Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40
- 60)
WEDNESDAY 21 MAY 2008
Mr Peter Storr and Mr Ben Judah
Q40 Lord Dear:
There are a couple of points you may be able to help us with and
they are interrelated I suppose. Looking at the respective roles
of the three key players, and you have made that forewarning of
this, we are interested in getting a greater degree of clarity
if you can help us on this: first of all, the UK SOCA representative
on the Europol Management Board; you have a UK official in the
Article 36 Committee; and a UK minister in the Council, all of
whom one hopes should, and the question is can they, make a significant
impact to the benefit of the UK? Can you help us tease out what
the respective roles are because to some of us they appear to
overlap?
Mr Storr: I should declare an interest
because I am the UK's representative on the Article 36 Committee,
so you must weigh my evidence carefully against that declaration
of interest! The ministers clearly have the key role because it
is at the point of the Justice and Home Affairs Council where
you have the recommendations of the Management Board for example
on the Europol Director appointments coming for a decision. The
Article 36 Committee also reports to ministers. For example, most
of the negotiations for the new Council decision on Europol were
conducted within the Article 36 Committee and within the working
groups working to the Article 36 Committee. In terms of overlapping
of responsibilities, yes, you will find that the budget goes to
the Europol Management Board, and it also comes from the Management
Board to the Council, and the Article 36 Committee has a role
also in determining it. As in many things that happen within the
European Union, there are different bodies looking at similar
issues. The way we try to avoid duplication of effort is to have
a fairly close working relationship between the UK representative
on the Article 36 Committee and the UK representative on the SOCA
board. I would say probably I am in contact several times a week
with the UK representative on the board, not only on board duties
but on SOCA's wider international business as well. Certainly
before key discussions in both the Article 36 Committee and the
Management Board, I will be in very close contact with the SOCA
representative because both he and I recognise that there is a
common interest between the Home Office and SOCA in making the
Management Board work and in trying to persuade it to come to
the right decision.
Q41 Lord Dear:
Would you see any need for changing the parameters of the roles?
Is there an overlap or are there gaps?
Mr Storr: I do not think so. I have not
been conscious in my consultations with the International Director
of SOCA that we have identified gaps. What we mostly look for
when we plan what we are saying on issues in which the Home Office
and SOCA have a common interest, are opportunities to advance
the United Kingdom interest, but on things like for example discussions
of key appointments to Europol, whether that is the Deputy Directors
or the Director, SOCA will want to have a Home Office view on
what sort of person we might look for or which candidates particularly
ought to be favoured. I am not sure we see the parameters of the
role changing all that much. To the extent that they do overlap,
I think we manage that by constant contact between my own office
and that of the relevant SOCA Director.
Q42 Lord Dear:
Much more importantly of course is the role of the Management
Board and the Director on the other and there is some emerging
evidence that we have seen, on which we have not formed a view
let me say, that the Director is being cramped in style to some
extent by the Management Board. I suppose roughly parallel would
be the governors of a school who would be the management board
and the headmaster would be the director. One is involved in the
direction day to day and the other is involved in the strategy,
or so one would conclude. Do you see from the Home Office perspective
that the Management Board has got itself into the position where
it is over-bureaucratic or overbearing and overweening vis-a"-vis
the Director and should that be changed?
Mr Storr: I am hoping that the Council
decision when it comes into effect will lead to a change. As I
have said, I would hope that the board would not get so far down
into the weeds as seriously to interfere with the ability of the
Director to run an efficient organisation.
Q43 Lord Dear:
Do you believe it doing that at the moment?
Mr Storr: I think there is some evidence
that the board has on occasions involved itself in a degree of
detail which, from a personal point of view I would see as being
more for the Director and his staff to go and sort out, quite
frankly. As I always do, if I make a parallel between that and
what applies in the United Kingdom, if I were a chief officer
of police working to a police authority that got down to that
degree of detail, then I would want to change it in some way.
You can change it in a number of ways. One way in which it could
be changed is not by delineating responsibilities but by simply
having a better relationship between whoever is Director and whoever
is the Management Board Chair. I think a lot of it does come down
to personal relationships, which is why the UK welcomes the 18
month period.
Q44 Lord Dear:
The police authority example in the UK has, as Baroness Henig
knows only too well, is laid out by statute. There is a very clear
statutory demarcation between the two. In something as complicated
or complex as Europol, I can see it might be quite difficult to
lay it down, though I suppose my question on this point is: should
one attempt to be more specific?
Mr Storr: The Council decision takes
it about as far as it was possible to take it, bearing in mind
that round the table you have 27 slightly different perspectives
on what that relationship should be. Much as one would like to
design European institutions and arrangements around what the
UK perceives as being an efficient model, it is not always possible
to do so. In the same way that you would use the analogy of a
legal relationship between the chief officer of police and the
chairman of the relevant police authority, I would also say that
maybe not quite as important but nevertheless very important is
the personal chemistry and relationship between the chief officer
and the chair of the police authority. If it is not possible to
achieve a perfect legal delineation in the way the Director might
want, then the lesson for whoever is Director is that you have
to establish the sort of working relationship with the board which
will get round the problem in a different way.
Q45 Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts:
You referred to your bilateral discussions with your SOCA opposite
number. Maybe it is somewhere in the papers but I have not seen
it. How often do the Europol Management Board and the Article
36 Committee meet formally?
Mr Storr: They will not meet together.
The Article 36 Committee meets roughly every five to six weeks,
usually for either a one-day or a two-day meeting. I do not have
specific information on the Management Board.
Mr Judah: It meets roughly four times
a year.
Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts: So they
cannot share that much if they only meet four times a year.
Q46 Baroness Henig:
Last year this Committee did an investigation into Frontex. I
think many of us are interested in the relationship between Frontex
and Europol. I was interested that SOCA's view was that early
signs were encouraging that the two bodies were working closely
together. You yourself in your report talk about Europol as having
good operational engagement on this. One of the things that was
told to us very clearly when we were over in Poland was that Frontex
itself is developing all sorts of data capacity and analytical
ability. I am interested to know how that sort of operation works
and how what Frontex are doing is going to be incorporated into
the European Criminal Intelligence Model.
Mr Storr: We would go along with the
SOCA view that the progress so far is good. Frontex, as you all
know from your previous inquiry, is a pretty new organisation.
As I understand it, and I think the Europol evidence itself to
this Committee touches on the point, there is good co-operation
but I think full information exchange is not possible at the moment
because Frontex does not have in place the sorts of data protection
and data security arrangements which would allow full transfer
of the personal information held. Once the Frontex systems are
established and pass muster from those data security and data
protection points of view, then the way will be clearer for even
closer co-operation. Certainly from our perspective we would see
value in exchange of information between Frontex and Europol.
Q47 Baroness Henig:
What timescale are we looking at in terms of making that interchange?
Mr Storr: I do not know. I think it largely
depends on how quickly Frontex can put in hand the work to make
those changes to its systems. While I do not have the answer at
the moment, I am very happy to go back and provide further information
to the Committee.
Q48 Baroness Henig:
Secondly, I must confess that before this morning I had never
heard of the Police Chiefs Task Force, but maybe that is my ignorance.
This is a new body to me. I wondered what their role was in the
European Criminal Intelligence Model. I would be interested if
you could tell us something about the Police Chiefs Task Force,
where it comes from, under what legal basis it was established
and how it relates to Europol's Management Board.
Mr Storr: The Police Chiefs Task Force
was something invented at the Justice and Home Affairs Summit
of Heads of State and Government at Tampere in Finland in 1999.
It was established at that point but there was some disagreement
among its Member States as to exactly what its status should be.
So it is not formally a working group of the Justice and Home
Affairs Council, but it was established I think by a Council conclusion.
It does not have the same sort of legal base or treaty base as
for example the Article 36 Committee we were discussing earlier
or indeed the Europol Management Board. It is a meeting of either
chief officers of police or senior level representatives of the
law enforcement authorities of Member States who get together,
usually once or sometimes twice during each presidency, to discuss
how best to put into operational action some of the priorities
that have been identified as being European Union priorities.
That is basically what it does. It has no formal relationship
either with Europol or with the Europol Management Board.
Q49 Baroness Henig:
Would Paul Kernaghan be our person on that?
Mr Storr: No. I think, as with the Management
Board, the representative from the Police Chiefs Task Force comes
from the Serious Organised Crime Agency.
Q50 Baroness Henig:
Would that person not be a serving police officer?
Mr Storr: He would be a serving SOCA
officer. To give you an example, I think I am right in saying
that during the UK's presidency in 2005, Bill Hughes, the Director
of SOCA, was the UK Chair of that particular committee.
Q51 Baroness Henig:
But it would vary; is there much continuity? It seems that the
Police Chiefs Task Force is an interesting innovation if there
was some continuity of personnel and it really contained people
who knew what they were doing with practical experience all coming
together. I can see that could be quite useful. On the other hand,
I could also see such a body as jollying around Europe. I am trying
to work out which it is.
Mr Storr: That is an interesting question.
In my view the Police Chiefs Task Force suffers from not being
established properly within Council structures. That means that
it does not have the sort of clout and status that you would have
if it were a formal body reporting to ministers. Again, without
wishing in any way to anticipate the Lisbon Treaty, the Lisbon
Treaty will establish a committee on internal security. Depending
on the mandate of that group, it may have a role to play in terms
of co-operation in tackling organised crime, pretty similar to
that which the Police Chiefs Task Force was established to do
in Tampere in 1999. If it gets to the point where we are planning
what to do under that particular Article of the Lisbon Treaty,
I think we will have to have a look at the overall architecture
of Council working groups and other bodies like the Chief Police
Officers Task Force to make sure that we do not have duplication
and overlap.
Q52 Chairman:
Let me follow that up. If you take a county police force or regional
police force in the UK, what contact or knowledge do you think
most of them have with Europol? Would they say, "Oh, yes,
we know it exists but it does not actually cross our path"?
What connection is there between the two?
Mr Storr: I do not think you would find
that there was a direct connection between your county police
force and Europol other than that in certain circumstances Europol
has provided specialist support to individual police forces in
the UK in detecting and investigating organised crime. What there
is, as I understand it, within each police force is an international
liaison officer who links in with, in this case, the Europol Liaison
Bureau housed in SOCA, so that SOCA has an outreach into the police
forces of the UK to people who look after their international
interests. Certainly those liaison points would be well aware
of what Europol does and what it has to offer. Quite what the
extent of knowledge within police forces about Europol and its
services is, I do not have knowledge of, but again that may be
something that you would want the Committee to explore when the
SOCA officers give evidence to you.
Q53 Chairman:
At what level would that liaison officer be in the average police
force?
Mr Storr: I would need to look into that
and let the Committee know. I would say probably at the desk officer
or operational officer level, not at a senior command level.
Q54 Baroness Henig:
To follow that up, I understand you want us to ask SOCA various
questions and that is very reasonable. You are, after all, representing
the Home Office, which has a pivotal role, to put it that way,
in terms of the way policing operates. One of the people who has
given evidence to us has suggested that maybe policing is not
as well represented as it might be because everything goes through
SOCA. I can understand where they are coming from but nonetheless
they do raise quite an important issue. If however many police
forces are not actually engaging directly, if they are going via
SOCA and that is perhaps perceived as being therefore something
that they do not have direct control over, is that not a problem?
Does that not mean in a way that there is a danger that some of
the really important anti-terrorism work that goes on in forces,
and after all it goes on in a lot of localities, is going to be
missed?
Mr Storr: I think Europol is all about
co-ordination, and indeed SOCA has a major co-ordinating role
in the UK. If you have a situation in which each of the police
forces had a separate relationship with Europol, Europol would
find that very difficult to manage, and you would have duplication
of effort or overlapping of effort. You may even find Europol
pointing out that something that was of interest to one UK police
force was also of interest to another. I think the problem would
be greater if you had completely unfettered and unsupervised access
from all police forces in this country to Europol. I think SOCA's
liaison function adds value for the benefit of individual chief
officers of police. Equally, it is for SOCA to let individual
forces know what is happening, what Europol can offer. I would
see that very much as being a two-way relationship.
Q55 Lord Teverson:
One of the areas in your written evidence that stood out was this
area of information on which you put a statistic of 80 per cent
of communication that is bilateral. I almost read that as being
off the record. There are two points on that. One is, first of
all, how that can be improved. Is it a question of confidence
that is the reason and how might we contribute towards helping
that situation? I would like to ask: is that as unhealthy as it
sounds? Does it mean that the forum makes it work, that the other
80 per cent, if you formalised it more, would not ever happen,
whatever you did? Is this therefore a means whereby, because of
personal relationships and the overlapping that happens, a lot
more goes on outside this rather bureaucratic, as you called it
in other areas, process or should, for accountability and recording,
we make sure it all does go through the systems? Is it as negative
as this makes it sound?
Mr Storr: By way of clarification, I
should say that my points about bureaucracy were mostly directed
towards the way in which the Management Board has operated in
the past, not necessarily Europol's rather more operational side.
With that qualification, as I said I think earlier, we would hope
that gradually, as Europol establishes confidence in its systems
amongst Member States in the security of its systems, that you
would see that percentage changing. A lot of it depends on the
nature of the work which is being done. I do not think the 80
per cent and 20 per cent are necessarily referring to the same
type of operational activity. There may be some, in fact a large
number, where you would simply have a particular piece of criminal
activity that involved two, three or four Member States. If that
is possible to solve within the liaison officer arrangements,
then that probably is a more efficient way of doing it than inviting
Europol formally to take charge of co-ordination arrangements.
I think SOCA and indeed other Member States' competent authorities
will constantly be asking themselves: what will get us best value
out of those arrangements? Is it using the liaison officer function
or is it inviting Europol to open an analytical work file or otherwise
to provide assistance of a specialist nature or good quality analysis?
That really is a judgment for SOCA to make; it is an operational
judgment. As I have said earlier, I would hope the percentages
would change. To some extent, as we have said in our evidence,
there is a feeling amongst some Member States that the Europol
handling of data needs improvement. Our information from experts,
as I have said earlier, is that there are handling arrangements
applying to Europol data systems which are pretty rigorous. Again,
I think this is something for the Director of Europol to add to
the list of services that he advertises because I think more needs
to be done to convince Member States of the added value that Europol
can provide, and indeed the integrity of their information systems
and the security of their information systems.
Q56 Lord Teverson:
Do I take it from that that some of that 80 per cent might be,
for instance, practical cross-border policing work that would
not technically come under organised crime and it acts as a channel
for things which are not necessary Europol's direct responsibility?
Mr Storr: It is more to do with the nature
of not necessarily whether it serious crime or organised crime;
it is simply the complexity. The tendency amongst law enforcement
officers is to try to keep things as simple as possible. If you
can solve the problem simply through getting liaison officers
together to identify commonalities and joint approaches, then
you probably do not need to avail yourself of Europol's full services.
Amongst those 80 per cent there will be operations which develop
to the point where a decision will be taken by the originating
Member State: let us call in Europol, let us get their analysts
working on it, and let us see whether there are links with other
countries that our information has not yet revealed.
Q57 Lord Teverson:
The next point is whether as the Home Office you are satisfied
that the Europol National Unit connects the relevant parties in
the exchange of information about organised crime within the UK?
This comes back to the question about co-ordination.
Mr Storr: We are satisfied with that.
SOCA, as I have said before, brought together a number of different
organisations: the National Crime Squad, the National Criminal
Intelligence Service and HM Revenue and Customs. The third round
of mutual evaluations of Europol which the European Union conducted
in 2007, the Europol Information Exchange, regarded the SOCA arrangements
as being a model arrangement for fighting organised crime. That
is the sort of independent clean bill of health which I think
gives us some confidence. The arrangements within SOCA link out
to individual forces and link up fairly effectively with Europol.
From that point of view, I think things are moving very much in
the right direction.
Q58 Lord Teverson:
Partly at the risk of showing my own ignorance here, a similar
question at the European level to get the Home Office view: we
have the Schengen Information System; we have an information exchange
system under Prüm with all sort of DNA factors and then we
have a Europol system. Is that satisfactory or should we have
this segmentation of those things which are often all related
to criminal activity?
Mr Storr: They are all related to criminal
activity to a greater or lesser extent. Frankly, I think if we
were starting now with a blank sheet of paper, we would not design
the systems in quite the way in which they have been designed
or developed. As with many things within the European Union, life
is not perfect. What we have been pressing for very strongly over
the last two years or so is the establishment within the Justice
and Home Affairs Council structures of a body of experts which
will look at the overlapping information systems, their interdependence,
what exactly each one does, and to try and come up with an information
strategy across those systems. We are continuing to push for that
and, being an optimistic sort of person, I think it is moving
in the right direction.
Q59 Chairman:
Finally, can I ask you this. You have referred to a significant
intelligence data source with regard to the Europol Information
System. Could you clarify what you mean by that?
Mr Storr: Yes. The Europol Information
System would be able to store a wide range of information on criminals
subject to investigation, things like personal details, identity
documents, communications data and the means by which the offence
was committed; for example, things like use of firearms and car
registrations. To that extent, it has the potential to be an extremely
useful system. It is very new; it was implemented in October 2005.
We refer to it as having potential rather than the actuality because
there is work to be done to ensure that Member States link up
to it in an effective way. For example, to do so, individual Member
State systems would need automatic data loaders to connect with
that system. At the moment, the great majority of Member States
do not have systems in place which will allow that to happen.
That indeed is the position in the UK. SOCA, having inherited
a large number of separate and incompatible data systems when
it was set up from its originating constituent organisations,
has a programme to review its own knowledge management and its
data system. When that is done, I think the UK will be in a position
automatically to connect up to the system and we will benefit
from that.
Q60 Chairman:
Mr Storr and Mr Judah, thank you both very much for coming. I
hope you do not feel that we put you through the mangle in the
same way as maybe the Prime Minister is being put thorugh the
mangle in another part of the building. If I may say so, you have
been admirably concise and helpful. If I can enter a word of conceit,
I think your evidence has made us rather congratulate ourselves
that we have embarked on such an intriguing subject for an inquiry.
We are most grateful to you. Thank you both very much. If there
is any follow-up you think would be useful to the Committee, perhaps
you would care to write to us or email us. We would be grateful
to receive any back-up information which you think may be helpful
to the Committee.
Mr Storr: We will certainly do so. May
I say that we welcome your Committee's examination of Europol.
I think it is very timely and necessary.
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