MR DENIS O'CONNOR CBE, QPM

21 APRIL 2009

  Q40  Tom Brake: That protocol would allow them to leave if they produce identification?

  Mr O'Connor: Allow them to join or leave, in fact both of those issues have arisen.

  Q41  Chairman: Finally on G20 issues, you talked about sharing information with Mr Hardwick, who is going to give evidence to us very shortly. Presumably you are leaving the IPCC to deal with the actual complaints against officers but you are dealing with the policy aspects. Is he going to be sending you copies of complaints? Some of us know that The Guardian for example this morning has sent some information, some complaints to the IPCC. Would you also be seeing the complaints in full or are you relying on the IPCC to send you a synopsis? How is that relationship going to work?

  Mr O'Connor: The division of labour, and I am sure Nick will correct me if I am wrong, is he is looking at individual behaviour of what people did or did not do and I am looking at the tactics that were deployed overall. That is the division of labour: the methods the police were using as opposed to the behaviour of individuals. That is the first thing. We are in the process of making arrangements to take some of the complainants who complained about the methods and to look at their complaints, but we have to go through a process to make contact with them, and we have a process in hand for that to happen.

  Q42  Chairman: Sir Paul has asked you to conduct this review and even though you have been appointed by the Home Secretary to do your job, you have had no conversations with the Home Office and the Home Secretary about taking on this responsibility?

  Mr O'Connor: I have had some conversations with officials in the Home Office and obviously I have had a lot of conversations with Sir Paul. We are an independent Inspectorate and we do have the capability to take on issues if we think the issues are important. I think we are at a potentially decisive point here. When I joined the police, too long ago, we used to win by appearing to lose. That approach has been left behind and I think there is a danger at times of us collectively losing because the police appear to be intent to win when that is actually not the case. I think they are trying to find a balance and it is a difficult balance to strike, but I think we need to expose the issues so that we can all see them and all take an informed view about it, that will be our intention.

  Q43  Chairman: Moving this evidence session on to your wider role, what may concern some is that the Home Secretary has appointed you to this very important post following the Green Paper that was published last year, and I do not know whether you have a chance to read the Select Committee's Report Policing in the 21st Century but this is a huge role that you are going to have to undertake in a relatively short period of time. How can you devote sufficient attention to the other aspects of your job as the Chief Inspector of the Constabulary when so much of the first few months is going to be spent dealing with this particular inquiry?

  Mr O'Connor: I do have some staff and some good people and I hope to get a lot of co-operation from experts outside. We are not simply restricted to the staff within policing. It might be helpful if I just give some indication of how I propose to go about the role.

  Q44  Chairman: It would be very helpful also if you could tell us what you think the main changes are going to be since you are succeeding Sir Ronnie Flanagan, how are you going to change the Inspectorate?

  Mr O'Connor: Yes, thank you. Should my status change after this process, my intention is that the Inspectorate should be more independent, and I will say a little about that; it should be grounded in the public interest, difficult though it may be to determine in every circumstance, as we have just discussed; and we should have an aim to inform the public about what is happening in policing because it is a service which has one of the lowest profiles in terms of public understanding about what actually happens in policing. Those are the three reference points. On the independence piece, we want to be more independent, and hopefully after today, if I am successful, I would hope that once a year we do a state of policing report. That might be something that this Committee would consider, to help underline our independence in reaching the view that we do, and indeed there may be other issues of concern to you where it may be profitable for you to ask us questions to help you take a view. In order to help hold our feet to the fire, in case we get lost on what public interest means, we intend to have a non-executive advisory board of distinguished individuals in their own right.

  Q45  Chairman: Is this your idea?

  Mr O'Connor: This is my idea, in order to help us prioritise what we do and make sure that we take a balanced view of the interests that we are looking at.

  Q46  Chairman: And who will sit on this board?

  Mr O'Connor: We are in the process of approaching people but I imagine we will have some people who are academics, who are experts on issues like public confidence in crime reporting, which has its own controversies around it. I would hope to get somebody who has been involved in developing public policy, particularly around issues of diversity. I would also hope to get some individual who had had a senior role in the media and the press because communication is so important, so a range of individuals.

  Q47  Patrick Mercer: Mr O'Connor, how would you fulfil the duty of being "a fierce advocate and more explicit guarantor on the public interest"?

  Mr O'Connor: Putting it into practical terms, Mr Mercer, what we have been quite good at in our own way is being a guarantor of professional standards, and we are recognised as that by the profession. What we are seeking to do in becoming a much more public-facing body is to do this: to start our inspections with the public experience and outcomes in terms of their risks, their sense of security, their confidence, and the costs of policing. In other words, we are going to ground what we do in what it feels like to be policed. For example, on rape, in the past we would have looked at rape in terms of what is the intelligence about rape, what are the processes around rape. We hope to do a rape inspection early next year. We are going to start in that particular case by looking at the victims' experience of it and the outcomes for the victims, and then work backwards from that, so we are going to try and ground what we do in how it feels to be served. It is a switch of effort which that hopefully exemplifies.

  Q48  Patrick Mercer: Would you expect to be more publicly critical of the police than some of your predecessors or all of your predecessors?

  Mr O'Connor: I think at times we may be more critical but I do think at times we may be able to shine a light on a lot of great work that the police do, which is hidden, submerged and never sees the light of day. I would hope that as a result of being more independent and acting in the public interest and informing people, that we will be able to give people a sense of justifiable confidence in their British police. I think there is a great opportunity to do just that because at the moment if you want to know about schools or you want to know about where to put your mum when she is very elderly and in need of care, you know where to go where you can get an objective take on what the service is like. For the police it is quite hard to do that, and so we aim to fill that gap.

  Q49  Martin Salter: Mr O'Connor, looking at the five key principles on which the Inspectorate is being based, one is focus on improvement which is measured through outcomes for users. We note, and in fact as a Committee we probably welcome, the fact there has been the abandonment of most Home Office targets for the police. Of course, that then begs the issue about how your inspectors will judge the performance of police forces without targets to aid them. In your answer could you give us your view of the usefulness of targets or otherwise. In our previous inquiry when we visited Mr Mercer's constituency we heard from Chief Constable Steve Green about the perverse effect of targets in certain situations where police would actually be encouraged to solve non-crimes in order to tick a box rather than address some of the more serious issues facing the community? I am sorry, there were about five questions there.

  Mr O'Connor: Let us go with it. On improvement, we think one of the things that the police have suffered from is a narrow take on how well they do, and I have to declare an interest because I have a very close relative in the police and I know the effects of that on the individual. We intend in the autumn of this year to publish for the first time—and it will not be perfect—a rounded assessment where we look at how it feels in the public in terms of confidence in this area, whether crime is up or down, (hopefully it will be quite accessible), what local policing looks like and how well the local policing seems to be doing (because we have ways of assessing that), we will look at the organisational health and what the mix of the workforce looks like and, importantly, for the first time, value for money. We have developed quite a lot of work to help police forces and police authorities look at value for money, so we put a broad, hopefully reasonably accessible, set of information for you as an interested citizen if you want to find out about policing. We look across the piece so we will take a judgment in the round about how well they are doing. If you are serious about getting something done then targets can be helpful, but I think local targets are the way to go rather than remote targets, unless there is a huge national effort around one issue when you can mobilise people to build a spaceship, or to do something in the civic interest which helps concentrate and mobilise people's minds. There are real difficulties with a remote battery of targets that do not seem to relate to Leicestershire or Reading particularly.

  Q50  Mrs Dean: Mr O'Connor, your career has been spent largely with the Met and Surrey Police. How can we be sure that you have got a good understanding of the smaller and more rural forces around the country?

  Mr O'Connor: Unusually it was in Kent, where I spent the best part of four years, and I have to say I went to over 400 parish hall meetings with the then Chairman and I saw a lot of the rural end of Kent, including Romney Marsh and the like. I think in comparative terms I am unusual in that I have served at the top end of two provincial forces and the Metropolitan Police. I have inspected 16 forces across the Midlands, from Wales towards The Wash. I hope I have a feel, which is good, for what smaller organisations do and the complexities that the large ones face.

  Q51  David Davies: Mr O'Connor, in your report Closing the Gap you highlighted the problems of getting specialist units investigating very difficult crimes in small forces and you suggested mergers as a solution to that problem. That has obviously gone by the board now for various reasons. What do you think could be done to ensure that specialist units are able to investigate crimes to the level that is required?

  Mr O'Connor: My concern at the time was a range of issues including counter-terrorism. We did not have a counter-terrorist network then. Huge investment has gone in to put that layer on top of police forces, so that deals with one of the risks. The second risk I was concerned with was serious and organised crime. Some things have been done about that, but that issue is still unresolved in terms of how you get a unified strategy in order to make sure that all of our agencies are pulling together so that we make sure we are prioritising those who damage the UK's interests most. I think there is more work to be done there, and we have reported on that recently, and I hope that work will follow through. There is a series of other issues—public order, civil contingencies—where it makes lots of sense for police forces to collaborate. I know this Committee has been encouraging collaboration. I have been tasked recently—and you may regard this as somewhat ironic—to look at collaboration and how collaboration can be fostered. I have worked with all of the partners and developed an approach which I call "Informed Choice", and what it will amount to, in a nutshell, is that there will be a hub which will produce information about costs and risks, how much IT costs, the risks to different regions of serious and organised crime if it is left as it is, which will inform police authorities, the Home Office, and people like yourself so that they can make informed choices about how they collaborate and when they should collaborate because it is in the public interest because you can reduce cost and you can control risk. At the moment we do not have a FTSE or a little reference point that gives us good, solid information to say that if you buy your cars in this way or your IT in that way you would be able to stretch your budget so you can do other things for the public.

  Q52  Tom Brake: Can we come on to the issue of efficiency. We have just had a discussion about targets and you do not think there is a need for national targets because local targets are appropriate. Presumably you are going to carry on the work of trying to improve the efficiency of police forces. How are you going to do that without having targets?

  Mr O'Connor: Of course the police authorities are required to have some targets for efficiency themselves, and it does seem to me a sensible thing not to immediately remove their discretion, if you have given them some discretion, to see whether they pursue (that discretion to good effect). That is one issue, but in the public interest I think it will be very useful additionally, and this is what we are working on now, if for an area we had a value-for-money profile of that police force. That is what we are producing. Value-for-money profiles would produce the best information that we have about staffing in the police and costs. It would enable us to look at how much is spent on patrol, how much is spent on intelligence, what is the difference in the mix between the people who are police or non-police, and it will give the local executive, the chief officers and the police authorities comparative information about costs and overheads, for the first time. It will be imperfect to start with, and I have no doubt people will tell you that, but this is where we started some years ago when we were starting to look at crime and comparative crime to see whether we could do better at it. I think the same thing is possible with value for money. We intend to shine a bit of a light into that territory. We started it with an experimental pilot piece last year and we will be rolling that out in the autumn.

  Q53  Tom Brake: From your point of view, what do you think are the areas that are going to deliver the best in terms of improvements in efficiency? Where do you think the flashpoints are going to be with some police forces or police authorities about implementing those improvements in efficiency?

  Mr O'Connor: When recently I produced this piece of work on Informed Choice for the Home Secretary, we identified three candidate issues in relation to costs and risk. In relation to risk we felt that the candidate issue for immediate treatment was serious and organised crime because of the variation in treatment across the regions in England and Wales, ie variation in the degree to which control (of serious criminality) is exercised. The other issues that we identified as immediate candidates for this efficiency hub or collaboration hub to look at were procurement where, if the Police Service brigades itself, it is a massive buyer potentially and there is good experience in the Health Service of what you can achieve if you mass yourself together in order to make purchases. Obviously IT is but one consideration in all of that. The other area we looked at was shared services, human resource and finance. There are some real opportunities in there. Some forces have been trying to pull themselves together, seven or eight of them, in order to act as a bloc to be able to be strong in the market. We thought that that also offered opportunities, so there were several opportunities here to be pursued and taken.

  Q54  Chairman: In our report Policing in the 21st Century, which I am sure you have read, we do point out specifically about the issue of hand-held computers and new technology. Will you be able to write to the police chief constables in the various authorities and say, "We recommend that you should all buy the same hand-held computers and they should be bought from this same company," or are you going to be advisory? The point of having efficiency savings is that somebody can actually say, "Buy here."

  Mr O'Connor: My role, depending on where we get to today, is to find the facts and inform. I think that the NPIA, the Home Office and the Home Secretary have ample powers to effect or execute those facts.

  Gwyn Prosser: In your earlier answer to Mr Mercer you said that in terms of being critical of individual police officers, or indeed police authorities, you might be more critical than past incumbents. You also went on to say that on occasions you might like to shine a light on the brilliant things the police are doing. Would that be the situation in your relationship with government?

  Q55  Patrick Mercer: It would have to be a powerful light!

  Mr O'Connor: Maybe with the benefit of hindsight, the best word I would use is "forthright" and then people can decide whether it is criticism or praise, and no doubt they will do that in equal measure and if I upset enough people I am probably doing the right thing. One potential candidate to be upset is government. If the policy frame is problematic we will say that.

  Q56  Gwyn Prosser: In particular, in terms of police funding, how robust do you feel you will be able to put those matters in terms of government?

  Mr O'Connor: When we look at value for money, as well as profiling where the staff are and the costs are, I think we will note the funding that those forces receive and we will make visible to the public the issue about where they stand on the funding formula, another issue which I know you have walked through in the past, so the public will at least have the information. It is for government and others to resolve.

  Q57  Ms Buck: You were a senior officer in the Met at the time of the Macpherson Report. I think it is fair to say that the Police Service has come a very long way since Operation Swamp and the death of Steven Lawrence. There is widespread community support for the use of stop and search as one tool for dealing with knife crime and street crime. Given one of the biggest challenges that you face is violence and crime between young people, why is it that the police do not as a service have the confidence of young people, particularly in minority communities?

  Mr O'Connor: I think that is a very good question and it is an enduring question. It is not new. If one were being compassionate, one would say it is because it is the job of the police to exercise sometimes, as we have discussed today, a measure of control on the streets and sometimes it is not tempered or finely contextualised or highly tailored because it is Friday or Saturday night, or whatever else, and young people are the people on the streets and they are on the receiving end of it. Young people are more likely to be stopped and searched and they are on the receiving end of that. Young people communicate hugely so that the word spreads very, very rapidly. I am not fatalistic about the issue. What I do think is that where young people are particularly targeted as victims one huge way for the police to regain their confidence is if they explain to them when they do stop and search, "The reason why I am doing this is because somebody else (maybe not you) may be carrying a knife." If they explained it to young people they will win them over. However, it is how they do it and it requires a discipline and a tolerance on their part to do it and it is not always done as well as it could be or we would like.

  Q58  Ms Buck: I think that is absolutely true. Would you accept that one of your key tasks is to move this forward, because I think we have seriously failed young people and young victims in particular? Whatever the effectiveness and usefulness of the tactics that the police use in protecting the wider community, that is a challenge that they have got to rise to. We need to turn that from generalities, which I am sympathetic to, into specific actions.

  Mr O'Connor: With the Tackling Knives Programme I think there is a potential opportunity there. As the Committee knows, it is an end-to-end, it is not just a law enforcement approach to a very difficult problem. It does strike me that there are opportunities within there to think how you communicate effectively with young people about what you are trying to do to protect them, to guard them as citizens. If we could put that at the heart of that programme maybe we can make a real dent in that confidence issue.

  Q59  Bob Russell: Mr O'Connor, you have been closely involved in the development of the Neighbourhood Policing model. Is that not just reinventing the wheel, Heartbeat revisited?

  Mr O'Connor: When I started out trying to persuade the Home Office and others before it was fashionable seven or eight years ago to provide some money so we could reinvent it, I did not think so then. It has some facets of Heartbeat in it, but what we found when we trialled it in eight police forces on 16 sites was that having a Heartbeat around was one of the ingredients but if you wanted to convince the public what you were about, you also had to take account of what they worried about, not what the constable had in his or her head, and you had to try solve every problem even if you did not succeed. If you put those three ingredients together, over those 16 sites we got a 12% to 15% increase in confidence in a year. It took six or seven years to get to where we are now. I would say that is because the ground had been relatively untilled. The research evidence on that is available in a Home Office report and that became the basis for Neighbourhood Policing, so it is a bit of Heartbeat but it is Heartbeat with some specific disciplines about what you do in public priorities that work.