Policing and Crime Bill (Second sitting)

Jake Berry Excerpts

Tuesday 15th March 2016 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

Q Anything else on resources?

Alan Wardle: Again, I think it is a question of how resources are allocated and prioritised. There is an issue we have come across, again, with registered sex offenders, where there was a company providing monitoring software for registered sex offenders, called Securus Software, which had to withdraw from the market because police forces were not prepared to pay the £40 a go that it costs to monitor a registered sex offender. We would say £40 is pretty small beer; if someone is a registered sex offender that money would go to monitoring the websites they are on. It can look at patterns of words, to see if they are moving back into reoffending behaviour. That is one prevention piece that is very important: how do we ensure that people who have already offended, who are serving community sentences and suspended sentences, do not continue to reoffend?

We do hear of some cases where there is a bit of a false economy going on: to save a small amount of money and not to monitor sex offenders—the risks that that is storing up are vast. We know the police are under pressure; but how do we make smart choices so that such technology is shared across police forces, and so that they know what is most effective, what is working well and what is good at managing risk? Those are the sort of things that we hear quite a lot of. It is about how to make sure that those decisions are being made in a sensible way, across the country.

[Jake Berry (Rossendale and Darwen) (Con)]

Q Do you welcome the additional support, or the additional provision of the super-complaints system detailed within the Bill; and is it a system where you could see yourself triggering a complaint against a force or a police officer?

Iryna Pona: I think it is welcome that the Bill aims to ensure that the complaints system is transparent, and that when you make complaints against the police you are informed of all the different stages that your complaint is at. I think it is a welcome focus. I think it would also be helpful to ensure the same thing in relation to victims of crimes. Currently there are huge discrepancies between different police forces and from case to case—for example in how much the victims of sexual offences are informed about the investigation of their case. It would be good if the changes made for complaints could be mirrored in relation to victims.

[Jake Berry]

Q Is it specifically the ability of third parties to trigger a complaint?

Cassandra Harrison: I have to say I am not familiar with all the detail of what is being proposed, but, as Iryna said, there should be greater transparency, and if third party organisations like mine had the ability to trigger complaints where we thought it appropriate, when we were working with young people and we felt they were not properly served, we would welcome that.

[Jake Berry]

Q Basically the idea is that if you take things like, for example, the outrage that we saw in Rotherham around the CSE, where there were lots of individuals who were treated very badly, it would enable a third party with an overview to speak to all the victims and trigger a complaint on their behalf, rather than having not to. Is that something you would be keen to be involved in?

Cassandra Harrison: It sounds sensible. I suppose, thinking about it at the moment, my only caveat would be that I would want to be very sure that the young people and children involved would be happy, in terms of the kind of participation that was being proposed.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Karen Bradley)]

Q I have a specific point for Iryna, but I want to say welcome to all three of you, whom I work with lots on a daily basis. Your work, Iryna, with the Children’s Society, particularly on missing children, is incredibly valuable; I thank you for all you have done on that.

I wanted to ask something specific about something that struck me as you were talking about child abduction notices. Obviously, the Children’s Society has had a big campaign about 16 and 17-year-olds, and you will know that section 2 of the Child Abduction Act 1984 is clear about the fact that it applies to 16-year-olds and under, not to anyone older, and that is the reason for the current position. I take the point that you make, but I wonder whether you can envisage any situations—I am thinking particularly of honour-based situations—where a child abduction notice issued about a 16 or 17-year-old who had left home of their own volition, perhaps because of honour-based problems, might end up being detrimental to the child. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Iryna Pona: I think the child abduction warning notices will be informed by intelligence from all the different people who are involved in the safeguarding of young persons, so the police will be able to decide whether they will issue such warning notices if they also know that there are concerns around someone who maybe left home because of an honour issue. But we are talking about some of the vulnerable young people who will have a range of different agencies involved in their lives, and those agencies would know about different safeguarding concerns around young persons. So, hopefully, when a child—a 16 or 17-year-old—left, fleeing from home because of particular issues, the police would know those concerns and would not disrupt things. It depends on where the young person will go and they should be able to provide protection to that young person.

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[The Chair]

Finally, Jake Berry—I hope we will then have time for all the questions to be answered.

[Jake Berry]

Q My question is specifically on volunteer police community support officers. In terms of pressure on budgets, do you think that the ability to use volunteer PCSOs more fully will remove pressure on budgets? Do you think that it is appropriate for police forces to use reserves to preserve the role of existing PCSOs, or should they be replaced with volunteers?

[The Chair]

Who will answer first? Perhaps start with the north Wales-specific question.

Winston Roddick: I will, because there is a Wales-specific question, to which I will come in a moment. On the use of the expression “takeover”, I do not think that this is anything like a takeover: it is a first-class example of highly necessary collaboration. The statutory duty of myself, the police service and all chief constables is to provide an effective and efficient police force, and value for money, and to reduce crime. The additional words for the fire service are to save lives. While we share those common objectives, it makes perfect sense to me to work in unison—with a small “u” this time—to achieve the objectives.

As far as Wales is concerned, the need for collaboration does not respect geographical boundaries; it does not respect political boundaries; and it has to follow the pattern of crime and the needs of the people. For example, I suppose the European countries and Switzerland collaborate with other European countries; the Americans collaborate with the Canadians; and I am sure Scotland collaborates with the north of England. Therefore, devolution does not stand in the way of collaboration, and the need for collaboration does not stand in the way of devolution. Devolution, and the different position of Wales, is not a sound reason for not putting effective collaboration into effect.

David Lloyd: I will not say anything about Wales—unusually. On collaboration, it is right and proper that we have a greater duty to collaborate. If anything, I would say that the Bill perhaps does not state its intention firmly enough. I was reflecting on the fact that only two people around this horseshoe are from counties that have a fire authority. Most are combined fire authorities. That duty to collaborate could be more firmly noted so the direction we are heading in is clear. It is difficult to convince local fire authorities that they should collaborate, so I think that if we firmed that up a little it would be better.

To answer your question directly, I am comfortable that a case for takeover can be made. If there is a way of getting better value for money for local taxpayers and a more efficient service for individuals, it is incumbent on us to do it. I am very comfortable about that. I note the difficulty with geographical areas. That is something that has to be worked through. If we start it in the areas where the two work perfectly well and worry about the other areas afterwards, that is a better starting place than worrying about the few where there is a difficulty.

[Lyn Brown]

Q Can I ask you to talk about privatisation?

David Jamieson: What has not been addressed in the Bill is this. There could be two reasons for a merger between police and fire. One is that there would be better governance—one assumes better governance of fire—but I have not yet heard a convincing case come out of the Home Office about whether the PCC role is a better way of handling a fire authority. When I hear that case, I will get much more excited about doing it.

The other thing is, would working together with the fire authority lead to benefits and savings? I would say that that depends on where you are in the country. The geographical differences make a lot of difference to what the benefits will be. We have begun to look at those benefits. In a large urban area such as mine—the second largest force in the country—they are much smaller than they would be in a large rural area, where there could be benefits from co-locating fire stations. The benefits in an area such as mine are very much smaller.

The issue of privatisation was raised. I suppose that that could happen anyway. That would be up to a PCC. Those are issues that Parliament has now delegated to PCCs to decide. I will not be going down that road, but there may be those who choose to do so. It will help PCCs during the passage of the Bill and when it becomes an Act for the Government to have the courage of their conviction. If they believe that PCCs are a better way of handling the fire governance, let them say so. I think it is wrong for PCCs to be able to make a unilateral decision in their area.

Vera Baird: I am in favour of the duty to collaborate. We already collaborate hugely with the fire service on day-to-day operations. The duty to collaborate will just mean that we all have to sit down. We have started a collaborative board in my area, which will have the fire chiefs, the chair of the fire authority, the portfolio holder from the county council that runs the other fire service—we have two forces—myself, the chief constable and the fire officers on it. We will have to go through our properties systematically to see what we can share. We already share some. We will go through things such as training and the great crime prevention work that the fire service already does through things such as the local intervention fire education course. It is out in areas where fires start and deprivation leads to crime. There are great opportunities for us to work collaboratively to provide a better services and make savings, and we will seize them with both hands.

Governance—takeover—is completely irrelevant until issues of governance actually arise. I think the Government have started at the wrong end in trying to press the change of governance, as David put it, without stating any rationale for it.

[Jake Berry]

May I just bring you back—

[The Chair]

Order.

[Jake Berry]

Q Mr Howarth, we have a minute remaining.

Ms Baird, you recently said:

“When I was elected as Northumbria’s police and crime commissioner…the role was little valued and barely understood”.

By that, I suggest you meant that you had to do the job to see how it worked.

[The Chair]

Order. I just tried to bring you to a halt because we have now reached 3.15 pm, which brings us to the end of the time allotted for the Committee to ask questions of this group of witnesses. I am sure that your last comment will elicit some correspondence, but I am not sure that the whole Committee needs to hear it answered. I thank the witnesses for their wise evidence. If there is any disagreement between us, it is certainly conducted on a friendly basis.

Examination of witnesses

Chief Constable Sara Thornton and Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley gave evidence.

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[Jack Dromey]

Q The local case is made by the PCC to the Home Secretary. That does not mean that the views of locally elected representatives responsible for the fire service can be taken into account. That cannot be right, can it?

Sara Thornton: I think if the Home Secretary were to consider such an application, she would want to know what the views of the local fire authority were and I am sure that she would take those into account. It might be that you want to put in some qualification that, as part of that case, views need to be sought and to be part of the argument.

[Jake Berry]

Q I have one final point. Recent police research revealed that the PCC governance of police forces, as opposed to the old police panel governance, has saved the taxpayer around £2 million every year. If there were similar savings to be made by the extension of PCC governance to the fire service, do you think that both the fire service and the police service could usefully use those savings to prioritise front-line services?

[Mr Kevan Jones]

That is a difficult question.

Sara Thornton: Collaborations of all kinds deliver all sorts of benefits. They can concentrate expertise, save money, help you to deal with crises and share best practice. In the same way that we already have collaborations with the fire service, which are about shared control rooms and shared estate to save money, if there is more of that, there is more potential to save money.

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[Mr Kevan Jones]

Q May I ask one last question on advocacy? Clearly, some individuals have family members or others to explain the law or situation to them. In many of these cases, individuals have no one. What is your view about making it a requirement for people to have access to advocates?

Dr Chalmers: It would be a pragmatic response. There are pragmatic responses and principled responses. It is essential that people have good information explaining in easy, accessible language what is happening to them and their rights at that point. Nursing staff in section 136 suites are well placed to do that. Again, I would imagine that that is patchy, but it is something that should be built into the specifications and reviewed.

The pragmatic answer is that for people on longer-term sections, for whom there is a statutory right to advocacy, the responses are patchy, so we have not got it right for the people who already have a statutory right to advocacy. I think stretching it to 3 o’clock in the morning is going to be very difficult.

[Jake Berry]

Q If I may address Sally: thank you for coming here today and for providing very detailed information about the journey you have been on with Maisie in advance of our meeting, for which we are all extremely grateful. As someone who has experienced the problems faced by yourself and Maisie at first hand, can you tell us a little about those experiences and what further you think we can do in the Bill to try to help parents who find themselves in the same situation?

Sally Burke: I have to state that of all the agencies we have worked with in crises, the police have gone the furthest in improving how they are with Maisie and understanding her. I welcome the Bill for not putting children in a cell as a place of safety. Maisie has not been in that position—just the thought of it—I did not realise at the time the damaging effect it would have had on her.

As Maisie’s parent my main concern was to keep her safe, but I was in too much of a state seeing my child doing the things that she was doing to make a long-term decision. With hindsight, I was able to reflect on what the police need to do in that crisis. I am now more hardened to it, so if Maisie wraps something around her neck, I can say, “Take that off”. Before, I would be going to pieces asking, “Oh, what do I need to do? I need to find a pair of scissors, but everything is locked away in a safe, so find the keys”. It is an awful predicament to be in, but you do get hardened to it, as you know, and a lot of police officers are hardened to those scenarios.

You need to have officers who can talk about mental health to parents. The approach of a lot of the front-line officers who turn up depends on their view on mental health. An older generation chap would think, “It’s attention-seeking, this. What do we do with this girl?” But younger people who we have had out seem to be more sympathetic and have more of an empathy on mental health and can deal with Maisie on a much friendlier, teenage level, which brings her down. If you have somebody who has quite a negative view on mental health thinking that she is having a behaviour fit and wants some attention, trying to bring her down in that scenario is not as effective.

It is also important to help a parent make a decision about the best way forward and the best place to go for safety that will have the best impact on that child in the long run. That is really important. My confidence has grown massively over the past two years since we first went into crisis. The first time I went into crisis with Maisie, if somebody had told me they were taking her to the moon right now to keep her safe, I would have said yes, because it was so horrible. You just cannot comprehend how you feel, as a parent. So I think it is about educating the officers who go out to these calls.

I have helped our local police force. I have been to conferences there and have heard the mental health cop talk to the officers and say, “60% to 70% of our time is spent on mental health conditions, yet we get hardly any training; 6% to 7% of our time is on criminal offences, or crimes, and how much training do you get for those activities?” When you see it in the balance, I think that would really help families and youngsters in mental health crisis.

Also, if you could sew into that, with your magic wand, some training on autism and learning difficulties, because that comes across as a bit of a grey area. Some officers just do not know what autism is and how to treat a child with autism. When Maisie is in crisis, she does not like to be touched, but an officer will come up to her and say, “Come on, Maisie, it’s okay” and she will freak out because she does not want to be touched. So there needs to be some education around how best to approach a child in that crisis scenario.

[Jake Berry]

Thank you, we really appreciate that. We have the College of Policing coming next so I and other colleagues, I am sure, will raise that issue with them. That has been extremely helpful.

[Karen Bradley]

Q Sally, thank you very much. Your point about the amount of time police spend dealing with this is exactly why we want to do what we are doing in the Bill. It had been too easy, I think, for all agencies to let the police deal with this problem. It had become a police problem, but it never should have been. Police should always have been the last resort; it should always have been other agencies stepping in. You say you have not had the personal experience of a 136, but I wonder, as you have come into contact with police, whether you have had any experience of the mental health triage that I know many forces have rolled out as part of the crisis care concordat?

Sally Burke: She has been 136, but not taken to a cell. She has been taken to the adult 136 suite in a mental health unit, or to our local A&E department. With the triage, do you mean the concordat?

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[James Berry]

Q Thank you. This is my second and final question. You run the senior command course, on which I have had the pleasure of lecturing. That is the course senior officers go on in order to qualify to be a chief officer, effectively. Could that course be opened to senior fire officers to prepare them for appointment to chief constable posts in a single-employer model?

Alex Marshall: I came from there today—that is where I have been this morning—and it is already open to people from outside policing. For example, other Home Office departments and other parts of the military, and it will certainly be open to fire officers. The issue at the moment would be that to become a chief police officer, you must pass the four-day selection process, complete the course successfully, and be a constable. We will look at these proposals on how we bring people to that level and standard. It might just help very quickly to say that the current course has different elements such as professional policing skills, which is all about professional policing skills, and modules on leadership, ethics, business skills and working in partnership. Many of those areas, of course, will be common to senior leadership in many other organisations.

[Jake Berry]

Q Coming back to the point about your role, I think you were in the room when we had quite a lot of evidence from Sally Burke. She gave us some powerful evidence about the ability of police officers, when they arrive at someone’s house, to deal with young people in mental health crisis. Specifically what support could the College of Policing give officers to ensure that they get appropriate training to deal with situations like that? Is there more that the Bill could do to support that work?

Alex Marshall: I very much support the way in which the Bill gives greater protection, particularly to young people suffering from mental health crises and keeps them out of police cells, where they should not be. I think it reinforces the right areas. This is a very important issue for our members, particularly for the people on the frontline of policing. We have relooked at what we know about mental health, what the knowledge base is, what standards we set in this area and what education should be laid out.

We recently finished a consultation on brand new guidance for everyone who works in policing on dealing with mental health, reflecting the concordat and the work with voluntary organisations, and we will publish that in the next few weeks. There is still a lot we can do to improve the education of those officers and to set clear standards but, equally, the onus must sit with other organisations, particularly health services, to have the professionals on hand, particularly out of hours, to deal with someone who is in a crisis.

[Jake Berry]

Q I have one final point on this. You said that you were about to publish it. How long after publication will it be until it becomes accepted as practice?

Alex Marshall: It went out to a three-month consultation period that finished about six weeks ago. From memory, we are now adopting the consultation responses, including from charity and voluntary sectors. That will be published by us and then we will put it into the curriculum for everybody joining policing and for their training throughout policing. We will publish it to forces but, of course, we then rely on forces to adopt and use it.

[Craig Whittaker]

Q Dame Anne, could I just come back to you? It was really good to hear that the Government were listening to your ideas and allowed you to get on and do the IPCC work. Could I just touch on what you said? I think that you said that the Bill goes “some way” towards being an effective complaints system. Do I detect that we could have done more?

Dame Anne Owers: The decision was made, and I understand why, to proceed by way of amending current legislation, rather than starting with a blank sheet. There are still a lot of tie-ups between complaints and discipline in a way that you might not do if you started from scratch. To be honest, I am grateful for what there is, so I am not about to say that the exercise should not be done. I understand exactly the pressures of legislative time and so on. There is still quite a considerable tie-up between the two, but I hope that, between us, the police and crime commissioners and ourselves will be able to develop a more effective way of handling complaints in the first instance. You should not start an investigation by saying, “Who dunnit?” You should start an investigation by saying, “What happened?”