UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 242-ivHouse of COMMONSMINUTES OF EVIDENCETAKEN BEFOREHOME AFFAIRS COMMITTEE
THE GOVERNMENT'S APPROACH TO CRIME PREVENTION
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This is an uncorrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others.
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Transcribed by the Official Shorthand Writers to the Houses of Parliament: W B Gurney & Sons LLP, Hope House, Telephone Number: 020 7233 1935
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Oral Evidence
Taken before the Home Affairs Committee
on
Members present
Keith Vaz, in the Chair
Tom Brake
Mr James Clappison
Mrs Janet Dean
Bob Russell
Mr Gary Streeter
Mr David Winnick
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Witnesses: Rt Hon David Hanson MP, Minister of State, and Mr Stephen Rimmer, Director-General, Crime and Policing Group, Home Office, gave evidence.
Q289 Chairman: I would like to welcome the Minister for Policing and Crime Prevention, Mr David Hanson. Mr Hanson, thank you very much for giving evidence to us. You have brought with you today Stephen Rimmer from your office. Since we have just heard evidence from Sir Alec Jeffreys, I would put one question to you, and we have heard from ministers on this before. He is pretty clear, is he not, about not wanting to retain DNA on the database? What is the Government's current thinking on this? Has it changed since the matter was last brought before the House?
Mr Hanson: No, it has not, Mr Vaz. We are in the middle of the Crime and Security Bill Committee sessions at the moment. Yesterday we reached clause 14 of the said Bill. Clauses 2 to 13 are part of the DNA database argument, as is clause 14 and beyond, and to date we have not had a division in the Committee. We have had some useful debates. The Government's position remains that a six-year period is appropriate and proportionate.
Q290 Chairman: I have asked Members of the Committee to be brief in their questions, so you can be brief in your answers, because we are all keen to go to Prime Minister's Questions, and we have arranged this session on a Wednesday because we wanted you to be present. You are busy on the Bill and we appreciate that. The other inquiry that we are conducting at the moment is on crime prevention, looking at the causes of crime and assessing the Government's record on dealing with the second limb of the former Prime Minister's statement that Labour was going to be tough on crime and the causes of crime. Crime has gone down, according to official statistics last week, so you must be quite pleased about that.
Mr Hanson: I am very pleased that crime has gone down now, Mr Vaz, because it is important that we do tackle crime. Crime has fallen 36% since 1997. Last week's figures show an 8% fall over the past reflective quarter. They have shown major falls: a 57% fall in vehicle crime, a 36% fall in household crime, burglaries down 54% over the past 12 or 13 years. They are impressive statistics, particularly, if I dare say so, at a time when we have been in recession over these past 12 months which has made a difference.
Q291 Chairman: What have you done specifically to tackle the causes of crime? We had some powerful evidence yesterday from Iain Duncan Smith and Graham Allen as part of their initiative into early intervention. Are we tackling those causes? We know we are doing well after crimes have been committed, but what about those causes?
Mr Hanson: It is an important point. I know that both Iain Duncan Smith and Graham Allen are very focused on it. We are just coming up to the third year of the Youth Crime Action Plan, which was a £100 million investment. There was the first year; the second year we are currently in; and then the third year is 2010/11. It is designed specifically to look at tackling some of the longer term issues that involve early identification of individuals who have been involved in crime, looking at some of the key things they are interested in (such as diversionary activity, after-school clubs), patrolling around schools, supporting Family Intervention Projects. Indeed, you will know that the Prime Minister announced only at the end of last year that the 10,000 Family Intervention Projects that we currently have proposed are to be increased to around 56,000 over the next two to three years. We are trying to identify early who is vulnerable for potential criminal activity, to look at the first-time entrants and what is happening to them, and to try to build in long-term strategies to divert people away at the earliest possible moment. As you know, quite frankly if someone reaches the age of 18 and they are still involved in criminal behaviour, it is much harder to turn them away than it is at a much earlier age.
Q292 Chairman: Louise Casey told this Committee that where there is a will there is a way. Clearly there is a will to do things. Do you think that more should have been done faster? We appreciate what has been done over the last 18 months.
Mr Hanson: We are never satisfied. Although there is a drop in crime by 36% there is still 100% of crime when it happens to an individual or to a family or to a community. We have to continue to drive it down still further at every opportunity. We are looking now at Family Intervention Projects, the Youth Crime Action plan, looking at legislation on support to parents, currently going through the House with the anti-social behaviour orders. We are looking at minimum standards of anti-social behaviour, we are looking at support for diversionary activity, and we are looking at new legislation which we have just introduced on reparation orders. There is a whole range of things and we need to do more, not just on individuals but also on big issues like designing out crime. One of the reasons that crime has fallen in cars by 57% is because we have invested in crime measures in vehicles. The same needs to be done for mobile phones, for buildings and for other activity as well to continue this progress.
Q293 Chairman: Before I call on Mr Russell, you are the Police Minister and there is a debate on policing this afternoon, and you were quoted yesterday talking about the culture of overtime amongst the police service. Is it correct that off-duty police officers are paid £100 when they answer a phone call?
Mr Hanson: There is a range of potential overtime packages. That figure was in the overtime packages that we put into the public domain yesterday. We are very keen to try to save round £70 million from police overtime. We are going to do that by rostering, by tackling the culture, but also by engaging with the police negotiating board in those very issues to see if we can make some changes.
Q294 Chairman: £100 for a phone call?
Mr Hanson: Officers are given a minimum amount of time on duty. These are phone calls that are taken when they are on duty but not on duty.
Q295 Chairman: On duty but not on duty?
Mr Hanson: Overtime on duty: on call.
Q296 Chairman: That is what the cost is, £100?
Mr Hanson: That would be the minimum payment they would get. In theory, it could be one phone call, but it could equally then be attendance at the office and going on duty.
Q297 Chairman: Every time they do any activity, they will get £100.
Mr Hanson: It is the minimum payment for on-call activity. That is part of the fee we have negotiated with the Police Negotiating Board.
Q298 Mr Clappison: Just to be absolutely clear, although it was becoming clearer towards the end of your answer, it is the case that a police officer can receive £100 for taking a call off-duty.
Mr Hanson: There is a minimum on-call allowance, yes.
Q299 Mr Clappison: That happens.
Mr Hanson: Yes.
Q300 Mr Clappison: It is something that does happen.
Mr Hanson: It could happen.
Q301 Mr Clappison: Does it happen?
Mr Hanson: It has happened, yes. These figures have come to the attention of the public because we have put them there as part of our drive to drive those figures down.
Q302 Chairman: I think we know why you put them there, because people are saying that you are cutting the police budgets and you want to say, "Well, they can make their own savings."
Mr Hanson: Can I be clear: we are not cutting police budgets.
Q303 Chairman: Of course you are not.
Mr Hanson: No. A 2.7% increase next year.
Q304 Chairman: Exactly.
Mr Hanson: We are trying to make savings on the police budget, to put that money into other activities.
Chairman: That was a soft question from me to allow you to say that, but I am sure you will say more this afternoon. Bob Russell.
Q305 Bob Russell: I would just observe that MPs are never off duty. Minister, if crime rates are plummeting, why does Britain have the highest prison population in Europe?
Mr Hanson: There may, Mr Russell, be a correlation between the two. We are capturing more people, getting more convictions, the people who are being caught are very often getting longer sentences, and therefore we have seen a rise from 1997 until now of around 22,000 to 23,000 in the prison population. Part of that is because the changing nature of crime means that there are more serious, dangerous, violent offenders going to prison. One of the strategies that the Ministry of Justice followed when I was the Minister there for two years and which it is following now, is to try to look at taking out people from the lower end of crime into community-based sentences at a time when making sure that we have serious violent criminals put in prison for long periods of time.
Q306 Bob Russell: I would certainly welcome that, particularly if it is going to remove that vast number of people who have mental illnesses who have been incarcerated in prisons. To what extent is it the role of the Home Office and criminal justice agencies to tackle the root causes of crime? To what extent does it involve partnership co‑ordination with other departments, following on the Chairman's opening question?
Mr Hanson: It is absolutely essential that we involve other departments, and not just other departments but also other agencies in the community, such as local councils. Stephen Rimmer may want to speak on this in a moment, but he will lead as an official on monitoring our public service agreement targets. We have several, 23 or 24, which are cross-government targets, where the Home Office has a lead but other departments have to play their role. We are very keen on doing that. Ministerially, we have regular meetings on crime prevention issues. On youth crime particularly, DCSF, the Ministry of Justice and the Home Office are responsible jointly for the Youth Crime Action Plan, and Stephen as an official will deal with cross-government responses on crime reduction measures.
Q307 Mrs Dean: What evaluation was carried out of the Cutting Crime strategy for the two-year update report and what were the key findings?
Mr Hanson: The Cutting Crime strategy report was produced several years ago. We did produce, as you will know, the update document. The update is essentially a refresh of where we are going and what we need to do. Although the strategy itself is a three-year strategy, we do need to monitor it and evaluate it continually, and officials are doing that. The update two years on is simply to say how we are performing against what we said we would do, what are the challenges that have arisen in those years, what are the crime figures that have happened in that period and how do we need to refresh the strategy. That is an ongoing process. In a broad sense of evaluation, there is not a formal evaluation, but there is a continuing examination by ministers and by officials. Stephen may wish to comment on where the strategy is.
Mr Rimmer: Some of the key individual programmes that this strategy highlighted around youth crime, around tackling knives, around prolific priority offenders are subject to their own individual evaluation. We develop a range of indicators and then we link it in outcome terms to the PSA requirements that the Minister has already outlined, so that we have a sense of outcomes in terms of crime but also on whether our programmes, to the extent we can judge these things, are contributing to those reductions in crime. The only thing I would add to what the Minister was saying earlier about the range of partners we work with to do all with that is that we try, even on a national level now, to engage much more directly with crime and disorder reduction partnerships locally, so that we have that clear sense, not just at the departmental level but at the delivery level, of what the pressures and the challenges are for local crime partnerships.
Q308 Mrs Dean: Are there any key findings that you want to draw to our attention?
Mr Hanson: There is a range of measures. For example, on the Tackling Knives Action Programme we have seen a considerable amount of investment go into that and we have seen a fall in hospital admissions. We continually monitor issues. We are currently in the second year, for example, of the knives programme. We are hoping to produce a third year shortly, but we have not finally made a decision on that. We will monitor what the performance is in years one and two versus our objectives. Each of the programmes here has a clear outcome to it, because we are trying to reduce crime in certain areas across the board.
Q309 Mr Streeter: Whoever wins the next election, Minister, from April 2011 it is likely that all these budgets will come under pressure. Are you satisfied that steps that will have to be taken will not undermine the crime prevention work which, I accept, has been going on in recent days?
Mr Hanson: For policing budgets, subject
to the House of Commons approval at
Q310 Mr Streeter: From April 2011 onwards?
Mr Hanson: April 2011 onwards will be more challenging. We have a CSR to go through. I cannot give you outcome of that CSR. I can say that on policing numbers and on police community support officer numbers, the Chancellor has given an indication in the PBR that there will be sufficient resources to allow forces, if they wish, to maintain their current numbers, as of 2009-10, post April 2011. If I am honest, it is going to be a very challenging public spending round, whatever the outcome of the election, and therefore there will be pressures on other partners, as well as on ourselves, to meet those demands. That is even more important, in my view, for the benefit of partnership, to make sure that we maximise the benefits of the resources that we have. I cannot, as yet, give to the Committee, because we do not know, what the Home Office budget is going to be, what my Department's budget is going to be and what local government and other agencies are going to have.
Q311 Mr Winnick: Minister, yesterday a youth was convicted of murder. The person convicted had breached his anti-social behaviour on numerous occasions - numerous occasions. While I would not expect you to give us an explanation about this, I certainly hope that you will write to the Committee - I hope with the Chairman's approval - how it is that this youth who was convicted of murder breached his anti-social behaviour on so many occasions. What is being done to ensure that if someone gets an anti-social behaviour order it is enforced? That is what the public, understandably, is asking.
Mr Hanson: You are absolutely right, Mr Winnick. With regard to the specific case yesterday, some aspects are currently ongoing, so I cannot comment upon it.
Chairman: Are the facts about the breach of the ASBOs correct?
Q312 Mr Winnick: They had been breached about a dozen times.
Mr Hanson: Some of the press reports indicated a very, very high level of ASBO breach. The level of ASBO breach, in my understanding, is not as high as the press reports, but it is still unacceptable and it still is a contributory factor in my view to the offending behaviour. It is not acceptable to have ASBO breaches. Certainly if Mr Vaz wishes, we will write to the Committee when this case is completed about these issues.
Chairman: Please, if you would do that.
Q313 Mr Winnick: Will that be next week, in so far as it is possibly legally?
Mr Hanson: When the legal proceedings are completed, I will write to the Committee. The key thing is that it is not acceptable. Perhaps I could say to the Committee - and this is an important fact - on ASBOs, 93% of individuals who receive an ASBO, after their third criminal justice intervention do not get involved in the two years following that ASBO in criminal activity again. ASBOs themselves are effective. They are an effective tool and they do work.
Q314 Mr Winnick: 93%.
Mr Hanson: I am not happy with the fact that there are breaches which are not followed through. That demands us to look at both the court proceedings the probation proceedings, what we do in terms of the Youth Offending Team and/or the criminal justice system generally, and I accept fully there are needs to tighten that up to make it much more effective.
Q315 Bob Russell: Following on from earlier questions, you write that from 2011-12 10,000 families will be supported through the Family Intervention Projects each year. Do you have an assessment of how many problem families there are by that definition in the UK?
Mr Hanson: The Prime Minister has indicated that we want to try to expand the 10,000 to around 56,000 by 2014. The assessment is that, whatever the challenges in family life in the United Kingdom, those 56,000, which are Family Intervention Projects for England only, are the assessment of what we can do in relation to funding challenges in the next three years.
Q316 Bob Russell: What impact has inadequate housing had on those problem families? Has there been any evidence looking at the fact that 25/30 years of failure to provide sufficient low rent housing has contributed to the growth in the number of problem families?
Mr Hanson: There is a range of challenges. Housing may be one, but there are much more dysfunctional issues sometimes than housing. Part of the problem for young people who are going on to commit crime may be because they are growing up in a culture where alcohol dependency or drug dependency is rife, or a culture where their parents have committed criminal behaviour, or where their parents are not tuned to help support them to achieve aspiration, where the standards that many people would expect - not just those in low-cost housing would expect - are not being met. There is not one specific issue. There is dysfunctionality which very often relates to a parental approach and parental behaviour, and the key aspect of the Family Intervention Projects is to help tackle some of the problems in the parents as much as some of the challenges in the children's lives.
Q317 Bob Russell: I certainly would not disagree with the last 90%, but I would urge you and your officials to look at the impact on housing.
Mr Hanson: Housing is an important issue. Where there are challenges, it is an important issue. But I grew up on a council estate, but there was not necessarily crime because we were living on a council estate. The first seven years of my life was spent with eight people in a two-bedroomed house. We did not commit crime. My parents did not go to prison. It does not mean, necessarily, that overcrowding or social housing or low-cost housing equals crime. Absolutely not.
Q318 Bob Russell: I think you have misunderstood my question, I hope not deliberately. The point I am making is that people need to be housed. Do you agree with Louise Casey's proposals for Family Intervention Projects to include residential schemes, effectively taking whole families into care?
Mr Hanson: There are occasions when that is necessary, but it is in a small number of cases. There are currently examples - Manchester City Council, is one, Sheffield City Council is another - where they do have specialist units. If I look at this dispassionately, the 56,000 people for FIPs are not going to be in 56,000 special accommodation units or in ten special accommodation units. We need to tackle people at source, wherever they happen to be. If there are totally dysfunctional families, in a small number of occasions then a specialist unit might help.
Q319 Bob Russell: Why has it taken 13 years to find out there are 50,000 problem families?
Mr Hanson: Everything, Mr Russell, is continuous improvement. We can always say that there is something that we could have done five years ago, ten years ago, 20 years ago. There are always things that we can improve. We have to continue to look at the problem, analyse it, and come up with solutions. The Family Intervention Projects are a natural continuation of the work on the Youth Crime Action Plan to do that. I am sure you will support that.
Q320 Mr Clappison: Do you have a figure for the recidivism rate of people who have served a prison sentence?
Mr Hanson: It would vary, if I am honest, Mr Clappison. For some young people it will be as high as 75% to 80% - for people under the age of 18. For some people on community-based sentences, it may be between 45% and 60%. For those on prison sentences, maybe 60% to 75%.
Q321 Mr Clappison: It is natural for it to be higher for people who have gone to prison because they have committed the more serious offences.
Mr Hanson: Yes.
Q322 Chairman: It is still very high and it has been high for years. We have heard a lot of evidence on this Committee that more needs to be done in prisons to rehabilitate offenders and to give them work and to give them skills and to give them a better chance in life. Do you think this will be an important task for whoever forms the next Government?
Mr Hanson: It certainly is. It is a task that we have undertaken during the course of this Government. I cannot now speak for the Ministry of Justice because I am not there, but I did do this job for two years as Prisons Minister. One of the things we were trying to do was to ensure that we helped to give support for drug intervention and alcohol intervention in prison, to help support employment prospects, to get people through the gate in a positive way. We have reduced re-offending by 23% over the past seven years.
Q323 Mr Clappison: As a member of the Select Committee, it seems strange to me that when so much offending is committed by people who have served custodial sentences, and we are talking about reducing offending and you are a Minister coming to talk to us about reducing offending, that you are not in charge of what happens to them in prison, where more could be done to rehabilitate people and reduce offending. It is a strange division.
Mr Hanson: We do work very closely with the Ministry of Justice, so much so that I did the job for two years and now I am doing this job.
Q324 Chairman: It is your reward for a successful period, obviously.
Mr Hanson: Absolutely. A reward made in heaven. It is a very important point that Mr Clappison makes. I still think - and we have discussed this in the MoJ - that there are people going to prison who would be best served by a community-based sentence which would help them tackle some of their drug, alcohol or attitude problems, which we cannot deal with in the five, six or seven weeks of a short prison sentence. That is a key area to look at. In the longer term, prison also needs to work with employment, drug and alcohol problems, to help people reintegrate back into society, and - to link up with Mr Russell's point - to give housing opportunities and offers. That is certainly a part of my colleagues' MoJ experience and proposals to date, but more can always be done.
Chairman: Indeed.
Q325 Mrs Dean: What proportion of those who receive Parenting Orders complete the programme and is there any evidence to show their effectiveness?
Mr Hanson: Parenting Orders are extremely positive. From memory - and I am looking for the figure - we have around 14,500 to date. We do not have published research as yet on the effectiveness of the evaluation of Parenting Orders, but if I could give you my hunch, Mrs Dean, my hunch is that help and support for parents is an important point in helping to reduce re-offending in young people. Although we do not yet have formal evaluation of that, I believe that they are a valuable product and we are certainly encouraging their use still further.
Q326 Mrs Dean: Do you know what proportion complete the programme?
Mr Hanson: I am afraid offhand I do not.
Q327 Mrs Dean: Would you perhaps write to the Committee.
Mr Hanson: I would be very happy to give a figure rather than make one up now, Mr Vaz.
Q328 Chairman: We would like you not to make one up. If you would write to us, that would be wonderful. I hope you never make one up when you are dealing with this Committee anyway.
Mr Hanson: What you see is what you get, I promise you.
Chairman: Excellent.
Q329 Mr Streeter: Perhaps you would have a go at this question, Minister. What is Integrated Offender Management and how will it improve upon current Prolific and Priority Offender programmes?
Mr Hanson: Integrated Offender
Management is one of the small schemes we are currently developing, which is at
a relatively small level of operation at the moment, whereby in areas where we
have identified it, such as some of the boroughs in
co‑operation between the police, between probation, between local authorities to manage offenders through the system. In practice that means that if David Hanson was a young offender then the interests of all parties would follow David Hanson through his initial trial, through his ultimate conviction, through his sentence. If that was a custodial sentence, we would follow him through to his return to the community, and we would look at what his needs were and try to manage that in an integrated way to maximise the benefits of all of these systems. In the past, probation may not have known what happened in prison; prison may not have known previous histories in the detail that we want them to; the police may not have managed that individual outside as a potential further offender. That is really looking at how we do this in a much more focused way on the offender.
Mr Rimmer: To add a bit of data to that,
the overall reduction in re-offending for people going through the Prolific
and Priority Offender scheme last year was 29%.
In most areas we have built beyond that, with an Integrated Offender
Management approach, which brings in a broader range of offenders, and there the
figures are even more encouraging. In
Q330 Tom Brake: Minister, the Government pledged to "create an early warning system that draws on local crime analysis and consumer experience to identify problems quickly" to help the nation to stay ahead of the game in emerging crime areas. That was specifically in relation to new areas of technology. However, it would seem that in relation to mobile phone crime in prisons and the use of Facebook to bully or threaten people from within prison, certainly mobile phone use has not yet been tackled, and in relation to Facebook it would seem that the Government have only just realised that this was a problem that needed addressing. Why did this early warning system not work?
Mr Hanson: If I am honest, Mr Brake - and I always try to be to the Committee - it is work in progress. We need to sharpen up on how we develop that early warning system. The inspiration for it is there. Some of the practical applications are in place. There is more work to be done to make sure that we are effective on issues that you have mentioned, such as mobile phones. One of the key things we have to do is to look at those issues really carefully, about designing out crime, because that is what has proved to be working, particularly on issues such as vehicle crime, in the past. We are looking now, with, for example, the Design and Technology Alliance, at how we can design out crime on mobile phones but it still is very early days and we are not at the stage that I would hope to be.
Q331 Tom Brake: I understand in relation to prisons - and I am sure you will be aware of this as an ex Prisons Minister - that there is a relatively straightforward technological solution to the use of mobile phones in prisons which requires the installation of a network in prison. I understand the costs involved are relatively small. We are talking possibly of tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds. I do not know whether you are able to confirm that. There is a solution but it has not been rolled out. Why not?
Mr Hanson: I am talking with the absence
of eight months or nine months' knowledge of where we are now, so it may be out
of date, but the position was that we wanted to ensure that we have BOSS (body
orifice security scanner) chairs in prisons.
We have invested in those to make sure that individuals coming in are
scanned before they arrive in prison for mobile phones. We are looking at technological
solutions. My understanding of where we
are with that is that there is a range of solutions, but the technology,
necessarily, does not always work solely within the prison. One of the key things is that many prisons,
even in
Q332 Tom Brake: Moving on to the subject of how the Government is going to incentivise businesses to work with local authorities and other partners to address the issue of crime prevention, perhaps I can give you one good example. My understanding is that when houses are being built, the builder is not required to fit locks on their properties, possibly any locks at all and certainly not locks of a certain standard. Minister, you have quite rightly pointed out that vehicle crime has been greatly addressed by manufacturers introducing better systems, what joined-up working is going on at a government level to incentivise home builders to ensure that they fit adequate locks, for instance?
Mr Hanson: I confess, Mr Brake, that I am not personally in my responsibilities dealing with that activity of incentivising builders.
Q333 Tom Brake: The crime prevention aspect of it.
Mr Hanson: On the crime prevention aspect, we do have, as you will know through things such as Operation Vigilance, extra resources going to specific areas, but we are not tackling areas on an industry-wide basis, we are tackling those on a crime hot-spot basis.
Mr Rimmer: To add to that, I think you have already heard evidence from the Design and Technology Alliance. One of their key remits is to work with business to determine the sort of risk areas and opportunities around crime prevention areas, certainly including target hardening, which you have already described. We are still in a process of waiting for some further recommendations from them on a range of discussions they have had with various elements of the private sector.
Mr Hanson: I know my colleague Alan Campbell deals with this on a day-to-day basis. I am not aware of any firm proposals coming through as yet. Our focus has been identifying hot-spots, trying to fund preventative measures in those hot-spots and that is where the resource has gone to date.
Q334 Mr Streeter: Minister, can I take you back to money for a second. I discovered this morning that the Chief Constable of Devon and Cornwall, a relatively small authority, is paid over £170,000 a year - so that is more than the Prime Minister - and there are five officers employed by Devon and Cornwall Police Authority earning over £100,000 a year - five of them. Do you think that any chief constable should earn more than the Prime Minister? Do you have any observations on this? Because I do not.
Mr Hanson: The Prime Minister himself has been very clear that there needs to be examinations of high level salaries. At the moment I am looking with colleagues at a range of police salaries, but I cannot as yet give a firm policy announcement in relation to that. I think we do need to look at the issues of recruitment and reward but also at restraint in the current circumstances.
Q335 Mr Streeter: Were you aware that chief constables were earning that kind of salary?
Mr Hanson: I was aware, Mr Streeter.
Mr Streeter: I was not.
Q336 Chairman: Despite that, the Government has had to intervene, has it not, in Nottinghamshire, and in Leicestershire they have difficulty in filling the post of Chief Constable? Who is supposed to be looking after all this for you? Is it Mr O'Connor or is this done by the Home Office itself? Obviously you cannot choose who the Chief Constable is.
Mr Hanson: There are two aspects to this. First of all, in relation to the intervention in Nottinghamshire, that is an Inspectorate initiative led by Denis O'Connor. I am obviously kept informed of those issues. Dependent on his report on Nottinghamshire, which will be due out, I hope, within the next few weeks, he will make recommendations which then I will have to consider as Police Minister with my colleague the Home Secretary about whether we take any further action or not based on his assessment. There is an ongoing process. I cannot comment on that until it is complete. We are very aware of the challenges that Nottinghamshire faces and we are apprised of the fact that we might need to look at that report in due course.
Q337 Chairman: It might surprise people. We understand government intervention with failing schools, but this is a kind of central issue, is it not, that this goes on for years, the money continues to be paid, but the results are so poor that there has to be intervention in a police authority?
Mr Hanson: Ultimately, I have the power to intervene, based on recommendations through a procedure. Ultimately, if we wish to, we have the power to remove a chief constable, and we have the power, I think, to replace the police authority. Certainly we have the power to intervene, and we will exercise that power in the event of recommendations if there is a need to do so, but there is a process which the inspector has to go through.
Q338 Chairman: Of course. What concerns this Committee, I think, is how does it get to a situation like that? You have all these structures, all these highly paid people in the Inspectorate, all giving advice and assistance - with chief constables earning a large amount of money, as Mr Streeter has said - there is an Assistant Chief Constable and a Deputy Assistant Chief Constable, with all these people around, how does it get to a stage where you have this?
Mr Hanson: One of the key things we were trying to do in the Policing White Paper produced before Christmas, and which we are doing through the process over the last 18 months and beyond, is to put in place a real level of inspection on the performance of authorities, inspection on the performance of the constabulary, and ensuring that we start a benchmark: performance, outputs, costings.
Q339 Chairman: Do you mean that you do not have any of this already?
Mr Hanson: We do, but we are tightening that up, Mr Vaz. It is very important that we do so. We are receiving, occasionally, some resistance to those issues, so we have to do that. From my perspective, the public need to know the performance of their force. We need to know the value for money of that force, we need to know the business outcomes of that force as well as the crime outcomes, and that is all part of our general drive in the White Paper, which includes some national procurement, some regional co‑operation but also benchmarking and focus on what chief constables and authorities are doing.
Q340 Chairman: With hindsight, because you and the Home Secretary keep reminding everybody, as you will this afternoon, how much money you have given to the police force - more than any government in history - ought you to have given that money with strings attached in the first place? Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Now that everyone is screaming that you are cutting their budgets, even though you are increasing their budgets - and I am sure you have seen the Committee's last report on this, where we have said: "The money has gone into these forces, but where is it all?" - should you not have attached those strings at that stage rather than dealing with it right at the end?
Mr Hanson: There are numerous strings and monitoring attached to any funding. Perhaps I could say, Mr Vaz, that I welcome your report and I thank you for it. We have around 20,000 extra officers and 16,000 extra PCSOs, and we have a 36% reduction in crime. The two are not unconnected to each other. The work that we have done has shown the output. The output for me, ultimately, is: Is crime down? Do the public feel safer? Confidence levels are now at record levels. The chance of being a victim of crime is at the lowest ever level in history. The figures of crime reduction are dramatic. We have gone through a recession and crime is still going down. Whatever happens in the election, after 13 years we will be the first Government to have gone into a 13-year period with figures going down.
Chairman: I have allowed you to give that little advertisement because you said you welcomed our report. Could you take a message back to the Home Secretary. We produced a report on Monday which he called "wholly inaccurate" and "inadequate." Could you point out to the Home Secretary that the role of Parliament in a Select Committee is sometimes to praise the Government when they do things well and on other occasions to point out that there are problems. That is our role. It would be nice when you like our reports if he could say something nice about them, even though he is very critical when we do not agree with him.
Q341 Mrs Dean: What evidence is there to suggest that the introduction of Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships has improved the rate of local agencies to prevent crime? What more needs to be done?
Mr Hanson: I will ask Stephen to talk about specific evidence, but my hunch and my gut feeling is that the Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships are bringing together at a local level the key players who have budgets and influence in any community to tackle crime. There is a shared ownership of what is needed to be done at that local level. If I am being critical - which I will be - I think we need to raise the game of CDRPs. We need to make them more public focused, we need to make them more visible, we need to make them and their outputs more known. One of the things that we are doing in a paper that we will be producing, hopefully, by the end of this month, is to look at how we do that to get a sharper focus to their work in more general terms.
Mr Rimmer: We do look at the range of crime-related data across CDRPs. We are obviously not responsible for managing them but we do provide support and advice and some modest level of resources to particular partnerships that are facing particular crime problems. Through those sorts of engagements with CDRPs, we find - as I expect you would expect, Mrs Dean - that there is a range, and the strongest single indicator of effective CDRP, as opposed to a less effective one, is the quality of the leadership of the key people on that team, the Chair and the three or four other core agencies that drive it. One of the things the Minister is reflecting on is the fact that there is still quite a lot of variation between very good CDRPs and not such effective ones.
Q342 Mrs Dean: Turning to the Safer and Stronger Communities Fund, what would be the impact of the reported 50% cut in capital grants to that fund?
Mr Hanson: We had to make a decision and I had to take a decision and I will have to account for that decision. We had a very tight budgetary settlement to look at in relation to the police budget and my responsibilities on crime and capital in the Home Office this year, and I chose to support police authorities by maintaining the £220 million capital grant which we promised to the police authorities for this forthcoming year 2010-11 and which is debated this very afternoon. In order to do that, and because of the capital pressures we faced, I had to look elsewhere. One of the "elsewheres" I looked at was the local government capital grant allocation which went from £20 million to £10 million. There is still £10 million-worth going into that and the impact for local councils might be as little as £8,000 in capital funding through to around £100,000 for some others. I do not think it is a major impact although it will be a concern. I had to make the choice: do I give capital directly to the police or do I give capital to a range of bodies including local councils and I chose, rightly or wrongly, -rightly in my view - to give it to the police.
Q343 Mrs Dean: Can I ask you about the relationship between the Government and the voluntary sector. I should declare that I was a founding member of Uttoxeter Crime Prevention Panel and I am still a member of the joint Neighbourhood Watch and Crime Prevention Panel in Uttoxeter. How has the relationship changed over the past decade? How do you view the public working with the police in the future?
Mr Hanson: The voluntary sector plays an absolutely vital role. One of the things we have done, both in terms of the Home Office and in terms of the Ministry of Justice, is to develop formal strategies with the voluntary sector to help on crime reduction. That could be through something as complex but as simple as Neighbourhood Watch. It could be through activities such as prison visitors and monitoring boards in prisons. It could be through partnership arrangements with NACRO, with mental health charities, with alcohol and drug charities, and a lot of the government resource still ends up in the voluntary sector to achieve joint objectives to reduce alcohol and drug dependency, to help rehabilitation, and to support crime prevention and crime detection measures. The voluntary sector is absolutely vital to help us with innovation, with focus, and sometimes with more efficient delivery than a cumbersome public sector can do.
Q344 Bob Russell: Minister, following that up, you just mentioned Neighbourhood Watch and I have written it down to ask you this question. You say you are a supporter of Neighbourhood Watch and I would hope we all are. How much money does the Home Office give for Neighbourhood Watch or is this something that you leave to chief constables who may or may not regard them as a good idea?
Mr Hanson: We give a range of resources to Neighbourhood Watch, the latest of which is £500,000 to Neighbourhood Watch to have a capacity building programme which is to extend still further the development of current Neighbourhood Watch schemes and also new ones as a whole. I do not have a total in-the-round figure for Neighbourhood Watch at the moment in front of me but it is certainly something we support and indeed are looking to do more in the very near future with the Neighbourhood Confidence strategy.
Mr Rimmer: The main funding stream at the moment is part of the overall Safer Homes Fund where a whole range of voluntary organisations, including Neighbourhood Watch, are funded to provide practical measures on target hardening of homes, going back to Mr Brake's point, and they get another half a million on that.
Mr Hanson: Again, the reason I cannot give a precise figure is that some of the money for things such as the Operation Vigilance Scheme that we have got for crime prevention money is channelled in direct application for Neighbourhood Watch. As part of the White Paper we are currently looking at community neighbourhood agreements. I know several Neighbourhood Watch schemes have applied for those, so there will be a range of funding streams and in terms of our core activities Stephen has mentioned what we try to do.
Q345 Bob Russell: The reason I mention that is because the eyes and ears of the public are crucial and I do not think that that message is really coming out of the Home Office down to chief constables. If I am lucky my oral Home Office question on Monday is on Neighbourhood Watch, so perhaps this could be a dress rehearsal. Linked with that, what support is the Home Office giving to Crimestoppers in the fight against crime involving the community?
Mr Hanson: Again, rather than give a figure that I could not comment upon, the actual figure on Crimestoppers is not in my head, I am afraid, but if the Committee will allow me I will combine that in the letter I drop you in due course.
Chairman: That will be very helpful. Gary Streeter has a question.
Q346 Mr Streeter: Just to come back on police funding, Minister, I am becoming quite exercised about this. Have you done any analysis in your Department about what savings might be achieved through voluntary merger? I accept that no-one is going to force it top-down, and that is quite right, whichever party wins the election, but what sort of amount can a police authority or a police force save if there is a voluntary merger with the next-door authority? Can you talk us about through that and what kind of numbers might we be looking at?
Mr Hanson: For example, self-evidently
they would save senior management costs because there would not be two chief
constables; ultimately there would be one.
They would save money in terms of the resources on back office staff, on
personnel, HR functions. They can
combine and co-operate on things like forensics and all sorts of issues. The basic principle would be that there would
still be in the City of
Mr Streeter: Thank you, that is very helpful.
Q347 Chairman: One final question from me. You have had a very distinguished ministerial career. I think your last three jobs were Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Prime Minister, Minister for Justice and now Minister for Policing.
Mr Hanson: And
Q348 Chairman: And Northern Ireland. So you have been in this area of crime and justice for a great deal of time and you have a great deal of expertise. You told this Committee you were born in a council house and lived there and that was not an excuse for you to go and commit crime, almost Thatcherite in your statement, though that is meant positively rather than negatively! Off the page, without thinking about your brief and worrying about your officials and Home Office policy, if there is one thing that all parties can do together, including Parliament, what would it be if we are going to reduce the causes of crime?
Mr Hanson: I think the earlier the identification of individuals who are vulnerable to criminal activity the better. That means essentially working not just with the parents but also picking up from head teachers, from other areas, from the police, the earliest possible intervention. The earlier the intervention the better chance we have of turning someone's life around. Once people are in the system there is a greater propensity for them to be drawn further into criminal activity and simple early intervention, whatever that means, is the most important thing.
Chairman: Minister, as usual, thank you very much for your candid responses and thank you to Mr Rimmer as well.
Witness: Chris Grayling MP, Home Affairs Spokesman, Conservative Party, gave evidence.
Q349 Chairman: Mr Grayling, thank you very much for coming to give evidence to the Committee this morning. We have heard from the Minister for Policing. Our inquiry is on the subject of reducing crime, not just tackling crime but also the famous statement of the previous Prime Minister "let us be tough on crime and the causes of crime".
Chris Grayling: Absolutely.
Q350 Chairman: If we believe the opinion polls after whenever the election is and nobody knows - say the 6 May - you will be the Home Secretary and you will be at your desk and your civil servants will come in. What would be the first thing you would say to them about trying to get at the causes of crime?
Chris Grayling: I think what I would say to them is that I believe that the criminal
justice system needs to do two things.
It needs to focus more on early intervention and it needs to do more,
for want of a phrase, to do what it says on the tin. What I would add to that is I would be saying
that against a context of colleagues in other departments talking to their
civil servants about the underlying social policy approach which I think is
necessary as well to deal with many of the underlying root causes of
crime. If I might touch on that really
briefly, Chairman, before we start. I am
very much of the view that we have pockets of deprivation around this country
where you will find, as you know from all the work you have done, high levels
of addiction, family breakdown, educational failure, long-term benefit
dependency, where we need to deliver real social change if we are to break
people out of the environment that I have described which is almost like living
in an estate with a glass wall around it, where entire streets of people have
little experience of attainment in any particular way at all. I think that is an essential part of getting
to grips with the crime problems in this country. Very often you will find that it is in those
areas that crime is at its most pronounced.
One of the great issues in our society is that it is the poor and
deprived who are the most likely to be the victims of crime. Where I think the criminal justice system has
to come in is this: I do not think the criminal justice system alone can deal
with this problem; I think it is part of the solution and not the whole
solution. The criminal justice system
does two things wrong at the moment. The
first is that it lets people get away with it for too long. I pick particularly the example of
anti-social behaviour. If you look at
the pattern of offending as it builds up in an issue of anti-social behaviour,
typically you have two groups. You have
a broader mass who offend in the teenage years and you have a smaller group who
are what is defined by the academics as the "life-course offenders" who will be
coming from very difficult backgrounds, causing trouble as they get older in
school, and going on to more issues in later life. I believe very strongly that the criminal
justice system in both those groups' cases, although it will have a different
effect, actually allows them to get away with it a number of times before it
kicks in. I have come this morning from
a meeting with a senior police officer in
Q351 Chairman: Do you think politicians are too short term because they have to deal with the statistics issue to bring down crime and actually what we need are long-term solutions to these problems?
Chris Grayling: Yes I do. You will find that I talk very seldom about statistical issues in the quotes I give to the media and in the work that I do. Particularly, I gave a lecture at King's College before Christmas when I talked about some of the thinking that needs to underpin an approach to criminal justice. We need to intervene earlier. There need to be simple penalties immediately when young people begin to go off the straight and narrow. For those who get into more trouble further on, the system has to do what it says it is going to do. We send out all the wrong messages by overuse of cautions for violent offences and overuse of fixed penalty notices for violent offences and even the automatic early release scheme. I talked to a youth worker on an estate in North London who said to me, "One of the problems with the early release scheme is that the guys round here all think they are getting away with it because they are expecting to do a certain length of time, they get out earlier and they come away with a sense that they have bucked the system."
Q352 Bob Russell: Mr Grayling, so far you have not mentioned housing. Is decent housing a prerequisite in tackling crime and disorder in neighbourhoods?
Chris Grayling: Decent housing is a factor but it is not the only factor.
Q353 Bob Russell: I recognise that.
Chris Grayling: What is quite striking is that if you visit an estate where there have been significant crime problems, drug problems and so forth, there is no commonalty of pattern. They are not always the same. Sometimes it is streets of old terraced houses, sometimes it is streets of relatively new housing, sometimes it is estates of pretty awful 1970s tower blocks, so I do not think it is automatically the case that being brought up in not a great housing environment is going to lead you to do things in your life that you should not. I am inclined to take the view that family background is more important than housing. I am not saying housing is not a factor at all but I am not sure it is right at the top of the list.
Q354 Bob Russell: If I have focused housing on your radar I have achieved something. The crime chapter of your manifesto makes no reference to tackling the root causes of crime. Again following up the Chairman's question, is that a deliberate omission?
Chris Grayling: I speak as somebody who has previously done the shadow Work and Pensions job and was responsible for drawing up our Green Paper on Welfare Reform. If you said to me what are the key elements of solving crime, I would say the biggest piece in that jigsaw is the need for welfare reform. What we have to do is to break down the glass walls around those estates. We have to create a sense of purpose and aspiration again. We live in a world where the generations pass pretty quickly these days. You have an environment where you have children being brought up in households where there is no experience of educational achievement. There is no experience of people getting up and going to work in the mornings. There is an environment where very often there is addiction in the household and an environment that is not great to be brought up in. We have got to break that down. You will find in our draft manifesto plenty of material about the need to deal with some of those other social issues. That is my point. The criminal justice system is one bit of a jigsaw puzzle that is much bigger.
Q355 Bob Russell: So I can be fair to Her Majesty's official Opposition, those issues are covered in joined-up government Opposition thinking elsewhere in the manifesto?
Chris Grayling: Yes.
Q356 Mr Streeter: Shadow Home Secretary, I know we are committed to reforming Sure Start and the better co-ordination of early intervention funding but what do you see are the current problems in relation to early intervention and Sure Start and what would you change?
Chris Grayling: I think the criticism that is most frequently levelled at Sure Start is it is not yet getting to the right people, and indeed David Cameron talked about that two or three weeks ago when we talked about the need to focus and direct Sure Start more clearly on people from the most deprived backgrounds. That is what it is there for. Some of these things inevitably are anecdotal but there is a lot of such anecdote around and a lot of evidence to suggest that Sure Start is not really getting as well as it could do and should do to those families that are most deprived. We have said that instead of building the number of Sure Start outreach workers in the way that the current Government envisages, we would bolster the health visitor profession. I think that is a very powerful route. I think the health visitors should work closely in parallel with Sure Start, but I think our health visitors are very effective at identifying problems early on. We have all had discussions in the past and I think we are all agreed that some kids are brought up in the most dreadful circumstances and must do something to try and support their families, to mentor their families - and the voluntary sector has an important role to play in that as well - to try and improve the quality of their early years upbringing, to create more intellectual stimulation and to provide support for lone parents in particular who often really struggle in that environment. I have met a number of lone parents who have said it is actually pretty difficult if you have a small child and you have not necessarily got great experience of inherited parenting skills yourself. A lot of help needs to be provided and I think Sure Start could do a better job of focusing on the most challenged families.
Q357 Mr Clappison: Can I put to you the same question which I put to the Minister and I have put to a number of people before this Committee. Given the high propensity to reoffend for people serving youth custodial sentences or prison sentences, do you think enough is being done to equip people in prison with skills to rehabilitate them, to get them used to work again, to give them another chance?
Chris Grayling: No, I do not. I would identify the prison gate as being one of the key problems. I talk to a lot of police officers who say that what is actually happening is that the guys who are coming out of prison are effectively going straight back to the same streets they were in before with 20 quid in their pocket. Indeed, I was having a conversation in the last couple of days with somebody who has been working quite closely with the criminal justice system who said that they had met a group of young offenders who were approaching release who were scared witless about what was going to happen to them after release because they had nowhere to go. I think the best solution to that problem, and again this is something I wrote into our Welfare Reform Green Paper, which is going back to Mr Russell's point, there is a genuine attempt to join this up, that actually when you come out of the prison gate you should be put straight on to a back-to-work programme so you are picked up virtually from the prison gate by the person who is going to be your employment adviser. If you a have a third party organisation contracted to deliver welfare-to-work services in a particular area, and there is a prison there, what I would expect to happen and what I would want to happen is that they identify what are the barriers to getting these people into work. They have got to have somewhere to live. We have to make sure they get their benefits initially. We have then got to get them into a process of building confidence. If I was doing that job, I would have arrangements with landlords and with the benefit office so I could make sure things went through smoothly. I would have a partnership with a number of local employers so there were work placements that I could immediately put these people on. I think that by delivering the kind of radical change to the welfare state that we have talked about, we can provide that from-the-prison-gate support. I am then all in favour of doing more within prisons. There is a great project in Liverpool Prison where Timpson's, the shoe firm, have set up a workshop and a mock store inside the prison and they are giving work experience to people there and are taking on some of the people through that work. More of that would be absolutely ideal.
Q358 Bob Russell: Are they teaching them to become locksmiths?
Chris Grayling: I think more shoe repairers in that case.
Q359 Mrs Dean: Is it right to place so much blame on parents for youth offending rather than the education system or lack of opportunities, including job opportunities?
Chris Grayling: I do not think it is one or the other. I think that the reality is that we have to understand the challenges that many parents face themselves. Those of us who have kids learned our parenting skills from our own parents. You have probably all had one of those worrying moments when you suddenly find yourselves doing things your parents used to do when you were a child and you used to think, "Oh no!" There are lots of young people with children who do not have that inherited parenting skill passed on from their parents, who are shooting in the dark when it comes to parenting, who have been brought up in an environment themselves where there is no experience of educational attainment, where perhaps there was not even experience of going to school. It may be that their families just did not bother to go to school. I have talked to teachers who say we have had families where there is generational educational opt-out where some people do not send their kids to school, and their parents did not send their kids to school, and so on and so forth. Yes, it is the responsibility of parents but we have to understand the context for the parenting that exists. If we are simply judgmental we will not get to grips with the problem so, yes, we should look at parenting as being a central problem but we need to understand why it is a central problem as well. When I talk about this I always commend the charity Home-Start and I would some time, Chairman, encourage you to bring Home-Start in to give evidence to you. They are a charity that provides mentors to young families. I think that is the kind of example of what we can do to make a real difference where somebody who has experience, a 50-something mum, can go and work with a teenage mum who has no idea about some of the challenges and help them do a much better job with their kids. Nobody wants to do a bad job with their kids.
Mrs Dean: I endorse your comments about Home-Start.
Chairman: We took evidence from Iain Duncan Smith and Graham Allen yesterday and we were very impressed with the work that they had done and their emphasis on early intervention as being absolutely crucial. Tom Brake?
Q360 Tom Brake: How do you rate the Government's approach to crime prevention and what would you do differently?
Chris Grayling: I think my worry about the Government's approach is that it has been
too centralised and too bureaucratic.
The consequence of that in the end is that there is too little police
presence on our streets because we have created too much of an infrastructure
of bureaucracy that keeps police off our streets. One pretty important part of crime prevention
is the fact that there are people around who are going to nick you if you are
caught. One of the great ironies, I
remember when I was a relatively newly elected MP five years ago talking to one
of the chief superintendents in my own area who said, "The truth is that we
have probably got more officers than we did ten years ago but we have fewer
officers out actually policing than we did ten years ago." I have come up with some horrendous
examples. In one case in a police
station I visited in
Q361 Tom Brake: You said there is too little police presence on our streets. Does that mean that if you were the Home Secretary in the next Government you would be guaranteeing the number of police that there are available?
Chris Grayling: Let me ask you the question: when you are talking about the number of police that are available, are you talking about the overall number of police officers, are you talking about the police on the streets? We should certainly aspire to and I want to see more police working on the streets. There are police forces today that are looking at how they can collaborate more effectively and deliver services across boundaries. We get very hung up as politicians on issues of numbers. It is not actually within our gift. The Home Secretary cannot say there will be so many police officers. There are some around who are saying the Tories plan to scrap PCSOs; and I have been very clear in saying we have no intention whatever of scrapping PCSOs. I happen to think that it is the job of the chief constable to decide where, how, how many, and in what way to use a PCSO. It is not the job of the Home Office to say: "You will have X numbers of PCSOs," full stop. I think it is for police officers to determine how best to use the mix of skills they have available and how best to deploy police staff and non-police staff. If you said to me do I intend that our policies if we are in government will lead to more police on patrols in response cars in neighbourhood teams? Most clearly, yes. I do not want them where they are at the moment, which is sitting in the police station filling out forms for days on end.
Q362 Tom Brake: That is your stated aim. Do you have a figure that you are seeking to hit? I know that John Major in 1992 announced that he was going to recruit 2,000 extra police officers. I do not know how he was going to do that, but that was the policy pledge that was made then. Are you making a similar pledge that there will be 1,000 more officers patrolling the beat?
Chris Grayling: I am not making a specific numeric pledge. Sometimes politicians are too quick to make specific numeric pledges. What I am saying is that it is my clear belief that we should simplify the processes. Another example is the provisions under RIPA which require an extraordinary amount of bureaucracy to observe somebody to see whether they are out to commit a crime or not. If we can remove some of that, that is more police time that can be spent out on patrol. I would be rash if I said I know by scrapping these four processes we will create the equivalent of X thousand extra officers on the street, but what I am clear about is if we remove those processes we will get more officers on the street, and that is the sensible position to be in.
Q363 Bob Russell: Very briefly so we have it on the record, you said you would not as Home Secretary cut police community support officers. Can you give an assurance that you will not send out any directions to chief constables that they should reduce their numbers?
Chris Grayling: It is the decision of the police chiefs to do that. What I have said very clearly on police community support officers is there is a block of money that comes from the Home Office to chief constables which is specifically designated for police community support officers. They are required to have whatever the requisite number of police community support officers they have for their area. I do not think we should be ring-fencing money in that way. My intention would be to say to the chief constable of X county, "This is your money. You sort it out. You make sure the mix is right for your area." I am absolutely certain from all the conversations I have had with people at different levels that in some areas they may take a view in the future they want more PCSOs rather than fewer. Some may take a view that this is a particularly challenging area and therefore they want to have more uniformed officers and fewer PCSOs. That should be a decision for them. You, Mr Russell, myself, Mr Brake, Mr Streeter and Mr Clappison all share a view that power is too decentralised, and my view is that we should devolve that power to the chief constables to decide.
Chairman: Mr Grayling, thank you very much for your evidence today. We look forward to seeing you again in whatever capacity in the future. Thank you very much.