Home Affairs Committee
Oral evidence: Reform of the Police Funding Formula, HC 476
Tuesday 10 November 2015
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 10 November 2015
Members present: Keith Vaz (Chair); Victoria Atkins, James Berry, Mr David Burrowes, Nusrat Ghani, Mr Ranil Jayawardena, Tim Loughton, Stuart C. McDonald, Naz Shah, Mr Chuka Umunna, Mr David Winnick.
Questions 185 – 291
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, Metropolitan Police Commissioner, and Stephen Greenhalgh, Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime, gave evidence.
Q185 Chair: Could I call the Committee to order and welcome the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and the Deputy Mayor for London for Policing? Thank you very much for coming today. This is part of the Committee’s ongoing inquiry into police funding but also we will take in other aspects of the work of the Metropolitan Police. I know, Deputy Mayor Greenhalgh, that you will need to leave for another commitment and we appreciate you coming in at short notice and I understand we have agreed that should go at about 3.15 pm. Commissioner, if I can start with you and deal with the future rather than the past, first of all, there were reports in The Times that there are currently discussions underway as to whether or not your contract would be renewed for a further period. This is important in the light of what seems to be an exodus of very senior officers all over the country, the Chief Constable of the West Midlands is retiring, the Chief Constable of Manchester has gone, the head of the NCA has changed. Could you comment on that? Is it still your wish to stay a bit longer or have you had enough?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: First of all, I think we are all getting a bit older, so I suspect that is why we are moving on. No, I have said from the beginning I would like to stay for seven years. I have been here now for four. I have an FDA, fixed-term appointment for five, which would take me to September of next year. I have asked through the Mayor for the Home Office to consider whether or not there would be an extension because obviously I need to plan with my wife. But what the outcome of that is, I don’t know. I read, with some interest, what The Times said but I don’t know if it is true or not and in fact, coincidentally, I saw the journalist at an event the night after who sought to get from me corroboration of her story but I pointed out that I didn’t know it was true either. I am afraid I can’t help the Committee any more, other than expressing my view that I would like to stay longer to finish some things that we have started and I think we are doing a good job but that is for others to decide in the end.
Chair: Indeed, so there is a formal request going in for that extension, that is the normal way in which it is done.
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: That is right.
Q186 Chair: Deputy Mayor, you presumably support an extension, do you, because the Mayor has been very supportive of the Commissioner’s role as Commissioner?
Stephen Greenhalgh: Obviously both the Mayor and I are hugely supportive of Sir Bernard. He has been an excellent leader and continues to be an excellent leader and his contract extends obviously beyond the life of the mayoralty. As you know, the decision is one for the Home Secretary on the advice of the Mayor and I know they are in discussions, but I can’t provide any more information to the Committee.
Q187 Chair: No, of course, but in terms of your general position, do you support the extension?
Stephen Greenhalgh: I am very keen that we get the stability and that Sir Bernard can continue the work that he is doing beyond certainly my time and into the future. The length of that extension is a matter for the Mayor and the Home Secretary to agree.
Chair: It is a big yes from you.
Stephen Greenhalgh: I am hugely supportive.
Q188 Chair: In terms of the process—because obviously this is the most important job in policing, hence our interest—you and the Mayor have discussions with the Home Secretary, how long does that take, bearing in mind everyone wants to know the results so that there can be a process for stability and planning? How long does it take because we are now into November? The Mayor ceases office in the end of April, I assume.
Stephen Greenhalgh: I don’t think it needs to take very long at all but it is a matter for the Home Secretary and the Mayor to reach a common position. There is no point in having a disagreement about how they want to move forward, so I know that matter is still being sorted out between the two of them.
Chair: It is just that I am a bit worried that it might be the same as the water cannons that the Home Secretary might be sitting on—
Stephen Greenhalgh: I wouldn’t compare Sir Bernard to a water cannon. But, no, I am sure they can come to an accommodation and sort this out. It is very important for the people of London that there is stability and security in the leadership of the Mayor.
Q189 Chair: Indeed. We will see the Home Secretary before Christmas, so we will ask her how the discussions are going. Let us turn to the police funding formula. You must be a relieved man, Commissioner, you were going to lose £184 million and now you are going to lose only £3 million, so overnight, as a result of a letter to Devon and Cornwall, not only are you not losing this money but it has all been put off for the next year.
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: First of all, I am relieved to some extent. Members will know that there have been three threats to the Met’s funding in particular. One was the size of the cake nationally, what is the CSR going to deliver, which we will not know—at least by department—until mid-November? We will not know the allocation to the police until December. The second was around our capital grant funding, that element that is for the Metropolitan Police that no other force gets because we police the capital. The third area was this funding formula: not only how big is the cake but what slice do we get of it? We discovered probably four to five weeks ago now that we were going to lose, we believed, £185 million, which is, by anybody’s standards, a huge amount and that was one of the factors that caused me to speak publicly about my concerns for London.
Q190 Chair: Yes, you were very, very forceful in the article in The Evening Standard. You were very critical of the process.
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: That was a bit of a final straw because, if you take it together with the other expectation, we think we might lose around £800 million-worth of the budget, together with another £185 million, the compound effects of that £1 billion and that was getting into the area where I thought it was getting very, very difficult. We were concerned about how the formula was being operated. Now it has been established that obviously there has been an error in the formula but that is what led to our concerns. The short answer to your question is, yes, we are relieved to some extent but it is not the end of the concerns.
Q191 Chair: Deputy Mayor, last week you were one of the people who signed a letter to the Home Secretary about this. You were very critical of the process. You must be relieved that it is now paused.
Stephen Greenhalgh: Can I praise the work that this Committee has done in probing this area and looking at the review because the process has not lived up to the objectives, which was to have a more transparent approach to police funding? All the way through we were not receiving the tables and the workings behind the figures that we were receiving. It took the work of a very small constabulary to purchase the data and then for another constabulary to model the data to show the errors in the latest iteration of this process. I described it almost like an episode of “Wheel of Fortune”; one minute we were £184 million down and then we were down only by £3 million. The process has failed to make the process more transparent and reflect policing demand and I am delighted that there has been this pause for a year.
Q192 Chair: Have either of you received a letter from the Home Office telling you that there is a pause or are you picking this all up from the statement and the urgent question yesterday, because I would have imagined if something of this kind was happening you would all have had a letter saying, “Don’t worry, no more work required. Please, wait until we give you further information”. Has that happened? Has somebody written to you?
Stephen Greenhalgh: I have not received a letter, to my knowledge, from the Policing Minister. I have a copy of his response to your question, but I have not had a letter.
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: No, to be fair, what happened on Friday was that one of the senior civil servants in the Home Office wrote to, first of all, Devon and Cornwall, and this was circulated to all forces about the fact that it was accepted that the basis of the formula was wrong. I presume the Police Minister wanted to make an announcement to Parliament yesterday as the first announcement, rather than to Parliament as the second announcement, and I imagine that we will get a letter within the next 24 hours or so.
Q193 Chair: Moving forward now, one of the suggestions that has been made is that we do not go back to the Home Office for them to make these decisions, but that instead a degree of independence is required to number-crunch and to make those decisions. What are your views on the possibility of an independent panel being established to look at this?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: I would ask for two criteria, whatever the future holds. The first criterion has to be about transparency so that we can understand the basis on which the formula is being first of all created and then applied. Had that happened earlier in this case we would have probably spotted the error earlier and we wouldn’t have been left with this dilemma. It would be helpful to be able to share that information as early as possible and the second thing is to have an independent element in it might be helpful. I suppose no Government is going to allow an independent body to determine what the Government grant will be, that obviously has to be the prerogative of Government. But to have an independent element for one simple reason alone is that we would like to understand the four or five criteria by which the funding will be decided. What is the correlation between that and the amount of work that we do? There may well be a correlation but we need to understand it and I don’t think we have fully understood the criteria suggested, to the effect that we see on the streets that we get calls about.
Q194 Chair: You are saying to this Committee you still need much, much more information before you can answer any of the points that have been raised. This information has still not reached you, is that right? You would like all the information.
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: To be fair, that is what they are now going through, to work out, first of all, what should the formula be and, secondly, what underpins it? But we still have some doubts and the more we are able to be open with each other, not that we will always agree but unless you understand the rationale you will always be concerned about whether it is valid.
Q195 Chair: Deputy Mayor, you, of course, will be setting the budget for your successor, whoever that might be.
Stephen Greenhalgh: Yes.
Chair: Do you have all the information that you need in order to make those critical decisions about policing in London?
Stephen Greenhalgh: Clearly, we don’t have the budget for next year set. Obviously we have been modelling within the guidelines of anything from a savings between 25% and 40% in all unprotected departments. We are clear about the impact that will have on policing. I have the information at this stage that everyone would have and we will hear by mid-December the absolute final budget.
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: I don’t know, Chair, if it would help a little just to very quickly say what the criteria are that were underpinning the formula, just to give you an idea of how we just need a little reassurance. The latest proposals were around population volume accounting for a third of the grant, households with no adults employed and dependent children 31%, urban adversity, which is known as the Acorn 5 factor, 31% and volume and density of bars, that being licensed bars. Each of those may have a value but understanding why that criteria, why that waiting, whether it always applies to every force area or it might apply differently to London compared to Cumbria, this is the sort of discussion we are talking about having. It is not an esoteric discussion.
Q196 Chair: It is not and witnesses have said to us that they would like to see an increase in the number of criteria to include, for example, issues such as diversity, which are not currently in that criteria. Do you agree with that?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: The critical test for me, professionally, is how many times do the public call us and what type of help do they need? There could be 20 million people in London but if they never call us it is of no interest. It may be to health, it may be to education. It is how many times do they need their police, is the first test and we get 4.5 million telephone calls a year? The second test is having callers, is it a lost dog or is it a murder? Along that spectrum determines how many resources we will put into it. Thirdly, which is unique probably, we would say, to London, if you have a need, as we did last week, to deploy probably 1,500 officers in one day to 7,000 on another, we need some flexibility to be able to do that in areas where there are large numbers of people.
Q197 Chair: Deputy Mayor, the people of London have already started to raise their own money because of the shortcomings and the shortfall in policing. I don’t know whether you saw the reports that residents in North London are starting to crowd fund in order to get police officers, 160 residents in Hampstead have raised £160,000 towards a target of £600,000 to pay for one sergeant and two constables for three years. Did you see that report?
Stephen Greenhalgh: I saw the report, yes.
Chair: How do you feel about that, that people are having to go to crowd funding?
Stephen Greenhalgh: Under the Policing Act 1996 there are obviously provisions for local authorities to buy policing resources under section 92 and there is also provision for the public, that will be with full-cost recovery because the terms of section 92 can be better.
Chair: You are relaxed about that.
Stephen Greenhalgh: I am not, no. Let us understand where we are. It is important to recognise that police officer numbers are at or around 32,000. It is one of the only forces that has maintained police officer numbers at that level and, as Sir Bernard can say, there are 2,600 extra officers in neighbourhoods. As we stand today we have been able to protect the frontline. The issue we have is about the future and specifically what we—
Q198 Chair: There is no doubt that you have kept to your promise. The Mayor and you have already said, frequently, you would keep to that level. But specifically on the public raising their own money, are you in favour of—
Stephen Greenhalgh: It is a matter for the Commissioner how he deploys his resources and all of those section 92 agreements or any agreements under the Policing Act, it is a matter to be worked through with the Commissioner.
Chair: You do not agree with that.
Stephen Greenhalgh: I am not against it.
Chair: You are not against it.
Stephen Greenhalgh: I am not against people, institutions and organisation reaching an accommodation to pay for policing, no, I am not against that. One of the ways you balance your books is obviously by taking costs out and Sir Bernard and his team have done a phenomenal job at reducing costs. But, equally, raising revenue is another way of balancing the books and so, of course, I support that.
Q199 Chair: Sure. Sir Bernard, the Deputy Mayor says he is not against the idea of crowd funding in Hampstead in order to pay for these officers or wherever in order to help. What is your view because the Commander has said that she is very much against this idea?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: Generally, you have to look at them on a case-by-case basis. The first criterion would be: is this a large public body? For example, Transport for London pays for a significant number of police officers and PCSOs from the Met, a large public body, and it is hardly likely that they would be influencing our enforcement of the law and unlikely that they seek any special treatment.
Q200 Chair: We know about public bodies, we are talking about the residents here.
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: I understand, that was just an example.
Chair: We understand that. Are you against or in favour of the public crowd funding in order to pay for police officers?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: I am a little careful and I am a little careful for two reasons: first, the smaller the number of people involved, the more the risk is that there were some potential conflicts of interest in applying the law and we need to be independent.
Chair: Yes, but on the principle—
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: Secondly, which is probably the point that you are talking about, is that do we only provide extra policing to those who can afford it?
Chair: What is your answer to that?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: I am intuitively against that. The public purse is the place to attribute supply to demand and I would be wary but open-minded to consider it. I have a slight concern, if only the people who can afford more are the ones who receive it.
Chair: I am not clear what your answer is, are you in favour or against the idea of the public crowd funding?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: You may not like my answer but I am saying I am being open-minded to the possibility.
Chair: Right, so it is a possibility.
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: But, intuitively, I have concerns when it is a small group and they are the only ones who can afford to pay for it.
Q201 Chair: We understand that bit. In terms of the Gurkhas, a number of Gurkhas being employed in order to act for a security company, that was also in the news this week. That is not a problem, former soldiers who come here, who can now be employed in security—
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: Chair, is this in London or—
Chair: Yes, in London.
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: Right, I have not seen this, so I am not sure. To work for the police or—
Chair: To work for a private security firm.
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: Right, I am not for vigilantes and I am not for people patrolling the streets, that is the police’s job. They are there to be held to account, as you do me, so I am not for private enterprise patrolling the streets.
Chair: Very helpful.
Q202 Mr David Burrowes: I want to ask about stop and search and knife crime, but just picking up on the funding issue, if you had to plan for the £100 million of cuts over four years, what would be the impact on your campaign against knife crime?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: It certainly wouldn’t help.
Q203 Mr David Burrowes: Any specific examples of where it would—
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: The starting point would be: what would happen to our broad numbers? Police numbers are not the answer entirely, but we had said before Friday’s announcement that we thought we might lose between 5,000 and 8,000 officers from a 32,000 base, so a very significant number. We think that with this announcement on Friday that is nearer to be no more than 5,000 depending on what the announcements are in December. But still quite a significant drop in numbers. There are two ways—
Q204 Mr David Burrowes: Would you able to keep up the level of stop and search?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: There are two ways that we attack this. One is through the gangs, so we lock up the people who are the criminals who go around carrying the knives when they are stealing drugs or whatever else they are doing. Secondly, we do targeted stop-searching on the streets, even if they are not in a gang. There is no doubt that if you have fewer people, it will be harder. We will have to work smarter to keep on top of it, but it is not helpful in a big city, which is growing at pace.
Q205 Mr David Burrowes: You said when you were last before the Committee, in response to my question back in late September, “Over the last three months there has been more stop and search and more arrests from it”, but there has been more knife crime, so has that been a success?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: Over the last few months, I think we have seen a slight reduction. What we are seeing is an increase of about a fifth over the previous year, and now we see a slight diminution in that, so I think what we have done has had an impact. We have increased stop-search, but not hugely. We have increased it by about 5%, but in a very targeted way, so it is 5% across London, but in the areas where we are having most problems there has been a more significant increase. We think, therefore, by refocusing on the gangs, which we have done more of, we have made more arrests for the gang side, and more targeted stop-search, that has had an impact. There is still too much knife crime, but we have had a decrease of about a third, an increase of about a fifth, and now we are starting to see it slightly dip again.
Q206 Mr Burrowes: So you do maintain the link with the targeted stop and search in relation to the level of knife crime?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: I believe so. I cannot prove absolutely that more stop-search will mean less knife crime, but the converse is true. In the previous three years, we have reduced stop-search by two-thirds, and yet still seen knife and gun crime come down, so it is not always true that by doing less of something, you see less effect. We saw that actually we had more arrests during that first three or four year period. The last time I came before this Committee, I think that it had probably bottomed out in terms of reducing it, and therefore we now need to start increasing it.
Q207 Mr Burrowes: So you reject the Home Secretary’s comment in her speech in September that it could be a knee-jerk reaction on the back of a false link?
Stephen Greenhalgh: I am looking in some detail at intrusive tactics, and I am doing this in fact tomorrow, so I have the tables which will be published tomorrow. It is very interesting that for the first period of the reduction there has been a huge reduction in the numbers of stop-searches, and also in weapon stop-searches, but until about the middle of last year, the number of people that were arrested in possession of a knife was largely static, at or around 7,500-odd, despite the fact that numbers of weapon stop-searches had almost halved. That has gone down even further. The problem has been that the arrest rate has gone down as well, so the annualised figure of people arrested recently is now less than 5,000. So we have seen a 35% reduction in the number of people arrested in possession of a knife and that correlates almost with a similar drop in weapon stop-searches. Overall, the huge benefit has been fewer stop-searches, a higher arrest rate, except for weapon stops where recently that has gone down, and I think that is something that I raise that clearly there is an opportunity to perhaps be focused. After discussion with Sir Bernard, obviously that has to lead to a charge and it has to be effective. But it is concerning that there has been a drop in the number of people arrested in possession of a knife in recent months.
Q208 Mr Burrowes: Yes. Just finally, in terms of the relationship between the Mayor and yourself with Sir Bernard and the Met, so your role in terms of your concerns about stop and search, and the level of stop and search, is that of more influence than the Home Secretary’s view of stop and search? Who bears more influence with that?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: Sorry, was that a question to me?
Mr Burrowes: Both.
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: All right, certainly for me both. We take it into account, but the bottom line is you can only apply stop-search if it is legally justified. You cannot tell people to stop-search more people if they have no grounds. What we can encourage them to do is to—back in 2009 to 2011, each year, we were stop-searching 1.2 million people a year. We were stopping a very large number. It is very hard to see that that many people entirely knew that, so, yes, we did ask for there to be less but better targeted. My concern is that officers are losing confidence, which is to add to Stephen’s point about whether or not they are intervening at the right time, so we are encouraging them to have the right confidence with my support to get stuck in. There will always be debate about the right number. People in London would have a certain view, some communities would have a certain view about whether it is higher or lower, but it is not a precise science in getting it right. So, of course, you will listen to both the national and the local political leadership, but at the end of the day I am paid to keep the public of London safe, and I will take all that into account in doing that.
Stephen Greenhalgh: I strongly believe that you should try and let the data speak for itself, so we pointed out in a previous review of intrusive tactics, including stop and search, that the number of people arrested had gone down. Up to that point, it had not, and that was something that perhaps the Met needed to reflect on. We did not direct the Met to do anything. I think it is entirely proper to review the figures; be transparent about that, and allow the professionals to form a view about what to do with that, but that is my personal view.
Q209 Victoria Atkins: Just on this subject, because it is right that the HMIC report for 2014-2015 noted that more than a quarter of stop and search records did not contain reasonable grounds to search people, so I think perhaps the magic word that we have been talking about is the word “targeted”. The use of intelligence and so on to target stop and search means that hopefully you are finding the people that are carrying weapons and then you can arrest them?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: I believe so. If you looked at that report—and I think there is another report that will be published shortly—what they do not make clear is whether there were not sufficient grounds or there were not sufficient recorded. It is probably the latter, but, either way, clearly, in terms of legitimacy we need to accurately record what we are doing and why. That is what I would always support, and that is what we try to achieve. I think genuinely what has happened in London has led the rest of the country, because nowhere else have you seen a two-third reduction in the stop and search, or stop and account. In fact, we are the only force that continues to record stop and accounts. Remember one of the outcomes of the first inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence was not only that the police should record stop and search, they record when they stop and account someone. We are the only force who have kept going with that, despite, as it happens, this Government asking us to stop. So you have a very comprehensive account of what happens in London about those people who are stopped for whatever reason.
Q210 Victoria Atkins: Presumably the use of body-worn cameras will help make sure that the right people are targeted because that in itself will mean that officers are thinking on their feet carefully, and reasons are given during the stop and search that is being recorded by the cameras?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: I believe so. By the end of March next year, so now only a matter of about four months away, 22,000 officers on the frontline will have body-worn video. That is not without cost, given what we have started talking about. It is costing us £9 million to buy them, and another £2 million to £3 million to run them every year, but I also think it is a great benefit in terms of transparency and accountability, so that people have got a chance to come back and say, “Actually, you did not give the proper reasons. You did not tell me why. We were not even given a very good account of what you were doing, let alone what I was doing”. It seems to me that has going to be transparent. If it is not, then we need to ask the officer why they did not record it.
Q211 Chair: Commissioner, what is that as a percentage? At the moment, today, what percentage of your officers have cameras on them?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: I think we have about 1,500.
Chair: What is that as a percentage?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: There is probably 18,000 on the frontline, most probably if I worked it out it would be about 10%. But that was the pilot to test the technology and which one we should buy. We were always intending to roll it out for the whole force.
Q212 Chair: When will you make the decision of which one you are going to buy?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: If it has not already been—Stephen is the one who is dealing with the procurement side—I think it is within this next few weeks.
Q213 Mr Jayawardena: Deputy Mayor, I believe that the Metropolitan Police have said, in relation to the stop and search initiative, in late October that, “We have already seen fantastic success on this earlier in the year, which means young people are safe on the streets. Stop and search is an absolutely vital tool”. I have to agree with that, but could you then outline perhaps as in terms of political leadership where you believe the balance should lie between protecting the public and maintaining good community relations with regard to stop and search?
Stephen Greenhalgh: It is obviously a difficult balance because we want to maintain public safety. We also want to see confidence in all communities in the police, and we know that the two major drivers of public confidence are around obviously the effectiveness with which the police engage with communities, but equally the just use of police powers, and there is no greater impact on confidence when there is misuse of police powers. That is why we have set an objective, not just to cut crime but also to boost public confidence, and I think it is a 50/50 balance of maintaining confidence, but also ensuring that crime continues to go down and people feel safe.
Q214 Mr Jayawardena: So what are you doing to improve that confidence?
Stephen Greenhalgh: First of all, when it comes to intrusive powers, we review those on a quarterly basis in some detail. Every single London borough has a stop and search monitoring group. We monitor stop and search complaints, which incidentally have gone down by around two-thirds, which I think is very positive news. We continue to look in some detail at where stop and search is being used, right down to a borough level, and see if there are lessons to be learnt between the particular boroughs, so I think that is a significant amount of public scrutiny.
Q215 Mr Jayawardena: Thank you. Commissioner, you have talked a lot today and previously about targeting stop and search, and you said, “We were doing too much, repeatedly stopping people who have done nothing wrong”. Could you tell us a little bit about how you are targeting, so that we are better informed on the work you have been doing?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: There are probably two things we have done. One is that we have done a lot of work around what is termed as unconscious bias. In fact we all have, and people do not even understand how they are applying bias or prejudice, so that has been helpful in allowing the individuals to understand how they may be applying rules that they take to be obvious and objective, which are actually quite subjective, and that has been quite powerful. Secondly, we have done a lot of training with our officers, and, thirdly, we have included the best stop and search people in that training, so some of our people are very good at it. When they stop people, generally, they get an outcome; they arrest them for whatever it has to be drugs, offensive weapon, or evidence of a crime. Secondly, they do it with respect, so that the people end up with a positive outcome, even if we do not find anything. Thirdly, with good reasons.
So we try to make sure that the training is increased, but the bottom line is it has to be done within the law. It has to be done by providing reasons. It has to be shown to be effective. I think when we started this work, about 7%, only seven out of 100, of the stops were resulting in arrest, so 93 were not. We have now got up to about 20%. You may still regard that as it is clearly not a majority. It is quite a significant difference from where we started, and during that first three years, we moved from arresting 45,000 a year to 47,000, so we reduced by two-thirds the number of stop-searches but increased the number of people arrested. As Stephen has indicated already, the number of complaints has come down drastically. Just to give you an indication, since April this year to September, which is the last time for which I have figures, during that time we have stop-searched 71,500 people and received complaints on 143 occasions. That did not mean to say that everybody was pleased who did not complain. I would not suggest that, but it does indicate that it is not the majority of people who are stop-searched who will take the further step of complaining.
Q216 Chair: The figures on race are still quite stark. A black person in London is 17.5 times more likely to be stopped than someone who is white. That is right, is it not?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: There are two different measures. As you explained just now, if you consider yourself of a black origin, then you are 1.3 times more likely to be stopped compared to a white person, so 1.3 times. I will come back to how relevant that is. If you are of an Asian appearance, you are equally likely to be stopped as if you are a white man, which is a big change from post 9/11, when in fact the complete obverse was true, when a high percentage of people of apparently Asian appearance were stopped. The other thing I think is fair to point out—and academics have and it is a fair point—that measures the percentage of minorities within the population who reside in London, but our street population at certain times of the day is quite different.
Q217 Chair: So are you telling us there is no more likelihood of black people being stopped?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: No, I cannot say that for certain. I am just making the point that—
Chair: The figures are against you, are they not?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: No, I have said quite so clearly that it is 1.3 times more likely generally for people of black background. It is equally likely for people of an Asian background. I want to make it a point; that measures residential population to stop-searches, and that is not the street population that we have in London, and certainly not at certain times of day, but I share what we have.
Q218 Chair: Sure. Deputy Mayor, before you leave, the last time you were before us, on procurement and the buildings that the Met owned, some of which you have sold off, like New Scotland Yard.
Stephen Greenhalgh: For a fantastic price.
Chair: I am sure if you want to do the negotiating, I am sure you got the best deal possible. You talked about going around the estates of the Metropolitan Police and finding a lot of lockers that had not been used for years.
Stephen Greenhalgh: You remember.
Chair: I do, because I was fascinated with the sight of you going around all these lockers. Have you now discovered all these lockers and are they all closed down now?
Stephen Greenhalgh: No, we are rationalising the estate. There is some way to go and it is fair to say that the assumptions we have around the budget are that there are more savings that can be done in the estate. But we would not be able to pay for things like the rollout of body-worn video or mobile technology or the transformation of the police into a digital police force without making these kinds of savings.
Q219 Chair: What percentage have you sold off since you became the deputy?
Stephen Greenhalgh: Only about 100 buildings, but very, very valuable ones. They were poorly used. We have booked about £1 billion-worth to reinvest into policing. If you think the public sector in its entirety has raised around £2.5 billion, I think that is a considerable achievement. But it pays for the transformation that we require for a 21st century police service, both in technology and in the remaining estate. Any London MPs who go around the police estate, a lot of it did not seem to have had any significant investment since Victorian times. It is important that we have state-of-the-art custody suites, that the police service work and operate in modern buildings and that they also have modern technology.
Q220 Chair: When will you be moving next door?
Stephen Greenhalgh: That is going to happen in the early part of September.
Chair: Next year. Deputy Mayor, thank you very much. We know you have another engagement. We will continue with the Commissioner. Thank you very much.
Q221 Mr Umunna: Just going back to the history of serious youth violence and gang prevention, tackling these issues goes far beyond use of stop-and-search powers. I think we have, according to your figures, around 3,500 or over 3,500 gang members in London, over 200 gangs. The gang violence indicator measure is up 14.5%. With regard to tackling this, would you agree that active, visible neighbourhood policing is vital?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: Absolutely vital. We have two or three strands to the strategy, but clearly one of them is you have to know the local people so they will tell you who the gang members are and then you have to keep an eye on them.
Q222 Mr Umunna: You said, following up on the Chair’s question about your remarks in The Evening Standard interview, that the possible cuts that you are facing are between 5,000 and 8,000 and that it is likely to be around the 5,000 figure now that the police funding formula cut has been taken out of the equation. You said in that same interview that there would be less police visibility as a result of all this. Would you say, therefore, that cuts of the order of 5,000 alone would compromise your ability to tackle serious youth violence and gangs?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: I think logically I would have to because there would be less police officers. You could argue that we ought to make the remaining 28,000, or 27,000 better, equip them better, but it is certainly not going to help and we do need significant numbers in London.
The only thing, if you would allow me just to add, is we realise that public funding is difficult and we realise that we will lose some money. At the moment we have 32,000 officers in London. We have managed for three of the four years I have been in charge with around 30,000, because we made the savings and then we recruited. So I think we could go back to 30,000 and manage, but it is a growing city and it is a constant challenge to keep it safe.
Q223 Mr Umunna: Of course neighbourhood policing has a vital role to play in the counterterrorism effort. Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley, who is the national lead, as you know, on these things, has said that the thinks it is vital for building relations with communities that might hold intelligence to help prevent the terrorist threat. Former Assistant Deputy Commissioner Peter Clarke also described it as being one end of a thread that can take us from Britain’s streets to wherever in the world the terrorists are trained, equipped and radicalised. Will these cuts in neighbourhood police officers—and I notice you are nodding away there—working in communities also therefore hamper the counterterrorism effort?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: I should make clear sometimes I nod to confirm that I have heard what you said, otherwise I could be trapped quite a lot.
Genuinely, of course it will not help. I think the latest statistics show that it used to be that the majority of the leads we had on the counterterrorist side came from either the security service or foreign intelligence services. Now we are seeing a significant rise in that from local reporting, of people concerned about individuals’ behaviour and when we investigate it we find they have good reason for that. So the main reason people tell police officers is because they know the PCSOs, they have a trusting relationship and they trust them to do something about it. So it is a vital component. The danger is as we all get constrained on money we concentrate on the counterterrorist side and say we have to have surveillance teams and investigators, of course, but forget the pump priming and do not protect that side. So we are going to have to be really careful in the future. We are trying to protect both.
Q224 Mr Umunna: The other big pressure in your resource—and we took evidence from Deputy Commissioner Mackey last week, is the historic—as they are called, but of course survivors live with it every day—child abuse investigations. From what I understand in my own contact with your officers, of the 30,000 referrals that are estimated as likely coming out of Operation Hydrant, about 15,000 of those, at least, are going to fall to the Met to deal with. How many officers do you currently have working in your Child Abuse Investigations Command Unit? In light of what is likely to come your way, how many more do you think you are going to need.
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: I might need notice, and I will give you my best answer but I will let the Committee know exactly. It is certainly approaching 1,000 officers in that area. I think I might have mentioned it at Committee before that over the last two years we have done two things. The first was about 18 months ago we moved two murder teams over, which I think was around 100 officers, and then we made the decision within the last eight weeks to move a further 200 officers over there. That is to cope with the present demand.
Mr Umunna: Which is nothing on 15,000.
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: Yes, it is going to be difficult, there is no doubt.
Q225 Mr Umunna: Sara Thornton said to us when she was here as well last week that certainly at National Police Chiefs Council level you are making the argument that in the comprehensive spending review there should be a separate line for the funding of Operation Hydrant. I am presuming you are part of that and you would agree, but perhaps you can tell us if you do not. But if the ask there is not granted and you are still having to fund this extra work out of your existing funds, what are likely to be the consequences, given the funding pressures and the huge demand in work that this is going to create?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: I suspect there will be two. One is that we will of course investigate, but slower. We will have to prioritise the things that are very urgent from the things that will have to take longer.
Mr Umunna: Which things? The child abuse investigations or other work?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: To start with child abuse investigations—
Mr Umunna: Yes, that will be slower.
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: —because over the last couple of years in the Met I think we have seen a rise of about 80% over the two years, a quarter of which are historical offences. That is an offence reported beyond one year since its commission. So I suspect that the older the offence the slower we will be. Now, you cannot say that absolutely, because you might have a suspect who is still in contact with children, say a teacher, so it is not a perfect rule. But I suspect we will have to slow down some of those investigations because there will not be as many resources, whereas the rape that happened last night we will have to deal with very quickly.
Q226 Mr Winnick: Commissioner, previously when you appeared before us I referred to the number of youngsters, teenagers, who have been murdered. I think the figure so far this year is 15. Am I correct?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: That is correct, I believe.
Q227 Mr Winnick: You understand, of course, how horrified people are that such murders continue to take place. On average I would say that those who have been murdered have had 65 fewer years of life than I have had so far, a 14, 15, 16-year-old who has died. Would it be right to say that in many instances this is a result of gang warfare?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: Often, frankly. I have the numbers for the number of young people who have been stabbed. When young people die, often it is down to gangs. Not entirely, because it can be a simple dispute. I do not think we need to get it entirely out of proportion. Five years ago in 2010 19 young people died. It went down as low as nine in 2012 and then it raised to 12 in 2013, 13 in 2014 and by the end of October, 15. But as you said already, any one of them is a tragedy.
Q228 Mr Winnick: Indeed tragic, to say the least. There are reports, and I would be interested to hear your views—perhaps those reports are somewhat exaggerated—but it is said that in some areas in London—of course, this is a national Parliament and I am not a London MP—perhaps more south London than otherwise, as far as I understand the situation, there are places that are dominated by gangs and the pressure to join such a gang is intense. Your views?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: I am not sure I would accept “dominated”, but there are certainly some areas more affected than others. It is pretty difficult on some of the estates for some of the kids to avoid being in the gangs or, I think probably as worryingly, to get out of them once they have joined. I think that is the hardest thing, that once they are in there they are regarded as an enforcer, they are regarded as part of the hard crew who live in that area. I think when they go into prison or young offender institutions and come out again they struggle to avoid that lifestyle. So I am not sure I would admit or accept “dominated” but there are certainly some areas that are significantly affected by them.
Q229 Mr Winnick: Would it be right to say bullying and intimidation occurs to get youngsters involved in gangs, often, presumably, to be involved as well in drugs and other such forms of criminality? Particularly drugs, I take it?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: It certainly can be, because some of it starts at school, some of it is in the area they live. There is no doubt if you have a group of 10, 20, 30 young, violent people, they will have a dominant effect in the estate. So it is certainly a worrying thing when it happens.
Q230 Mr Winnick: No one expects the police force, be it in London or anywhere else, to be miracle workers who by A, B and C or what have you can suddenly undermine the number of gangs that exist. But the feeling is that these gangs come about and dominate areas, which I have been saying and that you have confirmed to a large extent. What can the police do more effectively in order to ensure that such intimidation to join gangs and have fewer gangs occurs? Do you see that as an active role for the Metropolitan Police?
Chair: We do not need a long essay, just some bullet points of what you can do, in answer.
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: There are two principal strands to our strategy. One is to enforce the law. If you are going to hurt people, then you will get arrested and get prosecuted and put through the criminal justice process. That tends to stop them doing it if they are inside. The other one, particularly the younger the offender, is we try to divert them to a more productive life. That is where we call on other partners, because we cannot provide for them to move house, we cannot provide an extra literacy course. Those are things that others can assist with: drug rehabilitation, alcohol abuse. Those are things that others can assist; we can be a portal. Those are the two strands we have: enforce the law when they hurt people, and if they are prepared to accept help we can point them towards it.
Q231 Nusrat Ghani: At the National Black Police Association conference, the Home Secretary praised the outstanding results of the Met more than doubling the number of officers from ethic minority backgrounds. She also said no force has a BME representation that matches its local demographic. What further steps are the Met taking or trying to take so that the force reflects the population of London?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: The first thing to point out is all the things we have been talking about today have been about our ability to recruit at all, because of course if we have less money the opportunity to change an organisation is very limited unless we lose the people we have. So the main ability to change is by recruitment and it looks like that is going to get very difficult.
What we have done already, and it seems to have some effect, is first of all we changed the residency criteria for people who join the Met. For the last year you could only join the Metropolitan Police if for three of the last six years you had lived in London. That has had two benefits. It has meant it is a more representative group and, frankly, that they have a place they live in London that they can afford to live in. Over that period, about one in four of the recruits we have taken have been from minorities, which is an historic high. In fact, I think the last group in September it was about one in three. We have also seen better women representation, which is up to about a third, which is still not half but it is far better than we have seen in the past. So it is getting better, slowly. I know we want it quicker but that is where we are. I have talked to you before about arguing for the Northern Ireland opportunity of doing 50:50 recruitment. But frankly, without any recruitment, that is a waste of time.
Q232 Nusrat Ghani: You talked about the numbers slowly increasing. What is the percentage of people from BME backgrounds that are in senior positions within the force?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: Probably we can write to the Committee with the figures exactly, because, depending on the tier depends on the number. On my board, for example, about half are women and one minority. If I looked at the borough commanders, I think we now have five borough commanders, of 32, from minorities. But that is rather selective. I could go to other areas and find it is not as representative, so I prefer to give an accurate answer.
To be fair, where the majority of them lie is in the junior roles, because going from 300, as we were about ten years ago, to now nearly 4,000, the majority remain in the junior roles and are gradually working their way up the pyramid.
Q233 Nusrat Ghani: There have been discussions about how difficult it is for people who enter a profession that may not have fully represented their backgrounds and how difficult it is then to progress through the career within that profession. Is anything in particular being done to make sure you retain those people and they can progress?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: Generally our retention is pretty good. Our turnover every year is about 5%. Compared to most employers in London, it is unheard of that you would only lose 5%. In fact, we lose white people in proportion to the rate of minorities. They do not tend to leave us at any higher rate.
Where I would accept that there is more progress to be made is around progression, which is what you said. We have got things in place. For example, over the last 18 months we have taken two cohorts of lateral entry superintendents, which is 11 people who have never been a police officer who are coming in as what you could say is a Major equivalent, for those who understand the army, or a senior person within the Met. Of the 11 people, I think 40% are women and a third are minorities. I accept the numbers are small but it goes back to your point about progression is quick and we will have an injection of pace in that way. We can provide the numbers on what we are doing, if that would be helpful.
Nusrat Ghani: That would be useful.
Chair: Thank you.
Q234 Nusrat Ghani: We have talked about stop and search, we have talked about how there is 1.3% greater likelihood, if you are black youth, to be stopped, and we have also talked about how 27% of cases failed to provide a reasonable justification for using the power in that specific case. Do you think there is a link between the stop and search system, which has often been seen as being flawed, and a lack of diversity in the police force?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: It is possible, but I am not sure I entirely accept that because during the period we are talking about where our diversity has increased and the effectiveness of stop and search has increased, I do not think the increase in diversity has matched the increase of our effectiveness of stop and search. There are things that organisations can do beyond diversity that improve stop and search. There is no doubt, I accept, that legitimacy improves when you represent the society you police.
Q235 James Berry: It is right, is it not, that there is no direct correlation between the number of police officers in a certain area and the level of crime?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: That is committed?
James Berry: Yes.
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: No. Yes.
Q236 James Berry: There are some examples, I think in Sweden and Spain, where the police numbers rose but crime rose as well. There is no direct correlation. In fact, while you are, for understandable reasons, quite wedded to the number of 32,000, it is right, is it not, that you have policed London safely and effectively with less than 32,000 police officers a few years ago?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: First of all, I accept there is no absolute number. If you say, “Is it 32,001?” I cannot give you that number. I accept that.
There are two things I would ask you to consider. One is that the Met did a piece of work about three years ago—I have been in various police forces and I would argue it was the best piece of work I have seen, it was not mine, but it was ours—that articulated how many officers you need to police and it underpins our territorial policing allocation. If the Committee are interested in looking at that, I believe it is a good, objective piece of work.
The second thing is that while I accept there is no absolute number, just to give you one comparison, we in London thought we were going to have to go back to potentially 24,000 police officers. The last time we had that number of officers was in the 1970s and this city was 6.5 million people. It is now 8.6 million people and predicted to grow. That seems to be an odd diversion of resources, or supply and demand. That needs to be considered but I cannot argue there is an absolute number.
The next thing is that certainly in London, as I alluded to earlier, when we have big operations I cannot throw laptops at people. We had 10,000 students protest and they did it, on the whole, pretty lawfully. That was not a problem. However, there were a group within them who were not lawful and we had to deal with them. That meant deploying 1,500 officers. On the succeeding night when Anonymous attended - only a couple of thousand but fully 80% of them were intent on problems and they spread themselves around London - we had to have a significant number of resources to deal with that. At the Remembrance celebrations this weekend, we will have about 1,400 officers deployed solely for that. Every time we do something in this big city, we need sometimes to have a large pool. The final point is of course they come from the boroughs. We have no separate box waiting to be opened. They come from borough policing.
Q237 James Berry: I accept that but there are reports—we are going to hear from HMIC shortly—that talk about the use and deployment of officers being more important than raw numbers. It is right, isn’t it, that elsewhere in the country police forces have shrunk and at the same time crime has gone down? That is presumably in part because a lesser number of officers have been deployed more effectively.
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: I cannot argue against what you have just said. Of course it is not just the number, it is what they are doing. That is the argument the Home Office uses. I accept that, but there has to be a point at which the police become less effective if there are not enough of them to deploy to the incidents that are reported. One thing that is very hard to measure but I have to keep an eye on is that of course if the officers are not confident to step into that crowd, you have a problem. If there are 200 of them and there are three of you, the chances of you enforcing the law are fairly limited. There is something about numbers that gives the officers confidence, and the public, that they will intervene.
James Berry: Quite right. Certainly.
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: I would accept entirely that it is hard to be precise about whether it is 12.3 or 508.
James Berry: In a public order scenario, of course—
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: Not only that. You think about the pubs on a Saturday night.
James Berry: That is a public order situation.
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: I do not mean big ones, I mean outside a pub where there are 50 people who are all drunk. You are going to have to get stuck in and resolve it by stepping forward and hoping you are going to take the day. It is an imprecise science, I accept, but the numbers are getting significantly challenged. I can only make the argument for London given the scale of growth that I see and we experience in this fantastic city.
Q238 James Berry: Just coming to an issue that you were questioned by the Chair about, special police services and your views on that, it is right, isn’t it, that under the law you have general police services and special police services? General police services are what you have to provide, subject to you having sufficient officers. Special police services effectively being surplus to requirement, which you can buy, which football clubs regularly buy and private individuals can buy. For example, if I have a shop and I think there is going to be a disturbance and you say, “Your shop needs one police officer posted outside” and I say, “I want 10”, you could charge me for nine police officers. That is the way the law operates, isn’t it?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: In theory, you are right. The way it operates really is that what we try to do is to put some buffer between individuals or just one organisation asking for resource. Just on your example, perhaps Westfield, they have many businesses in that business so they are individual shops that are buffered from, “Will you please arrest this shoplifter?” Football clubs are interesting because of course they only pay for what is at the ground, they do not pay for the policing outside the ground and in the local Tube. They only pay for what is at the ground. There is very little at the ground now.
We try our best to make sure that individuals nor individual organisations pay for a service. You might remember the case of Sky about five years ago. Sky were paying some extra funding for an investigation into some fraud on them, which left the courts wondering did this mean that we were partial in our application of the law. It is best not to be open to that charge.
Q239 Mr Chuka Umunna: Can I just go the diversity in the Met? In August you said that you thought the Met had a pretty representative workforce in quite a lively interview with Iain Dale. You do not believe that, do you?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: A lively interview with—
Mr Chuka Umunna: Iain Dale on LBC. You surely do not believe that you have “a pretty representative workforce”? I listened to the interview, Commissioner. You said that.
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: I am sure you did but I would like to re-check it. First of all, you will remember I challenged Iain that he did not know what his own representation was in the organisation.
Mr Chuka Umunna: Yes. We are talking about you. We are talking about the Met.
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: He did not know, as many do not, but I do. What I pointed out to him was that one in four of our police staff are minorities, one in three of our PCSOs are minorities and one in four of our specials are minorities, but 12% of our police officers are minorities. I was merely making the point that some parts of our organisation are very representative and the police are not. As an employer, we have quite a lot of representation.
Mr Chuka Umunna: That matters.
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: Yes, but the point you make was in a lively discussion with Iain—
Mr Chuka Umunna: Which I accept, yes.
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: —which I accept—is that I said briefly that there were some parts of our organisation that were representative. I am the one who has been pushing for us to have better law to allow us to—
Q240 Chair: Order, Mr Umunna. We would prefer to know your views now rather than what you have said to some presenter. Perhaps you could clarify and then we could move on. What were you going to clarify, Mr Umunna? What did you need clarification on?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: Perhaps we have clarified. I was confirming that some parts of the organisation were representative. The police are not. What I said in two seconds I cannot remember, but that is what I meant.
Q241 Mr Chuka Umunna: Among senior officers it is shocking, Commissioner. You have one out of 29 Chief Officers, five out of 76 Chief Superintendents, 12 out of 165 Superintendents and seven out of 333 Chief Inspectors. Those are the latest figures I got from the House of Commons Library.
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: They are all wrong.
Q242 Mr Chuka Umunna: It is better now, is it?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: The one I know definitely is wrong is Chief Officers because there are at least three.
Chair: Sorry, order. Perhaps the best way to do it is, if the figures are wrong, you could write to us with the correct figures.
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: Of course.
Chair: That would be very helpful.
Q243 Victoria Atkins: Just following on from the conversation on football clubs, would you support football clubs being asked to contribute towards the cost of policing a perimeter around the football ground, the Tube stations and the high streets?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: Yes, and certainly the Premier League clubs. For some of the smaller clubs, to be fair, it would be a bit more challenging. I accept that. However, some of these are big businesses. The community bears the cost of the people who attend the grounds and they are not always from London.
Q244 Victoria Atkins: Although I am not a London MP, I can imagine the residents around certain big grounds in the city and elsewhere, Manchester and other places, feeling very—
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: I know the British Transport Police are particularly concerned. We have a campaign at the moment because much of the violence that is still associated with football is happening on the Tube and the railway system. People, particularly travelling on Saturday, can sometimes have a pretty unhealthy experience. We no longer have—for those old enough in the room to remember—football special trains.
Q245 Victoria Atkins: Moving on the subject of technology, there is a real role for technology helping and supporting police officers in their day-to-day roles nowadays. We have talked about body-worn cameras already. Can you help us with some ways in which the Met has tested technology and where there have been success stories?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: There are a couple in particular. One is that we use Twitter, which is a good measure of getting information out and getting information back. We have online reporting. We have about 1,200 cases per month where people will report crime online. There are some slight concerns about that sometimes because you do not want somebody to use that when they should have been dialling 999. If it is an urgent thing, we want them to dial us immediately for us to respond. Probably those are the two major ways.
The other thing is that we have been testing now for a year tablets with our officers so that they can record crime online at the victim’s address. We make sure they have a tablet with them to do all they need to do on the street and not have to return to the police station.
Q246 Victoria Atkins: What about measures such as SmartWater and Skype? We have read this week or last week that Cambridgeshire is introducing Skype as a way of contacting victims.
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: SmartWater do not have the numbers. We are now into tens of thousands of homes that we have SmartWater out into. The campaign is to get all of the Met recorded in the same way the Fire Service managed to get smoke detectors in many homes and businesses. Neighbourhood officers are leading that. I may be wrong—we will find out—but I think something like 80,000 homes have now had these kits delivered and we are in the process of rolling it out across London.
In terms of the Skype opportunity, I had not heard that before I heard it from this Committee. It sounded like a good idea and we are talking to Cambridgeshire about how they are using that.
Q247 Chair: Thank you. A quick question with a very quick, one-word answer: I am sure you followed the proceedings that we had with Steve Rodhouse when we talked about the late Lord Brittan. Have you now referred yourself to another police authority?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: This is about the review of Operation Midland? There was another name for the—
Chair: It was specifically about the late Lord Brittan’s case.
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: Yes, and it has started. I think there has been an interim—
Q248 Chair: Which one is this, Commissioner? Which police authority have you referred it to?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: I believe it is Dorset. A Deputy Constable is carrying that out.
Q249 Chair: Is there a timetable?
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: The interim account, I believe, has already been given orally and we expect the full account to be given by the end of this month.
Q250 Chair: All right. That is the timetable. As far as DCI Settle is concerned, who gave evidence before this Committee, is he now working again? We were concerned that he was on gardening leave. When you have such precious resources and such talented people, we were concerned that anyone would be sitting at home.
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: In short, he is. I am probably not saying too much more in public, just in terms of his confidentiality, but we are trying to make best use of his skills.
Chair: Excellent. Thank you very much for coming in.
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe: Thank you.
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Sir Thomas Winsor WS, Chief Inspector of Constabulary, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, and Mike Cunningham QPM, Inspector of Constabulary, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, gave evidence.
Q251 Chair: Sir Thomas, Mr Cunningham, thank you very much for coming in. We are expecting a vote sometime during your evidence session so we will be very succinct in putting our questions to you. I hope to start by showing a good example. Thank you for coming in. I congratulate you on your elevation. The last time you were due in you were off to the Palace to be knighted. Many congratulations on your honour.
Sir Thomas Winsor: Thank you.
Q252 Chair: You have been watching the funding formula situation. What are your thoughts about the way in which it has been conducted?
Sir Thomas Winsor: There has been an extensive consultation that has borne fruit in terms of alternative views and alternative data.
Q253 Chair: Yesterday you would have seen the Minister’s response. Do you think that it is the right thing to do, to pause the consultation process?
Sir Thomas Winsor: In the circumstances, given the data difficulty, I think that the Home Office has done exactly the right thing. It is likely that there will be a reconsultation and that the police forces and police and crime commissioners concerned will have an opportunity to take the model and to run it in a number of different ways with not only the Home Office-provided data but perhaps alternative data.
Q254 Chair: Your organisation, which you have led now for a while, may be considered to be a very suitable organisation to be involved in this process because you know the police service and you have been working with individual police forces. If HMI was asked to be part of a review process, would you accept that role?
Sir Thomas Winsor: The Home Secretary can commission us to do almost anything provided it concerns policing. However, our principal function, which is unchanged since the County and Borough Police Act 1856, is to inspect and report on the efficiency and effectiveness of the police. Decisions about the level of funding are matters for elected representatives, so the Home Secretary under section 46 of the Police Act 1996, and levels of precept are matters for local government.
Q255 Chair: We are well aware of that, but in respect of how to take these matters forward, do you see the possibility of a role if the Home Secretary said to you, “We would like you to be involved in this to provide a degree of independence”? Is this something that you would be able to do? I am not commissioning you now because I am not the Home Secretary, but I am saying is this something that you can be involved in?
Sir Thomas Winsor: If the Home Secretary commissions us, we have no alternative but to accept.
Chair: Excellent.
Q256 Naz Shah: Would you be content if police forces used their reserves to balance their budgets up to 2020?
Sir Thomas Winsor: The use of reserves is something that is a subject of our efficiency report that we published very recently. HMI Cunningham may wish to come in on this. There is prudent and there is imprudent use of reserves. Some forces have built up reserves by just spending less but without really a proper appreciation of why they are spending less and just putting the money in the bank. Other forces are using reserves in a very prudent way so as to invest in infrastructure, for example new technology so that officers can be much more productive on the streets, in better ways of working, and are making reserves for voluntary severance of officers, and that is a prudent thing to do. It is highly likely that with the spending review, which we will know about quite soon, forces are going to have to make very significant savings. 85% or so of the costs of the police are in pay and the likelihood is high that they will have to lose officers as well as staff. I think it is a prudent use of reserves to make provision for those kinds of things.
Mike Cunningham: I should say that over 60% of force reserves are allocated reserves, so forces are doing broadly what you have asked. In other words, they are using reserves or allocating reserves to be used during transition phase.
Q257 Naz Shah: Can you explain that a bit more in detail? Last week we heard there was a vast amount of differences between different police forces.
Mike Cunningham: Yes, you are absolutely correct. I am giving you the national picture of the overall totality of police reserves. Over 60%, about 62%, are allocated reserves. In other words, they have been earmarked for specific purposes, which might vary from investment in capital through to transition arrangements between where forces are now and where they will be. In among that, some forces have earmarked much less than that and other forces have earmarked much more than that. There are gaps between those forces that are prudently using reserves and those that are not.
The other point I would make on that is that the issue with reserves—a statement of the obvious—is that they can only be spent once. So, in terms of would we be satisfied about forces balancing books, if they were spending reserves on things that would accrue revenue costs going forward then we would consider that to be an imprudent use of reserves.
Q258 Chair: The reason why Naz Shah asks you that question is because much is made of the £2 billion that is currently held in reserves. You are saying 60% is earmarked; that means 40% could be spent. You were the Chief Constable of Staffordshire at some stage.
Mike Cunningham: I was.
Chair: When you piled up your reserves of whatever they are at the moment and left your legacy for your successor, were you just squirreling away a lot of money for fun or was it specifically for a purpose? That is really what we are trying to get at.
Mike Cunningham: Yes, okay. I will speak as the HMI who inspected all police forces and their use of reserves. They vary. The best forces are those that plan to save in order to spend money in a very direct, premeditated and planned way. The poorer forces are either those that cannot save anything or those that save money in a way that they do not understand why they are accruing money, how they are accruing money or what they are going to spend it on. The most prudent, the best forces, the one that we judged to be outstanding, and there five of those in the assessments that we made—
Q259 Chair: Reel them off to us now.
Mike Cunningham: Durham, Lancashire, Norfolk, West Midlands and South Wales.
Chair: Reel out the last five on your list.
Mike Cunningham: There was one force that we assessed to be inadequate and that was Humberside, and there were eight forces that we assessed to be requiring improvement.
Q260 Chair: Was Staffordshire one of them?
Mike Cunningham: It wasn’t.
Q261 Victoria Atkins: We heard last week from the Police and Crime Commissioner for Devon and Cornwall that he planned to spend up to £2 million on a failed referendum, in other words a referendum to raise council tax precept above 2% and he said that if it was not successful it may cost up to £2 million. Would you consider that a good way to spend reserves?
Mike Cunningham: We have not made any comment on individual plans such as a referendum. They did not appear as part of our inspection and clearly individual decisions would be a matter for individual police and crime commissioners. What we have commented on is that it would be imprudent for anyone, as I have said, to spend money on anything that would begin to accrue revenue costs going forward. It would be a political judgment whether £2 million on a referendum was well spent or not.
Sir Thomas Winsor: It is worth emphasising that we do not inspect police and crime commissioners, so a decision made by a police and crime commissioner in that respect would be outside our remit. Parliament has not yet, and I doubt it ever will, given us the job of inspecting police and crime commissioners, because that is a job given to the electorate.
Chair: Indeed.
Q262 Stuart C. McDonald: The National Audit Office has reported that police forces have an insufficient understanding of future demand for their services. I think a lot of that was based on your own finding that only 10 out of 43 forces have a sophisticated understanding. What exactly is it that you want forces to be doing and why is that so many have not come up to scratch?
Sir Thomas Winsor: Demand in policing is a complex business. As you may know, I used to be an economic regulator for another safety critical essential monopoly, an essential public service, namely the railways. Measuring demand in those ones is much easier because there is a number of people who want to travel and so on. Demand for policing is a much more complex thing. That does not mean to say it can’t and shouldn’t be measured; it should. But calls for service come from a variety of sources. Then there is latent and patent demand. Patent demand is when the phone rings, broadly, or an officer sees something happening. Latent demand is when the phone does not ring, and of course the primary purpose of the police is to protect people, to prevent crime, so that is harder to measure.
Nevertheless, the fact is that the police service has never operated on a national basis, so we do not have a national template, a national way of measuring demand, and therefore police forces have measured demand, when they have measured it at all, in a variety of different ways. So getting a single approach to the measurement of demand is very important. In the review that I did of the police service, principally pay and conditions but other things as well, and published in March 2012, is a recommendation that there should be a consistent measurement of demand. There should be a document called the force management statement that is modelled on network management statements in all the other safety critical essential monopoly public services, which determines in a consistent way but for each police force and then you can build up a national picture, a consistent measurement of the condition, capacity, capability, serviceability of performance and security of supply of the assets, that they have a consistent way of measuring demand and they have a consistent way of presenting their resources. Therefore, they should also publish—and we are developing this—a statement of the steps that they intend to take for each of the next probably three or four years to improve efficiency and effectiveness. That will corral the police service into measuring demand in a consistent and sophisticated way, probably for the first time.
Q263 Stuart C. McDonald: If I picked up correctly, you think that work will take about three or four years?
Sir Thomas Winsor: No. I recommended it three years ago. It was a recommendation that I made to HMIC in the sure and certain knowledge that I would not be at HMIC and have to do it. We have been working on it now for some considerable time with very significant co-operation and enthusiastic support from police and crime commissioners, the College of Policing, police forces, the National Crime Agency, PSNI and the Home Office.
Q264 Stuart C. McDonald: If you were back this time next year, how many of those 33 forces that do not have a sophisticated understanding of demand will have by then got up to scratch? Are they taking steps to address this?
Sir Thomas Winsor: Yes. The police service is doing a lot of work on the measurement of demand. Chief Constable Steve Finnigan of Lancashire Police is in the vanguard with this work. The College of Policing has also done very valuable work. Other forces such as Durham, Avon and Somerset, Norfolk, and South Wales Police have sophisticated measurements of demand or means of measuring demand as well. Those things are valuable and we will be building that into this work that I have described.
But your question is: where will we be this time next year? Not as far forward as I would like because the template of the force management statement that we are developing is something we have to do in consultation with everyone. We are going to give the police forces in question from April 2016 to April 2017 to produce their first ones. They won’t be perfect, there will be gaps, but over time they will get better.
Q265 Tim Loughton: We have heard from all the witnesses today about the importance, when realising redundant or surplus assets, of reinvesting into smart resources, and in particular technology is one of those smart resources. Sir Bernard just now responded to one innovation from Cambridgeshire about the use of Skype for interviews, which apparently he did not know about until he came to today’s Committee. Whose responsibility is it within the police to be sharing best practice when it comes to technology, deployment of assets and more efficient policing?
Sir Thomas Winsor: I think the first point to make—and this is a point I make consistently to the police services—is that police forces are not in competition with one another and they should not behave as if they were. If there is a best practice, then I can see no reason in principle why they should not all adopt it. Best practice will, of course, mean that it is an efficient and economical practice; it won’t be an unduly expensive one.
Whose responsibility is it for ensuring best practice? It is the responsibility of police and crime commissioners—this is under section 6, I think it is, of the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011—to secure an efficient and effective police service. So the principal responsibility is with police and crime commissioners and the chief constables whom they hold to account. They need to learn where is best practice and what does it look like. That is a function predominantly of the police service collectively through its professional body, the College of Policing.
However, when we do our inspections—and we have an increased budget so as to do the PEEL programme, which we can talk about, which stands, as you know, for police efficiency, effectiveness and legitimacy—and we find best practice we publish it and we make a variety of recommendations as to the adoption of best practice. We publish it, we disseminate it and we recommend that it is adopted. It is for police chiefs and police and crime commissioners to implement those recommendations. We are not a regulatory authority. Regulators have powers of intervention, direction and enforcement. We are an inspectorate.
Q266 Tim Loughton: How do you define best practice? It is obviously subjective; different police forces will have different ways of approaching certain types of crime. One can see where it is quite straightforward in something like procurement, and there are still huge anomalies in the price of sourcing a police car in Durham to a police car in Devon and Somerset, which seems complete nonsense for what is a standard bit of kit for the police.
Mike Cunningham: We do two things. One is that the value for money profiles, which HMIC produce, are sent to all forces. What that does is exactly the point, Mr Loughton, that you are making: that the costs of spend on various items are set against each other so forces can see where those places are that are managing to spend less on a particular issue.
The second thing that happens is, as a result of our published inspections, when we have assessed somebody as outstanding—as we have done recently—there is evidence that forces that are less good will go to the forces that are assessed as outstanding in order to look at good practice, so those two things do happen. I speak as somebody who was in the chair as a Chief Constable; I do believe that it is incumbent upon Chief Constables to take the initiative in terms of seeking out good practice and low costs.
Q267 Tim Loughton: But in terms of overseeing that sort of peer mentoring, there was a scheme certainly that the DfE oversaw some time ago, whereby local authorities joint services department would: one, share best practice where you had an authority that was rated outstanding, or whatever, but also authorities that were weak, and potentially about to be downgraded in Ofsted inspections, would go to some of the stronger authorities in order to get some advice and some help to strengthen their case. That was overseen by I think it was the LGA and SOLUS and various others. Given you are not a regulator and don’t have that role, is nobody actually doing that role? It is absolutely up to individual Chief Constables/PCCs to take that initiative?
Mike Cunningham: One thing that I have not mentioned up to now is that when forces are deemed to be not performing well—and that could be across any range of measures—there is an escalation process of monitoring within HMIC. The first stage of that is more intensive monitoring from the staff of HMIC to look at what a force is doing. The next stage is for that force to be invited—the Chief and the Police and Crime Commissioner—to a monitoring group, which is chaired by the chief HMI and is attended by peers, which looks at the performance of that force and then points that force in directions where it may be able to achieve support. That is not done in a regulatory way. It is done through our monitoring process.
Q268 Chair: Yes, thank you. I think Mr Loughton is on to something here. I went up to Staffordshire to have a look at your good practice in respect of some of the things that you are doing, with the then local MP whose name escapes me at the moment. The difficulty is getting what you do well or what you did well out to the rest of the 43 forces. You are saying you publish a league table. If it is outstanding you expect people to go to them to find out why they are outstanding. Why don’t you publicise this on your website so that kind of good practice can be followed? Why do you have to have all these meetings? After all the Home Secretary has made it very clear that she wanted to see red tape cut, so when we have examples of this we should be telling everyone rather than expecting people to go to all of them.
Sir Thomas Winsor: We do encourage them talk to one another, but we do publish what we regard as best practice.
Chair: On your website?
Sir Thomas Winsor: Yes, in our reports and so do the College of Policing.
Q269 Chair: Not everyone might read your report, distinguished though it is. Not everyone reads ours, Sir Thomas. That is the problem.
Sir Thomas Winsor: Well, I do. But there is—
Chair: Do you have a little section on your website saying, “Good practice: Staffordshire has done a good job on X and—”
Sir Thomas Winsor: It is in the individual reports and the peer programme report, the principal peer programme report that comes out every year is just the tip of the iceberg. If you click on your force area you will see an analysis and you can go as deep as you like, including the supporting evidence. You will also see the overall judgments that we have made as to what is best practice and how it should be implemented.
The other thing to mention, in terms of mentoring, an example is that Humberside Police have set up a partnership with South Yorkshire Police, so that they can learn better how efficiency is done. We are not Ofsted. We do not have the power—unless Parliament gives it to us—to put a police force in special measures, which would then trigger not only a right to have assistance from somewhere else but an obligation to obtain and receive that assistance. Parliament has not yet given us that power.
Chair: No, we have noted that and we will certainly consider it. David Winnick. If you could hold on, Mr Berry, we will come back to you.
Q270 Mr David Winnick: First of all, Sir Thomas, I take it that the controversy over your appointment has died down, vanished and everything is okay. Is that the situation?
Sir Thomas Winsor: It hasn’t died down. It will never die down completely. There are people who just don’t agree with it. The Home Secretary received, as I understand it, 20,000 letters of objection to my appointment but I don’t think she is receiving correspondence about it any longer, so at least—
Q271 Mr David Winnick: She hasn’t sacked you. But of course you did achieve a record of a kind, I suppose. You were the first to be appointed from a non-police background.
Sir Thomas Winsor: Yes.
Q272 Mr David Winnick: Can you remind us how long you have done it now, three years is it?
Sir Thomas Winsor: Just over three years now.
Q273 Mr David Winnick: Yes, and you are on a contract?
Sir Thomas Winsor: That is right. My three-year appointment would have expired at the end of October 2015 but, in December 2014, I was given a new five-year term so I will be around for another four years.
Mr David Winnick: Yes. Of course, the controversy was not just over the fact that you had no record of policing but the review that you carried out, which as we know caused a great deal of antagonism, but I don’t want to pursue that because we have done so on other occasions. Can I—
Chair: Order; order.
Mr David Winnick: One or two of my colleagues are amused by that. Can I follow up what the Chair has been speaking about regarding the inspections carried out and, Mr Cunningham, you have named the five outstanding forces. Humberside has been mentioned and considered inadequate. Now, as I understand the situation, the rank and file police officers warned their seniors in Humberside of their significant concerns—that is before the inspection—about a major overhaul of its operation model and shift patterns. When you carried out the inspection were you aware of the fact that such warnings had been given by junior people?
Mike Cunningham: Yes. As part of our inspection process, we undertake focus groups with operational staff and one of the things that they wanted to point out to us was their uncertainty and, in some cases, displeasure with plans from senior leaders. I have to say that is not unusual when we inspect forces to hear that from line operational staff.
We went into Humberside at a particular point in time. We were very clear about this in the report. The context is very clear. They had recently implemented a new operating model, and I think the Chief Constable and the Police and Crime Commissioner both concede that the implementation of that operational model did not go well. They have since revisited it and they are changing it as we speak. What that has triggered is more engagement from HMIC with Humberside Police—and that is ongoing—to make sure that improvements are made.
Q274 Mr David Winnick: Is it not a matter of congratulations for those involved who warned their seniors that the path that they were taking was unsatisfactory and led to the way in which the force was described by the inspection as “inadequate”?
Mike Cunningham: In terms of people warning leaders that changes afoot are either going to go well or not, it is my experience—particularly through times of really rapid change—that very often staff will want to point out to you why that change is ill-advised, and the job of leaders is to discern the good evidence in that and listen to wise counsel. On this particular occasion the force and the leaders within the force, decided that the model and the plans that they had were fit for purpose and they weren’t.
Q275 Mr David Winnick: Sir Thomas, what happens—you have touched on this I think to some extent—if a force is declared or found to be inadequate? What happens? Do you follow up immediately? Well, if not immediately, within six months or so?
Sir Thomas Winsor: Yes, it depends on the terms of the inadequacies, and this isn’t just in terms of the peer inspection. It would relate to inspections in to particular subjects, such as domestic violence and child sexual exploitation. If we find something that is a matter of serious and immediate concern we will tell them immediately and then we will make recommendations. Of course we will, if necessary, re-inspect after an appropriate period, having established that they have an adequate action plan.
Q276 Mr David Winnick: The re-inspection, is that occurring?
Sir Thomas Winsor: Re-inspections occur from time to time when serious shortcomings have been established.
Q277 Mr Ranil Jayawardena: First, can I congratulate you on your new approach. The appeal assessments, which I think are very helpful in helping us understand the environment that the police are operating in but also the efficiency that they are driving through, which is so necessary from the situation that we find ourselves in as a country. I am particularly interested in the third criteria around financial positions of different forces for the short and long term and I wondered, first, if you could outline why you believe that some forces are becoming financially unsustainable or operationally unviable and what, in your professional judgment, might be the best outcome for those. Is it right for those forces to consider more strategic partnerships? Is it right for them to consider mergers or is it simply saying that should funding for those forces at a local level, the precepts, be looked at again given there are great disparities across the country?
Chair: Sir Thomas?
Sir Thomas Winsor: I will hand you over to HMI Cunningham in a minute but we have not said that any force is yet on the precipice of operational or financial non-viability. I think that is important to emphasise. It is of course conceptually possible that if a force has poor efficiency it will get closer to the edge; closer than it should do to the edge by definition because it is not being efficient and effective. But we monitor the efficiency, effectiveness and of course the financial condition of the police forces on a regular basis, and so we should be able to see when forces are approaching the precipice if, indeed, that is what is happening. However, viability is a function of efficiency and one should only be discussing viability when a force has reached its maximum practicable level of efficiency.
Mike Cunningham: Of course there is not yet any agreed definition of force viability. One person’s lack of viability might be another person’s lack of imagination, so I think there is something that needs to be worked through. We have said very clearly that there ought to be commonly agreed stress indicators that set out when a force is approaching—what are the alarm bells that will sound when a force is approaching real operational difficulties? We have said that that work is required and that we will play a full part with the service with the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners and the Home Office to agree what those indicators are likely to be.
Q278 Mr Jayawardena: Could I come to that point on precept? Do you think that the disparity in precept—and you look at all the different forces—available to those forces, which is set by the PCC, and I appreciate that you don’t look at PCCs but do you think the funding that is available as a result of precepts is creating different and more challenging situations for certain forces?
Mike Cunningham: Yes, my view is that that is absolutely the case. It is a 30%-odd difference in terms of reliance upon central funding, so when the central funding is cut that does have more significant impact in some places than others.
Q279 James Berry: Sir Thomas, you made it clear that your statutory function is as an inspectorate and, as I understand it, the body with responsibility for promulgating good practice and guidance in the police is the College of Policing. Do you share good practice you identify with the College of Policing for them to disseminate, or do you expect them as part of their function to read your reports and pick it out themselves?
Sir Thomas Winsor: We have a concordat with the College of Policing. We have regular communications at a number of different levels. I meet regularly with the Chair and Chief Executive of the College, and what they do is no surprise to us and what we do should be no surprise to them, so the communication is good. If we are going to make recommendations to the College we will consult them on what those recommendations should be before we make them.
Q280 James Berry: Thank you. In 2014 you produced a report criticising the mis-recording of police recorded crime statistics and you made a series of recommendations. Have you followed up on those recommendations and, if so, has the situation improved?
Sir Thomas Winsor: Yes. The report that we published about a year ago revealed a deplorable state of affairs. One in five crimes was not getting on the books. This is the national average and the position was far worse with crimes of violence and sexual offences. So we made a number of recommendations.
This was the most extensive and expensive, as well as comprehensive, inspection HMIC has ever done on any subject, ever, and we cannot afford to go and do it every year. However, last week I wrote to all chief constables and police and crime commissioners saying that we will instigate a 43-force programme of unannounced inspections in crime recording. They will not know when we are coming until we arrive on the doorstep. We will not tell them what we will look at and in what depth and in what respects until we get there. They therefore have an incentive and this is an extension of incentive regulations; incentive inspection. Their incentive is to ensure that when we come we do not find that they are going backwards, backsliding, or not taking it seriously because I have made it clear that if we do find failures and shortcomings that should not exist then we will be robust in our public criticism.
Q281 James Berry: Final question. If you take out unusual events like large-scale reporting and historic sex crime, how useful do you think crime statistics are for policing?
Sir Thomas Winsor: Crime statistics: information is the oxygen of accountability; it is the oxygen of efficiency and effectiveness. Without the critical information you cannot make efficient and the optimum deployment decisions. Crime statistics are enormously important.
But the police recorded crime does not cover everything; neither does the crime survey of England and Wales. The most valuable information, which is of course what we are going to get with force management statements, is what is the demand on the police, latent and patent, and it is all demand on the police; crime, and non-crime. There is a grey area between crime and non-crime but the police are called to do many things that do not involve the immediate commission of a crime.
Chair: Thank you. Chuka Umunna has one very quick supplementary.
Q282 Mr Umunna: When you published your “Policing in Austerity” report in June of last year you said, “As budgets continue to tighten the opportunity for further savings will be fewer and savings will be more difficult to achieve. Continuing to administer substantial cost reductions in the same way is not an option. It is likely to place the viability of some forces in jeopardy in the next three to five years”.
The Treasury is asking the Home Office to model cuts of 25% and 40% in real terms during the time horizon you cite in that report. Is it still your view that this is going to place the viability of some forces in jeopardy?
Chair: Sir Thomas, can we have a quick answer to that, please?
Sir Thomas Winsor: Viability is a function of efficiency. It is not a question of numbers of police officers, as you heard from Sir Bernard, it is a question of working smarter because they will have to work smaller. Efficiency and effectiveness comes from a variety of instruments and techniques but if a force does not adopt the optimum best-practice efficiency and effectiveness then its viability will be jeopardised.
Q283 Nusrat Ghani: In 2013 stop and search powers were inappropriately used in 27% of cases where officers failed to provide a reasonable justification for using the powers in the specific case. That same year HMIC made 10 recommendations as to how the system could be improved but your report from March of this year suggested that only one of those 10 recommendations had been implemented. Can you explain this failure?
Sir Thomas Winsor: We did not say stop and search powers were inappropriately used in 27% of cases. What we said was there was insufficient information recorded to justify their use in 27% of cases. It is not a subtle difference because in many of those 27% they may have been entirely lawfully carried out; it is just that the information recorded about them, the reasons for them, was not there. We did make a number of recommendations. As part of our legitimacy strand in the PEEL programme we will look at stop and search.
Q284 Nusrat Ghani: You made 10 recommendations and only one of those recommendations has been implemented. What was wrong with the other nine?
Sir Thomas Winsor: Nothing was wrong with them. We should have done them all.
Q285 Nusrat Ghani: So why have they not been implemented?
Sir Thomas Winsor: I don’t know why they have not done them and we are more than disappointed that they have not done them. We will be going back and checking.
Q286 Nusrat Ghani: So only one was implemented up to March. So between March and now has anything else happened? Has there been any improvement on that figure of one?
Sir Thomas Winsor: Yes. They are taking action but there are real limitations. Too many police leaders and officers simply do not seem to understand the impact that the use of stop and search powers has on the people who are subjected to stop and search. This can lead to resentment; it can lead to anger and a loss of trust in the police. They need to take much more seriously the way in which they carry out these stops and searches, particularly how they are used on children, because it is necessary in every case that the stop and search is lawful, necessary and appropriate.
Q287 Nusrat Ghani: You hinted at something very important there. In your report in March, very similar to what you have just said, there was a quote that too many police leaders and officers still don’t seem to understand the impact that the use of powers to stop and search has on people’s lives especially for young people and those who are from black and minority-ethnic backgrounds. Do you see a cultural problem and also a link between stop and search and the lack of diversity in the police?
Sir Thomas Winsor: It is hard to tell why stop and search is going wrong but we can determine that it is going wrong in too many respects and it can lead to a loss of trust in the police. Also, of course, frankly if black boys in Brixton are stopped every week and so on, then they are not likely to want to join the police and do those sorts of things to their friends and neighbours.
Q288 Nusrat Ghani: You are quoted, as you mentioned earlier saying, “Too many police leaders and officers still don’t seem to understand the impact”. If they were from those communities would they understand the impact better?
Sir Thomas Winsor: I think it is inevitable that they would understand the impact better because they would have lived it.
Q289 Nusrat Ghani: So do you think there is a link between stop and search and the lack of diversity in the police force?
Sir Thomas Winsor: Yes, there is certainly that possibility.
Q290 Nusrat Ghani: So Sir Bernard was wrong earlier when he denied that there was a link?
Sir Thomas Winsor: I would disagree with him on that.
Q291 Nusrat Ghani: So Sir Bernard was wrong and you are right?
Sir Thomas Winsor: I think that is what I just said.
Chair: All right. I would not expect you to say that he was right and you were wrong. That is very helpful. Thank you, Mrs Ghani. Thank you very much for coming in. We are most grateful.
Sir Thomas Winsor: Thank you.
Oral evidence: Reform of the Police Funding Formula, HC 476 21