MR DENIS O'CONNOR CBE, QPM

21 APRIL 2009

  Q60  Bob Russell: You mentioned all the strengths there but are there any weaknesses? Eight years ago was the starting point. Was that at about the time that community support police officers were arriving on the scene or was it before then? How do the CPSOs fit in with the Neighbourhood Policing pattern?

  Mr O'Connor: It is before them. Mr Russell, the reason why I brought the idea to the Home Office and colleagues in ACPO was because we saw something which I think your Committee has noticed which is that although recorded crime is going down, anxieties and concerns and disbelief are going up. We saw that reassurance gap and our diagnostic was a powerful part of that, the absence of, in your terms, some Heartbeat-plus type of policing, and we need to put it back on the road. The PCSO was a subsequent development which was designed in part to help populate the 3,600 neighbourhoods which now have a team.

  Q61  Mrs Dean: Mr O'Connor, is not the whole point of the new emphasise on Neighbourhood Policing that it is the local people that assess the performance and to whom the police are accountable? Why then should HMIC be involved in assessing the performance?

  Mr O'Connor: The British Police Service is great at innovating locally a lot of the time, but here for the first time we actually have three key ingredients which if you implement them well will work in any environment, because when we tested it we tested it from the Gloddick ward in the north (Manchester) all the way down to the leafy lanes of Surrey and, believe it or not, those three ingredients work. The reason why the Inspectorate inspected it is because we wanted the systematic implementation of something in which we had invested a lot of money and for which we had an evidence base. Whilst it is nice for people to do something that they have just had a thought about in the bath in the morning, just like in medicine or wherever else, if you get a strong evidence base about what works for the patient, or in this case the public, we wanted to be sure that people would implement the evidence-based approach rather than the last thought that was in their mind, because the hard bit in this is not putting somebody on the ground, the hard bit is to engage with people about their priorities and then try and solve them. You have to be as good at all three, not just the first one, if you want to succeed, so that is why we put a lot of effort into it. It is a big investment of over £1 billion and I think the public deserve a decent return from it, and I know the Police Service want to do well in it.

  Q62  Mrs Dean: Practically how do you assess it?

  Mr O'Connor: We assessed it over three years. We started looking to see if they had a cunning plan to do it, as it were. We then looked at the implementation of the next stage, a second year, to see if they were implementing it as per the evidence. Then in the third year we started looking at outcomes and we did some reality checking. For example, we spoke to people who went to public meetings. There is an idea that you have key individuals and networks, people who own shops, people at the doctors' surgery, and we linked into those people to see if they had noticed, and by year three they were noticing. It was not even everywhere and it was not perfect everywhere and if you see our report, we think there is a still a way to go, but we were confident that it had been implemented. British policing is devolved. It has great strength but we wanted to make sure that the evidence was well-used.

  Chairman: Mr O'Conner, thank you for coming to give evidence today. On the G20 you have told us the timetable for your proposed review and in certain respects you found the police behaviour unacceptable and in others you did not. We look forward to receiving the interim report when it was ready. On your own appointment as the preferred candidate, the Committee will be writing today to the Home Secretary to give her our observations on your appointment, so you may like to sit by the phone because she might phone you today.

  Q63  Mr Winnick: Keep your fingers crossed!

  Mr O'Connor: Can I just put one footnote to what I have said. Everything I have said today about G20 of course I say with a certain modesty and humility because I do not have all the facts. In terms of acceptability, on the face of what I saw, it was unacceptable. That is the only footnote I would wish to add.

  Chairman: You have been very open and very transparent in what you have said and we are very grateful. Thank you very much for coming in to give evidence to us today.