Uncorrected Evidence 364

1.	This is an uncorrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others.
2.	Any public use of, or reference to, the contents should make clear that neither witnesses nor Members have had the opportunity to correct the record. The transcript is not yet an approved formal record of these proceedings.
3.	Members who receive this for the purpose of correcting questions addressed by them to witnesses are asked to send corrections to the Committee Assistant.
4.	Prospective witnesses may receive this in preparation for any written or oral evidence they may in due course give to the Committee.

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Home Affairs Committee

on Tuesday 11 March 2008

Members present

Keith Vaz, in the Chair

Tom Brake

Ms Karen Buck

Mr James Clappison

Mrs Ann Cryer

David T. C. Davies

Mrs Janet Dean

Gwyn Prosser

Bob Russell

Martin Salter

Mr Gary Streeter

Mr David Winnick

________________

Memorandum submitted by the Mayor of London

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Mr Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London, gave evidence.

Q56 Chairman: Can I open this session by referring all present to the Register of Members' Interests. Mr Livingstone, thank you very much for coming to give evidence to the Select Committee in our inquiry into policing in the 21st century. Obviously London's role in policing is absolutely crucial. In your view, does the Police Service in London have the appropriate structures and capacity for dealing with the challenges of the 21st century, in particular counter-terrorism and in preparation for the Olympics in 2012?

Mr Livingstone: We have just reached the end of an eight-year programme of expansion going from 25,000 uniformed staff to 35,000 and a big 4,000 of those have been PCSOs who were not in anyone's thinking ten years ago. Sir John Stephens made changes and Sir Ian Blair made even more substantial changes and, under the threat of terrorism that arose after 9/11, those were absolutely essential. I think, now that we are seeing the falling crime figures on the back of rolling out Neighbourhood Policing, you can begin to see - there will still be some changes but this is broadly the structure that is important - the huge specialist operations tackling terrorism but a return to neighbourhood policing that is giving us the raw intelligence on who gets in and out of trouble. For decades kids could get into vandalism, petty crime and not be identified by the police. Now, half a dozen kids hanging around on a street corner, the neighbourhood officer walks by and knows them by name and they know they are known. If I can give one specific example: we introduced 21 teams of 18 PCSOs in the outer London boroughs around transport modes, particularly targeting the buses, and crime by under-16s has fallen 19% in the 12 months following. So, all those academics, Home Office and Treasury people who told us for decades that putting police on the streets was a waste of money, I think, have been demonstrated to be wildly wrong. Clearly, we are putting in place now the structure for the Olympics and, bearing in mind the venues remain afterwards, it is a permanent legacy for policing because they will always be doing high-profile events and they will always be a target for terrorism.

Q57 Chairman: The evidence given to us so far by Sir Ronnie Flanagan, who has just finished his major inquiry into policing, is to look at the better use of police resources rather than more police officers. In fact, Sir Ronnie told the Committee that the days of the large increase in police officers was over, but you have promised additional officers. Have you had a chance to look at the proposals that Sir Ronnie has put forward?

Mr Livingstone: I think it is absolutely right. I asked Sir John Stephens to give thought to how many police are needed to police London, and after about a year of looking at this he became back and said, "I need 35,000 uniformed officers." We have now achieved that. We are still looking at new initiatives. We are looking at the moment at expanding some of the neighbourhood police teams in a project with the Ministry of Justice and what we call "neighbourhood pathways" in those wards in London that bear the brunt of returning criminals from the prison system. We think that perhaps increasing police in those areas will help prevent some of them falling back into crime. We will continue to be tweaking at this, but I think the 35,000 is broadly right. We have plans for some expansion this year, but clearly, having taken about 40% of the increase in total policing numbers nationally over the last ten years, I do not expect to be able to do it again.

Q58 Mr Clappison: Mr Mayor, violent crime is a big problem for many Londoners. Twenty-eight per cent of Londoners say they are very worried about violent crime, compared with a national average of 17%. I was supplied yesterday with some statistics from the House of Commons library which showed that since you became Mayor total violent crime has gone up every year, except for last year when there was a change in recorded statistics and the figures were not comparable. Do you accept that crime is now higher than before you became Mayor and that London is a more violent city?

Mr Livingstone: I absolutely reject that. We had, with some oscillations up and down, basically a 50-year increase in crime that started in the 1950s. It peaked nationally, I think, in 1999; it peaked in London in 2003. Since that time we have had a 21% reduction in overall crime. The murder rate is down 28%, gun and knife enabled crime are both down by over 20%, rape is down by over 25%, and that is against a background where we add to the figures. In one year recently there was an increase in what is labelled "gun crime", but it was mainly the use of CS gas. There was an increase in sexual crime when we reclassified it so that flashers were included in the sexual crime figures; we will see an increase in violent crime where we amended the figures to include spitting; so the figures, if anything, are being expanded all the time. There would be something seriously wrong if we put 10,000 extra officers on the street and you do not get a cut in crime.

Q59 Mr Clappison: These are figures that have come from the House of Commons library. They put total violent crime together and they show that it has gone up every year since you became Mayor and that it is now higher than before you became Mayor. Do you accept that violent crime is higher now than when you became Mayor or are they wrong?

Mr Livingstone: They are, clearly, completely different to my figures. I have to say, I have always trusted first now Lord Stephens and Sir Ian Blair to bring to me figures that they were confident in. They are fed into the Home Office figures, and, I repeat, crime continued to rise until 2003; since then it has fallen by 21% overall and violent crime has fallen by more than the average. We can swap our figures. It might be perhaps the Committee needs a group of statisticians to boil down the figures. It might also be from 2 May people will have less interest in inflating the figures.

Q60 Ms Buck: We all know that there is a concern at the moment about youth crime and some of the issues around gangs. Extra policing and enforcement powers are clearly part of the answer to dealing with that, but, in addition, there is a critical need to deal with some of the issues around prevention. What role has the Mayor got in dealing with issues of youth crime and prevention?

Mr Livingstone: It is important to remember the Mayor sets the police budget, and that is it. The application of that budget is a matter for the Commissioner, i.e. the day to day administration is matter for the Commissioner. I am not in the position of, say, the Mayor of New York, who has basically operational control of the Commissioner and the budget, and I suspect no-one would actually want that for any mayor, but the relationship is one in which, I think, all the agreements I have achieved with the two commissioners to put resources back on the streets have worked. The second area is what you do. We can flood the streets with police, but wherever you go in London the kids say, "There is nothing to do around here." The Government has now given my �59 million, and we have added �20 million to the LGA budget to restore youth provision. I grew up in a city where in the evenings and at weekends kids were taken to organised activities, where our parents and others were role models and mentors, that used our energy, and we need to rebuild that so that kids have got something to do other than hang round and get caught up in gangs. I am delighted. At the moment the total spending on youth provision in the evenings and at weekends in London and for all 32 boroughs is �60 million. This is �79 million to spend over two years, so the objective has to be to double this provision and then sustain it.

Q61 Ms Buck: On that second point, there is also an issue around young people and using public transport. Have you been able to do anything since you have become Mayor in dealing with some of those concerns about young people's behaviour on buses and transport?

Mr Livingstone: We had a spike of anti-social behaviour in the immediate aftermath of making free travel on the buses for under-16s, and our response to that was to create the safer transport groups in the 21 outer boroughs. We are now rolling them out in the 11 inner boroughs this year. As I said, in the year following that, crime by under-16s on the buses was cut by 19% and the conviction rate went up about 20%. From June, where initially we decided the photo-pass would only apply to children over 14, I think we will make that from the age of 11 (so at that point where children move from primary to secondary school they have to have a pass with the photo ID or they will not be able to get on the bus), and that is going to be easier for conductors to enforce. It is much easier to tell the difference between a ten year old and a 14 year old than it is a 14 and a 16.

Q62 David Davies: Mr Livingstone, the figures that you are using, are they based on the British Crime Survey, which the Chief Constable of the BTP has recently said are not that accurate, or are they based on recorded crime?

Mr Livingstone: They are the Recorded Crime Statistics. It is quite interesting: when you track the Recorded Crime Statistics and the British Crime Survey, over the period since 2000 our crime statistics show an 18% reduction and the British Crime Statistics - it is an opinion poll really, a good poll, and we spend a lot of money on opinion polls, so I am not going to rubbish them - shows a 15% reduction. That is within the margin of error. I think the problem with British Crime Statistics is I know people are interviewed in their home, but if the overwhelming background of the media is endless crime, it encourages a fear. The big difference between, say, London and New York is that, as crime figures came down in New York, New York's media broadcast this world good news story. I have yet to see on the front page of the Evening Standard: "Murder, rape down 28%". In almost any other city in the world you would expect to see that. When you analyse fear of crime by newspaper readership, people who read the tabloids have a greater fear of crime than those who read the broadsheets.

Q63 Mr Clappison: So it is all the papers' fault!

Mr Livingstone: In the London BBC and ITV regional news programmes they have a slogan, "If it leads, it leads", and it is quite bizarre that as crime and serious crimes is coming down they are not instantly reporting it. It sells papers. People love horror stories; here they get one free on the TV.

Q64 Tom Brake: Mr Livingstone, you have talked in glowing terms of the extra police that you have provided and, consequently, the drop in crime that you say is associated with that. Equally, you are on record as saying that no mayor, no commissioner of police can stop young people killing each other if they have not been given a moral code. Are you responsible for reducing the crime levels, or are you in fact not able to address crime? Which is it?

Mr Livingstone: The point I am making is that, even if we had 70,000 police on the streets, a child that takes a knife to school can end up being killed with it in a fight, and, therefore, the moral code is important. My parents, that post-war generation, gave me a very clear sense of what was right and what was wrong and a very clear sense of a responsibility to society. I was taught from a very early age that you get up and give up your seat to a woman on the train. Now we have to put stickers up to remind people to do that for pregnant women. I do think you are looking at a generation today, and I know this is controversial, these are the children of the kids that grew up in the eighties when society was talking about, "Get your snout in the trough; no such thing as society; look after number one; greed is good, as Gordon Gekko said. I do think society has a duty, through its parents and through its schools, to give a basic moral code and I think a lot of parents do not do that - they did not get it themselves - and there was a newspaper story the other day about teachers having to do this. We have got to get to those parents who have never been shown how to be parents.

Q65 Tom Brake: Mr Livingstone, I would share your views on the success or otherwise of the Thatcherite years. However, you seem to be suggesting that really there is nothing that the police can do and you as Mayor can do about tackling the crimes that are associated with the sort of young people that you are talking about.

Mr Livingstone: There is a real difference between saying the police cannot stop somebody killing someone else, unless it is very ugly circumstances, to saying the police cannot do anything about it. We have had incredibly effective targeting. We used to have a much higher rate of murder amongst the black communities. We established Operation Trident and rebuilt confidence between the black communities and the police. The conviction rate for black-on-black murders under Operation Trident: at the beginning, before Trident, it was only a third of convictions; it is now running at two-thirds of convictions because the black community have gained the confidence that the police are on their side and they are giving information up. When we have specific, targeted operations, as we did over Christmas and New Year, against clubs where we know a lot of the customers carry knives and close them, a dramatic reduction in knife crime around that time. You can extend CCTV. Every time you are on a bus we have six or seven cameras trained on you, we are gradually getting better and better at arresting people, even people who carry out quite small crimes. We can do all this, but it is not just the police on their own, it is wider society: parents, teachers, community leaders have all got to be involved.

Q66 Mr Streeter: I was interested in your answer to Karen Buck, Mr Livingstone, when you said that people in this country would not want the Mayor of London to have operational control of the police, because in your submission to us you suggest that one of the reforms you support is that the Metropolitan Police Authority's executive functions should be taken over by the Mayor of London. It seemed to me that was more or less saying the same thing. Do you think that people in this country would be comfortable with you as Mayor having day-to-day control of London police?

Mr Livingstone: That is the Metropolitan Police Authority, which is the small body that is comprised of half of Assembly members and then co-optees; it is not the Metropolitan Police Service. They cannot help the Commissioner how to operate either. I think there is confusion. The problem with the Metropolitan Police Authority is, like the old BBC Board of Governors, it is the body they are accountable to but it is also involved in advising, guiding and managing. So I would rather that the Mayor appointed a small core of non politicians with expertise in this area, representing the community, representing people who have real expertise in crime, and the MPA then became accountable to the London Assembly, so you strengthen their role as well. At the moment they are not.

Q67 Mr Streeter: So you are not saying that you should have day-to-day control of the Metropolitan Police?

Mr Livingstone: No, I do not think so. I think Mayor Giuliani was particularly successful and when you have got a good and honest mayor, that is all going to be fine. The risk from a mayor that is not so honest---. How would someone like Mr Yates have conducted his inquiry into the cash for honours scandal if I was, effectively, his line manager? I do not want that situation.

Q68 Martin Salter: Mr Livingstone, how do you react to David Cameron's proposal that we should have elected police commissioners? Is there not some validity in Liberty's criticism that this could lead to excessive politicisation of the police?

Mr Livingstone: In London we have an elected mayor and there is clear responsibility for providing the police budget; the Home Secretary appoints the Commissioner. I actually think that is now an anachronism, it should be the Mayor that makes that appointment, but I notice no capital city in the world allows it. Wherever the government is based, they always insist on appointing their police commissioner, so this is a pattern we are not going to break. I do not dismiss everything David Cameron says. I am particularly struck by his statement that you would never have got police back on the streets of London if there was not a directly elected mayor, and you needed somebody who actually set the police budget to be in a position to negotiate and say, "I am prepared to give you eight years of expanded spending. I want police back on the streets", and that was the deal I struck with Sir John and it is a deal that has been honoured by Ian Blair, and I think that a clear point of accountability, the person who sets the council tax, subject to the Assembly, able to say as you sit there with the Commissioning Office, "I will give you X million more. How are they going to be deployed?", and the two commissioners have always honoured the deals we have done. If police numbers in London go down, Londoners have the Mayor to blame, because the Mayor has not provided the funding.

Q69 Gwyn Prosser: Mr Livingstone, I want to ask you about the relationship between minority groups in London and the Met Police. In your view (and perhaps if you have got any evidence you could share it with us), how has that changed within the time that you have been Mayor and, in particular, what effect have the counter-terrorism measures and activities had on that relationship?

Mr Livingstone: Twenty-five years ago we had riots in London and we eventually had the hacking to death of a police officer at Broadwater Farm - relations were appalling. Before I became Mayor at the time of David Copeland's free bonds, I went to community events where the police were working and I was struck by how already things had begun to change. Sir John Stephens drove that forward, Ian Blair has continued that and I think there is an incredible level of trust between London's ethnic minorities. If you look at the Muslim community, which is the one most under pressure at the moment, a police officer that mishandles a stop and search clearly worsens the situation, but I think the vast majority of our police are very sensitive to the fact that the Muslim community needs to be kept on side. It is our eyes and ears; we get much of the intelligence that leads us to prevent atrocities from the Muslim community. If you actually look at the raid in Forest Gate, in Newham, which could have stretched relations to breaking point, I was struck by the number of Muslim leaders saying, "We know these things have to be done. If there is a suspicion, there has to be a raid." We learnt how to handle it a bit better out of that. What is stretching relations between the Muslim community and wider society is not the police, it is the war in Iraq, and anybody whoever sits before you and says that the major force fuelling terrorism is not the war in Iraq, they are really misleading you.

Q70 Gwyn Prosser: The specific effects of counter-terrorism activities?

Mr Livingstone: This is a tension. My primary response in all these debates is if something would genuinely make it safer for Londoners, we have to do it, and that is the balance against civil liberties, but it is a constant struggle. I followed the twists and turns of how many days. I am not persuaded to go beyond the present limit at all, and being honest and slightly humorous, if you say to a police officer, "You would like 42 years", they would say, "That is fine" - the police are inevitably going to take whatever enables them to do their job more easily. Members of Parliament have got to balance that against any long-term damage to established civil liberties, which might in the end---. There is no point fighting Al Qaeda if at the end of the day we have lost most of the liberties which were are told they so hate.

Q71 Gwyn Prosser: You mentioned stop and search. What do you think the effect of Sir Ronnie Flanagan's stop and search proposals have had on the relationship?

Mr Livingstone: I am attracted to them, because anything that reduces the time of the stop and search is to be welcomed. You have got to retain the essence of what the Macpherson Lawrence Inquiry did in terms of accountability. If we can have a small handheld computer and something is tapped in, or if each officer has got a named identity card that they can give with a phone contact point, that is fine. I think one of the great mistakes of the last ten years is this drift into the idea you can manage everything with monitoring and checking and reforms to the centre. I think an awful lot more is achieved if you devolve and let people have more responsibility locally.

Q72 Gwyn Prosser: On a number of occasions you have said that you want to see a police force in London that looks more like London. How are you progressing in that and what effect will that have?

Mr Livingstone: We have made very good progress. It is very difficult when you inherit an established force; you can only change the intakes coming in. It is much more instructive to look at the police community support officers, which look much more like London. What is really good about that is that a lot of people are doing a year or two PCSOs and then feel they have the confidence to go to Hendon and train to be a full police officer. Bearing in mind what I remember of tensions between the police and ethnic minorities in London 25 years ago, it is never going to be perfect and it never can be because their job is to police, it is to control, it is to check, but it is infinitely better than it was. I never go to bed worrying if there is going to be a riot in London; whereas that was a constant threat 25 years ago.

Q73 Chairman: Are you disappointed that more progress has not been made in appointing senior figures from the black and Asian community within the Police Force to senior positions in the Metropolitan Police, because we have not had very many in the last four years?

Mr Livingstone: This is not just in the police, it is in the fire brigade, it is amongst my own senior staff. Progress is being made. There are black and Asian and female appointments being made, but it is always going to lag a good decade behind that initial wave of recruitment and we have just got to push much harder. I think you actually may need special mentoring and help, because there is a huge focus of attention on the first few faces that appear at the front of any organisation, they almost have to be perfect, and the slightest mistake, the slightest error, all the hostile evidence of watching to exploit it, and we have a couple of examples (which I do not need to go into before your committee) where, had they not been high ranking ethnic minority officers, their small indiscretions might not have achieved the attention they would have liked.

Q74 Mr Winnick: You said the police would take any number of days beyond the 28 they can have; so you are not surprised that Sir Ian Blair is one of the very few people in leading authority who support the Government on extending the 28 days?

Mr Livingstone: No, I do not agree with him on that. That is the difference between---. You know where I am coming from politically. Before I had responsibility in some small measure for London's safety I would have been totally in the camp of no extra powers for the police.

Q75 Mr Winnick: On the basis that all of the candidates are for necessary protection against terrorism, we would listen, obviously, to the other two who are appearing after you, Mr Livingstone, but if the three of you are very much opposed to extending it beyond 28 days, should not the Government take that very much into account in deciding on the policy?

Mr Livingstone: Yes. We may reach a point where this problem of decoding the encrypted data on computers means you have to come back and look at 28 days, but I would think it would be unusual to have a situation, unusual but not impossible, where you had not already identified other things you could charge them for whilst you continued to work on the computer. My broad view would be only to extend the encroachment of civil liberties once it had been irrevocably demonstrated that it was running the risk of costing us lives.

Q76 Mr Winnick: That is more or less the evidence given to us by the Director of Public Prosecutions. Have you notified the Government in one way or another of your views on this subject?

Mr Livingstone: I think I have made that clear. Mind you, they do not seem to be paying much attention to me or my rival candidates on the question of the third runway either.

Q77 Bob Russell: You indicated earlier that of the 35,000 uniform officers, 4,000 of them are PCSOs. Following on Mr Prosser's question about the ethnic diversity of police officers, are the PCSOs more representative of the London community?

Mr Livingstone: Much more and, in particular, in terms of women as well. I do see that almost as an entry into the full police service later on, so we are very encouraged by that, because that is the group of officers that Londoners most see. Seventy five per cent of their time is spent out on the beat.

Q78 Chairman: Finally, Mr Mayor, if there was one thing the Government could do to help you with your policing priorities in London, apart from giving you more money to do it, what would that be?

Mr Livingstone: Part of the problem is this, and Sir Ronnie Flanagan's report touches on this question of the damping. I would say give us the freedom financially to manage our own budgets. Ninety-seven per cent of all tax in this country is collected by central government and then doled out. The life of ministers is a stream of people like me coming from their towns and counties, saying, "Can we have more money for this, more money for that?" At some point the Government has to let go. When I told that figure of 97% to the Mayor in Moscow he said, "That is worse than Russia under Stalin", and that is absolutely true. There was once a promise to return the business rate. That would help.

Q79 Chairman: Mr Livingstone, thank you for coming to give evidence.

Mr Livingstone: Thank you. It is a pleasure to be here.

Witnesses: Mr Boris Johnson MP, Conservative Candidate for Mayor of London 2008, gave evidence.

Q80 Chairman: Mr Johnson, thank you very much for coming today. As you know, the Select Committee has begun an inquiry into policing in the 21st century and we thought it would be helpful, in view of London's essential role in policing, for you to come and give evidence today. Are you satisfied that the London Police Service has the structures and capacity for dealing with the challenges that will confront London over the next few years?

Mr Johnson: Let me begin by saying that, of course, I think the police do a fantastic job and I certainly agree with much of what the Mayor has said about the decline in some crimes in this city over the last few years, though I do not think he necessarily reflects the reality as it is perceived by many people in this city, and I certainly do not think that in the case of violent crime his picture reflected what the Home Secretary herself seemed to indicate when she said she was worried about walking down the streets of Peckham---

Q81 Chairman: I thought it was Hackney.

Mr Johnson: Hackney, forgive me. I mean to cast no aspersions on either borough. ---and her colleague, Emily Thornberry, who said there was not a child in her constituency who had not been mugged for a mobile phone, or whatever it was. I do think there are two interrelated problems that we need to take more seriously, and they are gang violence and the general climate of disorder on public transport. I think there are things we could do with the structures of the Police Service at the moment that would make a difference to those two particular problems, and I have urged that we reallocate some of the Mayor's publicity budget for next year, or some of the increment in the Mayor's publicity budget for next year, so that we get more uniformed personnel, PCSOs, on the buses giving people a sense of reassurance and security, which they do not have at the moment. One of the crimes that is going up, in spite of some of the statistics we have just heard, is bus crime, violent crime on buses is up 3.4%, and if you talk to Londoners this is something they care about and something they want addressed.

Q82 Chairman: Do you personally feel safe at night in London?

Mr Johnson: It depends where you are, but by and large, yes, I would feel safe to walk down the streets of any neighbourhood in London, but I have to say that many people do not feel safe and I think the job of the Mayor is to deal with people's real apprehension and their real sense that the city is too violent and there are too many people who pose a real threat to them. In particular, I think what the Mayor said about a climate of disorder and instability as a result of deep social changes in the 1980s, or whatever his analysis was, is true in the sense I think we have the problem, I do not necessarily agree with his analysis, but I think it s up to the Mayor to do something about it, and that is why I want to see far more done to sort out this order on buses and that is why I want to see far more done to sort out gang culture.

Q83 Chairman: Mr Johnson, we have taken evidence already from Sir Ronnie Flanagan about the whole debate on additional police officers as opposed to the better use of police officers. Where do you stand on this particular issue? Do you think London needs more officers or do you think it is a question of their better use?

Mr Johnson: I think it is a question of getting more officers out on the street. I agree profoundly with the analysis that the public wants officers out on the street. We benefit as a city and as a society from having the reassurance of police out there and we can do much better. They have a much higher ratio in New York of police officers out on the beat than we do in London, and we all know the arguments about getting rid of some of the bureaucracy, we all know how we might do it, and that is why I do want to take the opportunity of taking the Chair of the MPA, working with Sir Ian, to get more of his officers out on the street where we want them and I think there is a case to be made for using more civilian power in the back room to deal with processing of forms. I am a great fan of the PCSOs. I think we should drop all the kind of---

Chairman: We will be coming to them later. A quick supplementary from Mr Clappison.

Q84 Mr Clappison: The point you made about fear of crime in London: I have a 14 year old constituent, the daughter of one of my constituents, who no longer feels safe to travel on buses in London. My constituency is very near to London, and her father came to see me from Potters Bar to complain about his daughter being mugged on a bus in the afternoon in North London. There seems to be a widespread perception amongst those of us who have constituencies near to London that there is more of a problem with violent crime affecting young people. Will you give priority to crime against young people? There seems to be an amount of feeling that it is of a lesser order. I do not think that is wrong.

Mr Johnson: Yes, and I just do not think we can be complacent about it. We cannot be complacent about people's real experiences on buses. I think there are things you can do. I applaud the Mayor. There is one act of theft that I will defend before this committee, and that is the Mayor's determination to steal my policies. I think his decision now, late in the day, to say that he wants to try live CCTV on buses, if I understood him, is a good idea, and I think we should do that: because very often, if you talk to the police, the problem they have with cracking down on young kids who create violence on buses and intimidate other kids on buses is that the bus companies do not have any obligation under statute to hand over the CCTV, and I think we should change that. I think it would make a huge difference. I am told by the police responsible for this in many London boroughs, in the case of a reported crime, the relevant CCTV is only handed over in 5% of cases and in the best London boroughs it is only handed over in 30% per cent of cases. We could do much better. I think we should have a by-law to insist that the CCTV is handed over by the bus companies in an effort to crack down on what I think is a real problem and must not be under estimated.

Q85 Ms Buck: You talk in your introduction in a lot of the coverage of crime about violent crime, yet your specific proposal concerns bus crime. What is the evidence that you have that suggests that this is Londoners' top priority for your one specific and costly proposal? Can you give us an indication of what has been happening in terms of staffing on the London transport system over the last few years?

Mr Johnson: Of course what happened was that there was a decision taken to remove conductors from buses, which, of course, is impossible to revoke because it will be financially extremely expensive, though I do think there is scope. Again, I applaud the Mayor for coming late in the day to the idea of putting more PCSOs, beefing up the transport teams, on buses to give people back a sense of security. You cannot restore conductors, but you can have more PCSOs on buses and I certainly think we should do that. To get to the first part of your question, I do think there is a relation between what goes on on the top deck of a bus and what goes on on the street generally. There is a relation between crime on buses and violent crime on buses and crime on the street, because if a young tearaway thinks he or, indeed, she can dominate people on the top deck of a bus and get away with mayhem, that person is going to get off the bus and think that he or she can dominate the street as well, and so I do think it has a very corrosive effect. I also think, by the way, that we should be much less tolerant of habitual theft on buses in the form of fair evasion. I am sorry, Mr Clappison, just let me finish this point. We are currently tolerating losses of �46 million per year in lost fares, and if we cracked down harder on that, we could, of course, spend a lot of that revenue more sensibly on staffing buses with the kind of people the public want to see.

Q86 Chairman: I was not trying to interrupt you to stop you, except that we would like briefer answers because a lot of the members wish to ask you questions.

Mr Johnson: Forgive me.

Chairman: Could you be as brief as possible.

Q87 Ms Buck: Just to pursue that point, what actually has happened to the transport police staffing and PCSOs on buses in recent years and what would be your proposal in terms of the trend?

Mr Johnson: What I want to do is to reallocate, as I say. The Mayor's publicity budget is going to go up from 64 million to 84 million next year. I think some of that money could be spent on getting another 440 transport PCSOs on some of the rowdier bus routes where there are not enough transport PCSOs. I would also like an additional 50 transport police, because one of the big problems we have got is suburban railway stations where people feel very threatened after eight o'clock at night. We only have about 330 transport police around London. I think we could do a lot better there and give people an extra sense of security, and I would also like to give the Revenue Protection Inspectors greater powers to interrogate people about their names and addresses if they are caught evading fares.

Q88 Ms Buck: Is it the case that the 440 that you are proposing is only about a quarter of the total increase that there has been since 2000? Why should it be that that number is as transformatory as you claim when the number that has actually changed over the last eight years has been so much bigger?

Mr Johnson: I understand what you are saying. I do not think anybody would claim that any single measure is going to be transformatory, to use your word, but I do think that something needs to be done, I do think we cannot be complacent about this. We cannot just throw our hands up in the air and say this is all the fault of Margaret Thatcher. We do need to do specific things to tackle the problem of crime on buses and people's sense of---. You asked me earlier on, I think, what gave me the impression that Londoners cared about this?

Q89 Ms Buck: Much of the evidence.

Mr Johnson: Believe me, I travel all around London boroughs talking to people, and it is the number one issue for many people across London, and not just late at night: people are feeling intimidated particularly at 3.30 in the afternoon when school is out and there are too many kids on the buses acting up. What I want to do is much more systematically take away their right to free travel, and take it away permanently, but then give them the right to earn it back if they want.

Q90 Ms Buck: You also make the general point about looking at (your words) the 3.2 billion policing budget for efficiency savings. What figure has been achieved, do you know, in the Met in terms of efficiency savings and what is your own personal target?

Mr Johnson: I am not in favour of losing any money from the Metropolitan Police budget. It is going to go up to 3.5 billion and I heartily applaud that. What I want to do, by working with Sir Ian and using my role as Chairman of the MPA, is to make sure we allocate those funds that London needs more effectively, as I was saying earlier on, to get a proportion of London's officers out on the beat where we want them.

Q91 Ms Buck: Do you have a target figure?

Mr Johnson: Of course I do not have a target figure, because I have not yet been able to go through the budget in detail, but I can assure you that that will be a priority.

Q92 Tom Brake: I think you accused the Mayor of stealing your policies on getting PCSOs on buses. When did you first call for extra PCSOs on buses?

Mr Johnson: Several months ago.

Q93 Tom Brake: Thank you.

Mr Johnson: He seems lately to have espoused this. I think it was at the transport hustings two weeks ago that he developed---

Chairman: Mr Brake, your question!

Q94 Tom Brake: There are many PCSOs travelling on buses already and there have been for a number of months. You have also called for extra BTP officers. They are not within your remit or responsibility as Mayor. How would you go about securing those?

Mr Johnson: It is curious you should say that, because as far as I can tell, having talked to the BTP at length about this, they would be very grateful for some Transport for London money to be allocated to them, as it already is, by the way, to supply another 50 transport police.

Q95 Tom Brake: What is your financial pledge then in terms of how much you are willing to put into that?

Mr Johnson: If you have studied my manifesto in detail, as I am sure you have, Mr Brake, you will discover that, again, simply by reallocating some of the increment in Transport for London's non recruitment publicity budget for next year, we can achieve---

Q96 Tom Brake: So the publicity budget is paying for that as well.

Mr Johnson: I do think that when Londoners are faced with the choice of more police officers or more press officers in London, I know what they would go for.

Q97 Mrs Dean: Mr Johnson, neighbourhood crime mapping is already undertaken by the police. What difference would your proposal to publish this information make?

Mr Johnson: Of course the difference, Mrs Dean, is that what I am proposing is that the public should be able to see the information, and I know that this is controversial because I know that people worry that it could blight neighbourhoods, for instance, and I know that there are anxieties about whether police information might be prejudiced in some way. I do not think that either of those are sensible objections and I think the public deserves to be treated as though it was grown up and as though it deserved information about what is really going on in their city. The police have crime maps. There is no reason at all why crime mapping should not be made available to all us so we know what is happening in London and we can use that information as a tool to make our points to the police about what is really happening in our neighbourhoods and we can, thereby, urge them to deal with the problems in our neighbourhoods. Additionally, of course, what I would like is to have proper monthly meetings between borough commanders and council leaders as widely advertised as possible so that everybody can go along with the information that is publicly available about what is happening on their street and make their point.

Q98 Mrs Dean: Would this not make it more difficult for the police to operate and retain discretion but also to target crime where they need to target it, without the public trying to get them to tackle it as they would wish, rather than the police feeling that it would be better tackled in a different way?

Mr Johnson: Mrs Dean, I do not think it is wholly illogical or wrong to allow the public some say in asking the police to tackle crime as they would wish, and I think that might be beneficial for policing in London.

Q99 Mr Winnick: On the make-up of the police force, Mr Johnson, some in your party over the years have dismissed having more ethnic minority police officers, be it in London and elsewhere, to use the phrase so often used, as political correctness---

Mr Johnson: I do not agree with that.

Q100 Mr Winnick: ---even if you leave off the "gone mad". Where do you stand on this particular point?

Mr Johnson: I firmly believe that London should be policed by a police force that reflects our community, and I think what is happening with the PCSOs is very hopeful. If you look at the recruitment to the PCSOs, we now have about 50% from black and minority ethnic groups and I hope that this will feed through into recruitment in the Metropolitan Police generally. We are making progress, it is not as fast as it could be, and I agree---

Q101 Mr Winnick: How can we make it faster? If it is your wish that it should be quicker and that the Police Force should, in fact, represent London as a whole, what would be your policy to quicken the number of ethnic minority individuals within the Police Force in London?

Mr Johnson: One thing you have got to do is build up a much greater sense of cohesion between the community and the police, and you have got to make people feel that they have a much stronger link with the police and that they are not just howling past in their squad cars with their sirens blaring, that they are part of our lives and part of our world, and that is why I have great hopes for the monthly meetings with the borough commanders and the community. Hammersmith and Fulham had a crime summit the other day which was very well attended by all members of the community, and if you are there and you are mingling with the police and you gain an understanding of what policing is all about, then I hope that it will lead to much more recruitment from communities that currently feel excluded or do not identify with the police.

Q102 Chairman: But it is pretty bad at the moment, is it not? There is only one assistant commissioner who is of ethnic origin. Over the last four years there have been no more. Would you not perhaps use positive action to try and get some more people appointed as commanders and beyond? Monthly meetings are very helpful, obviously, but some further action perhaps is necessary.

Mr Johnson: Of course, you need positive role models and you need to give people every possible encouragement and support. You have got to be very careful not to lapse into a quota system that generates resentment and invalidates the whole selection process.

Q103 Tom Brake: On the monthly meetings, just to clarify, what extra are they going to add beyond what is already discussed in the police consultative meetings and, indeed, the ward panel meetings that are organised at a ward level?

Mr Johnson: I agree with you, there is already an abundance of means by which the neighbourhood is supposed to be interacting with the police, but, as far as I can see, you get the same old suspects turning up with the same old---

Q104 Tom Brake: That happens at public meetings.

Mr Johnson: Perhaps, but I think we should try it and I think we should make sure these things are well advertised and that people have a genuine sense that this a forum in which they can make their point.

Q105 Mrs Cryer: Mr Johnson, you have already suggested that you would like 440 more PCSOs on the streets of London, and you have suggested that it would be useful to have them on buses and also that it would relieve other police officers from administrative duties at the station. It looks to me as if you are going to be spreading them a bit thinly. Mr Brake has suggested that this is already happening on the buses. You have also suggested that there should be some method of removing Oyster Cards from young people who have committed offences. Is that back of an envelope stuff or have you really thought about that? If so, how are you going to administer it?

Mr Johnson: There are already procedures for removing the right of free travel, not the Oyster Card itself but the right of free travel, from those who break the behaviour code. In principle, that happened 6,000 times last year. In reality, hardly anyone had their right to free travel revoked permanently. My proposal is that it should be permanently revoked unless and until the young person in question wants to earn it back through a scheme I am going to call "Pay back London", that would allow you, if you want to get back your right of free travel, to do some community service and prove that you value it and you are willing to give the community something back to get it back.

Q106 Mrs Cryer: What I wanted to know was who is going to make the decision to remove the Oyster Card?

Mr Johnson: There are already steps in place that removed rights of free travel from, as I said, 6,000 kids last year. The trouble is it is not being permanently revoked. People are reapplying and getting the ability to travel almost immediately. What I believe we need is a more substantial sanction.

Q107 Mrs Cryer: As regards PCSOs, you want to remove some of them back into the police stations to relieve officers from doing administrative work. It is said that often the PCSOs are very good at actually collecting information regarding potential terrorist outrages, and so if you remove them from the streets you will be losing that.

Mr Johnson: I understand the point you make completely, and I do not intend to remove PCSOs from the streets. I think actually as a country we should stop the general bashing of PCSOs and I think some of the "plastic policeman" rhetoric is misplaced. I think many of them are doing a fantastic job. They are very variable in quality and they are very variable in aspirations, but a lot of them want to go on to become warranted police officers, and they should be supported and encouraged, I just think there should be freedom to do a bit of both with the PCSO force; some of them might be better off in the back room and some of them would be better off out on the streets.

Q108 Martin Salter: Mr Johnson, do you support the Conservative Party proposals for elected police commissioners and, if so, could you explain why you have not argued for it in the Thames Valley, where we are both MPs, since your election in 2001?

Mr Johnson: I certainly think there is a case for more democratic accountability for police commissioners, and I myself believe that the Mayor of London should have a larger measure of democratic authority over the Metropolitan Commissioner. However, I accept that there is currently a difficulty, in the sense that the Commissioner is also responsible for counter-terrorism, which is a national responsibility, and, therefore, Home Office prerogatives are invoked, so there is a democratic difficulty there. I do think generally it would increase public confidence in the police and increase people's feeling of connection with what is going on if there were elected police chiefs. Yes, I do.

Q109 Martin Salter: But it is not without its problems?

Mr Johnson: It is not without its problems, and I accept the points that Liberty makes about the baleful effects of politicising the police. I would not want to see the politicising of the Police Force.

Q110 Martin Salter: One last question on recruitment, which is something that we both have had an issue with. You may be aware that on 4 February Thames Valley MPs joined a cross-party delegation of south-east MPs to protest to the Home Secretary about the aggressive recruitment policy of the Metropolitan Police Force in poaching over 1,000 police officers from surrounding forces over the last five years. You were not at that delegation. Two years ago you called for more police in your own constituency. It is a simple question, Mr Johnson. Do you support the steps to curb the loss of officers to the Metropolitan Police, or have your priorities changed since you became candidate for the Mayor of London?

Mr Johnson: I want to congratulate you, Mr Salter, on a brilliant attempt to put me in an impossible position.

Q111 Martin Salter: Let us see you wriggle then!

Mr Johnson: Let me reassure you, therefore, by saying that I am in favour of increasing recruitment all round, and I am very happy to see that actually one of the recent successes we are having is that we are succeeding in recruiting very well, both in London and in the Thames Valley. I am happy to say that the dilemma that you beautifully offer the conclusion of my interrogation does not arise for the time being.

Q112 Martin Salter: Are you saying that the Chief Constable of the Thames Valley was wrong to be raising this matter with the Metropolitan Police Commissioner and that all the MPs from the south-east, including several here, who attended that delegation were wrong to be raising this issue, that there is not really a problem?

Mr Johnson: As far as I am aware, the problem has been considerably ameliorated and I am happy to say that I support and encourage the recruitment of more police officers in both areas, and if you look at the figures, we are actually being very successful in recruiting in both areas.

Mr Winnick: You surprise us.

Chairman: We do have one last final question from Mr Russell.

Q113 Bob Russell: Mr Johnson, I wonder if I could seek some clarification. In reply to Mr Brake I think you said it was 50 extra officers for British Transport Police would be funded out of the Mayor's publicity budget.

Mr Johnson: Transport for London's budget.

Q114 Bob Russell: Transport for London; okay. The other one was that you were going to put additional resources, as I understand it, for PCSOs to go on the buses. Bearing in mind that the whole reason for PSCOs is that they have a physical footprint in a local community, will these police officers or PCSOs on the buses be a separate breed or will they be part of the overall, and, if so, how does than then reflect on the fact that they have a community base?

Mr Johnson: I do not see any reason to denominate them as a separate breed. It seems to me that they could perform a multiplicity of functions, but there is absolutely no reason at all why we should not have more PCSOs on the buses giving people the sense of reassurance they want.

Chairman: Mr Johnson, thank you very much indeed. We know you are very busy. Thank you for coming today to give evidence.

Witnesses: Mr Brian Paddick, Liberal Democrat Candidate for Mayor of London 2008, gave evidence.

Q115 Chairman: Thank you very much for coming. I will not start with my long introduction as to why we are here, because I saw you sitting at an earlier session and we do also have the Chairman of the Metropolitan Police Authority and the Deputy Commissioner to follow you this morning. How do you see the challenges of the next few years for London? Do you think that London has the capacity, or the capability, of dealing with counter-terrorism, the forthcoming Olympics and the overall level of crime?

Mr Paddick: I think if there is a change in approach from the police in London then the capacity might be sufficient if there is additional administrative support. At the moment, as has been discussed this morning, we have PCSOs who spend 75% of their time out on the streets; we have fully fledged police officers who are spending 30-40% of their time in the police station. If we were able to provide sufficient administrative support in the police station, we could actually release a lot of those police officers' time to increase their visible presence on the street. PCSOs do have their uses and, unlike Mr Johnson, in fact there are different sorts of PCSOs already existing. There are security PCSOs, there are transport PCSOs as well as community PCSOs, so they have their uses, but they are not as useful as fully fledged police officers. Indeed, when we are talking about counter-terrorism, whether we are talking about gun and knife crime, the use that PCSOs have is very limited. Administrative support to release police officer time out on to the street is one way of doing it; the other is to get back to the essence of British policing, which is policing by consent.

Q116 Chairman: You know that Sir Ronnie Flanagan has produced his report, and you have obviously come across him in your previous life as a borough commander. Do you think there is too much emphasis on additional police officers as opposed to the better use of police officers, which is what Sir Ronnie was talking about?

Mr Paddick: I think we can make police officers far more effective in the job they do: we can raise their moral and motivation, if we get civilian support to do the mundane paper work for them. For example, if we allow police officers to radio in or telephone in their crime reports whilst they are at the scene of a crime to a professional keyboard operator in the police station, rather than making the police officer go back to the police station and use two fingers to make up the crime report.

Q117 Chairman: And when you were Borough Commander, were you able to properly use the resources you had, or did you feel there were restrictions coming from the Home Office and others to prevent you from doing that?

Mr Paddick: The problem with the Home Office was nationally imposed targets, some of which were having perverse outcomes. For example, in terms of offences brought to justice, I am sure the Committee will realise that it is one point on the score board for a complex case of murder which might take 18 months to investigate and six months to try in court, provided there is a conviction that counts as one offence brought to justice, and a cannabis warning that takes 20 minutes to deal with on the street which counts as exactly the same under current Home Office targets. Clearly that is a nonsense, and clearly it is distorting what the police are concentrating on. If we are to rebuild that contract between the police and the public, the police must be free to be able to concentrate on what is most important to local people.

Q118 Mr Winnick: Recognising, Mr Paddick, that the overwhelming majority of Muslims are no less opposed to terrorism than ourselves, you however said that when you look at the Stop and Search figures under the Terrorism Act they are massively directed towards Muslims. Is that surprising any more than when the IRA was conducting its policy of terror in Britain? Presumably the police were looking for what they considered to be people?

Mr Paddick: But this is the problem we have had in the past with the Caribbean community and robbery; it is the same problem now with terrorism, whether in the past with Irish terrorism, now with so-called Islamic terrorism, although I find that term a little contradictory in terms of what the Muslim faith portrays. The fact is the tiniest minority of Asian people are involved in terrorism, and therefore for the police to target Asian-looking people for Stop and Search is a nonsense. We know from the atrocities that have been carried out in London already that the bombs that have been used so far have been carried in large rucksacks, so if there is a particular alert, if there is particular intelligence that an attack might be imminent, would it not be more sensible to be stopping and searching people carrying large rucksacks, rather than people who have a particular ethnic appearance?

Q119 Mr Winnick: Did you give that advice when you were a senior commander in the Metropolitan Police?

Mr Paddick: I even submitted a 12-page report on how Stop and Search could be made far more accurate and far less discriminatory. It never got past my boss and was never considered by the Commissioner and his top team because any report considered by them has to go through your boss.

Q120 David Davies: It is probably appropriate, then, to make my declaration as a special constable who has done a lot of Section 44 searches. I presume what you are referring to are Section 44(2)s rather than Section 60 or Section 1 case searches. Is that a fair comment?

Mr Paddick: Section 44 --

Q121 David Davies: That you say has targeted Muslims?

Mr Paddick: Section 44, yes.

Q122 David Davies: I am puzzled by it, genuinely, because the instructions that are given out to all police officers are that you must never, ever target people based on their ethnicity. It might be reasonable to look at rucksacks but that must never ever be done, and a Section 44 is meant to be a random search, not a targeted one. What you are saying, and I do not dispute it but I just want to be clear, is that Section 44s are being used to target one particular community, and you are saying the figures backed up that analysis?

Mr Paddick: The latest figures for London are that you are twice as likely to be stopped and searched if you are Asian and four times more likely to be stopped and searched if you are Black. I cannot see any other conclusion to be drawn from that other than some police officers are racially stereotyping.

Q123 David Davies: In order to make a Stop and Search a less blunt instrument, you are obviously aware that if somebody is stopped for a minor offence, a revenue offence, for example, and are being dealt with by process, that in itself does not constitute grounds for a search even if they have warning signals. Would you not think there might be a case for changing the law so that somebody who has warning signals, recent convictions carrying knives or drugs, could be given a quick pat-down type search if they are stopped and they admit an offence that is being dealt with by a process that is not arrestable?

Mr Paddick: There are two alternatives at the moment. Stop and Account, the issue raised by the Lawrence Inquiry report, and Stop and Search. I think Stop and Search should only be conducted if there is reasonable cause to suspect that the person has something on them at that time. Surely, if somebody is recognised as having a long record of street robbery, they are in an area of high street robbery loitering by a bus stop, then it is appropriate for the police officer to go up and ask them in detail to account for why they are there, what they are doing and so forth, but unless there has been a recent report of a robbery where that person fits a description, or there is some sign of something bulky being carried by them, there is some evidence they might have something on them, then it should not go through to a search.

Q124 Gwyn Prosser: Mr Paddick, you have been very critical about the health and safety legislation and the way it is applicable to the police. Was that your view when you were a serving police officer and did you make representations about it, and do you want to see that legislation abandoned altogether in respect of the police force, or do you want to see a more general interpretation of the law?

Mr Paddick: What we need is a common sense approach to the issue, and we had this ridiculous situation whilst I was in the police where we were commending officers for their bravery in circumstances in which the Health and Safety Executive would carry out a prosecution if they knew about the particular case.

Q125 Gwyn Prosser: How many prosecutions were there?

Mr Paddick: The law only changed reasonably recently and there was a high profile prosecution, one in particular was of the two previous Commissioners in the Metropolitan Police. I think maybe the Health and Safety Executive have learned from that experience, bearing in mind that the people were acquitted. Yes, the police have to take reasonable precautions in order to protect their staff but they must allow individual operational officers to use their common sense, to judge whether their actions could possibly save a life, for example, and in those circumstances if they wish to take more of a risk, put themselves at risk in order to save a life, then they should be allowed to do that, and that should not result in prosecution of senior officers.

Q126 Mr Streeter: Mr Paddick, I understand you have put forward crime reduction targets of 5 per cent per annum for the first four years and if you do not hit them you will not stand again as Mayor, so that is 20 per cent over the next four years. Some commentators have suggested this is not really very credible. Do you honestly think those targets are realistic?

Mr Paddick: They are far more realistic than the current Mayor, Ken Livingstone, who at this time in the election process last time round said he would deliver 50 per cent reduction in crime over the next four years and, as we know, even if we take the rather dubious police recorded crime statistics into account, it is only 17 per cent and not 50 per cent. I think a 5 per cent per year reduction in British crime survey crime - and what we are talking about here is people's experience of crime, not an opinion poll; it is a scientific survey of 2500 Londoners carried out every year, and is seen by most academics to be the most reliable measure of crime over time - is realistic.

Q127 Ms Buck: Following that up, you earlier talked about perverse and unintended consequences of targets. If you are setting a 20 per cent overall target, is there not a real risk then that you and the staff for whom you are responsible will aim to achieve that numerical target without necessarily focusing on priorities for Londoners, and how would you avoid that?

Mr Paddick: Because the British Crime Survey is actually a survey of Londoners where they ask people: "Have you been a victim of crime over the last 12 months?", it provides an incentive for the police to concentrate on those offences that are most affecting Londoners.

Q128 Ms Buck: Numerically?

Mr Paddick: So it is the only target that it is realistic to set. The fact is, if the public have more confidence in the police, which we hope to achieve, you could see recorded crime going up because you will not have the situation we have at the moment where a significant number of Londoners do not report crime to the police because they do not think the police will take it seriously, or they do not think it is worth it, or a lot of people in deprived areas, for example, do not have insurance so there is no point in getting a crime number in order to support their insurance claim. So British Crime Survey reduction is the only measure, and in fact it was one adopted by governments some years ago. When the recorded crime figures were going up they decided to base police crime reduction targets on British Crime Survey crime, but of course now we are in a situation where police recorded crime is going down Government has abandoned the British Crime Survey in favour of recorded crime.

Q129 Ms Buck: I still wonder if that has not missed the point because it is still a global numerical target that does not allow you the flexibility then to focus on what might be the priority concerns rather than just chasing numbers. But let me ask you one other question. You propose to chair the Metropolitan Police Authority. What would be the advantage of that for Londoners?

Mr Paddick: Unlike the Mayor who claimed that 50 per cent of the Police Authority were Assembly members, a third are Assembly members, a third magistrates and a third independent elected members. The advantage is I know the inside track. With the best will in the world, with fewer members of the Metropolitan Police Authority than you have boroughs in London, they do not know and they cannot examine in detail the way the police are functioning. I know exactly how the police functions: I know exactly the methods to present the best gloss on things, and I will not be misled in the way that the Metropolitan Police Authority has from time to time been misled.

Q130 Mrs Dean: Do you agree with Mr Johnson that neighbourhood crime mapping should be published?

Mr Paddick: At the moment whatever borough you live in in London it is possible for you, either interactively or by going to the monthly police community consultative group meeting, to find out exactly what the crime levels are in your particular borough. I think if you go down to, if it is published globally, what the crime figures are, say, on a ward basis, there is the danger of stigmatising particular areas of London, both in terms of creating ghettoes where only the poorest people would choose to live if it is shown to be a crime hotspot, and, as we know, the poor are disproportionately victims of crime, and in terms of house prices and so forth. There are lots of downsides to it. In fact, neighbourhood watch groups who currently exist publish to their members what crimes have been taking place locally in order that people can take necessary precautions and keep their eyes open. I do not think publishing that data so that the Evening Standard can pick it up and publish a map with different shades of red on it is going to be advantageous to anybody.

Q131 David Davies: The British Crime Survey does not include crimes involving children or property, does it, and it has been recently criticised for this by the Chief Constable of British Transport Police. How can you say that it is more valid than an opinion poll?

Mr Paddick: What Ian Johnson said was that it was not a comprehensive measure of crime but it is a good surrogate for crime levels generally, and the most accurate measure of crime over time. It does include property crime but not crime against people under the age of 16.

Q132 David Davies: Shoplifting?

Mr Paddick: Shoplifting is a type of property crime that is not included. It is about the crimes that affect residents rather than businesses.

Chairman: Mr Paddick, thank you for giving evidence to us today; it has been very helpful.

Witnesses: Mr Len Duvall, Chairman, Metropolitan Police Authority; Mr Paul Stephenson, Deputy Commissioner, Metropolitan Police Service, gave evidence.

Q133 Chairman: Mr Duvall, Mr Stephenson, we are extremely grateful to you for coming to give evidence to us today. As you know, we are conducting an inquiry into policing in the 21st century, and I am very keen to start by asking you about community engagement and the expectation of the police. What exercises do you currently undertake in order to engage with local communities?

Mr Duvall: There are a number of exercises. The Metropolitan Police Service do a number themselves at borough level in territorial policing, that is where we work with London boroughs; jointly with Council they conduct consultation exercises in producing local policing plans; they have Safer Neighbourhood Team panels that develop key individuals in neighbourhoods who they contact and talk to and use as sounding boards, and there is a panel of individuals that they bring together to talk about what the local policing plan on the neighbourhood that is developed over a period of time. They talk to local councillors - they are not part of the panels but they do liaise with local councillors about issues that are occurring within their neighbourhoods. We have a borough-wide mechanism that the Metropolitan Police Authority funds called the Legacy of the Scarman Era of Consultative Groups which we still retain and we are in the process of modernising in terms of the 21st century recognising not just holding the police to account but also the executive role of councils. We run London-wide consultation exercises; we are in the process of doing one across the 32 London boroughs about our asset property portfolio, and in the Metropolitan Police Authority itself we do a number of scrutinies, more recently the one on counter-terrorism involving every aspect of the community and how they feel about counter-terrorism, and more recently one about youth engagement, a very substantial exercise probably involving over a thousand odd people coming through the doors.

Q134 Chairman: That sounds pretty extensive. Do you feel you are currently meeting the expectations of the people of London?

Mr Duvall: I think as a Police Authority and at the Metropolitan Police Service in terms of all the survey work and the surveys carried out by others we retain the general confidence of the people in London about policing aspects. There are issues in communities where sometimes we have to regain their confidence, and certain incidences cause that to happen. We work hard at doing that. We know generally in terms of protecting Londoners that, much as we are the No 1 agency in tackling crime in its many forms, from graffiti and everything in between to counter-terrorism which we do both London-wide, nationally, and internationally, we do everything in between, that is what Londoners expect us to do, and basically people on the whole think that we are doing a pretty good job. We are not complacent about that and we enjoy very high confidence levels in doing that, but there are other ways we can check and test that. We are concerned; that is why I think the emphasis in the 21st century is about citizen focus; we have a mission I am constantly exhorting, and the senior management team are in agreement, to explain how we police, without giving the game away, to those who want to cause misery and mayhem to their communities; we have a mission to explain what we do and how we do it, if you come into contact with us, to make sure the public is on side.

Mr Stephenson: Just to set the context here I will start off by agreeing with my Chair, which is obviously a good thing to do, that we can do a lot better and that is our intention, but if you look at what we are doing at this moment in time and at the very extensive British Crime Survey work that is taking place, and our own public attitude survey work, virtually across the board there is an increase in confidence and satisfaction, and that means we are doing something significantly different. So it is important to set that in context. But even where we have got to it does not mean to say it is where we ought to be in the future. Historically the Metropolitan Police Service has been seen as being very good at delivering on very big jobs, and we have a good record on that, but the Commissioner is on record as saying when we break it down into individual contact we are not always guaranteed to be quite as good, and that is the big mission for the Met, to make sure those daily contacts match the same quality as we deliver on the big jobs. The survey work would indicate there is a significant improvement but we have some way to go.

Q135 Mr Streeter: London is obviously a great capital city; we have the 2012 Olympics coming up; you are on the front line for the fight against terrorism. Have we the right structures in place, and is there sufficient capacity to overcome these particular challenges?

Mr Duvall: The structures are beginning to take shape. Certainly inside the Metropolitan Police Service those structures are there. Government is reorganising their bits so they are interfaced with us. It is not just the Olympics that year; there are a number of other significant events that will be considerable challenges. From the policing point of view and in terms of this period leading up to the events the planning and testing for different scenarios is very important, but for us we still need to deliver policing in the capital, in your neighbourhoods, and in the other policing areas in terms of it being affected by Olympic events. So we have to chew gum and walk at the same time, as well as protecting people during this significant eventing issue. Albeit we are going to have to shift the resources around, from the policing point of view we need to do that from a common sense approach. We have learnt many lessons since 9/11 about responses to tragedies around moving police officer assets; we have certainly learnt different lessons in public order, the last one where we were severely tested was Heathrow Airport where we needed to have the capacity to move police officers from their local locations to meet potential challenges, and we think we did that with common sense without ordinary people suffering from a lack of police response.

Mr Stephenson: I think we have the right structure for this moment in time but the idea that structure should last for ever is fallacious, and I am sure you would agree. We have made recent changes to structure in recent times; I think the Chair has referred to it. We have made significant changes to our counter-terrorism command. We used to have an SO12 and SO13 which was the Intelligence and the Executive action separately. We are now quite clear that that was a structure fit for the past but not for today and we have moved to SO15, a much more dynamic, combined structure. So we have amended that to fit with the new terrorist challenge. We are currently, again with the Police Authority, looking at the structure of the Met in terms of central support. I think we can make some significant savings there. We have to rationalise the way we do business; we have to bring together our financial planning and organisational planning into a seamless piece that means we can save some resources and produce a better product. So we have to constantly look at our structures. The one thing we are clear on, and if the Commissioner was here today I think he would want to make this point, is that the structure that the Met has indicates it is already a regional police service, and the overlaying of delivery of day-to-day policing in the boroughs and the greater empowerment of those borough commanders is hugely important and we are wholly committed to it, but, in the absence of an overlaying of a wider structure to bring in those extra specialist departments and requirements to deal with the more serious end of crime, keeping that together as a cohesive whole is very important to the policing of London.

Q136 Mr Clappison: On funding, which you have just touched upon, I have to say the whole subject of police funding is not one I find readily comprehensively and I am not sure many others do either, but the Mayor of London has said that the application of a police funding formula as recommended by Sir Ronnie Flanagan would have a negative effect on the policing in London. What is your reaction to that?

Mr Duvall: There are a couple of issues around funding. My background is in local government --

Q137 Mr Clappison: You might understand it better than me, then!

Mr Duvall: It is a bit like SSAs, no one understood that but it did become more transparent as it was developed and if you wanted to understand how you got to the final pounds, shillings and pence, then you could, providing you had a whole year to do it and got there and you could challenge or not challenge. The issue for us about formula funding, of course, is that we will always want more money; there always will be a cap on that money that we can have. At the moment, if the floor is taken away from Metropolitan Police Service there would be severe doubt, it would have to be replaced, and that poses all sorts of problems to central Government because it would have to be a London formula, so I am reconciled to the issues that the protectionism we get is appropriate. The second point I would make about any funding we receive, because we receive funding in a number of ways - the core grant and additional grants for issues like counter terrorism - is please give us some certainty and come in to enable us to plan more effectively, because I think with those non-specific grants it is a matter of having some certainty of when you are going to take a decision rather than delay it, carry it over to the new year, give us it in the autumn if it is reasonable, let us then plan to the budget, and that is more important to us at this moment in time.

Q138 Mr Clappison: You know this well from what you are saying. Do you think within the constraints of the present system it would be possible for Government to give you more certainty?

Mr Duvall: Sometimes it is difficult for Government. They have their own timetable which does not always fit into a London timetable, either a mayoral or pre-set timetable that we have to respond to through statutory issues. I think with a bit of goodwill we could. Nobody gets out of bed to make life difficult for each other. Sometimes their timetable is obviously more important than ours. We can get there and get some planning around that. It is the same with Olympic grants. Paul and his colleagues need to do the job, they give you their best shots, but we need some certainty about the money and issues around that so we can get on and plan, and we are getting there with that money. We have recently had it; it would have been nice if it was a bit earlier, but the interface we have with government needs to be sharpened and more focused if we are going to do a good job. We always do the best job we can in the time available, but it is that certainty to be able to get on and plan and take the decisions they need to take in terms of delivering that response you require.

Q139 Mrs Dean: The Metropolitan Police Authority was judged to be performing only adequately by the Audit Commission in terms of the use of resources. Do you think this was a fair assessment?

Mr Duvall: Adequately? I think you have to look at it over a period of time. I have been in the job for four years and I value the Audit Commission and their comments and what they measure against. Someone likened it to an exam, are the right questions being asked and are we giving the right responses? The Metropolitan Police Service has 175 years of history; normally it has been always working to the Home Office. There is anecdotal information of how it received its estimates at that time. One thing that has been beneficial with the new governance arrangements in London is that it is much more transparent. If I told you in the year 2000 what my predecessor Toby Harris had to deal with, as well as senior colleagues in the Met, I am used to a local government background in terms of the arrangements but we never had any accountants, I think we probably only had one in the entire Met at that time, and we needed to make our arrangements fit and proper for the 20th century, never mind the 21st century. Over the eight years, year on year, you have seen some good things also said by the Audit Commission who has said there has been some good performance. There are still areas I am not happy with and that the Commissioner and Paul is not happy with, but I am expecting that to improve and I think we can do another step change in those issues. I am confident now about aligning the planning process with the resource process, and confident that we have some of the structures there that we would recognise in a local government setting, and the Audit Commission are confident about some of those structures and procedures. There are problems but we have identified some of those. The famous Amex exposure was one that we found rather than was found for us, and we took the corrective action and still take corrective action around those issues. So I am confident that we are getting better at it but I am not complacent, and certainly we are working hard for it and I hope in the coming year to give a different slant on some of those issues.

Q140 Mrs Cryer: How does the Met respond to Sir Ronnie Flanagan's proposal for workforce modernisation, and can I specifically ask, because it has been drawn to my attention recently by members of the West Yorkshire force, about better working options to attract women and ethnic minorities?

Mr Stephenson: Starting with the specific, whilst again there is much more to be done, if we look at our current recruiting, particularly for BEM population, in year we are currently recruiting, I think I am right in saying, something like 21 per cent, and I think 30 per cent are females, which is a significant improvement on previous years - probably unimaginable improvement if you turn the clock back maybe three or four years. We are doubling our rate in numbers of BEM background within the Met. The problem we have is we are a huge organisation and turning round the supertanker and getting ratios to hit the high mark is a long road, so I think the best measure is the in-year rate and the in-year rate is a significant improvement. So we are doing a huge amount around that. I would also say that our own HR department within the Met has been the recipient of numerous awards in terms of innovation and imagination to try and improve on this critical area. In terms of the wider question of Sir Ronnie Flanagan's reforms, we have responded positively and are already doing many things that Sir Ronnie anticipated we should be doing in terms of looking more flexibly and imaginatively at how we use our resources. We must do more in the future because we are facing constrained financial times, and the growth we have enjoyed in recent years has come to an end and we are going to have to make much better use of our resource, so we have to be even more imaginative in the future, but we are approaching that positively. What we would like to see, and this is where we share in West Yorkshire's ambition, is ever more flexibility allowed to us in the way in which we can employ a workforce that matches London's needs.

Q141 Mrs Cryer: So you think that the flexible working, et cetera, that you have in place now is sufficient to keep your officers with you rather than finishing after a few years?

Mr Stephenson: We have a very good retention rate, compared with anybody within the industry and policing outside, and something we are proud of. Of course, we always want to make it better. If I say it is not a problem, comparatively it is not a problem at this moment in time. If you ask me am I satisfied there is nothing more we can do? No, of course there is more we can do, but we are pushing the boundaries of the envelope now, and I think we have to keep researching and being more innovative.

Mr Duvall: I think it is quite clear that people are changing their attitude towards the police service as a career of choice, particularly women and BEM communities. There is a problem with recruitment, slow down is a problem in some ways, but there are some wider issues here. There is flexibility and we are a sensitive employer, and I think we are a premier employer, and I am happy to provide further details in terms of what we do and do not do, but there are wider issues here and principles about policing. Warranted police officers are important, we would all agree, but the shape of policing in the future, and we need to give some confidence to our community and we need to explain this, is that also PCSOs are an important part of policing now, and if I go to the other side most senior officers and borough commanders will say their support staff are. They are all crime fighters; they just do different jobs. The issue for the 21st century is that we all say we want to put policing on the street and I want to put visibility on our streets, but the front line in policing may not be on our streets, it may well be behind a desk, and I think we have to have a bit more of a mature approach about what we try to do. But the issue is using that resource, and we are a labour intensive resource which is why policing costs so much at this moment in time. You have addressed some of these issues in past meetings, and how people are paid and viewed and valued about their work is very important, and they are allied and cannot be separated. In general, we are looking at some of the efficiencies of how you deploy those resources, but equally, and we have both been on public platforms and said this, in the 21st century we seek to remain an unarmed police force. I know it is very difficult in central London to think that is the case, but only 10 per cent of our police officers are generally armed and even with trends as they are and despite all the interest from the press, that is an important principle we should seek to retain, professionally and from a police officer point of view.

Q142 Chairman: Why did it take Sir Ronnie to tell us there was too much red tape? Surely this was something that officers at a local level could have been involved in at an earlier stage.

Mr Stephenson: I think Sir Ronnie's addition to the debate has been hugely valuable but I think even he would turn round and say it did not need him to tell us that was the case. A number of people in policing already recognised that, and a number already recognised Sir Ronnie's point concerning risk aversion. I myself as Chief Constable in Lancashire six years ago made a series of speeches to my own people saying: "If you are well-recruited, well-intentioned and well-trained and you think something should be done, I want you to get on with it". So I do not think Sir Ronnie necessarily would say that he came up with it first, but he made a huge addition to that debate by highlighting it and giving it added impetus.

Q143 Martin Salter: As a Thames Valley MP a lot of my colleagues have concerns about recruitment, and we heard from Boris Johnson earlier that he felt there was no problem with recruitment to the Met and you have just said there is a problem with the slowing down of recruitment. Can you expand on that?

Mr Duvall: The trouble is there is an issue that even with slow down of recruitment you can be caught out if you have a rush of people leaving, and one of our issues in the coming years and leading up to the Olympics is retaining people with experiences and people who have choices. At the moment it is not a problem but I need to be mindful that some of the work we have been able to undertake in the Metropolitan Police Service is because we have been recruiting up to a number. John Stevens initially said it was 35,000; we have a mix now in the police service with just over 31,000, which is the highest it has ever been in its entire history, with the PCSOs at just under 4,000 I think. The question then for us is we are seeing some results from the ground. Much as we may have doubts there are trends happening around reductions in crime or increased reporting where young people have more confidence, and we want to go out and encourage that and not beat people up if they are coming forward to report issues. There is something happening in our community and we need to drive it further down. What is making the difference? It has to be about some of the investment in Safer Neighbourhood Teams where we have done survey work and seen that driven down; it has to be about some of the work that communities are doing themselves and local councils are helping us do that and other agencies; there is something going on here. We have not quite got to the bottom of it but it is going in the right direction. We can all talk about the flaws in the different recording aspects but there is a general direction in the right way, so we need to build on that. On recruitment issues, everyone knows the debate is can you get more out of police officers used in a certain way and get - not more for less, I am not suggesting Boris is saying that, but is there a different way of using them. That is his argument. My argument is London is slightly special; we need to make sure we keep the numbers up; we need to see how we are using those, but certainly I am very mindful of what it means to boroughs in the outer area. I have had conversations with the Chief Constable Thames Valley; I have spoken to Police Authority members, and it makes no sense for us to dilute outer London regions, but the issue is there always will be choice in the employment market. We are not offering any major incentives except for the Inner London allowance and the travel pass, and we have to work with those police authorities and police services to try and minimise the impact on any recruitment exercises we undertake.

Mr Stephenson: There is one particular point I wanted to make in response to Mrs Cryer's previous question around the issue of how we have responded to Ronnie Flanagan's workforce modernisation. We are very positive about that but I think all forces would say, but particularly in London, that we need to be bearing in mind the resilience of police officers, because when something happens we need to put fully trained police officers on the street. So there has to be a balance between modernisation and the retention of visible, skilled police officers who can do the business when the business needs to be done.

Q144 Martin Salter: Getting back to recruitment, you will be aware of the lobby from the forces surrounding London and of the figures that Sara Thornton, Chief Constable of the Thames Valley has put forward. Over the last five years not only have we lost one thousand officers to the Met but it has cost something like �11 million to recruit and replace specialist officers. Obviously it is not in the interests of the Met to displace crime just outside its border because it still becomes a regional problem, no one is arguing that the Met should not have the additional cost of the living allowance, but do you accept that there is clearly a much too stark cliff edge in remuneration between those officers who are serving just outside the Metropolitan Police area boundaries and those officers serving in it?

Mr Duvall: I would not want to make a Balkanisation case for extending the London policing boundaries, but I do accept there is a cost to training a specialist that is there. It is not for me to verify those figures that have been produced, and I do accept that in terms of our recruitment we cannot have a Do Not Care policy. Criminals do not need boundaries, and we need to work hard with each other to understand each other's needs and see if there are some issues that do not work against what we are all trying to do, but I think it is ultimately for Government to look at those funding issues, if there are funding issues.

Mr Stephenson: There is little doubt, one has to be fair, that the range of opportunities, particularly at the high and specialist level, are very attractive to police officers, but there is also little doubt that there is a two-way flow and some people do go back, and there is an opportunity for forces to gain from experience in the fairly unique environment in the Met. But I do not think we should ignore the fact that there is a two-way flow and there is no current active recruitment, but I do accept the attractiveness of the Metropolitan Police Service at the high and specialist level.

Mr Clappison: Chairman, may I say that Mr Salter speaks for me on this. We are in agreement.

Chairman: Excellent!

Q145 David Davies: I spoke within the last ten days to a constable in the British Transport Police who applied to the Met, was told the Met were not recruiting for a number of years, applied to the British Transport Police and was told informally by the Inspector in the Met that once he had done his training he would be very welcome, nudge, nudge, wink, wink, to reapply to the Met and he could be sure that a place would be found for him. So there seems to be anecdotal evidence that the Metropolitan Police are not happy to take on the cost of training constables, but are very happy to recruit them in from other forces.

Mr Stephenson: If you look at the figures in our record we are very heavy initial recruiters and we do bring in a certain level of experience, but it is not something that you would anticipate is anything other than disproportionate to the need. I think we have heavily recruited around the counter terrorism requirement; one would expect us to do that. We have the lead for counter terrorism along with a number of forces in this country; therefore you would expect us to make sure we attracted and gave opportunities to people across the country to give of their best in a specialised area of work, but that is a special case. We are heavy recruiters at the initial recruitment phase. We are also heavy recruiters into policing from our own PCSO base, because that has been a huge success, particularly when we look at black and ethnic minority recruitment.

Mr Duvall: On the question of whether we are moving away from our residential training to do more flexible training on the job in surrounding areas, can I just say that we will not ever have a policy of doing it on the cheap or letting someone else take the responsibility. That is not in our policy making, and certainly it would never meet our recruitment needs.

Q146 Chairman: Are you disappointed that in the last four years you have not appointed a black or Asian senior officer to the Met? We heard the Mayor earlier on saying it takes time, but in terms of 21st century policing, surely we should be appointing more senior police officers who are from the ethnic minority communities?

Mr Duvall: My background and inclination is to appoint people if they are of sufficient calibre. There are men and women in BEM community who I am obviously very willing to appoint and promote. On ACPO ranks we have had a number of Commander appointments, which is where the majority are coming through. Certainly I have appointed senior women in the last four years to senior positions in the Met; I do not think it is too far away for us to see an Assistant Commissioner position going to a woman, there are people coming through the processes: I do not think it is too far away to see other senior black and ethnic minority groupings coming into those ACPO ranks. We have in the Met the most senior Assistant Commissioner in the country with considerable expertise and we utilise that where we can. We do engage with the staff representative groups and the Police Association, and we are working that through.

Q147 Chairman: But is there a shortage of candidates? Because you have recruited more, have you not? Are they not applying? What is the reason, Mr Stephenson?

Mr Stephenson: We start from a much improved base, as we have indicated, and there is a fair point here, that once you start heavily recruiting at the base that will take some time to come through, but also it is a fair challenge. Are we getting the success coming through at the speed we want? It is starting to happen but we are encouraged by the Metropolitan Police Authority to be much more active in our talent management and in our interventions to ensure we get that representation coming through, and to ensure we have at some stage in the future a picture that we are proud of right the way through all of the ranks. It is significantly improving but it will take some time.

Q148 Mr Clappison: Do you have the feeling that that is something which is going to happen and, given what you said about appointing people on the basis of calibre, when it does happen we can all celebrate and say these people have reached the top on the basis of their calibre and there will be no question of anything else?

Mr Duvall: A lot of mischief-making has been done in the past. All people will receive their promotions on that basis and are very proud of their own achievements. It is a significant achievement to achieve high office in the Metropolitan Police Service. I am very much taken when I come across people newly promoted from the BEM community because it is not just for them; it has a wider significance in their community, and they are very proud of that.

Mr Stephenson: Reducing standards would do no one any favours.

Chairman: Thank you. David Winnick has questions on counter-terrorism.

Q149 Mr Winnick: The Metropolitan Police Authority, which, of course, you chair had two reports which were very critical indeed about Stop and Search. One of the reports, Counter-terrorism: The London Debate, said that Stop and Search is doing untold damage to certain communities. I am not sure if Counter-terrorism: The London Debate is actually Metropolitan Police Authority, but the Metropolitan Police Authority report on Stop and Search was very critical as well, and said it increased the level of distrust in the police and created deeper racial and ethnic tensions against the police. What is being done to try and avoid the sort of situations described in those two reports?

Mr Duvall: Both those reports are very balanced and are raising issues that have been pointed out to us in the various scrutinies we have held. Right from the very beginning, before I had my position, the issues at the forefront have been around Stop and Search, Stop and Account post-Lawrence, and the development of that, based on an original scrutiny back in the first term in 2000. What is the Authority's position, and what steps can we take? By and large, we should be proud of our young people. If you read the press you think most of them are committing crimes; they are not. Most are likely to be victims. Young people, black and white, say: "We do not mind more Stop and Search but can you explain to us why you are doing it, why we are being asked to account and being searched, and also can you please do it with respect?" And that is the issue. Stop and Search is a very valuable tool in policing, I am quite clear about that, and I had that view before I took this position as a local government leader. If it can save lives in terms of knife crime it must be important, and young people who were there before are many of the people questioning the issues. The issue of counter-terrorism stops has been much more interesting because the Metropolitan Police Service are not the only ones who carry out that power in London; there are other agencies like the British Transport Police, the Ministry of Defence, also doing it. Like all tools - and I think I represent the views of my Authority - sometimes we have used the blanket anti-terrorism stop as a way of keeping public order that has not quite brought the body into disrepute but has caused it to be significantly questioned. Equally, however, Stop and Search/Stop and Account is around places which we know terrorists are looking at and targeting through their surveillance and preparation issues and has almost certainly saved lives. The question then is what we need to do, and what we have been doing is, firstly, telling people their rights, which I think is appropriate in the circumstances; secondly, that if they feel they have been unjustly stopped explaining how they can raise these issues, or if they have a complaint where they can raise that; and we have highlighted, certainly through the counter-terrorism debate that we have promoted, the importance of why the police need to do this activity to ensure that if they feel aggrieved that they are being persecuted for the fifth, fourth, or tenth time, there are mechanisms where we can track that and see what the circumstances were at the time or will be in the future. By and large I think the training that the Metropolitan Police Service has undertaken is good but we need to improve on it. Most Stop and Search or Stop and Accounts at borough level are intelligence-led and not at someone's discretion, but I do think it is important to stand up and say that police officers do need to have discretion sometimes and make a judgment call. But by and large in the boroughs it is intelligence-led and mostly, on counter-terrorism issues, it is around areas of activity that we know terrorists are looking at.

Q150 Mr Winnick: Let's be blunt about this, Mr Duvall. Just as, when terrorism was being organised by the IRA and the suspicion was that the people who could possibly be involved were of Irish origin, the overwhelming majority of Irish people were against terrorism, terrorism now comes from that section of the Muslim community - not even a section - which is totally unrepresentative of the Muslim community in London and in the country as a whole, and surely the police have this dilemma, recognising this is where terrorism is coming from, and what are they to do but to try and stop what they believe could possibly be very dangerous people wanting to take as many lives as possible?

Mr Stephenson: Everything in my professional background, and I entirely agree with Len on this, tells me that with Stop and Search the issue is more often how you do it, not what you do. That is really the key issue and it has been throughout my entire professional career. Generally around Section 44, counter-terrorism stops, there is a real need to keep the way we use it and the need for it under close review. My professional view at the moment is quite simply that it is an unbalanced, if very useful, protective tool around certain parts of our environment to stop aggressive planning, and indications are that that particular tool adds to our armoury and potentially can save us from attack. That is a professional view at this moment in time but it does need to be kept under careful review. At the end of your question I think you were referring to the possibility of profiling, stopping people on the basis of terrorism coming from a certain section of the community and anybody who looks like they come from that section must be stopped. It is not a very smart tactic to do that because the enemy will simply turn round and decide to use people who do not look like that, and it would be a huge mistake to go down the profiling route. We have to be intelligence-led where we can be, but we should look at our infrastructure to put in protective regimes, and that is what we try to do. On balance professionally it is still worth doing it, but I think we have to be careful.

Q151 Mr Winnick: Finally, insofar as those two reports which I quoted were so critical of Stop and Search, how confident are both of you that progress is being made which would avoid the very sharp criticism which your own Authority made?

Mr Duvall: I am very confident because the processes of keeping it under review are there, rooted within the Authority; I am confident that senior managers such as Paul and the rest of the management team are sensitive to these issues; and if you go into a London borough our senior commanders are there. It is like all tools given to the police. If they are used appropriately and properly then they are effective tools at fighting crime. This goes back to regaining the confidence of communities, and in that sense I am confident that we can keep these under review; that we are mature enough to recognise if it is going adrift; that we can follow the stats and the trends in those stats, and take corrective action, and I think we are in a position to do that. Just going back to profiling, anybody who says they can do a profile of a terrorist only needs to look within the criminal justice system at those brought to book, either those who pleaded guilty or those who were found guilty, and it is very difficult. I keep reminding people of this in public, and they keep saying to me: "It is that group of people over there", and actually it is not; it is a reflection of all our communities. If you look at the number of people brought to justice we have had white, African, Asian - across the spectrum, and that is why it is difficult to profile.

Mr Stephenson: There is a really important issue here that we, Government, all agencies, have to pick up on, which is this. You asked the question: How confident can we be that we are getting the message through? We are doing huge amounts more. The Metropolitan Police Authority-led London debate actually came up with recommendations around youth boards and female boards to get the communication system better. What we have to do to be more effective is communicate much more with key communities about what counter-terrorism is about, what are the processes we use, what are the inevitabilities, come and try it, come and engage in some of our exercises and see for yourself how the decisions are made. We have to build up confidence in advance of incidents, because the idea of just sharing intelligence around incidents is much more difficult. We have to build up confidence in the systems, processes and people, and that is the challenge for us all.

Q152 Mr Streeter: Sir Ronnie had quite a lot to say about governance issues. What would you do to improve the accountability of local authorities?

Mr Duvall: I think there are some issues around the visibility of police authorities generally, although the Metropolitan Police Authority could do with being out of the limelight after recent months. I think there is a case for invisibility for them! My own view is about clarity of structure. Here in London we are special - and I do not say that with arrogance, or say that we are any different because the challenges in the rest of the country are just as challenging - but there are two shareholders who influence policing in London, who are the Government and the Mayor through his precepts and budgeting. Any Mayor that takes office will have a great influencing role. The Metropolitan Police Authority sets the trend and the strategic direction, and the new power that the Mayor will have when he takes office will be that he will be able to appoint his own chair of the Police Authority; I am currently elected by the Police Authority. If you did away with the Police Authority you would have to replace it. If the issue is about transparency and about engagement in a mission, we explain that in public. I think we have provided added value in London and I do believe police authorities provide added value to policing outside, but it does need to be done appropriately. We have got a balance; we are not in each other's pockets; we can work together, and there are very few areas where we disagree - there have been some but by and large it works well in London. We need to be closer to local government, and I do not wish to take any decisions about fragmentation of the police service but I do believe that with local democratic leadership and working crime and disorder partnerships we should be able to offer a different type of service to them, and we want them to utilise the existing powers they have in terms of working closer with us. So that is what we are working on where you will see some changes in London, and we will be working much more closely with some agencies on localism, and we will unveil those ideas post May, and they have broad consensus across the political parties in London.

Q153 Ms Buck: Mr Livingstone earlier made reference to Ronnie Flanagan's comments about the police being risk averse. What do you feel about that particular comment, and what are the Met doing in response to those comments?

Mr Duvall: You can imagine with some of the incidents and some of the tragedies we have had to deal with that issue is uppermost in the minds of police and professionals. We have had discussions in the Police Authority about risk averse issues, and we have had also the famous Morris Report talking about how we deal with HR issues and how black and ethnic minorities felt about discipline processes, and about what was happening. It was not so much that people were being racist; they just did not want to deal with it, so they were not taking the risk and managing properly the smaller issues that may have been dealt with lower down. Those were the findings that we all agreed in the end in terms of responses. We have to set in train some processes and actions here so that in an operational environment, when they come to make judgments, they have take those without looking over their shoulders. That does not mean they should not be held accountable for their issues or we should be above the law, but there are certain circumstances where we can send the wrong signals in terms of operational policing issues and in terms of how we want people to manage or deal with the media, and increasingly with some of those issues it is not that police officers are frightened about circumstances but there is the potential for issues to run and run if the wrong thing is said in the media, or at different operational levels, and this means we do not get the best out of policing, and that is the issue that Ronnie is trying to get across. It is cultural, it is about leadership and about training. We do not want people running around thinking they are not accountable to the people they serve because they are servants of the people, but equally we need to give back some confidence. Some of the foundations laid after the Lawrence Inquiry for John Stevens were important and we made a number of changes in the way the policing took place then; I think we have seen that in terms of the other issues we have; but it is something we need to keep uppermost in our minds.

Mr Stephenson: If I may say so, I entirely agree with Sir Ronnie. I also agree with his analysis that sometimes it has come about because of external influence, but occasionally because of the way we have responded to external influence and over-egged the pudding sometimes. It seems to me it is about professional police leadership and we have to internally redress that; but what Sir Ronnie has usefully done is brought the debate right out into the open because that debate also has to be had with the stakeholder groups who hold us to account and investigate us, to understand there is a wider context here.

Q154 Bob Russell: Mr Stephenson, it will be four years next month since the first Safer Neighbourhood Teams based in wards were set up in London, and I understand that by April 2006 all 630 were up and running with one police sergeant, two police constables and three Police Community Support Officers. Now, this has been rolled out across London, what impact has there been for the benefit of Londoners and those of us visiting London, and what more needs to be done to embed neighbourhood policing?

Mr Stephenson: There is little doubt it significantly contributes to what I was referring to earlier, the real increase in confidence and satisfaction, although there is more to be done. Safer Neighbourhood Teams have been key to bringing about that improvement, and I think it is right to say that in our most similar force grouping, which is the way we measure this, confidence in local policing is right at the very top, and that is something we are very proud of but which could get better. It has also had an impact on the crime figures. There is huge debate about the crime figures but whichever figures you look at, British Crime Survey or our police recorded figures, and you should not take one in isolation from the other, there are significant reductions, so it has had an impact there as well.

Q155 Bob Russell: And, for a Government that likes school league tables, have we got league tables for Safer Neighbourhood Teams? The "Safer Neighbourhood Team of the Year" award?

Mr Stephenson: I am not keen on league tables --

Q156 Bob Russell: Nor am I, but I was just wondering.

Mr Stephenson: -- but what I am keen on is recognising the fact that there are some places in London where the Safer Neighbourhood Teams are beyond good; beyond anything we ever imagined they were going to be. They are so outstanding. There are some places where they are not quite as good and we have to be clearer and cleverer at ensuring we bring everywhere up to higher standards. We are also rolling out Safer Neighbourhood Teams, and will roll out additional Safer Neighbourhood Teams where the wards are substantially bigger; there is an experiment going out about 24/7 in Hammersmith & Fulham Safer Neighbourhood Teams, and that has been evaluated, and clearly I will be very keen on something like that but that entirely depends on resourcing. What we now have to do is ensure we turn this very significant capacity into real capability. We were talking earlier about counter-terrorism; we have a potent opportunity in Safer Neighbourhoods now to embed counter-terrorism right to the level where counter-terrorism should be, and that is people working with communities who understand what counter-terrorism policing should be about and understand the need to support their neighbourhoods, and that is where we should be developing Safer Neighbourhoods in the future.

Mr Duvall: The important issue here is policing in that response alone, responding to a 999 call, is not good enough for police, it is long-term problem solving that Safer Neighbourhood Teams can do, and one of the tests of their success is that if there is a critical incident in a neighbourhood and you need other professionals the first port of call will be a briefing from the Safe Neighbourhood Team on what is going on in the area, what is the wider significance. Anyone who knows policing knows it is very hard to get other professional specialists to refer back to at an experimental, early development stage, but it is bedding in, it is working, and the fact that they are prepared to give credence to it is an important point.

Q157 Chairman: And giving the mobile numbers of the local police officers is very important.

Mr Duvall: It is new. We know people want to help. They do not want to spend hours on the phone if they go through the main switchboard; they do not want to walk into a police station where there may be other people doing other things and have to report issues, so if we can separate off people giving non-emergency information that can be important to solving other crimes at certain times that is the key, and we have to work hard at that publicity and make sure it is maintained.

Q158 Tom Brake: Mr Stephenson, could I tempt you to look into the future again? Obviously you want Safer Neighbourhood Teams to bed in but I think there is now evidence from a number of borough commanders that Safer Neighbourhood Teams have been so effective at reducing crime on their patch that there is not much crime for them to deal with, and those borough commanders might like to redeploy those resources in a different way. How do you reconcile the need to see people on the ground, which is something that local residents want, with what the borough commanders are saying about how those resources could be more effectively deployed to tackle crime on their patch?

Mr Stephenson: There should always be a healthy tension between borough commanders and the centre, and that way we can push each other into improvement, but I think we have to learn from the lessons of history. I have had 33 years of policing,