Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20
- 39)
WEDNESDAY 21 MAY 2008
Mr Peter Storr and Mr Ben Judah
Q20 Chairman:
Can I ask a last question on what has arisen from Lord Dear's
questions? Could you tell us what the UK Government is doing positively
to manage change both within Europol and with bilateral or multilateral
conversations and discussions outside the Europol arena?
Mr Storr: Yes. We were very supportive
of the idea of changing the constitutional arrangements for Europol
to the present Council Decision, which we are expecting to be
adopted in 2008. Our view was that the way in which Europol was
originally structured was inflexible and rather bureaucratic.
It meant that if there were new developments, new crime trends
and new mandates for Europol, it became a rather cumbersome process
for Europol to be able to change its priorities in order to take
these on board. So we contributed to a group called the Friends
of the Presidency on Europol, which identified a number of areas
in which Europol's constitutional and oversight arrangements could
be changed. As with many negotiations, there are aspects on which
we would have wanted to go further than some of our European partners.
What we came up with was something which will help Europol to
grow and develop in the immediate future. Amongst those I include
the decision to have the Chair of the Europol Management Board
with an 18-month term rather than simply having the Chair change
every time there is a change of EU Presidency; in other words,
every six months. Also, what is helpful is having the change within
Europol so that it can now investigate serious crime involving
a number of Member States, which does not meet the definition
of organised crime. I think that is important from the UK's perspective.
The other aspect which will help is the emphasis in the new arrangement
for the Europol Management Board to exercise a strategic role.
In the past we had felt that the Management Board was becoming
a little bit bogged down in the sort of day-to-day detail which
in a police force within this country you would expect the chief
officer of police to undertake without reference. We are hoping
that the combination of those three things and a number of other
changes might lead to a better delineation of responsibilities
between the Europol Management Board on the one hand and the Director
on the other and indeed that having the overall Management Board
Chair there for a reasonable period of time will enable the sort
of personal and professional relationship between Board Chair
and Director, which we think would benefit Europol greatly.
Q21 Lord Dear:
Pursuing much the same point and give a practical illustration,
and it really points towards a question of whether there is some
sort of sympathy running between conflicting or competing legal
arrangements. I can remember way back I suppose 15 years ago when
things were a good deal less structured than they are now, and
I give a hypothetical example. A lorry load of cannabis would
cross the Mediterranean into Spain. A British operation would
want to see that lorry load of cannabis delivered into a warehouse
somewhere in the Midlands. It would have to run through Spain,
hypothetically through France, through Belgium, through Holland,
across on the ferry and all the way through in order to take out
a complete organisation. If it was interceded at any point in
one of those countries, all you would get was a lorry load of
cannabis and a driver, which was fine because you would have a
degree of disruption but you would not take out an organisation.
The co-operation that one would seek in all those counties was
not necessarily forthcoming because they did to see things in
the same way, and so all sorts of alternatives were made which
I guess you know about. I wonder whether that hypothetical path
has been cleared not only in drug trafficking but in all the other
things that Europol is concerned with and whether there is a greater
sympathy, a greater number perhaps, in competing or enforcing
agencies and in conflicting legal frameworks?
Mr Storr: There is progress in the right
direction. I think there has been a lot of progress since the
time that you have described. The Europol liaison officers actually
have a vital role to play in this. Having representatives of law
enforcement all present working in many cases in the same corridor
or in the room next door in The Hague enables for example SOCA
to plan exactly that sort of good controlled delivery in a way
which I do not think would have been possible 10 years or so ago,
before Europol got up and running. As far as the sympathy and
understanding of each other's systems is concerned, the other
point to make is that we in the UK, and indeed in a number of
other Member States, have invested a lot of effort over the last
five to 10 years in training and designing infrastructures, particularly
in the Member States that joined in 2005 and since, and in trying
to bring them up to the same level of competence and the same
degree of reliable systems and the same concept of working together
through things like the European Union PHARE twinning programme.
There is a better arrangement within Europol, better liaison and
I think probably steps towards establishing a better understanding
of each other's systems. All that moves in the right direction.
If you wanted an answer chapter and verse on the degree of difference
in terms of operational successes over the last few years, that
would probably be a question which you might want to pose to the
Director of SOCA and his team when they are called to give evidence.
Q22 Lord Marlesford:
Could I follow up one or two of the points you have made? You
talked a moment ago about the distinction between serious and
organised crime. In many ways one would imagine that the bigger
the scale of crime, the easier it ought to be to deal with it
through the sort of organisation we are discussing this morning.
Looking at your excellent paper, on page 5 where you put the Europol
priorities in paragraph 7, you have the four priorities of: drug
trafficking; fraud covering financial and property crime; money
laundering and euro counterfeiting; and illegal immigration, trafficking
in human beings and child abuse. I do not know if you can give
us any feel for the extent to which, as far as the UK is concerned
at least, these forms of crime are organised. They are all serious.
In a way, one would have thought that the drugs one, as Lord Dear
was explaining, can be very difficult to deal with. I would have
thought that fraud (financial and property crime) was less likely
to be organised in that sense, and ditto possibly money laundering.
In as far as illegal immigration and trafficking in human beings
and child abuse is organised, it really ought, I should have thought,
to be possible to put an end to it. Therefore, I wondered whether
you feel that in general, in as far as it is still active in this
country, it is not so organised?
Mr Storr: Most of the list would probably
be covered by most Member States' definitions of what is organised
crime, with in my view the possible exception of child abuse where
some of it is organised; some of it is simply opportunistic crime,
but the internet enables child abusers to swap images and in that
sense it becomes if not exactly organised, but certainly something
which involves individuals with a shared interest working together.
I would see facilitated illegal immigration, trafficking in human
beings, as being issues of the same degree of difficulty as international
drugs trafficking because they involve the same element of organisation
with a cross-border element to them and that aspect of bringing
either goods or people past the best efforts of law enforcement
to tackle them. The distinction I would draw between what is organised
crime and what is serious crime really relates more to crimes
like murder, where previously the Europol definition of what was
organised crime and the mandate which it had, left serial murders
involving a number of different countries, or other crimes (rape,
et cetera) involving activity in a number of different countries
unclear as to whether Europol had the mandate to cover them. Yet
Europol, we knew, would have in those particular cases, or would
be likely to have, information and intelligence which would be
extremely useful to facilitate the investigation and detection
of those crimes. So we were very much in favour of widening the
Europol purpose to allow them to be active in those areas. As
an illustration of why we were worried about that, you can look
at the trial of the model pilot project for something called the
Prüm agreement where, when it was trialled between Austria
and Germany, revealed a fairly large number of serious crimes
of a non-organised nature involving criminals moving between those
two countries. Theoretically, you would think that if you were
investigating those sorts of crimes across border you would want
to see what Europol would have to offer in the detection of those
crimes. I am glad that we have now established fairly firmly that
in future those sorts of serious crimes will be within the Europol
mandate. I think that will come.
Chairman: Before we move on, I say what
I ought to have said earlier, which is that If Mr Judah at any
moment wishes to contribute, we would be delighted to hear from
him.
Q23 Lord Mawson:
Moving on to change of Europol's mandate, what criteria were used
for determining what should be Europol's new mandate and scope
of operations?
Mr Storr: I have made my main point about
wanting the Management Board to have a slightly more strategic
role and wanting Europol to have the ability to widen its mandate,
not to cover the sort of crime that was more appropriate to national
police forces, for example street crime, volume crime; we did
not want to get into that area but equally we did not want it
to be hampered, as I said, by an overly legal definition of what
constituted organised crime. The compromise we reached whereby
it is able to tackle and involve itself in serious crime is a
very good one. The rest of the criteria in deciding what should
be in the new mandate and strength of operations was, I think,
a classic example of a negotiation. In the original draft of new
Council decision, Article 5(1)(b) proposed that Europol should
have the role of co-ordinating, organising and implementing investigative
action. We were very happy for Europol to have the role of intelligence
coordinator. What we were not happy with was seeing Europol have
the right to initiate an investigation, which in our view remains
a decision which should be for individual chief officers of police
within what the law permits. During the course of the negotiation,
some Member States were advocating that and others were advocating
other roles. For example, some Member States wanted Europol to
be able to support simply national investigations. We were keen
that it should not, as it were, take the place of national police
forces or do the job which national police forces should do. I
think our ambitions were moving in a positive direction as far
as widening its mandate to include serious crime, reforming to
a small extent the way in which the Europol Management Board worked,
and also in protecting the UK interests, making sure that it did
not develop into something that looked like a quasi operational
European police force.
Q24 Lord Mawson:
As the Council decision introduces more flexibility to allow Europol
to support criminal investigations into the most serious of crimes
that may not obviously be linked to organised criminal gangs will
the configuration of the UK's EU co-operation need to be changed
at agency level?
Mr Storr: Our view is that it will not
need to change because the key role in all this is the role of
the Serious Organised Crime Agency. As its title indicates, it
has a mandate which covers both serious and organised crime. It
involves itself in both those sorts of activities. I think we
would still see SOCA as being the organisation which plays the
key role in liaising with Europol, and we would still see SOCA
as occupying the key position on the Europol Management Board.
Q25 Lord Teverson:
Could I come back to your earlier answer to Lord Mawson? I understand
entirely why you would be against Europol becoming involved in
crimes that just were about one state. Clearly national sovereignty
says that should clearly be the Member State's responsibility.
I am more interested in your answer about Europol being able to
initiate itself. Is that not in a way contradictory to some degree
to the idea that you were advocating earlier that there should
be a mental move from crime happens, therefore we investigate,
to trying to look ahead and anticipate? Surely one of Europol's
big added values should be that if it moves into that mode, it
should try to initiate investigations from patterns that it uniquely
can see from the information it gets from national authorities?
Mr Storr: I think it is a question of
how it does it, really. My answer is one in which I do not think,
from a British policing constitutional point of view, we would
want anybody other than the chief officer of police deciding to
initiate the investigation in the UK. Having said that, if Europol
identifies a particular series of crimes which have implications
for a number of Member States and expresses its view that that
should lead to the initiation of investigation and has the evidence
and intelligence to back up that point of view, then I am absolutely
certain that the Director of SOCA and his officers would take
that very seriously indeed. I think what we would stop short of
would be having a specific power allowing the Director of Europol
to initiate an investigation in each of a number of Member States.
Our view is that that remains the prerogative of the chief officer
of police, as I have said,
Q26 Lord Teverson:
In your evidence, one of the things around organisational changes
is that I think you welcome the way that the Management Board
should be structured so that the Director can get on with more
operational matters and you do not get detailed interference at
Management Board level. To me, that is a cultural problem, not
necessarily a legislative problem. Do you think the new procedures
will get over that problem or is that not just really someone
telling the Management Board to pay attention to the strategic
position and get on with it? Why would what is happening at the
moment change that?
Mr Storr: The changes are modest. I think
you are probably right in identifying it as being a cultural problem.
Many Member States have arrangements in which the police operate
under fairly close control, as indeed they do in the UK. In the
UK there is a recognition of a wider delineation of responsibilities.
I do not think that is an arrangement that is replicated in all
other 26 Member States. I think the change towards a more strategic
approach will help. As I have said, having a Europol board whose
Chair is there for a decent length of time and long enough to
establish a good working relationship with the Director will help.
The changes are modest. You will have an opportunity to ask SOCA
about this as they represent the UK, that it is very much in SOCA's
interests to try, through our position on the Management Board,
to push the board to take that strategic role seriously.
Q27 Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts:
On that point, could you just tell us if the Chairman can be reappointed
and if so for how long? You have talked about the importance of
the Chairman having a longer term of office. I think the proposal
here is for 18 months. Can they then be reappointed at the end
of a term and, if so, what is the maximum period they can serve?
Mr Storr: I think we would have been
happy to have had a system in which the Chair was elected for
a period of two years from within the Management Board as a whole;
in other words, the best or the recommended one out of all the
27 Member States. I think the two-year period would have given
greater continuity. What we ended up with was the election of
the Chair for an 18-month period from the three Member States
that are occupying, as it were, a team presidency. The three presidencies,
the incoming presidency and two thereafter, get together and decide
which of them will have the role of the Chair. I think in that
sense, you would not be able to reappoint the Chair of the Management
Board after he or she concluded that 18-month period.
Q28 Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts:
You have been talking about cultural change very much in response
to the questions here today and 18 months is quite a short period
of time to change culture. If then somebody starts again at the
beginning, scrambling up the learning curve, trying to deal with
national interests and everything else and trying to get some
strategic sense, do you feel this is a weakness, that first of
all they should have some period slightly longer than that to
try and stamp a strategic non-nationally oriented process on it?
Mr Storr: Yes, I think that is certainly
better than having a rotating Chair of the Management Board changing
every six months. In the past, that has meant that it has been
very difficult on occasions to make the sort of progress that
you would get if the Chair was strategically engaged with the
Europol Director. I think 18 months would be better but, as I
have said, the UK would have settled for a longer period, so you
could have a real partnership developed.
Q29 Lord Harrison:
Mr Storr, you might remind your colleagues that there is the Treaty
that the presidency of the Council be 30 months and renewable
for a further 30 months, which I think has enormous benefits attached
to it. Mr Storr, so far you have given us a very welcome report
of the deepening engagement that we have with Europol, but inevitably
that brings in its train the need for resources and finance. My
two questions turn to that aspect. Given that the Council decision
has now extended the mandate for Europol and the Home Office has
the ambition to keep finances under tight control, what do you
actually see as the problem? Is it making sure that we get value
for money or is it to ensure that the budget does not rise unnecessarily?
What is the approach specific to the Europol budget?
Mr Storr: As with many European Community
or European Union institutions, it is principally to ensure that
the UK taxpayers' value is protected. We are investing heavily
in Europol. This year our contribution to the budget will be between
€8 million and €9.5 million. That is a significant sum
of UK taxpayers' money. Our intention is that this should represent
value-added to the efforts of national law enforcement. That is
our overall approach. Within that overall approach, I do not see
any reason why the Europol Director should not be subject to the
same value-for-money and accountability requirements which we
ask of our chief officers of police in this country. Having said
that, if the Europol Director produces a well made out business
case for more money and proves that this is an area where Europol
can add value, then the UK will look at that very constructively.
What I do not think we want to see is the automatic assumption
that a change of mandate necessarily leads to more staff and more
money to pay for those staff. As with many public institutions,
the Director of Europol should be constantly reviewing his priorities
and looking to see whether there are savings made within the organisations
that can be used either partly or wholly to fund those new products.
Those are really the principles that we bring to looking at the
Europol budget both within the Home Office and I think also within
SOCA in the way that it looks at the budget within the Europol
Management Board and ultimately when the budget comes up for examination
at the Justice and Home Affairs Council of Ministers.
Q30 Lord Harrison:
Thank you for that. To turn on to something more specific, SOCA
tells us that further costs are incurred for maintaining a large
UK Liaison Bureau, which we touched on earlier, at Europol. Have
you quantified those costs and how will you keep a good weather
eye on those as well?
Mr Storr: In terms of quantification,
as I understand it, there are eight staff at the Liaison Bureau.
They represent a number of agencies: SOCA, the Metropolitan Police,
HM Revenue and Customs and the Scottish Crime and Drugs Enforcement
Agency. Our quantification of the costs indicates broadly that
the cost is in the region of £150,000 per annum per officer,
but we are not alone in having a sizeable liaison team there.
Large Member States have similar sized teams. As far as keeping
an eye on the cost is concerned, the decision where to place SOCA
liaison offices is rightly an operational decision for SOCA itself,
and I do not think we would second-guess that. All I would say
is that SOCA examines very carefully where it puts its liaison
officers and if it did not believe that it was a worthwhile investment
to have that degree of resource in The Hague, then it would think
carefully about deploying them elsewhere. I think the conclusion
is that the view of SOCA and the other agencies which I have mentioned
is that those officers, in terms of the liaison function, provide
good value for money.
Q31 Lord Harrison:
Are they external to the €9.5 million that you mentioned
as the top of the envelope? Are they inside that envelope or are
they external to that envelope?
Mr Storr: I think I am right in saying
that they are not part of the formal Europol budget. They are
financed directly by the UK agencies concerned.
Q32 Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbots:
I would like to pursue the bang for the buck further, if we may.
In paragraph 7 of your evidence you mention the importance and
the value of the United Kingdom's close co-operation with Europol,
but then in paragraph 5 you say that 80 per cent of the information
comes in bilateral arrangements with the bureaux. We are spending,
as I reckon, with eight officers at £150,000, €2 million
to get 80 per cent and we are paying €9.6 million to get
20 per cent. Am I playing down the right alley or have I got it
completely wrong?
Mr Storr: The figures are probably right.
I do not think what it quite covers is the quality, or indeed
the change that is happening within Europe. As our evidence makes
reasonably clear, we would want to see a situation develop in
which there is a greater degree of trust in Europol itself, and
a greater degree of information would actually be passed to Europol.
As it develops its systems, as it gets over a slight problem to
which our evidence refers, which is that of Member States trusting
Europol with information, I think we would very much want to see
that percentage change. At the moment, I think the UK is one of
the largest, if not the largest, user of the Europol Liaison Bureau.
We do that because it represents extremely good value for money,
but we would want to see greater use being made, as Europol develops,
of the facilities which it provides in terms of analysis and the
analytical work files.
Q33 Lord Mawson:
I am really interested in this whole culture change question because
I know from experience elsewhere that you can have lots of representatives
and all that and it all looks fine on paper but in reality it
might not actually be happening very well and that culture change
can really affect an organisation. It takes time to build and
develop. It also takes investment. You have to invest in people
and relationships that build trust that allow all these other
things. You can create whatever structures you want but if the
people and the relationships are not happening, the structures
will not work. In terms of the numbers, I wonder what investment
is actually going to be made into culture change and new ways
of working to start to move this forward.
Mr Storr: Within Europol, I think that
is probably a question which the Director of Europol will be able
to answer. The example of cultural change which I would quote
is that we have managed to sell to Europol and to the European
Union as a whole a pretty profound cultural change, which is the
whole move towards having top quality, properly analysed threat
assessments, which I think is not to be underestimated in terms
of changing the culture. Likewise, the move to try to establish
the concept of intelligence-led policing. As I have said, that
is something that we cannot sit back and expect to have sustainability
without continuing to invest effort in making sure that it sticks,
which is what, through the Management Board, we are doing and
through the Council of Ministers we are doing. I entirely accept
your point. If you want to change the culture, you have to do
it in terms of establishing trust and making sure that people
work together.
Q34 Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts:
Just staying on this change issue, change comes best when you
have very good quality people because they are confident enough
to accept change. Is it a tick in the box for a career to go to
Europol? Is it a good thing to have on your CV or is it somewhere
you are parked?
Mr Storr: I think it is a very good thing
to have on your CV to be the Director of Europol. That is a key
role because the Director sets the tone and the culture of the
organisation. There is a good number of UK officers in Europol
itself, but I think you have put your finger on one of the difficulties:
that is actually trying to create the conditions in which a period
of service in Europol or in other relevant international organisations
actually is of benefit to the career of the best sorts of officers.
At the moment, certainly the ACPO international representative,
Paul Kernaghan, would claim that more needs to be done, and I
think that is probably true.
Q35 Lord Dear:
I was going to ask you the same question when we get to SOCA because
their recruiting patterns are very poor. I could almost answer
the question for you from another angle and that is that it depends
on the organisation from which the representative comes. Using
the police as an example, there is a culture that says you have
to be in the public eye quite a bit if your promotional prospects
are going to continue. If you go off abroad, by definition you
are not necessarily in the public eye and you could be forgotten.
That would be a fear that many people would, first, apply in the
first place and, secondly, whilst they are out there. You would
need another organisation that recognises what you are doing and
embraces it when you come back and that will vary across the 52
police forces, Revenue and Customs and a whole host of others,
and so it becomes cultural within the home base. I want, if I
may, my Lord Chairman, to ask the same question of SOCA later.
Mr Storr: I certainly would not disagree
with that analysis. I think it does vary. There is a move afoot
within the Home Office to look again at the international policing
arrangements. That will enable us to examine to what extent we
can do something about that particular difficulty.
Q36 Lord Marlesford:
Following up Lord Dear's point, there have been press reports
recently indicating that a considerable outflow from SOCA at quite
senior levels for various reasons. Would you like to say anything
about that?
Mr Storr: It is probably better that
you put that point to the SOCA Director. All I would say is that
SOCA is a new organisation; it brought together a number of constituent
organisations and it represented a transformational change. It
was not simply stitching three or four pieces together; it was
approaching it in a different way. As with any organisation that
goes through that transformational change, you are bound to have
people who like the direction of travel and those who do not.
Anything over and above that is probably a question best put to
the SOCA people who give evidence.
Q37 Baroness Garden of Frognal:
Mr Storr, in terms of Europol's insistence, and I am conscious
that you have already talked quite a bit about the relationship
between the Management Board and the Director and the Council
decisions affecting that and making it a more strategic role for
the Management Board, perhaps I could press you to confirm quite
how you see that that Council decision will take a difference.
The Management Board does already have a responsibility for the
five-year financial plan, does it not, and for approving Europol's
annual report and future work pattern? Perhaps you could clarify
how the Council decision will make a difference.
Mr Storr: I would not want to over-sell
the Council decision but the changes I think are changes in the
right direction. They are modest changes and they reflect the
fact that there are different approaches among Member States as
to how Europol should be run and governed. At the risk of repetition,
one of the key changes is having a Management Board Chair who
will be there for a period of time. The more strategic focus is
another one. That is probably what will make a difference.
Q38 Baroness Garden of Frognal:
To what extent do you feel that the Management Board may be responsible
for Europol's lack of flexibility, given that it is responsible
for drafting the personnel plan, the work plan and the budget?
Does the Management Board itself have some blame in the lack of
flexibility which you highlight in your report?
Mr Storr: It is a balance. You have to
have for European and international institutions in my view—this
is borne of experience not only of working within the Home Office
but working for the United Nations—a system of governance
and financial accountability that is rigorous. To that extent
I think the role of the board in overseeing the budget and in
making sure that Europol's priorities are where the budget is
placed is very important. It is easy for organisations to drift
if they are not firmly managed. To that extent I think it is right
that the Europol Management Board should have a powerful role.
Where I think we were a little bit concerned was that they were
interfering too much in day-to-day business. This is going back
a few years. That is why we were very keen on emphasising that
they should have a strategic role. We would be prepared when we
see how the new arrangements bed down to look again to see whether
more could be delegated from the board level to the Director.
That would be the direction that I would see us moving in from
the UK's point of view.
Q39 Baroness Garden of Frognal:
Might the longer term of the Chair actually have an impact on
that too?
Mr Storr: I would hope so, if you get
the right Chair and if you have a Director who is able and willing
to work constructively with the Chair.
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