Welsh Affairs Committee
Oral evidence: Policing in Wales, HC 1657
Wednesday 12 July 2023
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 12 July 2023.
Members present: Stephen Crabb (Chair); Simon Baynes; Ruth Jones; Ben Lake; Robin Millar; Beth Winter.
Questions 1 - 56
Witnesses
I: Jeremy Vaughan, Chief Constable, South Wales Police; Dr Richard Lewis, Chief Constable, Dyfed-Powys Police; Pam Kelly, Chief Constable, Gwent Police; Amanda Blakeman, Chief Constable, North Wales Police.
Witnesses: Jeremy Vaughan, Dr Richard Lewis, Pam Kelly and Amanda Blakeman.
Q1 Chair: Bore da. Good morning. Welcome to this session of the Welsh Affairs Committee, where we are delighted today to be joined by four chief constables from the Welsh police forces to discuss policing in Wales. We are joined by Chief Constable Amanda Blakeman from North Wales Police; Chief Constable Pam Kelly from Gwent Police; Dr Richard Lewis, chief constable of Dyfed-Powys; and Jeremy Vaughan, chief constable of South Wales Police.
Perhaps I can start the discussion this morning by asking about accountability. Who do you see yourselves primarily accountable to? Is it the local force police and crime commissioner, or is it the Home Office within UK Government?
Amanda Blakeman: Primarily, I see myself as accountable to my local community, via our police and crime commissioner, as elected by the local community and, on wider issues that are covered in the strategic policing requirement and broader issues around performance et cetera, to UK Government. That answers it very simply. That is in terms of accountability. I can go into accountability structures if you want.
Q2 Chair: No, that is very helpful. As a group of Welsh chief constables, would you meet together with the UK Government Policing Minister? Does that ever happen?
Dr Lewis: The Policing Minister occasionally attends the Policing Partnership Board for Wales, which is the meeting that we have with Welsh Government, explaining the money we have from them and how we might spend that. That happens on a reasonably regular basis. There is usually a Home Office official there if the Minister himself cannot make it, so that relationship is one that is already close.
To build on Amanda’s answer, for Dyfed-Powys Police at least, the funding is about 50% Home Office and about 50% local taxpayers. The accountability is almost 50/50 between central Government, which is of course a reserved matter, and local policing. That changes a little between forces, but it is almost 50/50 at Dyfed-Powys. The relationship with the Home Office and the Policing Minister is through the Policing Partnership Board for Wales. All of us have national responsibilities as well, where we are meeting the Policing Minister for different reasons.
Q3 Chair: It is actually a more complicated picture than assuming that there is one line of accountability on the basis of it being a reserved policy area. Chief Constable Jeremy Vaughan, do you ever feel you are being pulled in different directions in the conversations you have with Welsh Government, UK Government and police and crime commissioners because of those different accountability relationships?
Jeremy Vaughan: I do not feel like I am being pulled in different directions. Sometimes the directions can appear to be going off in different ways. We are accountable to the law. We are accountable to the police and crime commissioner by virtue of the law. Chief constables are held to account by police and crime commissioners for efficient and effective running of policing.
There are another two substantial documents in which we describe interfaces. One is the policing protocol, which describes the relationship between chief constables, the police and crime commissioners, and the Home Office and the Home Secretary particularly. The strategic policing requirement describes our broader duty to delivering policing services across both England and Wales.
There are occasions when strategies are published in Westminster and it is not always that clear that Welsh Government have had an opportunity to comment on the strategy or be involved in its development. That can impact on devolved services in Wales. We are not devolved, so on one level it does not impact us. If you take the drugs strategy, for example, health services are devolved in Wales. Therefore it is difficult to write in a prevention strategy for drugs without engaging health in it.
I do not feel, personally, that I am pulled in different directions. I feel that I am clear on what the law says my lines of accountability are. Sometimes strategies are released that are not always apparently a co-operative development. That comes to bear.
Q4 Chair: Is the Police Partnership Board for Wales, which Chief Constable Richard Lewis just referred to, a UK Government entity? Is it a Welsh Government entity? How is that organised and resourced?
Jeremy Vaughan: It is a Welsh Government entity. The Wales partnership board is an opportunity for us, in the absence of having a Policing Minister equivalent in Wales, to engage with the most senior levels of Government—it is chaired by the First Minister—to talk about shared partnership priorities, concerns and approaches. Welsh Government fund PCSOs in Wales, so there is an obvious overlap.
Chair: It is a convening role.
Jeremy Vaughan: It is a convening role. It is definitely not designed to be a role where there is accountability. That being said, we are accountable to our communities, as Amanda said. On that basis, you do feel like it is a shared responsibility.
Pam Kelly: Being completely honest, what is important is that we, as chief constables, are operationally independent. That is essential. The issue for me is that the accountability structures are clear, but they can be blurred because of course we work with devolved partners. When we have that partnership board, some of those devolved partners that are clearly devolved to the Senedd are present. That is really positive, because it means that we can work together to make sure that Wales is as safe as it can be.
The Policing Minister attends at times, and/or his deputy, but it is difficult at times to weave our way through not just the accountability but also where the funding is. That is the issue for me. Why is it that, as Welsh forces, we have to knock doors twice to find out where the funding is coming from at times? That creates a very difficult job for us, especially when things such as drug strategies are released.
I feel that Wales is disadvantaged because of that. I want it to be very clear, when some of these strategies are released, where the funding is available. We should not have to go searching for it. It is up to both Governments to make that clear for us to deliver the best service that we can.
Dr Lewis: As far as I understand, that meeting does not have a statutory footing, but that is partly its strength. We convene because we feel that it is important to. To have UK Government, Welsh Government, the four Welsh chief constables and the four police and crime commissioners in the same room at the same time, discussing these issues, is a strength of the meeting.
In terms of the funding, I have been a chief constable in a force in England as well. It was not a question I had to ask. When there was mental health funding, for example, I knew that the funding was coming to partners in my area or directly to me. It is a question, as Chief Constable Kelly has already alluded to, that you have to ask in Wales: what does this mean for Wales? Part of that funding is funnelled through our devolved partners of course, so it is an additional complexity. It is not insurmountable, but a complexity nonetheless.
Q5 Chair: On that question of funding, as with every service where Government money is being spent, there are enormous pressures at this time and surges in costs as well. As Welsh police forces, how are you managing the enormous cost inflation that you are seeing? Is the funding you are getting from these different sources that we have been talking about adequate for your needs at the moment? How do you see that conversation developing?
Pam Kelly: All public services are struggling. We know that and we know the difficulties in terms of funding being available and distributed. The reality is that, for a small force such as Gwent, needing to find £5 million this year, that is significant. A custody suite, for example, which is fundamental to running a police service, generally costs me £1 million to run and I need to find the equivalent of running five custody suites in savings.
It is difficult, because we have already explored every avenue in terms of collaborative working on a national level. Certainly, we work really well together for the greater good of the public, but also from a funding perspective. The 20,000 extra police officers are absolutely welcomed, but the establishment of those 20,000 officers, quite rightly, needs to be maintained. That means that the only area we can go to, as it were, for savings is police staff.
It is our police staff who answer our 999 calls and who are our custody detention officers, cyber analysts and digital forensic analysts. Ordinarily, police staff are not warranted officers. It becomes much more complex than just numbers. It means that we are actually, potentially, going to lose good people with good experience because we cannot afford to keep them. Where else is that money going to come from?
Of course, I am passionate about a pay award for our police officers and staff. They are phenomenal, whatever you read in the papers. Yes, there is much that policing needs to do to improve culture, but they deliver a phenomenal service and deserve the pay award. Where is that money going to come on? It is important that we ask those questions, because we cannot afford to pay it from current budgets.
Amanda Blakeman: To build on what the chief constable was saying there, sometimes it is the short-term nature of the funding that we see, so safer streets for instance. It is a really good initiative. It gives us an opportunity to flex some resource, but the short-term nature of it means that it is very difficult to recruit staff in for a year’s worth of spend and to procure some of the necessary assets, for instance CCTV. The procurement route that we have to take sometimes takes longer than the funding is there for.
Those things can be real challenges for us as well. When we are looking at short-term pieces of funding that are coming in, I would rather that be built into the funding per se to enable us to react and provide for our local communities with issues that they see, so we are not driving some behaviours in relation to short-term funding and short-term resourcing.
Q6 Chair: Chief Constable Lewis, is the uplift programme that Chief Constable Kelly just referred to going to enable a more visible police presence in Welsh police force areas, do you feel? Is it a question, as Chief Constable Kelly just alluded to, of savings having to be made in other areas, so you are going to end up with uniformed officers back doing what they did not want to be doing, which is why civilians were appointed to those back office roles? Is that what is going on?
Dr Lewis: It certainly could be. Dyfed-Powys has more police officers now than it ever has in its history. That is to be welcomed, of course, but some flexibility into the future on how many police officers precisely I need to keep to would be useful. The 20,000 extra has been welcomed nationally by the police service, but there will be a point in time where some flexibility on those numbers would be useful to me as a chief constable, so I am not backfilling civilian posts with police officers sat behind desks. They should be out and visible in their communities.
There is a point in time where the Home Office, I would hope, is able to provide us some flexibility on those numbers. At the moment, we are held to account on the numbers and holding that 20,000 increase. There is a danger in the years to come because of the funding envelope. There is a £10 million saving plan for Dyfed-Powys over three years, including this one, and there are inflationary pressures.
The inflationary pressure on our utility bills is an extra £1 million this year. That is not our utility bills; it is the inflationary pressure on those bills. That creates pressure elsewhere in the budget, which usually means efficiencies, to use a pejorative term, for police staff members. Some flexibility in years to come is something that we would welcome.
Q7 Chair: As the chief constable of one of the largest police force areas in the whole country, do you feel that you have enough officers to provide the presence that you want to provide to communities across a very large rural area?
Dr Lewis: You could give me an extra thousand police officers and I will still tell you that I want some more. Of course we want to be more visible. The PCSOs we have from Welsh Government assist in that regard as well. It is not just about police officers. Police staff members provide a visible influence within our communities. With more officers than we have ever had, it is difficult for me to sit here and say that we are a poor relation; we are not. We have gained from that 20,000 uplift, but of course more are always welcome.
Jeremy Vaughan: I will not repeat, as guided. I lead on pay and conditions of service nationally, as well as pensions, among other things. We were really clear with the submission of evidence to the pay review body this year that, if any inflationary rise was unfunded, above the 2.1% that was funded as part of the spending review period, there is not a force out there that is not building in vacancy management, so, slowing down the pace at which we recruit people at different points in the year to create some capacity in the budget.
Reverse workforce modernisation is the phrase that is often used for putting police officers into police staff roles. There will be police staff reductions and borrowing. Just in Wales, the borrowing has gone up by £84 million this year. We get no money for capital, so any capital improvements need to come from big loans and big mortgages. Those big mortgages are increasing in cost, and the reserves have depleted significantly nationally.
My savings target is £1 million a month and the important thing to remember is that 74% of our budgets are pretty much locked now. They are tied to police officer numbers and PCSO investment, or are locked in other ways. It gives us little flexibility as to where we can find the money.
Q8 Robin Millar: Welcome, all of you. It is good to see you and thanks for coming in this morning. I want to develop a little bit this idea of collaboration between the forces in England and Wales, but I am mindful that we are going through an inquiry at the moment into Covid. I recall from my own experience that one issue during the pandemic in Wales was the problem of people crossing borders into Wales and the difficulty of communicating two different regulatory regimes, effectively. On that point, England and Wales work on an east-west basis. Do you think that there is good collaboration between police forces? Do you think that that is something you are doing effectively at the moment?
Pam Kelly: There is collaboration, of course, among all the forces in Wales. We work very closely together, not just in saving money.
Q9 Robin Millar: To be specific, I mean between English and Welsh forces. Perhaps you could focus, given the time allowance, on lessons learned from the Covid pandemic and that particular issue.
Pam Kelly: We work together as the National Police Chiefs’ Council. All chief constables get together and we procure nationally on uniform, police vehicles and the like. The Covid pandemic that you have mentioned was an interesting time. I was chair of the Welsh chief officer group at that point. With two sets of legislation running, sometimes with 24 or 48 hours’ notice, of course it is really difficult when Wales is working separately to English forces. In Wales we have other laws that are unfolding differently.
Wherever possible, we work together across forces. Amanda in particular, in north Wales, works very closely with Merseyside. It is not just about money; it is about making sure that criminals are sought after. Criminals do not see force boundaries. They do not see the boundaries of England and Wales, of south Wales and Avon and Somerset, or of Gwent and West Mercia. They break those boundaries. It is really important that we work together collaboratively, not just to save money but to enforce the law and lock people up who commit crime. We do that together, with our regional organised crime units as well.
Q10 Robin Millar: Dr Lewis, I know that we have spoken before and you used to work in England.
Dr Lewis: In terms of the Covid period—I was not working in Wales during the height of the pandemic—it was the speed with which new laws were being created that was causing confusion for people. That is understandable and there is an understanding as well as to why those laws needed to be created as quickly as they were.
Other examples of Welsh-centric legislation would be, for example, the ban on lawful chastisement, or smacking. With a longer timeframe within which to work, it is much easier to differentiate what is happening between England and Wales. It is not the, perhaps even unique, issue created by Covid and the speed with which things were changing.
Q11 Robin Millar: How do you address that for someone who comes across the border from another regulatory regime for a two-week holiday in Wales and is seen smacking their child in public, to use your example?
Dr Lewis: It is information, I suppose. It is about doing as much as we can in terms of education and going with engagement before enforcement. There were the four Es during Covid. There is an element of that and discretion for police officers to deal with what they see and how they see it. It causes the occasional issue, but they are so small and rare in nature that it is not something we necessarily concern ourselves with.
Q12 Robin Millar: Perhaps I could move this on to the particular issue of speed enforcement. The Welsh Government are now imposing a largely blanket 20 mile an hour limit on roads in Wales. Chief Constable Blakeman, how are you approaching that problem of the management of different regulatory regimes around speeding across the borders?
Amanda Blakeman: I will probably refer back to the fact that, as a group of chief constables and four forces, we work very closely together, alongside the fact that there has been quite a long lead-in time in terms of this being discussed and brought through as a piece of legislation. We have had the opportunity to work with Welsh Government in relation to that particular area to understand the impact of it, to look at some pilot areas and to be able to get some learning out of that.
There is a slower approach in relation to it, which has allowed us to put those mechanisms in place. Then it is about being very clear with the public in terms of the position and allowing our public to get used to that position. For me particularly in north Wales, we have a lot of tourists travelling to us. That understanding, engagement and education is really important for us, in terms of our roads.
I am interested in those high-risk, high-harm areas of our roads, where we know we get killed or serious injury incidents on our roads. Those are the areas that I want us to focus our policing resources on, so that we can make sure we are reducing the amount of incidents that we have in fast road areas. Of course we will continue to uphold the legislation that is in place, but I would have to think very carefully, focusing particularly on those that are not high-harm areas, about where we are placing our finite resources.
Jeremy Vaughan: Very broadly on the England and Wales basis, we share a lot of common policy approaches between England and Wales within policing, because we share regional organised crime units. Counterterrorism policing for Wales is hosted by the Met and led across England and Wales. There is the operational co-ordinating committee. We share mutual aid resources with English forces from Wales all the time. Much of what we do is a collaboration with policing in England and Wales.
When it came to Covid, Martin Hewitt, who was chair of the chiefs’ council at the time, was gold commander for Covid. He developed the strategy, if you like, for policing, which was to engage, explain, encourage and then enforce. We just stepped through that every time when we were dealing with people. That will have included explaining the different regulatory landscape if they came across the border.
On 20 miles an hour, our job is not to write the law; it is to play our role in upholding the law. In the end, someone gets a letter from the chief to say that they breached a speeding thing. It is up to us in policing to determine what the levels of enforcement are. It is important for us that we explain that to the public, that they understand what the levels of tolerance are and so on. We are ongoing in that dialogue.
Q13 Robin Millar: Can I pick you up on that point? You said that you did not write the law. Are the Welsh Government very involved with consulting with you as police forces in Wales on the deliverability of some of the laws that they are introducing, given that there are these differences?
Jeremy Vaughan: Yes. We have an assistant chief constable who works for me, Mark Travis, who is the roads policing lead for Wales. He is actively engaged pretty much on a weekly basis at the moment on the development of the law and what the levels of enforcement are.
Q14 Robin Millar: I know that last time we were together as four chief constables the balance of opinion was clear that the current arrangements were the sensible and right arrangements to deliver what was necessary. Is that still the balance of opinion across the panel, or do you feel that a single, unified, devolved force would be better? It is probably a yes/no question.
Amanda Blakeman: Operationally, for me in north Wales, I am an active part of our regional organised crime unit that covers the north-west region, so Merseyside, Greater Manchester and Cheshire. Operationally for me, having that position to be able to work closely with colleagues in the UK sees us being able to put a huge amount of disruption into organised criminality.
Robin Millar: Can I have short answers, please? I think that that is a yes.
Pam Kelly: Yes, but there are conversations to be had about where we are in this conversation around devolution and/or one force for Wales. In my view, let us say that we have so much money to save, so how on earth can we be diverted from that when we need to be tackling crime today and delivering at a local level?
Jeremy Vaughan: I do not think that it is a yes or no answer for me. I would need to understand more about the operational implications of it. Part of me sees that closer working relationship and policy development with Government, as a devolved partner, has promise and provides opportunity. There are lots of operational implications associated with the things we share with England that we would need to work through and understand, and I have not been asked to do that.
Dr Lewis: You mentioned unified and devolved. Unified, yes. Devolved is a matter for politicians, in terms of the governance around the four Welsh police forces. I do not think it is a financial case that you should be making for the unification of four police forces; it should be an operational one. I do not speak on behalf of Dyfed-Powys Police or the NPCC in that regard, nor on behalf of my other chief constable colleagues here. It is a personal view. A unified Welsh police force would be better for operational reasons to deliver the policing that we need in Wales.
Jeremy Vaughan: There are too many police forces in England and Wales in terms of number.
Robin Millar: I welcome the discussion.
Q15 Chair: Could I ask about collaboration between forces? You all had a spectacular success recently with Operation Mille, I believe it was called, the drugs raids and collaboration between Welsh forces, English forces and maybe even in Scotland as well. Congratulations to you all for that success.
Going back to the discussion that we started right at the beginning about the complicated accountability structures, and the different discussions and doors that you have to knock on to secure resources and clarity, should we assume that none of that impacts on operational delivery? Do you carry on doing what you have always done, collaborating and securing wins such as the one we have just talked about, or do some of those accountability and governance discussions feed through and bleed through into your ability to collaborate and deliver great policing on the ground?
Dr Lewis: It is important for our four chief constables in Wales to make it absolutely clear that there is no operational difference in the work our officers do. It is our role to make that the case, even though we accept that it is hard sometimes with some of the governance arrangements, where we are chasing money et cetera from across Offa’s Dyke. Even though that can be difficult, that should not be felt as a difficulty for our frontline officers.
Particularly in the southern Wales region, we have a firearms collaboration where my officers in Dyfed-Powys are sitting in the same car as Jeremy’s officers and patrolling across force borders. Those police officers do not recognise those force borders in the way that they did. There are some operational collaborations that work exceptionally well. That extends across to Gwent as well. Our job is to make sure that it keeps being easy for our frontline officers and that we take on the burden of perhaps the more difficult conversations around accountability.
Pam Kelly: Operationally, we work really well together. We are here to protect the public. That is our job and our frontline staff know that. I would ask politicians to make it easier for us in terms of navigating that money. I would rather be spending time making sure our operational staff are looked after and given that operational steer than knocking on doors, asking for money.
We are sometimes disadvantaged. When we think of the apprenticeship levy, it took us a long time to find out where the apprenticeship money for Welsh forces was. It took too long. I should not have to be writing letter after letter to find out where that money is and asking MPs and others to help us. Operationally, absolutely we work together, but make it easier for us, please.
Q16 Chair: Can the Wales Office not help in that regard? Should the Wales Office be your voice in getting those answers from central Government?
Pam Kelly: We ask the Policing Minister. We ask members of the Welsh Government to have conversations on this to resolve any issues, as well as police and crime commissioners. We will go to everybody who is prepared to open doors to allow us to access that funding. It took far too long.
Q17 Beth Winter: Bore da. You have probably answered most of this question, so I will try to home in on a couple of points. In terms of your experience of working with Welsh and UK Government, you have answered with regard to the challenges and opportunities strategically. I wanted to home in on whether there are any specifics in terms of confusion caused at an implementation level.
If I can dig slightly in terms of the funding, we have a table here that says how much you get from UK Government and Welsh Government contributions. There does not seem to be a correlation between what you get as forces from the UK Government and the Welsh Government. Could one of you explain how those figures are reached, in terms of the funding from particularly the Welsh Government? There are big variations in terms of the funding from the Welsh. You have already alluded to the fact that that is causing difficulties in terms of operational work.
Dr Lewis: I do not have access to the figures that you have there. In terms of the way Dyfed-Powys and the other forces are funded, there is a block grant from the Home Office, which takes about 50% of our money that we have to spend. About 50% is from local taxpayers. Above that as well, there are ringfenced sums of money from Welsh Government, for the PCSO school liaison programme for example.
The figures you have that might differentiate might be because of the sheer number of officers. Mine is probably the smallest force in Wales, against Jeremy’s, which is the biggest. There may be some variance because of that. In terms of the funding, there is no block grant necessarily from Welsh Government. It is to fund specific initiatives, such as PCSOs.
Pam Kelly: You asked also about a point of implementation, which is really important. For example, the UK drugs strategy, which I thought was brilliant, was released recently. Richard leads nationally on that, but the first question we asked was whether the funding linked to that strategy applies to Wales. It was really difficult to find out where that money was. The strategy was excellent. There was performance monitoring as a part of that strategy, which is really good, but we then had to ask, “The strategy is England and Wales, but where is the funding?” This is where some of our challenges are.
Q18 Beth Winter: Where was the funding?
Pam Kelly: The issue was that the funding was available through area planning boards, which are of course devolved to Welsh Government. It was quite complex, trying to access and really understand where that funding was, wasn’t it, Rich?
Dr Lewis: I am the NPCC lead for drugs, so I speak on behalf of England and Wales forces on drugs policy. The vast majority of money relating to the drugs strategy is in treatment and health services. Of course, those are devolved in Wales. It has not been insurmountable, but we have had to follow the money across from England through into Welsh Government to understand how we can access some of that funding to push people into treatment, for example.
I have a meeting later this week with the Policing Minister on that very issue. There is an additional complexity that is not overwhelmingly difficult, but still an added level of bureaucracy that we need to identify where the money goes to. There are local drugs partnerships in every area of England and area planning boards in Wales. It is just a slight change in terminology as much as anything, but it requires additional thinking.
Jeremy Vaughan: I am thinking that your question is partly what the actual operational impact is day to day for police officers. I would suggest that it does not have an operational impact at all. There were times during Covid when there was a really very rapid regulatory change and difference between certain rules, which needed explaining to individuals.
If you take lawful chastisement, which does not exist in Wales now, like it does in England, I would expect the police officer in England or Wales who saw a grown-up smacking a child to go and speak to them in either case and come to a conclusion about what might have happened. In Wales, the pathway thereafter might be different than it is in England. Actual operational day-to-day activity does not really change.
Q19 Beth Winter: Lots of evidence has been shown from the Silk commission and the Thomas review regarding the benefits of devolving policing to Wales. I take on board your comment about politicians, but you have opinions and experiences. Do you agree that policing should be devolved to Wales? Would that resolve the confusion and the issues that exist?
Dr Lewis: It is very important to draw clear blue water between the decisions that politicians need to make and those that police officers can be involved in. If we were to be asked those questions in an inquiry at some point in the future, I am sure we would provide some evidence in that regard. In terms of whether it should be devolved, we leave that matter entirely to police and crime commissioners in Wales, as well as those working in Welsh Government and UK Government.
Q20 Beth Winter: Would it make it easier for you if you had one Government body to be accountable to?
Jeremy Vaughan: There are 250 incidents reported to South Wales Police every day by people concerned for people’s safety. That concern is usually a combination of social deprivation need, mental health problems, underlying health problems and so on. On that level, it is very appealing to be part of a policy and regulatory landscape that meant that we would have a Minister in Government to go to in Welsh Government and we could work with partners to deliver a better “one public service Wales”. On that level, lots of our business is not crime and disorder, so it would certainly help.
The parts of the business that are crime and disorder rely heavily at the moment on very operational interfaces with England. We would need to understand, as chiefs, what the policy landscape would look like for that service in the future. It sounds like I am a fence sitter; I am not a fence sitter at all. I can see the benefits, but there are so many unresolved questions in terms of the operational interface outside of Wales that I would need to answer and be satisfied of before I could tell you, “Yes, we must go ahead with it”.
Amanda Blakeman: If I can come in with an example of that, I have done the lead work for violence against women and girls across Wales. In terms of being able to look at that, deliver the strategy and work through partnerships, it has been much easier to do that in Wales than it has been in England. The relationships, partnerships and scale make it an easier position to navigate.
If I look at regional organised crime, my collaborations across Cheshire and Merseyside, and dealing with the day-to-day business of criminals who offend on us but live elsewhere, then it becomes a real issue. To support Jeremy in what he is saying, there are two examples of where it would be easier, but then it is also a real challenge. We are absolutely clear that, operationally, we have to make an assessment of what devolved means for us. We need to have a look at that properly.
Q21 Beth Winter: All of you are open to the discussion, I think. You have all commented on the funding difficulties. The Institute for Government has said that, although spending has increased in recent years, it remains below 2009-10. Are you arguing for more funding? If so, where would that come from?
Pam Kelly: Going back in terms of police officer numbers to 2010, I am just about to go over those comparison numbers, but crime has changed since 2010. When I look at our emergency calls, for me, in the last three months there have been 28,000 999 calls. That is nearly 5,000 more than the three months previously. We cannot just say that we need more money. What do we need more money for? That money is to protect our communities from risk and harm.
To compare 2010 to current day and say that we have the same numbers is comparing apples and pears. What is the type of crime that we are dealing with? We are also dealing with those hidden streets, as you all know: the cyber world, the dark web, abuse online. There is no visible policing in those areas, but they are the hidden streets that we have a duty to police and protect. That has grown exponentially in the last 20-odd years and that requires policing to look after vulnerable people or children who go online.
It is not just about numbers. It is about money to ensure we have the right people, with the right skills, to keep us safe in Wales. That is what we are really passionate about. Yes, we need more money, because people need to be kept safe.
Beth Winter: I will bring Mr Vaughan in, because I know you were the lead on this.
Jeremy Vaughan: I am arguing for capital city funding. Cardiff is not funded as a capital city. It draws down resource from all sorts of areas, including your area in south Wales. We are arguing for apprenticeship levy funding, since we do not get what England is able to draw down. I am arguing on a national basis for some additional funding to deal with inflationary pressures. The next inflationary pressure heading towards us is pay. I do not know at the moment to what extent that is going to be funded.
Q22 Beth Winter: Are there positive discussions?
Jeremy Vaughan: We have given evidence to a pay review body, so we wait for its recommendations.
Dr Lewis: We have been promised within this Parliament as well that the funding formula for police forces in England and Wales will change. We are waiting for a decision on how that formula will change. Inevitably, there are going to be winners and losers out of that. Some forces will receive more and some less. There will be a dampening procedure, I hope, alongside that to make sure that forces that lose out have some sort of lead-in time to it. We are expecting a response on that imminently, I think.
Q23 Ben Lake: With regards to funding, Mr Vaughan, you mentioned there the capital city funding and status requirement. I am also interested to know, potentially more for Dyfed-Powys and north Wales, how much of an impact, if any, the seasonal pressures and changes in population have in your force areas.
Amanda Blakeman: It has a huge impact on our resourcing models, how we are able to deploy and where we need to change our focus in terms of the type of criminality. We have to have that flexibility within our budget to be able to do that. It would be nice if there was the ability to build that seasonal pressure variance in.
Looking for parity with colleagues in England in terms of funding opportunities is something that I am really interested in. As we have already rehearsed, we should not have to chase around after the money in the first place. That understanding of the environment we are policing, and being able to deal with that, is really important to our local communities.
Q24 Ben Lake: Dr Lewis, I suppose that there are population changes in the summer months, but there may well be other factors. Would you echo some of the points that Chief Constable Blakeman made there?
Dr Lewis: Some of the research work we have done at Dyfed-Powys suggests that we are the biggest force in England and Wales for seasonal variation. It is about 52% through the summer months and 48% as our demand fluctuates between summer and winter. It does not seem like a huge amount when you do it as a percentage, but the number of calls we get is significantly higher, if I can refer to summer as six months of the year just to simplify things. That brings additional issues in terms of seasonality.
There is also geography. Chair, as you mentioned earlier, we have the biggest force area in England and Wales. I have worked in a police force before where I had one custody unit and we could service the needs of a whole police service with that. I have five full-time custody blocks in Dyfed-Powys because of geography. That is five times the costs in terms of heating and the number of staff. We have made a very strong case that rurality should be reflected within the funding formula. It is not just about urban areas; it is very much about the challenges that come with policing rural areas.
Q25 Ruth Jones: Thank you to the four of you for coming in in person today. It really helps to have a dialogue with you face to face. I am going to be sneaky and follow on from that question because the Chair cannot stop me. You have mentioned the extra 20,000 police. In terms of recruitment, retention and supervision of those police officers, anecdotally we are being told that senior offices are retiring. Who is mentoring and supervising the new staff? You obviously want to inculcate good behaviour into them. How are you managing the recruitment, retention and supervision?
Jeremy Vaughan: The National Audit Office did some work on the amount of police officers and police staff lost during the period of austerity. We are some significant number short of getting back to those numbers of police staff and police officers. In that period, we lost a million years of police experience.
Now, I recruited 900 people in the last three and a half years. That runs to almost 15% or 16% of my organisation. What happens in policing is that, while I have recruited about 86 people through direct-entry detective schemes, the rest of the 420-odd officers on top of that have all gone into the frontline. They all go into response policing. There is a huge amount of response policing that is young in service, so in those first three years.
As part of the uplift programme, we have invested more in frontline supervision, so in what we call bronze-level inspectors and oversight and management. South Wales Police at least has mandated that people must attend certain training programmes before they can be eligible for promotion. We have tried to make sure that the supervisor is as good as they can be to deal with some of that experience deficit.
We have quite low attrition rates in South Wales Police. We have retained quite a bit of experience. It is permissible under the pension regulations at the moment to get people back into the service, to rejoin them. As a strategy, we have not done that yet, but we might do. We have not done it yet because I needed to grow the service by 20,000 more police officers before I then, in parallel, thought about how you draw back on that experience. Each police station, for me, has the opportunity to have someone experienced who floor walks and does the room management for people.
It is a big challenge. Generation Z, who have joined us now, are fast thinking, sharp, technologically able and astute. They are much more likely to challenge power and the status quo, and to question why we do things. We have to draw that out of people. It is a challenge.
Pam Kelly: Picking up on that, it is a heck of a challenge, but a huge opportunity. As you know, Ruth, we have the second youngest workforce in the country, in terms of experience, at Gwent police. If you have a look at our frontline age profile, these are very young people, often under the age of 26, expected to do so many difficult things, whether that be through all the data analysis and then the frontline policing issues, all of that.
There is a really good opportunity in terms of young people, the next generation, if you like, of policing coming forward. I am really excited by that, because you have a lot of energy, but we need to build resilience and experience. In terms of culture, in many agencies, forces, services and parties, we all see this societal cultural challenge. We need to take it on head on.
In policing, we are making sure that that first-line supervision is there. First-line supervision is critical when you have such a young workforce. It is fair to say that we need to build the resilience of these young officers up as well. That resilience is about them having the experience and the supervision. It is also about community support. Among all the difficult stories in the press, we have people out there saving lives every day of the week and that is often not even mentioned in the press.
There is a new wave, I hope, of positivity about policing where a new generation is coming through. We need to give them support, publicly and within agencies, because they deserve that. It is a challenge, but it is one heck of an opportunity for the future generation of policing.
Q26 Ruth Jones: Let me move on because my real question was about the relationship with the police and crime commissioners. These are relatively new appointments, after the police committees and everything. They are political appointments and they have personal relationships with the four of you. There are some concerns that PCCs, who are supposed to be critical friends, are seen as too close. How would you answer that criticism?
Amanda Blakeman: We have a very clear level of accountability set out in force in terms of my responsibility to deliver operationally and the police and crime commissioner’s mandate to the public, which he was elected upon. Clearly, I pay very close attention to the police and crime commissioner’s policing plan in what I am delivering to our local communities, but also in terms of the strategic policing requirements and all the other responsibilities I have.
I would like to think that the governance, accountability and scrutiny is there at a professional level. I would like to think that I understand my role enough to be able to deliver operationally and not have that proximity in any way fettering my ability to deliver to my communities. There is a very clear process set out in relation to that.
Q27 Ruth Jones: Richard, how do you see it? There should be a clear demarcation between PCC and chief constable. How do you ensure that?
Dr Lewis: The relationship between the PCC and the chief constable is a very important one, but does not stray into something that is personal in nature. It is a professional one. PCC Dafydd Llywelyn holds me to account publicly every quarter—every other week within the organisation, but every quarter in the public forum. Members of the public are also asked to come and provide questions to me as chief constable.
Anybody who sees that will know that it is a relationship built on trust, which is important, but there is a clear mark between what Dafydd does and what I do. He holds me to account very stringently on the standards of Dyfed-Powys. It needs to be a very carefully managed relationship. When that relationship breaks down in forces, and we have seen that happen elsewhere, it causes great difficulty for the PCC and the chief constable. Nobody benefits in the end.
The accountability in the forces that I have seen, including my own, is very clear and works well. He is the voice of the public at Dyfed‑Powys, so he has a mandate to direct certain issues and ask those difficult questions, which happens on a very regular basis.
Pam Kelly: The policing protocol is clear on this: chief officers, chief constables, operational independence, held to account for that local policing by the police and crime commissioners. Be too close at your peril. It is so important that we all appreciate each other’s roles.
From my perspective with Mr Cuthbert, there is constant scrutiny, yes, publicly, but also a formal one-to-one meeting literally every week with an agenda of issues that he is concerned about. That is formalised. That is really important.
Of course we need to work in partnership to resolve some of those issues around funding, because I want money to go where that operational need is and I need to be scrutinised on that in terms of the PCC asking questions around that publicly. There is healthy disagreement and clarity of roles. We are there to be held to account, but we are also operationally independent.
Q28 Ruth Jones: Jeremy, obviously the PCC holds you to account. How about, say, your MPs within your area? Are you held to account by them as well?
Jeremy Vaughan: We have a regular catchup with MPs on a quarterly basis. We perhaps have not had one for a while. During Covid, we were having one every other week pretty much. When you add up the Members of the Senedd and MPs, there are quite a lot of people for me to get through individually, one by one, so we try to do it by group. Of course, I get correspondence every other day from Members of Parliament, which I have a structure to respond to.
In that regard, of course there is accountability because all of these people are elected by their communities. Their communities need their support and we are very keen to respond to that.
On the police and crime commissioner, sometimes I look at that narrative and I wonder why people think that they need to have a bad relationship for it to appear like there is great scrutiny. The relationship needs to be good and the protocol makes it really clear that it needs to be good. That is important in the interests of service delivery to the public.
The police and crime commissioner holds me to account for efficient and effective running of the organisation. They can draw down on lots of other organisations to help them with that. HMIC is with me every month of the year, turning over very stone and reporting on everything it finds. There are other mechanisms: the Independent Office for Police Conduct, independent advisory groups, the audit office and so on.
I am very clear on operational boundaries. In my job, I am operationally independent and therefore will make operational decisions. I am also deeply invested in the governance arrangements where the commissioner can hold me to account. There is very comprehensive reporting into the commissioner, very comprehensive escalations and substantive reports that show everything. In turn, the commissioner goes and informs the police and crime panel, and I get an annual opportunity to speak to them, in the run-up to the budget, about the performance of the organisation. There are quite a lot of mechanisms in place.
Q29 Beth Winter: There have been updates to the strategic policing requirement and violence against women and girls has been added. Are there any national threats that you feel should be included but have not been? What adjustments, if any, are you having to make in terms of operational action, given the changes to the SPR?
Amanda Blakeman: We are in a good position in Wales, because we have done a lot of work on violence against women and girls prior to the change to the strategic policing requirement: the refresh and rewrite of the all‑Wales strategy, the formation of the blueprint, the formation of the workforce task and finish groups that we have around each of the areas, the inclusion of communities and partners in relation to being able to solve those problems. When you look against the SPR and mapping it across, there are not many gaps and there are not many areas that we are not already tackling or do not have plans in place in relation to.
I work closely with Deputy Chief Constable Maggie Blyth, who is the national lead in this area. Between us we have appointed a chief superintendent to make sure across Wales that the four forces’ public protection units, rape investigation units and specialist teams are sharing that best practice. It is pretty good in terms of how we have pulled that work together.
Q30 Beth Winter: The systems are in place, so how can we explain the abysmal conviction rate against perpetrators of violence and rape against women and girls nationally? It is less than 2% charged, let alone conviction rates. That has been consistent over many years. I am sure that you would agree that it is absolutely abysmal.
Amanda Blakeman: I do not disagree. We are looking at some of the most complex situations that people are involved in and the complex investigations that take place in relation to those. There is a whole system attached to this that includes the criminal justice service.
If you look at criminal justice for Wales, we have specific work in place in terms of improving this area, understanding it from start to finish and breaking down all of our investigations. Particularly in Gwent, we have looked at groups and being able to pick an offence from start to finish and understand exactly where we have had attrition, a victim who does not feel supported, a victim who has withdrawn or a case that has not proceeded, in order that we can understand those issues and tackle them at root and branch.
Q31 Beth Winter: Are they systemic problems, though? Flip it the other way: 98% of cases do not result in a conviction.
Amanda Blakeman: We are looking at all the systems and processes, everything that goes into that, to understand whether those problems are systemic and what makes up the issues that you see in relation to that conviction rate.
Q32 Beth Winter: In terms of the systemic issues, South Wales Police has the highest number of officers and staff involved in allegations of violence against women and girls. It accounts for 63% of all complaints against Welsh police forces. I do not know whether Mr Vaughan wants to come in here. Surely it does not instil confidence in the police force when we have those sorts of statistics.
Jeremy Vaughan: Shall I just deal with rape and sexual offence investigations to start with? We are an Op Soteria force. Op Soteria was the policing response to the fact that we were letting victims of rape down because our performance was not good enough from a police service perspective. South Wales Police now, having been running it for the last 12 months, is delivering the best outcomes in policing in England and Wales in terms of rape investigations. Now we are charging one in every 10 cases, whereas before it was a very low percentage.
Q33 Beth Winter: Nine out of 10 are not.
Jeremy Vaughan: Yes, indeed. I would want it to be significantly higher than that. Answering whether there are systemic issues, yes, there are systemic issues across the whole of the criminal justice system, not only in the way the criminal justice system is organised to handle and deal with victims of sexual offences.
There is a debate as to whether these matters are best served by specialised courts with specialised judiciary, rather than juries. There are two significant legal barriers to get over when it comes to rape. Not only do you have to prove that the person is guilty of the offence; you have to prove that, beyond a doubt, they knew that the person did not consent. That is a double barrier to get across. There is a question as to whether the law is sufficient there. I know that some commentators have suggested that that could look different in terms of the legal construct.
I have put up dedicated rape investigations teams now. I am giving people mobile phones back within 24 hours, so I am not traumatising the victim by taking all their items and possessions off them. We have invested in Wales in sexual assault referral centres with health.
Beth Winter: It is not working if we still have nine out of 10.
Jeremy Vaughan: It is improving, but it is not where it should be and needs to be. I would agree with that.
Q34 Beth Winter: What about South Wales Police having the highest number of officers and staff involved in allegations of violence against women and girls?
Jeremy Vaughan: Do you mean in terms of police officers themselves?
Beth Winter: Yes. It is very concerning.
Jeremy Vaughan: It is very concerning. I will say that I have more upstanders in South Wales Police than I have ever had before. I have dismissed people at twice the rate of any predecessor I have had. In the last 12 months 36 people have parted company with me. We lead nationally on the development of the abuse of authority for sexual purpose strategy. We are one of only two forces in England and Wales that had a good HMIC assessment for the way that we handle countercorruption and vetting standards. It is concerning, but when I am finding out about people I am getting rid of them.
Q35 Beth Winter: It is unacceptable, isn’t it?
Jeremy Vaughan: Of course it is.
Beth Winter: In terms of people’s confidence in the police force, particularly when the rate is so low, you would agree that there are systemic issues and this needs fundamental reform.
Jeremy Vaughan: Yes, indeed.
Pam Kelly: It is really important, because there may well be victims of rape or sexual abuse listening to this and/or seeing headlines linked to this today and in future. I want to make it clear that I have 30 years’ service coming up, and tackling rape and sexual assault is an absolute passion of mine and, I know, of my colleagues here. There is a lot of work to be done to have speedier justice for victims of rape and sexual assault. It is absolutely critical that, across all criminal justice agencies, this is a priority.
From a Welsh perspective, we have the all-Wales criminal justice board and we work really closely with our CPS and courts colleagues. It absolutely needs to improve. There are victims listening to this potentially and they need to know that we absolutely listen. I have been in policing for a long time, tackling misogyny and people who use inappropriate behaviour in the workplace. We take them on head on.
You have seen some of the press around Gwent Police over the last two years or so. I am tackling that, along with the deputy there, head on. We will see more reporting, because we are encouraging people to report any issues internally in terms of the police service. I hope that, in time, when these cases hit the headlines, you will see that it is because we are taking positive action. That is really important.
Amanda Blakeman: We are changing the culture of our environments and workplace. We are training our staff and empowering them to have the ability and confidence themselves to raise issues with colleagues who may not be acting appropriately. These cases are not coming up because somebody else is finding them. We are referring them to the IOPC. We are taking them on to make sure that we do not have people in our service who do not deserve to hold the office of constable and serve our communities, and to support our colleagues who do deserve that absolute unique position in our society.
Q36 Robin Millar: I wanted to return to a particular area of policy, which is the rural crime issue. I notice that the Welsh Government published their own wildlife and rural crime strategy. I think it was Chief Constable Kelly who made the appeal to politicians to make your life easier. Is there a conflict between the two and does this publication of a separate document hinder your ability to respond? For reasons of time, I will direct this to Chief Constable Blakeman and Dr Lewis, as the predominantly rural authorities.
Amanda Blakeman: I lead for acquisitive crime nationally, so the rural crime national position is my responsibility, along with colleagues. Richard leads for Wales. We have been very much hand in hand in the development of that policy and strategy in order to make sure that what each of us is doing complements what the other is doing and provides a greater ability for our officers to tackle those offences in our rural communities.
North Wales is particularly rural in its make-up. I know how much it means to my local communities to make sure that these issues are tackled from start to finish of that strategy. I welcome that. It is a really good starting place for us to be able to make real progress on something that impacts on our communities.
Q37 Robin Millar: The specific point is that the NPCC has also issued a wildlife and rural crime strategy. Is there a conflict between the two?
Dr Lewis: I can speak to that. There is a real synergy between the two things. As you would imagine, the same things appear in both, such as heritage crime, rural crime, wildlife crime, et cetera.
Where the one in Wales differs is that there are additional elements relating to domestic abuse and suicide. We know that those are specific concerns within rural communities in Wales. I am sure they pertain in England as well. I cannot speak on their behalf, but I am sure the Welsh Government would have thought that those were two big issues in rural communities that they needed to include in that strategy as well.
There is real synergy between the strategy from the NPCC and the one from the Welsh Government. There are just those additional elements in the one for Wales, which we would agree are issues within rural communities.
Q38 Robin Millar: It might seem a small thing, but that is a significant addition. Have the Welsh Government promised any additional resource to go to the delivery of that?
Dr Lewis: There is an additional resource that the Welsh Government pay for. There is a strategy lead in Wales, a co-ordinator who works on behalf of Wales. There are rural crime teams right across Wales that are working closely together. We cross force borders in order to deliver operations. There may seem to be some difficulties, but there just simply are not. It is a pretty borderless operation.
Q39 Robin Millar: That is a no, then. There has not been anything identified for this additional element within the Welsh Government strategy.
Dr Lewis: There is additional money provided because there is a co-ordinator paid for by the Welsh Government, who co-ordinates the work of the four forces in Wales.
Q40 Robin Millar: That is a co-ordination role, not a frontline delivery role.
Dr Lewis: It is not frontline delivery, no.
Q41 Ben Lake: Can I begin by expressing my sincere condolences to Dr Lewis and all your colleagues in Dyfed-Powys Police on the recent tragic passing of Inspector Gareth Earp? I know he was a proud Powys man, but he was very well respected in Ceredigion as well. If you are able to pass on those sentiments to your colleagues and to the family, it would be very much appreciated.
Dr Lewis: I was with the family last week. We will be with them for the funeral next week. I will make sure I pass on the condolences of the whole Committee. Diolch, Ben.
Q42 Ben Lake: On Robin Millar’s point about rural crime, we know the Kept Animals Bill has been recently withdrawn. It included several measures to enhance the investigatory powers of the police in relation to dog attacks on livestock. How much of a challenge is it to investigate these instances, which sadly afflict many of our rural communities to this day? I will start with Chief Constable Blakeman.
Amanda Blakeman: Yes, it is a real challenge. It is an area of work that keeps us incredibly busy. It is incredibly impactful for our farming community when they lose livestock from a dog attack, for instance. Practically, we are working incredibly hard, particularly with tourists and holiday lets, and trying to promulgate that understanding in relation to this particular area.
I do not know whether you would like to comment further in relation to that, but, clearly, this is a very specific piece of work adopted across Wales as part of the rural crime strategy. Yes, there is an impact.
Q43 Ben Lake: You are talking about the important contribution that prevention will have in this regard. Chief Constable Lewis, in terms of investigating some of the crimes once these instances have happened, were you disappointed that these powers might be delayed now? We are not sure whether they will come on to the statute book or not. Would they have made it a lot easier for your officers to investigate some of these instances?
Dr Lewis: Potentially, yes. You have hit the nail on the head there. The work we do is around preventing these things from happening in the first place. That is education-based and we do not need to wait for new legislation to do that. We are working with our rural communities on this. There is a farm group that works within Wales, which is drawn together by the co-ordinator Mr Millar has just referenced. That work continues regardless.
It is not the investigation of these offences that we want to prioritise, but the prevention of them in the first place. There are offences, dog attacks for example, that tend to happen in rural locations where nobody witnesses them. We are working with the farming community to ensure these things are prevented in the first place and working with responsible dog owners, et cetera.
The legislation that is pending does not necessarily change our work significantly, because the focus of our rural crime teams is on the prevention element, which happens regardless.
Q44 Ben Lake: There has been a lot of concern about county lines and organised crime groups. It would be helpful if you were able to outline the extent of county lines in Wales. How much of a problem is it in the day-to-day work of the forces in Wales?
Dr Lewis: We are a net importer of county lines. We do not tend to be the source of many county lines. They tend to come from the larger metropolitan areas, so London, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, et cetera.
Given that the transport links in Wales run east to west and west to east, we are impacted significantly by those county lines run from some of our English counterparts. I had a conversation with a Merseyside officer last week about working together more closely across borders to impact upon those.
I think I am speaking on behalf of every chief constable in Wales when I say that every town and village across Wales is impacted by county lines criminality. The way we deal with that criminality and the way we see it has changed. There is a more nuanced approach to those who are now carrying drugs into our communities. They are often, though not always, victims themselves. They are often children and we have to see them, yes, as offenders in some respects but as victims of a wider organised crime group as well. We need to draw young people out of criminality. Diversion is a key part of that work.
County lines is a scourge in our communities. It is the violence perpetrated by organised crime groups—I was going to call it a business model; it is a business model, a perverse one, but a very resilient one nonetheless—as they fight for territorial advantage in any particular area. Like any business model, as soon as we take out a county line, something replaces it to fill the vacuum.
Our work to try to break that cycle will never end. Thousands of county lines have been shut right across England and Wales over recent years. That work continues. We are working alongside the National County Lines Co-ordination Centre based here in London as well. It is an issue that impacts upon all our communities.
Pam Kelly: It is important to celebrate the work we have done as four chief constables, certainly some of the regional work. In June alone—I have some information in front of me—£1.2 million worth of class A drugs was seized from four or five serious organised crime groups and taken off the streets. That is linked to some of our county lines work as well.
We are working together on county lines and serious organised crime. That is really important, but people have to be vigilant. We always think this happens in cities and larger towns. It is across the board, in rural communities, that we all need to be vigilant. There is certainly evidence to suggest that the sphere of influence is moving from those built-up and highly populated areas to some of our rural communities.
Vigilance is important, but we need to celebrate the work we have done. I hope you are seeing that in the press as well because there are some great people putting in a lot of work to take these people off our streets in Wales. I am proud of them.
Q45 Ben Lake: Chief Constable Blakeman, I want to finish by asking you about the co-ordination and co-operation across forces. From what I gather, there is very close working with forces across England and Wales to try to tackle this issue. Are there any particular issues that you would like to see improved upon? Are there any barriers placed in front of you in terms of cross-force border working?
Amanda Blakeman: This comes back to the point Richard made about the vacuum that is created when we take out these groups. It is really important that we adopt things like clear, hold, build, in which we make a concerted effort on visibility and work with local authorities to problem-solve some of the area issues we are seeing. We have piloted that in Deeside really successfully. We are about to start to do that in the rural area of Denbighshire because we see that issue there, where a vacuum has been created.
We have to be continually aware of the victim: a young person who is no doubt involved in being used and utilised as part of this terrible criminality. We have to deal with that individual as a victim and somebody who has been exploited. We have had some success in doing that. We got convictions of four people for exploitation offences, rather than tackling them for the drugs offences, so that they got more of a custodial sentence. We were able to safeguard and redivert somebody who potentially found themselves in a really difficult place.
We need to develop that thinking, utilising the full range of powers available to us, and that wholesale approach, working with local authorities. That is really difficult with local budgets, but, by understanding that vacuum and working together, we can make sure that we do not create the space for them to flourish again.
Jeremy Vaughan: We are all pretty clear that one of the things we have done with the increased investment in police officer numbers is invest more in proactivity than we might have during austerity. Getting police officers to hunt county lines drug dealers on the road and making sure their operating environment is as difficult as it can be is certainly a priority for me in south Wales.
We are doing some phenomenal work to take out volumes. We should keep working on that because at the moment, relatively speaking, we have a low homicide rate in Wales. Relatively speaking, we have lower levels of gun crime in Wales. Our job should be to drive out that high harm as much as we can.
The prevention of addiction and breaking that cycle really is a public health challenge. I am not sure it is always understood to be a public health challenge.
Ben Lake: That is very interesting and useful. Thank you. Diolch.
Q46 Chair: To follow up on that point, it is striking to me, when you go to a Six Nations rugby game, a football match or a rock concert anywhere in south Wales, just how open drug use is in our society. It is everywhere. When I talk to my children about the circles they mix in, it has become very normalised.
Dr Lewis, a few moments ago you spoke quite powerfully about tackling the criminality around the drugs trade. Is it now the direction of travel to go after the criminals who support the trade but not necessarily to stop or prosecute the people using even very serious class A drugs?
Dr Lewis: I can speak on behalf of Dyfed-Powys. Perhaps it will be for other chiefs to describe the approach in their forces. If you are stopped with drugs in Dyfed-Powys, you will be prosecuted. We have upped the number of stop and searches nearly tenfold over the course of the last 12 months.
The UK drugs strategy, one I am entirely supportive of, tries to push people into treatment places. That is not instead of prosecution most of the time. You can do both things hand in hand. If we are going to tackle the drugs trade in its entirety, it is not just about prosecution, although that is an important element of it. Most of it is about cutting demand or the need for demand.
That means—as I mentioned earlier, I am meeting the Policing Minister tomorrow—increasing the number of referrals the police service makes into treatment. The number of treatment places has risen exponentially over the last 12 to 18 months after a significant investment by UK Government. It is incumbent on us now to keep directing people into those treatment places.
During the early part of someone’s journey into the criminal justice system, it is about diverting them back out of it where we can. In the meantime, there is no soft option. If you are caught in possession of drugs, particularly class A drugs, you will be prosecuted for that. We have a responsibility to those who use drugs to push them into treatment and to make sure that they are not rearrested at some point in the future.
Q47 Chair: Chief Constable Vaughan, your officers are told to prosecute people openly using drugs.
Jeremy Vaughan: There are different mechanisms that they can apply. There are cannabis cautions, which is an accepted policy position across UK policing. I would not expect police officers to walk past people openly taking drugs in public.
I will say this. I was at the Huggard Centre in Cardiff the other day. It is a phenomenal public service. They are trying their best to help homeless people with lots of multi-dependent needs. When those people come to need their crack or heroin, they are turfed out on to the streets. They go down the road, out of sight, to take it and then they are welcomed back in once they have taken it.
We really need to have a debate, as a devolved nation and across the UK, about whether 1970s legislation is sufficient for today’s problem. People need help. While we are driving down homicide rates and gun crime in Wales, two of our local authority areas, Swansea and Neath Port Talbot, have among the worst levels of drug deaths per thousand of population in Europe. We can keep the serious harm down, but we have a real problem there, which is closer to critical than people think.
Amanda Blakeman: To build on that and go back to the point about violence against women and girls and domestic abuse, we need to understand the part that is played, particularly in domestic abuse, by the use of drugs and alcohol. Drug testing on arrest is really important to us.
For us in north Wales, it is very clear. It is same as my colleague in Dyfed-Powys. If you have drugs, you can expect to be prosecuted. We see the harm this causes in other areas. It is not the case that, because you are a user at the end of that chain, it is acceptable for us to walk past.
Q48 Simon Baynes: Thank you very much for coming this morning and taking the trouble to come in person. We really appreciate that. As the MP for Clwyd South, I have a strong relationship with North Wales Police in my area. I spent a very informative morning with the police in Corwen. I have worked on a lot of issues such as Llwyneinion woods, the Ceiriog Valley, and so on and so forth. I take my relationship with the police very seriously.
I want to ask you a bit about police performance. Before I ask the question, I want to give three of my observations. I feel—this is my personal point of view—like the police are hamstrung, to an extent, in terms of how they work operationally by three things in particular.
The first one is about paperwork, albeit electronic paperwork. This is an issue I have raised on the floor of the House of Commons. It seems to me that there are excessive demands on you to record beyond a reasonable level of activity.
The second is the requirement to accompany vulnerable people into A&E. I am being very careful in what I am saying here because, where it is really needed, that is important. The demand put on you personally is excessive.
Thirdly, in my dealings I have noticed that the necessity to react to the league table of crime statistics can hamstring you in how you operationally approach certain issues in a local area. If there is an interaction with the community that generates lot of reaction, that goes straight into your crime statistics. In fact, that interaction may be quite constructive to sort something out.
Those are my three observations. My overall questions are twofold. First, what steps are your forces taking to improve your scores in areas needing improvement as identified by the 2021-22 PEEL assessments? I then have one subpoint, which is really more aimed at Chief Constable Vaughan, about facial recognition technology. I know this is one of your portfolio responsibilities.
Could I start on the overall issue of performance, with my own caveated comments, with Chief Constable Blakeman, please?
Amanda Blakeman: I will work through those three points and hopefully answer the question in doing that. You are absolutely right about the burden of paperwork, whether that is written paperwork or electronic paperwork. It is absolutely my responsibility to make sure I am not creating bureaucracy within my own organisation. It is really important that I understand that and rip that out, in order to make sure my officers are out there, being visible, engaging and doing the job of fighting crime.
I welcome the fact that crime recording statistics are being reviewed. Some of the developments we have seen over the years have made it a very complex set of requirements, with the Home Office counting rules, et cetera.
Around vulnerability, attending calls for assistance from colleagues in the Welsh Ambulance Service, attending A&E and the wait times I see in relation to that, we have done quite a lot of work on understanding exactly what that demand is. The work we are doing across Wales and in fact across the country around “right care, right person” looks promising. There is a lot of work to do and there are lots of agreements to reach with partners in order to make sure we do not end up in a position where we cannot uncouple ourselves from the position of safeguarding somebody and so spend a very long time waiting for the right agency to take over. From the crime statistics point of view, it becomes operationally really confusing for our officers. There could be changes to simplify things and make things very clear.
Responding to the point around dealing with issues in public, I would rather we got to the root causes of the issues in our communities, whether or not that increases the recording in that area. That does not matter. What matters is making sure we understand the issue, we are tackling it and we are able to problem solve it in the long term. I need to make sure my staff have the confidence to understand and know there is no expectation on them to try to cloak anything in a particular area.
In terms of the HMIC inspection, that was around investigating crime. We were rated “requires improvement”. That is around supervision. It is around officers being new in service. We touched upon that point earlier on. We are doing work around training, first-line leadership, making sure staff are supported, understanding those processes from start to finish, and making improvements around things like sexual offence conversion rates.
Those things are really important. I have set out the priorities really clearly with my staff so they are not confused or worried about something that I would rather we just got to grips with.
Pam Kelly: Amanda has mentioned lots of things. Accompanying people to A&E perhaps because other services are not available is really the issue, in all honesty. Please do not think I am blaming other services because everybody is working hard, and I have huge respect for all public services. When you total the amount of time police officers are spending on this, waiting for another service to attend and/or waiting in a hospital arena for a service to be delivered to somebody, it is hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of hours.
It is all very well having performance stats for policing. If we could get on with core policing, we could deliver much better performance. We are spending thousands upon thousands of hours waiting for other services. We could be out there targeting sex offenders and tackling more burglaries, which is what we all want to do. There is work to do across departments to make sure policing can be released to do policing business. The “right care, right person” approach is probably a good start on that. Anything that you can do to further those conversations would be really important.
Some of performance is heavy, and counting everything is difficult in itself, but it is important that we report on those key areas. In all honesty, we recently had a PEEL inspection before we transferred from our old headquarters to our new headquarters with the new force control room.
That PEEL inspection was around our 999 and 101 calls. It was not good reading, but it was really helpful. As I have said, we receive 28,000 999 calls. We have a 22% increase each month in 999 calls. People’s lives are at risk. How do you balancing responding to those calls and to our 101 calls when you have those constant increases? It is important that we have data so that we can reflect on and improve our performance.
The important thing for me, though, is policing experiences beyond numbers. It is about what our community think and feel about the service they get when a crime has been committed and/or when we are trying to prevent crime from happening in the first place. It is not all about numbers. It must be about people’s experience of policing as well.
Dr Lewis: Going to the point you make around A&E, about 16% of the total demand into our force control room is purely mental health-related. An enormous chunk of our time is taken up by what, I feel, should be dealt with by another agency that just does not exist. We are left to pick up that significant amount of demand.
The interface with A&Es and the health service more generally could be improved. Of course, we have protocols. We spend as little time as possible standing or sitting with vulnerable members of the community who require a hospital treatment of some sort or an assessment. The 16% is something I would like to see taken away in its entirety.
In terms of the performance of police forces and the league tables, there is a digital crime performance package that exists across England and Wales now. It is visible to the public. It is healthy that the public can see how their police force is performing compared to some others, but that comes with a health warning. It is not just about those numbers. It is because we are dealing, in various amounts, across 43 forces, let alone the four in Wales, with demand that just is not ours to deal with. We are being diverted from our core duties.
I am the national lead for performance management as well as drugs. My cup runneth over in terms of responsibilities. In terms of performance management, what I would like it to see—we are having this conversation with the Home Office, I am pleased to say, and it is listening to us, about the bureaucracy that needs to be taken away from the police service—is a healthy conversation and a public debate with our elected members and others about what good performance is.
Is it a pure reflection of the numbers? Is it about, as Chief Constable Kelly says, how our communities feel? There is not a common understanding or a common agreement across England and Wales as to what a high-performing police force looks like. What are the hallmarks of that? It is only when we hone down what we all think is a well-performing police force that we can start directing our resources towards those things.
There will be regional variations. What is important to the communities of Aberystwyth or Haverfordwest will be very different to what the communities of Pill in Newport feel is important. There needs to be some regional variation, but nonetheless a common understanding of what good performance looks like. That would be helpful for everybody.
Jeremy Vaughan: Do you want me to pick up technology and facial recognition specifically?
Simon Baynes: Yes, with just a brief comment.
Jeremy Vaughan: Every day we get about 700 999 calls and another 1,500 non-emergency calls. We record 750 incidents every day, of which 295 are crime incidents. The gap between what people call us to help them with and what becomes crime is quite big. Previously there have been discussions about some sort of commission on policing so that we all collectively can say, “This is what we want from policing services”. I am not sure that is always aligned everywhere.
From the South Wales Police perspective, HMIC assesses us as good at investigating crime, good at preventing crime, good at responding to the public and good in the way we use our resources. They said that we needed to improve the way we respond to people with vulnerabilities. We have lots of people in some of the deprived communities that we police who are vulnerable and who need our help.
If I can just talk about facial recognition as an example of science and technology in policing, there is loads of innovation in policing. We are not very good at scaling up that innovation to become a better and more efficient service. We do not ring-fence enough money for it. The Ministry of Defence ring-fences a huge amount of money for innovation all the time. We do not in policing. As I have said, we have a model that involves lots of police forces. Therefore, scaling up and rolling out is difficult.
We should keep innovating because we are duty bound to use whatever technology we can, within the law, to protect the public. I include facial recognition in that. We now have authorised professional practice that governs facial recognition. That is not a code of practice; it sits below a code of practice, but it exists by virtue of statute because the College of Policing exists by virtue of statute.
We get 140 matches a month from the retrospective application of the technology. Somebody’s image is caught somewhere; we throw it through the ident unit and we get 140 matches a month. We have caught rapists on buses; we have caught sexual offenders on trains; we have caught people wandering around outside school playgrounds, by applying the technology retrospectively.
Live, which has been the most contentious deployment, is overt. The vans are clearly marked up. There is a clear escalation authorisation process for who is on the watch list. We do not retain people’s data. It has been subject to two legal challenges in the Divisional Court and the Court of Appeal. We have addressed all the issues in response to those legal challenges.
There is a patchwork of legislation that is deemed to be sufficient. As we develop technology and innovations in policing, there needs to be some way of keeping pace legislatively with that. That is a truism. As for whether that is a code of practice rather than new law, because law would take time to implement, I do not know, but I am determined that we keep innovating because we have to catch bad people.
Q49 Ruth Jones: It is coming to the end of the session, but it would be remiss of me not to mention the elephant in the room—Pam, you alluded to it earlier on—which is police conduct. We know about Gwent, the suicide of Ricky Jones, a former police officer, and the historic levels of abuse that were uncovered in that investigation. I know that is an ongoing investigation, but the police and crime commissioner seems to imply that this is historic.
I am concerned because I get emails on a weekly basis, as I am sure my colleagues around the table do, from people alleging other incidents that are current. I am going to go to Pam first. What are you doing to stamp out these issues of misogyny and other inappropriate behaviour within your police force?
Pam Kelly: Thank you for that question. First of all, since that disclosure, you will have seen these societal issues across a number of services. I will not mention them, but they have all been in the local press. From my perspective, whatever is happening in society, when people are a part of policing, their standards of behaviour must be exceptionally high. We are there to enforce the law, and therefore we really do need to be role models. That is essential.
I am not going to refer to that case, but anybody who thinks it is not happening in their agency, in their department, in their organisation is very naive. Society really needs to look at its general behaviour. There was a report recently about Estyn schools and behaviour bubbling up around misogyny and some of the language that is used.
From a Gwent Police perspective, the reality is that, without question, every single person in my organisation knows the standards I expect from them. I meet literally everybody who joins the organisation, and I tell them exactly what those expectations are. If matters are disclosed, we will deal with them robustly. It is essential that people know that public confidence in policing is really hooked on to their behaviour. It is really important to me that they know those expectations. Our force values are there.
I am really pleased about what we have seen in our recent staff survey. There are areas where we need to improve, but one of the top three priorities that were a success was that our staff in Gwent Police felt they could come forward and disclose matters. They had confidence that we, as in I, would deal with them robustly.
I have alluded to the fact that I have worked in policing for a long time now. It is really important to me that I create an organisation and a culture where people feel really comfortable coming to work. Whatever people’s age or background, I want them to come to work and be really proud to work as a part of Gwent Police. I do that with passion. That means we deal head on with people who breach that trust—it is not just the trust of colleagues; it is the trust the public have in us—we do everything we can to make sure those standards are understood and we are not naive enough to think that, just because we have said those standards should not be breached, there are not dark corners where these matters are taking place.
It is about being aware. We were really hurt by the disclosures that have happened, not just in Gwent but across the board in policing. The important thing is that we are very clear about the standards we expect for now and in the future. As you know, I am more than happy to discuss that at any point because it is really important for us in Wales and in policing as a whole.
Q50 Ruth Jones: Richard, as Pam has already said, it is not just Gwent Police. We can look at the Casey report on the Met or at other police forces. What are you doing to deal with this issue in your police force?
Dr Lewis: The problems pertain in Dyfed-Powys as much as they do in Gwent. Internally, we are driving a number of initiatives. There is an internal confidential reporting line. You can report anybody for any type of behaviour. Your identity will remain anonymous even to our professional standards team until you feel able to explain who you are and give us more information about the allegations you might be making. The confidential reporting line is a safe environment, in which staff can raise concerns.
We also run an internal culture group. The work of the culture group is not a three-year project to improve the culture at Dyfed-Powys. It is a 333-year project. It is a continuous thing; it will never stop. We have to keep talking about culture and never think we have reached the pinnacle of our work and, therefore, can wash our hands and move on to the next problem. It is an issue that we need to keep discussing.
The internal culture group has hundreds of people dialling in to the same meeting and discussing the culture we have at Dyfed-Powys, the culture we are trying to build and the difference between those two things. A working group has been set up and meets regularly to ensure that the standards we have set are met. I could talk about initiative after initiative that we are doing internally at Dyfed-Powys, across Wales and nationally. We recognise that we are not where we need to be, but we are improving.
We spoke earlier about recruitment into the police service. We have to tackle this issue, if we want young people to keep applying to the police service. It is now a buyer’s market in terms of the workforce. People can choose where they work to a large extent. It is about us ensuring we are an employer of choice for young people. Unequivocally, I would recommend a young family member to join the police service in the future. That is not to say our problems have disappeared yet, but we are tackling them.
Q51 Ruth Jones: Richard, you have outlined very clearly the internal measures you are taking. Amanda, what are you doing to ensure that the public know what you are doing, that they have trust and respect for the police force, and that they will come to you in future? Policing by consent is the only way we can have policing.
Amanda Blakeman: Yes, absolutely. The culture and the environment internally are very much reflected externally. If I want the community to have trust and confidence in us as a service, my staff have to have trust and confidence in me as the leader to be able to make sure that the right environment is there.
From that perspective, I have launched a cultural audit within my organisation so I can understand the cultural environment we have. I am seeking a culture of responsibility because that enables the upstander behaviour that I want to see, but it also provides a supportive environment for people to feel able to either challenge individuals or report individuals where it is necessary to do so. I have revisited the values of our organisation.
You will be aware that I am the lead for police national database. We have put all of our officers and staff through the police national database so we can give that extra level of assurance to communities. We have dismissed more individuals for breaching the code of ethics in the last few years than at any other time in history. We have also had individuals who have resigned but would have been dismissed because their vetting has been removed.
We are updating the community about all of the things we are doing. When I arrived at North Wales Police, I was very clear about the current position in north Wales so I could be very clear with our communities on what I was doing about it, and to make sure we are a service that the community can trust. Our community confidence figures and the feedback from our community very much show that our communities have confidence in us in north Wales.
Q52 Ruth Jones: Jeremy, coming back to policing by consent in south Wales, recently there was an incident in Ely. We know all about that. The police and crime commissioner came out straightaway and said some things that were then found to be not correct. How did that affect the relationship between the police and the public in that local area?
Jeremy Vaughan: You will have to ask the police and crime commissioner to comment on his own words, but the relationship with the public in Ely has historically been very good and very positive. Everybody who has worked in Ely has always enjoyed working there. I have spent a lot of time operationally there. Sadly, a few people on the night of the disorder, in response to events that had taken place before, let everybody down. We are pursuing them with vigour in terms of offences of riot.
It is quite difficult for me to comment on the operational events that led up to what took place in Ely. It is even more difficult for me to comment on them now because the investigation of the Independent Office for Police Conduct, which is the system that we have in this country and the one I am bound to, takes primacy. I cannot really explain the events that led up to it, and I have not been able to explain that.
Chair: Can I just intervene? There are sub judice rules around this case, I understand, so we need to be careful.
Jeremy Vaughan: It is hard for me to give broad public explanations about events that have taken place when I am handing this over to other people to investigate and responding to them. That makes it difficult. The system is stacked against me in that regard.
Q53 Ruth Jones: I understand completely. IOPC investigations are—I can say this, you cannot—notoriously long and slow. That makes it more difficult for the public to see what is happening as a result of what has gone on. I understand completely. In terms of managing policing by consent, how are you working now to build up that relationship again?
Jeremy Vaughan: Importantly, for me, the neighbourhood policing response then kicks in. We have precious little neighbourhood policing resource across Wales and in south Wales, but that response means that, characteristically, we can have a relationship with the public that is built on visibility, accessibility, problem solving and engagement.
The neighbourhood policing response has kicked in. It was on the ground the day after. There is a community reference group, which owns the recovery. The police are part of that community reference group. We do not chair it, but we are definitely a partner at the table at a very senior level. We report into a ministerially led group within the Welsh Government. There will be some investment there, no doubt. I have put additional resource in there, naturally, because I want people to feel like they have a greater presence than they perhaps had previously.
We are working really hard on recovery in Ely. In the work we have done since, which has included our response to the ride-along video, to the funeral and so on, we have been really keen to make sure the public are behind us and understand exactly what we are doing at any given time and why. We are using that reference group to check and test the things we are putting in place.
Q54 Chair: We will bring the session to a close. You have all been extremely patient. Thank you very much for your time. Just on the point that Ruth Jones mentioned, Chief Constable Vaughan, earlier in the session you said very clearly that you are responsible for operational matters and they are not something for the police and crime commissioner.
You said a moment ago that the police and crime commissioner’s explanation for what had gone on was his own words, but it was still very much a live operational issue. The police and crime commissioner went on the national media and gave a version of events in a very authoritative way. He blamed it on social media. He gave a version of events that subsequently may not look to be true. Presumably he was briefed by operational commanders on what to say.
Jeremy Vaughan: The police and crime commissioner did receive a briefing. It is a matter for the police and crime commissioner as to whether he speaks to the media, but he engages in dialogue with the organisation before then.
I say this as an observer of that and as somebody who has a deep vested interest in it. The police and crime commissioner was hoping to help deal with what, let us not forget, was a riot. Of course, it had the potential to become an escalation of riots over an extended period. I am now stuck because I am not able to comment on the actual events and what took place in terms of the specifics. That might help with the answer, but I cannot really comment.
Q55 Chair: In terms of the work of building trust or rebuilding trust, there are some who argue there was never a lot of trust anyway in Ely. For somebody in such a significant position, giving a potentially misleading statement in a very live and fast-moving situation is not going to be particularly helpful.
Jeremy Vaughan: I am not going to be drawn on it because it is unfair to ask me to critique an interview the police and crime commissioner has given when I cannot furnish you with information about the sequence of events.
Q56 Beth Winter: The police denied chasing the boys initially. I know you cannot comment on the specifics, but can you regain trust with the same force leadership? There is a catalogue of events. I am talking generally now. You have got misogyny and racism, which we have not had time to touch on.
Chair: We have covered that issue.
Beth Winter: Do you feel you can regain trust with the current force leadership?
Jeremy Vaughan: When you say “current force leadership”, what do you mean?
Beth Winter: I mean the senior officers and the people in senior positions within South Wales Police.
Jeremy Vaughan: The standards of professional behaviour apply to everybody. People are asked to leave the organisation if they fall far below the standards of professional behaviour. I have a deeply committed leadership team around me who want to do their best to improve the service we provide to the public.
When I walked into Ely Police Station the following morning at 6.30, I saw all the police officers who had been wounded and injured as a result of the events of the night before, and who were also trying to investigate what turned out to be a tragic fatal road traffic collision. I have very committed humans around me who were public servants.
Others will be the judge of who said what when and what our response was, and we will deal with their judgment accordingly.
Chair: Thank you very much. We are really grateful for the length of time you have given us. We have run over the allotted time. We appreciate your frank and full answers to all of our questions. We will bring the session to a close.