Policing

Julian Huppert Excerpts

Thursday 12th January 2012 Westminster Hall

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

The House will know, Mr Brady, that over the past 10 years, you and I have had the honour of co-chairing the Westminster kids club Christmas party, but this is the first time that I have served under your chairmanship, and it is an enormous privilege to do so.

I welcome this opportunity to discuss the report by the Select Committee on Home Affairs, “New Landscape of Policing”, which we published on 23 September 2011. A new Government always want to put their imprint on an important area of policy, but in my 25 years in the House, I have not seen the kinds of changes to policing and the policing landscape that this Government initiated when they took office. The Government propose abolishing the National Policing Improvement Agency and the Serious Organised Crime Agency; creating a new National Crime Agency, a professional body for policing and a police-led information technology company; centralising non-IT procurement; supporting collaboration; and ending unnecessary bureaucracy.

Our report was a response to those fundamental and far-reaching proposals for policing reform. Given the significance of the changes to this £997.3 million budget, the Committee decided to examine the proposals in great detail. I am pleased to see that three members of the Committee are present—my right hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Alun Michael), and the hon. Members for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless) and for Cambridge (Dr Huppert)—as well as the official spokesmen from various parties.

We have received more than 50 pieces of written evidence and heard from 29 witnesses, including the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice, the right hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert). We have also held an informal meeting with the Police Federation, attended by its chairman, Paul McKeever, and Derek Barnett, who represented the Police Superintendents Association. At the invitation of the hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth, we have also held two public meetings—in Sheringham in Norfolk and in Cardiff in Wales. We put the public at the centre of our deliberations; after all, the police exist to protect the public and uphold the rule of law. To increase that involvement still further, we ran a nationwide polling exercise on our website, asking people what they wanted the police to prioritise. In total, 2,000 votes were cast, and the highest public priority for the police was dealing with murder and serious violence.

Despite the Government’s desire to unclutter the landscape, we concluded that it seems likely that the new landscape of policing will contain more bodies than the current landscape’s six. It is possible that the Government’s changes will lead to a more logical and better functioning police landscape and ultimately make the police more successful at achieving their basic mission of reducing crime and disorder, even though we will end up with more bodies. We believe that as the scale of the change is unprecedented, the possibility for mistakes may be large and with us for some time. That is why, at the point of publication, the Committee had particular reservations about the timetable for the changes, including the transfer of functions from the National Policing Improvement Agency by spring 2012 and the setting up of the National Crime Agency by December 2013.

It has taken the Government more than a year to announce where the functions of the NPIA will go. As the NPIA has an annual budget of £447.6 million, it is extremely important that we know those facts. The continuing uncertainty was damaging to the morale of the 2,000 people who work for the agency, and to the efficiency and effectiveness of the police service as a whole. I am therefore glad that the gap or loophole was rectified by the Government’s acceptance of our recommendation that the phasing out of the NPIA be delayed until December 2012, and by the announcement on the future location of some of the agency’s functions. It is not immediately clear whether further functions from the NPIA will transfer to the NCA, and how some of the functions already earmarked for transfer to the NCA will relate directly to operational responses to organised crime.

[Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman, who chairs the Committee, for giving way. Does he agree that, while it has certainly not been perfect, the NPIA has done a very good job, and that there is some concern that an impression has been given that it has not been valued by the House? It has had many disparate functions, many of which have been developed very well. It is important that we put on record our appreciation for the NPIA’s work during its existence.

[Keith Vaz]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for, and agree with, his intervention. It is important that we put on record the achievements of the NPIA in certain areas. The fact that organisations are being abolished does not mean that we do not recognise the work done. I will come on to some of those organisations later.

The fact that the location of all the NPIA functions has not been announced remains a concern. I hope that, during his winding-up speech, the Minister will finally give us the list of all the outstanding functions and tell us where they will go. Many of the NPIA functions bound for the NCA will have to move to the Serious Organised Crime Agency, which itself is due to be abolished and co-opted into the NCA by December 2013. This shifting of resources between agencies due for closure, before finally shifting them to the NCA, makes heavy weather of the Government’s important principle of uncluttering the landscape.

SOCA was set up by the previous Government, of which the shadow Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson), was an active member—one of his roles was that of Policing Minister—and our Committee has been concerned about it for a number of years. In our most recent report on the agency in 2009, we found that its budget of £476 million was used to hire 3,800 members of staff; that it was spending £15 of public money for every pound it seized from criminal gangs; and that it lacked transparency in the way that it operated. Despite improvement in its performance, it is essential that the Government’s new crime-fighting agency be set the correct targets and can use its resources cost-effectively, so that it does not become another SOCA. It is also not clear whether SOCA will be given extra resources to help it manage the NPIA functions during the short-lived transition. I hope that the Minister will offer clarification on that point.

The lack of detail regarding the creation of the NCA was one of the central concerns of the Committee, and that remains the case. We were concerned about the delay in appointing a head of the agency, and the lack of detail on the objectives and—most importantly—the budget of this new policing agency. We welcome the appointment of Keith Bristow as the head of the NCA since the publication of our report. We felt, however, that someone occupying a position of that importance ought to have appeared before the Committee before taking up his formal appointment. We also remain concerned about the lack of detail on his role and objectives. Will he be a civil servant, or the head of the No. 1 crime-busting agency in the country? Will he be Sir Humphrey or Eliot Ness? Perhaps we will find out when he appears before the Committee on Tuesday to answer some important questions.

The Committee still awaits the figures on the agency’s budget. When the Minister first appeared before the Committee on 28 June, I asked his director of finance whether he knew the budget. He replied that it would be a little higher than SOCA’s, which is £476 million. Luckily, he had the Minister next to him, who told the Committee that although the budget for the NCA had not yet been set, the lion’s share of it would come from SOCA. The Minister came before us again on 20 December 2011, following the announcement that the destination of some of the NPIA functions would be the NCA, and he could still not inform us of the budget. This is not a game of “Play Your Cards Right”—a little higher here, a little lower there. We want the figures. Parliament needs to know exactly what the budget of this new agency will be, particularly as it is the flagship of the Government’s new policy.

There remain many areas where the agenda for the future of policing is unclear. One such area is police IT. Despite costing the public £1.2 billion annually, we concluded that

“IT across the police service as a whole is not fit for purpose,”

and that that affected the

“police’s ability to fulfil their basic mission of preventing crime and disorder.”

The Home Office has made rectifying that, through changes to police IT, a top priority.

It was an error of judgment on the part of the Home Office to prevent Lord Wasserman from giving oral evidence to our inquiry. As the author of the police IT review that preceded the Home Secretary’s announcement of the creation of a police-led information and communications technology company, and as chairman of the board setting up that new IT company, he is central to any future plans. He hosts seminars on behalf of Ministers, he speaks on behalf of Ministers, and he advises Ministers. I have received many invitations to seminars that the Minister for Policing was unable to attend, and Lord Wasserman is sent in his place. It appears that Lord Wasserman is, in fact, acting as a Minister, so it is very odd that he has refused to appear before the Committee. I hope that the Minister will have some good news for the Committee, in terms of agreeing to allow him to attend. The Committee unanimously wrote to the Home Secretary again on 20 October 2011 asking Lord Wasserman to come before us and give us answers on the development of the new company. That request was turned down.

One of the areas that the Committee has been focusing on with regard to policing has been the policing protocol.

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[Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)]

Thank you for calling me in the debate, Mr Brady, even if only to prove that one does not have to be a member of the Privy Council to be allowed to speak. It is a great pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Alun Michael)—perhaps one should expect a Welshman to look for the dragons in the landscape. I do not intend to describe every single aspect of that landscape, which has already been done well by the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake), who went through a number of aspects of the report as well as some of the comments and suggestions that we, as a political party, had to make. Instead, I will pick out a valley here or a hill there, say a little more about those and perhaps suggest a few routes to take through the landscape.

The Government seek to undertake the most radical change to policing in 50 years, and there will be significant changes by the end of this Parliament. We will see dramatic structural changes, which will have a significant impact on the ground. What the public will care about is what will directly affect them. We should accept that the merger, abolition and creation of all sorts of agencies that members of the public have generally never heard about will not be what they care about, and that is not what the most interesting headlines will be about. The reforms, however, underpin delivery, so we have to get them right.

One of the key issues is the relationship between the democratic right of citizens to decide policies and how policing should happen—those policies might be developed in this place and by the Government—and the right of the police to use their expertise and knowledge to determine operational matters. Those two rights are distinct, and we need to ensure that we understand the difference between them. The police obviously need to be policed, but if our control over what they do is too strong and our grip is too tight, then they will lose that freedom of movement and expertise, their purpose will be undermined and policing in this country will simply dissolve.

I am concerned about how the system will operate. Currently, operational matters are dealt with by chief constables, but a huge amount is driven centrally by the Association of Chief Police Officers, which issues directives. A former Cambridgeshire chief constable has said, “I have an ACPO directive to do the following”. That may not be how the system should work in theory, but, as has been said, in theory, theory and practice are the same thing, but in practice they are not.

ACPO has a role in co-ordinating strategic responses and policing strategies, and it advises the Government on important operational matters. It uses that expertise, under the direction of Sir Hugh Orde, to direct police forces throughout the country and to provide policy advice. Generally, it does that well, but it has been in existence since 1948 and, like any Government-backed organisation with significant independence and vital responsibilities, it is liable to mission creep.

In 1997, ACPO became a private company limited by guarantee, so the body that sets the direction for policing in this country is a private company. There were technical reasons for that, but the message that it sends is worrying. Similarly, ACPO was not subject to freedom of information, although that has now been updated. It received increased responsibilities, such as control over the world’s largest per capita DNA database, which I am pleased is changing, control of undercover policing and control of the policing of political groups in the UK in addition to a growing number of income-generating activities, which stretch the definition of what one might call occupational guidance to breaking point.

There are a number of examples of how occupational guidance can be stretched. I have the great privilege of leading for the Liberal Democrats on transport policy, and when the Secretary of State for Transport announced a review of whether motorway speed limits should be raised from 70 mph to 80 mph, a key question for me was to work out the Government’s policy on how speed limits should be enforced. The current 70 mph speed limit is realistically enforced not at 70 mph but at 80 mph. The speed limit depends on enforcement, and 80 mph meaning 80 mph is a different policy from 80 mph meaning 100 mph. Those are two different policies, but who decides which is implemented? How would the Secretary of State decide? I have been told that the decision on what that policy means—the effective speed limit in this country—was taken not by the House or the Secretary of State for Transport, but by the ACPO lead officer in the area. That is not a case of ACPO deciding what equipment should be used, what the practicalities are or where police officers should be sent. A whole range of matters is for ACPO, and I would not expect the Department for Transport to decide them, but the effective speed limit applying on our motorways should be controlled democratically. Similarly, I found that ACPO guidance advises police forces not to enforce 20 mph speed limits in cities. ACPO should not determine that when the Government have made it clear that they support more 20 mph speed limits in appropriate areas.

Under the Labour Government, ACPO—a largely unaccountable body—was given responsibility for safeguarding some of our basic human freedoms. A private company had the role of deciding how tasers should be used when such weapons, if misused, can be deadly. It had similar control over DNA. ACPO sent me an astonishing letter when questions were being asked about how people could have DNA data deleted from the police national computer. I will happily provide a full copy of the letter to anyone who wants to read it. It is dated 2006, and it advised that the following procedures should be adopted:

“Upon receipt of a request for deletion of a PNC data entry the force”

should check that it can correctly identify the subject. That is absolutely fine. The letter goes on to say that

“an applicant may request the deletion of”

their

“record/DNA sample and profile/fingerprints”

and so forth when there are special circumstances. When that request is made, a check should be made on whether the data entry is correct. So far so good. It continues:

“In the first instance applicants should be sent a letter informing them that the samples and associated PNC record are lawfully held and their request for deletion/destruction is refused”.

There is nothing before that in the letter requiring anyone to find out whether the information is lawfully held, and to work out whether to refuse it. That is a glaring omission. The letter then says that the applicant may write back explaining why the data should be deleted, after which the chief constable should look at the matter and decide whether there is a case to answer.

That is not what we should expect, and I hope that it is not what ACPO intended, but the letter certainly went to several police authorities, including mine, as guidance on the rules. The guidance was that applications should be rejected, and if that was questioned, the police should find out whether the data were correctly held. That should be reformed.

To be fair, ACPO is in a difficult position, and I think that Sir Hugh Orde has accepted the need to change how it operates. It has a grip on national policing but, as Sir Hugh has said,

“it is not through any choice; it is because someone has to do it.”

It is partly the Government’s responsibility to ensure that the right people are fulfilling the right tasks, and that we do not say, “These are tasks that the Government will not do,” and force them on ACPO by accident. It is clear that we need to fix ACPO, and that the Government should have that role. I totally endorse the Government’s decision to create a new professional body to provide leadership and to develop the police as a profession. That is an extremely positive step, and I am delighted that the Government are taking it.

I also support the idea of a body where chief constables can meet to discuss important policing matters, to deal with operational issues and to advise the Government with their expertise. That is right and proper. Chief constables should have that role, and I support its facilitation. We can keep the best bits of ACPO, and get rid of the other bits. We must ensure that those organisations, whether councils or bodies, are accountable and transparent. Will the Minister comment on whether they will be private companies and whether they will be subject to freedom of information? They must not decide the law of the land, so how will the Government decide what is an operational matter, and how will the powers be outlined?

There is more we can do. During the Committee’s investigation, it became clear to me that we still do not have a good handle on evidence. This country has a long tradition of not using evidence-based policy, which applies to policing. It would be helpful to have an organisation that could provide reliable, independent and world-leading advice on policing. We need evidence-based policing, as well as more general evidence-based policy. I welcome the recent establishment of the British Society of Evidence Based Policing, and I hope that the Minister has had an opportunity to speak to it, and to hear what it has to say. One could come up with a number of interesting conclusions about policing styles and techniques that are driven by evidence. Britain leads the world. We train police officers in many parts of the country on executive leadership programmes, and the Minister, with the Chair of the Select Committee, kindly spoke at one of those events just before Christmas.

Much of that has been driven by an academic who is now based in Cambridge. Professor Larry Sherman is professor of criminology at that university, and he has a lot to say on this matter—I hope that the Government regularly listen to him. He recently gave the 2011 Benjamin Franklin medal lecture at the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. He said many interesting things, and I commend his speech to anyone who might be interested. He argued for the creation of a British academy of policing, which would be

“a civil society organisation uniting police associations with university faculties of policing in a self-governing professional body”,

and could

“extend the global influence of British policing”,

and provide politicians attempting to navigate a new policing structure with rigorous academic material. I endorse that, because it would be excellent to have the academic knowledge from our universities linked up with policing.

We have one of the best policing traditions in the world, but we must be able to reform it and we must be able to proceed on cogent evidence. There is always inertia with such a force, and some of it is necessary, but it should be changed from an evidence-based position. We need that rigorous change, and I hope that the Government will continue to head down that route.

I want to discuss some other issues. We have discussed the police IT company and organisational matters. I would like the police to deal with that better and to become more innovative by using small-scale ideas. I shall give two examples, using companies that are, not coincidentally of course, in my constituency. I have mentioned them briefly in the House.

Sepura makes radio handsets that are used by the police and other emergency services. It is doing some excellent work with West Midlands police in using those radios to record information about stop and search—I will not discuss the wider aspects of stop and search—and to log the location, time and other details of an incident that has just happened. I understand that that is extremely successful, because it saves time for police officers and provides more accurate and more accessible results. I am sure that the Minister remembers writing a letter to Sepura congratulating it on that work. I hope that we will see it rolled out in other areas, and that there will be other innovations.

Real VNC does similar work, but sadly only with the police in the United States, where there are similar systems. Hand-held devices can be used to access the main police computer in a secure and controlled way, so that the police can be more active, and can record directly at the scene instead of having to wait. It goes without saying that all existing IT systems need to be made to work. My experience with Cambridgeshire constabulary, from an evening that I spent with the police, was that it took about an hour and a half to download a video from a head-mounted camera. We need to fix such problems as well as be more innovative.

My final plea is that we should not focus too much on organisations. What matters in policing concerns what happens on the ground and with individuals, and the ward of East Chesterton in Cambridge, which I used to represent as a county councillor, contained excellent examples of that—I apologise to hon. Members who have heard me make that point previously. I would love to claim credit for all the brilliant innovations in that ward, but they were not mine and were largely driven by PC Nick Percival—I still think of him as that, although he has now been promoted. He came along as our community beat manager and carried out a whole range of measures that made a difference in that relatively deprived part of Cambridge.

In his first year on the beat, Nick Percival managed to halve the amount of antisocial behaviour and crime that was reported, which was a huge achievement. If all our officers could manage such things—I realise that it is not that simple—this country would be a different place. He also managed to arrest fewer people than was usual for that area. Some saw that as a cause for criticism, but I saw it as a great triumph. Successful policing involves reducing the level of crime, and a greater number of arrests is not the aim.

I would like to highlight two things done by PC Nick Percival. First, he created a link with young people. That is important, especially when looking at the factors that led indirectly to the riots. We used to have a problem, particularly during school holidays, of young people getting bored, hanging around, causing trouble and smashing up bus shelters or engaging in other forms of small-scale antisocial behaviour. Nick Percival came up with the idea of a voucher scheme. Any young person in the ward who was seen playing well during the holidays by a police officer or a PCSO—we have had a great team of PCSOs over the years—was given a signed voucher by that officer. At the end of the holiday, everybody in the class at school that had the most vouchers received a £15 voucher for the local shopping centre. That was a cheap measure, and it transformed the area. Rather than having groups wandering around feeling bored, people would play and hope that a police officer would walk by. They desperately hoped that the cop would come over and find them, and they would say, “Hi PC Nick, good to see you.” It would be fantastic to see that sort of relationship in more areas.

[Tom Brake]

My hon. Friend provides me with the opportunity to flag up an exciting proposal that has been put to me by an organisation called Cricket for Change. It is keen to work with those responsible for the training of PCSOs, and embed within that training a unit aimed at providing PCSOs with the skills that they need to engage young people in sport through games such as street cricket and tag rugby.

[Dr Huppert]

The idea outlined by my right hon. Friend sounds excellent, and I hope that it does well. There is much we need to do to engage with young people because of the risk that some see themselves as somehow detached from existing organisations. When the Committee took part in visits after the riots, people described how distrust of the police already existed and said that from an early stage they and their families had grown up distrusting the police. We have to break that down, and any initiative that leads to normal friendly relationships between the police and the general public must be a good thing.

The other initiative was a system called e-cops that originally started in East Chesterton but is now used across Cambridgeshire. It is a regular newsletter sent by the police to anybody in that area and includes information such as which roads PCs have been walking down. It was transformational in East Chesterton because instead of people saying, “Why do I never see a police officer on my street?”—frankly I would be worried if I always saw a police officer on my street—there was a hugely increased level of satisfaction in what the police were doing at minimal extra cost. One of the great things about e-cops was that it was set up in an informal, chatty style; it was clearly written by a PC or PCSO writing as themselves. The initiative was successful and spread across Cambridgeshire. It is now used more as a communications device, and I think that the formality has weakened some of its effect. The idea, however, was for people to know their local police as people, not only as a force to complain or argue about.

Policing is ultimately for and about people, not just national organisations. I hope that if we implement a number of the necessary reforms, albeit with many of the caveats described by the Committee and colleagues who have spoken in the debate, we will remember to think about people and look at what we can do to make things better for them.

--- Later in debate ---

[Nick Herbert]

I am afraid that I cannot satisfy the right hon. Gentleman on either count. That is the second hypothetical matter he has raised this evening. As I have said, we will consider the recommendations of the Police Arbitration Tribunal very carefully, and it is absolutely right that we should do so.

I join right hon. and hon. Members in paying tribute to police officers and, indeed, staff. The Chair of the Select Committee referred to the reception that was held in No. 10 Downing street yesterday by the Prime Minister to mark the contribution of those who helped to deal with the disorder last summer—not only police officers, but police staff and those who worked in the other emergency services and local government. The Prime Minister spoke fulsomely about the importance of what they and their colleagues had done in the summer.

I myself was reminded of what police officers do for us by the dreadful stabbings of three officers that took place in the Metropolitan police area before Christmas. Those young officers bore serious injuries. We should always remember what an important job the police do for the country. It is also important that the Government restate to the police service that we are having to take difficult decisions in common with those that affect other public services. None of that should allow the police service to believe that we do not value police officers or want to do the best for the police service in the future. I certainly wish to do the best for the service in the future, and for those who work in it.

I will pick up one or two specific points before I conclude. My right hon. Friend the Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) mentioned the budget for police and crime panels and questioned how it is derived. It is important to restate that police and crime panels are not ongoing police authorities with the responsibilities of police authorities. Those responsibilities will be taken by police and crime commissioners. Police and crime panels have an important scrutiny role in providing a check and balance that is carefully defined in the legislation that we debated. Their role should not be expanded, and they do not need anything like the kind of resource that police authorities have. The limited funding that has been provided to panels will enable them to do their scrutiny job. My hon. Friend the Member for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless), who intervened, made that point very effectively.

I agree with the comments made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Carshalton and Wallington about the police professional body and the importance of dealing with diversity issues. That is a very good example of the kind of thing we could expect a police professional body to take up. It is difficult to see where responsibility for those issues lies at the moment. One of the things a professional body could be responsible for is ensuring that we can make greater progress in recruiting a diversity of police officers.

My right hon. Friend spoke about the importance of collaboration with local authorities, to which I referred in my response to the right hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth. I endorse that. As my hon. Friend noted, I visited Sutton, where there is a very good example of police force and local authority co-operation. We would like to see more of that, but we are not going to prescribe it. We seek to enable and encourage such an approach, but we do not want to have a directive or master plan that tells police forces how they should go about it.

The right hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth launched his campaign to be police and crime commissioner for south Wales. I wish him the very best of luck in that regard and genuinely welcome his candidacy. He raised again the issue of the status of Cardiff as the capital of Wales and made a bid for the force receiving some kind of grant in recognition of that in the same way that the Metropolitan police receives a capital city grant. He has raised that issue with me before, and my hon. Friend the Member for Vale of Glamorgan (Alun Cairns) has also raised it with me separately. In response to my hon. Friend, I asked the chief constable to supply me with the financial information that would make the case for such a grant. Clearly, resources are tight. It is a difficult request, because it would require removing grant from those who would otherwise be receiving it. These are the decisions that Ministers have to take, but I have undertaken to consider the issue in a sensible manner—I am happy to reassure him about that.

My hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge, whom I welcome to this debate of Privy Counsellors, spoke about the importance of evidence-based policy in policing, as did my right hon. Friend the Member for Carshalton and Wallington. I strongly agree with both of them on this matter. I welcome the ideas set out by Professor Sherman, whom I would like to meet again shortly to discuss these matters. I do not know whether my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge can organise a convivial dinner in Cambridge, but I would be very happy to attend.

[Dr Huppert]

I am not sure that I have ever had a Minister make a request for such a meeting before—not that way around. I would be delighted to host him and Professor Sherman. I am sure that we can arrange that.

[Nick Herbert]

I am very grateful to my hon. Friend. That is a deal. I would be delighted to come up to the town of my birth and discuss these issues with Professor Sherman, because they are important. The absence of greater academic co-ordination and interest in the evidence for good policing practice is something that we should collectively seek to try and redress.