Examination of Witnesses (Questions 361
- 379)
WEDNESDAY 2 JULY 2008
Sir Ronnie Flanagan, Chief Constable Ken Jones, Chief
Constable Ian Johnston and Assistant Chief Constable Nick Gargan
Q361 Chairman:
Good morning gentlemen; I hope you are all sitting very comfortably
on the bench there. My name is Harrison and it is my pleasure
to chair the meeting this morning in the absence of Michael Jopling,
our normal Chairman. We are extremely grateful to the four of
you and colleagues for coming in today and we are extremely grateful
for the written evidence that you provided; we look forward to
the further written evidence from ACPO. As you may hear from my
raised voice, the acoustics here in this room, as elsewhere in
the Houses of Parliament, are notorious so I would be grateful
if you could speak up. In the 19th century of course, politicians
used to declaim and that is why they built them in this way, but
we would be most grateful if you could speak up. We are actually
being broadcast now, we are on the webcam and some day someone
is going to explain that to me but I understand the importance
of it. When you have given your evidence to us, we will be sending
you a transcript and we would be very pleased if you would look
at that transcript and if any corrections are needed or if you
feel that you may have in some way misled the Committee or that
you want to correct a false impression, we would be very grateful
if you would contact our Clerk, Michael Collon, and have that
corrected. The essence of what we do is to end up with good clear
evidence to help us in our thoughts. It would be very helpful
if the four of you would perhaps introduce yourselves first of
all, with the purpose of distinguishing your separate roles so
that the Committee has a better idea of where the answers that
you give come from, and then we go on to the first question. Perhaps
I can ask Sir Ronnie first of all just to start and give a brief
overview, but also say a little bit about his important role.
Sir Ronnie Flanagan: I am Ronnie Flanagan,
Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Constabulary. That is a position
that has been in existence for some 150 years and the legal responsibility
of the inspectorate is to inspect police forces, at least originally
to inspect police forces, to ensure and to satisfy Government
that they are operating in an effective and an efficient manner.
I said "initially" to inspect police forces because,
for the purposes of what you are examining, we now inspect SOCA.
I have to stress we have no remit whatsoever in inspecting Europol,
but through inspection of SOCA we get at least a sense of what
Europol is doing and the role that SOCA plays in respect of United
Kingdom policing vis-a"-vis Europol. So I am here this morning
in that capacity.
Chief Constable Johnston: I am Ian Johnston.
I am the Chief Constable of the British Transport Police but my
main reason for being here today is that I am the Chairman of
the ACPO Crime Business Area. ACPO divides its national responsibilities
out into a number of different groupings—crime, criminal
justice, force modernisation and a number of different areas,
and I deal with the crime side. In that respect, I have responsibilities
around serious and organised crime, and the Crime Business Area
is the main interface with the Serious and Organised Crime Agency,
which obviously then takes us into Europol and the issues that
you are talking about here today.
Chief Constable Jones: I am the President
of ACPO and my job is to coordinate activities across the business
areas, like the one that Ian runs, to give our best advice to
the Government, but also to liaise and get the best out of our
relationships with organisations like SOCA and, through SOCA,
Europol. We like to think we are here in the public interest,
we guard that very jealously and part of that responsibility I
have is to give independent advice to Government on issues such
as this.
Assistant Chief Constable Gargan: I am
Assistant Chief Constable Nick Gargan with Thames Valley Police
where I am responsible for crime and criminal justice. This gives
me the operational oversight of the interface with SOCA and Europol
from a force perspective. I am also here as the intelligence portfolio
holder on Mr Johnston's behalf within ACPO Crime Business Area
so I have a link into various of the connections, both with the
Serious and Organised Crime Agency but also the Schengen information
system too.
Q362 Chairman:
That is very helpful. Before I ask the first question, it would
be extremely helpful if you could identify those of you who you
feel you would like to answer any particular question. The Committee
does not want to hear the same answer four times, but obviously
if any of you want to complement the answer of one of your colleagues,
please do indicate and we can do it in that way.
Chief Constable Jones: We have been discussing
this and we have decided who would lead off to each particular
question.
Q363 Chairman:
I am most grateful; thank you very much indeed. Could you give
the Committee a brief overview of the UK arrangements for connecting
ACPO to SOCA, to the UK Europol National Unit and to Europol,
all of whom we visited last week? How would you assess these arrangements
in terms of effective flow of information?
Chief Constable Johnston: SOCA is the
gateway for ACPO into Europe and all ACPO forces connect to SOCA
in terms of all of their international work at a variety of different
levels through programmes of activity, through our international
liaison officers who are attached to each force, through joint
working with SOCA and others on projects and operations, and through
the international gateway which is provided by SOCA in their multi-lateral
department. The SOCA multilateral provides access to all of the
international channels, not just for Europe; it obviously includes
Europol and also provides a link to the large number of the UK's
overseas liaison officers' network. They also provide the route
through to Interpol and to policing cooperation under the Schengen
Agreement. SOCA also provides for us a central bureau for the
European arrest warrant. So broadly speaking the arrangement is
that our link to Europe is in through SOCA. In terms of their
general effectiveness, I guess the questions later on will take
us into a more detailed response to that, but I would say that
the arrangements are widely known but at varying levels across
the Police Service. Those who are involved in drugs and human
trafficking have a pretty good and sharp understanding of the
relationship and the route ways and how to get the best out of
the system. Others, who are perhaps investigating serious crimes
with international connotations of a one-off nature around a murder
inquiry, for example, will have less knowledge and therefore are
less effective in their use of the system. However, in each force
they do have their own international liaison officer and we can
seek advice from SOCA multilateral on the best way to get help
from Europe generally. I would describe the general arrangements
as effective, but there are opportunities within them for improvement
and no doubt we will get the opportunity to suggest a few of those
improvements during the course of our discussion here.
Chairman: We would be very grateful if
you could be sure to do that; it would be very helpful.
Q364 Lord Young of Norwood Green:
I find myself educated just reading your evidence. I had a totally
false perspective of ACPO. I had you down more as a trade union,
but that is probably because of my background. I found the evidence
very helpful. Could you tell us more about the different tools
of information management, some of which you have described in
your evidence: the organised crime threat assessment, the way
that the UK one seems to interact with the European threat assessment,
according to your evidence; situation reports; the criminal intelligence
model? How far have they developed and what do you think they
mean from the perspective of police governance?
Sir Ronnie Flanagan: What I want to do
first is draw upon experience within the United Kingdom because
one of the major tools is what we in the United Kingdom describe
as the "National Intelligence Model" and which Europol
has adopted as a European Intelligence Model. What I wanted to
do was give the experience within the UK and then extrapolate
that to where we see Europol and, having adopted the tools, how
far they have developed, as you have asked, and perhaps what more
might yet be done. The story starts in terms of adoption of the
National Intelligence Model in around 2001 and very quickly and
very encouragingly it was adopted as a model by all 43 forces
in England and Wales, by all eight forces in Scotland and indeed
by the Police Service in Northern Ireland; so that was a very
encouraging development. The model itself starts with what we
call strategic assessments, including assessments of all the threats
to be faced, all the operational activity in which we are to engage
and then, building upon those strategic assessments, the development
of what we call a control strategy. Then, through intelligence
assessments and through what we describe as tasking and coordinating
arrangements, how do we allocate all of the resources that are
available in the most effective and efficient way to deal with
those threats that have been identified in the original strategic
assessment? In the United Kingdom experience I said that it was
very encouraging that all 52 forces throughout the United Kingdom
adopted the model. That is not to say that it was not without
teething problems and certainly so far as the inspectorate were
concerned, what we had to create at the centre was an assisted
implementation team. Quite apart from adoption of the model, we
wanted to ensure through inspection and offering assistance that
each of those forces knew exactly what the model was, were operating
it to comparable standards and we in the Inspectorate continue
to inspect today and make judgments on how far individual forces
within the United Kingdom are actually applying and putting to
use the National Intelligence Model. It is fair to say that, if
we do not keep that continuing spotlight that we have identified
a real risk, impetus is lost and there is a risk of dropping back.
Why do I spend so much time outlining the UK experience? It is
true to say that during the previous UK presidency, our representatives
were critical in having basically exactly the same model that
I have described adopted by Europol. Of course, when you are talking
about 43 forces operating to a national standard in England and
Wales and similarly our colleagues in Scotland and Northern Ireland
and you realise there are difficulties in that structure, you
can imagine there are many, many more challenges in dealing with
27 Member States with different forms of criminal justice. In
terms of how they have developed, we are very conscious of previous
evidence given by our colleagues from the Serious and Organised
Crime Agency. There are very encouraging examples and you were
given an example relating to Croatia, where adoption of the model
worked very well. It is true to say that we would have concerns,
if we did not keep up that unrelenting focus to ensure that 27
different Member States adopt the model and apply it and through
that, indeed engaging in the organised crime threat assessment
and the other tools that they engage in, the analytical work files
that Europol so effectively provides. In answering that element
of the question that asks how mature these tools are, very encouraging
but very much still a work in progress. I suggested at the outset
that we, the inspectorate for policing in the United Kingdom,
have no remit in inspecting Europol, but we would be encouraging
them to place a very intense focus upon the development of the
tools and the application of the tools through their own inspection
procedures.
Q365 Lord Young of Norwood Green:
You mention in your evidence that the UK's threat assessment is
informed by the Europol organised crime threat assessment.
Sir Ronnie Flanagan: We will address
that specifically in relation to a question that is still to be
asked, but it is fair to say at this stage that our threat assessment
is very much informed by the organised crime threat assessment
provided by Europol. In terms of overall policing governance,
which is the last element of your question, we collectively and
certainly I individually would say that there are very positive
signs that the application of these tools, while still to be developed
and worked upon, as I indicated, do very much provide a positive
element to police governance and do very much feed in to what
we do in the UK and the conclusions that we come to in terms of
our threat assessment.
Q366 Lord Young of Norwood Green:
Just one final point, as you mentioned the analytical work files,
you seemed to mention them in a positive way. Do you think they
are developing well as a useful means of exchanging information?
Sir Ronnie Flanagan: Yes indeed and you
can see that in the structure: there is a different analytical
work file for extremist Islamist terrorism, the drugs problem,
human trafficking. There are different files for those different
areas of work and we would pronounce positively on those.
Q367 Chairman:
Sir Ronnie, just for interest, do you have a continental equivalent
to you as Chief HMI and are they too limited to just looking at
their own police forces and the equivalent of SOCA?
Sir Ronnie Flanagan: I cannot speak for
every one of the 27 Member States and indeed some other European
countries that are not yet within the EU, but I have not yet discovered
one. In fact we have been in communication with colleagues in
France and colleagues in many countries and in Europe and indeed
far beyond Europe in terms of their development of what might
be described generally as civilian oversight of policing. I say
"civilian oversight" because I would very strongly stress
the independence of the inspectorate, independent of both Government
and indeed independent of the Police Service.
Q368 Lord Mawson:
I was interested to hear you describe your organisations as "businesses"
and I am interested in who the customers are and what the market
is that you are actually operating in, but also how that actually
relates to this whole question of Europol. My experience of quite
experienced business people is that sometimes you can have all
the structure and all the speak in place in the middle, but to
really know what is going on in your business, you have to go
right to the front edge in one place and spend some time there
and really understand in one place what is actually happening,
what is actually getting delivered for customers. I would just
be interested to hear a bit about what your experience has been
when you have gone to that front edge of Europol and looked at
what is actually happening and just a brief description of what
you saw.
Chief Constable Jones: Nick is here from
Thames Valley Police as well, he has two hats on today, and he
has some statistics and experience of using these services directly
and also in a bilateral sense. I could make a broader point about
the Association of Chief Police Officers' description of its work
as divided into business areas, if that is where you wanted some
elaboration.
Q369 Chairman:
Yes; please do continue.
Chief Constable Jones: I will ask Nick
to pick up the Europol issue, but in terms of the way we divide
our policy development work, we call them business areas precisely
for the reason that we want people to have a sense of what we
do on behalf of the public. If it is not influencing delivery
to the public, our standards, our ethos, influencing Government,
then we should not be doing it. It is our attempt to move away
from a purist policy development machine, which we are not, and
to be one which actually puts the public first. Ian leads the
biggest area that we have and the Crime Business Area covers things
like homicide investigation, has a direct impact on communities
in the neighbourhood and we work back from there. We have used
the language of business for that reason, we have a view of who
our customers and clients are and it is definitely the public.
Assistant Chief Constable Gargan: In
terms of going to the front line, I would make three points. The
first is that I have not actually visited Europol itself for several
years but I had a sense, on visiting repeatedly, that it felt
like quite a bureaucratic organisation and an organisation that
was finding its feet and an organisation of staff who were nervous
of the constraints on their ability to grow in terms of operational
delivery. In terms of the UK front line, I have had several contacts
with detectives from my own force and colleagues from SOCA in
the last couple of weeks with an eye on this session and have
had some very mixed reviews. There are clearly some excellent
examples of Europol adding value to operations, making links,
particularly where those operations relate to three or more states;
that is where the value of Europol comes in, rather than in terms
of bilateral inquiries where we already have a very generous and
high quality set of arrangements in terms of SOCA liaison officers.
Q370 Lord Mawson:
What are they telling you about what is not working?
Assistant Chief Constable Gargan: The
difficulty of getting work adopted because, of necessity, Europol
must be quite discriminating in terms of the amount of work it
will take on, with a database with a relatively small number of
entries and a relatively small staff for a huge population in
the EU. At Thames Valley Police our experience is that if you
add together both incoming and outgoing inquiries to Interpol,
Europol and the UK central authority for mutual legal assistance,
combined, in both directions, that amounts to fewer than 500 inquiries
per year which, for a population of 2.1 million people, feels
rather low. Now that might change when the Schengen information
system comes on-line and when every police national computer check
then becomes an international check those volumes may go up but
our experience is that when colleagues do ask for an international
service, they invariably get a good and appropriate service and,
on occasions, that really is excellent.
Q371 Lord Mawson:
Is Europol sufficiently included in the implementation of the
UK's strategy to combat organised crime and terrorism?
Chief Constable Jones: That is a difficult
one. Building on some of the points which have been made, it is
critical that Europol continues to focus on those areas presenting
the most serious threat and risk to communities, so there is a
danger of mission creep and as they expand they are spreading
their jam far too thin. We have to keep them focused on the critical
areas, so in that respect we support the 18 areas they concentrate
on through the analytical work files. The other issue that is
critical is the issue around intelligence. We will get the maximum
benefit from the European Criminal Intelligence Model, ECIM, provided
that continues to align with our intelligence model, and we think
that is the best way for them to work. Obviously we were very
influential during our presidency in landing that, but there are
signs that that perhaps is perhaps losing some momentum and impetus.
Provided the ECIM continues to develop, then we will continue
to feed off it. That then directly informs our organised crime
threat assessment, which in turn influences our control strategy—sorry
for all this jargon—and that does feed through ultimately
to things like the national community safety plan and to police
authorities and chiefs' local force plan. However, there needs
to be this alignment around a common purpose and approach so we
do need to continue to keep pushing very hard on that and we do
through SOCA and through other partners and players. Is it sufficient?
I would say at the moment, probably not. I could not say "Yes
it is sufficient" because I would never satisfied. Could
it be sufficient? Yes, provided we continue to resource, provided
we continue to focus on the more serious issues and provided we
all operate to a common script; that is pretty critical.
Q372 Lord Mawson:
Are the EU Justice and Home Affairs Council conclusions on organised
crime routinely entered into the national policing strategies
of the UK?
Chief Constable Johnston: The short answer
is: yes. The conclusions from the Council are fed into the Serious
and Organised Crime Agency and they do feature in the UK threat
assessment which is the bit of machinery within the National Intelligence
Model that SOCA use to disseminate their assessment of threat
more broadly from serious and organised crime across the UK and
into the UK; they do feature as part of that. That clearly is
an annual publication but they also feature in their more routine
month-by-month assessments of priority, so they are embraced,
they are included in our assessments.
Q373 Lord Teverson:
Outside the Council obviously the Commission gets involved in
certain matters, and I know about the difference between First
Pillar and Third Pillar, but do police forces ever deal directly
with the Commission or lobbying or consultation? Is there a communication
at that level without going through the UKRep or purely government
political connections?
Chief Constable Johnston: Not that I
am aware of. Our route in to all those negotiations is through
SOCA, which has its value because a single route gives a very
clear and common, shared sense of direction; I am not aware of
any other route in.
Chief Constable Jones: We do get approached
by various EU bodies for advice or for a view on and we tend to
channel that through the regular channels that go through SOCA.
Regular approaches are made but we try, by and large, to discipline
that so that we present a united front.
Q374 Baroness Garden of Frognal:
Are the UK's chief police officers satisfied that the mechanisms
for improving law enforcement information exchange within the
EU are coordinated and adequate for their purpose for the years
to come?
Assistant Chief Constable Gargan: There
are four elements to that question. Overwhelmingly we talk here
about operational information exchange and that is a multi-stranded
activity. We have the SOCA liaison officers, we have Interpol,
we have Europol, we have the Schengen information system on the
horizon and then specific initiatives, the Prüm initiative
around finger prints, DNA and vehicle driver details, the Swedish
initiative, indeed we also have our own ACPO Criminals Records
Office. We have this very complex multi-stranded set of arrangements.
On occasion, it looks from our perspective that they are driven
by individual Member States' initiatives but our stance over the
years has been, rather like making a mobile telephone call, we
do not really mind whether it is routed bounced off a satellite,
sent down a fibre-optic cable or sent through a telegraph wire
provided we get what we need from the other end. That tends to
be the ACPO approach and we rely on SOCA to provide that coordination
on our behalf and we believe it is largely effective. The second
area of information exchange is that there is some rogue bilateral
contact, either unit-to-unit or the guy you met in a camp site
in Spain two years ago and you ring with an enquiry of your French
police colleague, but that is very low. The number of inquiries
that take place of that sort are very low; they used to be higher
and they are reducing as people become aware of data protection
legislation. The third and incredibly valuable level of information
exchange is for a very specific operation and this is where you
cannot actually beat getting detectives from the British Police
Force together with their overseas counterparts. Whether that
is pursuing a murder, a missing person investigation, an abduction
or an offence of drug trafficking, that face-to-face contact between
the investigators themselves is incredibly valuable, but of course
we rely on SOCA to broker that and to make sure there is a central
oversight. Then the final tier of exchange relates to the exchange
of know-how and support from one force to another. There is a
proposal for an international police assistance board to ensure
that there is some kind of central oversight and coordination
of that which has traditionally been something that the Foreign
and Commonwealth Office has had sight of. So across those four
elements, given that the second element, the sort of rogue contact,
is one that is low and diminishing in its level, we can be broadly
satisfied.
Q375 Baroness Garden of Frognal:
Chief Constable Jones mentioned a common script and in fact in
your answers about communication I wonder whether you find any
hurdles in a mutual understanding of terminology or indeed language
within EU members.
Assistant Chief Constable Gargan: There
are clearly issues around language, although the UK is fortunate
in that people from third party states are as likely to speak
English as a second language as any other. There are equally difficulties
around respecting judicial systems; the role of police, the role
of magistrates and state prosecutors can create confusion and
difficulties in progressing cases. I have personal experience
of working with the French and when British investigators make
a request the language of the British investigator is not understood
by the French examining magistrate, not because of an Anglo-French
linguistic difficulty, but rather because of very different operating
systems in the two countries.
Q376 Lord Dear:
The thing about terminology, and this cropped up when we were
in The Hague and Brussels last week, and pretty well everyone
was saying there was a difficulty, not in understanding the language,
because by and large English is the lingua franca but in
the way in which a word or a phrase can have totally different
connotations depending on the accusatorial or inquisitorial system.
The easy answer is that we should have a common dictionary, a
common lexicon and that is a long way off I guess. I wonder if
you saw it as a real problem, which they perceived to be a problem
across in The Hague and in Brussels, or whether it is something
we just wait to resolve itself?
Assistant Chief Constable Gargan: My
personal view is that the only pragmatic way around that is through
goodwill and better understanding of one another's systems. That
is where the SOCA liaison officer network really comes into its
own, when you are operating with a country and you actually have
people embedded there who have worked with the police and judiciary
there, worked with examining magistrates and have developed fixes
to work round specific problems that exist and commonly crop up
in operations.
Q377 Lord Dear:
To explain the correct terminology. One of the things we could
consider doing is to put a helpful recommendation into the report.
I cannot speak for my colleagues here but it is one of the things
clearly that we could consider. Since they are in a perceived
area, would it help you to have some sort of extra clarity injected
into that issue? I am not sure, sitting here, how you would do
it.
Chief Constable Jones: Absolutely, particularly
words like "intelligence" and "information"
and there are significant misunderstandings there which inhibit
the momentum which Sir Ronnie and I have already talked about.
At the risk of being controversial, the recent discussion around
pre-charge detention amplified quite well the differences of appreciation
of each other's processes and systems from very learned judges
and lawyers on either side of the debate. It is a big issue and
for the public it is a big issue.
Q378 Lord Mawson:
A lot of my life has been spent in trying to bring together quite
complex partnerships to make things work out of silo, but it seems
to me a lot of this area is about human relationships, not only
in this country but in 27 countries. Do you think enough is being
invested in the whole of that, in people and relationships? When
you actually start to get those things in place, all sorts of
things get dealt with quite quickly, whereas the systems and the
processes are not actually dealing with them. Do you think the
investment is right for the whole of that area?
Chief Constable Jones: It is not sufficient,
and one of the issues for Europol is that their visibility is
not high enough in the human sense at a senior professional level
in the way that some other European bodies are, and we do need
to invest in development on either side; I am not pointing a finger
at Europol. It is absolutely critical, but once you have the key
players, you overcome issues around threats of compromising information
and what have you. In my opinion it is not routinely invested
in sufficiently and it is the word "routine", it is
looking at cross-training or at regular fora for people at the
right level in different organisations. There is a risk that SOCA,
although it does not want to be a choke point, could become a
choke point. You have hit on a very important issue there.
Q379 Chairman:
Whilst it is clearly desirable to use SOCA as a filter, it could
be that what get obscured are Europol's relations with the UK
forces, and perhaps they do not know and understand that.
Chief Constable Jones: That is absolutely
right, and in some of the reforms to our training and development,
as we are revisiting this now through green papers and what have
you, we ought to look to create the space for more of internationalism
to come back in to our agenda because clearly we are up against
a global ideological terrorism threat but we are also seeing the
emergence of new forms of organised criminality as well which
are global in their reach and not just one country or even two
or three countries and we need to take those on.
Sir Ronnie Flanagan: Mr Gargan referred
to the establishment of an international police assistance board.
This deals with all sorts of international police assistance that
we in the UK would offer in areas outside Europol's remit. The
reason it is important to mention it is as I was leading on this
to advise in a cross-departmental Whitehall way, involving of
course the Home Office but also the Foreign Office, DfID, the
Ministry of Defence, Secretary of State for Scotland and Northern
Ireland. What we identified as absolutely critical was this concept
of having a one-stop shop. Relating that back to Europol, it is
absolutely crucial that we in the UK have a one-stop shop. I cannot
think of a better body or a more appropriate body than SOCA in
that national sense. Undoubtedly, it does have shortcomings. SOCA,
for example, has no remit in relation to counter-terrorism, so
suddenly you find our Met colleagues, who have very much an international
remit in that regard, deploy representatives to Europol quite
outside SOCA. So there are shortcomings with SOCA but the advantages,
in my view, very much outweigh the shortcomings. The trick is,
and we will be dealing with this in subsequent questions, how
to allow fully effective bilateral communication, force to force,
but in a way that is complementary and feeds into the central
mechanism. From my point of view, I would like to stress the absolutely
crucial nature of having this one-stop shop.
Chairman: You have posed the question
very well; it is the answers which are perhaps more difficult.
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