UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE
To be published as HC 939-i

House of commons

oral EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE THE

Home Affairs Committee

The New Landscape of Policing

Tuesday 26 April 2011

Peter Neyroud

JAN BERRY

Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 97

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Home Affairs Committee

on Tuesday 26 April 2011

Members present:

Keith Vaz (Chair)

Dr Julian Huppert

Alun Michael

Bridget Phillipson

Mark Reckless

Mr David Winnick

________________

Examination of Witness

Witness: Peter Neyroud, author of Review of Police Leadership and Training, gave evidence.

Chair: The Committee will now begin its major inquiry into the new landscape of policing and our first witness is Peter Neyroud. Mr Neyroud, welcome to the Committee and you are, in fact, our first star witness at the start of our major inquiry into the new landscape of policing.

Peter Neyroud: Thank you for that.

Q1 Chair: We can’t think of anyone better to begin our inquiry with. Do you feel rather let down by the Government, bearing in mind that you have headed the NPIA, in your view and the view of your colleagues quite successfully, and there it is about to be abolished and replaced by-well, we don’t know what else it is to be replaced by.

Peter Neyroud: That is an interesting first question. It was a difficult year last year. I put a lot of personal effort into creating the agency and I think at the time when we started to create it, it was the right model to have a single national support. It certainly brought a whole range of things together for the first time.

The evidence of looking at other major new public bodies that are created is that three years, which was effectively as long as I got in order to get it to the point of it being judged, was frankly not long enough. I have been here on a number of previous occasions describing the mess that I had to clear up.

Chair: Indeed.

Peter Neyroud: I think the judgment was premature, and the fact that we are still at the point where we don’t know what the successor bodies are going to be looking like I think is problematic. It was one of the reasons why, fairly early on last year, I decided to step out because I needed my voice to be heard in the debate. The reason why, essentially, I ended up doing the review of leadership was making those points.

Q2 Chair: Indeed. So you took a decision to come out of the NPIA because you were concerned that it was to be abolished, you felt there should have been more time to let the organisation succeed, and your worry is that there are bits of the NPIA, while of course accepting the Government can make decisions as they see fit, that don’t fit anywhere on what I regard as the right-hand side of the page?

Peter Neyroud: Yes.

Q3 Chair: We know what is on the left-hand side of the page, it is the existing organisations, but your concern is that you don’t know where all the bits are going to go?

Peter Neyroud: Yes. I think one of the critical things for me last year was thinking about the staff working in the organisation who still don’t know what their future is. Whatever we think about the agency as an organisation, 400 staff are already gone and I am sure by the end of the process there will be more. You can have an argument about whether there were too many-that is a bigger picture argument-but from my experience most of the people who joined the agency joined it because they wanted to serve the public and deliver better policing. I am disappointed that they find themselves where they are.

Q4 Chair: Let’s move on then to what you think is perhaps a solution to this, or at least partly a solution, which is the professionalisation of the police. Having served in the police for, what, 30 years, are you telling this Committee that at the moment the police are not professional?

Peter Neyroud: It is a slightly different argument. It is worth tracking back, because it relates to the debate you have just been touching on about the agency and its role. I think the agency has been successful in many respects, but it has not been entirely successful in getting clear and crisp commissioning-it may relate to some points you want to raise with me later on-of things like doctrine and guidance and the overall framework of professional knowledge. The service has been professionalising for all the 30 years I have been in it, in many cases responding to things that went wrong-things like the Yorkshire Ripper investigation and the miscarriages of justice that came to light in the late 1980s, early 1990s. There has been a great deal of work to make the service, for example, much better at investigating crime, much better at dealing with particular specialist functions, but, to be frank, none of those have been pulled together as a clear, single, professional body of knowledge yet.

Q5 Chair: This is what you hope to do with your new proposals?

Peter Neyroud: Yes, and the other part of it, which I know there has been a lot of debate around, is encouraging individual police officers to take more ownership of their practice and develop the profession and to be able to exhibit more discretion in the way that they carry out their duties, which I think is something that is qualitatively different now from when I joined.

Q6 Chair: Under your proposals ACPO will disappear, but would it not reappear under what you are proposing in that the new organisation will have the authority to issue guidance on policy, which is something that perhaps police officers should not be doing? The policy should be left, should it not, to the Ministers and the politicians and the new Police Commissioners?

Peter Neyroud: Let’s be careful about making a distinction between policy, which I think is entirely properly the province of Ministers and political structures, and the guidance about the day-to-day practice that police officers do. I think there is a difference between the two. For example, if we take the police use of firearms, there is a distinction between the overall policy about how the police service in England and Wales approaches the issue of use of lethal force, which is properly the province of political debate and properly the province of these two Houses, and the detailed practice about how you train police officers, how they will physically carry out their duty. There is a distinction between those two, and a professional body can properly operate in the second sphere and can properly influence the first.

Q7 Mark Reckless: As we saw with the Saunders and Tucker cases, isn’t it clear that quite a lot of what ACPO decided to take on as this technical professional guidance was in the wider sphere, particularly post-incident conferencing and whether officers should speak with each other about what happened prior to giving a formal version?

Peter Neyroud: It is interesting, because I was the ACPO lead on police use of firearms at the time that guidance was developed, and in contrast to previous development of practice I was very careful to make sure that it went out on the internet and was openly consulted on with a number of NGOs, including Liberty and a number of the other legal NGOs, in contrast to previous practice that had not been as transparent. I think the professional body can, as I described in the review, be extremely transparent about the way it does that. I agree with you to some extent-there is always going to be a join between the detailed practice and training and the overall policy-but it seems to me that that is better done by an open and transparent process.

Q8 Mark Reckless: I should declare an interest as a member of the Kent Police Authority. In particular I am a lead member for legal services, and I had to look very carefully at this and, frankly, did not find the ACPO contribution or the six different types of guidance at all helpful. We had a policy in Kent and, in my view, that was what was followed and I was very happy about this; but the chief constable was jumping through hoops to describe the policy as somehow being consistent with various types of-internally inconsistent in my view-ACPO guidance. On the key issue of whether police officers should talk to each other before giving a version of what happened, surely that is something where the democratic oversight, whether it is Parliament, the police authority or the new commissioners, should decide, rather than that just being decided by police officers potentially advised by NGOs? Surely it is a democratic requirement.

Peter Neyroud: I think you will find if Parliament wants to get into the detail of every single jot and tittle of things of that nature, you are going to be a damn sight busier in this House. Those principles were based on the legal principles that will already be enunciated in law. They were very carefully consulted on, as I say, with the NGOs.

Q9 Mark Reckless: But were found to be unlawful, surely, in the guidance.

Peter Neyroud: That is interesting because at the time, back in 2000, they were subject to a stated case-R v. Bass-and were held, in a series of legal cases, to be okay. The law changed and judges’ interpretation of the dangers and risks in those changed. That is where you need to have a professional body and a public debate about how you need to respond to different circumstances and changed circumstances.

Q10 Chair: Do you think that this is just a revamped ACPO?

Peter Neyroud: No, absolutely not and I have been very clear in the report to ensure that it isn’t just a revamped ACPO. I think there are some pretty well rehearsed flaws in the current organisation, not the least of which was creating the organisation as a company limited by guarantee operating in public space-that was a serious flaw. I have been very careful to try and set out an organisation that encompasses the whole of the profession. I think that is, again, a deep flaw in the current process.

Q11 Mark Reckless: I found the executive summary quite obfuscatory but I have read the whole report and, frankly, there is a huge amount of stuff about where ACPO-sorry, the revamped ACPO-is going to be taking on new powers, and things that are currently tripartite are going to be just this professional body in future. I wonder if you could point me to where in this report the sections are on the various powers that ACPO will be giving up-the revamped ACPO, pardon me.

Peter Neyroud: It is not a revamped ACPO, and what I have tried to describe in the report is not something that is a kind of reconstitution of what is currently there, but we looked at a whole series of professional bodies across public life and sought to construct a professional body for policing that would pick up the best of those, rather than try and take the existing pot pourri and reconstitute it in some way, so we didn’t try and do that.

Q12 Mark Reckless: But the Home Secretary asked you to reposition ACPO as a professional standards and training body. When she said "reposition", I understood that you would be moving to that model and giving up these other things that you have been doing without the sanction of this House that you picked up over all these years, but I cannot find in this report anywhere where you explain what powers you are giving up.

Peter Neyroud: What other things did you have in mind, Mr Reckless?

Q13 Mark Reckless: You have these 13 working practice areas. It doesn’t strike me that a professional body has 13 different areas deciding how every organisation should structure its work in the way ACPO does. You are considering giving up a few meetings but I just-

Peter Neyroud: Quite a few meetings.

Q14 Mark Reckless: We have all this material about what you are taking on but where in this do you describe what ACPO is giving up as it becomes this new body?

Q15 Chair: As well as that, you can put into the pot the fact that I think the Committee was unaware that ACPO was responsible for undercover agents until very recently. I don’t think that was sanctioned by Parliament.

Peter Neyroud: I think it was quite a surprise to everyone in that sense.

Q16 Chair: Was it a surprise to you?

Peter Neyroud: No, I knew that ACPO had taken on the public order side of things and that that implicitly implied that.

Q17 Chair: Anyway, if you can respond quickly to Mr Reckless we can move on.

Peter Neyroud: Yes, essentially there is already agreement-

Chair: Basically the charge that he is making is that you are not giving up; this is ACPO reinvented rather than something new.

Peter Neyroud: It is not me that is giving it up because I am no longer a member of the association, and I sought to be as independent as possible in doing this piece of work. What I have described in the report is a set of functions that are quite different from ACPO. They are quite different. The structure is quite different.

Q18 Mark Reckless: What are you giving up?

Peter Neyroud: It is not a question about giving functions up. What I tried to describe is the functions that a professional body needed to perform. They are quite, quite different to the current functions of ACPO.

Q19 Mark Reckless: But shouldn’t you also be describing current functions that ACPO performs that the professional body will no longer perform?

Peter Neyroud: That would be a very, very much longer report and it is quite long as it stands.

Chair: Thank you for that.

Q20 Mr Winnick: The concern of the public is not so much new frameworks, new organisations or replacements but how far the police are able to investigate major crimes. You mentioned in passing all the mistakes connected with Sutcliffe. If he had been caught before 1981, I think that was a year after you joined the police service so you were hardly involved in the investigations-

Peter Neyroud: No, I wasn’t.

Mr Winnick: -lives would have been saved. Do you accept that is first and foremost the duty and responsibility of the police?

Peter Neyroud: Yes.

Q21 Mr Winnick: How far will all your recommendations help in avoiding the appalling mistakes, not only in the Sutcliffe case, of course, but other cases and miscarriages of justice?

Peter Neyroud: There are several pieces of this that I think will contribute in the long term, and indeed in the short term, the first of which is to place a greater onus on individuals to be continuously professionally developed through their career. That has been one of the flaws, and there has been a tendency to have long periods between training when practice should have changed. Secondly, there is a strong thread running through this about ensuring the quality of specialist training, and including detectives. Thirdly, there is a stronger thread about senior managers: because a large part of the problems with the Ripper inquiry was also about senior managers who didn’t properly supervise and didn’t understand how to make the investigation work, there is a substantial amount of emphasis on ensuring better qualifications at those key levels.

The other piece is also making sure that there is a continued focus and emphasis on developing evidence-based practice, looking back and making sure that lessons are learnt and research is properly done, which again would have helped and will continue to help us ensure that we don’t end up with another one of those awful types of inquiry.

Q22 Mr Winnick: Our next witness is Jan Berry-obviously you will know her very well arising from your duties. The purpose of her evidence will be to tell us how reducing bureaucracy in the police force is working or will work. But, you see, your suggested professional body will have an executive board, a management board, a council of chief constables, a delivery body and, moreover, an independent scrutiny board, which no doubt will be useful. It does seem that on one hand we are being told the need to reduce bureaucracy and the rest of it, how that impedes the day-to-day work of the police force, and yet what you are suggesting will lead to quite a number of new bodies with all the necessity to have secretariats and meetings and conferences to co-ordinate and the rest. It is a contradiction, isn’t it, to reducing bureaucracy?

Peter Neyroud: No, it isn’t, because by creating a single professional body, for a start you are creating a single body that can make the decisions about how the profession is developed. There is, at the moment, what can best be described as a very complex relationship between the NPIA, ACPO, the APA, the Home Office and others. The result of that is a plethora of meetings and, Mr Reckless, if there is one thing that is going to disappear in these recommendations is a shedload of meetings. There are far more meetings going on as a result of that because you have a multiplicity of bodies. You also have a process of commissioning that ends up with a huge amount of duplication as well, which is another part of the process.

The recommendations in the report also focus very much on some of the things that do generate bureaucracy, which Jan has certainly raised in her report, in particular, for example, the competency framework and PDRs and simplifying those, which have been a huge part of the day-to-day bureaucracy that definitely affects police officers.

I understand the point about the bodies I have sought to recommend creating at the centre, but what I was seeking to do with those bodies is to create a transparent and accountable body that will operate in a very, very different way to the current structure, which I don’t think you or I would regard as being transparent or accountable.

Q23 Mr Winnick: One of the things that I have heard repeatedly said, particularly by politicians, is, "If only the police could get on with their job and not be involved in all this paperwork and the rest of it." Is there any substance to this criticism, which to some extent has almost become a cliché? Isn’t paperwork absolutely essential in those instances if the police are challenged in court and in other places?

Peter Neyroud: Yes. If you are going to take cases through the criminal justice system you are going to have paperwork. The question is whether we are making the right decisions about putting people into that system in the first place, or whether officers should be exercising more street discretion in a way that the Chairman has already mentioned. Thirty years ago, we certainly used a lot more street discretion to resolve issues on the street and made a short note in our pocket book. That has palpably changed, largely, I think, thanks to the fact that everybody now wants to record everything in order to get their points to make their prizes. I think that has been one of the biggest generators of paperwork.

Chair: You are very generous. I thought you were going to say it is largely because politicians have passed more and more Acts of Parliament making you do more.

Q24 Mark Reckless: In terms of financing of the new body, I note on page 55 of your report a potential new income stream, where you say the advantage of retaining retired members is that they can play their part in supporting international training in policing in a way that supports the standards of the professional body. Presumably that would also bring in some income to the professional body rather, I assume, than the retired individuals.

Peter Neyroud: Yes. We looked again across a range of professional bodies across the public sphere and that is quite common and quite beneficial, not least of which it provides the potential for a more flexible workforce, where people who have decided to cease their full career but retain their qualifications can be brought back when there is a particular need for more of that particular skill.

Q25 Mark Reckless: Can I confirm in terms of next year, despite the request from the Home Secretary for savings, are you asking for the same amount of money, except you are going to take on funding as one non-exec from the Home Secretary?

Peter Neyroud: If the body is-

Q26 Chair: Just to be clear, what funding is now given by the Home Office?

Peter Neyroud: Well, if you take the overall envelope of funding for the activities described in this report, it is around about £20 million.

Q27 Chair: So you want the same amount of money?

Peter Neyroud: No, no, the way that the funding is described over time has moved to a position where it is split. Firstly I have taken-

Chair: Just tell us some figures, so £20 million-

Peter Neyroud: Right, so £20 million down to £15 million because we are accepting-

Q28 Chair: Down to £15 million next year?

Peter Neyroud: No, £15 million over the four years of the CSR.

Chair: So a £5 million saving over four years?

Peter Neyroud: A £5 million saving in the total funding.

Q29 Chair: That £5 million, in answer to Mr Reckless’ question, comes from where?

Peter Neyroud: No, the difference is that funding that is proposed over time shifts towards: income from individuals paying a subscription to a professional body, which is about a third of the funding; income from either a levy or payment for services; and some remaining grant. So roughly split a third, a third, a third.

Chair: So £20 million down to £5 million?

Peter Neyroud: The grant funding, yes, exactly.

Chair: And then eventually down to £5 million. A third, a third, a third is what?

Peter Neyroud: The national grant funding coming down to about a third, so about £5 million over the CSR is what we are proposing.

Mark Reckless: What cut do you propose-

Q30 Chair: Sorry, Mr Reckless, I am a bit confused here. At the moment you get £20 million?

Peter Neyroud: At the moment it is national grant funding to the functions of the NPIA.

Chair: That is £20 million?

Peter Neyroud: Around about £20 million.

Q31 Chair: In four years time you see that reducing by £5 million, you said?

Peter Neyroud: The total envelope reducing by £5 million.

Q32 Chair: So you still expect £15 million from the taxpayer?

Peter Neyroud: No. No, the £15 million would be made up in a very different way. The split is roughly a third, a third, a third.

Q33 Chair: So grant monies then will be down to £5 million in four years?

Peter Neyroud: National grant money will be down to about £5 million.

Chair: In four years?

Peter Neyroud: In four years.

Alun Michael: So it is a tax on police officers.

Q34 Chair: Is the difference going to be made up by police officers paying this amount of money?

Peter Neyroud: Some will be made up by subscription.

Q35 Chair: What services are you going to charge for?

Peter Neyroud: You charge for registration for practice and for continuous professional development materials.

Q36 Chair: What about the rest of the third?

Peter Neyroud: The rest of the third from either income or from an agreed levy for delivery of services from local-

Q37 Chair: So at the moment you don’t know?

Peter Neyroud: Again, there are decisions that I can’t make for people about which services they want at the time.

Q38 Chair: No, I understand, but if you are writing this comprehensive report and you have spent a year doing it-

Peter Neyroud: No, I spent less than four months.

Chair: Well, four months doing it, surely people will want to know where all the money is coming from if we are going to save money at the end.

Peter Neyroud: Chairman, that is reasonably well set out.

Chair: Mr Reckless, you have read the report.

Q39 Mark Reckless: Yes, and on page 63 you say it is the role of the Home Secretary to promote the efficiency and effectiveness of the police service; therefore she should have the right to have a non-executive director on the board. I thought it was the job of the police authority, and in the new landscape the elected commissioners, to ensure that forces were efficient and effective?

Peter Neyroud: No, there are still two responsibilities under the Police Act for efficiency and effectiveness: one is the local responsibility for the force and the other is the Home Secretary’s for the overall promotion of efficiency and effectiveness nationally. They are both still there.

Q40 Mark Reckless: The Home Secretary has said she wants to see a rebalancing of the tripartite to increase the importance of the democratic and local role and she said that she wants the PCCs involved in the governance of this new professional body, yet you say that there should be a Home Secretary representative on the board but you have had a chat with the chief constables and they don’t want to have the PCCs on the board.

Peter Neyroud: No, because I made a distinction in the report between the national responsibilities that the professional body is exercising and the local responsibilities for an accountability of the PCC. My argument is that those two should be kept distinct, but that the PCC should chair the scrutiny board that makes sure that the body is doing the job that it was set up to do.

Chair: Thank you. We will return to this shortly.

Q41 Dr Huppert: Can I just ask about various aspect of the NPIA and how they will fit in? One aspect is clearly to do with training, and I will come back to that in a second, but there is a range of other things that the NPIA does. I went to their offices in Wyboston last week, which was extremely interesting and I am grateful to all of the people who set that up. There is a whole lot that is about what I might call serious crime. What I hadn’t fully realised until that trip was that serious and organised crime did not include serious crime-that disorganised murders, rape, serial killings and so forth do not fall within the purview of SOCA, and as it is currently written would not fall within the purview of the National Crime Agency. The description there talks about organised crime, national tasking, organised criminals and border policing, but it doesn’t talk about serious crimes. There is a whole range of things, as we know, that sit within NPIA. Where do you think they can go? What future is there for them? What future is there for the national injuries database, for the covert support team, for all of those different functions?

Peter Neyroud: Yes. Well, I propose that they sit with the professional body as support functions. Essentially, if you look at the diagram I have proposed on the body, there is a core that is about professional practice and it moves out towards things like providing support-what you have seen was serious operational support, but not operational support in the sense of people doing the operation but providing expert support. I put that within the professional body because one of the things that is critical about that is that the people that are doing that at the same time provide assistance and support on the development of practice. So I couldn’t see how those could be disaggregated effectively from the professional body.

Q42 Dr Huppert: So you would be comfortable that all of those things would sit in a professional body and that that would work comfortably? You will know better than I all the different segments that go into NPIA.

Peter Neyroud: Yes. We had a debate through the review with a range of parties in policing about whether there should be a separate delivery body, but to be quite honest-and it is back to Mr Winnick’s question-the more you looked at it the more that just generated another set of meetings and another body and another set of accountabilities. In the final report, I came down on the side that the professional body should have those type of functions within it and it should be held accountable for their delivery.

Q43 Dr Huppert: Then-just focusing down on training, if I may-you are talking about a model that uses further and higher education providers. Would that take over all police training? How would it compare to the training that is done now where a lot of it is done locally?

Peter Neyroud: If you take the big blocks of training, I am recommending in the report that higher education takes over the bulk of the delivery of student officer training, which is a direction of travel that has already been well advanced by many forces; and that it takes over a substantial amount of the responsibility for management leadership training, particularly junior managers and senior managers, but with elements like the command training being very much delivered still by the service in combination with higher education.

Q44 Dr Huppert: Somebody wishing to join the police in Cambridge, say, where would they go? Where would they study? Would there be necessarily a higher education provider in every force area that would do the training?

Peter Neyroud: Well, the model I have recommended to forces is the model I think looks the simplest model for forces to run and the clearest model is one where forces enter into an agreement with a higher education institution and ask the HE institution to deliver a set number of places against their planning in a year, and then it becomes a clear partnership. There are quite a number of such partnerships around the country already with forces.

Q45 Bridget Phillipson: Just on that point, I would be interested to know how we can protect existing good practice when it comes to the training of probationary police officers. For example, I used to manage a women’s refuge in the north-east; probationary police officers would often spend a full day or two with us. That was very valuable, both for the organisation I worked for but clearly for the new police officers. How do we ensure that that kind of local good practice is protected under the new arrangements?

Peter Neyroud: I think in some ways it may be easier to do that within the mechanism that is proposed because the bulk of the qualification in these proposals is acquired before attestation. I looked at examples from across the world, both in the States and Australia, where moves in this direction have been made and an awful lot of the type of almost internships-that is the word of the moment I think. Opportunities for getting learning are embedded into the university or HE-based courses that are preparing people for the service. I think you need those as early as possible, and training needs to be seen as externalised as possible and not simply sat within a police college.

Q46 Alun Michael: Can I just get one thing about the accountability? You have talked about the way you are going to change the financial arrangements, which means that, as I understand it, the individual professional is going to have to make a contribution, which is a form of taxation in itself, but they don’t get any representation. You only have chief constables plus one from the Home Secretary on the board. Is that right?

Peter Neyroud: No, no, no, no, they do get representation.

Q47 Alun Michael: On the board?

Peter Neyroud: I didn’t describe the entirety of the board in detail but I would certainly expect there to be constable representatives on that board, not just chief constables.

Q48 Alun Michael: And superintendent representatives?

Peter Neyroud: And superintendent representatives.

Q49 Alun Michael: Sorry, I should have said-Chairman, you didn’t ask us to declare interests when we started this part of the meeting-my son is the chief executive of the North Wales Police Authority.

The issue of professionalism, you have made it very clear what you see as the advantages of the body that makes it comprehensive and coherent, but it does seem, in the way you have described it, very reactive. How do you relate the professionalism to the purpose?

Peter Neyroud: Right, and if that is the way it has come across in how I have described it, that is certainly not the way I have sought to describe it in this paper at all. If you are working in that direction, then the fact that the professional body would spend a lot more time focusing on the values of the profession and the way the profession can make a real difference, and in particular around describing the types of things, the types of areas that should be properly researched and commissioning that properly within universities, which is something that does not happen now, seems to me to be an incredibly important part of trying to develop the profession in a way that policing can better deliver for the public.

Q50 Alun Michael: What attention have you paid to the justice reinvestment report that was published by the Justice Select Committee?

Peter Neyroud: The whole business about how reinvestment is made and how rehabilitation is taken forward?

Q51 Alun Michael: One of the key elements of that report, which is a theme that runs through it, is that you need to be absolutely clear about the purpose of the police and of the criminal justice system as a whole. How would that relate to the professional body?

Peter Neyroud: It is interesting because in the seminars and events that I have been running on the review, it was the very first thing that people said-that the first job of the professional body is to be much clearer about the outcome and purpose and the way in which police can make a real difference.

Q52 Alun Michael: Are you clear about that?

Peter Neyroud: I am pretty clear about it because-

Q53 Alun Michael: In what way?

Peter Neyroud: Well, I am clear about it because I think the thing that the professional body will do that will be different is focus on the evidence about the way the police can really make a difference.

Q54 Alun Michael: Can you sum it up?

Peter Neyroud: If you carry out focused policing against the problems that really matter to the public, you can have a huge positive benefit.

Q55 Alun Michael: Yes, to what purpose?

Peter Neyroud: To the purpose of reducing crime and making people safer.

Q56 Alun Michael: That is absolutely the point, and the key element of the justice reinvestment report was that, first, an awful lot of the resources that are essential to achieving that are outside the criminal system or outside the police system.

Peter Neyroud: Agreed.

Q57 Alun Michael: The Police Minister has been very clear about taking us back to the key purposes set out by Sir Robert Peel of reducing crime.

Peter Neyroud: Yes.

Q58 Alun Michael: It doesn’t seem to come out of the way that you have framed your report. There is an awful lot of stuff, an awful lot of detail.

Peter Neyroud: Yes, I was asked to deal with a lot of detail.

Q59 Alun Michael: A lot of woolliness, I would suggest.

Peter Neyroud: Okay, I am not sure I quite accept woolliness, but I wasn’t asked to describe the purpose of the police in the report. I was asked to try and find a way for the police to be able to be more purposive.

Q60 Alun Michael: But isn’t that why we end up with people moving away from a clarity of purpose-that it is not constantly restated and people are not constantly reminded? Isn’t it, as with other professions like medicine, very important that it is right at the heart of professionalism?

Peter Neyroud: I agree with that. Again, in trying to describe the type of professionalism that I think should be in place, a proper set of values and ethics that will necessarily encompass what the purposes of the police service are, yes, definitely.

Q61 Chair: So you would say this is something that you would expect the Government to commission?

Peter Neyroud: I think it is the first-

Q62 Chair: Absolutely the most important? Before any other reports are written about the new landscape of policing, it is essential to know what the purpose is?

Peter Neyroud: Yes. I think the purpose of policing is always going to be complicated, but yes.

Q63 Alun Michael: There is one other thing: would all existing police officers come under the aegis of this body in terms of their professionalism and professional development?

Peter Neyroud: Yes, and I would be surprised if they didn’t want to be so as well. What I have proposed is that there is a proper set of transitional arrangements to bring them in, but yes.

Q64 Bridget Phillipson: Do you think there is a danger in trying to change police learning and development at the same time that we are seeing such big changes across the board with the introduction of elected Police Commissioners and with the changes to the National Crime Agency?

Peter Neyroud: It is a hell of a lot of change, which is implicit in the question.

Q65 Chair: More than you have ever seen in your 30 years?

Peter Neyroud: I think it is the largest. What the Government said in its White Paper that it was a 50-year change and it certainly is in those terms. I am not sure, but I think a lot of people in the profession would argue that change has been necessary but the number of different things being applied at the same time is certainly challenging.

I don’t think you can do the other changes to the National Crime Agency-well, maybe you could do the National Crime Agency without some of the others, but I don’t think you could do each of these changes without making the others, because as you change the democratic accountability, it seems to me you also need to change the professional accountability and make it clearer what that relationship is.

Q66 Bridget Phillipson: You have previously said that other fundamental reform that took place in the 1960s onwards took a decade to work through, yet with these changes you are talking about 2010 to 2014. Do you think that is realistic?

Peter Neyroud: The difference is the pace of life in the 1960s-I can just about remember it. The pace of life in the 1960s in every sense was different and the pace of life these days is moving so much more quickly. I don’t think a 10-year cycle is capable of being done.

Q67 Bridget Phillipson: Have people changed such that they can respond to change more quickly than they could in the 1960s?

Peter Neyroud: I certainly think the service is a lot more used to absorbing change than it was then, and forces are going through massive changes because of the financial change anyway. I think the idea of a single body that should clarify some of the professional demands will help that.

Q68 Bridget Phillipson: Have the Government told you when they intend to respond to your review?

Peter Neyroud: There is a formal 90-day consultation out at the moment, which finishes on 28 June, and my anticipation is that the response will come fairly soon after that.

Q69 Mark Reckless: In your report you say you want the Home Secretary to appoint someone to the board, and you describe on page 64 the sort of person it has to be and how you want them to behave, but you tell me that you have to have this distinction between the local and the national, so you do not want the PCCs involved. Can I therefore assume that any of the standards and the guidance that is put forward by this professional body won’t apply to the local policing?

Peter Neyroud: No, no, not at all, and I have also commented in the report that I would expect the PCCs to be involved in some of the detailed development of those standards. You talked about the 13 business areas, but as that work develops I would expect the PCCs to be heavily involved in things like the development of the leadership work and so on, because it most definitely will affect local police forces.

Q70 Mark Reckless: You describe that as something akin to a scrutiny committee, perhaps a bit like the Police and Crime Panel. I wonder though about how these standards and guidance are promulgated. I think it is at page 66 or 67 that you set out, very fairly, that some of these standards will relate to causing harm to citizens, using force and interference with liberty, and on some of those, therefore, you do say-quite properly, I think-you need a democratic decision; but on page 67 you say, "This raises the question of who decides whether an area of practice requires the higher degree of public scrutiny". Your answer is the principal responsibility will lie with the executive board of the professional body. Don’t you think that may be unacceptable to elected politicians?

Peter Neyroud: Yes, I understand the point. I would expect there to be a very clear set of agreements and understandings openly set out between the professional body, the Home Secretary, and indeed I would expect a substantial amount-I think I pointed this out-of scrutiny of the professional body from this Committee, which seems to me to be entirely proper, and I would expect you to ask the questions in the same way you are asking me now.

Q71 Mark Reckless: Mr Neyroud, very fairly, you do pick up on what we have said on the operational independence for the individual arrest and investigation and you do refer to the operational responsibility and the discussion of where the powers lie in the broader policy areas, and I do welcome that. I just wonder though, in terms of policy that is going to be generally applicable through a standard or a guidance, wouldn’t it be appropriate for the Home Secretary where national or the elected commissioners where local to basically sign off on that? In many of the areas they will recognise it is technical and will be happy to take the lead, but shouldn’t the decision of whether that has to be applied really be one for people who are democratically accountable?

Peter Neyroud: We are talking about the big ones. I think I have indicated that that should be the case. If we are talking about how the police carry out their duties on public order and on firearms, I think that is most definitely the case. Going back to Mr Winnick’s point about bureaucracy, if you start getting into the details of how the police carry out a particular investigation of a volume crime in those terms then I think we are going to get into very bureaucratic territory. I was trying to establish that balance.

Chair: Thank you very much. We have gone on slightly longer than anticipated because of our interest in your report. Please don’t feel because we have questioned you in the way we have that we are at all ungrateful for the work that you have done. We are extremely grateful to you for coming here today. It may well be that we will write to you with further questions as we slot in the various bits of the jigsaw that are necessary for the new landscape of policing, but we are extremely grateful. Thank you very much.

Examination of Witness

Witness: Jan Berry, former Reducing Bureaucracy in Policing Advocate, gave evidence.

Chair: Could I call to the dais Jan Berry. Ms Berry, my apologies first of all for keeping you waiting.

Jan Berry: No problem.

Q72 Chair: As you can see, the Committee is fascinated by this inquiry, which is launched today, and we are also extremely interested to hear from you, simply because the issue of reducing bureaucracy is on the lips of, I think you will probably find, every Home Secretary you have dealt with. Certainly the last two before the current Home Secretary also came to the Dispatch Box and said they were going to cut bureaucracy. Then you came along with your report into reduction of bureaucracy and your 42 recommendations are, for the Committee anyway, extremely important. We will be monitoring what the Government does about Jan Berry’s 42 recommendations, and indeed we have already asked the Home Secretary to comment on how she has done in respect to meeting it.

If you were to give the Government marks out of 10, or even a grade A to D, what would those be in terms of your 42 recommendations?

Jan Berry: That is an extraordinarily difficult question to answer, because I think that politicians, civil servants, have some difficulty in really understanding what is causing the bureaucracy. Inevitably whenever there is a discussion around bureaucracy, it gets to talk about the pieces of paper rather than what is creating those pieces of paper and the structures, the systems and the processes. It is very easy to get into stock forms, missing person inquiries and things like that, rather than look at what is sitting behind that.

I suppose when I first started doing the role and started looking at it in some depth, I was very keen to find the top 10 processes that police officers undertake that really drives the bureaucracy, if you like, but, of course, I found very quickly that they were just a symptom of bureaucracy rather than the cause. If you sit a group of police officers down, it doesn’t matter where you are in the country, they will tell you the same things. They will tell you it is about crime recording, it is about incident recording, it is about missing person inquiries, it is about domestic violence. Somebody here said, quite rightly, this morning we do need to record these things. There does need to be a record kept, not just to aid your inquiries but also as far as a transparent audit trail is concerned. The key is how much is written down and how much of that information is then transferable, used again and accessible to other people. For me that is the key to what successfully reducing bureaucracy will be in the fullness of time.

Q73 Chair: Indeed. You are avoiding giving the Government some grades, but I am very keen that you should.

Jan Berry: I do not think any of the politicians fully understood what was causing the bureaucracy. I don’t think civil servants fully understood and I don’t think the police service does. It is an accumulation of everybody’s involvement and who I feel really sorry for is that poor constable on the beat who not only has their own bureaucracy, their own risk aversion to cope with, but they have everybody else’s up the line of command as well.

Q74 Chair: If we take that poor police constable and the 42 recommendations that you have put forward and the Government’s response, which is not as specific as the recommendations you have made, if we implement those 42 recommendations, will it mean that the police constable will have more time on the beat, which is what I assume the public want to see? At the end of the day there is no point in accepting all your 42 recommendations if the police officers are still not getting out more.

Jan Berry: Absolutely. You should see more police officers on the streets; you should see police officers and experienced police officers who are skilled and take responsibility for making proportionate decisions; you should see members of the public who are dealt with better; you should see a more proportionate response to dealing with crime. At the moment-going back to some of the things that Mr Neyroud was talking about earlier-the default position is the inquiry that follows every incident that has gone wrong in the past then becomes a default position for every inquiry that follows after that. It becomes a tick in the box. I would like to see police officers confident in their ability, but held accountable for the decisions they take in a proportionate way.

Q75 Chair: Now that you are no longer part of the Government structure, given that there is going to be a substantial reduction in police officers-your former organisation, the Police Federation, have put the figure at 20,000-will these recommendations mean that for less money we will get better service from the police?

Jan Berry: I believe so. I think there is about a third added on at every level through policing. Unfortunately, if you save 15 minutes on one document, half an hour on another, you streamline this process and you take a part of another process out, the only way that you can accrue the benefit of that financially is by removing people from the process. You might save a little bit of time here, there and everywhere, but when you add all of that up, the only way you benefit from that financially is removing or reducing your headcount and restructuring your organisation and your systems and processes within it. You do need to reduce the headcount to make some of those financial benefits.

Q76 Alun Michael: It sounds as if what you are saying is that we are guilty-all of us in effect-of always fighting the last war; or, to put it another way, always looking forward on the basis of what went wrong last, whether it was a complaint or a systems failure. Is that at the heart of what you are saying?

Jan Berry: Absolutely. If I go back to the very early days of my policing career and look at some inquiries that took place then and the recommendations that came out of those inquiries, and then look at very similar inquiries today, the recommendations are not a million miles apart. What I have not seen so much in policing is the intention to improve things on a continuous basis, which I think is some of what Mr Neyroud was talking about earlier.

The biggest cultural shift that policing needs to take place is so that you go into your daily work every day thinking, "I want to do my best, but I want to learn how to do it better." That mindset and that cultural shift are so important to policing. I think a lot of police officers want to get through the day. They don’t go out to do a bad job, but they don’t necessarily have that learning culture within them.

Q77 Alun Michael: I have a lot of sympathy, having dealt with complaints against the police when I was Minister, with the Independent Police Complaints Commission’s suggestion that an emphasis on service improvement, rather than always going to the complaint, might help. Bit is it not important at the same time to learn from mistakes?

Jan Berry: Absolutely.

Q78 Alun Michael: How do you make sure you don’t throw the baby out with the bath water?

Jan Berry: It is about getting the right balance, and I think what has happened in the past when an inquiry report has been published-when the IPCC have published a report-no force then wants to fall foul of the recommendations, so they take it all on and you then get this big spreadsheet to check that everybody has done everything. Mr Reckless was making that point earlier. If you look at the serious crime area, every force has to fill in a document with about 1,000 different questions to demonstrate they are complying with all the standards. I don’t think that is proportionate to the risks that those forces are facing. Not every force has the same level of risk, so some proportionality needs to be applied in that case as well.

Q79 Alun Michael: I think it comes back to the question I was asking Mr Neyroud as well: isn’t it important that we are clear about purpose and that the purpose is absolutely explicit? Do you think the failure to be clear about that and to be clear that we are looking at the same purposes, which by and large we tend to be when you explore it, gets in the way of making progress? You have said that progress is slow. Is that because it is a fundamental and not just systems that you are trying to change?

Jan Berry: Absolutely. I think it is very difficult to tell what success looks like. It is very easy for people to say it is reduction of crime. There will be arguments every time the crime stats come out about how accurate they are and what the accounting rules are, but what gets counted gets done. I go and talk to chief constables and they tell me they don’t count arrests any more, they don’t do this, they don’t do that. I go and talk to the front line and they are still being judged on how many arrests, how many tickets they are giving out and things like that, because they are very countable things.

I do think clarity of purpose is really important, but I think clarity of purpose across the whole criminal justice system is very important. You have the Crown Prosecution Service, the police, the courts, probation and people who we think are all doing the same thing, but they are actually not. It can be counter-productive at times, so we all need to have a common purpose for the criminal justice system and policing.

Q80 Mr Winnick: How far, Ms Berry, would you say that bureaucracy has impeded the day-to-day operation of the police service acting in the way which one would expect: competently and dealing effectively with crime?

Jan Berry: I think the performance framework encouraged people to arrest people too soon, and I think it encouraged people to pay more attention to the recording than they did to the investigation and the outcome, so, a considerable amount.

Q81 Mr Winnick: You list in written evidence examples of processes that are regarded as being excessively bureaucratic and give us an example of domestic violence interventions. What do you mean precisely by that?

Jan Berry: Domestic violence is a hugely sensitive subject and I understand that, but I would expect police officers to go into a domestic violence situation to establish if any crimes have been committed, to be very sensitive to the requirements of that particular investigation, but also to try and resolve it, either through their own initiatives or by working in partnership with other people as well. What it becomes is a paper-filling exercise as opposed to trying to resolve the problems.

There was a piece of work undertaken by one force, in Cheshire in fact, in a very small part of Cheshire, where they looked at all the calls coming into that area. They didn’t just take the normal command and control calls, they listened to answerphone calls, they shadowed police officers, and they looked at two things. Number one was how many of those calls for assistance were necessary. They came to an assessment that up to 41% of those calls were not necessary: either they were not the job of the police or it was because the police hadn’t got it right first time and they were having to go back and deal with it on a second or third or fourth occasion. That was one part of it. The other part of the exercise in Cheshire was to take a call in and to try and resolve that problem, not working outside the law but trying to resolve the problem using different agencies and using common sense. They found, first, that the police officers responded to it brilliantly but, secondly, that they were able to resolve things much quicker by adopting that approach.

I think, number one, look at your failure rate and why you are not getting things right first time, and start cutting that down-maybe sometimes the police not trying to deal with everything. Number two, listen to what calls for assistance from the public are. That is what the police service tend to do. If you phone up and say, "My car has been stolen," we go straight into taking details down. We don’t necessarily listen so well to what you are asking us to do, and this is what Cheshire have tried to do. They have tried to respond much better to what the public are asking them to do, rather than our systems.

Q82 Mr Winnick: But on domestic violence-certainly it is a subject we should all take very seriously, as I am sure you do and the Committee does, and one hopes the Government, whichever Government happens to hold office-if I can just make this point to you, the criticism that we have heard is not that there has been too much bureaucracy, too much paperwork and the rest. It is that the police have not taken seriously enough the allegations that are made and in some instances, indeed very recently, it has led to the person’s death as a result of murder.

Jan Berry: That is not right, obviously, in that situation. I am sorry, I am not saying that your allegation is not right. That is a really sad situation and should not happen. Inevitably there will be mistakes made, but my fear is that with things like missing persons and with sensitive cases such as domestic violence, more attention is being given to the form filling than it is to how much resource needs to be given to resolving this case and the sensitivities that the case dictates. I think sometimes when you give police officers long lists of things to tick in and fill up, they are more minded to deal with that than they are with how they are going to resolve or how they are going to provide the level of support that may be necessary in that domestic violence case.

Q83 Bridget Phillipson: I appreciate there is a balance to strike between form-filling and the purpose of that form-filling, but the unfortunate reality is that often when the police responded to domestic violence callouts, they simply were not asking the right questions. It has only been through the use of, yes, a blunt instrument in a kind of a tick-box that is before them that they necessarily ask the right questions or identify risk factors. In identifying those risk factors, they can identify the most vulnerable victims, who can then be offered the specialist support and put through the MARAC process. Without that tick-box, you are talking about generalist police officers who do not necessarily have the expertise to identify it without perhaps an aide-memoire.

Jan Berry: No, I understand that, but you just cannot have an aide-memoire without giving them some form of support and assistance in understanding why they are asking those questions. I think some of my problem with some of the training and development of officers has been that they are asking questions without any idea of why they are asking them, and that again doesn’t aid the purpose.

Q84 Bridget Phillipson: I would accept that. There have to be big changes-

Jan Berry: I cut my teeth on domestic violence and child abuse cases in my very early years. I am very aware of the need to take these cases seriously and to be able to identify those cases that are going to get bigger.

Q85 Mark Reckless: Ms Berry, have you seen any progress in terms of reducing these tick-box lists of bureaucratic form-filling, for example in the area of domestic violence?

Jan Berry: Not at the moment, no.

Q86 Mark Reckless: Why is hat, do you think?

Jan Berry: I think in patches, in some police forces, they are improving it but across the board I can’t say that they are, because I think they are very reliant on national policy and the national policy is all-inclusive. So I don’t see any reduction necessarily.

Q87 Mark Reckless: How would you like the Government or the police service to involve you in ensuring that your recommendations for reducing bureaucracy are carried through?

Jan Berry: I am no longer a contractor to the Home Office. I had a two-year contract that finished in November so I have no responsibility for that as well. When I started the role, as I said earlier, I became very aware that this is not just about trying to find the top 10 processes, make them a national process and then you have solved it, and I suppose I was trying to write my own resignation speech from pretty early on. I do think that there needs to be a very focused discussion between Government and the police service about what is national and who is going to be held responsible for what in this new landscape.

I am not going to get into the politics of what policing should be doing and what the Government, what democracy should be doing, but there does need to be a debate about what is national and what is local. Then, I do think that the new Police and Crime Commissioners and the new National Crime Agency will have responsibilities in certain areas, but they need to be made explicit. At the moment they are not explicit and the relationships between them are not explicit at the moment.

Q88 Mark Reckless: Ms Berry, I am disappointed to hear that you don’t want to get involved in those discussions because I think we would benefit from your voice. Certainly through my membership of the Kent Police Authority and from what I have heard from the federation, I know that you have made a very valuable contribution. Do you think that the role of the Police and Crime Commissioners, so you have some local direction, could perhaps allow a repositioning of the structure, so that forces are much more reporting up to that individual, without the necessity of all this bureaucratic accountability to other bodies, be they national or local?

Jan Berry: There is the potential that that could happen, but you have to make sure that in your structure you don’t put in additional bureaucracies. I fear at the moment there is a potential for additional bureaucracy, depending on the personalities of the individuals who take on this role and are elected locally; but there is a potential for them to provide real clarity about what they will be judging their local police on.

Q89 Mark Reckless: Do you have any response to Mr Neyroud’s report, in particular his bringing in the wider ranks and his view that ACPO should nonetheless remain the head and heart of the new organisation?

Jan Berry: I personally believe in a policing institution and I personally believe in a professional body, but I think that you have to incorporate the whole of the police service in that. If it is seen as ACPO leading it and ACPO directing it, then I think that is not the strongest unit for sharing good practice and experience, and I think the point that Mr Michael made earlier makes that point. It needs to incorporate support staff; it needs to incorporate constables, sergeants, inspectors and the superintending ranks as well.

Q90 Bridget Phillipson: With the Police and Crime Commissioners and the National Crime Agency being added, you have talked about the confusion that could arise there. How do you think that can best be avoided?

Jan Berry: I would have liked to have seen a bit more detail in the Bill that provided some requirement for the Police and Crime Commissioners to have some shared responsibility across borders. Crime and policing does not happen within lines that we draw on a map, so I would like to have seen that. I have not seen as much detail as I would like to see on the National Crime Agency and what the intention of that might be-I think one of you was asking questions about serious crime earlier on. My experience is that international crime that happens in our area was dealt with or is being dealt with reasonably well. Local crime is increasingly being dealt with well, but there is that crime that goes across borders, the crime that in some respects is faceless, that has not been dealt with so well, because who is responsible for investigating some of that crime? I think that is some of the clarity needed. I would like to see some clarity around joint responsibilities for some things for the commissioners, but likewise a bit more detail of what the intention for the National Crime Agency will be.

Q91 Bridget Phillipson: With the creation of the professional body that we have been talking about, do you think that will encourage a climate that you want to see in terms of reducing bureaucracy? Will it help or hinder the reduction?

Jan Berry: We might need to change the words "reducing bureaucracy". I would like to see far more effort being given to officers developing their skills and using their experience over the years. I don’t think that has been encouraged as much as it could have been. When you look at the training that was given to young sergeants and young inspectors, with the responsibilities that they held, it was very poor at times, and they really had to beg for training. That is so important and it should be part of their toolbox of policing.

Q92 Bridget Phillipson: You mentioned earlier that you also used to deal with child abuse cases and I think the analogy can also be drawn with the tick-box approach that social workers often feel that they have to use that they feel restricts the use of their professional judgment. I think that analogy could perhaps work very well with the police that, yes, you have the tick-box approach to develop that knowledge and understanding, but when the tick-box becomes the end in itself then clearly it is not serving its purpose.

Jan Berry: It is about balance, isn’t it? You do need to have experience. The very foundation of policing is about community safety, it is about understanding you are dealing with different types of problems and how you can resolve those problems. You don’t need to write War and Peace on something that is very simple to solve, but on some occasions, when it is a really serious and very detailed offence, you do need to have copious notes and records about that, and it is about having that confidence that you have the balance right. At the moment we are still doing too much paperwork because of the risk aversion that affects, if we are honest, absolutely every single one of us.

Q93 Dr Huppert: Can I move on to some of the issues to do with bureaucracy and more specifically with IT and how the IT systems work? My own experience from spending a night out with the police in Cambridge was that there were a number of problems with the IT system. It took well over an hour to transfer a movie file of an event from a head-mounted camera on to the computer. You say in your written evidence that the key to reducing unnecessary bureaucracy is the ability to transfer the case files electronically across the criminal justice system. I think we could certainly take it that integrated IT is an absolutely key system for the police to work more efficiently. How far away is the prospect of an integrated IT system that might work quite well? What can be done to make sure that we do get there, and who should do it?

Jan Berry: We would be starting from where we are now, I suppose, at the outset. Some forces can already do it; some forces have their own systems that they have built up themselves, which they then have got compatible with their local prosecution services and also with the courts. There are very few who can. Some forces are looking at putting work together with the rest of their criminal justice partners on a local level and doing it. The Crown Prosecution Service already has a system but, of course, it is a system that was developed for their needs of cases, not necessarily for how police would deal with case files.

My personal view is that it has to be mandated from the centre and I think that we will still be arguing about it in five or 10 years time if it is not. I think there should be one system, particularly for criminal justice, where files are electronically moved, you go into custody, the custody system is national, you go through custody, the case file system is national, it gets transferred into the Crown Prosecution Service, that is already national, and it gets transferred into the court system.

Q94 Dr Huppert: You think this should be mandated nationally, by which you mean the Home Secretary requiring this?

Jan Berry: Yes. She already has the power to do that. She has the power to mandate it if it is in the interests of the efficiency of the police service and she could easily do that now. The difficulty is there is no sanction applied to not doing it. There will be some forces who are considerably further ahead in the IT stakes than other forces are, so some forces would have to stand still to allow the other forces to catch up. It is a real patchwork out there. Some of it is linked. In your own area, it is not too bad, and you have a new chief constable who is really interested in technology. In Kent, for example, they already have the ability to move case files straight into the Crown Prosecution Service, but in other forces that is still a big aspiration.

Q95 Chair: There you have given us two examples of good practice where you have seen individual forces, as you say, moving ahead. Do you think that the way of sharing this good practice is the best possible way at the moment, or can it be improved? We have seen examples, for example, the Committee went to Staffordshire three years ago and we saw a reduction in forms. I wrote to the Home Secretary and said, "This is brilliant, everyone should do this," but three years later nothing has happened. How do we get this good practice moving?

Jan Berry: The difficulty is forces are not all at the same place; many of the things that you saw in Staffordshire other forces had already done, so when your report came out, they would say, "We’ve already done this, it doesn’t apply to us." Of course, people get very competitive and insular as well so they don’t like to think another force is doing a little bit better than them. But there is some really good work going on with criminal justice partnerships in Warwickshire, where a lot of the administration is done under one roof. Northumbria is trying to get something going between the police, the CPS and the courts so that the administration is shared. At a time when budgets are very tight there are some real opportunities to make some advances at this moment in time, but it does need personalities who are willing to be very inventive and creative, and transparent I suppose, with their budgets, so that you can get that value for money part of it.

Q96 Chair: Ms Berry, I and others, I am sure, were very surprised when, having completed your contract, you were not immediately offered a new contract to continue to monitor your own 42 recommendations. Were you surprised that this work then passed back into the police bureaucracy, if you like-given to a board that we have no idea of who sits on it, although we know it is chaired by Chris Sims? I have raised this a number of times with the Home Secretary, asking why you were not allowed to continue monitoring the work that you had started. Were you ever given an explanation of why this has disappeared back into the ether of police bureaucracy?

Jan Berry: I was appointed by the previous Government, and I think that was probably part of the reason.

Q97 Chair: You were no fan of the previous Government, were you?

Jan Berry: I like to be even-handed, Chair. I like to also think I am constructive with what I have done as well. I never received any formal response from any party, the Government or anybody, on any of the reports. I think part of that was there was an expectation that I was going to come in, find these 10 processes, cut the paperwork, everybody would then go back and say, "We have done it," and move on. But that is not what bureaucracy is about. And, I suppose, I tried to be true to my professionalism as an ex-cop-I tried to be true to trying to deal with the causes of bureaucracy. I was very mindful that I was preceded by two Chief HMIs, Sir David O’Dowd and Sir Ronnie Flanagan. If you go back over Sir David’s report and you go back over Sir Ronnie Flanagan’s report, and mine, I tried to rewrite some of it, but it is no different to what Sir David O’Dowd was saying 10 years ago.

My advice to Government has been, and would still be, you have to address the causes of unnecessary bureaucracy, and that is in the structures that we have, it is in the systems that we have and it is in the processes that we have. I know it is not up for debate, but I don’t think our current policing structure is fit for purpose. All the time we are carrying on with this structure, these problems are going to continue to flourish, unfortunately.

Chair: The loss to the Government is the gain to the Select Committee. We will be writing to you and calling you before us on a number of occasions in the future, I am sure, and certainly we will keep these 42 recommendations within our sights.

Jan Berry: I will be delighted to come back.

Chair: Thank you very much. Ms Berry, thank you for coming in.