Uncorrected Evidence 364

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Home Affairs Committee

on Tuesday 22 April 2008

Members present

Keith Vaz, in the Chair

Tom Brake

Ms Karen Buck

Mr James Clappison

Mrs Ann Cryer

Mrs Janet Dean

Patrick Mercer

Gwyn Prosser

Bob Russell

Martin Salter

Mr Gary Streeter

Mr David Winnick

________________

Memoranda submitted by the Association of Chief Police Officers

and the National Policing Improvement Agency

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Chief Constable Sir Norman Bettison, Association of Chief Police Officers, and Chief Constable Peter Neyroud, Chief Executive, National Policing Improvement Agency, gave evidence.

Q162 Chairman: Can I welcome everyone present to the latest session of the policing inquiry that the Committee established, Policing in the 21st Century, and can I refer everyone present to the Register of Members' Interests where members of this Committee have declared their interests. Can I also say to our witnesses that a number of the members of the Committee are also members of the Public Bill Committee considering the counter-terrorism legislation, so from time to time, and I am sure the veteran witnesses amongst you will understand this, members will be going in and coming out, and it is no disrespect to you. Can I welcome Sir Norman back again to give evidence to us. Sir Norman, the Government told us last year that the definition of frontline policing was in need of revision. What, in your view, is a good definition of frontline policing?

Chief Constable Chief Constable Sir Norman Bettison: Chairman, members, the definition of "frontline" that we currently work to is, in a sense, not the right one, because it is difficulty for members of the public to understand why we would count a police officer in uniform as frontline but not a rape interviewer or a forensic accountant that is investigating a fraud case. In West Yorkshire we have gone for something different which satisfies those who scrutinise policing at a local level. With the police authority we have worked through a definition of public facing as a means of coming up with a definition that (a) the public will understand, that these are the people that, regardless of what matters they want to bring to the attention of the police, they will come across as representatives of the police service. What that does is it gives us a certain figure that my police authority would want to always keep monitoring to ensure that nothing happens to that defined group of individuals that causes it to fall below a target number. So we find that much more helpful than the proportion of time that an officer spends in the front line. If he or she is making an arrest that is clearly the frontline, but if he or she is then doing the resultant paperwork and the resultant interviews that go alongside that arrest, then not all of that is counted as frontline in the current definition. So I think the current definition is less than helpful in terms of being sensible and understandable to the public and, I offer, just one example of a different way of cutting the cloth.

Q163 Chairman: In your ACPO submission you stress that the fact that the police are now reacting to events rather than dealing with underlying problems. It is obviously for politicians and for Parliament and ministers to try and solve the problems of crime, but do you think the police have a more important role to play in trying to deal with those underlying problems?

Chief Constable Chief Constable Sir Norman Bettison: Yes, we do, and the police service has responded to this in recent years. The neighbourhood policing model is a means of tackling the causes of crime, the root causes rather than the symptoms. The police service has been locked for the last decade or more into an efficiency model of policing, so what we have been concerned about, it seems to me, having served throughout all that period, is getting quicker and more efficient at handling incidents rather than satisfying the member of the public who turns to us for help, and rather than getting upstream and stopping that problem occurring next Thursday night or next Tuesday morning. Neighbourhood policing is a reaction to the efficiency model, giving us good crime detection figures and good crime reduction figures but not giving us the level of satisfaction amongst the members of the public that we are striving for. Neighbourhood policing, and I will deal with this in shorthand because you will have looked at this as part of the work of the Committee, is about taking people away from the Fire Brigade response to incidents, where officers would traditionally go, put a sticking plaster on the problem and drive away, and it is about putting officers, inspector or sergeant-led, as a team, a team that is capable of dealing with the problems that are faced the public in a particular area and leaving them in place, leaving them dedicated and committed to a particular geographical footprint. What most police forces do is they combine that policing team and lay it on to a democratic accountability footprint, principally council wards, so typically an inspector or a sergeant would have a team of officers and PCSOs and have a dedicated presence and build up a visibility and accessibility and familiarity in that area, and understand what the nature of the problems is. So youths drinking outside a row of shops on a Thursday or Friday night would in the old style of policing lead to them being moved on, or if offences were disclosed lead to them being arrested and dealt with, and then doing the same thing next Thursday or Friday. Neighbourhood policing --

Q164 Chairman: We will be coming on to neighbourhood policing in detail a little bit later.

Chief Constable Chief Constable Sir Norman Bettison: -- but neighbourhood policing is the response, the pretty universal response, in the police service now. We need to be in a sense let off the hook of central targets in order to let neighbourhood policing fly. Central targets still hold us to very narrow definitions of police activity, namely crime and incidents.

Q165 Chairman: Later this morning we will be hearing from a custody sergeant and also the relative victims of crime, and one of the issues that is bound to be raised is the issue of bail. What additional pressure is placed on the police service because of the bail conditions that are put on individuals? Is bail too readily available which will mean that more of police time is spent on dealing with people who are on bail?

Chief Constable Chief Constable Sir Norman Bettison: The Carter review, which the Committee may have been interested in, is the Government's review to deal with the problem of prison overcrowding. We worry that the Carter review might lead to the further reluctance of the courts to remand individuals in custody, remand serious offenders in custody. Bail is used more than it has been for some time and, therefore, what we confront as operational police officers is the frustration of people being given bail only to commit further offences. Some who are on bail and are expecting a term of imprisonment as their punishment will go on what we call spree offending, which is getting it all out of the way before they are locked away. That is both frustrating for us as professionals and soul-destroying for the public, who are victims of this type of crime. Again, there are some creative ways of dealing with this problem. In West Yorkshire we are asking much more often for the courts to make tagging orders. The electronic tagging of people on bail has two benefits. One is that the individual feels constrained by nature of being electronically monitored; the second is that offenders who are not quite so constrained leave their geographical map as a database, and we as a police service can go back and check where they were at a particular time. So electronic tagging, I think is a 21st Century phenomenon whose time has come, and it is a buttress against spree offending on bail.

Q166 Chairman: Are you saying to this Committee that you think that bail is too readily available, and when it is made available it means that there is more pressure on police officers, more pressure on police time?

Chief Constable Chief Constable Sir Norman Bettison: I am saying that there is a pressure on courts to be much more circumspect regarding those people who are remanded in custody. The types of people who would have been remanded in custody, in my professional experience, five or ten years ago now represent much more of a struggle; the threshold has been set higher. I think that is entirely to do with the size of the prison population, and it seems to me unfortunate that that is what is driving that policy and philosophical shift. People on bail and people who are persistent and prolific offenders are always the people that cause the police the most work. By definition, if they are locked away they cannot be committing offences. If they are out on bail I think what I am saying to this Committee is that is unfortunate but there are ways of controlling their behaviour whilst on bail other than locking them up for a remand period.

Q167 Mr Clappison: You have just enlarged on the question which I was going to ask you to say a little bit more about which is how this influence was operating in the court system as a result of people being given bail who might not formerly have been given bail. You have described the syndrome where somebody who is on bail already for offences, to put it in a West Yorkshire way, think they might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. There is a risk, is there not, if the number of people getting bail - as you put it the threshold - is raised, that we will be seeing more of those people out and being hanged eventually for a sheep as much as for a lamb, and this type of spree offending will increase. Does that follow?

Chief Constable Chief Constable Sir Norman Bettison: Yes, it does, and we are recognising that phenomenon.

Q168 Mr Clappison: It is very serious, is it not?

Chief Constable Sir Norman Bettison: It is, but I do want to reiterate the silver lining that is in that cloud, that there are technical ways in the 21 century of controlling behaviour.

Q169 Mr Winnick: Later on this morning, Sir Norman, we will be having evidence given by Paul Carne, whose sister, as we know, was murdered as well as his mother, and he was released on bail while awaiting a previous murder charge. Do you find it surprising that someone who can be charged with murder can be given bail, often, presumably, opposed by the police?

Chief Constable Sir Norman Bettison: I would find it amazing if someone was given bail for such a serious offence if it was opposed by the police and the prosecution, and the Crown Prosecution Service. I have known throughout my 36-year police career people who have committed murder who are not, bizarrely, ironically considered to be a threat to the wider public and have been given bail, but they have been the exception rather than the rule. One would hope that the cases that one reads about in the newspapers are the very exceptional cases. Those cases, it seems to me, are ones where one would need to be the judge in the case or at least to have been the fly on the wall in the court room to understand what the rationale was for giving bail. That is a long-winded way of saying that some of these cases are very surprising, yes.

Mr Winnick: The public tend to be baffled by the circumstances in that one case. It was such a terrible tragedy.

Chairman: Indeed.

Q170 Tom Brake: On the question of spree offending and tagging, is it possible for you to quantify how many people you think should be tagged who are not currently being tagged, or alternatively perhaps to provide us with some information about the type of person you are talking about who is currently escaping being tagged but you think should be tagged?

Chief Constable Sir Norman Bettison: A tagging order is an order that can be given by the court, either on conviction or on remand. I do not think there is any limit on the numbers or types of offending that can be controlled by tagging. It seems to me what the criminal justice system is trying to do at every turn is change the behaviour of offending individuals. If there is a mindset in an offender who has a proclivity towards further offending that they are being monitored, watched, carefully controlled, then that is a control on behaviour. We are a relatively short way down this particular road in terms of exploring the possibilities and the scope in which we can use the electronic tagging, but I do not see any limits on it and I do see it as a beneficial way of dealing with people who cannot be locked up for whatever reason.

Q171 Tom Brake: So your view, clearly, then is that anyone on bail should be tagged? That it should become the norm?

Chief Constable Sir Norman Bettison: Yes. Anyone on bail is amenable to tagging. There might be circumstances that would dictate. For instance, where the court is satisfied that this was a single offence unlikely to be repeated then that would not be an appropriate tagging case.

Q172 Tom Brake: Perhaps we could move on to the subject of funding. In the ACPO submission a lot of the recommendations that you have made are based on additional funding or increased funding from Government, yet it is very clear that the Government are not going to be providing that increased funding. Do you think that your recommendations can, in fact, be funded from the efficiency savings that Sir Ronnie Flannagan is talking about?

Chief Constable Sir Norman Bettison: I feel there is going to be a gap regardless of what is done, and I think that gap is in the area of serious and organised crime. That gap was highlighted in the HMIC report in 2006/7 called Mind the Gap, and still exists. I know that this Committee spoke to Sir Ronnie about that gap and the gap is being addressed by means of collaboration and some additional funding from central Government. But whilst it is being addressed, it is not being closed. The funding as defined by the current CSR is likely to mean that policing is unlikely to grow and to address gaps that currently exist. If I can say a little bit more about that, the public are often told, and usually there is a political reason for telling them, that the police have benefited from a 39% uplifting of funding over the last ten or fifteen years. The story that is often not told alongside that is the extension to the service that has been required, so when I look around my particular force I see a counter-terrorism unit that was not there - and was not there two years ago, a child protection unit that was not there; I see a confidentiality unit that was not there; I see a homicide and major inquiry team of considerable numbers that is necessary now because of the expertise that is required in major investigation, I see teams of officers brought together to tackle guns and gangs, et cetera, so that 39% increase in funding has, I would propose, been matched by a 39% plus increase in demand. There are again some linings in the cloud which are that the Proceeds of Crime Act allows the police service to recover funds through POCA forfeiture, or through seizure. At the moment, however, the amount of money that comes back to the police from such seizures amounts to sixteen and two thirds per cent of that which is seized, and I think that it would be possible for a government to change that formula and do two things as a result; first, boost the capability of the police service to get ahead of organised criminals, because it could be ring-fenced only for use in serious and organised crime investigation, but, secondly, it would be a sprat to catch a mackerel or a pump-priming process because the more you put into serious and organised crime investigation the more you will receive back in terms of proceeds of crime. So rather than barking at the moon at the CSR constraints, what I am hoping to point out to the Committee are a couple of ways in which they could be closed. You asked me specifically about Ronnie's ideas around efficiency and cutting bureaucracy. I think that is going to make a difference but it is not going to allow the additionality that would be required to tackle organised criminality. It has been estimated by ACPO that, in order to interdict in the organised criminality we know of, we would require an uplift of about �300 million, and efficiencies are not going to give us that. There are some areas that I would very much speak in favour of, and one of them would be that we spend an awful lot of money on IT within the police service, and one of the efficiencies both Ronnie and the NPIA have focused upon is national procurement in a more efficient way than is currently done.

Q173 Mr Streeter: The NPIA has been in existence for two years, and you have been the head of it --

Chief Constable Neyroud: One.

Q174 Mr Streeter: Since 2006 --

Chief Constable Neyroud: One.

Q175 Mr Streeter: Well - never mind!

Chief Constable Neyroud: It makes a difference, actually.

Q176 Mr Streeter: When did you start?

Chief Constable Neyroud: We started on 1 April last year, 2007.

Q177 Mr Streeter: What have you achieved during that time? I am sure the achievements are considerable; could you list them for us, please?

Chief Constable Neyroud: In terms of achievements thus far, first, to create the organisation and bring a whole range of national operational functions, particularly the database functions, together and to start running them much more as a coherent whole. Secondly, as we started we had somewhere between five and six hundred projects and programmes that we inherited, and at that point I stopped counting, and we have worked very hard with the service - and Norman is one of the leads in that - to take that collection of "stuff", and it really was "stuff", and produce eleven clearly articulated programmes that are going to drive on some of the ambitions that you started to touch on, like protective services and closing the gap and areas like that. In terms of specific deliveries we have completed the Airwave programme in terms of finally delivering the final section to the Metropolitan Police, and we are about three quarters of the way through delivering the Underground, so 75 out of 125 stations thus far. We have completed the roll-out of the national fingerprint system, IDENT; we have completed the roll-out of Case and Custody - that is worth repeating, we have finally completed the roll-out of that one and we are just now doing the join-up; the service have delivered a substantial part of the neighbourhood policing promise of delivering the process in every single neighbourhood; we have delivered a new leadership strategy for the police service; we have almost completed a new people strategy for the police service, and we are a long way down the track of things like the strategy for taking mobile data. I could go on but those are some of the first year achievements. Essentially it is about getting a new organisation that works for the service rather than what went before, which did not quite meet that test.

Q178 Mr Streeter: When you introduce your new ideas do you find resistance in any of the forces? How can you make them implement new ideas and new policies?

Chief Constable Neyroud: It is kind of the other way round. The key starts from the police service identifying the operational challenge that we need to follow, so you start from the business of policing saying: "We have a challenge, this is an issue we need to solve". Specifically, we have just commissioned a programme called Forensic 21 which is a major programme to take forward the development of forensic services. That came from the service, basically saying we have three big budgets. We have the people budget, which is 80-something per cent of our total budget, we have the IT budget and we have the forensic budget, No 3, and we need to look at whether we are maximising the benefits of that. So we work with the service to design the programme and get it commissioned; it gets commissioned because the police service - that is ACPO, APA, and the Home Office - all agree this programme is required and are prepared to fund it at the expense of other priorities.

Q179 Gwyn Prosser: Sir Norman, we have been told that your association is positively, though not unanimously, in favour of force mergers, which I suppose reflects the view that there is professed resistance from some forces and, indeed, even hostility to any form of merger. Over the two years since the Home Office plan to merge was effectively abandoned, would you say forces are coming more in line with agreement to merge, or the contrary?

Chief Constable Sir Norman Bettison: The professional view - not unanimous, there are two or three very vociferous opponents to this view - is that mergers are inevitable. The police force patchwork quilt these days is 43 police forces in England and Wales ranging from 42,000 officers in the largest to less than a thousand in the smallest, and yet all forces are required to cope with what 21st century life throws at us. All forces are required to be technologically equipped and ready to support a police service in the 21st century, and that is becoming more and more untenable. Whilst understanding the political realities of the previous policy proposals and disappearance of those from the table, it remains the professional view that a smaller number of strategically sized forces would be the best way of arranging ourselves against 21st century ills. The fear in the public's mind is that that would be a retreat from localism, that they would be losing their local police. Ironically it is the professional view of ACPO that it would be the best way of securing a committed, dedicated policing service locally that does not get disturbed from that role, because at the moment what happens in some small and medium sized forces is that they will be providing a service as a neighbourhood officer on Monday but on Tuesday will have to be dragged off to do something else, or form a team to respond to hue and cry around a major incident. What we would be able to do with a smaller number of strategically sized forces is the strategic stuff in the hubs leaving the local policing delivered by a local inspector and a local superintendent, and what that would mean is that there could be an integrated relationship with the community leaving the sort of stuff that is a rarity within that community to be handled by people at a more strategic level.

Q180 Gwyn Prosser: My own constabulary in Kent have started doing quite a lot of innovative collaboration since the pressure, if you like, from the plan to merge. Do you see a pattern emerging where adjacent forces move together in a loose formation but still maintain, perhaps, their county identity? When you describe it as being inevitable that there will be more mergers, do you mean that in the strict form of the first recommendations?

Chief Constable Sir Norman Bettison: No. The reason I say "inevitable" is I predict that it is events that will bring this back to the agenda. It will be the failing of a force to do what is required in the 21^st Century that will cause people to ask whether it is suitably equipped, whether it has got capacity capability to meet the demands. So that is why I say "inevitable". Actually, in the absence of that inevitability, or whilst waiting for it, forces are getting on with the business of collaboration. It is patchy and there are some obstacles, some barriers, to collaboration, and those barriers are the tight fiscal environment which means that a lot of forces are drawing in their belts which means they are not raising their gaze. There is an irony there because if they were starting from scratch it might be possible to configure the services so that they were more efficiently provided in a collaborative way, but starting from where they are it means finding new money to make the transition, and that is not possible in the fiscal environment. Secondly, there is that sort of sense in both chief constables and police authorities of sovereignty and the fear - which I have come across as I did some work around collaboration - of being a net donor. So what you end up with is the small forces thinking that all their resources are going to get sucked into the urban centre, and the urban centre think that all their resources that have built up capacity and capability to tackle 21st century problems are going to get diluted and dissipated in supporting and buttressing the shires. So there is this very real sense, and it is difficult to break down other than by the Home Secretary using her powers, which she has.

Q181 Chairman: Can you give the Committee an example of one collaboration that has worked?

Chief Constable Sir Norman Bettison: There are some good examples in Wales. Wales are collaborating around serious and organised crime, Operation Tarion, as it is called, where the four Welsh forces, with some pump-priming funding from Welsh Assembly, which was one of the triggers and incentives, have created a very active and successful joint force unit. My own area, Yorkshire and the Humber, is committed to collaboration, and we have just delivered a strategic roads policing regional commitment. This is not about traffic policing but about policing the roads because criminals use the roads, and we do that at a regional level by collating our intelligence and putting our patrol vehicles out in the areas where they are likely to gain most success, and that is done regionally with regional funding.

Q182 Mrs Dean: Mr Neyroud, do police forces have sufficient financial resources to invest in essential new technologies, and what should be prioritised?

Chief Constable Neyroud: This links very well with some of the questions Sir Norman has been answering. First, the service as a whole spends around about a billion pounds on technology, in particular ICT, so firstly we would have to justify that we are capable of spending that wisely and, if you are going to run 43 forces, to make best use of the cash you have to start thinking about operating some functions as one rather than 43, and this is one of them. We are embarked on an intensive review of the current state of play on ICT for two good reasons, one of which is the money and looking ahead to how we can best use it, but, secondly, we have had ten years of very significant investment. I mentioned earlier that we finished off the Airwave programme, so we are at a point where we have built an awful lot and we have to think about the next generation over the next ten years, so this is a good moment to do that. We are also coming together with a new science and technology strategy as well. In terms of how we would apply that and make it count, the essence of it is prioritising it against what really counts to the public, which is neighbourhood policing. The biggest individual investment we are making in the course of this next six months is in mobile data, trying to force the pace on that so that we move from individual forces like Sir Norman's in West Yorkshire putting some of the kit out on the street - in fact, I think all of his officers now have mobile data on the street - to making sure we have that coverage that can enhance neighbourhood policing, and then looking at how we deliver technology to deal with serious and organised crime, and then looking down the risks in those terms. The third challenge is how we speed that process up, because I think the constant tale is that it has taken so long. We are looking at ways in which we can speed things up by re-using what we have, by taking things off the shelf, and also by stopping the re-invention of the wheel. For example, if one person has a working system seeking, as they have done in Scotland, to take that system across the rest of the country more quickly. It is in those sort of territories that we believe we can make some quite rapid progress.

Q183 Chairman: The technology is not bought centrally, is it, but by individual forces, so you have the possibility of forces not being able to communicate with each other.

Chief Constable Neyroud: It is not quite that straightforward; it depends. For example, taking another aspect of technology, all 43 have just agreed that forensic procurement will be done once and the agency is doing that for the service. As far as databases are concerned, we do that once. In the mobile data programme we are creating a framework contract for all forces to buy into, so the forces who have not yet got a platform can buy into a platform they can use, so increasingly we are looking at buying once and make available the framework to the rest of the forces.

Q184 Chairman: So does the NPIA do this?

Chief Constable Neyroud: Correct. That is now the NPIA's responsibility.

Q185 Chairman: You would go off to one of the mobile companies and negotiate the best deal?

Chief Constable Neyroud: Yes. We put out an invitation to tender and we create the framework. That is exactly what we have done with the forensic procurement, which is out to tender at the moment.

Q186 Chairman: And the forces would be obliged to buy in, would they, or is it still a choice?

Chief Constable Neyroud: In a sense they have already committed themselves to doing it before we start, on the basis that they have bought into the idea of a national tender for forensic procurement. They could subsequently opt to come out of it, although I have to say the general consensus is that where we have decided to do it together we must bind and commit ourselves to doing that, not least because if we start to come out of it we lose the credibility with the suppliers to the market place to make the sort of progress we want to make.

Q187 Ms Buck: What is the ACPO position in terms of the scope and limitations of the civilianisation of the service?

Chief Constable Sir Norman Bettison: We are pro civilianisation, which seems an anachronistic term these days because we talked about it for years, for decades almost, and now the term is "workforce modernisation" but it still has the same overtones. I think workforce modernisation people would say, rather than thinking in terms of cop or civilian, what is the right person with the right skills at the right time for this particular post, and that could change. Many teams that do work that would traditionally be thought of by the public as police work involve both police officers and police staff. For example, the last time I had a roll call West Yorkshire police had 5,863 sworn officers and a total of 10,107 staff altogether, so almost 50/50. The police service, speaking on behalf of ACPO, would always want these days to take the view of whether this role requires warranted police powers and, if not, then what are the other options in terms of employment. We would also ask, and this is a 21st century question we ask ourselves, whether the technical skills required to do this job are, (a), available in the average typical warranted police officer, and (b), if they are learned skills, will he or she be around long enough to maximise the benefit of utilising those skills? For instance, we used to have fraud squad officers who were seasoned detectives but most of my fraud squad now is made up of accountants who bring their accountancy skills to bear and stay in that job for as long as they are with West Yorkshire police. They do not go off for promotion to the rape unit or the air support division; they stay as fraud investigators. So the bottom line to a very straightforward question is the scope is almost limitless, yet the public facing role of policing demands that many of our people in those roles are what you and I would both recognise as police men and police woman.

Q188 Ms Buck: What about the custody sergeant issue, and the sections of the Serious Organised Crime Act that have not yet been enacted?

Chief Constable Sir Norman Bettison: My personal - but professional - view is it is a mistake. The custody sergeant has a distinct role; the distinct role is champion of PACE on behalf of the accused and the detained; but he or she also has another role and that is to ensure that the investigation that is triggered by an arrest gets off to the right sort of start, so the custody sergeant is in an incredibly dynamic and complex working situation. The amount of money that it would cost to recruit somebody that could take on that level of complexity would be probably more expensive than a custody sergeant. From a professional point of view what I would say is: "Please leave the custody sergeant alone". He or she does a fantastic job not only in terms of looking after the interests of the accused and the detained but also in terms of making sure that the investigation gets done properly.

Q189 Ms Buck: And do you feel that that message is heard? Is the fact that that section has not been enacted a reflection of those legitimate concerns being heard in Government, do you think?

Chief Constable Sir Norman Bettison: What has happened, and this is again a personal view reading the runes, is that a question similar to the one you asked first, what is the scope and the extent, has been asked of others, and they have kept being pushed and asked: "What about the custody sergeant?" Of course, there is nothing explicit about the role of being a custody sergeant that necessarily needs warranted powers if PACE were changed, but putting forward something as possible does not make it desirable. So the custody sergeant role, I think, has been offered by some as, "What is the extreme thing you could think of in terms of civilianisation? Well, the custody sergeant could be civilianised if PACE were changed". Just because it is possible does not make it desirable, and I think what has happened is that the delay in enacting the legislation to make it happen has been caught up in that question of whether it is really desirable, and professionally we say not.

Q190 Mr Clappison: The Committee has taken lots of evidence in the past about police bureaucracy and has also heard from Sir Ronnie Flannagan. Mr Neyroud, how is the National Police Improvement Agency responding to Sir Ronnie's recommendation to build standard processes for use across forces as a way of preventing duplication, which we have heard a lot about, and bureaucracy?

Chief Constable Neyroud: Firstly, overall in terms of Sir Ronnie recommendations, we have taken on the job of programme-managing the entire programme of the recommendations on behalf of the service, so we will help to make the whole happen rather than just the individual recommendations for us, which are the bulk of the recommendations. Picking up standard processes, this is not a very straightforward question because we do have a range of standard processes now. One in particular, the criminal justice process, is reasonably standard because it had to be in order to enable the case and custody system to come into place and for us to get the join-up with the Crown Prosecution Service and the other criminal justice agencies and the courts, so one of the things we are doing is making that process stick this year by getting the join-up to happen, and some of the benefits that the police service has been promised for a very long time. In terms of the others we are trying to identify the top ten processes, working with the service, that would make a real difference to the frontline operational officer if we were to streamline them or make them work more effectively, particularly the areas of Stop and Account and the use of powers on the street but also in forensics there are some complex processes that would benefit from being refined, and in the process of information handling there is an enormous amount of time that officers take in getting information into various systems, and we will be looking very carefully at those, and have an opportunity to do that as part of the NPAC(?) programme. Sir Ronnie's report makes the point very carefully that just because you have a standard process, and Stop and Account would be, it does not mean you are going to reduce bureaucracy. You have to start by asking what the outcome is going to look like, what is the citizen going to gain, and what is the officer going to gain if we start streamlining the process.

Q191 Mr Clappison: On the point of information handling Sir Ronnie told us that up to 70% of information is entered into police systems more than once. Can we expect to see a reduction in that figure as a result of your work?

Chief Constable Neyroud: I would be very disappointed if you did not. The top line in the review of ICT is looking for opportunities to reduce double-keying and dual-keying, first to make sure that what goes into the system is what we need in the system in the first place, and then to make sure officers are not having to re-enter data, not least because every time they do that there is a risk that the data will be wrong on the second and third occasion.

Q192 Mr Clappison: Sir Ronnie also identified specifically the problem of risk aversion, which is a problem in society in general, and I think most members of the public recognise the police are brave and professional but they cannot be insulated from that general tendency in society. Could you say what the police are doing to combat risk aversion, and could you make specific reference to the de Menezes verdict, please?

Chief Constable Neyroud: By far the biggest part of this is about leadership. If you have a leadership that is empowered and confident and understands how to take risk decisions and is supported through its governance to make those decisions in an effective way, then you will get the beginnings of a change. One of the biggest pieces of work that we have been doing in the first year is working with the service to produce the revised leadership strategy, and a big part of that is continuing both to improve the professional operational qualifications of colleagues - because it helps if you are a confident professional operational commander who is clearly supported in making well-informed judgments about the risk - and to put a substantial emphasis on the personal and professional ethics of officers. Ethics dealt with in the right way, not in a bureaucratic way, in terms of understanding why you are taking judgments, is important, but also improving and developing the fundamental business skills also means you are in a position to take well-judged decisions about risk in the business. So I think leadership is going to be the biggest component of the change.

Q193 Mr Clappison: On this general theme, could I put in a very brief plea to you to take a look at the training of police in the law of self-defence from the point of view of the household, of the shopkeeper and of the law abiding member of the public, because I think the law is robust on this but it only needs one or two cases where it is misinterpreted for a poor climate to be created through reporting of those cases. Could that be something which is taken into account so that the police take full account of the way in which the law of self-defence does give people a wide margin to defend themselves when they are being attacked?

Chief Constable Neyroud: The key there is to drive in the guidance that ACPO and the Director of Public Prosecutions reiterated last year, which is pretty robust, in fact very robust and as robust as the law is, and we would certainly wish collectively to reinforce that guidance.

Mr Clappison: That is heartening.

Q194 Mr Streeter: On the issue of local accountability and governance, your submission to us suggests the retention of police authorities. Is it right for the 21st century to have this tripartite arrangement between the Home Office, local authorities and the police force itself? Is there not a better, more modern way?

Chief Constable Sir Norman Bettison: I think there is an addition or supplement needed, but not a revision. I do think that it has stood the test of time, which is rarely sufficient of a recommendation, but the fact that the current arrangement precludes the police service falling into a politically driven, politically expedient police force has to be a key tenet of British policing that the public would want to protect. ACPO do support the role of the police authority as the police force level strategic oversight body. They have several tasks but the three main key tasks that they have are to agree an annual policing plan with the Chief Constable which allows, therefore, the strategic focus that the public of that particular county expect the police to have to be built into the plan: they raise and delegate finance at a strategic level, much of which now comes from central Government by way of grant but they raise the finance to enable the plan to be implemented; and, thirdly, they hire, fire and hold to account the Chief Constable in that particular area. The "three-legged stool" arrangement, Sir Ronnie's favourite metaphor, which allows the different tensions that offer a stable platform to play against each other, has worked well and ensures that the police are both independent but accountable to global people. I think additionality is required, and a lot of observers, a lot of commentators, want to move from where we are now to something else and reject the old, but I say that we perhaps need something else that is built on to the present platform, and that is a much more local accountability or answerability at a very local level at the business end of neighbourhood policing, so the neighbourhood inspector ought, and I encourage it in West Yorkshire, to be accountable to those people at the very local level - the local councillors in the wards that he or she provides a policing service to, and the local people who live in the local houses on the local streets. That is the accountability and answerability that we have to find for the next phase of the 21st Century, but that is not to reject the accountability structure that currently exists.

Q195 Mrs Cryer: Sir Norman, on the business of accountability to local people, councillors, neighbourhoods and communities, in my own constituency, for instance, for the eleven years I have been member of Parliament I have had a different Chief Superintendent every twelve months, sometimes less. How can that square with neighbourhood policing where there is a need for knowing your area and the problems of that area? Also, I am finding and my constituents are finding that when we try to contact the police we are put through to a call centre and we talk to somebody who does not know the area at all. That does not square with where we should be going on neighbourhood policing. Could you comment?

Chief Constable Sir Norman Bettison: To become really parochial, the fact that we have put a person in charge now of Airedale and Bradford North who is a Keithley resident ought to give you some confidence that he at least knows what the problems are in the area. On March 3 in West Yorkshire - and the reason I tell a local tale is that I think this plays out in many forces across the country in that it is about recent moves and ambition rather than embedding and delivery - I put 650 more police officers into neighbourhood policing teams, and increased the number of neighbourhood policing teams in West Yorkshire from 36 to 47, and these 47 inspector-led teams have a more local focus, because 47 teams can be more local than 36, and a greater number of officers which enable them to tackle more crime. Those inspectors - and the inspectors at Keithley I know well - are local people who have been in post, most of them, for quite a while, and it is those inspector-led teams that have to be held to account and brought to the attention of the knowledge of local people. Each of them in their performance and development review has a requirement that they raise their personal profile and become known by and accessible to the people in their parish. The police authority surveys members of the public on the question of whether they know the neighbourhood team and whether they feel the place is getting safer or more dangerous. We have also pushed a newspaper through the letter box of every member of the public, every householder, in West Yorkshire, not only giving them details about the neighbourhoods that are responsible for policing them but giving the personal contact numbers of each of those teams. So if it were a neighbourhood matter, a continuing matter, an update that was being sought by a member of the public, they now have a direct dial number to ring to speak to the organ grinder. I talked earlier on about the efficiency model for policing, and what was done some years ago is that a single point of contact for emergency calls was set up within the force, but now that we are at that point it is very difficult in the current funding regime, if not impossible, to roll it back out to eight divisional areas. So we have a central point of reference for emergency calls but we are now very much publicising and rolling out, and the inspectors have it as part of their action plan to get that number and get their profile out into the local community. So it sounds like jam tomorrow, but that is the ambition.

Q196 Mrs Cryer: Moving away from parochial matters, do either of you feel that there is a gap between local priorities identified through neighbourhood policing and centrally imposed targets?

Chief Constable Sir Norman Bettison: There has been a gap. APACS is a new form of performance regime that has been rolled out by the Home Office. The concern we have in ACPO is APACS seems to be the way to go but we have not yet seen it have any traction on other local services, promised by APACS. APACS stands for "Policing And Community Safety" which ought to bind local authorities and others, and we have not seen that take place.

Chief Constable Neyroud: I substantially agree with that. The key is finding in the national scheme a much bigger focus which is embedded in the new performance framework with public confidence and trust being the starting point. If you are succeeding in that then you should have substantial scope to make shifts and change a lot of detail that lies behind it. That means that neighbourhood policing teams become the pinnacle of performance regime rather than being, as it were, at the bottom of it, and if we can accomplish that shift, and I think there is a huge amount of honesty and purpose to accomplish that between the Home Office, ACPO and APA, we will see neighbourhood policing embedded over time.

Q197 Mrs Cryer: The Home Secretary has said that public service agreements will provide greater flexibility for forces to focus on local priorities. Do you agree with that?

Chief Constable Sir Norman Bettison: Yes. The focus for the last six years has been on volume crime, and volume crime means that you have a very narrow view of what matters because volume crime only accounts for about a third of all incidents. What the public sector agreement targets now push us towards is seriousness at one end of the spectrum, whereas volume crime never thought about seriousness, and it pushes us towards, as Peter says, the confidence and satisfaction of local people. The reason those are separate is satisfaction is measured of those who have used the policing service, and confidence is measured of those who are actually passive receivers of the policing service.

Chief Constable Neyroud: Coming back to your point about contact centres and contact management centres, public experience of policing is through telephone and personal contact, et cetera, and we have to be able to measure that whole experience. We know we made substantial progress with neighbourhood policing; there is a 5 or 6% rise in the level of public confidence in areas we have been doing some very carefully controlled sampling of because of neighbourhood policing, but we also know that we fall back on the personal service when we fail to deliver on promises, for example, to turn up, to take a statement, and so on. Basic personal services. So what we have to do in the course of the next period of time is to meet both challenges. Neighbourhood policing is about more than just a name for a neighbourhood and a neighbourhood policing team. It is about the total service that we deliver to you in your local neighbourhood.

Q198 Chairman: I have two very quick questions and I would like quick answers. The Prime Minister said on 25 February that we would have the mobile telephone numbers of local neighbourhood officers. What percentage of the population is now covered by this wonderful scheme that was proposed whereby we could just ring people up on our mobile phones?

Chief Constable Sir Norman Bettison: ACPO's response to that statement was that we can deliver an individual telephone number; we cannot necessarily, across the Service, deliver an individual mobile telephone number. In my area, for example, there is an individual telephone number of every neighbourhood policing team, and that is published. The details of those have been pushed through letterboxes.

Q199 Chairman: There are no mobile numbers but just a number people can ring?

Chief Constable Sir Norman Bettison: Some officers creatively and of their own initiative are handing out business cards with their mobile numbers on them. We have started from a footprint of local numbers for the 47 neighbourhood teams.

Q200 Chairman: Certainly, with the reporting of crimes, for example the theft of a handbag or breaking into somebody's car, the police do not come out any more, obviously, because of resources and pressure of time. You report it; you get a crime reference number.

Chief Constable Sir Norman Bettison: Actually that is not true. Some forces apply a sort of triage system but my force asks the question ---

Q201 Chairman: If a handbag is stolen in West Yorkshire, somebody would come out?

Chief Constable Sir Norman Bettison: Yes. The question is: "Do you want a police officer to come to you now or come to your home at your convenience tomorrow?" We now run what we call an appointments system. Just the same as you would make an appointment with your doctor to get advice about ingrowing toenails, you can make an appointment in an office and we will attend.

Q202 Chairman: Is the crime reference number on a central database?

Chief Constable Sir Norman Bettison: Yes.

Q203 Chairman: You could access that crime reference number anywhere and know what is happening about a case?

Chief Constable Sir Norman Bettison: Yes.

Q204 Bob Russell: Sir Norman, millions of residents are currently engaged in the democratic process of electing local representatives, but your submission to us seems to be hostile towards that. For example, on page 14 you state: "ACPO consider the LSP (Local Strategic Partnership) should be responsible for making adequate provision for neighbourhood accountability which may or may not involve local councillors and local citizens." The recommendation on page 15 is: "ACPO recommends the Local Strategic Partnership as the model for local multi-agency priority setting." The recommendation on page 34 is: "ACPO recommends that Local Strategic Partnerships should have the facility to raise and deploy funds at a more local level, particularly for partnership activity aimed at meeting very local priorities." Bearing in mind that police authorities are themselves quangoes, albeit statutory quangoes, why does ACPO want to give powers, and money-raising powers at that, to quangoes that are not even statutory and are not answerable to any elected representatives at all?

Chief Constable Sir Norman Bettison: Local Strategic Partnerships are made up of people who in themselves are answerable to the community.

Q205 Bob Russell: We have a local estate agent on our LSP in Colchester. We have a chief executive of a theatre and a deputy garrison commander; they are worthy people but they are not answerable to the community.

Chief Constable Sir Norman Bettison: I doubt that there is any LSP chaired by a local estate agent. That is as may be. What that is meant to do is to give real voice or real substance to the proposal that I offered earlier on to a question from Mr Streeter about the role of police authorities. What I said was, and ACPO believes, that something additional is needed in terms of accountability and answerability at a more local level than the policy authority. The police authority at a force-wide level cannot hold officers to that very local accountability. We think the LSP is just the current example, and you might be able to speculate a different model, that gives us the opportunity to get much more local in being answerable and accountable to local people. Just in case it lies on the record, ACPO at this time and at any other time recognises and supports the business of local democratic accountability.

Q206 Bob Russell: I appreciate that but I would urge ACPO to reflect on its recommendations, particularly a statement which says that it may or may not include local councillors and local citizens. That strikes me as ACPO wanting to remove day-to-day policing from the local community.

Chief Constable Sir Norman Bettison: Quite the reverse; it is actually making it permissible, not exclusionary. The words "may or may not include local people" are actually an invitation, a permission, that local people can be involved in the holding of police ---

Q207 Bob Russell: On page 8, Sir Norman, ACPO states that there remains a need to win widespread public support for an understanding of their role. I welcome ACPO's commitment on page 11 to neighbourhood policing, which states: "There are core principles of neighbourhood policing that we would wish to see established and any Government policies should take account of these features." Can you tell the committee where PCSOs fit into the ACPO policing vision and where should the limits of their responsibilities and powers lie?

Chief Constable Sir Norman Bettison: PCSOs do a different job to police officers. The reason I say that is that we often do not say that up-front, and therefore the public get hold of the wrong end of the stick - plastic bobbies and all the rest of it. Police officers are traditionally a visible, accessible, familiar presence on the streets of the United Kingdom. What has happened in the recent years is that as they have been drawn in to deal with the greater amount of paperwork and the greater demands of the criminal justice system, et cetera, we put them out; they are out there for 10 minutes, they make an arrest and then they are in the station for the rest of their shift. PCSOs do something unique. They wear the uniform of the local constabulary and walk the beat of a dedicated area day-in and day-out, thus restoring that visibility and familiarity. PCSOs should not be given any more powers than are commensurate with that role. Giving them additional powers that take them off the street would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. PCSOs with their current levels of powers are providing a service, which is a sufficient service.

Q208 Ms Buck: ACPO blames poorly thought out police reforms, distortions of pay and conditions and parochial thinking for difficulties in recruiting into the senior levels of police officers. Indeed, something is driving a relatively low number of applicants at chief constable level and for other senior posts. What do you hold responsible for that and what is your organisation going to take as its priorities where it responds to them?

Chief Constable Peter Neyroud: A number of factors come together. Incidentally, this is not a unique problem. If you look across the pond to America and at Canada and Australia, there is a substantial problem in getting people to the top of the service in all of those countries. Colleagues in America would say it is because folk look up and see the amount of pressure that chiefs are under. I could reflect that in terms of the last hour or so! There is a substantially greater pressure for public scrutiny, and that is right. The second thing is that we had the merger debate and, frankly, that moved the goalposts in a way that a lot of people just stopped applying at that point. We had the lowest number of people coming forward for senior ranks for many a year and, in the end, it ended up with 15. We are in catch-up mode to fill that. We have substantially filled the vacancies for this last year with the largest courses we have had at senior level for some time. We are hoping to replicate that and more, and particularly in respect of more women and ethnic minority candidates coming forward this year. In terms of the agency's responsibly, we are now responsible not just for implementing the leadership strategy but for the National Senior Careers Advisory Service. Critically, we have to get in much earlier than we have been doing in the past when we talk to people about their prospects and their capability to reach the most senior ranks, when they are inspector and chief inspector level, and start them thinking about and making sure that they have the skills to do that at a much earlier stage. Those skills will not be wasted at that earlier stage; they will ensure, as Mrs Cryer was saying, that they are capable of doing a very good job as a BC and commander. We need them to be planning their own careers in a much more effective way. There is one final point. We do need to look at some of the incentives. If you are taking on a job of scrutiny at Chief Officer level, there is a gap in terms of the reward and the packages that support officers to move them around the country. We have set ourselves up to have a family-friendly organisation. We have many senior cops, men and women who are married to partners with good jobs in other sectors. If you ask them then to move around the country, you have to put something very substantial on the table to encourage that to happen.

Chairman: If you have any further thoughts on that, perhaps you could write to us. May I thank both you, Sir Norman, and Mr Neyroud, for coming. I am sure we will see both of you again in the future.

Witness: Sergeant Guy Rooney, Custody Sergeant, Acton Police Station, Metropolitan Police, gave evidence.

Q209 Chairman: Good morning, Sergeant Rooney. This is the first time you have given evidence to a select committee. Sir Norman Bettison described your role as dynamic and complex and he urged Parliament to leave you alone. Has your role changed in the time that you have been a custody sergeant?

Sergeant Rooney: Yes, it has and I would strongly agree with what Sir Norman Bettison has said.

Q210 Chairman: Would you regard yourself as being in the front line of policing as far as policing in the 21^st century is concerned?

Sergeant Rooney: Yes, purely based on the number and types of people we now have to deal with when they come into custody.

Q211 Ms Buck: Over the years I have had some really quite dramatic examples of some people with severe mental health problems having to be relocated from my central London constituency to the Isle of Wight on one occasion and Birmingham on another occasion. What steps are being taken currently and how successful are they to ensure that this kind of extremely upsetting experience is not repeated?

Sergeant Rooney: You mean relocating some of these people?

Q212 Ms Buck: These are people for whom there were no custody suites available in central London. That is just an example. I think there is pressure on custody for vulnerable adults, which is an experience many of us know about.

Sergeant Rooney: There certainly is. If a person is that vulnerable, we would look to have a mental health assessment of them in the police station. We would then be guided by the recommendations of the Mental Health Panel. That would be a psychiatrist doctor, nurse and social worker. It is down to the doctors. We are then guided by them. If they say that this person is not suitable to be in custody, we will then facilitate their movement from custody to somewhere that they need to be for the appropriate care and treatment.

Q213 Ms Buck: But you do accept that this kind of thing has happened?

Sergeant Rooney: It definitely has.

Q214 Ms Buck: Do you thin it is still happening or do you think there has been progress?

Sergeant Rooney: It is definitely still happening. Last week I was involved in two mental health assessments in custody, so it is definitely still happening.

Q215 Ms Buck: Can I ask you about the criticism that the IPCC made about alleged queue busting and what your view is of that practice and what measures can be taken to respond to that? Is this something that you are aware of in your own force?

Sergeant Rooney: What do you mean by queue busting?

Q216 Ms Buck: It is basically the fixed penalty notice practice and using that as a means of avoiding detaining people.

Sergeant Rooney: Where I work it is certainly not a means to avoid detaining people.

Q217 Ms Buck: Is it used to ease pressure?

Sergeant Rooney: No, it is seen as another way of dealing with somebody on the street. If my officers have to make an arrest and bring someone into custody, then that is what they do. If the disposal option subsequently turns out to be the issuing of a fixed-penalty notice ticket, if the person is suitable for it, then that happens. That does not necessarily mean jumping the queue in any way, shape or form because they have still come into custody.

Q218 Ms Buck: Do you feel therefore that the criticism that the Complaints Commission has made is not justified? Are they, in a sense, claiming that there is a practice going on that you do not necessarily recognise?

Sergeant Rooney: Yes. I do not know of instances when my officers have decided rather than taking a person into custody to give a ticket. We have very strong guidelines about when somebody is and is not suitable to be issued with a ticket.

Q219 Mr Streeter: How long have you been a custody sergeant, may I ask?

Sergeant Rooney: I have been a custody sergeant for the last 18 months. I have been in the Police Service for 17 years.

Q220 Mr Streeter: Can you tell us how you use technology in your job? Do you write things out longhand or tap into a computer? How do you use technology?

Sergeant Rooney: All of the above: if the computers are working, we use the computers; when they crash, we go to paper. On a day-to-day basis when the computer system is working it does save an awful lot of time over using paper records. There is no doubt about that at all. Recently we have gone to a new custody system. I would say that it is much better than the old computer-based custody system we had. It needs to be more joined-up but there are plans afoot to bring that on line. We cannot implement everything all in one go.

Q221 Mr Streeter: In the 18 months that you have been doing this job, have there been any changes in the technology which you have found helpful and where do you think it need to go? Describe how it could work if the best technology was being used in your police station.

Sergeant Rooney: From somebody coming in through the door under arrest, I would say that it takes 30 to 45 minutes for me to process them standing in front of me to a point when I can turn to one of the gaolers and say, "Now take their fingerprints, photograph and DNA". We need to be able to move the information that I have created into their file, for want of a better way to describe it, into the crime system. We need to be able to move it through the criminal justice system so that once I have put that information in, nobody else has to input the same information. At the moment, that does not happen.

Q222 Mr Streeter: Have your officers already asked this person much of that information anyway before they get to you?

Sergeant Rooney: Yes.

Q223 Mr Streeter: Could they put that information in to their hand-held devices and just slot that into your system?

Sergeant Rooney: That could be one way of doing it. We do not have hand-held data terminals.

Q224 Mr Streeter: How often does your computer system crash in an average working week?

Sergeant Rooney: Last Sunday it crashed.

Q225 Mr Streeter: That was not a good day?

Sergeant Rooney: It was not. It just crashed at 2 o'clock in the morning. I learnt that from a colleague who was there at the time. It is still a new system which has glitches. We just work around the problems. It is not easy and it makes our life very difficult. As I say, what we have now is an awful lot better than what we did have.

Q226 Chairman: I want to ask you quick questions about alcohol, migration and paperwork. Could you respond briefly to each? Has the number of offences increased as a result of changes in the licensing laws?

Sergeant Rooney: I could not tell you if the number of offences has increased. The workload has increased. We now deal with many more people who are drunk during the day, who are coming into custody during the afternoon drunk. That has a knock-on effect. In relation to licensing hours, instead of having minor public order problems at tradition pub leaving time, those problems are now spread from 11 o'clock in the evening all the way through to 4 o'clock in the morning, so that there is no one single mad rush timeframe outside licensed premises. We now have people leaving various establishments and going to other establishments which are open later. We need to police those people throughout their journey and their night. I have been on duty at 6 o'clock on a Sunday morning and that was their Saturday night and we were dealing with fights in the street.

Q227 Chairman: Roughly what percentage of the people who go through your suite could have an offence that is alcohol related? Is it half or less than half?

Sergeant Rooney: It is at least half. We have noticed how bad the problem is. We have drug referral services and we now have drink referral services, which we are trying to push. We are a pilot for that. Unfortunately, the take-up by detainees is not very high because these people do not want help with drinking because they do not think they have a drink problem.

Q228 Chairman: What about issues of migration? Has that had any impact on the number of people who come into the police station?

Sergeant Rooney: The types of people we have coming into custody have changed. Acton and Ealing historically have a very high Polish and eastern European community. That community is now an awful lot bigger. The increased use of interpreters reflects that. It has got to the stage where we are on first name terms with the Polish interpreters. The research that I did before coming to this committee today shows that in Ealing alone the interpreters' bill for the last financial year was �1 million. That will give you an idea of the expense involved in employing interpreters.

Q229 Chairman: That has created an impact on policing priorities?

Sergeant Rooney: I would not say necessarily policing priorities but policing time.

Q230 Mrs Dean: On the question of whether civilians should be allowed to carry out the role of custody sergeant, could you say a little bit more about where your experience and training as a sworn officer enables you to do a better job than a civilian would do and why it should remain as the role of a sworn officer?

Sergeant Rooney: You can train somebody to input the information into a computer system. You ask the person their name, date of birth, address and what they have been arrested for and you input what the officer has told you. However, whilst the person is there in front of me, I am making an assessment of them. That is my risk assessment of how I think they are going to behave during their time in custody. I can benefit from the short time I have been dealing with custody and my 16 plus years of dealing with people on the street. Somebody who is very quiet and withdrawn and does supply the answers needed could be put into a cell and dealt with but vital clues could have been missed because the person who is inputting that information does not have the skills and knowledge to think: hang on a minute, there is something not quite right about this person and we need to explore a few more areas. That is at one end of the scale. At the other end of the scale is somebody who is drunk, antagonistic and wants to fight and still continue to fight. How does a non-sworn officer deal with that person? That is not an easy thing to do because you have to try and reason with the person but you still have to try to get their details out of them. There does come a point when, unfortunately, you end up having to use force to put them in a cell. Just because you have put them in a cell does not mean that your duty of care is finished. When you have done that, your duty of care to that person is considerably higher than to somebody who has been compliant. Again, there is a time issue. If the person doing that is a civilian and he misses out on the cues, is he going to be allowed to use force and how is he going to be held to account? I just do not think you would find a civilian who could be paid enough money to take that amount of responsibility.

Q231 Gwyn Prosser: Mr Rooney, you have just mentioned the case when someone comes into custody drunk, unruly and perhaps violent. You probably know that a detention officer in my constabulary of Kent has made a call for more protections for the detention suites. He has mentioned the use of what he calls "bouncer spray". What is your view of that call? Does that tell us something about the use of civilians in the detention suite?

Sergeant Rooney: I think it does.

Q232 Gwyn Prosser: Do you think in general the custody suite and those working in it have sufficient powers, especially civilians, and sufficient protections?

Sergeant Rooney: First of all, if one of my officers used CS spray in my custody suite when I was in there, I would be furious because that is not the right place to use that piece of protective kit. It is not the right place to use batons either. If you have to put somebody into a cell, unfortunately the only way you can do it is by putting your hands on to that person. We are trained in how to do that. Also, we use those skills more often than an unsworn person would because of what we have to do out on the street. If the person is really violent, I would look to use special public order trained officers to relocate the person rather than just a normal PC. Those people have had extra training. That goes back to the duty of care on them as well as my staff. Our dedicated detention officers in London can carry handcuffs. I have not seen a DDO use handcuffs in the time that I have been in the Metropolitan Police. I have seen lots of other custody staff use them, but they are police officers and invariably that is under the instruction of a custody sergeant saying, "Right, the risk assessment now requires us to place the person in handcuffs and leg restraints because of something". That is justified. I do not think at all that DDOs should have more personal protective equipment other than handcuffs.

Q233 Chairman: Sergeant Rooney, what percentage of your time is spent on paperwork?

Sergeant Rooney: In custody or generally?

Q234 Chairman: Generally? You go in on a Monday morning. By the time you leave, what percentage of your time has been spent doing paperwork?

Sergeant Rooney: Too much!

Q235 Chairman: Is it 50%?

Sergeant Rooney: I leave the police station to go and deal with incidents that my officers ask me to attend. If I am not out dealing with incidents like that, I am in the police station doing paperwork. It varies from day to day. Sometimes I manage to get my paperwork done and sometimes I do not because I have to be out.

Q236 Chairman: Is it about 50% of your day or less?

Sergeant Rooney: I would say about 70%.

Q237 Chairman: What about the demands on the police force by the government and by Parliament to meet targets? How much is this a problem? How much pressure is put on you to meet the targets?

Sergeant Rooney: I think the senior management of the teams are under a lot of pressure to meet those targets. That filters down to the teams. Some of that is used as an effective management tool to make sure that the teams, and therefore by default the officers, are working, but then there can also be almost micro management involved: please do this, ensure you have done this, make sure this box is ticked. That is especially around crime recording. That takes up an awful lot of time.

Q238 Chairman: Say you were Home Secretary for the day, what are the one or two things you would do in order to help with the proper use of police time? You have immunity here because you are talking to Parliament. Do not worry about Sir Norman sitting behind you. What are the one or two things you would do to free up some more time to catch the criminals?

Sergeant Rooney: Short term, we have to sort out our relationship with the Crown Prosecution Service. If someone is arrested and is brought into custody, they are interviewed and may be decided that we are now going to go to see the CPS lawyer who is in the station during the day to get authority to charge. That is because the Attorney General Guidelines say that for these offences we have to go to the CPS. We cannot do that because I only have one CPS lawyer in Action and we have 40 charging slots a month instead of 16; we should have two lawyers. As a custody sergeant, I then have to bail that person for nine weeks. We need to sort that out because that is not serving anybody. It is not serving the judicial system. The police officers have to complete all that paperwork. It is certainly not serving the victims of crime. If it is out of hours, is there a CCTV officer? Yes, there is but I am in North Wales and I cannot view the CCTV over the telephone, so you will have to bail the person for your local CPS representative to deal with. We need to sort that out because, quite frankly, it is ridiculous that we cannot get the CPS either to work longer hours or to be more amenable as to how we can deal with problems like that as they arise. I am forced by law to bail the person. I have no choice. That is the first thing I would like to try to sort out. I think that would be enough for the Home Secretary for one day, to be perfectly honest with you.

Chairman: You did not even mention police pay, which I think is amazing. Mr Rooney, thank you very much for coming to give evidence to us today. As we progress through our inquiry, we are not going just to take evidence from the chief constables but we are in Reading later on this week where we will be meeting some front-line officers like yourself. Thank you very much.

Memorandum submitted by Mr Paul Carne

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Mr Paul Carne, Mrs Rachel Carne and Mrs Helen Newlove, gave evidence.

Q239 Chairman: Mr Carne, may I on behalf of the Committee first of all express my condolences to you and your family - your wife is here - on the death of your sister and mother. It must be very painful for you. We are very grateful to you for coming to give evidence today to this committee to provide us with an insight into the views of the victims of crime. May I also welcome Rachel Carne and Helen Newlove. Mr Carne, my first question to you is: what were your views on the decision to award bail to a man awaiting trial for murder?

Mr Carne: We were particularly concerned. We knew there was a risk of Mr Weddell receiving bail and eventually he did receive bail, much to our concern. Our main concern was that there was a risk to us as a family. Knowing Gary Weddell personally, we knew what he was like and felt that there was a risk of him perhaps harming the family in some way.

Q240 Chairman: The decision was opposed by the police, I understand.

Mr Carne: Yes.

Q241 Chairman: Did you feel there were sufficient ways in which you could make representations as the family of one of the victims?

Mr Carne: We worked fairly closely with Debbie Pritchard, who is here today, who worked with the family and explained matters. She had very good communication with us and kept us informed at all stages really. We put that question to Debbie but there was very little scope for any other action that could be taken.

Q242 Mr Winnick: As the Chairman has said, we all have the deepest sympathy for what happened. It was a tragedy. In the paper that you circulated to us, Mr Carne, you more or less say that wealth and privilege played a part in the fact that the person concerned received bail. What makes you come to that conclusion?

Mr Carne: If it had not been so, then Mr Weddell would not have received bail. His brother was able to put up a significant amount of surety. He also had a high position, particularly being a barrister, and the judge was aware of that.

Q243 Mr Winnick: Do you really believe that because the person concerned who carried out the murders - and there is no doubt that he murdered his wife and his mother-in law, your mother - had a brother who was a barrister that that played a part in the decision of the judge to grant bail?

Mr Carne: I believe so, yes.

Q244 Mr Winnick: I ask you that because of the figures which have been released by the Ministry of Justice. It does appear that 60 out of 455 murder suspects awaiting trial for murder were released on bail, so it was not quite a unique situation regarding the person concerned. Nevertheless, you remain of the view that in this particular case the fact that the brother was a barrister played a part?

Mr Carne: It was certainly a contributing element. I think if Gary had been somebody in a more normal position, and his brother also, that the support for bail would not have been as strong.

Q245 Mr Winnick: You are also very dismissive about the psychiatric evidence that was given, which played a part undoubtedly in the fact that Gary Weddell was in fact given bail. Why did you come to that view?

Mr Carne: I am not an expert in these areas. I have only recently looked at the Bail Act or part of it. There seems to be very limited scope for manoeuvrability in refusing bail. The judge identified from Gary Weddell's theft of the coaxial cable that there was possibly a risk to himself. I believe that for somebody to be able to form a proper assessment of a person, and particularly an intelligent person as Gary Weddell was, requires a lot more than just a few hours. In particular, the psychiatrist actually was conducting an interview with Gary Weddell immediately prior to the hearing and the granting of bail and in fact did not actually submit a full written report as the judge had initially requested.

Q246 Mr Winnick: While he was out on bail, did the police keep any track of him at all or do you not know?

Mr Carne: They attempted to, yes, but that is a matter of resourcing. In an ideal world, yes, you would tag, you would do all the other technological type things that can be done today, but that is not always possible.

Q247 Mr Winnick: Was he tagged?

Mr Carne: No, he was not. The bail conditions were fairly limited. He had to sleep and reside at his brother's house and he had to sign on on two occasions during the week.

Q248 Mr Winnick: While he was out on bail, he was able to join a clay pigeon shooting club and in this way was given access to firearms. You obviously consider that totally inappropriate?

Mr Carne: Given the way in which my mother died, if that could have been prevented, then perhaps her death would have been averted. Certainly there should be improvements made about the public having access to firearms for sporting activities. Even so, there should be some safeguards in place, particularly of unknown people to the club who may come along just as members with a member to use firearms.

Q249 Mr Winnick: We all agree with that. I find it amazing, and I would imagine all my colleagues would feel the same, that Gary Weddell could join this particular clay pigeon shooting club, with all the dangers involved. You have been very critical about the brother who is a barrister and who played no part, except along the lines that you have indicated, and you believe that was a factor and you have been very dismissive about the psychiatrist's report. Can I finally put this question to you? Do you believe that the judge did not take into consideration all the factors and that much of the responsibility was with the judge who decided that bail should be given?

Mr Carne: Could you repeat the question? I did not quite grasp it.

Q250 Mr Winnick: Yes. How do you feel about the judge in the case who decided that bail should be given?

Mr Carne: I feel that there ought to be a process to go through and perhaps a logical and sequential process when evaluating information that is presented during a hearing. I felt that the judge at the outset had a predisposition to grant bail. He denied a request to visit the prosecution details relating to the case. I do not think he took significant note of the prosecution evidence when it was advanced, particularly in regard to the fake suicide notes. The case did centre around suicide notes, about the use of the family printer to generate the notes.

Chairman: We cannot go into too much detail about the case. Your comments have been noted on what you felt about the judge's decision. We have two quick questions, from Mr Clappison and from Mr Salter.

Q251 Mr Clappison: May I express my sympathies. You were clearly unhappy with the decision to grant him bail. Did you made that known to the Crown Prosecution Service?

Mr Carne: Through our police liaison officer, yes.

Q252 Mr Clappison: A few years ago, Parliament created a right of appeal in respect of decisions to grant bail. Were you told anything about that and whether there was a right to appeal?

Mr Carne: We were not informed about that.

Q253 Mr Clappison: That is something we will have to look at as a committee. If you had been aware that there was such a right in your case, would you have wished to pursue it if you were against the decision that you knew was being taken?

Mr Carne: If it would have led to a fruitful end, yes. At that time, and even now, we are not particularly aware of all the evidence and the law and perhaps Debbie Pritchard could answer that.

Q254 Mr Clappison: You felt at the time that this was the wrong decision and you were worried about it and, if you had had a right, you would have wanted to exercise it?

Mr Carne: Yes.

Q255 Mr Clappison: Or you would have wanted the Crown Prosecution Service to exercise it and you would have asked them to do so?

Mr Carne: Yes. There are difficulties because Mr Weddell was of previous good character.

Q256 Mr Clappison: I understand that but you felt that the decision to grant bail was wrong in all the circumstance of the case and the seriousness of the offence?

Mr Carne: Yes.

Q257 Martin Salter: Mr Carne, I want to turn to the issue of Mr Weddell gaining access to a clay pigeon shooting club. Were you aware that he held a firearms licence at the time?

Mr Carne: I did not know anything of Gary's activities. I do not believe he had one. He never had firearms training from what I have heard from the police.

Q258 Martin Salter: It would have been quite extraordinary, would it not, for him to be participating in a clay pigeon shooting club without actually having a firearms licence in the first place? Did he have a history of an interest in shooting prior to this?

Mr Carne: Not that I am aware of. It is not a requirement to have a firearms licence to use the gun at a shooting club when accompanied. I have even used a shooting gun myself in company events. There is no requirement for that.

Q259 Martin Salter: Would you like to see the law tightened to include bail restrictions placed on people who are awaiting charges on crimes of violence that they have no contact with either firearms or activities that involve firearms?

Mr Carne: Yes, the bail conditions should be onerous to govern all possible eventualities to exclude the person from causing any further harm to any person by whatever means.

Q260 Chairman: To be clear, Mr Carne, you claim to this Committee that if bail had not been granted, your mother would still be alive to day? That is your opinion?

Mr Carne: Yes.

Q261 Chairman: Thank you very much. Our next witness is Helen Newlove. Mrs Newlove, could I, on behalf of the entire Committee, express our deepest condolences following the death of your husband and thank you very much for coming to give evidence here today. We are conducting an inquiring into policing and therefore what you have to say is highly relevant to our deliberations. May I also say to the Committee that two of those convicted for the murder of Gary Newlove are currently seeking leave to appeal against their convictions. The exact circumstances of Mr Newlove's death are therefore sub judice and should not be referred to in evidence. May I ask you what the reasons were for your setting up Mothers in Arms?

Mrs Newlove: I think enough is enough. We have been through so much altogether as families. Obviously the other murders were different from Gary's but in the end the criminal justice system and the policing are still the same. I think that if we all get together and we stand together, that is more impactive and we may get something done.

Q262 Chairman: Before your husband was murdered, he had already raised, and you had raised, the issue of local crime and the levels of local crime and antisocial behaviour in your area. What was the response of the police to those concerns?

Mrs Newlove: They did not come out because if it is just criminal damage they do not come out. It is not necessary for them to respond to it. Gary saved somebody from a serious beating. The brother of other two neighbours sent me a letter to thank Gary for what he did. The police came after the event, so there was no policing. We have been told on the phone that we are fifteenth down the line and that they are too busy in Warrington town centre.

Q263 Chairman: How important is the issue of visibility in circumstances of that kind?

Mrs Newlove: It is very important because I believe that children of today know that the police do not come out for minor crimes, and I think the police should, especially for criminal damage because criminal damage was the start and then it ended with the murder of Gary. I think that the police ought to come out so that these people know that they can get into trouble for criminal damage as well.

Q264 Chairman: Since this appalling incident, has there been greater visibility of the police in the local area?

Mr Carne: We have actually moved away but I do go back to the house and there is visibility, but it is a case of the horse having already bolted, and to me it is still not enough. You need local police stations and not just somebody on a bike who goes round. There are people present but, as I have said before, the children see the police and they run off and they come back, and that is what they a have been doing. It has become steadily worse over three or four years.

Q265 Mr Clappison: In an interview with the Sun newspaper you said that policing needs to go back to basics. What do you mean by that? Can you expand?

Mrs Newlove: What I mean is that we should have police stations in our villages like we used to instead of closing them all down. When I moved into Padgate, there was a police station there and that was taken away. We only have a central police station in Warrington town centre that does not cover the outskirts of Warrington.

Q266 Mr Clappison: Since April of this year there is supposed to be a neighbourhood policing team operating in every neighbourhood in the UK. You have mentioned that you have moved away but is this something of which you are generally aware?

Mrs Newlove: Yes, I have contact with my local inspector. They come out to me and we have meetings and they are the neighbourhood team and they are asking what I want. The police that are here now were not there when I used to go to the community meetings.

Q267 Mr Clappison: Without going into the facts of the case, as we have been told not to, you have heard about the position of offenders on bail. Do you think there is more that the police could do to manage offenders on bail generally?

Mrs Newlove: You mean once they are out on bail?

Q268 Mr Clappison: Yes, when they have been charged with offences and then granted bail?

Mrs Newlove: Yes, and I do think the issue then does relate to having police stations. You cannot have one central station and nobody can check. They do not have the resources because, as they say, they are bogged down with paperwork. We have to have somebody in the community who knows what is going on.

Q269 Mr Clappison: I am sure every member of the Committee has a great deal of sympathy with you and wants to express condolences. You have mentioned your organisation, which was formed since then. What is the general message that is coming out of that organisation for people who have been in the same position as yourself?

Mrs Newlove: We want more DNA database evidence. We want the punishment to fit the crimes. As victims in court, we want more help and respect. If you go into that court, you go through all the motions and you are fighting for a seat. You should not have to do that. The press have a box, and obviously all the legal people have a box, but nobody has any respect for the families. You do not know who you are sitting next to. I had excellent family liaison officers who helped us get seats. We were there for nine weeks and we managed to get a room but if that room had to be taken for another trial, we would have had to walk round the building, gone through the same rooms, shared the same canteen. I think that is utterly disgraceful because you think the court is your safety net but you are there to prove your case.

Mr Clappison: From my point of view, may I thank you very much for coming to speak to us.

Q270 Mrs Cryer: Helen, I have been widowed twice and so I know that you are very brave to be here. James Clappison has already touched a little bit on this. As from last month, we have a new system whereby we have neighbourhood policing teams operating in every neighbourhood in the UK, which is supposed to ensure a more visible police presence. You said to the Sun that the police should be more visible. Has it made any difference in your area? Are you seeing more policemen and policewomen around?

Mrs Newlove: Yes, I am. There were a lot more police officers obviously when it happened, and I did say, "Do not be na�ve. Once you leave, they will come back", because they were protecting us. They did come back, but we do have more policing and I am working closely with the neighbourhood teams in that area obviously because I have a property there. It is something I was passionate about before this happened. I said to Gary, "They will wait until somebody is murdered", and unfortunately it was my husband, so I am not going to go quiet on this. We need safety on our streets.

Mrs Cryer: You are doing very well.

Q271 Chairman: Is the fact that you formed this organisation an admission that the existing structures, for example Neighbourhood Watch and local police liaison groups, are not working?

Mrs Newlove: I did not actually form this Mums 4 Justice. It was the Sun. That is their headline. Obviously the murders of the daughters of these ladies were different from Gary's murder, which was because of yob culture, but we still have the same views. I do think we need to feel safe to go out there. Why should we feel afraid to go out and protect our property? It is amazing that these youths know their rights and they push you. On that night it could have been Gary who was locked up. We do not need to be saying that we need CCTV because that does not stop an act; that just records an act.

Q272 Chairman: Was it a fear that if in fact the police arrived and they saw a fight going on, everyone would be arrested?

Mrs Newlove: No. It sounds a clich�, but that is the general feeling of decent people because in most of society it used to be that the minority were of the yob culture and the majority were decent people. Unfortunately, there is role reversal now. The minority are decent people and the majority follow yob culture today. Yes, you do question it because they know that you can push their buttons and they can turn it round.

Q273 Bob Russell: Mrs Newlove, is it the case that for the young people in the area where you used to live there were no club facilities, no youth facilities, there is nothing for them to do?

Mrs Newlove: There is a youth facility. Yes, there might be a shortage of people covering to open up but, I am sorry, I still do not agree that there is nothing to do. My children are just the same as these children. They do not go out and do this to people. They do not go out and drink. It has nothing to do with that. It is about the fact of going out, glamorising getting drunk and then doing these acts and then getting your mobile phone and taking pictures. This is not a case of "we have nothing to do". This has gone above the boundaries totally.

Q274 Bob Russell: Thank you for that because that is a view that I hold as well. There is plenty for young people to do if they look for it. As a separate question, you have mentioned the closure of police stations. The counter argument that has been put to us - generally over the years and it is not a new thing - is that it is better to have police officers circulating around a neighbourhood rather than sitting behind a desk at the police station.

Mrs Newlove: Yes, I totally agree, but you still need your local police station for the elderly who are not good on phones or computers. People say you should email. You may not want voice mail. If that community hope is still there, I am not saying you should not bring the police out into the streets; you need them because the communities will get together. They will know the nooks and crannies; they will know the faces. Obviously if you have police stations, why do you not name and shame the people who are causing criminal damage and violence on the streets, or name the parents because we have to protect the children. If my children were in trouble, I would want the police to tell me and I would deal with it. I would not run away and blame the system because they are my responsibility, as Gary did when he went out to protect us that night.

Bob Russell: I thank you for all that you are doing.

Q275 Chairman: You mention alcohol-related crime. Do you think the availability of alcohol has now increased to such an extent that it is out of control?

Mrs Newlove: I think the availability is glamorised. I think it is so cheap to get and I think we need to have more powers for the police. Why are we not penalising the licence holders and the big stores and not by huge fines because that is nothing to them, as I have said before. Shut them down. If we do not pay our council tax, we are thrown in prison or we are stopped. Why are these places not shut down straight away? Make them stand up and be accounted for. They will just carry on and do it. You will never stop anybody going in and getting alcohol for a friend, but it is about the culture we have. Cheap alcohol is available abroad and this does not happen. You can go out at 2 o'clock in the morning with your family still around. I think now it is very glamorised. That is just a hinge that they like have for it - well, it is the alcohol. It is not a defence for murder but it is part of the mitigating circumstances. You have two levels there that do not go together. It does not matter; alcohol is a problem but it does not give them an excuse to go out. We all drink alcohol but we do not all go out and do that and now the yob culture think it is quite good because now they use their mobile phones to take a picture. Would you take a picture doing that and get fun out of it?

Mr Winnick: You are quite right. Your views are the same as ours.

Chairman: I think you will find that the Committee agrees very strongly with what you have said. Mrs Newlove, Mr Carne and Mrs Carne, thank you very much indeed for coming and giving evidence to us today.