Home Affairs Committee
Oral evidence: Policing for the Future: Changing Demands and New Challenges, HC 652
Tuesday 28 March 2017
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 28 March 2017.
Members present: Yvette Cooper (Chair); James Berry; Mr David Burrowes; Byron Davies; Nusrat Ghani; Mr Ranil Jayawardena; Tim Loughton; Stuart C. McDonald; Naz Shah; Mr David Winnick.
Questions 1-92
Witnesses
I: Gloria Laycock, Professor of Crime Science, University College London, Tim Newburn, Professor of Criminology and Social Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science, and Andromachi Tseloni, Professor of Quantitative Criminology, Nottingham Trent University.
II: Katy Barrow-Grint, Chief Inspector, Local Policing, Thames Valley Police, Tom Gash, Honorary Senior Lecturer, Jill Dando Institute of Security and Crime Science, University College London, Blair Gibbs, Expert Adviser, Behavioural Insights Team, and Associate, Crest Advisory, and Dr Rick Muir, Director, Police Foundation.
Written evidence from witnesses:
Witnesses: Gloria Laycock, Tim Newburn and Andromachi Tseloni.
Chair: Welcome to the opening evidence session of our inquiry on the future of policing. I welcome our witnesses. I also put on record the Committee’s tribute to PC Keith Palmer, who gave his life protecting others last week, and to the work that the police and other emergency services do so often to keep us safe. It makes this a timely inquiry, and it is part of our recognition of the importance of the work that the police do.
James Berry: Could I say, for the record, that in my work as a barrister I have represented the Thames Valley police and police and crime commissioner on a number of occasions?
Q1 Chair: We want in this first session to explore the changing demands on the police. I want to ask for your view of the way in which demands on policing have been changing over the last few years in terms of both crime and non-crime, and your assessment of what is happening going forward. Ms Laycock, why don’t you start?
Gloria Laycock: I think everybody is very familiar with the idea that crime has dropped dramatically over the last 20 to 30 years, not just in the UK but internationally. In all the research we have been doing—on this, Machi is a particular expert—the reason for that crime drop is to do with designing goods, services and systems better, so that the opportunities to commit crime are massively reduced. Car crime has dropped because cars were re-designed, and burglary has dropped because people are locking their houses better. That is what most of the research consistently says. Volume crime has dropped, which might have left people thinking that the police have nothing to do. In fact, they are incredibly busy doing all sorts of other non-crime things.
Meanwhile, crime has crept up behind them, driven by the internet. Cybercrime is very badly reported, recorded, understood and investigated. It is in dire need of attention. Looking further forward, one of the things we have been concerned about at UCL is what we call future crime. We have taken the view that if people had thought a little harder about the implications of the internet at the time it was evolving and had designed crime out and thought a bit more about how it could be made more difficult, we would not have the crime wave we have at the moment. At UCL, we have just set up a centre for future crime, and we are looking at all the new technologies that are being developed and their crime implications, partly because we think that the police at the moment are badly sighted on all of this, and we really need to get ahead of the game.
Q2 Chair: You would describe it as a cybercrime wave that is happening at the moment.
Gloria Laycock: I would, but it is very difficult to quantify. The crime survey for England and Wales last year estimated the extent of it, but if you want to do something about it, you have to go into that, and saying that it is 5 million crimes is not terribly helpful; you want to know what they were, how they were committed, who we think might have done them and whether they were in the UK or another country. You need a crime profile if you are going to solve crime problems.
We do not have a good grip at all on cybercrime, or any of the other kinds of crime that will come in on the back of new technologies like artificial intelligence and the internet of things. If you go round any of our departments at UCL or any other major university and talk to the engineers and technologists, what they are doing is incredibly exciting, and nobody is thinking about the crime implications of it.
Tim Newburn: I will add a couple of things to what Gloria said and not repeat what she said. The first thing I would do is enter a caveat about the crime decline that was implicit in what Gloria said. The crime decline as measured by the crime survey for England and Wales is very substantial over the last 20 years or so, but I don’t think anyone in the professional field seriously thinks it is nearly as great as measured by the crime survey. It may be much less substantial than those figures suggest, for a variety of reasons, one of which is that it simply does not measure various forms of crime terribly well, cybercrime perhaps being the most obvious one. The work done in the last year by ONS to add a whole series of questions about cybercrime, fraud and so forth effectively doubled the level of crime as measured by the crime survey for England and Wales, so I think we need to be terribly careful.
The second thing that I would say about demand is another caveat: the distinction between crime and non-crime is very problematic. One needs to be terribly careful, when thinking about the demands on the police, not to assume that many of the things that they do that look like they are not crime-related are not absolutely central to the police missions. That is for two reasons. First, the police have a very broad mandate, and should and must deal with a whole series of things beyond crime. Secondly, with many things that come to the attention of police, it is impossible to know at that point whether they are crimes or not. They may appear to be crimes and subsequently turn out not to be, but they necessarily have to be dealt with by the police.
A third point, and then I will stop. To pick up Gloria’s point, it might look on the surface like the demands on the police are diminishing, because of declining crime, declining reported crime, declining use of 999 and 101 and so forth, but for a variety of other reasons—some to do with future orientation, not necessarily of crime but of managing risk and preventing or seeking to prevent a whole series of problems that we take seriously, including child sexual exploitation—the demands on the police service from working with other agencies, and the amount of time spent, are not well measured but are almost certainly very substantial indeed. I can come back on any of that, but perhaps I should stop there.
Andromachi Tseloni: I will try not to repeat what Gloria or Tim said. Crime has fallen massively, but has now stagnated; 2% of households in England and Wales are burgled, about 1% of the population are victimised by people they know—acquaintances—and other forms of crime have developed. That is down to opportunity, as Gloria said. As we are using more technology now, there are more opportunities for cyber-enabled crime. I am not sure whether to call it cybercrime or cyber-enabled crime, because it could include hate crimes, intimidating behaviour or misogyny crimes that are cyber-enabled as well as basic cybercrime.
The demands on the police are changing, but there is still a part of the population who need very focused attention for crime prevention. That population sub-group, which is what we are looking into at Nottingham Trent, share similar characteristics. It is similar people who are burgled and who suffer violence.
There is now more focus on antisocial behaviour. About 27% of people in England and Wales have witnessed or been victimised by antisocial behaviour.
Chair: What percentage did you say?
Andromachi Tseloni: About 27%, and about a quarter of them are also victims of crime. That is a really high statistic. It is not a volume crime as we traditionally measured it, but it could pick up on more serious crime.
With regard to cyber-enabled crime, the demands now put on the police include looking at more intelligence-led crime prevention and less community-based crime prevention, which also needs to be focused on the population sub-groups that crime is now concentrated on.
Q3 Chair: Looking at some of the non-crime incidents and some of the public safety issues that the police face, do you see them as growing? We have some evidence that suggests that they are growing, and some that suggests that they are not. First, as a demand on police time, do you think that those incidents are growing? Secondly, how far are those the kinds of things that the police will need to deal with—perhaps for public safety issues—and how far are they simply picking up the pieces for other public services and other things that are failing?
Gloria Laycock: There is some evidence that they are picking up the pieces of other, not so much failing public services, but strapped-for-cash public services, particularly in terms of mentally ill—I was going to say patients, I should probably rightly say patients—people who are not necessarily offenders but who are causing anxiety on the streets. The police are called then. They have serious trouble in knowing how to deal with that. Along with eight other universities, we have just been doing some work on what works in crime reduction. The police were very keen that we try to find out what they can do with mentally ill offenders. There is very little in the research to tell them. There is very little information available that has been tested rigorously that would help them in any of that.
Q4 Chair: Do you think those kinds of incidents are increasing?
Gloria Laycock: That is the police impression.
Q5 Chair: Is there any data or analysis that can tell us?
Andromachi Tseloni: For the last three years, antisocial behaviour has been decreasing slightly.
Q6 Chair: What about missing persons or other forms of incident?
Tim Newburn: There is pretty good information on things like levels of suicide, suicide prevention work and missing persons work. Some of that is going up. It is difficult to know. If you take something like missing persons, which often comes up as an issue in terms of whether this is a central task of policing, one of the difficult things to know is what kind of case it is and how to categorise it, and therefore how much police time might be involved in it.
The last review that I am familiar with, which I think was based on Metropolitan Police Service data and which was done about a year or 18 months ago, divided missing persons cases into high, medium and low risk. As I remember, it reckoned that both high-risk and medium-risk cases were increasing, and estimated that it was taking upwards of 5,000 police investigatory hours a week, or some such figure. So I think there is some evidence that missing persons related work is increasing.
There is a lot of anecdotal evidence that suggests that mental health related work is increasing. Again, there have been reviews, but I don’t think there is solid empirical data, at least to my knowledge.
The other things that I think are increasing are the things I was alluding to before—the statutory and non-statutory protective activity, whether it is related to victims of crime, domestic violence, child safety, or to various vulnerable peoples. I think the amount of inter-agency, multi-agency and committee work involved in that—necessarily and importantly—is almost certainly on the rise, but again I could not put a figure to that.
Q7 Chair: The College of Policing report from 2015 on estimating demand on the police service seems to be talking about data from 2012 or earlier. It talks about five forces saying that the number of public safety and welfare incidents that they deal with is greater than the number of crime incidents that they deal with. That data feels quite out of date now. Are you aware of analysis either being done or that has been done to look at how that has changed since then? Or is this an area where we just have a massive gap in our knowledge?
Gloria Laycock: I think there is a gap.
Tim Newburn: If I am right, that report was published by the College of Policing in 2015, so it would be hard to be too much more up to date than that. I don’t think we have anything that has anything more recent than 2012 data in it, but this whole area that you are exploring of demand understood in some fine-grained way, and more particularly the issue of those things that we might broadly think of as non-crime related demand, has historically been hugely understudied and ill understood.
Q8 Chair: The BMA evidence suggests that there is a 33% increase in incidents involving a mental health aspect between 2011 and 2015. Does that sound accurate to you?
Tim Newburn: Probably not, in the sense that I don’t think anyone can be accurate. It doesn’t sound to me to be implausible, which might be a different thing. The estimates of how much police work is mental health-related vary from about 5%, I understand, to about 20%. That margin of error is what you are working with, I think. The higher figure seems perfectly plausible, but I don’t think we know with certainty.
Gloria Laycock: It does depend how you define things. Sometimes mentally ill people are also offenders; sometimes they are not. All these categories overlap, so it is difficult to suggest, if it were, say, 33% mentally ill people, that they are not legitimately being dealt with by the police, because some of them may well be offenders or victims at the same time.
Q9 Chair: May I ask what your perception is of what we should be thinking of now as the volume crimes? Clearly there is cybercrime or fraud online, and there is online child abuse in which there seems to be a significant increase. Do you think that our traditional assessment of what counts as volume crime—burglary, theft, car crime—needs to change?
Gloria Laycock: We need to ask that question. The way to answer it, it seems to me, is to unpick what cybercrime means. As I was saying earlier, to use “cybercrime” as though it is just a big homogeneous blob is very deceptive. It would be a great mistake to suggest that child sexual abuse was a volume crime; it isn’t—I hope.
Q10 Chair: It is online—online viewing of images of children.
Gloria Laycock: A volume crime? I wouldn’t want to say that—well, how do we define a volume crime? I don’t know that I would call it a volume crime at this stage. We just don’t know. The data are very poor on all aspects of cybercrime. People don’t report it, among other things. If you wanted to speculate about how much unreported child sexual abuse, or people viewing images of children, there is, that is a really difficult question to answer.
Andromachi Tseloni: I think we should keep on considering car crime, burglary, violence and theft from person as volume crime, because although that has been going down for the past 15 or 20 years it has now stayed stable. It is now concentrated in certain socioeconomic groups, and they are the ones who are particularly victimised, not just by the same crime type but by different crimes. They are also the ones who to a large extent experience antisocial behaviour. These types of crime should be prioritised by the police because they create a lot of harm and distress in society, and it is now focused and concentrated, so that prevention is really easy if it is well targeted. We know who these categories of people are: social renters are the ones who experience most crime types and antisocial behaviour, so something needs to be done there. The crime survey for England and Wales measures victimisation of children who are 10 to 15 years old, but it does not measure current sexual victimisation, for obvious reasons.
Q11 Nusrat Ghani: I want to continue the theme of cybercrime. Cybercrime recorded during 2016 almost equalled the total volume non-cybercrime experienced during the same period. My constituency is in East Sussex—I am the MP for Wealden—where we have a lot of older people. We carried out a big survey of where they thought they were most vulnerable when dealing with crime. They said scams, and we collected quite a lot of evidence of people being scammed in their own home. People were coming forward to say, “It’s not that we are nervous about being outside; we are nervous when the phone rings or an email comes through, because we’ve been a victim once and we’re embarrassed.” They don’t want to share that. How can we get that in hand?
Gloria Laycock: The obvious answer is to try and educate people to be careful, which is the way we have dealt with crime for decades. I would want to have some conversations with the internet service providers and with the people who manage these systems. One of the things the police need to do, together with Government, is work out levers over these organisations.
Q12 Nusrat Ghani: Levers?
Gloria Laycock: Levers. There are ways of leveraging action out of them. They are not the victims of the crime; other people are.
Just to go back to car crime, the reason car crime dropped so dramatically is because the Home Office published the car theft index, and that ranked cars by make against the risk of theft. None of them wanted to be at the top of the list, so they built deadlocks and immobilisers into the vehicles at the point of manufacture. That was a lever and it was based on police data.
The point about cybercrime is we have got no data. We need to get far better data and the public need to be encouraged to report these things, even though they probably don’t think for one moment that anyone is going to be caught. That is not the point. We want to spend more time on prevention and designing ways of preventing it from happening in the first place.
Just on the side of older people, I live in East Sussex and I am very pleased to hear that you are concerned about it. Older people do feel vulnerable; I do. Many years ago when we spoke to the police about what they were worrying about, they said then—and this was pre-cyber days—that they hated artifice burglary, where people would knock on the door and con old people out of their things or get into the house. They didn’t know how they could stop it. Conning old people has always been around; it’s just the way it is done now, it’s almost on a grand scale because of the internet.
Q13 Nusrat Ghani: A grand scale, definitely. Kent police recently had a meeting and they said they had recorded 8,000 reports of fraud involving the loss of some £12 million in their county. It’s a big impact crime. Would you say it is a high-volume crime or a big impact crime? How would you identify it?
Gloria Laycock: It could be both. We don’t know enough about it. The banks probably have the data on the scale of losses. Whether they share them—they don’t share them with us, I can tell you that.
Tim Newburn: I would agree, I think it is both. Probably in many cases it’s going to be high impact, it is certainly high volume. We know that the vast majority of those forms of fraud are not reported. So if a constabulary such as Kent is, none the less, finding information about what appears to be not an insubstantial number of crimes, you can bet you can multiply it very considerably to imagine what is really going on.
The one point I would add to this—I got my letter out just to check the title of the inquiry, which is “Policing for the Future”—so the one thing I will add is, so far, we have focused on the police. We have mentioned by allusion some other agencies. In relation to things such as fraud and so forth, there are a whole bunch of agencies involved, so I would want to know—and I partly know what the answer is—for example, what trading standards are doing in relation to the kinds of things your constituents will be worried about and will be experiencing, some of them. The answer will be probably much less than they should be doing or ought to be enabled to do, or possibly levered into doing in some kind of way. When we are thinking about all forms of crime, but cybercrime and so forth, we need to be thinking very carefully about the range of agencies involved in what we might think of as the policing of these things.
Q14 Nusrat Ghani: Do you have anything to add?
Andromachi Tseloni: No, I agree with this.
Q15 Nusrat Ghani: When you mentioned trading standards, you also mentioned banks and you also mentioned social media companies. Are you telling the Committee that if the banks were able to publish data, there would be levers we could have over internet companies to try and reduce the number of older people being scammed online? Is that the conclusion we could draw if we could have the data?
Gloria Laycock: It is the conclusion I would move towards drawing, yes. You need the data. They won’t do anything, I don’t think, unless you can demonstrate and embarrass them. There are all sorts of levers you can use. At the end of the day you can use legislation, but en route, there are other things you can do. They are concerned about their image, their marketing and the rest of it.
Q16 Nusrat Ghani: Carrying on with this, there were an estimated 3.6 million cases of fraud—this was a crime survey for England and Wales—and 2 million computer misuse offences in a year. How much, in reality, can the police do? How much time and resources should they devote to dealing with this?
Gloria Laycock: If by “dealing with it” you mean trying to catch people, I would not put a huge lot of effort into it. They have to do it if they can, obviously, but my guess is it would be extremely difficult to detect some of these crimes. The police could very helpfully map out the field, explain what is going on and help you to work out who needs to be levered, for example. Is it the banks, the internet service providers, or the hardware manufacturers? What is going on?
Q17 Nusrat Ghani: Is it the police’s responsibility to do that mapping or is it the banks’ and social media companies’ responsibility?
Gloria Laycock: I think, in future, the police are going to have to get better at developing levers. Data are the starting point for that most of the time, in my experience, so the police hold the data. Many years ago, they had calls for service, for example, but they could not tell you how many they had. When the car theft index was being developed, we could only get data from 15 forces. If my car had been stolen and then they got it back, they wiped all record of it ever having been stolen at all. They were not thinking in problem-solving terms, but in detection terms. “I’ve got the car back. End of story.” “Got the guy caught. End of story.” They need to think how they are going to solve problems, and that means having data.
Tim Newburn: Just one very quick thing. The police could do an awful lot more. Of course, that will always be the case. We simply know an insufficient amount about this area to be able to make a judgment, but there is one review I am familiar with, which was done by the City of London last year. I took two headline things from it. It said there has been a lot going on within the broad world of policing of cybercrime and fraud and so forth, which is very positive but, on the other hand, police resources devoted to that kind of work appear—the word “appear” is important here—to be in decline because there are other priorities squeezing the amount the police service can do at this moment, given fiscal restriction, retrenchment and so forth.
Gloria Laycock: Can I make one other point about that? It is not just about how many policemen we have on it; it is how well they are trained. They need to be retrained significantly if they are going to be able to deal with the sort of cybercrime we are talking about.
Q18 Nusrat Ghani: Do you believe a high proportion of police officers need to be significantly retrained?
Gloria Laycock: If they are going to be dealing with cyber, yes, I think they do.
Q19 Nusrat Ghani: My final question: is there evidence to support the notion that the reduction in volume crime and the increase in cybercrime are linked? I want to draw out your response on issues such as grooming young people, whether it is for sexual exploitation or to be radicalised, or grooming women to be involved in extreme pornography or any other form of organised crime by criminals who are now taking all their activity online?
Gloria Laycock: I don’t know if there is any evidence of that, although it is a plausible hypothesis.
Tim Newburn: It seems impossible to imagine that they are not linked, but I agree that we do not have solid evidence for it.
Q20 Nusrat Ghani: Who should be responsible for collecting that evidence?
Tim Newburn: Who shouldn’t be? Everyone from the Home Affairs Select Committee with the levers that it can pull through to the police service and all the other organisations that are involved in this work, through to the academic community, which has not done nearly enough work in this regard, through to—if I may; a special bugbear—the Home Office. Government agencies—this is the special pleading bit; many years ago we both worked in the Home Office—would say, if I may go out on a limb, over the last 10 years it has abrogated its responsibility for research generally in the field of crime and policing, and it should do a lot more.
Gloria Laycock: I agree.
Q21 Mr Burrowes: I recognise that there is a paucity of data, so it is hard to follow the data in terms of cybercrime, but what about following the money? Many analysts would say that cybercrime was the most profitable field of crime. Would you agree with that? Where are the proceeds of crime going? Are they going into other criminal activity, maybe offline?
Gloria Laycock: Tracking it is extremely difficult. For example, the banks are required to report suspicious activity. I don’t know of any really good analysis of that data. They get all the data from the banks, but they use it in a reactive manner. So they might say, “Well, we think Gloria Laycock is a bit iffy; let’s go and see what she has been doing and mooch around the suspicious activity data,” but they do not analyse it in a questioning way. One reason, I think, is because they are not trained researchers. That is not a criticism by any stretch of the imagination. They do not know what they do not know. They have got all this data on those sorts of issues, for example, but the people who have got a lot of this data are the banks, and they will not share.
Q22 Mr Burrowes: Do you want to add anything to that?
Tim Newburn: Not really. In a sense going back to the volume crime question, we do not know, within this broad body of activity that we might think of as cybercrime, the proportions; it might be a small number of extraordinarily profitable crimes, and a larger-volume number of much more modest activities. That is one of the places we ought to be starting.
Q23 Mr Burrowes: In terms of priorities, that is a good place to go; it could well be one of the most profitable. You talk about stretched resources. Surely that is a way that you can find your priorities: going where the money is.
Andromachi Tseloni: But the police do not have the resources to do the work. It has got to be bank-driven. It might be confidential agreements with the banks, or whether the banks think it is worth their investment.
Q24 Mr Burrowes: It links to our previous inquiries on the proceeds of crime, and opportunities to resource the agencies that will need to do the enforcing.
Andromachi Tseloni: Yes, and going back to fraud, there is a national fraud reporting system now, so the response should come nationally. The only thing that the police and crime safety partners can do is raise awareness.
Q25 Mr Burrowes: Where there is a focus on cybercrime, where is it? Is it on the threat to businesses, rather than to individuals? Is there perhaps a misplaced focus?
Gloria Laycock: There is a massive effort put in by Governments on cyber-security. I am drawing a distinction between cyber-security and cybercrime. The effort on cybercrime is pretty poor. The people who would be better able to address the financial aspects that you are raising are the banks. If you talk to a hacker, for example, they will tell you that all the banks are hacked regularly, but they do not tell anybody that, for obvious reasons. There are an awful lot of things going on that nobody knows about. Well, the banks know, but they do not talk to each other, or they do a little bit, but very much within closed environments.
Tim Newburn: If I may, I am going to stray again. The question you raised, which was a very good one, was about priorities. You said, “Shouldn’t this be a priority”—and I think you could add, in brackets, “for the police?” Probably it should, but the difficulty I think we face is—this will probably be something you will talk about in the future—who decides priorities for the police? Everyone thinks their priority for the police is the most important one, and they probably all have a case, in some kind of way.
The police service is always caught between a whole variety of pressures—local pressures, governmental pressures, financial pressures and so forth. For a very long time, the police service has been trying, in the absence of a map or a clear understanding of what it is really for, to deal with possibly ever-growing, but certainly conflicting, demands. We have never found a way of sorting it out, and we have always avoided the serious issues of how we think about dealing with that question. We tend to fall back into thinking about the sort of practical, everyday, immediate, hugely important matters for policing, without necessarily taking a step back and thinking about the principles.
Q26 Mr Burrowes: Because we elect PCCs now, don’t we, to come to some conclusions?
Tim Newburn: We elect them to think about priorities, not about principles. Possibly they should.
Q27 Mr Burrowes: Coming back to the balance between online crime and volume crime, is there another direction? Is online crime specifically fuelling various criminal activities?
Gloria Laycock: It is enabling them. It is making them easier to do. It is maintaining anonymity, for example, which is one of the things offenders want to do, clearly. As to whether it is actually driving it disproportionately, there are new crimes facilitated by the internet. Hacking was not a crime until someone invented the internet, so some things are driven by the internet.
Q28 Chair: I am sorry, I am going to interrupt you and suspend the sitting for two minutes; we have a technical fault in our cyber world: the equipment is not recording.
Sitting suspended.
On resuming—
Chair: Order. We can return to the evidence session. We are now recording again.
Gloria Laycock: You were asking about the extent to which crime in general is being boosted by the internet. I think in the old days we used to talk about prisons being the university of crime, and we do not need prisons in that function any more, because whenever any offenders work out how to overcome anything, they put it on the internet. Retail tagging, for example—you can go online and find out how to overcome that. You can find out how to defraud someone, how to clone something. It is just all there. So in that sense, I think we could reasonably infer that crime is being seriously facilitated by the internet.
Q29 Mr Burrowes: Is that for issues of terrorism as well?
Gloria Laycock: Indeed, but we do not know to what extent.
Q30 Mr Jayawardena: Professor Newburn, a minute ago, if I understood you correctly, you were talking about the way in which policing priorities could, should or perhaps will be set, whatever we think or whatever you think. I understand that researchers at Cambridge have examined some new ways of measuring harm and have produced a crime harm index as a possible way to help the police manage risk and focus resources more effectively. In your view, to what extent should those policing priorities be driven by the volume of crimes committed, or, as is possibly set out by this direction of travel, the level or the risk of harm caused by such activity?
Tim Newburn: I might be typically academic and argue that it should not be either exclusively. The Cambridge crime harm index, which is fairly new and all rather experimental, is a very interesting idea. All I understand it to be doing is saying that if you have a crude measure of crime that says that when you have one homicide and one theft from a shop, each is one crime, that is not very helpful in thinking about rises and falls in crime. You need some other index for thinking about the harm caused. Essentially, what they have done is weighted crimes according to the amount of time that would be served in prison, or the amount of days that would be spent paying off a fine, if you committed a particular crime. You multiply that all up and you get a slightly different measure of crime. That, too, in a sense suggests that we would have a less dramatic measure of what has been happening to crime if we applied it.
I think you need to do both those things, and I think the Cambridge people are suggesting that, too. You need to understand the volume for a whole variety of reasons, not least because we need to understand what is happening to policing, but also what is generally going on around us. We need to think about harm. As to whether the way they are suggesting we measure it is quite the way to do it, I guess people will begin to disagree about that. What victims actually think about crimes and harm might be another issue.
There is a third thing, which is really important in this. The priorities for the police eventually have to be determined—at least in part—politically. There will be an awful lot of people, not least the police service, who will argue that you must keep politics out of crime, but you cannot. It is a public service, supported by public money, with all sorts of claims upon what it should do under different circumstances, and I would say it is right and proper that there be some form of democratic input into that process. I do not think we necessarily do it in the best possible way, but I think it is absolutely central. If you want communities and neighbourhoods to engage in policing, you have to give them some kind of say, so at the very least, I would be doing all three of those things.
Q31 Mr Jayawardena: It is very kind of you to expand it. Perhaps I could provide an alternative. One way to do a risk assessment is to combine likelihood with severity—in this case, severity of the harm, or at least perceptions as to how likely and how severe that harm might be. If taking politics into this is “right and proper”—in your words, not mine—what if a local community or council says that antisocial behaviour and low-level crime are common and the public wish it to be addressed? It is likely that that crime is going to be there, and it has the potential to do great harm to lots of people, even if the severity is not very high, because the perceptions of the likelihood and severity may well be higher than the actuality. Wouldn’t it be right that those sorts of crimes should be considered over the harm index, which looks simply at the objective harm, not the subjective?
Tim Newburn: I don’t think it looks at the objective harm; I think it looks at the way in which we currently operationalise our sentencing procedures in courts, which is another normative standard.
Q32 Mr Jayawardena: Before you go on to answer, you rightly talked about the horrific crimes of murder that have taken place in the last weeks. Yes, there is clear and objective harm there, but there is also the subjective harm caused to communities that perhaps do not face immediate threats; it is the fear of crime that counts. You might want to continue; I stopped you mid-flow, but I wanted to correct the point about objective and subjective.
Tim Newburn: I think that is precisely where politics comes in. You can try to construct a variety of more or less objective measures, which would influence where police priorities lie, but in the end there will be a subjective element to the decision-making process. That will partly—possibly quite fundamentally—be to do with the ways in which people understand and perceive the risk and likely harms and so forth and communicate that politically via their PCCs or through neighbourhood meetings or other things. It is right and proper that they do so, and under those circumstances, if they took that view about antisocial behaviour, yes, absolutely, it should be on the local policing agenda. That is my view.
Andromachi Tseloni: To some extent, I would agree. The Cambridge harm index takes into account sentencing guidelines, and the Office for National Statistics harm index takes into account sentencing guidelines, but I do not think either looks into the victim’s perspective and resilience. In the same way that the consumer price index weights food more for poor families, the same crime should be weighted more for those victims who are especially vulnerable—those who, for example, do not move house if they are burgled or if their property is vandalised frequently. For them, victimisation is much more harm-creating than it is for others, so that should be taken into account.
All the physical—whether someone is disabled, for example—economic and social conditions of the victim should be taken into account, as should the repetition of victimisation. Taking into account risk or likelihood looks at only one point of view. We should take into account the likelihood of repetition, so the expected mean number of crimes someone will suffer, either of the same crime type—so how many burglaries—or of any crime, such as burglary, personal crime or whatever, or antisocial behaviour. If we go down the line of crime perceptions, we risk what can be called “winter in Florida; summer in Alaska”, so what is a mild winter in Florida is summer in Alaska—what is fresh in Alaska is winter in Florida.
Q33 Mr Jayawardena: But isn’t that what counts to people? If they fear that they are going to be mugged when they leave the house, whether or not it is true, isn’t that what counts?
Andromachi Tseloni: Then it is up to the police service and the crime and safety partnerships to educate people and raise awareness of various matters. For example, colleagues at Nottingham Trent found that the likelihood of violence went down because the night-time economy became more equally distributed between genders and age groups. We need elderly people to get this public space and go out there, because that eventually reduces violence for everybody. They are not out there to get more victimised; they actually create externalities.
Q34 Tim Loughton: We have heard a lot about how various forms of perhaps more traditional crime have reduced, and that is down to technology and the greater availability of preventive measures. One area that has increased substantially is sexual abuse—particularly child sexual abuse. That has been prompted, in the post-Savile era, as I will call it, by a large number of historical cases coming forward that the police are now investigating, and the knock-on effect of a greater likelihood of contemporary crimes being reported and a greater tendency for victims to come forward. This has a large impact on police resources and time. How have you quantified that? Or are the police using it as a bit of a catch-all for why they are having to spend a lot of time now that they did not pre-2012 on chasing up child sexual abuse cases? We are told that something like 70,000 historical child sexual abuses are being investigated every year. Does that accord with your research?
Gloria Laycock: We haven’t done any research on that. It is very difficult to get a handle on. It is the sort of thing the inspectorate might look at. I think the question—I suppose this is a political question— is whether we want to spend £1 billion a year investigating historical cases, investigating current cases or on prevention. That is the type of question about priority that needs to be addressed—not by individual police officers but far more centrally by the public or politicians. It is a real question: is it sensible to spend £1 billion a year on historical child sex abuse when it is happening now and the police are stretched? I am not saying what the answer is, but I think the question needs to be asked.
Q35 Tim Loughton: Do you not think that more than many other parts of crime, prevention in this case, which cannot be brought about by going along to B&Q and buying a gizmo, is more likely to be by greater publicity and the greater profile of sexual abuse happening; that it is properly pursued by investigating authorities—the police and others—and is taken seriously, leading to more convictions and incarcerations by the courts? If one were to deprioritise it in that case, your major deterrent factor is reduced?
Gloria Laycock: I would not necessarily want to deprioritise it in that sense; I think you have too lightly dismissed the prevention option. When you talked about not going to Homebase or wherever to buy a gizmo, that might be true, but how would you prevent it? Deterrence is your implied answer to that, but deterrence is a very weak mechanism for prevention.
Q36 Tim Loughton: There are two deterrents: there is education, but that is a longer-term option and one that successive Governments have been slow in adopting but which the Government are at last adopting. The other is the deterrent factor of saying, “You are more likely to be caught; this is a crime; people will now come forward and you are more likely to end up being prosecuted”.
Gloria Laycock: You absolutely need clear messages that this is a crime. That is undoubtedly the case. If you think you can raise the probability of detection sufficiently, that might well act as a deterrent, but I am not sure that it is that easy to do.
Q37 Tim Loughton: Do you think the job is being made easier by recent and proposed developments in the courts, making it easier for victims to give evidence in person—and now perhaps not in person? How is that impacting on the police’s ability to bring these cases?
Tim Newburn: I am sorry to keep saying it, but I honestly do not think we know the answer to that question as yet. I shall repeat one thing that Gloria said then add one thing to it. In terms of deterrence, the research evidence is generally very poor on such things as sentencing, length of sentences and so forth. The one thing that appears to have an effect of any strength is the likelihood of detection. If people think they are going to be caught, that acts as a deterrent. When they are caught, whether they go to prison for five years, 10 years or 20 years really does not make very much difference at all. Therefore, reporting becomes crucial here, and the taking seriously of reporting of sexual offences, domestic violence and so forth by the police. Anything that can be done, while respecting due process, to persuade women—it will mainly be women—to come forward and report the things they have experienced to the police service, in the knowledge that they will be taken seriously, is hugely important. That goes back to the beginning of your question: what we are really trying to do is to vastly increase the amount of reporting over and above what we are already seeing, with really serious implications for policing if we are successful.
Q38 Tim Loughton: Do you think the police can cope with it?
Gloria Laycock: I think they are saying they can’t.
Q39 Tim Loughton: Yes, but what is your analysis? You study crime. A large increase in crime and the use of police time has emerged post-October 2012, when the Savile revelations came about, in the subject of sexual abuse, predominately child sexual abuse and predominately historic child sexual abuse. On top of that, contemporary sexual abuse, or the reporting and investigation of it, has risen exponentially, far more than we have seen reductions in burglary and car crime. As academics overseeing assessments of crime and how it is being handled, you must have views on the impact this is having on the capacity of the police to be able to deal with it and on how we go from here, in terms of how the police are having to remodel their approaches, their time and their procedures to deal with something that is forecast to continue to be a problem—historic and contemporary sexual abuse—over the next few years. So what’s the answer?
Gloria Laycock: I think the answer is to think a bit more strategically about what is going on. However many people there are, we all have a different opinion of what the answer is. We have got no hard evidence on what to do, but from the work we have done on what we might call regular crime, there are five ways to prevent crime: increase the risk; increase the effort; reduce the rewards; remove excuses; and reduce provocation. If you can do something to affect the offenders’ decision making in relation to any of those, you will reduce the crime. Increasing the effort, for example—can you make it more difficult for people to abuse children? As it happens, yes you can. You can make sure that people like Jimmy Savile don’t get away with it, or that they are not left on their own with children in the way that he was. Bear in mind that that kind of abuse that he was carrying out is quite rare.
Q40 Tim Loughton: Well, we don’t know that, do we?
Gloria Laycock: Most child abuse that we do know about is by a member of the family.
Q41 Tim Loughton: The fact that it was neglected, not publicised and clearly ignored by people who should have reported it or investigated it does not lead to the conclusion that it was rare, as we are now finding out, otherwise we would not be looking at 70,000 cases a year. May I just say, what is slightly frustrating is that we are conducting a study into the future of policing? Two or three major developments in the past few years have got extraordinarily big implications for the future of policing: one is to do with terrorism; another is to do with the use of the internet, in whatever form the crime takes; and the third is around sexual abuse, which partly connects with the internet as well. We are trying to get a handle on what the priorities for the police should be, how they are coping with it now and how they will need to adapt to cope with it in the future. That is why we want to get your view, as academics, on how they are coping now and how crime prevention and dealing with crime will need to adapt in the future—we need more of a handle from you on the impact it is having.
Gloria Laycock: The sense I am getting is that you think that the police need to catch people. Crime prevention is more than policing, and policing is more than enforcement. I would put my priorities on prevention. You are emphasising detection and historical child sex abuse, for example—
Q42 Chair: Do you think that the job of the police is prevention?
Gloria Laycock: I think that the police have a great deal that they can contribute to prevention, for the reasons we said earlier, but they also need to think more creatively than they have been doing, if I may say so. If they think in terms of problem solving, to take domestic violence, for example, one of the things that I would like to do is to take an engineer, a physicist, a chemist and a doctor into a room and say, “Here are all the facts on domestic violence. It hasn’t gone away. We’ve had it forever. What would you do? How would you prevent this?” I think that there are lots of ways we could think about prevention if we asked different people. If you asked a priest, he would say that they need to believe in God more; if you asked a teacher, they would say they need a better education; if you asked a social worker, they will put them on a child protection register or what have you.
Q43 Tim Loughton: But, Professor, with respect, we are asking three academics at the moment, and we’re not getting much of an answer.
Gloria Laycock: I am saying, think of it as a problem-solving exercise, the answer to which is not necessarily enforcement.
Q44 Mr Winnick: Prevention is obviously essential, in the sense that the crime should not be committed in the first place, but do you feel that the police have so changed in the past 10 years or so that they take more seriously allegations of abuse, be it sexual or domestic? Because it has happened on a number of occasions, and been widely reported, that the police response has been the very opposite—more or less, “Well, if the husband has given a slap or two to the wife, what is there to complain about?” Do you think that the police have now reached a position in which they take the sort of attitude that one would like?
Andromachi Tseloni: I think the police are taking previously hidden crimes much more seriously now. One thing that the crime survey did was increase domestic violence reporting in England and Wales, because it raised awareness, and people were then more confident in going forward and reporting those things. Obviously, there are more women in the police service; that is another issue. I think the police are taking these matters seriously now. In Nottingham, we have the misogyny law, where any intimidating behaviour on the basis of gender is now a crime, so they have gone even further.
Tim Newburn: If I may respond, I will then come back to Mr Loughton’s question, given that we have collectively let him down. This is a classic academic’s saying yes and no, but the police service has improved immeasurably in the way in which it deals with sexual and domestic violence over the last 40 years or so. Would it be true to say that it is fantastic at dealing with it? No. Is there still a huge amount that could be improved? Yes, absolutely; I think the police service would be among the first to put its hands up to that. There is still an awful lot to do.
The research evidence supports that very well. There is a huge amount of research evidence that says, over a period of time, the police service hasn’t been coping at all well, and dealing appropriately—according to the standards that we generally expect and hope that it will aspire to—with sexual and domestic violence and child sexual abuse. The problem with academics is that when you ask them a question, they want evidence in offering an answer. If we have fallen short of answering some of the questions, I feel it is because we have been honest about the absence of evidence. The issue for your inquiry, among many other things, in relation to issues like terrorism, cybercrime, child sexual exploitation and so forth, is that there is an enormous evidence gap, as we described before.
You asked the more immediate question of how the police service has been coping, given the very substantial—I would not call them exponential—increases in reporting of various forms of crime over the last two or three years. I think it has been coping in the sense that there has been no drop-off in the kind of measures of whatever—satisfaction, reporting, the number of cases getting to court and all of the other kind of measures that one would look at. Is that enough? Almost certainly not. However, if it is to do more, going back to the previous bit of the conversation we were having, something else will have to give way.
Q45 Mr Winnick: The police used to be male-dominated, and females were very few, to say the least. That has now very much begun to change, and one obviously assumes that you welcome that. Fortunately, women are now taking an increasingly senior role in many instances—the new Commissioner of Police, for example. Do you think that that change in gender in the police force will mean, or has meant more recently, a more positive response to complaints basically from females? Obviously, in 90% or 95% of cases, it will be females complaining of abuse.
Gloria Laycock: Inevitably it has. I have been around long enough to have been talking to police officers 40 years ago, and they are different now. I think it is excellent that the genders are mixed in the way that they are.
Tim Newburn: A whole variety of things have made a difference. It is undoubtedly absolutely crucial that the police service, in a variety of ways, becomes a more diverse body of people. This is one of the areas in which that has had a very substantial impact. However, the research evidence still shows that much of the police service still displays, unfortunately, a very macho culture, notwithstanding those changes.
Q46 Naz Shah: I am going to go back a bit to cybercrime. My apologies; I had to leave the room. You were talking earlier about leverages; I would like to understand. If there was leverage in terms of cybercrime—if the easiest banks to break into were name and shamed, for example—do you think it would be helpful, in terms of prevention, if we published that data? Banks will no doubt have that data.
Gloria Laycock: I think, in the short term, I would probably just share it privately with the banks, rather than publish it; it is a conversation. But yes, that is just an example of a lever. If you judge that the people—let’s say the banks, or another agency—are competent to do something and to change the situation so as to reduce the opportunities for crime, you need to work out how best to lever them. You might only have to ask, but they are not going to do it if you haven’t got any evidence, so you need to be able to evidence your request.
Q47 Naz Shah: We interviewed Twitter, Facebook and Google a few weeks ago as part of a different inquiry. One of the things that is coming across is the rise in hate crime and cybercrime, etc. In terms of our response in policing all of that, one of the things I am thinking about is that we have policing being paid for at events. I will put this to the next panel as well. We have football, arenas and music events being policed. Do you see any mileage in developing something where, rather than us putting resources in, the likes of Google, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook and Microsoft should be paying for policing? Events pay for it; why would that not work with cybercrime?
Gloria Laycock: Because they are not the victims. If awful things happen at events, people stop going to the events, so it is in the event managers’ interests to make sure that they are policed properly. As for Google and most of those, I love the internet; I am very aware of all the problems with it, but it is not going to stop me using it, because I just do.
Q48 Naz Shah: As a result of the session we had a few weeks ago, highlighting that Google were making money on certain adverts, advertisers have pulled back on that. So it is in their interest, isn’t it?
Andromachi Tseloni: Indeed, yes. If we have a list of safe search engines, it is in their interests to make their search engines safe, because they get money from advertising, as you said. If people try to avoid them if they are not safe, they will try to make it safer.
Tim Newburn: At the risk of controversy, I’d say that they should pay their taxes, and then you should continue to pay for policing.
Q49 Naz Shah: We have talked about changing crime. I met with my deputy chief constable, John Robins, only yesterday, in Yorkshire. What he was telling me about the change in crime patterns was also about terrorism. Obviously, we have had a recent incident. Have you done any research around that trend, in terms of the finances and energies of policing going towards that? There is cybercrime, there is CSE and then there is terrorism. Have you any thoughts on that?
Gloria Laycock: In terms of priorities?
Naz Shah: Not priorities. Policing is changing. What I am thinking is that there is an increase that is half and half cybercrime—we have touched on that—but there is also an increase in terrorism and that threat to us and to security and community safety. How do you see that panning out, in terms of future policing? Because it is impacting, isn’t it? All of these cuts are impacting. Ms Laycock, you touched earlier on authorities being cash-strapped and police having to do things that they wouldn’t normally do.
Gloria Laycock: I do not want to be complacent about terrorism, but it is very focused. I don’t think it is the case that anyone is suggesting the whole of England is at risk of a terrorist attack. It is focused, so the Metropolitan police are particularly exercised about it. The major conurbations would be, but Norfolk, Devon and Cornwall? Again, it is about targeting effort. You can’t suggest every police force in the country has got to put an equal amount of effort into counter-terrorism, if by that you mean collecting evidence on suspicious people and so on. They might all be doing something on countering radicalisation, which is a slightly different matter. But you have to invest in proportion to the problem on the ground.
Q50 Stuart C. McDonald: First, a quick question on police recording of crime. A couple of years ago, there was quite a public spat about the fact that something like 20% of crimes reported to the police were then not recorded as crimes by the police. Has the subsequent focus on more accurate recording resulted in what you might perceive as an improved service for victims of crime, or increased satisfaction with the service they get from police officers? Has it made any difference to how victims of crime feel the service is operating?
Andromachi Tseloni: In my view, it has gone the opposite way. The new requirement that burglaries of sheds and outbuildings be crimes has seen a massive increase in recording and administrative work by the police. That does not even match the crime survey for England and Wales definition of burglary with entry. It went the other way, and a lot of police time is now spent on recording. In my view, the service for victims should be judged by the victim satisfaction surveys. Those are now done locally by each police force, but that is a huge waste of resources. It should go back into the crime survey for England and Wales questionnaire, with increased sample sizes that are representative within each police force.
Q51 Stuart C. McDonald: Are there upsides to the increased focus on recording? Does it give us a more accurate picture of how the police are spending their time, or is it simply, as it sounds, increasing bureaucracy?
Gloria Laycock: Recording and reporting crime are just measures of the demand on the police; they are not better or worse measures of crime. A better way to measure crime is the crime survey for England and Wales. There is still a gap between what is recorded by, or reported to, the police and the crime survey data.
There is too long a chain between the happiness, if you like, of the victim and the recording: “I don’t really care how they record; I want something done, or I want to have them explain it to me.” For me, whether something is recorded or not is not really the issue if I am the victim.
Q52 Stuart C. McDonald: But recording is more likely to lead to something being done as a result.
Gloria Laycock: I don’t think that’s necessarily the case.
Q53 Stuart C. McDonald: I have one final question, which goes back to the balance in workload between crime and non-crime. There are two possible theories. Obviously, there are circumstances where it is important for police to get involved in issues that others might see as social work, safeguarding or mental health work. Some have suggested that it is because of defensive policing attitudes. People are worried that if they do not get involved in, say, safeguarding, something will occur that ends up with the finger of blame being pointed at the police. Another theory is that the police are having to pick up the pieces because other services are simply strapped for cash. To what extent do either of those factors come into the shift in the burden of workload?
Andromachi Tseloni: From experience on the Nottingham Crime and Drugs Partnership board, that is very much so for the mental health service. The police have to fill the gaps that another reduced service—say, for the elderly—is creating. People are going missing quite often. It is the police’s job to look for them if they are at risk of harm, but it is not the police’s job to look for people who go missing because they don’t have proper care.
Tim Newburn: I am going to disagree vehemently with that view, for once. Absolutely it is the job of the police to look for missing people. That is central to the mission of the all-purpose emergency service that is the police service.
I would say the jury is still out on changes in the burden of workload. I am sure the nature of the workload is changing, because of demands and new things coming about and so forth, crime and non-crime, but the police service has always been a service that spends a huge proportion of its time doing things that we might broadly think of as non-crime. That is still the case. My view is that it always ought to be the case, because there are really significant issues of legitimacy tied up with that broader mandate that the police service holds.
I also slightly disagree with my colleagues on the recorded crime issue. If I had to pick one of the two, I too would pick the crime survey for England and Wales as the preferred measure of crime, but I actually think that living in a world in which you have two measures is better than living in a world in which you have one, for a number of reasons. It is partly because they enable you to look across from one to the other; that is very important. Secondly, I think people care locally about what the police service is doing. Recorded crime is one way of thinking about what the local constabulary is doing, either within a neighbourhood or a community, or more broadly across the whole constabulary. There will perhaps be issues about how much time and effort is put into recording, but I frankly think it is something that we should be taking really seriously. It is central to the police service mission.
Q54 Byron Davies: Richard Mayne, in 1824, when he set up the Metropolitan police, said that “The primary object of an efficient police is the prevention of crime: the next that of detection” and prosecution of the offender. Given that we live in a world of child exploitation and cybercrime, do you think that still stands good?
Gloria Laycock: I think it’s more complicated than it might have seemed in his day. We know now that the police themselves cannot do much to prevent crime. It is other agencies and organisations that control the levers that facilitate crime, if you like. What the police can do in relation to crime prevention is promote it—encourage people to lock their doors and take simple measures like that. But they can also—I come back to it—collect the data that will be needed to get action out of those people who are competent to do something about it. It is a really important message because, for example, when the internet of things becomes ubiquitous, it is going to cause huge crime problems, and the police won’t be able to do anything about it. Those solutions need to be built into the systems in the first place. The police can push for that; they can lever it, action for it, and scream and yell about it.
Coming back to the business about police priorities, I don’t think that is the right question to ask, if I may say so. I would ask the police, “What is your strategy for dealing with crime and calls for service, to broaden it out? What are you doing about crime and calls for service? How are you dealing with it? Where are you placing your priorities and why?” In other words, “What is your strategy, senior officer, for dealing with these issues?” It is not a matter of saying “Cybercrime is more important than child sex abuse,” or “This is more harmful than that”. It is, “What are you doing with the resources you have, given the changing world we are all faced with? What is your plan?”
Q55 James Berry: The Government used to set national targets for policing, and more recently, we have moved to local targets, particularly set through the PCC. In London, we have the MOPAC 7, and that is how the Metropolitan police are judged, primarily. I want to ask how you think police effectiveness should be measured in the future. For brevity, I will ask Professor Newburn, given that I know you have just published a book called “How People Judge Policing”.
Tim Newburn: I don’t know the answer to the question—[Interruption.] Just for a change; thank you. But I don’t think policing should be measured by targets. The unintended consequences of targets, as we well know in all sorts of services, including universities, are just too great.
How people judge policing, though, is that they disagree. Fundamentally, in a sentence, what that book says is that if you ask people what they have seen when they are watching a police officer do their duty—use their powers in some way—they don’t agree with each other. Indeed, if you ask the same question of police officers, they don’t agree with each other. Fundamentally, then, what it says is that policing is naturally a contested thing, around which we will always have conflict.
In terms of what we do, I think that how you think about priorities and how you measure policing goes back to the conversation we were having before, which is that you allow all those things. You think about crime harms and whether they are going up or down. You think about volumes and whether they are going up or down. You think about public satisfaction and how that is measured and whether that is improving or not. You do all those things and try to think about it subtly, which is tough when you are standing for election, for example, as a PCC. I don’t think it is a simple one.
Andromachi Tseloni: Try to measure this away from police administrative data.
Chair: Thank you. I thank our first panel for giving evidence. I appreciate your time and your patience through our technological challenges as well.
Examination of witnesses
Witnesses: Katy Barrow-Grint, Tom Gash, Blair Gibbs and Dr Rick Muir.
Q56 Chair: I welcome our second panel to give evidence to us. This inquiry is to look at whether the police are equipped to deal with changing patterns of crime and public safety demands. Can I ask you in opening whether you think the police are equipped to deal with the changing patterns of crime and public safety that we have just been discussing, and if not, where you think the biggest gaps in capability are to meet those changing demands? Ms Barrow-Grint, do you want to begin?
Katy Barrow-Grint: May I start by offering my own tribute to PC Palmer from Thames Valley police? My colleagues there and I would like to say that we very much respect the fact he gave his life to protect us all. So thank you very much.
In relation to your question, for me policing is definitely changing. There are significant areas of hidden harm that we don’t see generally day to day in terms of the police work that we do. We have talked already about child abuse, but there are a number of other significant areas of business—for example, modern slavery, human trafficking, female genital mutilation, honour-based violence—where we are not understanding the full demands on us currently and perhaps do not have some of the skills that we might need in the future. Cybercrime is one of those.
I totally agree with the last panel in terms of the skill set, but I think we need to widen our thinking in terms of the skill set. You don’t necessarily need a police officer to investigate. We have police staff investigators. There are lots of members of police staff who are able to offer us skills that, perhaps, would complement the investigation of such crimes. So I think crime is changing; the organisation needs to change with that. Austerity is significant. We are looking at how we focus our demands differently going forward, where we put our resources and how we prioritise.
I think definitely the key for me is that we actually need to consider in every case the vulnerability of the person we are dealing with. I don’t think we can prioritise on the basis of a certain crime type. We can’t say we would always just deal with a certain offence per se. I think you need to look at the vulnerability of the person you are dealing with as a victim, but also the threat and the harm, the opportunity and the risk are key to everything we deal with, and we need to make sure that we reflect that in how we prioritise going forward.
Tom Gash: It is helpful to think of a few different comparisons across public services here, when we talk about the police coping with the current challenges that they face and the limited resources that they have. If we take a comparator very close by in terms of agencies that, in fact, used to be responsible for dealing with the same problems—if we look at the Prison Service and what’s going on there—we can see a service that took a 20% reduction in staff numbers, while having a stable level of demand in terms of number of prisoners, and we have had a dramatic increase in levels of self-harm, suicide and assaults on officers. That suggests that that is a situation where cuts have not been managed effectively enough to mean that the actual problem is still under control. Things are getting worse. Levels of rehabilitative activity in criminal justice overall have dropped rather dramatically.
The situation for the police is rather different, because the level of cuts that were experienced from 2010 to 2015 are somewhat different. There is about a 15% reduction in officer numbers and it is very variable across the country, so this is in very broad terms. They have had those cuts, but also now funding is more stable going forward, although, again, some forces will experience quite a strong pinch.
The question of what goes wrong in a system like policing when things are under strain and when there are many competing pressures is rather different and infinitely more complex than what goes wrong in a closed environment like a prison, but one would expect that, although the consequences are perhaps harder to find, they will exist in some capacity.
The truth is that the police are already taking many different prioritisation decisions each day and they always have done—even before austerity bit. The question I think we have to ask first is: what are we measuring to understand whether the service is still adequate?
HMIC provide our best measures in terms of understanding police force performance and effectiveness. Their assessments are actually that policing has broadly stood up pretty well in this situation, but in their last round of reports this year—2016—when they published their summary report, they raised a red warning flag and talked about an unreasonable rationing. I felt two things about that. One is that there are some serious concerns that the inspectorate is bringing out and we should take that seriously, but the second one is that we are talking about unacceptable rationing in police without having any idea of what it actually is and expecting forces to understand, force by force, what on earth that is.
For example, there is an excellent initiative in Northumbria which asks people who are victims of car crime what would suit them best in terms of responding to an incident: do they need a physical presence or do they want a different type of response, perhaps one that is dealt with virtually because the car has been found and so forth? The different responses you can take to dealing with car crime could save you four hours, eight hours, 12 hours, two days—there are lots of different types of work involved. Those two free days can be used for different work, maybe around preventing child sexual abuse or dealing with trafficking. It is an interesting example of prioritisation.
What we have not seen is any steer systematically nationally from the inspectorate or anybody else—or even PCCs, frankly—capable of having the public dialogue that says, “We are okay with this type or prioritisation—this looks like the sort of stuff we have to do. And this type of stuff is unacceptable and we are not willing to do it.” We need to have those conversations very explicitly and be a little bit braver about the choices that we make.
Blair Gibbs: This is a necessary inquiry and we have reached an interesting point. In the last Parliament, as the Committee will know, we had a very sustained period of budget reductions combined with a phase of police reform that was very much about structures, efficiency, value for money and accountability, and the most important of those reforms was police and crime commissioners.
I think we have now reached a quite important juncture where in fact having coped quite well with those budget reductions—I think HMIC are right in that conclusion—the anticipated reductions going forward are a bit better than was feared before the spending review in 2015, but many people in policing, in terms of both operations and policy, are getting worried about the squeeze, if you like: not just the resources going into policing but what happened in that five year period of the last Parliament. As Professor Laycock mentioned, there was a quite rapid shift in the crime demand on the police at the same time, and I do not think at the moment we have reached the point where the police themselves or policymakers have reached a consensus about whether or not the crime demand we have at the moment is being addressed adequately by the police and policing set-up we have.
That takes us very much straight to the long-standing question of the function of the police. When I was in a previous role in London, we wanted to try to start a public discussion about that, because there was clearly a whole lot of expectations going on about what the police should do, particularly with new types of crime, and there was a lack of any sense of parameters about the mission for the police. Of course, the police have always had a very complex, all-encompassing role, but there seemed to be certain activities that were either much bigger in scale now or that were just taking up much more time because of changes in technology, and we did not have enough information about what the public themselves really thought about the police’s function. So we had discussions about the form of policing—whether we should have a National Crime Agency or a different role for the inspectorate—but we did not have enough information or even simple surveys that tested whether or not the public were willing to prioritise, like the police themselves always do, between different types of crime.
Some of the research that we conducted in the Mayor’s office told us things that we needed to know about the public’s view on crime prevention, for example, being one of the most important roles for the police, and some of the new public safety or social protection functions that the police should do. When you ask the public, they are prepared to rank those and to say that this is more important than that activity. I still think we need a much bigger and more sustained public debate about that, because we have not yet got to a point where the police can deal with the squeeze that comes from this change in crime demand we heard about—falling budgets and very high public expectations.
Dr Muir: I think two things have happened, and policing is trying to catch up with both of those trends. One is the shift from the volume crime being local and taking place in the public realm, to crime taking place in the private realm, in intimate spaces and particularly affecting vulnerable people. The second shift is the one away from crime that can be locally managed within the boundaries of a police force, to crime that crosses borders. The internet is obviously the key driver of that.
The requirement on policing of those two shifts is that the police have to work much more effectively as part of wider systems. Locally, that means working across organisational borders. When dealing with high-harm crimes affecting very vulnerable people, they have to work with housing authorities, the health service and all sorts of local agencies much more effectively than has been done in the past. They have to break down the organisational borders. When it comes to cybercrime and the cross-border stuff, it is about working across geographic borders because crime has escaped the bounds of local crime control—in so far as we could ever really control it.
I think that asks very fundamental questions. It asks questions about data—do we understand this? Therefore, we need the data to help us deal with it. It asks questions about skills—do we have the skills to deal with these particular different things? It asks very fundamental questions about structure and organisation—are we organised to deal with this new kind of world? It seems to me to require policing becoming much more deeply integrated into the work of other public services at the local level to deal with the first category, and then policing across the country and across the UK being much more deeply integrated together, working as a network to tackle cross-border crime and working internationally.
The cutting edge on the investigative side in dealing with cyber and so on is Europol. If you look at the work that Europol is doing, it really is at the cutting edge of that kind of international law enforcement. Our future membership of Europol is, of course, now in doubt, and we will have to renegotiate our relationship with it.
That is what is required. It is no longer about 43 local forces being able to carry on in local silos or, if you like, regional and national silos. They need to work much more effectively as part of wider systems.
Q57 James Berry: When our current Prime Minister became Home Secretary, a little while ago now, she told police leaders, “I couldn’t be any clearer about your mission: it isn’t a thirty-point plan; it is to cut crime. No more, and no less.” I wonder whether that is still regarded by the police as its core mission. Do you think the public also regard that as the police’s core mission, or do both the police and the public think that the police’s core mission is something different?
Katy Barrow-Grint: I think that our core mission is that we are an emergency service. We are about preventing harm and protecting the vulnerable. For me, that is why I joined and I think it is why most people joined. Cutting crime is part of that, but being able to look after people in the hour of their greatest need and provide a good service is why I joined the police and why many of my colleagues have done so. So, it is wider than just simply cutting crime.
I think that there are differing public expectations. The public are gaining more understanding of the fact that crime, and the way we deal with it, is changing. Generally, the public would like to see police officers on the street—there is no doubt about that—and we keep neighbourhood policing fundamental to part of the way we deal with our communities. I actually think that the work that we do behind the scenes—dealing with cybercrime and hidden crime—is extremely important as well, so it is much wider than simply just cutting crime.
Tom Gash: I completely agree. However, I think that the Home Secretary was trying to makes quite an important point, which is that the goal of reducing crime—going back to Peelian principles and beyond—is very important. The truth is that the police sometimes struggle to prioritise preventing and reducing crime, because the demand that presents to them is acute, and the response that they are most familiar with is investigation.
When a set of burglaries happens in a certain place, the natural, default question is, “Who did it?”, rather than, necessarily, “What can we do to prevent this happening in future to other communities?” The unfortunate answer is that they need to do both, and when they are actually asked to do both, what do they actually do? I think there is something very important and fundamental that we mustn’t lose sight of in what the Home Secretary was saying, but the truth is that we need to think much more broadly about the role of the police.
However, in the context of Rick’s point, the important question—which we are not asking at the moment but which other cities, states and geographies have asked themselves—is how we allocate different, complex demands from the public to the people who are best placed to help them with their problem. If I have a neighbour shouting next door, is it a mental health problem? Is it a domestic violence incident? Is it a party? All of those different questions come through, and at the moment we are not encouraged to ask those questions. When the call comes out, it is often misallocated across the system, because you call 999 and get a police response, but the police say it is actually someone who is mentally ill so they call the ambulance.
We know that first contact with police is negative, in terms of mental health outcomes, so we need to think much more intelligently about how we allocate the various public service resources to the different calls for service that come in. The famous system in New York is the 311 non-emergency number that will take a call from somebody and try to triage it much more effectively to the service that best suits them, but it will also collect data and information about those cases—how well they have been followed up and how well victims and caller are satisfied. That is fundamentally important, because we need to start to track things like the impact.
Is there actually a lot of demand for social service-type services out of hours? At the moment, if someone calls up and does not get a response, they leave a message. Anecdotally, the police will always tell you that if only we had more social workers on at a particular time, we would not have to deal with this particular call-out from this particular community all of the time.
We need a data-based, evidence-based view of that and to have conversations across agencies about how we can most effectively deal with the particular problems of a community in an area. At the moment, I don’t think there are really the mechanisms to drive that. Some police and crime commissioners are being quite proactive and pushing for that sort of role and that sort of conversation, and I think that is really promising, but there is still a long way to go before we are actually having that conversation, unfortunately.
Katy Barrow-Grint: May I give an example, just on your point in relation to mental health and the way we deal with it? In Thames Valley police, we have something called mental health street triage. We currently have a police officer and a mental health nurse crewed together in a police car, going out to deal with those initial calls that seem like they may have a mental health issue connected to them. That has meant that that initial contact is not just with a police officer and people do get that medical care that they need.
We have also managed to reduce the number of section 136 of the Mental Health Act 1983 dealings that we have had, and we are actually getting people the right support that they initially need. They may need a police officer because there may be issues of violence. I just think that the evidence is there, we are starting to gather it and different forces are starting to do different things. It is just about collating that and finding out what works best.
Tom Gash: To extend Katy’s point further, this is not just about allocating public service resources more intelligently; it is actually about allocating individuals within the police service. What has changed over the last 50 years is that the idea of the omni-competent police officer is simply no longer tenable. Frankly, police standards have risen so much in dealing with different types of crime and situation that they can no longer really be a specialist in terrorism plus dealing with victims of domestic violence. There is more knowledge now and there is more breadth in the work, because they are taking on the private crimes through to cybercrime. One of the big gaps is in how the police service—I wonder what the chiefs, PCCs and others are telling you about this—can segment their workforce and put the specialists against the specialist tasks that they should be performing.
Blair Gibbs: To the point about the speech by the Home Secretary at the time, I think that was a deliberate piece of rhetoric that was designed to correct a kind of complacent assumption in parts of academia, actually, and among some of the police leadership, that assumed that conventional volume crime was not something that the police, by their own actions, could do much about and that they should devote time to a simple public confidence exercise or some sort of harm-minimisation social work.
What the Home Secretary was trying to do, through that speech and subsequently through police reforms, was to say, actually, there are now quite a lot of examples, in the research and elsewhere, that well-targeted, well-deployed policing can be quite effective at crime reduction, that it can be sustained and does not just displace offending. The police were, if you like, being encouraged to rediscover that kind of core mission. Where it did not take us was to the obvious next lower-down level, around what do we mean by cutting crime? Do we just mean prevention, or do we mean more efficient reaction to the crime after it has occurred? That is where we still lack clarity of the mission.
Ask the public what they want the police to do and crime prevention still scores more highly than anything else, closely followed by the sort of traditional arrest, detection and prosecution of offenders. It is helpful to hold that in mind, but also to consider how that is then applied to the crimes we are dealing with today.
A couple of submissions to the inquiry so far, from Barry Loveday from Portsmouth University and Chief Constable Creedon, have both talked about the growth of cybercrime and how, despite being a very difficult crime to get a handle on, in terms of the traditional approach of detection, arresting offenders and prosecuting them, it is actually a type of volume crime that lends itself quite well to prevention efforts.
The police do need to get better at preventing a volume crime type that did not exist 20 years ago. For that, they need more support, more skills and new ways of partnering with the private sector. But I do not think we should jettison the idea of crime prevention, or say that crime prevention is largely somebody else’s job and the police should be there just to react in an emergency.
Dr Muir: I didn’t agree with the statement that the then Home Secretary made about the role being about cutting crime; nothing more, nothing less. Cutting crime is part of the police role, clearly, alongside other people, but it is also about emergency response, public protection, maintaining order, protecting the vulnerable and so on. That is not new. The breadth of the role has been built in from the very beginning, and if you talk to the public, the public understanding and expectation of the police is very broad.
If you called the police because you saw an incident in the street involving someone who might have mental health problems and they said, “Call the NHS; we are not dealing with that because it is a mental health issue,” I think the public would find that extraordinary. They expect the police, as an emergency service, to come out and deal with incidents where they fear that harm may be caused to someone, even if a crime is not being committed. Egon Bittner, the sociologist, described the police role as being about responding to the statement, “Something is happening now that ought not to be happening and about which something needs to be done.” In a sense, it is almost as simple as that. It is intrinsically broad.
I never agreed with people who said, “Let’s work out what the police can stop doing.” It was the sort of thing that everyone said at the time when austerity began in 2010. People said, “We need to save money; what can they stop doing? Stop attending missing people; stop dealing with these problems.” If they started doing that, police legitimacy would corrode pretty quickly. If the public were ringing up about these things and the police said, “We’re not dealing with that any more,” I think we would have a real problem.
What you need instead is for public services as a whole to work together and collaborate much more effectively. Easy to say, hard to do, but that, it seems to me, is the solution. If you want to reduce the demand you have to have the kind of work we are talking about with mental health street triage; you have to have the kind of integrated working to prevent problems happening in the first place.
It is intrinsically broad. The police have to work with others so it is understood whose skills are best placed to deal with a particular problem. That is a 24/7 emergency response service. I don’t think you can just say, “We’re not going to turn up for that category of incident.”
Q58 Mr Winnick: Chief Inspector, let me take you back to what you told the Committee, which is that you joined the police force because you wanted to help vulnerable people. If the point was made to you that, yes, you can help vulnerable people—other Members, Dr Muir and Mr Gibbs were talking about that—but that the first and foremost function of the police should be to combat criminality, what would be your response?
Katy Barrow-Grint: I think they are complementary. People who are vulnerable are very often the ones who have crimes committed against them. Everybody has their individual reasons for joining the police. For me personally, it was to make sure I can do my very best for society and help vulnerable people in their time of need. If you ask any police officer, they will all say something slightly different. Yes, it is about cutting crime; yes, it is about protecting people from harm; yes, it is about dealing with vulnerability. I don’t think those things have gone away in my service, and I don’t think they will ever go away.
Q59 Mr Winnick: You should have given that answer at the interview—they decided fortunately to accept you. That is highly commendable. Perhaps there are those who think that fighting criminality would be the first wish of someone wishing to join the police force, and clearly they would be wrong.
This issue arises from some of the points made earlier. The chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, Sara Thornton, said recently that the police are being increasingly used as a safety net. She went on to say that often public services are not available or are not easily available after, say, 4 o’clock on a Friday. She clearly implied that the police are taking on work that is, to a large extent, the responsibly of the obvious organisations connected with helping people. What would be your view about that? Do you think that what your colleague said is more or less so?
Katy Barrow-Grint: I think there will always be examples of that. We are a 24/7 emergency service, and people will always ring the police. If they can’t get hold of other partner agencies, sometimes we are the people they call to help them with their problems. The important thing is to work with partners. In terms of austerity, we need to shrink together. We need to work out who has what responsibility for what area of business. There is something about collaborating properly, and there is something about understanding the different skills of the partnership—what healthcare can do and what social services can do. We have to make sure the right information is available. Sometimes the problem is that people don’t know who to turn to. They don’t know that there are out-of-hours services, so the police services then becomes the call taker to help them find the right person to talk to.
Q60 Mr Winnick: Do you think it continues to be the case—it certainly is in my experience and, I assume, that of my colleagues—that our constituents, to a very large degree, see the police being around as a form of safety measure, even if criminality is not obvious or likely to be much of a problem? The very presence of police officers gives a sense of security to residents. Do you think that view prevails generally, as in previous years?
Dr Muir: I think the public certainly do think that. All the polling evidence shows that when you ask how we should improve the police service and what people want, a visible uniform presence on the street always comes out top. I think there is probably a connection to social change in that, in the sense that as society has changed and become more anonymous—particularly in towns and cities, people don’t know each other and the sense of community is weakened—people want to see figures of authority in the public realm. In a funny sort of way, even though we have seen a decline in volume crime, we have seen a rise in the demand for that traditional function. People take comfort from seeing a visible uniform presence in the street. I think that is certainly the case, and I don’t see that changing. I think the question for the police service is, how do you resource that while dealing with all the issues we have been talking about—cybercrime and so on? How do you maintain the neighbourhood presence that the public think is the absolute bedrock? How do you make best use of it to deal with the kind of problems that we have been talking about—hidden harm, preventing cybercrime? How can our neighbourhood officers be deployed more effectively to deal with these kinds of new threats?
Q61 Mr Winnick: If the police are to be seen, as we all recognise they should be, as representative of the community that they serve and of the very different Britain from the time of PC Dixon or PC 49—just shows my age, though colleagues around the table will know what I am talking about—have they committed enough effort to recruit people who are not white, as they did females? Have they done sufficient as a whole to recruit people who are not white?
Blair Gibbs: First, I echo the point that Rick made about the importance of neighbourhood policing. I do not think we should get trapped, by the way, in thinking that there is a kind of settled consensus around the impact of the beat bobby, which is to say, “Not very much impact, but it is nice to have; the public want it, so it should be provided.” Actually, the most recent research from Cambridge is that if you do a randomised control trial on this, and they have finally done that, it tells us that in fact it is not just something that people have a very strong emotional attachment to; it is something that is now proven to work quite effectively to prevent crime. That is the first thing.
Secondly, the challenge is that when it comes to the most important resource that the police have, which is their own people, who absorb most of their budget, we definitely now are in the territory of thinking, “How do we sweat the assets?” essentially. How do we make sure that everyone who is deployed into a patrol or a neighbourhood function is not just there for reassurance, but there equipped with the tools and the insight to be in the right place at the right time, and with the mobility—the boring old issue of police IT—to make their shift the most productive that it can be, by having the means to operate outside the station through mobile devices, drawing down intelligence and data they need to be effective.
We coined the term of the “digital Dixon”, which is a bit corny, but, basically, the attachment to the idea of Dixon is important, yet we cannot have police officers continuing to be hamstrung by poor IT, so that they cannot actually be as smart and as preventive in the community as we need them to be because they are forever going back to the police station to spend hours trying to log on to a Windows 7 there.
Q62 Mr Jayawardena: Some of you may have heard me speak to the previous panel, asking for their thoughts on how policing priorities should be driven. I will come back to you in a moment, Chief Inspector, but in the view of the other panel members, what should be the process to determine priorities and direct resources on that spectrum between public opinion and robust evidence?
Dr Muir: It’s a mix of those things. You need an objective—or as objective as you can get—assessment of harm in order to asses where to focus your resources. You need public input into policing priorities, which is clearly the rationale behind police and crime commissioners. You then also need some assessment at the national level of the strategic requirement, because if you ask people in a local area what the priorities should be, they will not say, “Cybercrime and fraud,” by and large, which is why those things feature very little in police and crime plans—they are getting better, but there is very little in them. That is why we have the strategic policing requirement, but the question with that is whether it is robust enough.
One of the concerns when PCCs came in—I support local accountability, and there have been many benefits—is this danger of increased parochialism. What has happened with fraud and cybercrime is an example of that. We are very confused about whether that should be a priority at all, and whose priority it should be. There is a need for a national look at the whole system there, which is to say: local forces do not prioritise it, because they think, “Well, what can we do about it? We can’t catch people sending us emails from halfway across the world.” They probably could do something on prevention, but that is not seen as a big strategic focus for them locally. So it is a mixture of objective assessments of harm, public priorities and, I think, the need for some national strategic look at, particularly, this cross-border stuff and to what degree we think that the role of the police should be to respond to it.
Q63 Mr Jayawardena: I have had an answer that there should be some elements that are looked at nationally and strategically. But I have not yet got an answer on the level of regard, other than “a mix between public opinion and robust evidence”. Mr Gibbs, would you like to give an answer? Mr Gash?
Blair Gibbs: We have a way of defining local priorities, which I would argue gives more clarity than we had before with police authorities. Elected police and crime commissioners now try to do that. I agree with Rick that it is a mixed bag. Some have tried to spell that out within their police and crime plans, not just in terms of everything being a priority and we want to be safe, but actually saying—in some places more effectively than others—that there is a choice, that crime is changing and we need to prioritise.
I think if you look at police and crime plans as a whole, although they are designed to be read by the public and it is important that the public can read and understand them, they are trying to set a strategic direction for their local police force. That won’t be the same everywhere. There will be crime demand in places such as London or Manchester or Bristol that presents the police locally with different challenges to a rural area such as Norfolk or Suffolk.
So it is no surprise that those plans would look different. But I think that there are increasing partnerships between, for example, police forces and universities, which did not really exist in the same way five or 10 years ago. Those are helping the police then translate that objective of, “This is the crime problem we want to solve,” to an evidence base about what actually works and how we do it.
Q64 Mr Jayawardena: So you are more on the side of evidence driving how police should do their work, less on the public opinion side.
Blair Gibbs: I think public opinion now has a conduit to frame the local priorities, because you have an elected PCC, but the idea that that is enough—no. After that, you now have the police with partnerships with academia, where they can draw upon the research and the evidence—where it exists—to help shape an operational response. The truth is that in lots of these areas, particularly new crime patterns that are emerging, we do not know enough about what works. So it is good to be committed to the evidence base, but we should also acknowledge that in some areas it is quite weak.
Q65 Mr Jayawardena: Mr Gash, could you take those points on and perhaps take it on a further step? Is the public wrong about what makes them feel safe? What other witnesses have said is that the evidence shows these things and those are the things that the police should do, quite apart from what the public feel.
Tom Gash: I think the public’s immediate response to certain questions is not always what the evidence will tell you is the right thing to do. Instinctively, people believe that tough sentences will have a big deterrent effect. It turns out that that they tend not to.
Q66 Mr Jayawardena: While someone’s locked up, they can’t commit a crime to the rest of society, can they?
Tom Gash: There is a sort of incarceration effect. If they are not, for example, dealing drugs, they are not necessarily going to be replaced. If they are involved in illegal markets where there is high demand, you would expect almost one-to-one replacement around those particular crimes.
Q67 Mr Jayawardena: We can lock them up as well. That is another matter.
Tom Gash: Then you keep going and keep going and keep going.
Q68 Mr Jayawardena: It creates jobs.
Tom Gash: It does create jobs for our prison officers, of which we can’t recruit any. So it is interesting strategy if you want to pursue it.
The truth is that the prioritisation decisions are incredibly complex and difficult, but in my view there are ways in which they should be made. First, they should be based on the total harm and potential harm that is caused—that is one criteria—and, secondly, on the potential to reduce that harm, which is the effectiveness of your interventions.
Now, your question is whether the level of total harm that I am worried about somehow conflicts with public priorities and public concerns. I think that it is probably false to say that the public don’t want you to deal with things that are high harm problems. I think they generally are focused on harm. They have their own understanding and definitions and so we should be careful how we measure harm and how we think about it, but often they overlap to a great degree.
On effectiveness, the problem at the moment, frankly, is that when we talk about prioritisation, too often we are talking about prioritisation of response and investigation, not of all policing activity. So when you say, “Are you going to prioritise sexual offences?” that means, “Are we going to investigate all of the sexual offences that come to our attention, whether they are minor or not?” not, “Are we actually going to think about the problem of child sexual exploitation in the round and try to come up with preventive approaches?”
The big problem facing policing at the moment is that the situational crime prevention approaches that have worked, predominantly, for vehicle crime and burglary are not as well studied and understood for these domains of private crime and online crime. We have good reason to think that we can apply similar tools and approaches, but we lack the data infrastructure, the evidence infrastructure and, frankly, the existence of people within our system who have responsibility for the problem and for solving it, in a way that will hold us back in making progress on these areas. Therefore, we need to think about prioritisation in terms of tackling the problem at source, preventing the problem and reducing the harm, because that is where you’re going to get your most cost-effective interventions. If you can reduce car crime by a sixth, that is a dramatic reduction. You could not have done that just by arresting your way out of that problem.
Q69 Mr Jayawardena: Chief Inspector, could you sum up on this point and perhaps provide us with any thoughts you have on the way that the public could be better educated about the real risks they face and the real level of crime, and what the police are doing about that to help people fear less going out into their community?
Katy Barrow-Grint: I go back to Mark Moore, an academic who worked on public value. There are two sides: what do the public value, and what adds value to the public? They are quite different, quite often, and sometimes do not cross over. We have to be careful when we are talking about prioritisation. I go back to the fact that it should not necessarily be about the crime type; it is about the threat, the harm, the risk and the vulnerability.
In terms of what the police are doing to allow the public to understand what their risk is, some of it is about changing behaviours and making people understand things that can be done differently. An example of the stuff we have done in Thames Valley police is our “Consent is everything” campaign, which you may have seen. It focused on having a cup of tea and said that how you make a cup of tea relates to how you get consent for sexual activity. That has gone down really well in terms of allowing the public to understand and educate themselves about obtaining consent. For us, that reduces activity in terms of sexual assault.
Another thing we have done in terms of prevention—you will have seen it; indeed, it created a debate here in Parliament—is our work on the fatal four. I am talking about driving while using a mobile phone. We had some footage of a lorry on the A34 that crashed and killed a number of people. That footage has reached over 7 million people on social media, who have watched it. It is about engaging with the public. While it might not be about saying, “These are the things that are going to affect you: child sexual abuse,” and this, that and the other, it is about saying, “Here are some examples of things that can help you to change your behaviour and help yourselves in terms of crime prevention.” It is a question of thinking about it differently.
Q70 Mr Jayawardena: That is very interesting. I wonder if I can lead you into a new area, Chief Inspector. HMRC—
Katy Barrow-Grint: HMIC.
Mr Jayawardena: HMIC. We are so used to talking about the other one, which has a great track record. HMIC stated recently that neighbourhood policing is being eroded as a result of workforce reductions. How have you in Thames Valley, as chief inspector for local policing, effectively dealt with the high-risk serious offenders, who need to be dealt with, while maintaining the neighbourhood presence? I wonder if you can add colour to that on the urban-rural divide. There are great differences between different parts of your Thames Valley area.
Katy Barrow-Grint: Yes, Thames Valley is three counties, so we have cities and very rural areas. We have looked at our neighbourhood officers, and it has been quite clear that they have been taken away from some of the work we would want them to do to cover our response demand. The work I am currently involved in is on changing our operating model and how we use our response staff, our investigative staff and our neighbourhood staff. Essentially, we are creating neighbourhood problem-solving teams. Our expectation is that they work with partners really closely to do early intervention work in particular.
For many crime types, the earlier we can invest in people and families and the earlier we can spot crimes and try to prevent them from happening, the better. Key to our work is giving our neighbourhoods that safety net—a word we have used before—to ensure they are able to deal with those neighbourhood issues. Neighbourhoods are critical. If you want information or intelligence on terrorism or serious organised crime, it is our PCSOs and our officers on the street who are dealing with families day in, day out who will get that information for us. It all links up into the higher crime areas.
Q71 Mr Jayawardena: But is policing a vocation today?
Katy Barrow-Grint: That is a completely different area of business.
Mr Jayawardena: I ask that because one local councillor from my constituency wrote to me, as the Chairman knows, and said, “Rural communities are the target of criminals. Our beat officer understood that rural policing is proactive not reactive. His objective, which he achieved, was to raise the profile of the police across his beat area so that he could better protect the area by working with the community and send out a message to those who continually see the rural areas as vulnerable and rich pickings.” If policing is not a vocation, police officers are not going to do the job he does, which is to get up at two in the morning when his phone rings.
Katy Barrow-Grint: I think they will. I absolutely think that policing is a vocation, and I think I have demonstrated that it is for me and always will be. Anybody who joins the police must have that understanding about what the police role is. There are new ways in which the police force is transforming in terms of workforce: there are new ways of getting people to join the service, be that direct entry at superintendent or inspector level, and other methods, such as Police Now. There are different ways to engage our communities to get them to join us, and I think because we are using those different methods, those people are part of our communities and therefore have a vested interest in doing exactly what you have explained.
Q72 Byron Davies: To go back to the previous conversation and some of the points that you made, Mr Gash, do you think the police do enough to work with industry and design out crime?
Tom Gash: In my view, quite a bit more could be done. The real challenge is that that talks to structures, because when you are creating your police and crime plans at force level, some of the big crime prevention approaches that involve working with industry are best done at a national level. Of course you could do stuff with local shops, licensed premises and so forth, and broadly that is one of the great success stories of the last 10 years in policing, because that has been done much better.
Q73 Byron Davies: I take it that involves town planning.
Tom Gash: Exactly. On the more systemic level, the question for me has always been who is responsible. At the moment, a question for the Committee to ask the Home Office, the APCC and other national institutions, including HMIC, is who do we expect to do that and who is leading on the specific issues? If there is no one in charge, it is the age-old principle that you are unlikely to see rapid progress on the problem. It will be a collaborative and open effort, and it needs to be, but it is very important that someone can say that they are driving this. That leadership probably needs to come from ministerial level as well.
Q74 Byron Davies: But surely this should have been done by now, don’t you think?
Tom Gash: There are conversations ongoing and work is being done. The question is the level of energy and push through when you talk about online fraud in the banks, for example. Some banks will give you two-step security when you are dealing with them, so you will not just have to enter one PIN code on your little magic chip, but you will also get a text. There are different techniques and tools used, and some have gone further than others. The banks have done that because they have a threshold of acceptable loss for which they are willing to cover their consumers. We must ask ourselves whether we are happy for that to continue when we know that people are profiting from that acceptable level of loss and whether we realise that the banks may not be investing as much as they could in the security and technology solutions and in educating their consumers in terms of what they can do to protect themselves online.
That brings us to the second question that this national effort should be focused on. Often we are talking about achieving national, cultural and behavioural change, so if you are talking about vulnerable older people using the internet securely, we need to have a set of interventions that can help people to change their behaviour and protect themselves online. The problem at the moment is that we have all these sophisticated rules, procedures and evidence-based practices operating in various different parts of policing, but when it comes to anything that is to do with behaviour change, we tend to say, “Oh, let’s do a mail shot”, or “We’ll do an ad campaign”. Sometimes there is a little bit more rigour behind it than that, but too often we default to very lazy approaches when actually there is a huge emerging science around how we change behaviour. We should use measurement techniques to work out whether the money that we are investing in those interventions is actually working. We need more responsibility taken and leadership at a national level, and then a more scientific, rigorous approach to solving the problems.
Blair Gibbs: That question is not asked enough. Politicians and policy makers need to be much more explicit about the ask of private industry across the board, whether it is the public safety concerns about what happens online or, as you said, the more parochial issue of a town planning department thinking about the impact of or the public safety infrastructure that you need for a giant Westfield mall in Croydon, for example.
In terms of a police force like the Metropolitan Police, which, when I was in the Mayor’s office, was closing many buildings, thinking about where the demography of the capital was changing, where the growth was happening, and where they were planning their infrastructure and new police deployment centres and new custody suites, something like a giant shopping centre in a borough such as Croydon is a direct question of public safety support for that development. The police sometimes find themselves having to barge into that conversation at the very earliest stage to even get the issue discussed, and there should be much more of an onus on the private sector to think about the implications for public safety and try to engage the police very early on. A lot of the solutions are practical, operational measures that the police have used in other areas and which can be lifted and put in place.
Q75 Byron Davies: Somebody has to take the lead on this and make sure it happens.
Blair Gibbs: Yes.
Dr Muir: I think there are two ends of it. One, as people have said, is that there is a local police role in prevention around things like fraud. With people who are repeatedly targeted for fraud, there is the so-called suckers list, which is available on the dark net and tells fraudsters who they should target. If you have that information, which many forces do because it is available on the dark net—it is available to the fraudsters and the police now have it—police forces should be able to know who the people in their area who are likely to be vulnerable to these attempts are.
Then there is the role of the police working with the voluntary sector and others to go round, perhaps door to door—this is a role for PCSOs and neighbourhood policing—talking to people who are likely to be repeatedly victimised by fraudsters. So there is a role there, but in terms of the national and the international levels, there is a massive role for Government in trying, whether in terms of regulation or persuasion—however it is done—to design out this crime at source.
There is another thing as well, which is that these big companies like Google are inventing all these whizzy and amazing things—you know, driverless cars—yet the amount of effort and investment that is going into doing things like preventing the sharing of images of abused children is minuscule in comparison. Nobody makes money out of that. We need to work together and massively uplift the effort because there is a danger that in 20 years’ time we will turn around and say, “How on earth did we allow the invention of the internet to become a free-for-all in terms of criminality?” That may mean more regulation. The internet is a hard space to regulate and it might be becoming harder to regulate the more decentralised it becomes. But I cannot see anyone other than the Home Office and national Government, working internationally with other countries, being the way to try to bring some influence to bear on the large companies that manage and operate the infrastructure of the internet. That is absolutely critical.
Q76 Byron Davies: Dr Muir, you have been talking about cross-border crime quite a lot. One of my frustrations when I was a police officer was exactly that. Would you agree that regional policing is the way forward in that case?
Dr Muir: The ship may have sailed on merging police forces, and, actually, that is probably not the right question. We could continue to have 43 forces but much greater collaboration at the regional level. We are seeing that in organised crime, and in back office stuff—not always in the same regions, incidentally. There is much more collaboration, but they need to go further. There is a big review going on around specialist capabilities like armed policing. That absolutely has to happen. You do not need to lose the individual forces but there does need to be much greater collaboration across forces. Sometimes that may need more of a push from the centre to make it happen. Austerity, in a funny sort of a way, was pushing people towards—
Q77 Byron Davies: But you will get resistance from chief constables.
Dr Muir: Yes, in these areas chief constables and PCCs need to pool sovereignty. They need to trade power for impact and club together to tackle some of the big challenges. That means that they will not be able to say no all the time to things that they do not want to do. They will have to have someone else managing a response to an incident and have it dealt with at a regional level. I think that is essential. We need a locally accountable system but for these cross-border issues, we need a much more robust system. At the moment it is up to PCCs and chief constables to decide whether they want to do that. We are making pretty slow progress in that regard.
Blair Gibbs: I think form follows function. Too often we get stuck in this cul-de-sac of whether 43 forces is the right number. I do not think many people would say that it is, but I do not think any of the solutions to some of the issues that we have talked about are magically solved by having nine regional police forces. That would keep us just in the narrow debate about whether that is more efficient and whether it delivers a bit more value for the taxpayer. It does not go to the question of whether, as a function, nine, 43 or 200 police forces are capable of dealing with—and have the capacity to deal with—modern crime demand.
Q78 Byron Davies: It is about resourcing cross-border policing. At the moment, chief constables who are parochial with their budgets are reluctant to spend the money crossing borders.
Blair Gibbs: That was the case some years ago. Since PCCs have come along, there has been a move in the other direction. People thought that PCCs would be even more wedded to the fiefdoms that were there before, but as you have seen in certain areas, such as the south-west, there has been more voluntary collaboration between forces. Rick talked about that level of regional specialist capability, which I know the NPCC is working on. Again, in terms of the form that would flow from that, if you reform where armed policing and other specialist functions should sit, there is no reason why the answer to the question, “Why 43?” should not be that there should be 150. If you have capability like that at a regional level, why should local policing be much more local? Why does Thames Valley police, for example, exist as a coherent unit? Because it was designed in the 1970s. The Thames Valley region is made up of three distinct counties. Devon and Cornwall are very different places with very different geographies. If you were worried not just about efficiency, but about local connection and accountability, you could make the argument that we don’t need 43 forces but that we need more, as long as we have the function resolved—about where that specialist capability sits.
Q79 Chair: Isn’t there a process for resolving that function? At the moment it involves a lot of decisions that go round and round in circles and have been doing so for a long time.
Blair Gibbs: Chair, you are right. The conundrum we have is that because we keep gravitating to the question of capability and regional forces, we are not paying enough attention to the benefits that might come from having more, smaller forces. The mechanism for that is difficult: it is either legislation through Parliament or allowing local areas to opt to de-federate, effectively. For example, some years ago the council in Cornwall talked about the benefits that would come to them from having a separate force, but as you say, getting there is not a simple process. I would rather that the debate about the future of policing put function before form. In a way, if you resolve some of those issues, you should allow the democratic process to play out and then you will end up with a different form at some point in the future.
Q80 Stuart C. McDonald: I will take you back to what influences policing priorities in England and Wales. There are a couple of things that ideally would not influence priorities, but that some say do. One or two of you have touched on police funding cuts, but if anybody else wants to chip in and say how that has affected police priorities, please do. Also, quite a few of the submissions that the Committee has received to this inquiry refer to a culture of blame in the police. Do any of you recognise that culture? Have the police become too risk-averse and if so, has that affected policing priorities?
Katy Barrow-Grint: I think we have moved on significantly as a service in terms of understanding when things go wrong and when there are failures and how we learn from them. If you look at Thames Valley police, we had Operation Bullfinch, which was this significant child sexual exploitation case in Oxford, and out of that we have learned significantly, both as a force and nationally. Following that, we introduced what we call the Kingfisher unit in Oxfordshire, which is a dedicated unit of police officers, health workers and social workers who all work together to look after young people who have been victims of child sexual exploitation. So we have learned significantly cross-partnership when we have had big failures.
There is a bit of a stigma about the hierarchy in terms of policing. Professor David Collinson at Lancaster University talks about “Prozac leadership”, and I think that often fits quite well into the police service. He talks about not being able to tell the truth to the hierarchy. We have to make sure that that is not the case and we learn to admit when mistakes have been made and take good learning from it. We are all human beings at the end of the day; mistakes are going to be made, but if we can change process or we can change the way that we think about things, I think we all learn from that.
Tom Gash: I am lucky enough to do work in a few different countries, and one of the things that I would say is distinctive about the UK at the moment is the extent to which the police service is talking about issues like mental health, stress and strain among the workforce and starting to be more open about those issues and trying to tackle them. That is one aspect of the blame culture that is knocking around. I think understanding the impact of a blame culture and bullying and the effect it has on your workforce, in terms of both their mental health and their effectiveness, is one of the routes into doing it. So I would say that progress is being made. Of course, you always hear stories that are contrary to that, too, so I cannot really give you an evidence-based view on what exactly has shifted in terms of blame culture in policing, but it seems that there has been some progress on one aspect of it, in terms of thinking about the workforce and their resilience.
Blair Gibbs: The impression that I have had in places like north America is that if you compare our model with those in Canada or parts of America, the civilian oversight that we have—the checks and balances that come from the inspectorate and the IPCC—gives a degree of regulation and investigation that I think should cultivate much more of a learning culture. We are lucky to have that. It is not perfect; the IPCC, despite its budget, does take too long to resolve investigations into officers. That is an issue around the cloud of suspicion that there is with that.
The Government’s plans around the office for police conduct are important. We will have to see how that plays out, but even the name is symbolic; we are talking not just about the importance of complaints against the police being investigated, but about conduct generally, and how that fits in with professionalism. We want people to be confident that they can police according to best practice and the law, and we want the public to have confidence that the police have a mechanism by which they are held to account. We take it for granted in this country that we have that, to a very large degree. There are ways of improving it, but we start from quite a good place.
Dr Muir: There are two aspects of this. One is blame at the force level, in terms of managerial and organisational culture. There have been improvements—changes in leadership styles and so on—and there is an awareness of bullying and a lot of these issues that perhaps was not there before, but there is still a long way to go. Policing has this traditional command-and-control culture. It may not be amenable to putting your hand up and saying, “I made a mistake. Can we all learn from it?” if you think you are just going to get blamed for something.
So there is a question about managerial and organisational culture, and then there is a specific thing about the IPCC and conduct cases. There is the issue about the length of investigations, which is clearly a big problem. There is also the issue that at the moment we have HMIC, which looks at police forces as organisations to work out how they are performing and so on, and then we have the IPCC, which deals with cases of individual officers and so on. If you are going to have organisational learning, what you really want is the learning from the individual cases to be used to benefit the wider system and organisation. There isn’t really a good enough feedback loop.
When we look at IPCC investigations into officer misconduct and so on, most academic evidence shows that there are often organisational reasons why accidents and misconduct in the workplace happen. We tend to focus very much on the individuals’ negligence or blame, but we need to look at that in an organisational context. There is probably too little of that, and the way the system is set up probably means that there is not enough learning from mistakes that are made.
I think that there is a question about how forces are managed, and a question about the role of the different institutions that are there—and are, quite rightly, independent of the police—to inspect when things go wrong. We need to make sure that when things go wrong, the lessons are fed back into the system, so that people can learn, and the system as a whole can improve. At the moment, it feels a bit like it is very focused on the individual, less so on the context, and less on how the system as a whole can improve. I think that we need to look at that.
Q81 Naz Shah: I have a few questions. First, I don’t know if you are aware that in this morning’s announcement, the Home Office said that it is going to look at opening up recruitment and potentially—this will go out to consultation next week—recruiting civilians into the role of chief constable. What are your views on that?
Dr Muir: As I understand the policy, I would not be in favour of it as it has been set out—that people could come straight into the role of chief constable. We do need a more porous police workforce, and people should be able to come in and out of policing more. It is interesting that Cressida Dick has come in as the commissioner of the Met and has spent some time out of the police service. I think that is a good thing; it is important for people to be able to go out and come back in. It is important that people can come in at a senior level, as we have seen with direct entry for superintendents, which is good. If we made more of that system, we would get more people coming in from the outside at that level, then getting more knowledge and experience of policing, and then putting themselves forward for chief constable positions. My concern about direct entry at the level of chief constable is whether they will have the operational knowledge and experience.
Some of the skills are management, leadership and HR skills—all those sorts of things that are quite generic, in a way. You might think that chief executives could come in from other areas and do those roles, but there is something about operational policing and the chief constable being accountable for a body of sworn officers. Ultimately, the chief constable has direction and control over those officers. That person has to have some knowledge and experience of policing in order to do that properly and to command the confidence of the workforce. That would be my concern about bringing people straight in at that level.
Q82 Naz Shah: How would you address the issue of us having had fewer than two applicants the last three times we have tried to recruit nationally at the chief constable level? Certainly, in West Yorkshire, we did not have anybody but the acting chief constable in the last three attempts to recruit new chief constables. We have not got many people waiting in the wings to take on the role of chief constable. How do you suggest the Government address that? It feels like this is a failure that is now catching up with us; the horse has bolted, and this is the response to it.
Dr Muir: I think that with the creation of PCCs, there is now a gap, in terms of the strategic management of recruiting leaders into the service, because it has been devolved to PCCs. That is right; PCCs should have the power to hire and fire the chief constable. However, we do need a system—this is probably something for the College of Policing—that ensures that the training is in place, that there is more mobility in the system, that people are applying for different roles, and that there is more specific training for chief constables in particular, which is a gap.
There is also a very specific issue about the pension and people not wanting to apply for senior roles because they are worried about losing tax benefits on their pension. The college recently did a survey, and that came out higher as an issue than the concern that if someone goes for it, the PCC will just appoint the local person. That is a concern—people think PCCs become quite close to the deputy, and that person gets the nod—but there is a specific technical issue about people’s tax benefits in relation to their pension that is stopping people going for promotion in policing. I think that is another issue that needs to be addressed.
Q83 Naz Shah: I will come to you all for a comment on this. We did an inquiry last year on diversity in the police force. We have not moved on, and it will be 20 years since Macpherson next year. Given your concerns and what you are saying now, the Prime Minister’s dream, when she was Home Secretary, of an increase in that 5.5% at senior level seems even more remote. That is a pressing and damning indictment of where the Government are on diversity in the police force.
Dr Muir: Yes. It goes back a long time, but there is a real need to open up more routes. Direct entry at superintendent level is a good policy. It has not been as well used as it might be, but it is a start. Clearly, increasing the diversity of the workforce as a whole needs to be a priority, and then people will rise through the ranks. My concern about direct entry at chief constable level is specifically about the need for knowledge and understanding of policing in order to carry out that role and command confidence. Police Now has very good rates of recruitment of BME candidates and female candidates. We need a more porous workforce; we need more routes in, rather than the traditional “start at the coalface and rise up”; we need a more diverse range of routes in.
Q84 Naz Shah: I want to challenge you on that. You say we need to get more recruits in, but our evidence in the past and our report has shown that that is not the issue. The issue is with the leadership. It appears that you are bringing the BME staff in and setting them up to fail, because the institution—the structure and the culture of the organisation—is not about diversity. It is not about fixing the black person, sending them on lots of courses and turning them into what we have. It is about accepting diversity, taking it up and having that reflected.
Blair Gibbs: I agree with Rick that it is important that the police service is made more porous. I have been a supporter of direct entry. I think there is a stronger case for it at the rank of inspector than at superintendent. I am not convinced at the moment that there is a case for direct entry at the highest rank of the service, for a number of reasons. What is in the papers today indicates that the Home Office may be interested in a second phase of police reform that focuses more on the people, rather than the structures. That is needed. We need more effective policies on how we recruit and retain a diverse workforce, but we also need a workforce with skills and competencies from other disciplines to tackle crime.
On the management of police forces and the chief executive role, I would like to know a bit more about what problem we are trying to solve. If we want more diverse applicants for the role of chief constable, or even commissioner of the Met, it is striking that in the recent round, despite the global nature of policing in London, which is a great metropolis that has so much in common with great cities around the world, from what we know—the process that the Home Office ran was very secretive—there were essentially no international applicants shortlisted for that role. It is interesting that a position like that, in the home of the policing-by-consent model, is not attracting international applicants. I think it should.
What is interesting in other walks of life is that people who have that kind of role and that amount of responsibility, and who manage that kind of budget, are in an increasingly global talent pool. I never understood why the law, until quite recently, prevented an Australian or Canadian chief constable, operating in a common-law jurisdiction, from even being considered for such a role. In future, when we are thinking about leadership, we should think about what skills people from outside the UK can bring to policing here.
We have things we can learn. We have plenty to teach people, but we have things we can learn. There was a submission to this inquiry by the NPCC. One of your questions was about what we can learn from international developments in policing, and the NPCC’s response was, “Well, we’ll get to that, but we should share best practice in the UK first.” That is a bit complacent. We need to be thinking about the challenges of policing as shared challenges that are happening in other parts of the world. We are not the only country that has to deal with difficult challenges around crime demand changing and budgets being constrained, and I think we should have a bit more exchange of not only ideas and evidence but people as well.
Q85 Naz Shah: Mr Gash, what do you think about the idea of civilians taking the top jobs?
Tom Gash: It seems to me quite unusual. The idea that this is what is done in the private sector is obviously a complete myth. You would not appoint someone to the top job at Goldman Sachs or M&S without their having experience in investment banking or retail respectively; it would be very unusual for that to happen. It seems slightly unnecessary, and I think I agree with both Rick and Blair that we have routes for direct entry a little bit lower down that seem to answer the main questions and problems that we are really trying to solve.
On the question of how to get more chief constables vying for each of the top jobs when they become vacant, there is both the pensions issue and another technical issue around the relocation allowance, which, I think, if you asked chief constables, might factor into their decision making. That was cut quite recently and I think has affected the willingness of people to relocate. Obviously, selling a house and moving home and all those sorts of things are big family decisions.
On the third question on ethnic minority representation, I think you are right that this is not just about routes in; it is also about routes within. One of the things that we know from the evidence is that when people are brought into policing from ethnic minority backgrounds, they are more likely to fall out quicker. One of the routeways in that has been more or less diminished is the PCSO role. That was a very good route to recruiting people from ethnic minority backgrounds, was highly visible, and also tended to be a routeway into policing. I think it needs a bit of attention. There are questions about what exactly the right way of dealing with it is, but I think it needs to be asked.
Tom Gash: Equally, as we found in London, there are policy choices you can take. It was the case for years that the Metropolitan police lagged, in terms of its diversity, and it didn’t reflect the city it served. It then became apparent to us that there were things that could be done that were not just about, if you like, PR—promotion in certain communities of the importance of the role or the job of police officer. It was something as simple as saying, as county forces such as Sussex had done for some time, “We will prioritise applicants who have resided in our area.”
In London, we settled on three years. Effectively, by default, we prioritised Londoners, and we immediately saw a different applicant pool, which was not just eroded through the typical training and recruitment process. The diversity of the Metropolitan police was stuck for years at less than 10% for most of the 2000s, but under the last Mayor, it jumped, only because it was possible to recruit more officers—because they took difficult decisions around police buildings and civilian staff, for example—but they also changed; if you like, they cast the net more narrowly, so that they were recruiting more Londoners. They then started to prioritise the softer community skills that we actually want our police to have, such as having a second language, which in a city like London is so important, and which had never been done.
Q86 Naz Shah: You are a chief inspector. There is a culture in policing, is there not, of working your way up, earning your stripes and getting your stars? If you have a chief constable who was not a police officer, do you feel, as a senior officer, that they would command your respect, or do you think there would be a cultural issue about having respect for, and leadership from, a person if they were a non-police officer?
Katy Barrow-Grint: I think there is something about competence and confidence in relation to this. We are seeing that already, in terms of direct entry into inspector and superintendent. It is not new for the police service to have people coming from outside with significant experience in other areas of business—social care, for example—and doing a very good job. They have significant training to get them competent in a number of areas of police business. I think we are overcoming the culture difficulty of having somebody that has no police background coming into the police service.
I think chief constables are a different kettle of fish, to be quite honest. I have some way to go before I reach that level, but I think that it needs to be open to debate. Now is the time. We are talking about transforming the police service, so let’s have that debate. It does not necessarily mean it is a good thing or a bad thing, but let’s discuss it, see what other countries do internationally, and see what good practice we can bring.
The other point I wanted to make was on diversity issues. It is quite key to look now at some of the senior leadership positions in policing. At the Met, you are about to get Cressida Dick; at the National Crime Agency, you have Lynne Owens; and at the National Police Chiefs Council, you have Sara Thornton, so in three of the most senior offices of policing in this country we now have females, and I think that is important to note. While we have still got a long way to go, in terms of gender equality we are certainly making strides.
Q87 Naz Shah: But we are not with BME candidates.
Katy Barrow-Grint: That is different. Yes, absolutely.
Q88 Chair: Let me ask you some quick final questions. If you think back to the changing patterns and pressures on the police and the resources and capabilities the police have, do you think that, as a result of the changing and competing pressures, greater complexity and so on, on the basis of current trends we will still have any neighbourhood policing left in five years’ time? By neighbourhood policing, I mean the kind of dedicated teams—either police officers or PCSOs—who stick with working in a particular area and community, so that they know that community.
Katy Barrow-Grint: My personal opinion—I have talked about it already—is that we cannot do without it. Neighbourhood policing, and having that understanding of your community at that lowest possible level, is key to getting our information and intelligence about terrorism and serious and organised crime. To diminish it completely would be wrong.
Q89 Chair: Can it survive, though, given the competing pressures and demands in different directions?
Katy Barrow-Grint: Well, the demands are going up significantly. Child abuse—the area of business I have worked in most recently—is going up like we have never seen before. We have to deal with those areas of business, especially when there is vulnerability and safeguarding that needs to happen now and it is current. You are always going to have to do this cost-benefit analysis. I think we have to be measured in our response, and I do not think we should knee-jerk from one to the other, but on the basis of threat risk and harm—I know I have said it a lot of times already—it is so important to look at things on a case-by-case basis.
Tom Gash: I expect we will still see areas that are pursuing neighbourhood policing models. I think we should also be seeing a discussion about what neighbourhood policing really is. A lot of it, if it is just bobbies on the beat for reassurance purposes, is probably not justifiable, given the constraints that we face. It has to be about solving problems in communities and gaining intelligence and insight, and it has to be fundamentally professionalised, because the core concepts behind it are reasonably sensible. We just need to find ways of operationalising it, so that we know it is delivering what the public really want and the best it can for the pounds that are spent on it.
Blair Gibbs: Sir Denis O’Connor, who is, as you know, the former chief inspector of constabulary, was involved in the creation of what became neighbourhood policing. In his lecture to Policy Exchange some years ago, he talked about the need for this expansive approach to the policing mission. His argument was that it cannot be sustained, and that we need to draw up a bit more of a definition of what the police mission is, so that we do not end up with finite resources drifting into areas of business, which would end up with neighbourhood policing being completely eroded. I think there is a danger that if we do not get a bit clearer about what the function is of the police and, for example, what role they play within social media, missing person response and even in public order, in terms of policing of public events and football matches—these crunch questions of who pays for the police, how they share the burden with others and who picks up the tab—there is a risk that it will be spread too thinly and neighbourhood policing will suffer.
As I say, there is a way in which you recalibrate neighbourhood policing to make it effective in the modern world, and that is equipping officers and empowering them and training them. But if the police continue to try to be all things to all people—particularly by rushing into these new areas of crime without public debate—there is a risk that neighbourhood policing will suffer.
Dr Muir: I think it will be patchy and variable. The Police Foundation are about to publish some research on what has happened to neighbourhood policing since 2010, and it makes very interesting reading. Different forces are doing different things, but there are a number of different types. Some have basically got rid of their PCSOs and retained and focused very much on their neighbourhood officers, retaining the officer number. Particularly where the Mayor or PCC said, “I want to retain a certain number of officers,” They have lost PCSOs but retained the officers. Others have created hybrid roles where response and neighbourhood functions are being merged. You might ask, “Is that really neighbourhood policing anymore?” For a number of them, if you look at the figures, a very high proportion of their staff are now in a so-called neighbourhood role, but actually, they have just merged response and neighbourhood, so there is a question about dilution of the role.
Then there are other areas, particularly in rural forces—and in Wales, where the Welsh Assembly Government are still funding PCSOs—where a PCSO-led model is emerging. I think that is because in rural areas, they want to retain their response teams—police officers doing the response function—and want the reassurance function to be done by PCSOs. I think what we will see is a very patchy picture.
Clearly, some forces have just pulled out of it completely and are starting to move back, but although I certainly do not want to go back to a national model or anything like that, I think there is a need for some clarity. Forces need to be clear about what neighbourhood policing is about, provide information about what their officers are doing when they are doing this work, and be clear, as Blair was saying, about how neighbourhood policing can be relevant when we have this big shift in demand. Neighbourhood policing came out of the demand for visible policing on the streets. Fear of crime was high, and that was the response.
We have seen a big shift in demand. I think neighbourhood policing will play a critical role in it, but it needs to be rethought and repurposed. Different areas of the country will have different models; I think that is the truth of the matter. In austere times, we will have to find different ways of deploying the resources that we have.
Q90 Chair: A final question, for which I ask for, effectively, a one-sentence answer. What one area would you flag up to us as the area where you are most worried about a capability gap between demand and what the police are capable of doing over the next five years?
Dr Muir: I think child sexual exploitation would be the one. What we are seeing there is a doubling of recorded offences, and a huge increase in demand coming through to the National Crime Agency as well. Sorry; this is one sentence. Child sexual exploitation.
Blair Gibbs: I still think cybercrime will only get bigger as an issue. It will be in different forms, so unless the police can recruit and train more of their people to tackle it, it will overwhelm them.
Q91 Chair: Mr Gash?
Tom Gash: You asked about capability. I would say national crime prevention capability—dealing with cyber or child sexual exploitation in a problem-solving, preventive way at a national level—because these are common problems across areas.
Q92 Chair: Chief Inspector Barrow-Grint?
Katy Barrow-Grint: I would say detectives, because I think we have a problem recruiting and retaining detectives, and that skill base needs to be looked at going forward.
Chair: Thank you all very much for your time. Dr Muir, you raised an issue about pensions preventing people from applying. If you could send us some more information in writing about that, it would be very much appreciated. I thank you all for your time, and your patience for our late start. We appreciate your evidence today.