We have a very big challenge ahead, let’s be absolutely honest about that. Do I stand by the prospect of achieving greater efficiency in policing? Absolutely, I do. What one needs to note, though, is that, even to achieve the 12% figure, there needs to be a system redesign in policing. In other words, a number of the things that were taken for granted during the period of growth and during the past can’t stand if you want to achieve even the 12% efficiency gain. If we don’t tackle those issues, I think that there will be even more pressure on all of the people at the front end, as it were. That is the only other way of potentially saving money easily. That is why I am so keen to look very hard at efficiency. I can say a bit more about system redesigns, if that would help you.

Q6 Chair: Yes, you can, but Mr Reckless will probe you on that a little bit later. I am concerned about the reports of inspectors and the purpose of HMIC. Basically, why are you all there? The public need to know your purpose. If it is just to produce reports after the event, rather than to provide support during a problem, why-I know that you weren’t there 13 years ago, Sir Denis-has it taken HMIC 13 years to try to redesign the system? If there is waste and inefficiency in the system, why wait until now?

Sir Denis O'Connor: We could even go back to 1856, and some people think I do, but the point is that the inspectorate was originally set up as a professional advice body looking in towards the sector and advising Ministers. The break in 2008 was to say, "What about an inspectorate that looks back from the public’s point of view and uses its knowledge to expose some issues?" What we are trying to do-we may not succeed-is to identify some of the issues in sufficient time for people to be able to do something about them. Whether we are talking about the police authorities and their big challenge-many of them want to do well in that-or about how we handle money in future, we are trying to identify how you might do that from what we know about the police market.

Q7 Dr Huppert: I want to follow up something you asked earlier, Chair. In the comprehensive spending review statement, the Chancellor’s exact words were:

"Her Majesty's Inspector of Constabulary found in his recent report that significant savings could be made to police budgets without affecting the quality of front line policing."

Would you stand by that?

Sir Denis O'Connor: I would stand by that, plus what it says in the report:

"A re-design of the system…has the potential, at best, to save 12% of central government funding, while maintaining police availability."

The redesign of the system has not occurred yet.

Q8 Chair: No, and it will be a bigger cut for you, will it not?

Sir Denis O'Connor: The alternative to redesign is the cut. First, it is bigger than 12%, and secondly it will fall less well for the public in terms of the public-facing services that we all depend on.

Chair: We will come back to that.

Q9 Mr Burley: I want to ask the Chair’s question in a different way. Rather than asking why didn’t HMIC identify the £12 billion of savings sooner, why haven’t the police forces themselves identified that 12% saving or, secondly, done something about it? What is intrinsic to police forces that they cannot drive out inefficiencies and have to wait for HMIC to point them out?

Sir Denis O'Connor: The issue about policing is twofold. The organisation is a very can-do and everyday one. It finds it difficult to do change at 50 miles per hour because it is constantly doing things. Standing off things is quite difficult. Its focus is very local most of the time, and appropriately so. The only way to extract savings is by having a much bigger picture and bigger deals with the private sector and others on many commodities in policing. But that requires them all to act together, to sit back from it and look back on it, and say, "What could we do?" rather than doing unilateral deals or one-officer bilateral deals to look at what we could with these big commodities-whether the fleet or anything else-as a whole.

Q10 Mr Burley: On that, why aren’t chief constables or indeed the police authorities that are supposed to govern them doing that as a matter of course? Why aren’t they looking at their neighbouring police forces and saying, "Why don’t we get together and procure uniforms or cars, or try to obtain greater purchasing powers from the private sector?"

Sir Denis O'Connor: Let’s be fair. Some are doing just that. The report that Zoë referred to showed around 2% cashable savings year on year over the past few years, so they were doing some of that, but the scale between that and the ask now is substantial, to say the least. That is the first thing.

The second is that it tends to rely more on personalities, and police forces’ ability to get along-Kent and Essex, Durham and Cleveland, Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire-which is good up to a point, but you won’t get the best deal from BT on a two by two basis. If there are 20 of you, you will get a dramatically different saving. I can illustrate that.

Q11 Chair: That is what Peter Neyroud was supposed to be doing, and that is what the NPIA was all about. Why have we not done this already? That is what the Committee wants to know.

Sir Denis O'Connor: Well, I might say that it would be best to direct that to Peter Neyroud, but part of his issue was to try to get decent information in the police landscape. Getting people to look at the thing in the round rather than at their own particular interest is quite a big thing to do. Police authorities and chief constables were operating in a period of growth when, brutally, pressure from the centre-that must include the Home Office and others-was not as sharp as it might be. We haven’t mentioned that yet, so I thought I would.

Chair: No, we will mention everything in due course.

12 Mr Winnick: Sir Denis, it will be no surprise to you that constituents constantly ask their Members of Parliament for more of a police presence, and, accordingly, we write to the police authority. The latest information from the chair of the finance committee of the West Midlands police authority is that, arising from the Chancellor’s statement last week, it is estimated that, within four years, there will be more than 1,000 fewer police officers in the metropolitan area of the west midlands, which is obviously bound to have an impact on my constituency and the Walsall borough. How far do you feel that, if there was such a reduction, it would have a severe, or any, effect on tackling criminality?

Sir Denis O'Connor: It would depend on how Chris Sims and the police authority use all the other assets that they have apart from the 1,000 they lose. The way it works in terms of your constituents is that there are two key decisions in relation to what you end up with and what they come to your surgeries about.

The first key decision is how much do I put in the forward-facing visible end of the spectrum? They put different amounts in across the country, but once you put something in at the top, and after you suffer the shift systems and attending court, you get a certain amount at the bottom. The less you put in, the less you get out. The second main decision is what shift system do they operate to, and those two convert into something that you see or don’t see. Chris Sims is actually quite vigorous in looking at both of those issues. The more rigorous he is, the more you will have left once the 1,000 others have left for other purposes.

Chair: Thank you. We now move on to Alun Michael.

Q13 Alun Michael: We heard earlier about the tension between, on the one hand, being effective and, on the other hand, having the confidence of the public. If I can explain that by saying that we hear that the police are much better at using data, analysing data, and targeting and reducing offending, but the public, at the same time, don’t feel that they know what is going on and don’t trust crime statistics. Against that background, do you think that we need to change the way that we measure and talk about crime?

Sir Denis O'Connor: It is a fundamental duty of the authorities and Government that people believe the information that they get from them.

Q14 Alun Michael: Why do you think that they don’t?

Sir Denis O'Connor: It should be a big priority to all of us that if people don’t believe in these statistics, it begs a very big question about what we are about, doesn’t it? As for why they don’t believe, you saw some of the reasons for that in the report we did on antisocial behaviour. The bottom line is that we have things that get categorised as crime as a result of legislation, and then we have things that the public think are crime, which are not all categorised by legislation in a comfortable way that meets all the rules. For most of us, if we see rowdy and bad behaviour in front of us, we think that it is crime. If we want people to believe in the information, it has to roughly look like what they see, otherwise what they hear from statisticians or, dare I say, politicians will not be believed.

Q15 Alun Michael: Sir Denis, I have a photograph on my desk of you and me and a meerkat, from when we were propounding precisely that point some 11 years ago.

Sir Denis O'Connor: I hoped you wouldn’t reveal that.

Alun Michael: The problem is not new, and I agree with the way that you have phrased it, but the fact of the matter is that there is still this tension between performance and confidence. Going back to the question, do we need to change the way in which we are measuring or communicating details about crime? If an issue has been around this long, and you have been working at it for this long, and it is still a problem, how do we deal with it?

Sir Denis O'Connor: Actually, it is a severe problem. Last summer, I even stood in a hall with 100 people from different parts of the country-all the cities-and I asked them how much faith they had in information that they were getting from the centre. At one point, the score was so derisory that it is probably not proper for me to say, but it was very low. People just did not believe, and I found that degree of disbelief unnerving. There are at least three steps to heaven here.

Q16 Chair: Could you give us the steps very quickly?

Sir Denis O'Connor: I could. Very quickly. Step number one, I would not just release things we consider to be crimes at the moment, I would release disorder data. I think that that is a bit closer to the picture that the public see. Secondly, I would offshore the publication of that data from a Department or anybody who is seen to have a particular interest in its outcomes. It is probably in everyone’s interest if it moves, at some point, away from the Home Office. Thirdly, I would localise the information so that people can easily find out what is happening locally.

Q17 Alun Michael: At community level.

Sir Denis O'Connor: Yes, absolutely at a community level so that there can be some interplay, so that they feel it is part of their life and that they can have some effect on it-that it is not something done remotely by people in white coats.

Q18 Alun Michael: I thought that was already done, or supposed to be.

Sir Denis O'Connor: It’s been done to a degree in crime mapping. It is at a relatively bland point at the moment, but there is a huge opportunity to develop that.

Chair: Thank you. We will develop it further in questions from Lorraine Fullbrook.

Q19 Lorraine Fullbrook: Sir Denis, following on from your report "Getting Together" last June, I would like to talk a bit more about the positive benefits, performance benefits and, as we heard earlier, cost benefits of collaborative working for forces. What do you think the Government can do to assist forces to engage more in collaborative working and where do you see the National Crime Agency in helping that process along?

Sir Denis O'Connor: Just quickly on the National Crime Agency, which probably merits a very good debate because it is a very big decision to make, I think it is about the division of labour between themselves and the larger and other forces. That has not been properly scoped at the minute and perhaps we can come back to that, but if you have a decent agreed division of labour then you are en route to doing something collectively well together. I think much is said about collaboration, but the truth of it is that unless there has been Government money beside it-or in some particular cases, as I suggested to Mr Burley-then it really is not a substantial part of police business. The reason for that is that people are focused on their local issues and how their resources are being used locally, and their ability to make contact with either public or private sector players depends to a degree on what information they get.

What I think has been a problem is that there is no mandated information that exposes the cost choices a police authority makes so that we can all see it very clearly. If you looked at our report, "Valuing the Police", you saw some of the choices being made in forensics that showed some people paying quite a lot more than others. Now, they would debate this-although it is their own data-but the fact of the matter is that that exposure of those choices has not been made. So we have a market operating without good information. This is not a good place to be. We should at the very least have a mandated requirement for good information that we can all see-the public as well as the police authorities. This would help you to move people towards either public or private sector collaboration.

Q20 Mr Burley: On that last answer, do you think that there should be mandated collaboration on purchasing, not just on data?

Sir Denis O'Connor: Where we have commodities that are obviously that, then I think that there is a huge case for it. In fact, in the circumstances we are in right now, there is a very, very big case for it, because otherwise we will get poorer value for the taxpayer.

Q21 Mr Burley: The reality is that a police uniform is essentially a police uniform, so why not mandate all 43 forces to buy the uniforms together?

Sir Denis O'Connor: Indeed, why not? Except that, as you know, the saving is pretty modest. It comes down to how much of the budget you look at. The really smart thing here is to look at sufficient elements of that budget to get significant savings to avoid losing lots of staff at the front end of the business. We are really, to be honest, still at the foothills of that. This isn’t because of a lot of chiefs and others are not willing. We just haven’t had the right market incentives and information to help us get there in our lifetime.

Mr Burley: Well, a 4% reduction year on year is probably the best incentive there is. My real question was about bureaucracy. You published a report in the summer that showed the number of pages of guidance that were issued in 2009-2,500. I think the HMIC was planning to complete a review of working practices and duplication by October this year. Is that on its way, and can you give us an idea of the kind of themes that are coming out of that review on duplication and bureaucracy?

Sir Denis O'Connor: We are doing a report for the Minister on that issue. What we have decided to look at there are super-outputters of bureaucracy, rather than just going for the property forms or something limited like that-the things that really chuck it out. So there is the integrated competency framework and the national intelligence model. These are things that are all worthy, but they’ve grown like Topsy. We have identified a whole series of those. But we have also looked quite hard at why bureaucracy has not landed in a serious way, so that the front end of the business knows it and, more importantly, the public do because the police are outside the police station and we see the lesser spotted constable that we all want to see.

Q22 Mr Burley: You’ve mentioned reports and the NCA. Does the HMIC feel that it has had an adequate role in the establishment of the NCA, given that a lot of the reviews of the last decade will now sit under the NCA?

Sir Denis O'Connor: I just want to be sure that I understand.

Mr Burley: The sort of reports that you would carry out.

Q23 Chair: Are you involved in the process of the creation of the new landscape of policing?

Sir Denis O'Connor: I hope to be involved in it. At the moment, the process is being run by officials who are putting together proposals for the Minister. I think at some point they will speak. We have reported not just on "Closing the Gap" but on SOCA and Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. We would have things that would be helpful to say.

Q24 Chair: The Committee feels you would be very useful. I think Mr Burley is trying to find a round-about way of inviting you to his constituency on 22 November for the Select Committee summit into this matter, which I hope you will attend so you can tell us your views.

Sir Denis O'Connor: May I say, Chairman, that I am delighted to have the opportunity, because I think it is a serious issue that needs serious consideration.

Mr Winnick: The American President might be there as well.

Chair: By satellite.

Q25 Mark Reckless: What I take away from your report, "Valuing the Police," is that the focus of the public was not so much on lowest cost, but on police effectiveness in its widest sense. For them, effectiveness was linked with visibility. In that context, do you share my concern that the focus many forces appear to be developing is to slash the number of PCSOs to cut costs?

Sir Denis O'Connor: I have a big personal stake in the whole nature of policing development, of which PCSOs are a part. One part of the motivation for releasing this report was to say, "Can we please look at every other possible thing we can do and be prepared even at a national level to change what we do in order to safeguard that?" The answer is, yes, I am concerned. That is why we did that report.

Q26 Mark Reckless: But aren’t the projected cuts to PCSOs a corollary of not being able to make police officers redundant?

Sir Denis O'Connor: I think they’re a corollary to not being able to leverage all the resources in the business, Mr Reckless. Here’s the thing: if you consider the back office part of this business to be about 10% to 14%, even if you go hard at it-in HR or finance-you’re only going to get so much out of it. But I would be for going hard at it. If we looked at the business differently, the whole transactional bit around the criminal justice system is a massive machine. On the whole series of the other big transactional things policing does-we call it the middle and back office-you could get up to about 25% to 27%. If you put that into play, you either go to serious public collaboration-we have to believe that is possible-or private outsourcing. You could save quite a lot of money, which might enable you to save on people.

It is partly about how you see, as it were, the liquidity of policing and how you see the ability to extract money to put it into the things the public value. The service needs help, assistance and support on that. We say that it has had some of that in the past, but that was not on a serious resource-leveraging basis. This is a great opportunity to really go at that, as well as everything else. But it will need some strength and support from the centre. There should not just be a hands-off approach, otherwise we will have at least 43 ways of doing it-we will not get good value for the taxpayer and you will be reading about the PCSOs and other issues more and more. That’s why I’m very keen for somebody to look at the system in the round and say, "What are we going to change here?" I know about the cuts. That’s a longish, big incentive, but we need to change the rest of the market operation. So, for example, you get Government grant in this country on an unqualified, unconditional basis, even if your spending is not great. Is that a smart place to be in the environment we are in? I don’t think it is.

Q27 Lorraine Fullbrook: Sir Denis, while we are looking at changing the system in the round to get better policing and value for money, do you think that the neighbourhood policing grant should continue to be ring-fenced to keep visible policing on the streets?

Sir Denis O'Connor: The reason we retain the grant is effectively to try to safeguard what Mr Reckless was just talking about-we feel that if it is hypothecated it will be safe. As an interim measure I can understand it. When you have to find the scale of cuts that some forces have to find-it would be useful if the Committee could get some of those projections-this falls variably across the country, depending on the national grant and precept and so on. But if you wanted to hold up neighbourhood policing for an interim period, it’s an option. It’s not a great option, to be honest. I would hope that people cared enough about the front end, and what you are going to be facing from your constituents, to make that the last consideration for cuts. We know that since we have had this investment, something very good has happened. Since 2003-04, confidence in policing has risen year on year on year. This is a turnaround from where we were in the ’80s, when confidence slid year on year.

Q28 Chair: So more money, more confidence?

Sir Denis O'Connor: Well more investment in things that connect directly with the public about their issues, a rise in confidence. That was the neighbourhood policing research finding.

Q29 Lorraine Fullbrook: Sir Denis, do you think that constabularies may take the easy route to balancing their budget and cut front-line services, as opposed to looking at the system that they operate and being more inventive and entrepreneurial in how they work? Do you think that they will initially take the easy route and cut front-line services?

Sir Denis O'Connor: I have to be absolutely honest with you. Given the scale of the cuts, I don’t think there is any easy route for them. I think they will look at where they can make savings comparatively easily. The savings on people you can- for want of a better phrase-let go, are made easily, which is why I am hugely keen that the centre reassert itself, given that it is the major shareholder in what police authorities get. By that I mean the Home Office and people around the Home Office. DCLG has a small role in this as well. There is a big public interest issue about them taking some responsibility to help forces to leverage their resources better, either together, or with the private sector.

Q30 Alun Michael: You have referred a couple of times now to more help for forces in terms of research, or in terms of clarification, expectations and all the rest of it. Is that not essentially what the inspectorate is for?

Sir Denis O'Connor: I think the inspectorate would be seen in many ways, but not always as helpful, by police forces because sometimes we give hard messages.

Q31 Alun Michael: Are you suggesting that we need somebody who is going to give soft messages? I am not quite clear what you are suggesting. You seem to suggest that there is a gap.

Sir Denis O'Connor: There is a gap.

Q32 Alun Michael: The gap seems to me to be shaped along the lines of what the inspectorate was meant to do. That is my point.

Sir Denis O'Connor: The inspectorate was a help and support mechanism prior to the NPIA. Our focus has been more directed towards exposing the issues and the possibilities. You need somebody who can devote some time and energy to get alongside the West Midlands or the 16 forces that Zoë looks at. To give you an example, in the health service there is a regulator who may or may not tell you what you need to know and there is also an institution called NICE, which will tell you whether a treatment is good value and whether you should be doing it. We do not have a NICE in policing; we have a regulator now who tries to look at things from the public point of view.

Chair: Indeed, but that might all have been part of the discussion on the new landscape.

Q33 Steve McCabe: I want to ask you two quick things about the antisocial behaviour agenda. First, we have had quite a long time with the Respect-type initiatives. What are you recommending? Is it broadly more of the same or are you suggesting something particularly new and different?

Sir Denis O'Connor: From memory, I think that we recommended five things. One, tell the public about the disorder issue, and we haven’t published decent data on that.

Q34 Steve McCabe: My point is that that is part of the Respect agenda. That sort of stuff has been happening. We might argue about the scale of it or the degree in certain areas, but all of that has been going on. Is there anything that we’re missing that you think has to happen?

Sir Denis O'Connor: I’m hesitant about disagreeing with you, sir-

Q35 Steve McCabe: Feel free.

Sir Denis O'Connor: I will feel free because the brutal fact is that we have not been publishing antisocial behaviour incidents nationally. We have not been publishing them-

Q36 Chair: Do you mean the Government when you say "we"?

Sir Denis O'Connor: I mean the Home Office and NPIA have not been publishing that data. We published them for the first time in that report, where you could see the scale of it: 3.5 million incidents. We have not required police forces to publish them consistently, which is why we were able to name only a few that had. The first thing to do is tell the people what the problem is. That might help to make them believe more in things that they should believe in.

We should look very hard at some decisions to grade out-response, particularly to repeat callers, because we know that they are vulnerable. Do not think that this is part of what we are saying in Respect; this has been about being much more forensic about how to deal with the problem. It wasn’t part of the Respect agenda. On looking at the partnership effort, we think that an awful lot of money has been spent, including on asking officers to come from neighbourhoods to lots of meetings. I’m looking at only 43-one in each police force across the country. The University of Cardiff, which looked at it for us, did not find that to be associated with a lot of convincing action for victims, so we said, "You should look at this. There’s a lot of money in it and, for a fair bit of it, there’s not much product." Those give you three opportunities to do things. I am in favour of early intervention, because if we do not do early intervention with this, it only gets worse for the public.

Q37 Steve McCabe: On that point, what’s the practical thing that the police can do? We have the problem that some things are crimes but some things are not. We’ve all heard, "Oh, we can’t arrest them for that." We say that people should stand up to them and not let them get away with it, but you report on the number of people who suffer retaliation. What practical things can the police do to support victims that aren’t happening at the moment?

Sir Denis O'Connor: There are some very good practical examples, but the most practical thing of all is to hold up the response and neighbourhood element of policing so that there are people available, not only to respond but to prevent some of this and hit it early, rather than when it’s escalated to the point where people are fearful of living in their own homes. That is why, in valuing the police, we attach so much importance to holding up the front end of policing in a focused way, which is what a lot of the conversation has been about today. In the report, we tried to say what works, and what works is having people available, and what doesn’t work is cutting people off arbitrarily because the call system is not very good, and, frankly, a lot of partnership work looks, to us, to be not very effective. Those are good opportunities to do things. We should be looking hard, shouldn’t we? I know one person who would be very interested in that and in what partnerships at least are yielding for us, because we are spending a lot of money in them.

Chair: Mr Michael will ask a very brief question if we get a brief reply, because we are very over time.

Q38 Alun Michael: When you referred to the absorption of time, were you talking about things such as the PAC meetings?

Sir Denis O'Connor: The PAC meetings are with the public; I am talking about all the things that the agencies do together.

Q39 Dr Huppert: Can I move on to a different topic? We heard last month that the review of how the police handle rape cases-which you were supposed to be running-had been cancelled, because the Home Office withdrew the money, as I understand it. Why did it withdraw the money? Perhaps more importantly to people around the country, what will you be able to do to rectify the failures in rape policy implementation?

Sir Denis O'Connor: I think you should ask the Home Office why it withdrew the money, to be fair. Part of the thinking may have been that we have had the Stern review, which has taken a good look at victimisations, and Sara Payne’s excellent considerations around the victim. That was going to be part of what I said to the Committee when I was here to be confirmed.

On what we can do and what we are looking at, there are two things. The first is in sampling; how the police manage cases to see if there is good way of managing so you can recognise risk. The second is that we hope to move on to look at serial rapists. Those are things that can’t be done easily otherwise. So, we haven’t given up on the topic. We are now narrowing the scope and focus and over the next few months, we will be doing some work on that.

Q40 Dr Huppert: Are you able to do part of the work for the plan in any sense-a quarter of the work, or a tenth?

Sir Denis O'Connor: It’s going to be quite a bit more focused, because we are moving other bits of our budget around to enable to us to have that tighter focus. We assume that you would be reasonably content that you did have a view about the victim from Baroness Stern and Sara Payne, so we don’t feel the need to repeat that. But we think there are some issues arising from some cases that it would be useful to inform you and others about.

Chair: Thank you, Dr Huppert. This is a very brief final question.

Q41 Mark Reckless: Turning to Ms Billingham, I haven’t yet had the opportunity to read your report that came out at midnight, but I look forward to it. Over the next 18 months, we are telling police authorities, "We are going to abolish you and replace you with elected police commissioners." I support that process, notwithstanding my membership of one of those authorities. At the same time, we are asking those police authorities to oversee very significant reductions and potentially, the restructuring of police budgets. How serious do you think the risk is in the juxtaposition of those two processes? What advice, if any, would you have to mitigate that risk?

Zoë Billingham: This goes back to what was almost the Chairman’s opening question, which was a good example of where HMIC has looked at what has happened over a series of inspections, and has drawn lessons out that can be applied moving forward. You are absolutely right; police authorities in the next two budgets are going to have to make two thirds of the 20% reductions in central Government funding. In order to do that, we have identified where they need to focus now. I think that there will be a risk that they won’t achieve the savings in the correct way if they don’t focus on the strategic direction and on value for money. It is absolutely essential that they do so. In the report, we set out a number of key issues that police authorities have got to ask themselves. We are saying that they need to take a long, hard look.

My simple answer to your question is that the police authorities are here today, tomorrow and for the next 18 months. They have got to act as though it is business as usual. They have to set aside the fact that they are being abolished, and they have some really tough decisions that they need to take now and next year. We are really extolling them in this report to take those decisions and not put them off till tomorrow, when the new Government’s arrangements come in. If they put them off until tomorrow, they are putting the public at risk and they are not going to be able to achieve the efficiencies and the savings that we’ve talked about. They also won’t be able to protect that front-line public face of policing that we say is so important to them.

Q42 Mr Burley: We’ve talked a lot about structures in the Home Office this morning. Do you think the ministerial structure is fit for purpose, or do you think it is about time we had a Minister responsible for collaboration, efficiency, savings and reducing bureaucracy?

Sir Denis O'Connor: I’d be very hesitant to tell the Ministers how to organise themselves. It’s bad enough with the police and God knows, I bear the scars. All I would say is that I commend to the Minister and others that they look at the police market and say, "How do we make this market really ramp up?", because I am worried about the issue that Mr Reckless raised.

Q43 Chair: Sir Denis, the fact is that every member of the Committee is very interested in your work and grateful for the evidence you have given. We know what happened to you and Mr Michael, but we still don’t know what happened to the meerkat that was in this particular picture.

Sir Denis O'Connor: The answer is that I was captured live, responding to a meerkat, as I had been warned not to. Do you know the pose they strike? I struck the pose. I was in uniform and it was on the front page of a newspaper.

Chair: Excellent. We look forward to seeing you on 22 November in Cannock Chase. Ms Billingham and Sir Denis, thank you very much.