Policing

Tom Brake Excerpts

Thursday 12th January 2012 Westminster Hall

[Tom Brake (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship once again, Mr Brady. I welcome the opportunity to debate the “New Landscape of Policing” report produced by the Home Affairs Committee and the Government’s response to it. I welcome, too, the fact that many of the Committee’s members are here today.

I begin by saying, very much in the way that the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), started his contribution, that there is a very busy picture when it comes to policing matters. As he stated, the NPIA will wind down by the end of this year, and SOCA will take on some of its responsibilities before being wound down. We expect the National Crime Agency to be fully functional by the end of next year. The elected police and crime commissioners should be in post by November, and the police authorities are being wound down at the same time. The protocol has recently been published. There is a shadow strategic policing requirement and an organised crime co-ordination centre.

They are just some of the things that have been established or are in the process of being wound down. At the same time, it is clear that the UK remains under threat, as it has been for many years. We have had other threats or incidents—the riots in August have been mentioned—and the diamond jubilee and the Olympics are upcoming. The changes present a complex picture of what the policing landscape will look like in a couple of years’ time, against a backdrop of a high level of threat to the UK.

The Home Affairs Committee has an important responsibility to scrutinise all those activities, and it has shown itself perfectly capable of doing so. The Minister with responsibility for policing will no doubt be personally responsible if any of those bodies fail to act in the way that they should, but it is clearly not possible for him to have a day-to-day handle on the progress that is being made across all those different areas of policing activity. Who, therefore, is actually responsible for having oversight on a day-to-day basis of all those different activities to ensure that one is not having a knock-on effect, or an unintended consequence, somewhere else?

As the Home Affairs Committee report highlights—this is reported in the Government’s response—those changes, even when complete, will not be set in stone. For instance, the point about the protocol in paragraph 38 in the Government’s response, Command Paper 8223, is likely to change once the police and crime commissioners are in post, because they may seek to make sensible changes. There is also the issue of what will happen to counter-terrorism. I certainly support what the Committee has said: it would be wrong to make changes to where counter-terrorism sits at present, but, post-Olympics, there is a strong case for including it in the National Crime Agency, given that it affects all parts of the United Kingdom. It is, therefore, a moving picture in more respects than one. I am sure that the Minister will want to continue to ensure that these matters are reported to Parliament on a regular basis so that, almost month-by-month, we can see the progress that is being made on all these different restructuring activities.

I raised the issue of the scrutiny of police and crime commissioners by the police and crime panels and the Government at Home Office questions on 12 December. I wanted reassurance that the budgets for the police and crime panels would be sufficient to allow them to scrutinise the police and crime commissioners in the way that was intended. The Government have said that £40,000 is set aside for that. In his response, the Minister may be able to set out how that figure was derived. On the face of it, £40,000 for a panel to scrutinise the activities of the police and crime commissioner does not sound like a lot of money, certainly not in comparison with the budgets of the police authorities, although they have other responsibilities that the police and crime commissioner will take on.

[Mark Reckless]

With the exception of two individuals, the police and crime panels will assist elected councillors who already receive allowances and may lean on other support from their constituent councils. Surely, at least part of the process must be to provide funds to allow appropriate scrutiny, rather than putting in great dollops of additional money.

[Tom Brake]

Councils may make a contribution in that respect, but at some point a police and crime panel might need to call on expertise that is not available in local authorities. If people are trying to access such expertise, which may be required for the panel effectively to undertake its scrutiny role, it does not take too long for a substantial bill to build up. I hope that the Minister will set out precisely how it will work and will reassure hon. Members that resources will be sufficient for the important task that the panels will undertake.

I hope that the Government will quickly review their role in scrutinising the police and crime commissioners, or at least the way in which they have been implemented. Given that activity is already starting in relation to London, it is not unreasonable to hope that by sometime in 2014, say, when the police and crime commissioners have been active for a couple of years, the Government may want to consider whether those bodies are delivering the sorts of things that we expect them to, in terms of increased accountability, greater involvement of the public and ensuring that the police and crime commissioner and the chief constable are engaging effectively with the people who are, at the moment, excluded from that consultation and engagement process.

I am sure that many hon. Members—possibly all hon. Members here—will at some point have attended the ward panel in one of the wards in their constituencies. I have done so occasionally in Wallington, South. It is clear that those panels receive useful input from key individuals in the community. It is true to say that young people are rarely present on those panels, and I suspect that those on lower incomes are underrepresented. The Government will want to consider whether police and crime commissioners and chief constables are beginning to engage more effectively with such groups to see whether their views, concerns and priorities, from a policing perspective, are properly taken on board.

The Home Affairs Committee report and the Government response contain a large body of information about the professional body. I support that and want it rolled out quickly and, as the Committee has suggested, in an all-encompassing way that is not exclusive in terms of its membership. That body should be doing some things at an early stage, including considering national minimum recruitment standards for the police force, considering whether there is scope for learning from the Teach First scheme, to see whether there are ways to get a different group of young, qualified people into the police force, and looking at whether there is any prospect of using some of the expertise that has been built up in respect of teaching schools to see whether there is any role for some of our larger police stations in that respect.

[Keith Vaz]

I was remiss in not recognising that the right hon. Gentleman appeared as a witness in the Committee during its inquiries.

The Government’s proposal to completely and radically reform the way that police officers are trained and to look at standards is exciting. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree with the Committee that it is important to bring the profession with us when having a discussion of this kind and to have the widest possible consultation, so that we have something that will last beyond this Government—the worst possible thing would be to have too much party politics in this—and that we should be getting people on board and united behind a new method of education and professionalism?

[Tom Brake]

I welcome this proposal and agree that the profession must be brought along and that that requires consultation and engagement, although, of course, it may be difficult to get a single view of the profession from all levels of police officers about what that professional body will look like. However, it is clearly essential to engage with all of them, whether chief constables, superintendents, police constables—the whole range—or staff.

I hope that the professional body will look more carefully at black and minority ethnic recruitment into the police force and how BME officers do or do not make progress within the ranks. It should take that task on at an early stage.

As an aside, the professional body should, rightly, concentrate on training. What training will be available for both police and crime commissioners and police and crime panels? In relation to the former, what training might be available to candidates who are going to be, or want to be, police and crime commissioners? Such training could be beneficial. I am concerned that some candidates for those posts may not have the experience, knowledge or expertise that is required. Although coming to the job with a fresh approach may be welcome, understanding the environment in which people are going to work will also be beneficial.

I shall mention efficiency, touch on one major omission from the new landscape and then conclude. On efficiency, the report clearly and rightly highlights the importance of getting more out of the procurement process and out of IT. However, it is short on detail about ensuring that the police are taking the most effective approach to tackling types of crime.

I want to see more in terms of drawing into the centre the evidence base for what is effective from a policing perspective, so that we can make that information available widely to all the police and crime commissioners and chief constables and can be certain that, when they launch an initiative—whether tackling antisocial behaviour or organised crime, at NCA level—they are using a policy or approach that evidence suggests will be the most effective possible. Doing that may require universities and others to be more heavily involved in the research than may currently be the case.

The Home Affairs Committee did not focus enough, to my liking, on the linkages that should exist between police and local authorities. The Chair of the Committee has visited Sutton, as has the Minister with responsibility for the police, to look at the partnership between the local authority and the police, which has drawn together under one person police and local authority resources to tackle antisocial behaviour and so on. I would like to have seen that agenda pushed more, because there is no doubt that it has been effective in Sutton not only from a policing perspective, but in ensuring that the police, the local authority, the fire service and the voluntary sector work together effectively. I would like it to have been more prominent in the Committee report and in the new landscape of policing more generally. From a policing perspective, these are exciting and challenging times, and there are lots of opportunities, which is why we need to keep the situation under constant review. I hope that the Minister will reassure us there will be an ongoing and heavily engaging process for all Members.

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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.

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[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.

[Tom Brake]

Has the Minister gone further than interest on this matter? In the new landscape, where does he think that body of evidence will be held?

[Nick Herbert]

That is a very good question to which I do not have an immediate or off-the-cuff answer. I am loth to suggest the creation of some kind of Government-sponsored body for obvious reasons—we are seeking to reduce the number of quangos and declutter the policing landscape—but that is not to say that there is not a value in looking at who might be responsible for, or encouraging in academia, this kind of work. I am not necessarily endorsing Professor Sherman’s call for some kind of British institute as an additional policing body, but it is worth having the discussion about where this kind of evidence-led approach could be developed. It could be that there are aspects that can be led by the professional body. Professor Sherman thought otherwise—he thought that it would be for others—but these two things might not be mutually exclusive.

May I turn—briefly, because I am aware of the time moving on and I apologise for that—to some of the remarks made by the right hon. Member for Delyn? I have sought to deal with some of them in relation to what I consider to be the coherence of the Government’s policing reforms and the issue of the morale of police officers. I cannot leave unremarked his point about police numbers and the cuts in policing. Of course, the kinds of reduction in police funding that the previous Government have admitted that they were considering —cuts of £1 billion a year in police funding—would inevitably have resulted in fewer people working in policing. It is impossible to see how they could have made savings year-on-year without a smaller work force. Therefore, it is important that those in policing should understand that reductions in manpower were going to happen under any Government. Of course, the issue is the extent to which that has to happen, but I point out to the right hon. Gentleman that Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary’s report on what has happened so far in those reductions in funding shows just a 2% reduction in officers on the front line.

We know that in the back and middle offices of policing, using the definition supplied to us by the inspectorate of constabulary, there are approximately 25,000 police officers. It is therefore simply wrong to suggest that a reduction in manpower necessarily means that the front line will be affected or damaged. The right debate is about how policing should be transformed, restructured and made more efficient so that resource continues to get to the front line. Police forces up and down the country are showing that that is possible, and that the kind of characterisation of the debate we have seen from the Opposition is wrong and will be shown, in the end, to be wrong. I believe that police forces are rising to the challenge of reorganising, driving out cost and ensuring that they can continue to deliver a service to the public.

The right hon. Gentleman raised the issue of who would be responsible for ensuring that police and crime commissioners would deliver value for money. Of course, there is the ongoing responsibility of Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary in that regard, but ultimately police and crime commissioners will answer to the public—that is the force of this reform. We are not appointing police and crime commissioners, because the public are electing them. The commissioners will be strongly incentivised to deliver value for money for the British public. The right hon. Gentleman asked whether we are going to set further targets. No, we are not going to set targets for police and crime commissioners. We have abolished policing targets, because we seek a different approach that gives greater freedom.

That concludes the remarks that I want to make in the debate. I apologise for speaking at some length, but I wished seriously to engage with the points made by hon. Members. I welcome the Home Affairs Committee’s interest in these matters. I note that its report is not critical of the changes in the policing landscape, although it has things to say about the pace of change and so on. The Government have taken those comments seriously and have responded. Some of the reforms relating to the establishment of police and crime commissioners have been controversial, despite the cross-party buy-in to the new office. However, other aspects of the reforms command the support of the whole House, such as the creation of the police professional body, the better way of dealing with policing IT, the de-bureaucratisation of policing and the creation of the National Crime Agency. Far from being matters of party division or contention, we can have a good debate about how to make the reforms work while recognising that those are the right changes to ensure that policing can rise to the challenges of the 21st century and continue to ensure that crime is fought effectively and that the public are kept safe.