Home Affairs Committee
Oral evidence: Policing for the future, HC 515
Tuesday 24 October 2017
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 24 October 2017.
Members present: Yvette Cooper (Chair); Mr Christopher Chope; Rehman Chisti; Stephen Doughty; Preet Kaur Gill; Sarah Jones; Tim Loughton; Stuart C. McDonald; Esther McVey; Will Quince; Naz Shah.
Questions 1 – 113
Witnesses
I: CC Dee Collins, Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police, CC Gareth Morgan, Chief Constable of Staffordshire Police, CC Dave Thompson, Chief Constable of West Midlands Police and National Police Chiefs’ Council Lead for Finance, and CC Sara Thornton, Chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council.
II: Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley, National Lead for Counter-Terrorism Policing, Metropolitan Police.
Witnesses: CC Dee Collins, CC Gareth Morgan, CC Dave Thompson, and CC Sara Thornton.
Q1 Chair: I welcome everyone to our evidence session on the future of policing and thank our witnesses for coming before us today. Can I ask you initially to each introduce yourselves and also tell us very briefly—because we have a lot of issues we want to cover—what you believe to be the biggest unresolved challenge for policing over the next five years? If I could start with Chief Constable Thornton.
Chief Constable Sara Thornton: Hello. My name is Sara Thornton. I chair the National Police Chiefs’ Council, which brings together all the Chiefs in this country.
In terms of the biggest challenge that I think we are facing, it is the difficulty that we are having currently dealing with rising demand and rising crime demand, and the threat from terrorism that we have been experiencing over the last 12 months. Those increases in demand, and the increases in the complexity of that demand within a settlement for policing, dates back to 2015 when the demand had not begun to rise.
Chair, if I can give you a couple of examples. The crime statistics that were published last week showed a 13% increase in recorded crime. I don’t want to alarm anybody. The survey showed crime was down 9% but the 13% increase in recorded crime has a very real impact on the busyness and the workload of our officers and staff. Similarly, you will know of all the terrorist attacks we have had in the last six months and we have been at a critical state twice in the last six months. Again, that requires a lot more extra officers and staff available.
So we are seeing a huge increase in demand pretty much across the country and then a 2015 settlement that, in terms of the whole settlement for policing, protected the budget in real terms but the settlement for forces was only, at best, a settlement in cash terms. What that means is that forces have had to absorb pay rises, any inflationary pressures, which is an effect that meant that all forces have had to make cuts. That is causing great stress and strain. The worry about that is that ultimately impacts on the service delivered to the public but, also, we are very concerned about the level of stress and strain on our officers and staff. If you look at figures such as long-term sickness figures, they have been steadily increasing over the last two or three years.
Q2 Chair: Thank you. Chief Constable Thompson.
Chief Constable Dave Thompson: Chair, good afternoon. I am Dave Thompson. I am the Chief Constable for West Midlands Police. Nationally, I am also the Police Chiefs’ Council Lead for Finance.
I suppose I have some similar things to say to the points that Chief Constable Thornton has made. The challenge the service faces, which has become very focused across this year, is the balance of delivering a traditional and valued service to the public on things that the public still think matter to them, as well as dealing with the broader and increasing range of threats. It is this breadth of mission that the service faces in 2017 that is challenging.
We saw across the summer a substantial step up in terms of the terrorism threat and what I would describe as the type of protection operations policing needs to deliver for the public that we serve, as well as the ongoing activity we need to pursue and bring people to justice. A range of new threats: the online threats, the exploitation of children online and the differing approaches the force has to take to deal with that threat; the growth in crimes that affect vulnerable people, particularly in our changing society, new threats that we face in those areas that it is important the police service respond to.
At the same time—and I think particularly markedly now—lots of traditional crimes are back as a problem and a challenge, which we had seen decline over the last three or four years. So, in the West Midlands, a rise in gun crime, a rise in knife crime, a rise in vehicle crime, a rise in burglary, an increasing amount of calls for service from the public taking place at a time when many of the partnerships that we used to have that would deliver services that were involved in prevention, particularly work with young people, are also in a similar position where their funding is reduced. It is that broadening mission of the service, coupled with what is a static settlement, which is creating a real challenge now for policing.
Q3 Chair: Thank you. Chief Constable Morgan.
Chief Constable Gareth Morgan: Good afternoon. I am Gareth Morgan. I am the Chief Constable of Staffordshire Police. I have been in post since June.
My observations are very similar to what my colleagues are saying. Maybe I would emphasise not only the changing nature of the demand placed on the police service but the serious complex nature of it. I will give you an example. In my force area, rape and serious sexual offences have gone up 65% since 2010. That is a reflection of the confidence that victims of crime have got to report those crimes and that should be celebrated, but my concern is whether I have the resources available to match that demand and investigate those crimes in the way in which I would want them to be investigated. We were under 1,000 in 2010 and we are closer to 3,000 now. That accounts for seven offences a day in Staffordshire of rape and serious sexual offences.
So, if I might start with a public and political expectation that is often around police visibility. That is a conundrum that we grapple with. Tied in to the conversation earlier in relation to staff, in the conversations I have had with every member of staff since I arrived in Staffordshire—and I have met a great many of them—not one of them has mentioned pay and conditions to me. They have talked about their frustrations at not being able to deliver the quality of service that they would want to, to victims of crime and their frustration at not being able to do that. Undoubtedly, there is a debate about pay and rewards but that is not at the forefront of their discussions with me.
Q4 Chair: Thank you. Chief Constable Collins.
Chief Constable Dee Collins: Yes. Good afternoon. My name is Dee Collins. I am the Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police.
I agree entirely with the comments made by my colleagues. I would just like to build upon the people issue, if I may. One of the additional challenges that we are facing is our ability to attract, recruit, develop and retain police officers and police staff at a time when people can see that policing is facing great challenges.
One of the reasons why I think that is significant is our ability to be able to change our workforce mix and be truly representative of the communities that we serve. It also presents challenges for us to be able to ensure we have the right skillsets and capabilities across the service, at a time when we are very much in response mode, and our ability to then be able to abstract people to have the training that they require is incredibly challenging. A lot of the people-related issues are things that are going to take some considerable time, so if there are decisions that are going to be made around the future of policing we need to be making them now in order to be able to have a different workforce, potentially, within the next three to five years.
Q5 Chair: Thank you very much. Further to those points, in terms of the way you are responding to these pressures and the growing demand and the resource pressures that you have at the moment, be that counter terror or dealing with the rape and sexual offences, which areas of policing are you having to take resources out of? Obviously one of the issues that have been raised with us is neighbourhood policing, but I will be interested to know some more detail from you about which areas are absorbing more resources, which are getting less as a result.
Chief Constable Sara Thornton: We have done some work with the Police and Crime Commissioners—that David has led over the last couple of months—looking at where the case is strongest for investment in policing. We discussed this among Chiefs. Police and Crime Commissioners have discussed it and there are four main areas that we would identify. One would be in terms of counter-terrorism. We would argue that it is not just about the officers and staff who work in counter-terrorist units but, in fact, it is the whole system of policing that responds when there is a terrorist incident.
So, counter-terrorism is the first area. The second area is around cyber, working very closely with the National Crime Agency but building up both the National Crime Agency capability but also: what is the force responsibility? What is the responsibility of regions?
The third area is economic crime. The recent report by the National Crime Agency pointed to the gaps in the way that, for example, fraud is dealt with so a lot of work is going on in that area.
The fourth area would be neighbourhood policing. We would argue that there is a strong case for investment there. I fear that in quite a few areas that has often been the place where resources have been moved from in the last few years. We are quite clear that if we are serious about a preventative approach to policing, and if we are serious about that link between communities and the counter-terrorist effort, to have that presence in communities is absolutely essential but it is under great strain.
Chief Constable Gareth Morgan: I would not disagree with that. I am obviously reviewing the stretches in the resources I have inherited, so since 2010 there are just over 500 officers less in Staffordshire. That is about a 26% reduction. PCSOs and officers in neighbourhoods have been retained at a standard level, pretty static since 2010. Clearly, those resources have come from somewhere within the organisation and my sense is the pressure that I see on a daily basis is around the investigations of serious crime, so there will have to be a decision. Those decisions are going to be made by myself and my team in discussions in the coming months about how we can readjust those.
My argument around the neighbourhood resources would be that I would seek to give them more responsibility and maybe change their focus on neighbourhoods rather than remove the resources. In policing for too long we have been responding to problems and not solving them, so my ambition in a neighbourhood model would be—and I know this is what Dave is doing in West Midlands and elsewhere—to work with partners to solve problems at an earlier time, early intervention, solving those problems so they do not repeat and repeat. That is one of the ways we will manage demand better. It is a different skillset that we need on neighbourhoods but, undoubtedly, it is a mix between responding to an increasingly serious and complex threat of crime while recognising the public and I, as a Chief Constable, want to keep visible resources in neighbourhoods.
Q6 Chair: In terms of the areas that get squeezed, if you are trying to put more people into other things does that mean you have fewer people dealing with serious crimes?
Chief Constable Gareth Morgan: I think everything is squeezed and that is what it feels like. That is why you have to manage demand, not to keep responding to it but to manage it, to solve problems with partners and others and to give yourself space to deal with the issues that you have.
Q7 Chair: Given the number of questions we are going to have for you, I am not going to ask everybody to respond to each one, so respond if you want to.
On neighbourhood policing: in West Yorkshire we have certainly seen a significant reduction over the last 10 years in the number of neighbourhood policing in many areas, and we have seen the announcement from Norfolk that they are planning not to have any more PCSOs at all. How far do you think, either in your own forces or across the country, that neighbourhood policing has taken a big squeeze, given that we have also seen reports of neighbourhood police officers being used for other things or used to fill in for response or used to fill in for other jobs?
Chief Constable Dave Thompson: Chair, that balance between what people are in the structure but what they are doing in their activities is the big challenge we found this year in West Midlands. West Midlands Police is now 27% smaller than it was in 2010. In police officer numbers it is smaller than it has ever been in the force’s history since 1974.
In terms of our police officer balance it has been about a 25% reduction; a reduction of about 44% in police community support officers during that period as well. The decisions we have made as a force between now and 2020—we will have about 750 neighbourhood officers, about 465 PCSOs—I am pretty certain we will be able to protect those numbers in the work we have done. Our approach has clearly been to prioritise more of the staffing into areas where we have high vulnerability, complex crimes and domestic abuse. Areas like that. Now we have settled that number we will hold that.
Our challenge at the moment, though, is with the upsurge in demand that we have seen, particularly more traditional volume crime now, which is an increasing feature of what we have, we are also seeing a shift in the types of calls we are getting from the public, more urgent calls. We are about 20% up on what we call immediate response calls. We are starting to see that bleed of activity into responding hitting neighbourhoods. There is a lot of work we will do around that but I think that is the challenge. In some ways notionally we may have in the structure staff assigned to neighbourhood but, increasingly, what they are spending their time on is being impacted by more reactive workloads.
Q8 Chair: Do you think that the reduction in neighbourhood policing across the country has had an impact on crime prevention, on intelligence gathering so far?
Chief Constable Dee Collins: I would certainly say that, Chair. In West Yorkshire we have a slightly different situation than perhaps in other forces. We have managed to preserve the number of PCSO, but that is through the Police and Crime Commissioner supporting that through the use of reserves. We have also seen reductions in the contributions made by partners, so that has had a significant impact. What that does mean is we have had to take some difficult decisions around dedicated ward-based police officers who are there doing the longer term problem solving. It is not just about the collecting of evidence and intelligence. It is also about being able to do community-based problem solving, which I also think has taken a huge hit.
Chief Constable Gareth Morgan: Chair, one of the other challenges that we have and we need to remember is that policing is a system, and our colleagues in the National Crime Agency and our colleagues in CT policing are dependent on my neighbourhood resources as my own teams are because of the nature of the work they do. There is a risk that when we start to describe policing in different parts, particularly when money is associated, we forget there is a system. We need to recognise that the decisions made by individual forces around their resource have an impact down the system somewhere. That is part of why the work that we are doing nationally to try to co-ordinate that and understand it is important because, absolutely, the public want to see visible neighbourhood officers in their area and we all recognise that but our ability to deal with counter-terrorism issues and also dealing with serious and organised crime is hampered if you don’t have a visible presence in communities.
Chief Constable Sara Thornton: Chair, if I may add, I think most Chiefs would agree that crime prevention work has been squeezed as there have been fewer officers and PCSOs in neighbourhood policing. One of the things we sometimes talk about is the ability for officers to be proactive not just responding to calls, as David was saying.
I know there are a lot of issues behind the numbers in stop and search, but I was just looking at the reduction in section 1 stop and searches over the last six years. It is down from 1.1 million a year to 230,000[1] in England and Wales. That is a substantial reduction. There will be other things behind that and some of that might have been—and definitely has been—about greater intelligence-led, focused stop and search, but that gives you a bit of a feel of the less activity in that area. That may be symptomatic of other proactive powers we might be using.
Q9 Chair: Do you think that the resource pressures on neighbourhood policing, prevention work and so on, are making it harder to stop the volume crimes increasing again?
Chief Constable Dave Thompson: The reduction in police spending has been over a considerable period of time. There have been a lot of successes the police have had during that phase. We have seen reductions in crime and we have seen the resources realigned around vulnerability much more. I would reflect that the last 18 months has started to feel quite tough around this in a way that it has not before. I think it is that balance that, as the service has been shrinking, there have been more resources going across into areas like vulnerability. They are complex. They are resource intensive. They are very demanding on the resources we have. We have seen that rise in volume crime and, invariably, there are fewer resources devoted now to acquisitive crime, either in investigation and prevention, than there has been.
It feels to me that a series of things have come together in terms of a step up in the resourcing for terrorism threat, protection operations and a demand for vulnerability. We have seen the inspections on modern slavery today and human trafficking, the demands for fairly resource-intensive areas coupled with the return of a lot of volume crime that affects communities, which is the stuff that hits police legitimacy very hard. That kind of squeeze has felt quite tough in the last 18 months.
There is a balance, as I look back across austerity to things like the National Audit Report in 2015, to ask the question: what is the tipping point that says at what point the stress indicators would be that start to say, “Service is at a level where we are feeling that stretch”? I often use the boiling of the frog analogy: the water started to feel quite hot this summer and there is a real stretch in the last 18 months that West Midlands Police has not felt. I think different forces experience this in different ways. There is a kind of stretch here that feels more profound than it has done.
Q10 Chair: Do you think you are at the tipping point now?
Chief Constable Dave Thompson: I have used the analogy of: there are some red lights but not white flags. I would say that our ability to be preventative has been quite curtailed this year. Neighbourhood officers are very frustrated that some of the preventative work they want to do is not happening. I look at the reactive investigation loads and we have to prioritise that harder.
Of course, there are lots of things we need to do in terms of technology, a lot of the way we are trying to improve our productivity, trying to improve the pace at which we are reacting, trying to be more pre-emptive, but that kind of stretch feels quite tough at the moment. I did not join the police service to give up on challenging issues but it is pretty tough at the moment.
Q11 Chair: The figures that we have been given show the Government have given you a flat cash settlement, which presumably means that you would be expecting real cuts to your budgets unless that is then compensated for by the local precept. If the budgets that you are currently expecting continue over the next three years, what happens?
Chief Constable Sara Thornton: If I may say, Chair, it is flat cash including the precept. In addition, money has been taken off for adjustments in the Council Tax base. That is why I say it is stretch. It is flat cash and—
Q12 Chair: So real terms cuts?
Chief Constable Sara Thornton: Yes, absolutely, because you have the inflationary pressures; pay rises but also other inflationary costs that are in your budget. In order to present a balanced budget, every force will be looking at reductions in either staff or things they buy or other service costs.
Q13 Chair: One final question: what does that mean in service terms? If that level of real terms cuts continues over the next few years, what do you expect that to mean in terms of the service that you provide to the public.
Chief Constable Sara Thornton: I am afraid there is no one national answer to that question because different Police and Crime Commissioners working with their Chief Constables make different decision about how to implement those savings and reductions, so there isn’t one picture for the whole of the country.
Chief Constable Dave Thompson: I was absolutely clear when I took on the role that my gap for 2020, on those assumptions by 21 March, is I would have to find another £11 million of savings. Now, 80% of my budget is made up of people but the challenge I have set myself is that, if those assumptions remain the same, I am going to try to do everything I can for that not to be resource people but I don’t have a lot of stuff left to work with in terms of it.
We collaborate effectively in the region. I collaborate with the Fire Authority. I collaborate with private partners. I work with a range of different people. I will do more of that. I will find ways of saving money, but if I cannot then the places I will have to go are people and that is either officers or staff. My organisation, like many on this table, is a blend. Police officer numbers are always politically interesting but nearly 50% of my resources are police staff. Many of them are police investigators. They do an awful lot of investigative operational work without warranted powers.
I am in the middle of looking at where those savings will come from as we track our way forward, but it is a real challenge not to go back and look at people. I cannot contemplate that at the moment given the demands that we are confronted by.
Chief Constable Dee Collins: There is also the double-edged sword around the type of reports and incidents that people are reporting to us. The vast majority of us use what is called a harm and risk-based approach in terms of deployments. The reality is if you have less people to be able to deploy that threat of harm and risk scale starts to get eaten into, so if you are reporting some things at the lower end of that scale you may not get the service that you might wish for and, indeed, that we might wish for.
Chief Constable Dave Thompson: Chair, I would make the observation that it is about £40 million for West Midlands Police between now and the end of the current CSR period to 2020. I think Chief Constable Thornton is right. It will fall in different ways in forces. There are only three ways of managing money out of services. One is there is reduced demand. We are in a sector where reducing demand seems a good thing, getting crime down and things like that. The service is working hard around that and hopefully in some areas we can reduce demand down but, at the moment, pretty much every area of policing business is showing an upturn in demand.
The second area is to change the way you work: the methods of working. How you use your people. How you use your technology. How you use your buildings. Tonnes of that have happened over the last few years in policing. There will be more of that go on because there are more technology opportunities, so there are things we will still be doing in that area.
The third area is change service levels to the public and—certainly, in West Midlands with a 27% reduction in budget and more to come—that is invariably where that debate will take place. It is probably going to take place more around what I would call the universal service of policing. It cannot happen around the most vulnerable in society. It cannot happen around child abuse. It cannot happen in these areas because, quite rightly as a society, we have a very low risk appetite around those vulnerable people, but the concern I have is around the universal services and the larger volume crime areas.
The place where I think the public in a democratic society take a view is that you sign up to the rule of law as part of that deal and you get protection when people step outside it. I fear there will be some service choice differences in that area. There have been some that have been very positive. We do a lot more online reporting. That works for the public. There are some things that are positive in the way we can change the way we work, but I suspect there are some choices there that might be more difficult in the next few years.
Q14 Naz Shah: You may have partly answered this but I am going to ask it anyway. In 2015 the Chancellor George Osborne said he would be protecting police budgets during the Spending Review period, pledging real terms protection for police funding. Mr Thompson, you have talked in particular about not having enough for preventative work. Do you guys feel that the current funding settlement for police forces is sufficient to enable you to deliver the level of protection services expected by the public? If we can start with you.
Chief Constable Dave Thompson: As Chief Constable Thornton said, the flat cash settlement means that if the Police and Crime Commissioner increase the precept to the maximum, the budget will stand still. In 2015 West Midlands Police had a budget of £524 million. It will have a budget of £524 million in 2020 if the Police and Crime Commissioner lifts the precept to the maximum. With inflation at 3%, with changes in terms of the pay settlement coming with all the other cost pressures we know in services, the answer is that is a real term cut.
The overall police budget may have been protected but police forces weren’t, so there is a good debate to start to ask the question with the amount of money the Home Office has allocated whether more of that money should be spent on police forces.
If you look at the National Audit Report, you will see HMRC has had a budget increase during this period. You will see the Independent Police Complaints Commission has had a budget increase this period. You will see that more money was sent to the Ministry of Justice and Legal Aid budgets to deal with the bail changes. There are other areas where money has been spent out of the central police grant not on policing, and I think the public would like to see perhaps a greater share of that money spent on delivery of service rather than some of the other areas where the grant has been reallocated. About £812 million of the Government’s grant for policing is spent on things other than police forces.
Chief Constable Gareth Morgan: I am very clear. Public servants often come forward and ask for more money. It is not my money. It is the public’s money, and I am trying to match that money with what the demands placed on me are to deliver the best I can in safety for the public. That is the challenge.
Mr Thompson has just outlined the reality of a flat cash settlement is not protecting the budget. I am not going to repeat it but it is not protecting the budget.
Q15 Preet Kaur Gill: Thank you. We have heard that the lost to neighbourhood policing has hindered the forces’ ability to proactively tackle issues and reduce crime. Can you tell me how does neighbourhood policing contribute towards countering terrorism, for example? Is it used to gather intelligence?
Chief Constable Sara Thornton: I am more than happy to take that. I think that Mark Rowley, who is going to give evidence after us, will give you a lot more examples than I can give but I am absolutely aware of the fact that the information that comes from members of the public and then contributes through the counter-terrorist units up into the security service structures is probably unparalleled in the world. There are many cases where those bits of information and intelligence have been absolutely key.
As we have seen the nature of the threat change over the last six to 12 months, a lot more people have been radicalised over the internet, not part of complex, hierarchical structures but very much more self-starting. Therefore, the ability for the security services to discover that earlier is much reduced. The nature of the threat, the profiles of the terrorists that have acted this year mean that that sort of information in intelligence from local communities is even more important than it has been in the past.
Chief Constable Dave Thompson: In terms of an example, in 2013 a man called Pavlo Lapshyn from the Ukraine bombed a series of mosques in the West Midlands and murdered a gentleman in East Birmingham. He was captured by neighbourhood officers in the community taking his picture round looking round for him. More than that, clearly, there is intelligence that neighbourhood officers gather in feedback but there is a balance. I say this particularly from the West Midlands’ perspective. We have a number of neighbourhoods where attack planning plots have taken place. There is an important balance here when we are working with communities and, in particular, Muslim communities where much of the concern around terrorism has been.
It is important that policing builds legitimacy with those communities, concentrates on the things that cause those communities concern and deals with the threats and issues they face because that is a way of building inclusion. It is the way of building citizenship. It is the way we recognise that we build cohesive communities. It creates an environment that is less tolerant of extremism, dangerous behaviour and criminality. Of course it is about intelligence gathering but, at the same time, it is about building policing legitimacy.
It is one of the reasons why we have found it hard to sustain the numbers, particularly the numbers in very challenged communities because we see that as an intrinsic part. It is something we tend to accept when we deal with this issue across the globe very easily. We recognise ever present security forces in communities are a fundamental part of dealing with issues. It is an important part that stems from policing and that is where the doctrine came from.
Q16 Preet Kaur Gill: Yes. It is important I ask the question around the impact because obviously we have seen the reduction of neighbourhood policing and, therefore, how it fits in in terms of the light of the current terror threat. Do you think that the appropriate balance of funding between rural and urban forces needs to be looked at because, while counter-terrorism is funded separately, there is a need for more intensive neighbourhood policing in cities rather than in rural areas?
Chief Constable Gareth Morgan: I would go back to my point about the risk of putting this into pots. One of the issues around policing is it has this slightly romantic association with it, and actually it is a tough role to police in a local community close to the people that you are serving because, yes, you are going to be involved in community engagement and crime prevention but you are also going to be arresting people. You are going to be managing intelligence and it is intelligence around crimes in communities. It is counter-terrorism. It links all the way through serious and organised crime.
We are currently being inspected in my force around our ability to manage serious and organised crime at a neighbourhood level, right the way through to the National Crime Agency. This is policing in neighbourhoods. It is not soft policing and, whether it is in an urban or a rural environment, it is integral to the model that we cherish in British policing, which is that we police within our communities.
Chief Constable Dee Collins: Of course the terrorism threat is not just about ISIS. I operate in the north-east. We are also very concerned about the rise of extreme white issues, so our neighbourhood officers have to have that real understanding of how local to global works but absolutely everything is place based and that is why I think neighbourhood policing is so important.
Chief Constable Sara Thornton: We try to avoid choosing sides between urban and rural for very obvious reasons. I could not please everybody, but all my Chief Constable colleagues would say they have insufficient resource. It is not an urban versus rural issue.
Q17 Preet Kaur Gill: No. The concern, though, is about the impact on neighbourhood policing, even though the numbers have diminished. For example, in the West Midlands neighbourhood policing had to stop when the threat level risk rose to critical to backfill other roles. Meaning that the vital service was not delivered for about a month this year because there needs to be a cooling off period after each threat level rise. With changing shift patterns the overtime cost, post the Tube attack and the rise to critical, was over £400,000 to the force and after Manchester it was £600,000. It just feels that neighbourhood policing always seems to continue to get squeezed even further because of the rise of the threat that we have. What would you say, Dave?
Chief Constable Dave Thompson: In terms of summer there were a number of pressures. When the threat level steps up to critical in an area like the West Midlands, clearly, where there are a lot of crowded places, there is a requirement to deliver a protection operation. There are no additional police officers. We have to use the police officers we have. We have very good national plans. Again, a great many officers that we saw in June in the West Midlands were from other forces—certainly this has happened in others—but obviously we have to spend a certain amount of money. Our total costs are in the region of about £600,000 that we have taken out of reserves to pay overtime and non-reclaimable costs.
We looked across the Parsons Green attack and we probably did shift in the region of about £260,000-worth of local policing resources away from neighbourhoods to deploy them into crowded places. Of course, there have always been exceptional issues that take place in policing that require us to use the workforce flexibly, and that is part of the opportunity of the police workforce. It is the same officers that may deal with urban disorder as deal with neighbourhood policing as go to calls for services. There is something quite strong about that in policing.
The challenge that we would say now, though, is I don’t think we can say the things that happened in the summer might be exceptional now. As we have moved into a broadening threat and not a spike but a step up in activity, the concern of being able to consistently deliver those protection operations is a bigger challenge for us.
Chief Constable Gareth Morgan: Just to make the point around the rural/urban. The smaller force next door to us—Midlands—with a bigger rural mix, that same uplift for those two events has cost me just over £200,000 in resource to provide a visible uplift of police officers out in communities and neighbourhoods and crowded places. That is from within the existing resource.
The debate we had at the time is: these are not new people. These are the same people working longer hours. That was an unbudgeted cost. That is going to be found as we go forward. That is not just an issue for the bigger forces. The urban forces did. We all experienced that over the summer, and I agree with Dave Thompson that that is the new normality. We need to work out how to do that going forward.
Chief Constable Sara Thornton: If I may make a general point about when we move to critical, which has happened twice this year, as David has said, we put resources in crowded places and transport hubs. Often the critical plans are about additional patrols in neighbourhoods as well, particularly where there is a history of some sort of concern. It is not a binary choice between transport hubs, crowded places and neighbourhoods. Very often forces will have a plan that covers both.
Q18 Sarah Jones: You have probably covered most of my question, although I was going to ask about future pressures. You have talked about the savings you are going to have to make and some of the challenges that you are looking at in the future. Is there anything else, in terms of when you have considered the savings you have to make: the 2% pay rise for officers recently announced and all the other pressures? Are there any other budget pressures that you have not mentioned that you foresee coming down the line?
Chief Constable Dee Collins: One of the areas that cause me a great deal of concern is what is happening to our local authorities and the pressures that they are under because of austerity and, therefore, any neighbourhood-based services that they are providing also being at risk. We are seeing things like youth offending teams being looked at, their own preventative arrangements in terms of officers and staff. That is a very, very real concern for me.
We also recognise in West Yorkshire, for example, 83% of my time in terms of delivering services is not about crime, so real pressures around mental health, real pressures around missing from homes, children and adults. We have seen almost a 300% increase in the number of missing from home people over the last three years in West Yorkshire. I would predict that that will continue to rise. That is around children’s homes, looked after people, elderly people with illnesses and so on, so there are a lot of additional pressures coming down the line that are much more difficult to predict. That is why it is important to work with partners to best understand what pressures they are also under.
Chief Constable Gareth Morgan: Just to pick up one issue, a small moment of pedantry. It wasn’t a 2% pay uplift. It was a 1% pay uplift. The other 1% is unconsolidated. It is not pensionable. It has to be funded out of our resource this year. That is the police officers. We are still awaiting the police staff settlement and we need to understand what that pressure will be going forward.
We need certainty on those issues around pay and rewards. An independent pay body recommended 2%. It isn’t 2%, so that has caused some uncertainty in the service because an independent pay review body we expected would be honoured. That needs to be understood, going forward, so we can plan accordingly for the resource issue.
I would agree with Dee Collins on the issue around partners. In a force the size of Staffordshire, I am currently averaging 13 missing people a day. On average 16 calls for service for mental health issues called into the control room where we are deemed to be the most appropriate first responder. I do not think that always turns out to be the case, so those pressures on the public sector across the piece mean that we are sometimes involved in things that perhaps are not our primary role. I have previously described it at times—having seen this and been out with my own staff—as it feels increasingly like uniform social work rather than policing.
Chief Constable Sara Thornton: Chair, could I talk about how we are dealing with some of the pressures because otherwise we are going to talk in very negative terms? There are huge pressures on forces but we are working together in a way that we have never done before to try to ease some of those pressures, so whether that is about joint plans on procurement. Of the £350 million procurement target we had, I think about £219 million savings have been delivered by forces.
We also have the transformation programme where Chiefs, working with Home Office colleagues and Police and Crime Commissioners, have a good programme for working together around sharing some of our specialist capabilities much more so, every force does not have to have the full spectrum, about developing technology platforms together, which will be cheaper, about working out different ways to deliver forensic services to all forces, which will be cheaper. So there are things that we are doing together and individually to try to reduce some of the pressures. There are significant pressures but we are not sitting supine waiting for this all to happen to us.
Q19 Rehman Chishti: Thank you. A question to you, Chief Constable Thornton. With regards to pressures and resources, of course, one understands the ability to do what one can is limited to resources. In 2010 what was the overall figure nationally for police reserves?
Chief Constable Sara Thornton: I do not have the figure for 2010. I am aware that in 2015 it was 22%. Let me just get the—
Q20 Rehman Chishti: Can I give you a figure and see if it is correct or not? The figure that I have in 2010/11 we are talking about £1.4 billion and in 2016 we are talking about £1.66 billion. Would that seem to be around the right figure overall?
Chief Constable Sara Thornton: We need to be really careful with these reserves.
Rehman Chishti: Sure. Yes.
Chief Constable Sara Thornton: The current figure for March 2017 for total reserves, which includes general reserves, earmarked reserves and capital reserves, was £2.1 billion. That is planned to be reduced by 60% over the next three years.
In terms of the revenue reserves, which currently stand at £1.6, we know that since 2015 they have gone down by 22%, which is exactly what forces said when the NAO did the report back in 2015. We said that there was a plan to spend earmarked reserves. That has been happening. One-fifth has gone in the last two years and we suggest that 60% will go over the next three years. So there is a general profile of spending reserves.
I think I and all my colleagues are absolutely of the view that we should not be hoarding money. That this is money that should be spent on ongoing services and, as you can see from the figures, most forces over the last couple of years have spend reserves on services and they plan to do so over the next three years.
Q21 Rehman Chishti: Just a clarification on that: £1.4 billion in 2010/11, £1.66 billion in 2016 and, at the same time, we get a statement to say that funding is at tipping point, and your point about not hoarding money. How do we get police forces to use the money? They should have been doing the right thing back from, say, 2010?
Chief Constable Sara Thornton: The last time that we had a look at this was 2015 and, as I said, reserves have been spent at a rate of one-fifth—that is 22%—since then and the plan is to go to 60%. I completely agree with you that we should not be keeping these reserves. As I say, most forces are spending them and plan to spend them over the next three years.
Chief Constable Dave Thompson: If I illustrate from West Midlands’ perspective, I think it might be useful. West Midlands has current reserves at around £106 million and £27 million of those are in what is called a general reserve. The force has to self-insure, so it needs about £10 million in reserve to self-insure. It has a level of reserves to self-insure and then there is a level of reserve in there allocated on uniform, equipment, vehicle replacement as a kind of standard level.
The level of capital that has been coming in to forces has been reduced over a number of years in policing. If you look at the types of programmes forces are doing to lever savings have changed over the last seven years. Earlier on you would change your processes, you would make some choices. Now we have a lot of changes that are quite technologically driven but it is one of the pressures I think that will emerge on public services in general over the next few years. We are moving from a phase where we are not spending as much perhaps on resources in terms of people, more on technology.
If you look, we have about £1 million provisioned against risk in our budgets because we have capital programmes that move between years. We have in the region of £12 million/£13 million in there that is spent against capital programmes. We have a significant amount of money against estates but, of that money, about £28 million is in the revenue budget this year supporting spending. There is about £18 million this year. We will make a similar level depending upon where our position is at the end of the year. It is actually in revenue now.
Q22 Rehman Chishti: Just a clarification on that. For example, if money had been used from that reserve pot from 2010—say, the £1.4 billion, and then the £1.6 billion that you have at the moment—does that then mean if money had been used from resources from the pot of money that the police had then that would have had an effect in relation to the level of crime that could have been prevented?
Chief Constable Dave Thompson: In terms of resources available, the balance I think people are trying to do with the reserves is we are using some to support revenue spending. I am using £18 million this year in the revenue budget to prop up the £524 million to keep resource numbers up. That is important but of course the plan cannot be to do that, so I am also spending a significant amount of technology to enable me to manage with fewer people in that space.
I think people have made choices when they phased reserves in over a period of time. I agree with the points that Sara is making that reserves are for a rainy day. It feels like it is raining quite hard at the moment and so we need to be spending the money. But it is kind of one moment so, in terms of technology, in terms of estate changes that free up money from revenue, in terms of resources and revenue there is a choice across that spread. From 2015 we have seen that acceleration just as we told the National Audit Office would happen. People were initially told that austerity would probably be about five years. People wisely made some assumptions they may need reserves later in the period.
Q23 Rehman Chishti: A final question to Chief Constable Morgan. You mentioned earlier in terms of the increase in gun crime and knife crime, and we have also looked at the issue of resources. I have just had figures and stats quoted to me by the regional media in Kent about the increase of knife crime, like the rest of the country. What extra resources do you need to address the issue of knife crime, both to your point earlier about responding and also resolving the issue of knife crime?
Chief Constable Gareth Morgan: I am wary of drawing correlations between resources and crime figures because at different times in history they have been in different places. My interest is in having the resource to deal with issues and prevent them. I don’t think there is necessarily much time for the correlation.
The issue around knife crime, my own force is seeing the same rise as other areas are. I do not think you can arrest your way out of a knife crime issue, so that is about an engagement with young people in particular who are arming themselves in fear of knife crime and, therefore, promulgating it themselves. That is education. That is youth engagement. That is a role for policing to play. It does involve stop and search. That has already been touched upon in terms of a tactic. It needs intelligence-driven objectives and it needs punishment for those who are carrying weapons and causing life changing injuries.
That is a true partnership problem that needs resolving with partners. In large parts of the country it is working across the piece. I have done the same over the summer with a knife amnesty, hundreds of knives being taken off the streets by young people coming forward, so it has to be sustained in those terms. We are doing that work. We are doing it with our partners. Of course we would want to do more.
Q24 Will Quince: I am conscious that the public very much see visible policing as key, but we know so much policing happens behind the scenes, keeping people safe, well away from the public eye. In fact, PEEL said that the test of efficiency in policing is an absence of crime and disorder, not in fact visible policing or the visible actions of policing. I am interested to know—a few of you have touched on it—what are you doing around efficiency in terms of technology and the use of technology, but also working with other forces and, indeed, other emergency services and other agencies to try to be more efficient as organisations?
Chief Constable Dee Collins: For the last three years West Yorkshire Police have invested over £20 million looking at what technology can offer us. We have invested heavily in things like ANPR. We have invested in mobile data and hand held terminals so that we can ensure that officers are out on the front line for longer.
The technology that we now have talks directly into a system, so there is no double keying, no need to do further work when you get back to the police station or another office. We have invested heavily in body-worn video, which has now been issued. The cameras have been issued to all of our frontline staff. We also have to look at replacing existing IT systems and infrastructure. In West Yorkshire we also have responsibilities around regional capabilities and, again, we are investing heavily in making sure that systems talk to one another right away across the region.
We are taking every opportunity that we can. We are also doing horizon scanning to see what the opportunities there might be further down the line. All of that is being underpinned by the national police ICT work that is ongoing around digital policing as a whole.
Chief Constable Gareth Morgan: A similar set of circumstances in the Midlands region. There are four forces working collaboratively, so we work together on serious and organised crime. We work together on counter-terrorism. We have a range of other regional structures that we all support. In a similar way—I touched upon it earlier—I am in a partnership with Boeing to provide IT support to Staffordshire Police. They are supporting us with a technology programme. We also have mobile data to keep officers out and about and visible in their communities. That is working very well. It is very popular with the officers.
We are on our second iteration of body-worn video now, so we are on our second set. The first lot is redundant so we are getting new kit out to people. I am in a partnership with a local Fire Authority around procurement for uniform and for fleet. There is more we can do. That is part of what I alluded to earlier. I will revisit all of these issues to find effective and efficient ways of delivering and maintaining the best resource I can for policing. A lot of it is tied into the national work that Sara alluded to earlier. It does give an indication. Although this is quite complex because I am working locally with providers, local authorities for shared accommodation, the Fire Authority for issues and then there is a national push to do national police procurement. We are constantly ebbing and flowing as to what the best one of these is to do. That is a focus for an awful lot of how we can get the best return on the money that we have.
Chief Constable Sara Thornton: If I can take this answer locally, regionally and nationally. Locally, as Dee said, we know there are 20,000 fewer officers than there were in 2010, so those fewer officers need to be much better equipped. Most forces now have given mobile data to their officers or are in the process of doing so, and most are giving body-worn video. We know from the work we have done that undoubtedly saves the time of frontline officers, so there are a range of things that are making a real difference to their productivity.
The second area is in terms of regional collaboration. The regional structure has strengthened over the last three or four years and all regions have a range of joint units, from their counter-terrorist units to their regional organised crime units but more and more are beginning to pool and share capability.
Then nationally—I mentioned them briefly but I would just cover them again—we have some fantastic programmes as part of the transformation approach about sharing the basic office technology that we all use, about a much better shared approach to forensics and a shared approach to the development of digital policing for both the contact with the public but also, really importantly, the way that we send digital files digitally to the criminal justice system, so work going on at three levels: local, regional and national.
Chief Constable Dave Thompson: Similar things in terms of mobile data, body cams, all those things that improve productivity, a lot of effort into those.
We are showing that balance between what forces are doing and how it connects nationally as part of the transformation of the work of the West Midlands Police with the partnership with the regional forces but, also, the other metropolitan forces in the country and the NCA on work at our national analytic centre. We think the service could make a step change in terms of the use of big data and how long it takes to make service much more predictive.
Within that space there has been quite a considerable level of investment. There is balance around how much more the service needs to spend on technology and optimising that is important. We try to strike this balance on police numbers. It is important particularly when things like threat levels rise but, at the same time, it is important the service embraces modern technology.
We have also done similar things. West Midlands Police is in a partnership with Accenture that it has had for three and a half years, which is a technology-based transformation. We have seen our operational systems being swapped out. Our back office systems will go into a very similar transactional service that the Home Office is doing. The similar things you would expect modern organisations to be doing.
Q25 Will Quince: I want to ask some questions, so moving on to the precept. At the moment different forces are funded in different ways; historic mostly, so pre-2010. Do you think that is fair and still relevant today in that forces have different demands and, therefore, pressures or do you think that needs to be looked at? The second question is around: you and your Police and Crime Commissioners have the ability to hold referendums if you wanted to raise the precept above the set rate, which I think is 2% at the moment. The point being have you looked at that and discussed that with your Police and Crime Commissioner, and what would you spend the money on if you did that and do you think the public would be behind it?
Chief Constable Sara Thornton: The money for police forces comes from two sources: basically core grants or precept. If you look at the tables for both you will see the variation of both core grant per head and band D precept is significant. On core grant I think it goes from £64 per head of population to £200 per head of population. Then the precept goes from well under £100 to well over £200. There is massive variation on both, and they are sometimes working against each other and sometimes not.
We have been talking about the precept issue, in terms of our discussions that David has been leading with the Police and Crime Commissioners and it is primarily a matter for the elected bodies. I think we make that clear. I personally think that some flexibility on precept would make an awful lot of sense. I know there might be sensitivities about this with Treasury but we are electing Police and Crime Commissioners. If they had the ability to raise the precept by more than 1.99% without going to a vote, I think that gives them very much more real power locally and people would listen and want to be engaged in the issues in terms of local democracy. So it would be a good thing and it would certainly ease some of the pressures that are on forces.
Chief Constable Dave Thompson: It is a difficult balance here. As Sara rightly says, the decision on a referendum and precept levels are one for Police and Crime Commissioners locally in the area. That is always informed by a discussion from the Chief Constable in the force as to what the position would be like. Of course, PCCs at the moment, even if they raised the maximum, are only sustaining flat cash. There is no ability now to raise above and invest more. The arrangement is not allowing that at the moment.
As you rightly identified, the precept positions are largely across historical positions. West Midlands Police is the second lowest precepting police area. These will not be issues that are easily resolved. We talked before about the Council Tax base growth. That often potentially contributes almost as much as a precept rise in the West Midlands in terms of growth. There is a difficult balance for policing. In one sense we have a model that is very localism based with PCCs and if we elect people through that direct democracy route, in one sense there is a question that says, “Ought they to have the levers to make a difference?” At the moment they are constrained in terms of their ability to lift precept, and referendum is a challenging place for anybody to go.
At the same time there are still a lot of policing priorities and issues that are dealt with as a national system. We need to work through carefully how this is resolved. Simply just allowing freedom on precept will not resolve the issue for some forces that have quite a poor tax base anyway. When we worked with the Government on the funding formula work, part of that work was to look at what realistically could be expected given the tax base in some police forces.
Chief Constable Gareth Morgan: I am not certain I am ready for another referendum. In fact, I am not sure anybody is. I do my own Commissioner is very keen to look at lifting the cap. I cannot speak for him. It is a matter for Commissioners but it does constrain his ability to, as David has described, deal with those issues that are local, accepting we are not always delivering local policing issues. There is quite a lot of debate about that, whether that cap is inhibiting the option to go locally and say, “Look, these are the challenges being governed by Staffordshire Police. This is one of the options”. At the moment that option isn’t there for them, but it is a matter for PCCs.
Q26 Will Quince: I suppose the question I am trying to get to is, when you start asking people to pay more tax directly on a precept, they want to know what bang they are getting for their buck. As a result, their priorities may be very different to your policing priorities.
Chief Constable Gareth Morgan: Yes. That is one of the challenges. I respond to the Commissioner’s plan that he was elected on, most of which chimes with what the issues are that we are dealing with and our job, collectively, is to try to weld those together. The public are very sophisticated and understand what those challenges are in policing. They see it all the time and they recognise that. We need to help inform that if there is an issue with that but, from my own position, doing the work that I am going to do, I could go out to the public and explain what that division of resource would look like in terms of what could be in neighbourhoods. What would have to be specialist? Where I would want to invest in cyber enabled investigations and so on. I think the public are ready to have that conversation.
Chief Constable Dee Collins: In my case in West Yorkshire, I would be very much aware of the fact that when you look at the housing stock that you have and band D in West Yorkshire the vast majority of properties would be below band D, so it would have an impact in terms of various parts of the community. There is a risk of inequality then emerging. If we were able to raise more money, you asked where I would be investing. That is what we have been talking about, neighbourhood policing.
Chief Constable Sara Thornton: Chair, if I may say, in the old Police Authority days when there were not the restrictions, the caps on precept, I can remember we would always agree with the Authority that if we were going to ask for 6%, 7%, 8%, 9%, it would be very clear what the public were getting in terms of value for that. That would normally be around neighbourhood officers and child abuse investigation with the sort of investment case to be made. I do not think it is possible to go to the public and ask for more money unless you are saying, “In return you will get this additional investment”.
Q27 Esther McVey: I would like to declare an interest because I am the ex-Chair of the British Transport Police Authority. I would also like to put on the record what a tremendous job the British Transport Police do.
Going back to the discussion we were having before and that is about the shared resources across police forces and, also, as we are in an age of increasing technology. Looking at the tendering for contract management project oversight, in this increasingly complex world, where IT and projects and phone systems can cost tens and hundreds of millions of pounds, who is making those decisions on how those are going to be done?
Chief Constable Sara Thornton: The most obvious one is the replacement of Airwave with the Emergency Services Network. The problem with Airwave at the moment is that it costs about £1 million to run it.[2] It is a very expensive system. The decision was made by Government, I think five or six years ago, that to move to what is known as the Emergency Services Network, which is 4G LTE, would in fact save money. I think that is still the case. The difficulty is that the technology is cutting-edge, and the service-ready date was originally last month; in fact, September 2017. We know now it is going to be at least June 2018, and I fear that it might well be as late as summer of 2019, but you would have to check with the Home Office. That was a decision because of the expense of it and the fact that it is not just policing; it is also about fire and ambulance. It was a decision that was made from Government.
In terms of the programme itself, it is hugely complicated and I know that colleagues from all emergency services are engaged as key stakeholders.
Q28 Esther McVey: The question was: who is making those decisions on project oversight, tendering and cost? If you let me know who those people are, then I can do a follow-up question.
Chief Constable Sara Thornton: It is the Home Office. They are the leads on that, and the programme director and the senior responsible officer sit within that as well.
Q29 Esther McVey: All these other project managers, which you talked about before, with body-worn video cameras and other technologies like Niche, who is then making the decisions on them within the police forces?
Chief Constable Sara Thornton: On the body-worn video it will be individual police forces because they are procuring them separately. For something like Niche, most work is procured independently. Niche is the system for crime recording in several forces, and what has happened now is the forces that use Niche now work together as a bit of a collaboration, but the procurements will all have been done individually by those forces.
Q30 Esther McVey: Yes. Is this within the core group’s chief operating group? Who is it then? I am trying to get to who is signing it off and who is making the decision.
Chief Constable Dave Thompson: Largely, the decision is on contract issues. There are some national projects in the Home Office: the biometrics issues, the work around ESMCP. Those issues are largely in the Home Office. We then have within policing something called the National Commercial Board that is starting to take some work forward, so there is a programme called Collaborative Procurement in Law Enforcement. There are some national projects in there that are being agreed in frame. That is done in partnership with the Commercial Board and the Home Office.
Then the individual decisions that are made within forces: Chief constables operate within schemes with consent, with the Police and Crime Commission, that will detail how much money they can spend within the forces.
Q31 Esther McVey: Can we just get to who would then be within the chief operating group, and do they have the experience to do this?
Chief Constable Dave Thompson: Right. In terms of the decision to sign a contract, we are about to sign a contract for a new operational policing system. The contract signature will be the Police and Crime Commissioner because that is the person who holds the purse strings, and above that amount I cannot spend. However, it comes with programme management support. It comes with commercial advice that comes from the force within the forces. Some of those contracts are challenging. The decisions are usually made by directors who finance resources with their Chief Constables. It is the reason why we created a partnership with Accenture to ensure that we were supplemented to do that, but the decision to advise the Police Commissioner on major contracts is one that comes from the Chief Constable himself.
Q32 Esther McVey: Exactly, because it would be operational, so it would be with the chief operating group and with the Chief Constable. My question is: within the chief officers’ group, is there the capability and the experience to be signing off tens of millions of pounds, or do you need more support within that chief operators’ group?
Chief Constable Gareth Morgan: From my perspective and the similar piece that Dave Thompson has just referred to, the decision-maker is the Police and Crime Commissioner. That is the person who makes the ultimate decision. It is made on the recommendation of the force through the Chief Constable, so I have a range of professionally qualified people in procurement and finance. They are all accredited in their own professional rights. They are not police officers doing this work.
Q33 Esther McVey: Are they in COG or are they part of COG?
Chief Constable Gareth Morgan: I have a director of resources and people, who is in my chief officer team. That is the person I would look to to give me that advice, in the same way that I have a head of legal services who is legally qualified, who gives me legal advice. I will take that for due diligence. It will be tested. I go through the same process with the Police and Crime Commissioner, and the Police and Crime Panel will then hold the PCC through a similar process.
Q34 Esther McVey: You do not think you need any support? You think you have enough there: you have your FDs. You have your management oversight. You have your IT oversight. These systems that you have put in, whether it is Niche, whether it is the new phone system coming in now, you will have made the savings, and it is tens of millions, hundreds of millions, which is many police officers on the front line, and they will give the returns that you expect?
Chief Constable Sara Thornton: In terms of some context, all forces will either have a chief technology officer or chief information officer, and that group works very well together as part of the National Technology Council. The police service is no different from other parts of the public sector. There are high-level skills in complex programme management, in very difficult commercial areas, and these are in short supply. I am not massively confident that everything is perfect, but each force will have some provision for those sorts of skills, paying the right levels to attract and retain the best people to do this. We are in competition with the private sector, and it is difficult.
Chief Constable Dave Thompson: On some types of buy you will go and bring in specialist advice for it. We made some decisions in terms of West Midlands Police on estate decisions, and the value proposition around what we do around our estate. Because those decisions are not made very often in the force, it is right we bring in professional support. On some of the larger procurements, we have brought in our own auditors to review the decision-making processes around those. It is why we have partnered with somebody to help us to make those decisions.
In general terms, there is always room for improvement on these issues. It is a big issue that bedevils Government. If you look at what policing has done on efficiencies, we probably have a better track record than Government as a whole. If you look at what HMIC says about how much of our budget we have saved through more efficient working, it is a better figure than we would report against Government spending in general. We work hard on it. It is something the service has improved on massively over the last seven years.
Q35 Esther McVey: You are content, then, with this new phone system coming in that will be saving money for you and the other police forces?
Chief Constable Sara Thornton: That is slightly different.
Q36 Esther McVey: We will leave that there, then. Just quickly on body-worn video, which is a relatively new addition, did you say you were already altering and getting a new update for—
Chief Constable Gareth Morgan: Staffordshire Police introduced body-worn video I think three years ago. The technology now needs replacement. It has revolutionised in the time they have had it, so they are getting new kit that can download quicker. That was procured through our IT partner in Boeing. They have done the work. They have gone out and procured it. They have done their due diligence. They have the expertise. It is then being tested with local officers. You have to police-proof technology to make sure that it does what it is needed to do. I am very comfortable that is a good way of procuring and using public money.
Q37 Esther McVey: You had it written off in three years in your finance and in your budget. You knew that you would be given it straight away and that you would have done that?
Chief Constable Gareth Morgan: Yes. It was budgeted, and it was budgeted to be replaced. Yes.
Q38 Esther McVey: You do not think you need any help or support, then, in any of your project managing, IT oversight, or—
Chief Constable Gareth Morgan: No, no, no.
Q39 Esther McVey: I was just trying to help you if you thought you needed any in that, but you are—
Chief Constable Gareth Morgan: No. I am always happy to take help.
Chief Constable Dave Thompson: We are trying to buy more of this collectively. It goes back to the point that Sara was making. There are some big buys here that will be better done at scale. That is why we have the National Commercial Board. It is why we are trying to work more closely with Government. It is why we work with Crown procurement, all of that Crown services area.
On the issue of the emergency services communication system, there are some concerns about that. It is a very large and complex project. It is not a project that is being delivered in the police service.
Chair: We may need to pursue that through some further written questions, to explore behind your facial expressions in response to some of those questions.
Q40 Stephen Doughty: I want to get back to the big picture about crime numbers, crime statistics and changes in crime statistics. Certainly, it is an issue that concerns most of the public and my own constituents. The ONS statistics said that the recorded crime went up 13%, knife crime up 26%, sexual offences up 19%, violent crime up 19%, homicides up, and that is excluding terror incidents and the Hillsborough issue. The crime survey obviously says something different or appears to say something different, but the ONS was at pains to say this does represent genuine increases in crime. Do you all concur with the ONS position, and would you say that crime is up overall and it is up overall across all sectors, or are there particular areas of concern for you? Maybe start with Chief Constable Thornton.
Chief Constable Sara Thornton: I would probably differentiate. If you looked at the data last week, some of the increases around assault with no injury and harassment I think are about different recording. The increases around some of the violent crime, the gang-related crime and the knife crime and scooter thefts absolutely are real. It varies from crime type to crime type and it will also vary from place to place, but in terms of some of those youth-related crimes we are definitely seeing an increase in some of those violent crimes. Other areas are more about recording, I think.
Q41 Stephen Doughty: Others?
Chief Constable Gareth Morgan: My force has been audited by HMIC in relation to crime recording, and we have a good grading. I am confident we are recording crime appropriately. My observations around violent crime, for instance: it is the biggest cause of the uplift in crime in Staffordshire. It is about 22% of the overall uplift, and it is around—as you have described, it is consistent with the ONS—probably 13% by the end of the year. That is about 9,500 crimes.
Interestingly, just by way of example, in that mix, 1,000 of those crimes are offences are under the Malicious Communications Act, which are people sending offensive letters or correspondence to each other online, normally. I make the point that I am not minimising the crime—it needs to be reported—but I am back in the world of now needing to investigate that, and that was not a crime type that was causing me particular concern five or 10 years ago in the way in which it is now. That is the changing nature of the crime, not just the increase. We have to deal with the increase, or we have to have the capability within our resources to deal with it effectively because that is a specialist crime type, and that is a significant uplift for me in what looks like a violent crime category. You do need to get behind the figures, but the ONS feels right to me and it feels correct that crime is up, and I also have the same issues around acquisitive crime: vehicle theft, burglary.
Chief Constable Dee Collins: In West Yorkshire a couple of years ago when the original crime data integrity inspection took place, West Yorkshire was one of the forces, unfortunately, at the poorer end of the inspection, so we put an awful lot of time and energy into really focusing on how we record crime. Our increases were around about 18% at the end of the last year. We have done a lot of forensic work to try to understand, what does that 18% mean? Around about 7.5% of that is about making sure we are recording correctly and accurately. Some of it is around reporting practice, encouraging victims to come forward and have the confidence to report to us. Some of it is a little bit around some of our own policy decisions around making sure that we do record particular types of activities as crime. Then around about 4.5% we think is about an increased risk of being a victim.
When you are asking about types of crime, where we are seeing some of the significant increases is in anything effectively cyber-enabled, and also the lower level of violence without injury touches a little bit upon what Gareth was saying, but we are seeing increases, yes.
Chief Constable Dave Thompson: I broadly agree with the contentions by the ONS. The bits that keep me worrying: firearms discharges, part of gun crime, counted slightly differently. We have already had more this fiscal year than we had in the entirety of last year. We are seeing different patterns. We are seeing a significant rise in firearms discharges nationally. We definitely have in West Midlands.
The serious violence end, we have seen a step up in attempted murders and murders. Some of that is in the knife crime territory, particularly young people. It worries me, particularly some of the offenders we have arrested with no convictions. It is really, really alarming.
The acquisitive crime shift has been a bit of a shock this year in some ways. That started to go up a little bit last year. It has gone up quite a lot. That is the bit that is causing us the challenge of getting to the demand the public is giving us now. I broadly agree with the ONS position.
Q42 Stephen Doughty: I am going to specifically ask about drugs, particularly new emerging threats from things like spice and so on. Is that an issue you are seeing rising uniformly, perhaps, Constable Thornton, across the whole of the UK, or is that specifically in cities or elsewhere?
Chief Constable Sara Thornton: It is certainly an issue in London and I am pretty certain in other major urban centres. I am not quite sure of the penetration to rural areas. Having spoken to officers who are dealing with it, it is a real concern, and the harm that is around that sort of offending is really problematic.
Chief Constable Gareth Morgan: It is as much a problem in small and medium towns in Staffordshire as it is in cities, because if it is available, it is there.
Q43 Tim Loughton: Chief Constable Thornton, you mentioned four areas where police are particularly squeezed at the moment: neighbourhood policing, economic crime, cyber and counter-terrorism. You did not mention child sexual exploitation, which has certainly been a huge pressure on the police. At the moment sexual crimes, including historic CSE, are counting for over half of cases going to court, which must put huge pressure on police in preparing and investigating those cases. Is it not such a big deal for you?
Chief Constable Sara Thornton: It is a big deal. But I was talking about investment choices and, if you look at the growth in the units that are dealing with that across all forces, there has been a massive shift of officers into units that are dealing with sexual offences exclusively, and also units that are dealing with sexual offences along with domestic abuse and maybe elder abuse and other crimes against vulnerable people. There is already a substantial shift, which is why I did not make the investment case.
We have also done some work nationally in terms of trying to improve the response against modern slavery. The report that was out yesterday was noticing some improvements in some areas, and they will come and look again next year. We have put an awful lot more processes in place and some special units to make sure that we are collaborating across the forces on that. The reason why I did not mention it is largely because forces have made substantial investments.
As well as child abuse units, the other area is we have stepped up our response in terms of online paedophilia, all the work around peer-to-peer. In 2010 we had about 400 referrals a month nationally. It is now at 4,000; about 500 requests to forces a month going out, nearly all for arrests but some for searches. Forces have had to step up to provide the proper response and the proper resources for that.
Q44 Tim Loughton: How manageable is it at the moment? Perhaps the experience of some of the other forces. Can I differentiate between the historic child sex abuse cases that you have to investigate, going back many years, and the increase in contemporary sex abuse cases, which the first has led to a greater rise in reporting? Are you on top of that? Do you still have to play catch-up to a large extent and is that trend still going up? Have we plateaued? Where are we?
Chief Constable Gareth Morgan: You are right to identify the challenge, and it is the challenge that officers have to make when those referrals come in. I am not making a distinction here between rape involving children and adults because, in the figures I have—of that 3,000 I referred to earlier—nearly 700 of those are reported offences that are over 12 months old. We have to apply a risk assessment to that to understand where the risk is, but we cannot be at a point when somebody has come forward in the brave step to report something, for us to then say, “Well, actually, this is more of a priority”. My officers are juggling with that all the time in terms of it. I do not think it has plateaued yet. As a service, we are waiting to understand when that plateau might happen because I am seeing, as I indicated earlier, a year-on-year-on-year increase.
That is part of the resourcing issue that Sara has alluded to. It continues to be a real pressure on the service. I have about 350 cases a year being looked at for online IT issues and that is a 150% increase in three years, and nearly 70% of those are around online paedophilia. I come back to that question of: if I had the resource that is one of the pressures I would be saying I need assurance that I have the right resources in there, because at the moment it has not plateaued.
Chief Constable Dee Collins: I would agree that the trend is still going upwards. We have seen an increase of 40% over the last three years. Around about 40% of our cases are historic, that is over a year old. We do exactly the same as Gareth Morgan has said about prioritising and trying to determine where we best place the energy, what we do. Do we have investigations running hot and other investigations running not quite at the same place, to make sure that victims do feel as if we are doing our very best for them?
The other issue that we also have to think about is making sure that we have the best qualified and accredited staff that we can, and trying to get everybody upskilled in a short timeframe is incredibly challenging, as HMIC already recognises.
Q45 Tim Loughton: Just to be clear, are you saying that historic abuse—which you are saying is over a year old, but I think many of us would understand it is obviously more long-standing than that—is increasing at the same level as more people coming forward now with recent, contemporary crime? I am particularly concerned about child sex abuse, rather than general sexual crimes. Where is the draft going on both of those?
Chief Constable Dee Collins: With my experience in what is happening in West Yorkshire, and depending on what latest issues hit nationally, of course, which also sometimes encourages victims to come forward, they are probably still both going upwards.
Q46 Tim Loughton: Both still going up. Some of us were concerned when Simon Bailey, who I think has done an excellent job as the lead on CSE within the police, proposed that there should be alternatives to prosecution for individuals who were viewing indecent images. Do you agree with him, or do you think that is sustainable? There is still a victim involved here. In a previous role I have dealt with historic cases of child sexual abuse where, of those who were not prosecuted, some were still in denial about their offence. In terms of whether they should remain on the sex offenders’ register, it largely needs to be assessed on whether they appreciate that what they have done had a victim and was a serious crime. To say that modern paedophiles viewing images of children being abused, which is a serious crime, should not be prosecuted seems to suggest that either the police were not taking it seriously or did not have the resources to take it seriously.
Chief Constable Gareth Morgan: From my perspective—I have 27 years’ service, a lot of it in the world of child protection in my service—I have seen this trend from interfamilial historic issues to online. I recognise what those challenges are. My observation related to the issues that you are alluding to, which have been well reported. All those outcomes and options should be looked at because there will be circumstances in which that would fit the nature of the offender and their offending behaviour, so I do not close my mind to it. From my perspective, it has to be based on the judgments that a range of people make, not just the police service. That is about how you best manage the risk of an offender going forward, so there are a range of options and I think that is a decision that you take with a range of partners, not just the police on their own.
From my perspective, that should never be driven by a resourcing issue because that is not the right reason to make the decision, and it is certainly not about taking the issue seriously.
Chief Constable Dave Thompson: I am staggered by what I see in terms of the operations the force carries out on peer-to-peer sharing of images and more sensitive, covert policing techniques we carry out with people. The amount of men in this country who appear to show an active interest in this area is horrifying, and the scale of it takes my breath away. The point that Chief Constable Bailey is making is there is a really big discussion as a society about how we deal with this that is much broader than law enforcement. Of course, it makes us all deeply uncomfortable to think that people who have that view and engage in those activities should in any shape or form escape punishment, but the scale of it is just absolutely huge.
In terms of people reporting historically, I think we have made great progress and that is still coming through. In the work we do with partners, we still see child abuse referrals coming in and complex investigations into vulnerable young people. The area of online activity is just breath-taking, and there is a need—which I think was the point that Chief Constable Bailey was making—to have a big conversation about that.
Q47 Tim Loughton: I agree with that, but would you agree that counselling and rehabilitation—rather than prosecution, as was being put forward—is not appropriate for those offenders who effectively are in denial about their crimes and the severity of them, and that the biggest deterrent is the naming and shaming, that they are then a registered sex offender in the public domain, and that is more likely to stop them doing it again in the future?
Chief Constable Dave Thompson: Everything as a police officer and a parent says that we need to do something urgently to deter people in this area. For people who are in denial, who have a problem, we need to be really careful that treatment might not work, but the broader issue that is being raised is that this is a massive challenge that goes far beyond policing. I think the point Simon is making is that just simply seeing prosecution as the answer to this is not going to be the answer on its own.
Tim Loughton: To finish on a completely different subject—
Q48 Chair: Yes. Just before you do, I want to follow up on that. Do you think then we should be treating this online child abuse as a volume crime?
Chief Constable Dave Thompson: I absolutely think it is. The scope of it—
Q49 Chair: In terms of the way the police respond, the scale of resources that you have on the traditional volume crimes, the theft and burglary and so on, do you put now comparable resources, given the scale of the problem, to the way you treat things like theft and burglary?
Chief Constable Dave Thompson: That tipping point now, if I looked at the amount of investigators that are in general crime, from homicide to volume crime and public protection, they are getting close to matching now in West Midlands Police. It is almost about the same. That is a massive shift, and I say that in a context where the budget has fallen by 27%. There is a huge shift across now that we are almost at parity in those areas, and that is across things like domestic abuse, modern slavery, child abuse, online abuse. The volume of that is now almost matching the amount of investigation that is dealing with the car being stolen through to the homicide.
Chief Constable Gareth Morgan: I just want to acknowledge—because it is important to recognise we do as Chief Constables—these officers doing this on our behalf, on the behalf of the public, are spending their time viewing these images on our behalf to build those prosecution cases. The increasing number—150% increase in my own force area—that is an extraordinary act on behalf of the public. It is one of the most difficult jobs in policing, but it is an increasing demand placed on us. Back to Dee’s original point, we need to recruit people into the service who recognise what those demands are going to be and bring those skills with them, and it is a broader societal question. I agree with Dave Thompson completely. It is abhorrent, but it is a shocking statistic when you see the numbers.
Chair: I am conscious of the time that we have. We have obviously run over the first session. I still want to bring Stuart McDonald in to follow up on modern slavery. I had a brief follow-up question from Naz Shah about CSE. We were going to also have further questions from Tim Loughton on Brexit and I think from Sarah Jones around mental health, and we had some other questions but, if it is all right with the Committee, we will write to you about those questions because I am conscious we also need to have the discussion about counter-terrorism.
Briefly on CSE from Naz Shah, and then we will come to Stuart McDonald.
Q50 Naz Shah: We have come a long way as a country in terms of recognising victims of abuse, and it is only years ago that we have removed the word “prostitution” from parliamentary literature. I am very supportive of some women who were convicted of soliciting, even though they were actually children at the time, and they want their convictions quashed now. Back in the 1980s and 1990s they were convicted, underage. They were actually the victims of abuse. I am supporting that call for their convictions to be quashed. Would you agree with me, as senior officers with the experience that you have now, that they should be seen as victims?
Chief Constable Dee Collins: I certainly would. It is very, very important that we revisit this particular issue, in the same way that we are doing everything that we can to get upstream in terms of early intervention and prevention around children not being criminalised. We also have to take the bold step of looking at those people who have been criminalised and saying whether or not that is still relevant in 2017. I would support exploring it.
Chief Constable Gareth Morgan: I would not disagree. Dee has summarised that.
Q51 Stuart C. McDonald: The new inspectorate report, which has been referred to already a couple times, concludes that many victims of trafficking and slavery receive a wholly inadequate service from the police, and furthermore that victims are being let down at every stage. Chief Constable Thornton, can you tell us why that has been allowed to happen and what can and will be done to turn that around?
Chief Constable Sara Thornton: The legislation is a few years old, and we got off to quite a gentle start in terms of using it to deal with this evil in society. One of the difficulties has been that modern slavery and human trafficking tend not to be local to one police force area. They tend to cross force boundaries. Shaun Sawyer, the Chief of Devon and Cornwall, who is our lead on this, made proposals to have intelligence sharing, triaging units and approaches, which we now have. We have had that up and running for about six months now. It was necessary to have that because they are the people who are now saying we need to do a range of campaigns to highlight these issues, to have a variety of operational campaigns in forces around the various themes. That is now running quite well.
The inspection was done in the spring. We are confident that if you inspected now there would be a lot more activity, and when the inspectors come back in 12 months there will be even more. There are several hundred live investigations going on at the moment but, as I say, they require a degree of co-operation between police forces, between the National Crime Agency, and between the third sector, and we have been developing those capabilities.
Q52 Stuart C. McDonald: In terms of intelligence sharing and co-operation, that certainly seems to be one aspect of the report, but the other thing that seems to shine through in the report is, first of all, awareness about the Modern Slavery Act and how to go about dealing with possible cases of modern slavery among non-specialist staff. Secondly, even just attitude. There are suggestions that some people working in the police do not see this as a public priority and even that it is just not an issue in their local force. How do you go about tackling that side of things?
Chief Constable Sara Thornton: That is exactly why we have been having the monthly campaigns focusing on various different industries where we know there are a lot of modern slavery situations. It is also about this being a new piece of legislation, getting people familiar with it; familiar with what the Act’s sections are and what you need to do in terms of proof for cases. It has been a slow-burn into it but I think that we really are beginning to make some progress.
Q53 Stuart C. McDonald: Are other Chief Constables confident that awareness is growing?
Chief Constable Gareth Morgan: I think it is growing. The report is pretty stark in terms of its assessment of those challenges, but my challenge back is: we are policing the society we police. Ten years ago I do not think I, as a serving police officer, recognised the connection between the agricultural industry and modern slavery, in nail bars, car washes and so on. We are working hard to get that awareness in the police service of a 50% uplift in recorded crimes of modern slavery in a year, so it is in the mid-60s now. We have five or six ongoing investigations that Sara has alluded to as part of that national work. Again, it is a network issue, so we work closely with the National Crime Agency and a range of others but there is clearly more to be done. I suppose I refer back to some of the comments I made earlier.
This is a new, changing demand in policing alongside existing demand and issues, and we are going to have to work our way through how we best tackle that. A lot of the issues in relation to modern slavery are not stand-alone; they involve drugs and firearms and a range of other issues, which is why, increasingly, in my view, that is not the kind of issue that individual forces are best suited to solve. That is more of a national and network solution.
Chief Constable Dee Collins: Because of the nature of what happens in terms of the communities within West Yorkshire, we were one of the forces that invested in this some time ago. The Police and Crime Commission used some of the reserves money in order for me to be able to set up a specialist team. We have done a lot of work with a third sector organisation called Hope for Justice to roll out training to all of our front-line staff, which has been very successful. It just depends where on the spectrum of awareness you have been, and of course the HMIC report is a report that is a moment in time. We are far, far better networked. My own Police and Crime Commissioner has set up the Anti-Trafficking and Modern Slavery Network in order to get best practice right across the service, including from third sector parties. There is a lot more work that we can do.
Chief Constable Dave Thompson: When we take the West Midlands, probably better awareness and work around the trafficking of women and girls for sex. If you look over a period of time, the service has done quite a lot of that, all the way back to Operation Pentameter a number of years ago. But on the issues around labour exploitation, as Gareth says, we are a little slower around that. Who would not want to do better in this area?
However, the challenge again is this breadth of mission issue I talked about. We are in a phase where we are beginning to spend less on policing than other European countries. If you look at the research we have done around complex crimes that the UK deals with, we have some of the highest levels of crime complexity that are out there in the developed world. The issue I look at in the report is, as often is the case where the inspectorate shines a light on a particular area, of course we want to do better, don’t we? Who would want to see people subject to slavery in this country in this day and age? The stretch is balancing off also at the same time a high proportion of people who have been burgled, who also look to me in volume crime areas, to say what am I doing about that? As I think we have described, we are now reaching a level where pretty much from the investigation of vehicle to homicide, it is close to what we are now investigating for vulnerable people. That is a really hard trade-off. I do not think there is a force that does not want to do better, and of course we will do better off this, but it is tough at a time when we are spending less and we have probably more complexity of crime than other European countries.
Chair: Thank you very much, and I thank you very much for the evidence you have given us. We will have some further questions following on from this evidence around changing demands and resources. We will also be seeking, for some of the issues we will be exploring later on in the inquiry, evidence around diversity in policing as well, which we take very seriously. Can I thank you very much for your time, and also thank you on behalf of the Committee to all of your staff and officers who work so immensely hard to keep us all safe? Thank you very much for your time.
Examination of witnesses
Witness: Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley.
Q54 Chair: I welcome Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley to the evidence session and thank you for your patience as well. Can I just ask you then to update us, to give us the brief summary of the state of the counter-terror response at the moment, given obviously the challenges and the awful attacks that we faced earlier in the year?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: Thank you very much and thank you for the opportunity today. It has been an extraordinary and sobering year.
Our ambition must always be that no one dies in a terrorist attack, and we recognise that is probably an unrealistic doctrine of perfection but that has to be our ambition. A year like this, where 36 people have died in five attacks, four of them fatal, and indeed five people died within sight of this room, is sobering and it challenges us to do better.
This year has also seen—not just about the attacks—a dramatic upshift in the threat. You will have heard Andrew Parker, Director-General of the Security Service, talking about that last week. Probably the statistics that really illustrate how challenging this year has been are that this year we have seen 12 potential attacks, five successful and seven foiled. At the start of this year you might have heard Andrew or I say, over three years or so, we had foiled 13 attacks, and that felt busy. Three years or so, 13, and then 12 in a few months, have been massively challenging. The assessment of the experts is this is not a short-term spike. This is a shift up in the threat that we are going to have to counter long-term.
On our counter-terrorism model, I do still believe we start from a position of strength. I still have, every week, people from across the world coming to this country, seeing how we do counter-terrorism. That strength comes from 50 years of learning because we have been wrestling with terrorism domestically for that period of time. It comes from hard experience.
There are two personal reflections for me. One is we have had to double down and be even more determined to learn from the attacks this year. What do the attacks teach us, and what do we learn about the changing threat to strengthen ourselves and our work with partners even more so?
The second thing for me this year has been immense pride. The bravery, compassion and determination I have seen in colleagues has been amazing, and that has been a pleasure to be involved in the leadership of. Today will probably focus on how we get even stronger than we are today.
Q55 Chair: Thank you very much. We want to cover some of the individual attacks, some of the reasons why we are seeing the increase in attacks and threat, and the nature of the response that we are able to give. Could you start by clarifying some of the issues around funding that you have? Chief Constable Thornton has previously written about the CT budget in advance of the Parsons Green attack and said that the policing component of the CT budget was £700 million, but was due to fall by around 7% over the next three years. Obviously, since that there has been the one-off announcement of the further £24 million announced in September, and there have been announcements around increases to armed police funding, capital, as I understand it, as well. Could you just clarify for us? What are you expecting to happen to the particular CT policing budget over the next two to three years?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: The budgets were set a couple of years ago, the outline in terms of the spending review, and the counter-terrorism policing budgets, which I co-ordinate across the country, are currently about £700 million. For those first couple of years, last year and this financial year of the spending round got a significant upwards kick, but the profile that has been set is then to reduce it over the next three years. From where we are today, as Sara Thornton said, that is a 7.2% cash reduction, so it seems to be more real-terms. Those budgets were set before that dramatic shift this year.
In terms of this year’s budget, I now have a double challenge. The resources across the country: we have to look back and investigate the attacks and support all the victims and take those cases thoroughly through to trials or inquests, and I still have over 100 detectives across the country on those cases. At the same time, I have a bigger threat to try to mitigate in my work with the Security Service. That challenge has stretched us enormously. We have done a range of things to strengthen our ability to do that. We are overspending considerably this year, and in constructive engagement with the Home Office on that and support on that. That £24 million will cover part of the overspend, and we are still discussing with the Home Office how we cover the rest of it this year. That is about helping us out this year, which is welcome.
Looking forward, there are lots of metrics and we have a complicated system in terms of how we prevent people from becoming radicalised, how we investigate attacks and we protect the public. Roughly what I am seeing at the moment is about 30% more work in the system for us in counter-terrorism. That is going to take some dramatic new ways of working for ourselves and the Security Service, a lot of learning from what has gone on this year, and we will do everything we can do through creativity, but we are going to need real-terms extra resources to help counter that, as well as our creativity, not 7.2% reduction. The Home Office understands that, and we are having good conversations with them on the detail of our proposals and thinking. My ambition has to be: how do I get our capability back to the position where we are as well-matched against dealing with a threat next year as we were last year?
Q56 Chair: In terms of the things that the CT policing budget covers specifically, obviously a lot of the additional support for counter-terror will be from neighbourhood policing and so on in forces across the country, but in terms of what you need this budget to cover, if you have a 30% increase in demand and a 7% reduction in terms of funding or budget projected, what then is it that gets squeezed? What are the kinds of things that you currently cover within that budget?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: I assume we will talk later on about how local police forces are a big part of the counter-terrorism system, so I would not want anyone to believe that this budget alone deals with the police contribution. It is the cornerstone. It is not the whole show by any means. From that budget, there is a proportion of it—I think it is about a fifth—that deals with specialist protection issues, protecting VIPs and certain premises and things. That is a niche capability.
Then the core of the rest is intelligence and investigation work, the work police and Security Service do together. The Security Service has the lead on the intelligence picture, the police have the lead on investigation, but it is very much a joint approach. We help with the intelligence and they help with the investigation. The core of it is in the investigative space, but I also have experts in protection and preparation. For example, we co-ordinate the plans regionally. That is critical, as you were discussing earlier on.
The last thing I should mention is that quite a sizeable slice of the money goes to local police forces for armed policing capability. It is not the whole armed policing capability. A proportion of the armed response vehicles in key locations in the country are funded through this grant, and also the specialists who do the top-end interventions—counter-terrorism specialist firearms officers—are funded through the grant as well.
That is the canter across the things it covers. In terms of prioritisation, dealing with this uplift in work at the moment is a real stretch. After the London Bridge attack, talking with Chief Constable colleagues also responsible for terrorism across the country, we effectively put the counter-terrorism network on an emergency footing where we were trying to get the initiative back against the terrorists and not be on the back foot because of having to respond to the attacks. What that meant was deprioritising some key areas of work.
We have some niche responsibilities, for example, for war crimes investigations. Those have been deprioritised. We look at domestic extremism, and most of that work has been deprioritised, except for the work against the extreme right wing, which is a growing threat. We are squeezing small areas like that. Given that we now have a growing number of subjects of interests we are investigating and a very big growth in the number of investigations, frankly, a lot of the prioritisation simply takes place within that cohort and we have a bigger proportion of our investigations that are at the bottom of the pile and getting little or no work at the moment. Constant reprioritisation in that investigative workload is the key to it.
Q57 Will Quince: One of our previous panel members of the session before has previously been somewhat critical of the amount of money out of the quite significant 30% increase in counter-terrorism funding between 2015 and 2020 that is going to the police, something like £700 million. Do you think that is sufficient and justifiable, versus the Security Service and GCHQ and other areas? Start with that.
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: You have to be careful. Sometimes numbers that get published are about the total spend across the five-year CSR period; sometimes they are annual. The £700 million counter-terrorism direct grant to policing is about a fifth of the pot that gets spent. There was a massive increase in that, and those figures have been published—I cannot recall them today—in terms of the overall counter-terrorism pot. As you can see from that, Government made prioritisation decisions about going elsewhere. The other big recipients in the system are the intelligence agencies and the military, and in the spending review the Government made prioritisation decisions and the police got the numbers that I described.
However much as those may have made sense two years ago, that is why I am working with the Home Office now. With the threat having changed as it has done this year, I think we are going to need a very different profile going forward over the next three years.
Q58 Will Quince: I assume you were talking about Operation Servator in relation to the additional armed response capability.
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: That was part of it, yes.
Q59 Will Quince: Part of it. Do you think the right balance has been struck between regional capability—I know this is probably a difficult question to ask you, being the Assistant Commissioner—and resource in London? What I am saying is we have other major cities and other towns. I represent Colchester, which is a garrison town, potentially a threat. Have we got the balance right between London and the rest of the UK?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: I would say yes. You probably want more than that. After some of the French attacks we decided that our armed stance needed to be stronger, and we looked across the country. We looked at JTAC, the Terrorism Analysis Centre, that looks at threat and how that is dispersed across the country. We looked at the capability in policing. We came up with options and we discussed those at Chiefs’ Council. I put those with the Home Secretary to the National Security Council about what the best priority was, looking at the lay of the threat across the country. Sensibly, you are bound to take a decision to allocate resources to threat, and that is how it was done.
While I have this co-ordination role nationally, I work with Chief Constables and I do not have executive authority to move the money from one to another. I think we have the balance about right but of course we have to keep looking at that.
Q60 Will Quince: Can I ask my next question, which jumps subjects a little bit? It has been in the news somewhat over the last 48 hours. We are seeing an unprecedented threat now with British nationals that perhaps have gone over to Syria or Iraq to fight alongside Daesh or part of Daesh. With them now returning back, could I ask what the police here are doing to tackle that now unprecedented threat that faces us?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: There are not large numbers coming back of the high-risk individuals but there are some. Police officers have to start from a quite simple perspective: if people have committed serious criminal offences, then it is our job to try to put them in front of the court so they then go to prison for a long time. That is a straightforward ambition. It is not always straightforward to deliver.
Of the people who are still out there, who we are most concerned about, there is a significant proportion that we think there is prosecutable evidence against, but unfortunately it is not all of them. Not all of them left evidence behind when they left. Not all of them have put material on social media that would help us convict them. Anybody coming back who we still have a high degree of concern about, they are likely to be arrested and we will see if we can gather enough evidence from that process, but if not we are going to have to manage that risk in the community. That is probably going to mean they will become one of our priority operations with the Security Service, and we will look at other measures. You will be aware of terrorism prevention measures, which are quite stringent provisions to potentially relocate somebody and put a lot of controls around them based on a burden of proof signed off by the Secretary, and also people returning. There was a power brought in a couple of years ago, a temporary exclusion order, which is really about managing return.
You do find some individuals coming back, where some of the people who have gone have not gone to fight. Sometimes you have naive women and naive families who have gone over there because they think this is a great place to go and live as a Muslim, and clearly they have realised how ghastly it is. Just travelling to that area and not taking part. There are no criminal offences there but, clearly, there is a degree of concern when they come back and we use those sorts of measures when they come back. That way, the powers enable mandates to attend classes and to look at ideological education types of processes like Channel, and the Home Office organises those, which is very helpful.
Q61 Will Quince: You mentioned some of those powers. In your view, do you have sufficient powers? In other words, do we as legislators need to do more to empower you to take action against these individuals?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: I would not answer the question so much narrowly about returners but, in terms of the overall threat, we have looked this year in great detail with the Home Office. The Home Office has been thinking about legislation and there are not massive revisions that are needed. There are quite a number of tweaks and refinements to legislation that would be very helpful. Both Labour and coalition Governments over many years have wrestled with counter-terrorism powers because we have had it for 50 years, so it would be odd to find massive, gaping holes in our suite of powers.
Some of the issues we are wrestling with now, where radicalisation is spreading differently, it is spreading through the internet, the way propaganda on the internet is radicalising people in communities to an unprecedented rate in parts of the country, the offences that capture those issues and how they are treated in the courts could probably do with some refinement, and I think Government will probably bring the proposals forward on that matter.
Q62 Chair: Have you used the terrorism exclusion orders?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: A few times, yes.
Q63 Chair: How many times?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: I would have to come back to you on that.
Chair: If you could let us know, that would be very helpful.
Q64 Preet Kaur Gill: Do you think internet and social media companies are doing enough to address the problem of extremist content online, and what more do you think they should be doing?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: They can do more. Andrew Parker, when he spoke last week, summarised the issues well. Put aside a few small, rogue countries operating from odd parts of the world. The big social media companies that are probably in people’s minds, I am absolutely sure they have no desire for terrorism literature or paedophilia or whatever to be on their sites. They are absolutely committed to trying to deal with that problem.
The challenge is, though, they are not as mature a sector as the banking sector. If I look at the relationship we have with the financial sector, the financial sector and the banks, there is a lot of regulation there, but there is now a lot of willpower there, where they see it as their duty to look for dirty money and dirty practices going across their systems, and proactively report it and work with law enforcement and intelligence agencies on that matter. The banking sector has been around for decades, hundreds of years. In the social media sector we have a developing relationship. They do do some good work with us but, with the pace of this and the amount of material there, the challenges we have to work closely with them on are not just about them cleaning stuff off their sites, which they are very good at, but more proactively working with us. Sometimes they will spot somebody who is sharing bomb-making instructions months before we know about it because it is happening on their systems. More proactivity in those sorts of areas could make a big difference.
Q65 Preet Kaur Gill: Do you think there should be a mandatory duty placed on them, then, to report things like that if that helps us all with our counter-terrorism strategy?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: The legal provisions around social media are so complex because of the global legal issues. Whether jumping in legally is the right answer I am not sure, but we have to get to the same level of intense co-operation and a sense of real social responsibility from these companies that we have developed with the banking sector over many decades.
Q66 Preet Kaur Gill: Do you think the Prevent strategy is working? We have seen diminishing neighbourhood policing resources. Do you think that the programme needs to be more rooted in the community and less focused on ideology, and equally more focused on threats of violence?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: I see lots of evidence of Prevent working. It is a long-term, difficult challenge when we have radicalisation in growing communities. When we look at the growing extreme right wing threats, we now have a proscribed domestic extreme right wing terrorist group, National Action, which is a real concern to me, or the even larger global threats of Islamist jihad that come from Al-Qaeda and Daesh and others. We do see those.
What is different today, though, is that they reach into our communities in a way that they have not done before, and that is largely down to social media. Whereas previous terrorist groups were about secret organisations working very closely together and protecting themselves, there is now much more an open-source approach encouraging people to, “Buy into my ideology and act in my name”. Therefore, we need to work with the roots of the transmission of that virus, ie the electronic world and the virtual world, but also we have to make our communities more hostile and able to defend themselves against that ideology, which often picks up, of course, the most vulnerable.
Q67 Chair: Does that mean you are more worried about the online propaganda, effectively, and the openly available extremist material than you are about the secret, inaccessible plotting going on online?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: We are worried about both. Sometimes you will see in the media a suggestion that all Isis is doing is generating lone-actor attacks. You only have to look at recently in Australia, where they had a very narrow escape with a piece of police work that prevented an airline being brought down, and that has been widely reported. They are still planning those sorts of complex, sophisticated global attacks, but there is this high volume of material going out that is radicalising people in our communities. People who once upon a time may have been involved in crime or made other bad decisions when they were growing up, or people with mental health issues, and it is hooking into them. They think, “Actually, this will give me a purpose. I will act in the name of Islam as presented in this warped document, and that gives me a purpose”. We are seeing so much of that in communities that it is of great concern to me.
Then, on the opposite side of the fence—not on the same scale yet but we have seen extreme right wing issues growing over the last couple of years—as I say, we now have a proscribed white supremacist, neo-Nazi organisation in this country. We have not had that before. If you have both sides of that penetrating into our communities, often through social media, it requires a different approach in terms of working with those companies and it also requires us to work in communities differently to make communities able to be hostile against this virus that can spread.
Q68 Chair: Do you see that online extremism then as being the biggest reason why we have seen the increase in the number of attacks that you have to deal with?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: It certainly plays into the volume. The low-sophistication attacks. Online, you can have an ideology taught to you and you can buy into this warped ideology. You can receive instructions on how to conduct a simple attack, which does not take much preparation. You can be told where you can buy the necessary proprietary materials, whether it is weapons or chemicals, to try to build an explosive device. You can be given helpful ideas about what a good attack site would be. You can get all that from publications on the internet, and sometimes you might hook up with somebody online and go into secret chat-rooms and they will give personal instructions. That is going on.
Ten years ago, if you were young and disturbed and were somehow attracted to Al-Qaeda, the chance of ending up in contact with them and ending up in the foothills of Afghanistan was very low. That was not easy to do. In this world today, making that connection is completely different.
Q69 Preet Kaur Gill: Do we need to review our Prevent strategy, given the online threat?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: Government have announced that they are reviewing the whole CONTEST strategy, of which Prevent is one of the four strands of it. It is being reviewed, and absolutely it must be. I know Prevent has had a lot of public debate about it and about its credibility. It will always be a messy business doing this sort of preventative work in communities. All political sides need to stand behind it and make it as good as possible, because what we do in terms of arresting people is not going to solve the problem. We can mitigate the threat, and if the threat is big we are going to need more people to mitigate that, but we have to stop the conveyor belt and intercept it earlier on.
Q70 Chair: Are you most worried about the material that is put on some of the biggest sites that have the widest reach—the Facebooks, YouTubes and so on—or are you more worried about some of the smaller ones with less apparatus and less ability to intervene?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: I am sorry, but it is all of the above and more. The big, well-known sites are important because that is how you hook into somebody who is vulnerable but not that well-connected, because they are not likely to be on some dodgy minority site that comes out of some odd part of the world and is only used by criminals. The main sites are important, but there are also some news media sites that enjoy publishing the latest instructions from Isis, and they see that as part of an open and free news media, which I do not think is always as sensible as it might be. There is material out there coming from all sorts of different directions, and social media sites are working really hard to clean it up. I would praise them for what they do in that. There is more work they can do with us, and there are other sites, like some news organisations, and in some countries where they have a different view of the balance between freedom of speech and illegal material there are archives of material that hold some of this.
Q71 Stephen Doughty: I have a huge amount of respect, Commissioner Rowley, for all the work you and your team have been doing, particularly over the last year. I want to put on the record my praise to my own South Wales Police, who have obviously dealt with a number of very serious incidents, including my own constituency.
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: They have.
Q72 Stephen Doughty: You were talking earlier on about the nature of the interaction between the Security Service and the police. I was wondering about the nature of the interactions with other parts of the system, particularly the Border Force, because it has been reported that the Italian authorities informed the UK in 2016 that Youssef Zaghba, one of the London Bridge attackers, had been stopped at Bologna Airport and prevented from travelling to Turkey. Salman Abedi, the Manchester bomber, was known supposedly to the intelligence agencies and apparently had been reported to the anti-terror hotline, but he still managed to travel between the UK and Libya.
Indeed, in my own constituency, one of the two Muthana brothers, Aseel Muthana, was able to travel—despite being known to the authorities—to Syria to join Daesh, despite his older brother already having travelled and his own passport at the time being put under lock and key. Do you think there is enough consistent sharing of information, particularly with the Border Force and particularly regarding the issue of exit checks on individuals who are either travelling abroad for training or to link up with others and then perhaps return, or indeed to go over to places like Syria or Libya elsewhere?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: That is a very long question. You made a lot of comments about some of the cases this year, which I am not really able to respond to, but not everything you read in the papers that you are recounting is true.
Just in terms of what is going on at the moment, immediately ourselves and the Security Service is doing a whole series of reviews to see exactly what was known, what lessons can be taken from that. The Prime Minister and Home Secretary have asked David Anderson, who was formerly the reviewer of counter-terrorism legislation, to quality assure the work that we are doing and make sure it is as penetrating and thorough as it needs to be. That process is coming to an end and David Anderson will be reporting back to the Home Secretary in the next few weeks.
Some of these cases still have trials ahead, so that limits what can be said publicly. There will be inquests, of course, and if there is parliamentary scrutiny on intelligence matters, that is what the ISC is configured for. So it is right and proper and there will be a whole pile of scrutiny of what has gone on, but I would just challenge a little some of what you said until the report is back.
Q73 Stephen Doughty: In terms of the exit checks in particular, are they occurring at every point of entry and exit now in the UK? Are you satisfied with the level of co-operation within the Home Office, particularly with the Border Force?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: We have a flagging system run by the Security Service. They are leading on the intelligence work, so they decide which individuals get flagged. Of course it is not a straightforward issue, because if you are trying to build an intelligence case on somebody, if they get stopped every time they move, then they know there is surveillance on them. So there are choices about when you flag people and when you do not flag them; there are choices about when you try to exclude people from the country or not. But those decisions are made systematically and thoroughly.
We have many hundreds of specialist CT police officers also working at ports who can bring extra insights and knowledge of the counter-terrorism issues in terms of dealing with issues at borders. There is a good system there. It is one of the things we have looked at in our reviews and we have some proposals on how to do it differently, but the data sharing does happen.
Q74 Stephen Doughty: Are you satisfied with the co-operation of travel providers, particularly commercial airlines, charter airlines and others, in terms of their co-operation with that system as well in terms of additional measures that can be put in place, for example, in looking at passenger manifests and so on and bookings online and who they are made by and so on in advance?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: As a police officer, I would always want lots more information. The Home Office leads on the policy issues around borders and data and have made big strides with foreign countries and with companies in terms of the amount of data that we get in advance so that we know who is travelling in and out of the country. I would always ask for more data. Clearly, there is a balance in terms of freedoms in that and there is also the practicalities of what responsibilities and burdens are put on the companies, but I am satisfied the Home Office are pushing that agenda hard.
Q75 Stephen Doughty: On the armed policing capacity, which you touched on earlier, a specific question about the Civil Nuclear Constabulary, which was raised with the Home Secretary last week. I have just had a ministerial response that said that 826 personnel were deployed from the CNC last year in support of Operation Temper. Do you think it makes sense for the CNC to be within the auspices of bays and for them to have a separate arrangement in terms of, for example, their retirement age and other pay and conditions and so on, given the clearly very important role they are playing in support to armed police operations, particularly at critical times?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: I do not have a strong view on that. The critical issue is both the Ministry of Defence Police and Civil Nuclear Constabulary, we need them to meet the same occupational standards for a firearms officer, which we would expect one of my protection teams, for example, guarding Palace of Westminster across the road. As long as they can meet those same occupational standards, which is what they seek to do, then I am relaxed about age and a whole range of other factors.
On the back of seeing the attacks in France and recognising for a sustained period of critical, we may need more armed capacity than we have normally marshalled, but being very proud of our largely unarmed policing model, one of the things we built up was Operation Temper as a contingency, where we would use the military first of all to free up police officers from Ministry of Defence Police and Civil Nuclear to assist in protecting crowded places, shopping centres and transport hubs. That has worked to great effect. If we needed it, there is more capacity in the military to help us even further. It is one of the developments over the last couple of years that I think has been really positive and it has certainly tied CNC and MDP into policing even stronger than they were before.
Q76 Stephen Doughty: But would you think it would make sense perhaps to look at the structures again now, given the increasing role that they have been playing, perhaps whether that is working most effectively as it can?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: I am relaxed about it. We did the plans, we press the button and help arrives, so from that perspective it works.
Q77 Sarah Jones: Can I ask a quick follow-up question on the social media stuff? Some of us met with Facebook recently. We were talking about how they should be reporting more of what they see to the police and they were saying, “In part we do not report it all, because they do not want us to, because they would not be able to cope with the quantity of it”. It was just whether you agree with that, that if suddenly they started behaving in the way that you might want them to and reporting more that you would not have the resources to deal with the quantity.
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: Intelligent reporting would be very welcome. If I use the banking sector analogy, we want banks to be intelligent, not to send us so many referrals we cannot deal with them. But the most acutely concerning files and documents that are being shared on the internet, for example, those with bomb-making instructions or the specific latest publication from Al Qaeda or from ISIS, those are obviously illegal, they are of a high degree of concern and people sharing those, we would like to know about them.
Q78 Sarah Jones: My other question was about neighbourhood policing. It is twofold: first, are you satisfied that the intelligence is passed from the Security Service to neighbourhood officers and vice versa, does that kind of system work?
Then the second part of the question is about the cuts that we have seen to neighbourhood officers and the degree to which they are being used to deal with some of the impacts of other cuts, whether it is mental health or whatever it might be. What impact does that have on the terror threat and your ability to deal with that?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: I will deal with the system and then I will deal with the intelligence piece second. The resources I am responsible for co-ordinating across the country are, as I say, just the cornerstone of the police’s contribution to counter-terrorism. Policing as a whole system and local forces make a big contribution. The resilience that they offer in terms of responding to an incident is important. I wanted to mention that when we did an analysis of the Westminster attack and the Manchester attack, what we found was in Westminster it was about two-thirds of the resources were from local policing strength, not from counter-terrorism funding, and in Manchester it was about 80% was from the local. That is just indicative of how significant they are. Local officers work with us, disrupting individuals and dealing with safeguarding issues, but community policing is the critical underpinning of everything we do, as colleagues said in the previous session, and I strongly support what they say. They build trust and confidence that gives that legitimacy for us to act.
We have been making many more arrests, executing many more warrants in quite a small number of communities across the country as the threat has gone up. To do that with trust and confidence and to take communities with you requires those local policing relationships to be so strong. We have seen massive increases in reporting. At the moment, I think we have nearly half as much again what I would call Prevent referrals coming in from all sources, whether it is schools or whether it is communities, people locally referring in people they are concerned about, vulnerable people who have been radicalised. That platform of community policing is critical to us.
When I see Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, as they reported first a couple of years ago, their concerns that neighbourhood policing across the country was degrading, from a counter-terrorism perspective that concerns me. I know there are some forces—Bedfordshire would be one—that are really struggling to maintain any viable community policing capability. For a whole range of policing reasons that colleagues before spoke about, that is critical, but it is really important for counter-terrorism as well.
Q79 Rehman Chishti: Just looking at the nature and the scale of the issue that we have across the country, how many overall individuals would you say we have who are either under investigation, under observation and also taking into account the figure of 800 approximately that have gone to fight with Daesh? Overall across the country, what is the overall number we are looking at that will give us an indication of the nature and scale of this issue?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: We have well over 3,000 people that we are investigating between ourselves and the Security Service, subjects of interest as we refer to them. But then there is a wider penumbra of the problem: you will have heard us speak about before over 20,000 people who previously touched investigations and are not currently under live investigation. Indeed, some of the attacks we have seen this year have come from people in that cohort, who years ago we were pretty clear—and I think right at the time—that they were not criminally or terrorist active, even though they had unsavoury friends and unsavoury views, and subsequently, years later, they have become more active and committed an attack. So 3,000 and 20,000 are good numbers to work with.
Q80 Rehman Chishti: Looking at 3,000 and 20,000, and if one just can just break it down into categories of dangerous, disillusioned and disturbed, in that category, just looking at how people get sucked into this poisoned, evil ideology, out of that 23,000, how many would you say go in the category of clearly dangerous, clearly disillusioned and disturbed?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: In the 20,000, there is a whole range of characteristics in there. I would not try to even analyse it. In the 3,000, I cannot pull a number on that out of my head, but there are a lot of people with mental health issues, there are a lot of young, vulnerable people in there and there is some very clear-thinking, determined and very dangerous individuals. There is the whole combination there.
I mentioned 12 potential attacks this year, seven foiled, five successful. In there you have people being directed from overseas; people just inspired by the propaganda; you have adults and children; you have boys and girls; men and women; you have people connected into ISIS; people connected into Al Qaeda; you have very clear-thinking, very bright people and you have vulnerable people with either mental health issues or vulnerable by a matter of age. The spectrum is enormous. It is such a diverse picture.
Q81 Rehman Chishti: That is the question I raise, because if the spectrum is so diverse, then you need a different approach to deal with the different elements that you have. Dangerous, you have to have a different strategy to deal with that. If they are disillusioned, you have a different strategy, but then if they are disturbed, mental health issues, you have a different approach to deal with. Of the 3,000 that we have, roughly what would you say you would place down in clearly dangerous and those who are disturbed and need mental health support, approximately?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: They are on the list because they are all potentially dangerous. Just because you are disturbed does not mean you are not potentially dangerous. I cannot simplify that, but you are right about different strategies. Some of the things we have been doing over the last two or three years is this picture has changed, so we have a very different relationship with the mental health service, we have dedicated mental health teams working in three of the regions, helping co-ordinate work across the country so that if someone comes into one of our operations who has mental health challenges, looking at do we deal with it as an enforcement issue or a health issue, for example.
We have been increasingly doing safeguarding work with local councils, so at any one stage there has been many tens of children who are going through ward of court type proceedings because we are worried that their parents are radicalising them or their parents are not managing to look after them and they are being radicalised elsewhere and there is some sort of vulnerability towards them. All the time there are new types of work going on in local partnerships to try to wrestle with this problem.
What I think this summer teaches us is we are going to have scale that to a scale way beyond what we have done previously. We are going to depend more on local policing, more on local councils and social services. There is a lot more work we need to do in this territory, which given the state of resourcing in those spaces, it will take more resources to make it viable.
Q82 Rehman Chishti: Just three clarification points, if I may. First, I completely get they are all dangerous. The point I was making was in relation to some, they do not have the disturbed element of mental health issues, that they are clearly bent on causing carnage, the differentiation I was trying to make on that.
With regards to the 800 who have gone to fight with Daesh, from the information that you have, how many of them have been taken out as known targets and how many of them do we know are confirmed as having been lost in battle? That gives an idea of the number we are looking at who may be coming back to this country.
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: I am not going to give out any more exact numbers. I think we have said before into three figures have been killed; the rest of them, about half have come back and half have stayed there. The half that have stayed there so far are much more dangerous. They were much more committed to fighting and they are much more determined. It is still possible that most of them will die fighting, which from a domestic perspective, I am not against that as a prospect, but I think we have to expect some of them will come back. As I said earlier, we have done everything we can do over the last two or three years since they travelled out there to build a case against them, so any of them we can put in prison we will do. If we cannot, those will take labour-intensive operations.
Q83 Rehman Chishti: Just finally, with regards to the social media aspect, of course we had a statement today with regards to Daesh being defeated in Iraq, but the bigger argument on that is defeating the poisoned ideology idea and appeal. That goes across Europe, because it may be 800 from the United Kingdom have gone out there to fight with Daesh, but there are thousands from across Europe. The argument in relation to how one addresses the issue of online recruitment, which is the biggest recruiting ground around Europe and internationally, is there a set strategy with all our European partners?
For example, Germany is now introducing legislation for extremist material to be taken down within a certain period of time. They have the same problem that we have with online radicalisation. Is there a set standard procedure in relation to when that material should be taken down so that all the 27 countries can work together to push those social media companies to do what they should be doing?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: The UK has led in that way. One of the units we run, the Counter Terrorism Internet Referral Unit, which does that work with the companies in terms of identifying material that we want taken down, we were the first place in the world to do that. Europol have created a parallel unit and European countries are co-operating on that. There is not a legal standard. As I said earlier, the companies are keen to clean up their sites because they recognise they should do. I think most countries are working in this direction. The challenge though is there so much material out there and it only takes a small amount of it to get into the hands of the wrong people.
Q84 Mr Christopher Chope: Can I ask about the issue of deterrence, because at the heart of crime, prevention is deterrence. To what extent, if at all, does deterrence work in relation to members of these two groups you have been describing, the 3,000 who are subjects of interest, and the 20,000 who were previously in that cohort?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: I am not sure I follow the drift of your question.
Q85 Mr Christopher Chope: In other words, putting it directly, what is stopping those 3,000 subjects of interest from doing their worst? Are they being deterred? Are they being inhibited in some way? Are they frightened of the punishment that will follow? Are they worried about being detected? Normally you would make sure, a potential burglar you would say may be deterred by the fact that he is going to be caught. There may be intelligence to play with here, but we are talking here about people whose minds have, in our sense, been polluted, they are completely brainwashed.
When you say there has been a 30% increase in terrorist activity, what I am trying to get at is what can we do in response to that? Are we going to be able to deter any of those people who are in that cohort or are in these cohorts you have been describing, or is deterrence completely unworkable? If deterrence does not work, should we go for preventive detention, for example?
If neither of those, what solutions are you putting forward or do we just wait for one of these ghastly incidents either to be prevented and not materialise and the people to be brought before the courts and sent to prison or what do we do? We seem to be like sitting ducks.
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: No, not at all. We spoke at length earlier about Prevent, so preventing the list getting longer, that critical work in communities, protecting people from radicalisation we have spoken about, so I will not address that part of it. That is critical, for the reasons you articulated.
Q86 Mr Christopher Chope: But the people who are already on the list.
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: In terms of the people already on the list, in terms of those 3,000, we will do everything we can do to put them in prison, so that is the starting point, the potential for punishment. When they are in prison and on release, the Government have various programmes to try to confront their radicalisation. Again, they are looking at reviewing those and what more can be done.
We will use every disruptive tactic available to us. We find a lot of these individuals have criminal lifestyles, so the arrests we are making, in the last 12 months to date the counter-terrorism network across the country have made 460 arrests. At this point last year, it would have been 334. That is a massive change. Some of that comes from the attacks, but a lot of it does not. About 60% of our arrests we are using crime powers, many of them fraud. These people are defrauding their insurance to try to fund their lifestyle, so we will use whatever we can do to make life difficult for these individuals, which will disrupt them and stop them building their capability, because if they need money to buy equipment, then if we disrupt the fraud, that is a way into it.
The second point I would make is it is thinking about the wider society and opportunities. The availability of firearms in this country is a massive competitive advantage, because it is much lower than it is elsewhere. As colleagues beforehand said, it has gone up a little and we are bit concerned about that. But the effort of counter-terrorism policing, the local forces and the National Crime Agency to try to keep the availability of firearms suppressed is important.
In these sorts of attacks we have stopped over the last three or four years, probably in about half of those attacks, a third to half of them, in my recollection, people have had an ambition to get hold of a firearm. In many other countries, having an ambition to getting a firearm would be quite a trivial step. In this country it is quite difficult. It is not impossible, of course, but that degree of difficulty gives us more time to intercept this and prosecute them. So you make the operating environment harsh, you disrupt them in their preparatory acts and if you can prosecute them for the most serious offences, you can put them in prison for a long time.
Q87 Mr Christopher Chope: So really you would like to see those 3,000 subjects of interest in prison, because that would make us a lot more secure?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: That would make my life a lot easier and it would make the public a lot safer. The thing is the courts need evidence.
Q88 Mr Christopher Chope: Yes. That is where the terrorist review man pronounced today that he does not think that if you have terrorist thoughts that is—some of these people in the 3,000 are people with terrorist thoughts, but he does not think that should give rise to any—
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: No, they are people we are worried about their actions, their potential actions. The people in the 20,000, some of them we will have evidence that they support violent jihad, but we have worked on them for a period of time and come to a view they are showing no ambition whatsoever to do anything at that time, and then five or 10 years later they become more active. That is the challenge in that cohort of people with the ideology. The 3,000-odd people we are concerned about at the moment are actively involved in terrorism, whether it is fundraising or whether it is a plan to conduct attacks.
Q89 Mr Christopher Chope: So we should be making more space in our prisons ready for them to go in?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: It sounds like a good idea.
Q90 Naz Shah: A couple of things. Your outgoing Commander, Mak Chishty, who I did a great deal of work with, when he retired and just before retirement, because he was very involved with the terrorist attacks, there are no less than three articles that suggest he thinks sermons at Friday prayers should be regulated to watch the message and so on. That would suggest to me that he has confirmed that radicalisation is happening in mosques on Fridays. Do you share that view?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: I think that is way above my pay grade, the regulation of mosques. I see very little evidence that large mosques are involved in mass radicalisation. That is not what goes on in mosques. What I do see evidence of, though, is sometimes radicalisation taking place in small groups sometimes associated with mosques or with a madrassa or in some of the very small, much less official mosques that you sometimes find in some communities. I think the problem we face is this is not a problem I see with the heart and core of Muslim communities; it is a problem at the margins. It is how you address that problem at the margins that is critical and I imagine that is behind what Matt was talking about.
Q91 Naz Shah: You just said about the margins. We were talking about the Prevent strategy and you said the contract is being reviewed and that includes Prevent. Now, in that review, the last article suggested that the review would suggest strengthening Prevent as opposed to review it, as such. Given that it is in the margins, but the mainstream Muslim communities see the brand as toxic, would you not agree that the Prevent strand on its own needs closer scrutiny?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: Clearly we have a problem with extremism, whether it is extreme right wing or Islamist extremism. The strategy is going to have to get stronger. I think there is a danger with just talking about labels and is the brand good or bad et cetera, because I think we are not then talking about the issue. The issue is about what we do to tackle the problems that we are facing. I have not met anybody who thinks that we should not have a preventative strand to our work in counter-terrorism. We have to stop these things happening. I think the debate should focus more on what are the right steps to be taken to reduce the risk of people being radicalised? How do we make communities stronger at resisting it?
A parallel that struck me recently, we now look back at some of the historic sex offending that has been reported and we realise institutions in the 1970s and 1980s, schools, churches, police, lots of institutions, in hindsight did not take as robust an approach as they should have done and abuse was more widespread than it could have been. We are now much more hostile to that, I think, than we were then. We are still in those early stages about how do we create and help communities become strong and hostile to the risk of extremism growing. Because it is so sensitive, because it goes to ideology and belief and it is challenging, I think wrestling with it is so difficult, and of course if you do it clumsily, you can make the problem worse. But we have to wrestle with this, otherwise I am just going to keep coming back here with bigger and bigger lists of people that we need to investigate and put in prison, as opposed to finding the right preventative solutions in communities.
Q92 Naz Shah: Talking about communities, because I come from a community with that background, is working with organisations like the community trusts. Who do you work with, which mainstream Muslim organisations are the CTU working with to get into those communities, who have the respect and command the respect of the large Muslim communities?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: Most of the groups that we tend to work with tend to be on a local basis. There are the local CTUs, the Prevent police officers, who work with local authorities and their Prevent teams. They tend to be often with third sector organisations locally. The reason that is powerful is those are the solutions coming from within communities. This needs a strategy that helps join it together and helps the country progress, but a lot of the practical activity will always come from grass roots.
Q93 Naz Shah: Because some of the issues around the extremism, and every time we see an attack there is a rise in Islamophobia, so do you work with organisations, reputable organisations such as Tell MAMA, MEND, MCB?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: Yes, exactly.
Q94 Naz Shah: You work with all of them?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: Not all of them, no. I am not going to go through a list of organisations and who we work with and how we do and don’t and all the rest of it, but we work with many Muslim organisations, many faith leaders. If you look, we have done some work around faith leadership in anticipation of attacks. After the Westminster attack and other attacks, we had some plans with faith leaders in London, which meant that we had people standing together very, very quickly and that reduced the amount of hate crime that we saw on the back of it. We have some very good contacts in communities.
Q95 Naz Shah: I was very involved with those conversations at the time, but recently I attended a national conference where there were over 500 Muslims attended, the Minhaj-ul-Quran one. Minhaj-ul-Quran were the first ones to issue a fatwa against terrorism in the Muslim world, and yet despite invitations, not a single police officer was present. That worries me, because here is a counter-narrative to ideology. I saw the presentation, I witnessed it. It was very strong on the pushback in terms of extremism, Islamic extremism and ideology, but there was no police officer there.
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: I do not know why that would be. If Prevent is just about the police role, then I do not think it is about the police, it is about councils, it is about community groups, it is about local politicians. The police are just one player in that space. If it is just about the police, then it sort of securitises it too much.
Q96 Naz Shah: Finally, it has been stated that Muslims are 80 times more likely to be referred to Channel. What are you doing to address this imbalance and how are you tackling far right extremism?
Also, one of the things that is really important is differentiating between hate crime and religious crime; because there is a new obligation to record religiously motivated crime, so how well are your officers equipped to deal with all of this?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: I think the balance of referrals reflects the balance of the threat. It is well into double figures of percentage of the Prevent work is going on extreme right wing issues. It is 10% to 20%, I cannot remember exactly. But the bigger threat is the threat that is coming from the groups, AQ and ISIS. I think that balance of work is not surprising.
In terms of local forces work on hate crime, it is absolutely critical, because the danger is that hate crime then generates more extremism and causes more problems. I think all forces see hate crime as a priority.
Q97 Chair: That up to 20% figure, does that apply to your 3,000 figure?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: No, I am talking about preventative referrals. This is outside of those, so these are—
Q98 Chair: But I meant just in terms of the proportion, so does that same proportion apply to your 3,000 people of interest?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: No.
Q99 Chair: What proportion of those are—
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: It is less than 10%, which again, if you look at the high-risk investigative work and the nature of the threat, most of it is inspired by ISIS. There is a small and growing amount of extreme right wing terrorism. We have one domestic extreme right wing terrorist group, so you would expect the numbers to be quite imbalanced. When you look below the sharp edge of terrorism to hate crime and other extremism issues in communities, the balance is slightly different and the extreme right wing is nearer 10% or 20% than it is at the very small percentage it is in terms of the terrorist activity.
Q100 Tim Loughton: Assistant Commissioner, we have managed to go for two and a half hours without mentioning Brexit so far, so let us end that. What are the implications for Brexit in your area of policing, as you see it?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: The politics and the legal and the negotiation, all that complexity, I do not think it is something for me to comment on. In policing, whether in counter-terrorism, organised crime or day-to-day crime, we need arrangements to work internationally, to routinely exchange data, forensic data, biometrics, fingerprint data, criminal conviction records and to join our investigations together when necessary. In Europe and outside of Europe, there are different arrangements. In Europe, obviously there is a whole suite of arrangements that have built up over time that we rely upon very heavily. Our expectation/hope is that whatever arrangements and whatever deals are done in the future, we secure at least a proper replacement for those arrangements or something better. I am aware when the Home Secretary was here she stressed that was her ambition in terms of negotiating that. My focus is on the operational requirement, which is to be able to interoperate with foreign partners.
Q101 Tim Loughton: Sitting in that seat last week, the Home Secretary said that she thought it would be unthinkable that we would not have some form of arrangement around intelligence-sharing and security. She specifically referred to that alternative. Given your experience of dealing with your counterparts in other EU countries and Europol as well, do you think absolutely there is a willingness and an urgency by them to make sure that there are suitable arrangements and that it is doable or is it going to be problematic?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: I cannot speak for the legal and political negotiations, but what I have seen since the Brexit vote, I have seen operational co-operation continuing to strengthen with partners across Europe. The practical problem of a growing terrorist threat that we all face is bringing people together and the politics of debating Brexit and negotiating is not getting in the way of that. I see all the right practical ambition and I simply say, as a police officer, I need whatever the replacement arrangements are to give me and my colleagues the same operational opportunities that we have today.
Q102 Tim Loughton: You are seeing that closer co-operation outside of the Europol partnership through Five Eyes and others just as much, are you?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: I was focusing on Europe, but the Five Eyes relationship is very, very strong as well but, given you were asking about Brexit, I was focused on Europe and the closeness of relationships, the speed of exchange of information, particularly on the back of attacks or rapid developments, that is strengthening month by month.
Q103 Tim Loughton: I know the criticism in the past—and when we have had you as a witness in front of us—has been the mindset of closer co-operation between police services and intelligence services in other Europol countries is not nearly as great and as well-established as it is in the UK, for the reasons you started off with, Northern Ireland and other experiences like that. Do you see evidence that that is getting better, partly because of recent experiences of terrorism on the Continent?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: I do see that, but there is a variety. The reason we have probably the closest relationship in the world between police and the Security Service is that we have been tested and stretched for 50 years, as I have said. Yesterday morning, like every Monday morning, my senior team, Andrew Parker’s senior team, were sat down together reprioritising the week’s work, looking at what the latest intelligence picture is. That degree of interoperation is not common across the world, but I do see it, as everyone is wrestling with this growing and concerning threat and every country is wrestling with how do they get police intelligence agencies to work more closely together. In some countries there are real legal and constitutional barriers to that, so it is not always straightforward, but everyone is wrestling with it.
Q104 Stephen Doughty: Just to follow up on that, so you would say we definitely need a deal, particularly in these areas, in terms of the access to information and sharing?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: I did not say that. All of the stuff that you guys talk about, that deal/no deal, all the rest of it, I am not even sure I know what the definitions are. What I am saying is I need arrangements in the future that are at least as good as the arrangements today.
Q105 Stephen Doughty: I would describe that as a deal, but I wanted to ask one specific. Just in terms of the debate that goes on around the diffusion of the threat that you face, particularly the lone wolf individuals, whether they are on the far right or isthmus or otherwise, versus the kind of clustering effect that goes on and we know to go on around particularly organisations or groups of individuals, where would you say the balance of the threat lies now, sort of individuals acting alone versus concerted groups perhaps influencing each other and feeding off other?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: The problem is both. You have the same scale of ambition to do the major attacks on aviation and I use the recent Australian attempt as an example. You have that same scale of ambition for those iconic attacks that terrorists like to aim for that has always existed, that we have had for a decade or more. Then on top we have now added this approach where there is this ideology propagated across the world that reaches more people and inspires many to act, based on propaganda they have seen as opposed to even being connected to an organisation, then you see ISIS claim, “That attack was in our name and that is part of our movement”. We have this conundrum about the same operations against these complicated plots as we have ever run, but then a wholly different approach on this wider cohort of people, some of whom are deadly determined, with clear thinking, some of them have mental health issues, some are young and vulnerable.
That is a different problem for policing and the Security Service, but you can see why it takes us into we are going to need to more working with local partnerships. The role of neighbourhood policing is ever more critical; the role of partnerships with local authorities will be evermore critical. The strength of that space, referring you back to the earlier conversation with my colleagues, the strength of people operating at that local level, their ability to contribute towards this counter-terrorism agenda will be more important going forward than ever.
Q106 Chair: Just very quickly, a few follow-up questions on the answers that you have given to people. On the Brexit issue, I think the point you made about the co-operation and the increased co-operation across Europe certainly is reflected in all of the things that we have heard in terms of people’s willingness to get a deal on security and to continue to increase the co-operation on security. One of the concerns that is being raised is around data adequacy and what the EU’s response and request will be in terms of the data adequacy standards that are set for the UK if it is outside the EU as opposed to being inside the EU. Clearly that may raise questions for the surveillance data that we collect. If it reaches the point where you are faced with a choice, from an operational point of view, to recommend to Ministers whether the most important priority is to be able to retain the surveillance data, or alternatively to be members of the EU databases for the Schengen information system and so on, which of those currently has more value for you?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: I think it would be very hard to put it in a binary choice. Where we are at the moment is that European regulations do affect data in terms of how long we are able to keep it and our weeding regimes. Probably the European approach is maybe a little stricter than our domestic approach may otherwise be, but we have found accommodations to date, so we have found a way to do our sensitive surveillance work and interoperate with Europe. The trends I see in Europe are because of the growing threat of terrorism there, more pragmatism about management of data. I do not see us being driven to a binary, that the data standards of Europe change in a way that make all our surveillance illegal and therefore we have to make a stark choice. I do not see that trend at the moment. There will be some compromise and I am sure there will be some difficult choices, like there are at the moment, but we have managed to square that circle to date and I have not seen anything that says to me we will not be able to square it in the future.
Chair: I think you may want to engage a bit more with the legal and political discussions that you said you were leaving to others, because I am sure you are right in terms of what we should be aiming for and what our objectives should be. However, some of the views being expressed elsewhere in the legal and political system across Europe may perhaps conflict with what you would like to see.
Q107 Tim Loughton: In labouring this point, is it your judgment that the sharing of data with our Five Eyes partners is an easier and more extensive operation than it is with our Europol partners?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: Yes.
Tim Loughton: That is a good answer, yes.
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: It started earlier, so it is longer, it is more mature, it is more embedded in the intelligence relationship, which goes back to war time. It is not surprising, given its length, its strength.
Q108 Tim Loughton: If that is working better than the Europol arrangement is now and there is no—
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: I did not say it works better. I did not mean working better, it is just it is deeper. It has been going longer so there is more shared, so it is a deeper relationship because it started in war time.
Q109 Tim Loughton: Deeper, better, whatever. There is no reason why the intelligence sharing within Europol could not be as good as that, is there?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: It depends what you politicians negotiate, I suppose.
Q110 Tim Loughton: No, I am saying the analysis now, regardless of Brexit, there is no reason why we should not be sharing information. We retain that information, but all information for Europol members is independent, it does not have to be offered up.
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: That is quite a different question. Europol is not a state; it is an agency that has a limited set of functions. I think comparing data sharing with Europol to data sharing with America is apples and pears. There is no reason why we should not have an appetite that our exchange of data with European partners does not continue to go in a positive direction. We would want it to do that. I know the Home Secretary wants to do that. I am not sure I see how you make the comparison there with Five Eyes.
Q111 Tim Loughton: But as we have seen, American Homeland Security people are stationed in the Hague in Europol, their co-operation with full Europol members—
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: Sorry, that is a separate point. Are there countries outside Europe who have a good relationship with Europol? Yes, there are, and America would be one of them.
Q112 Tim Loughton: Absolutely. They are not losing out by not being members of Europol, because they have associate member status, which entitles them almost to the same status and they do not pay rent.
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: It is not exactly the same relationship, but they get lots of benefits from it.
Q113 Chair: Just a final question to wrap up, which is given the increased threat that you have described, you talked about the 3,000 people and then also a wider 20,000 people. You obviously, whatever your budget, will always have to make difficult decisions about how you prioritise the resources that you have, but given your current ability to monitor or investigate those 3,000 or keep any track at all of the broader 20,000, do you think we are just getting the scale of the national response wrong now, given the scale of the threat? Do you think that we need a step change in our response or do you think it is more gradual and more about what you are able to do within incremental increases in resources?
Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley: A step in work that says roughly around 30%, depending on which metrics I look at. If the ambition remains to stay matched with the threat and be perhaps as on top of it as we were a year ago, then it is going to take a step in resources, certainly, as I said earlier, the CT policing budget not going down by 7% over the next couple of years, but going up significantly in real terms. It does not need to be 30%. There are new ways of working, there are always things you can improve upon, but it is going to need some extra capacity and capability in the system if we are going to stay the counter-terror.
Because otherwise what I see is the choices we are making on surveillance, because the surveillance team is a big asset with lots of people involved with it, you cannot have hundreds of surveillance teams, but we can stretch it a bit further. Who gets surveillance today; whose phone calls are being listened to; who is being followed? All of those choices that are being made, you can always make tougher and tougher choices and get closer and closer to the top of the list, but if you want to stay sufficiently well-matched against the threat, I then return to how I felt we were performing last year, it will need a step in resources.
Chair: Thank you very much for your time. We very much appreciate your evidence. Can I also just conclude by thanking you and all of the staff and officers that you work with and also those of the intelligence and other emergency services as well for the work that you are doing to keep us safe? Thank you very much.