Home Affairs Committee
Oral evidence: Policing for the future, HC 515
Tuesday 7 Nov 2017
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 7 Nov 2017.
Members present: Yvette Cooper (Chair); Stephen Doughty; Sarah Jones; Stuart C. McDonald; Naz Shah.
Witness
I: Cressida Dick CBE, QPM, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service.
Witness: Cressida Dick gave evidence.
Q114 Chair: Commissioner, welcome. It is very good to have you before us. This is the first time you have given formal evidence to us since you took up your post, and we are very glad to have you here. We want to ask you about a range of policing and crime and counter-terror issues. May I start by raising with you a couple of topical issues where concerns have arisen over the last couple of weeks?
First, some serious allegations have appeared in the papers made by the First Secretary of State and Minister for the Cabinet Office that a former Assistant Commissioner in the Met—one of the most senior police officers in the country—leaked false information from a confidential inquiry for personal or political reasons. Clearly, this is a significant issue, even if the former Assistant Commissioner, Bob Quick, is no longer in post, and even if, as we understand, there is currently a Cabinet Office investigation under way. This obviously also affects investigations that I know you will have been involved in some years ago. Could you comment on this case and tell us how you think these allegations should be dealt with now?
Cressida Dick: Thank you very much indeed, Chair. I am delighted to be here.
In relation to these matters, I am not going to comment on an apparently or allegedly leaked set of information from a confidential investigation, and in not commenting I am absolutely not either confirming or denying what may or may not have been uncovered in that investigation. What I can say is that, of course, if the Metropolitan police or indeed I myself can assist a Cabinet Office inquiry, we would want to do so and we would seek to do so.
If I may turn to matters of principle, it is quite clearly absolutely fundamental that information in confidential inquiries is kept confidential. The public rightly expect very high standards of protection of information from police officers and police organisations, and we would do everything we can to try to keep the information that has been given to us for a particular purpose confidential.
In my next comment, I am not commenting in any way at all about what Assistant Commissioner Quick may or may not have done because I do not know, but what I can say is that whether you are serving or not serving, it is absolutely imperative that confidential information is kept confidential. The only times when it might be appropriate to breach that confidentiality—for example, in a criminal investigation where material has been given for a particular purpose—are where there is an overwhelming public interest. We would, as an organisation, always want to look at a public interest case before we passed information to anybody else—even a Select Committee, for example. As an individual, should one fear that somebody’s life is at risk or perhaps, hypothetically, that a gross miscarriage of justice has taken place, it might be appropriate to break that confidentiality, but there would be ways in which it is done.
I must repeat that I am not commenting here on what AC Quick may or may not have done, because I do not know, and nor am I confirming or denying what that investigation may have found out. I go back to saying that I would be delighted if the Metropolitan police can assist the Cabinet Office in their inquiry in any way, and then I think we need to go step by step. If Mr Green wishes to make an allegation to my organisation or indeed to the Independent Police Complaints Commission—that might be something he would wish to do.
Q115 Chair: Aside from anything that the Cabinet Office may raise or ask you to do, given that this is about a former officer and events that took place some years ago, do you think that there is more the Metropolitan police itself should do on this issue?
Cressida Dick: I am sorry, Chair; I do not want to comment any further. I want to take these matters step by step. At the moment there is a huge amount of speculation, misinformation no doubt—I am sure—and third-party comments on this, that and the other, and I think we should go step by step through this.
Q116 Chair: Thank you. We do not want to contribute to any further confusion on this issue. Can I turn to another very current issue? You will obviously be aware of the concerns about unreported sexual assaults and crimes that have been raised in Westminster and political parties, but also in other institutions. Clearly there has to be a huge amount of work done by those institutions, in Parliament and by political parties to deal with this and make sure there is proper support, independent processes and culture change, but I also wanted to ask you about the policing aspect to this. Some of those who have spoken out have said that they did not report cases to the police because they feared that they might not be believed. Do you think that the police have done enough to improve support for victims of crime, for those who need to raise their concerns, and to instil confidence?
Cressida Dick: I am sure there is even more we can do to instil confidence, but I do think we have made huge strides over the last several years, and I think we are seeing that. For example, when I speak to organisations that support victims of serious sexual assault, they would say that confidence is higher among the people who come to report to them in the first instance. They themselves have more confidence in the way in which we will both investigate and support complainants and victims. We are, I think, generally regarded—I do not want to sound complacent about this—as being in the forefront of the world in respect of this. Clearly, if somebody has been assaulted, particularly a sexual assault, there are lots of things that they have to think about. We are absolutely sure that we are getting higher levels of reporting and, therefore, recording now proportionately than we ever have. That is, of all the assaults that take place, a higher number come to see us and talk to us about that. They may or may not wish a criminal justice outcome, but they are feeling more confident. But I am sure, absolutely, that there is more we can do.
Q117 Chair: There is a massive gap between the numbers reported and the number of convictions.
Cressida Dick: Yes, there is.
Chair: Why do you think that gap is still so large?
Cressida Dick: I think there are lots and lots of reasons for that. We are seeing a very large increase. Many of the people who come to talk to us and then we end up recording a crime are extremely vulnerable in a number of different ways. Secondly, in a high proportion, the circumstances are quite contested, if you like, and there is often not very much other corroboration. We work really closely with the Crown Prosecution Service, and there have been huge improvements in our joint working, and clearly the courts and some of the law has changed to make it more supportive, if you like, for the victim. However, it is still a very large step, and on a number of occasions there is simply not the evidence to meet the evidential test that the CPS will apply.
Q118 Chair: If those sexual assaults take place within the workplace or within institutions, is your experience that the co-operation between institutions and the police is effective, or do you tend to experience resistance from institutions or workplaces when investigating those sorts of allegations and crimes?
Cressida Dick: Goodness me. I have been a police officer for 35 years and my experience is that the world has changed enormously. More and more institutions are very aware, very alert and have very good human resource processes, good avenues for grievance and dealing with issues in the workplace, and a very good understanding of the sort of thing that ought perhaps properly to be referred to the police. I think it is very rare, when the police arrive, for us to meet resistance, but I can imagine many occasions where it is possible that somebody reports something to somebody more senior or more powerful in an institution and they are either put off from going to the police, wittingly or unwittingly, or they are not given factual information about what would happen next. So, for us, there is a really important piece of work that is always going on, particularly with large employers, to make sure they understand when we would get involved and should get involved, and when it is something that ought perfectly properly to be dealt with through the disciplinary or misconduct processes.
Q119 Chair: Are there any cases in your experience, or any that you are aware of, around either assault allegations or sexual assault allegations, where there has been any occasion where Parliament, political parties or similar institutions have not co-operated sufficiently or effectively with the police when making those sorts of investigations and enquiries?
Cressida Dick: Clearly, I cannot speak for everybody in my organisation. I could write back with further and better information if that would help, but my sense is that, certainly in latter years, we have not met any resistance or inadequacy once we arrive. You will be well aware that the matter that you mentioned first resulted in quite considerable changes in the relationship between the police service and Parliament and some greater systematising of certain processes. For example, when we need to retrieve evidence from the parliamentary estate, I think we have really good, co-operative working relationships with the parliamentary authorities. We have officers here who are very expert on the law in relation to this and, indeed, parliamentary processes. I am not personally aware of any where we have met difficulties—absolutely not.
Q120 Chair: Thank you. If you do have any further reflections on that or on any changes that you think would be helpful in terms of making sure that crimes can be brought to justice, obviously, given the timing of both Parliament and political parties making changes in the way in which they operate, we would appreciate any further reflections or views that you might have in writing—that would be very welcome.
Cressida Dick: Thank you very much, Chair. I will say one thing. I am of course anxious to ensure that the processes that the various institutions are creating as we speak have sufficient linkage with other organisations who can give support and that it is not a matter of inevitably referring everything to the police and then we are the signposts to the support. There is lots of support that could be given to parliamentary parties, as you know—or, indeed, to Parliament—from other organisations that will support victims, for example, very well and do not need police involvement necessarily.
Q121 Chair: May I turn now to funding issues, which obviously are a particular concern for the Met at the moment? Can you tell us what funding cuts you are expecting in your budget between now and 2020, and what reduction you would expect to see in the number of Met police officers in order to deliver that scale of cuts?
Cressida Dick: There are obviously very many unknowns between now and 2020 in terms of inflation, the exchange rate, pay settlements—I could go on. You will be very familiar with that. But on our current best calculations, we believe, having found savings over the last several years of between £600 million and £700 million, we will need to find further savings. We have pressures of £400 million. You will be aware, I think, that the Met has made savings in a number of different areas. In our estate, in our procurement, we have lost a very large number of members of police staff. Head for head, about the same number of people have gone from the Met proportionately as any other police service. There are a number of other areas—technology, of course, in particular. We have to date protected police officer numbers to a large degree. We believe that there is certainly more efficiency in productivity that we can gain over the coming years, and we intend to. I am happy to talk about that. Notwithstanding that, our planning assumption at the moment is that if it is £400 million and if things stay pretty much as we see them—with the caveats referred to at the beginning—we will go down to somewhere in the 27,000s: between 27,500 and 28,000 perhaps.
Q122 Chair: So that is a reduction of what?
Cressida Dick: We are currently bobbing around at over 30,000, which is much less than at our peak.
Q123 Chair: Is that a loss of about 3,000 officers—about 10% of the officers?
Cressida Dick: Again, yes, potentially. That is what we are looking at if the funding stays as it currently is.
Q124 Chair: What is the consequence of that in terms of service?
Cressida Dick: It is not straightforward, clearly. It does not fill me with any joy at all. Clearly, you will be aware that we are doing this against a background of complexity in what we are being asked to deal with and the expectations of how we will deal with, for example, online crime or child sexual exploitation. I know colleagues have spoken about this before. I do not talk in hyperbole, but I do believe it is genuinely unprecedented, certainly in my policing time, to have violent crime going up as it has, the threat in terrorism changing as it has, and calls going up as they are. This all does feel unprecedented. The consequence of that is that we have to do our level best to be efficient, and to take demand out of the system through technology and in other ways. I would say that if we go down to that level we will absolutely have to look at whether we can be quite as front-footed and proactive as I would like us to be, and doing as much as I would like us to do on prevention. We probably cannot. We will have to be really ruthless about some demands, I think. We will not able to invest in the way I would like to invest in improving our capability in, for example, child sexual exploitation and certain aspects of serious and organised crime. You will be aware that we have been talking with the Government about this position, as have other police chiefs. I completely respect the Government’s political decisions, and my job is to advise on consequences and impact. But I am very concerned about it, and if we got some more funding right now then I would feel more confident about our ability to deal with violent crime and our ability to keep on investing in neighbourhood and local policing.
Q125 Chair: I am not quite clear from what you said, because when you describe it as not being “front-footed”, it is hard to understand what that means in terms of the impact, in service terms and what this really means. When you talk about not being able to respond to violent crime in the same way, what in practice does that mean that you will not be able to do?
Cressida Dick: Right now, we have suffered quite a considerable increase in London in certain types of violent crime over the last 18 months, in particular knife crime, gun crime, and moped-enabled crime. We may well come back to these. I think that we have stemmed the tide of that increase through a herculean effort over the last few months, primarily through enforcement measures. I certainly hope so. I would like to continue to be able to bear down on violent crime in all its forms: sexual offences, domestic violence, street crime and of course terrorism. That is a priority for me. But I came in at a time when we were seeing some very significant increases. Without more funding quite soon I am really concerned that it will be very difficult to maintain: getting a grip and seeing a reduction once again in violent crime. As an example, I am really concerned that we will not be able to respond to what I anticipate will be one of the logical conclusions of the counter-terrorism strategy—CONTEST—review, which is that we all need to do quite a bit more in certain local areas through neighbourhood policing, as one example, to stop people becoming violent extremists. I am concerned that other aspects of preventative work, as opposed to just straight law enforcement, will be very hard for my service to do. I believe that we are good at preventative work and I also think it is really, really important in the long run for reducing crime and increasing public confidence, which are my two big things, clearly.
Q126 Chair: What kind of preventative work—particularly, for example, around extremism and counter-terror—that you think is effective is really hard to do if you do not have enough resources?
Cressida Dick: I know you have heard from Assistant Commissioner Rowley, and he will have talked about the preparedness and the fact that, in the seven days after each of the ghastly attacks we have had this year, for every person involved in the direct response who is a counter-terrorist specialist, two others are not specialists. Some will be neighbourhood officers; some will be firearms officers—a whole variety of people.
If I take the Finsbury Park attack—a terrible event—as an example, it is absolutely the case there, again, that for days afterwards, the response is more from the generalists than it is from the specialists. But in terms of talking to people in that local area, equally importantly they know their local officers and they understand what the local officers have been trying to do and have very successfully, I think, done in order to, in effect, bring communities together. A hugely contested part of London just 10 years ago has become somewhere that is very, very united and one in which I think community issues are dealt with extremely fast, extremely well and extremely sensitively by the local officers.
If I take you back 10 years, you will remember a raid on the Finsbury Park Mosque and how incredibly difficult that was. I am not suggesting for a second that we would need to raid the Finsbury Park Mosque now—I don’t think we would—but if the counter-terrorist officers need to go and do operations in that area, they have neighbourhood officers who understand the location, who have their contacts, who know how to do things safely. They bring legitimacy to the counter-terrorist officers. And then they are exactly the people, together with the PCSOs, to whom local people will say, “I’m worried about Cressida,” or “I’m worried about so-and-so; they have changed,” or “I’m worried about the fact that they’re on the computer all the time,” or “I’m worried about the sulphuric acid I know they’ve bought.” These are the neighbourhood officers who glue communities together and glue the counter-terrorist officers to communities. I am very concerned if we reduce the numbers of those; I actually think, in certain areas, we need to be doing a lot more work through them, with them and, of course, with other public authorities to stop people from becoming violent extremists.
Q127 Chair: I know that other forces have already very substantially reduced neighbourhood police officers. Would you expect, if you have to go ahead with the £400 million cut, the number of neighbourhood or community police officers to reduce?
Cressida Dick: I have made a commitment as Commissioner that I will have my two dedicated ward officers, which I pretty much do have, and schools officers as well. I would hate to go away from that commitment. There are some areas where I have more than that and I think I need more than that, and I might have to start reducing those, definitely, if I went down to the 27,000 level. But it slightly depends on what happens. Events will clearly drive things a lot.
Q128 Chair: Of course. Let me ask you, then, about the capacity to deal with the full range of crimes—obviously, you are not just about counter-terror. There were reports in the papers about there being a new crime assessment policy, and the Deputy Assistant Commissioner, Mark Simmons, has said that “it is not practical for…officers to spend a considerable amount of time looking into something where…the value of…the item stolen is under £50”. Does this mean the Met has just effectively stopped investigating small crimes?
Cressida Dick: No, it doesn’t. I think I should reassure the Committee and indeed, through it, the public that I don’t believe that we are, through becoming more formal in this particular way, going to reduce the number of crimes that we bring to justice. What we are saying is that we are trying to help our officers with the less serious crimes that may be—I will come back to this—very important to an individual but are less serious crimes in general. We are trying to help them to think through how they assess, how they make decisions and at what point it would be appropriate to say, “I have not solved this one.” That is what they do every day of the week anyway, so we have just helped them with how they do that.
If a crime that appears to be less serious is having a big impact on an individual, is linked to other crimes or is in some other way aggravated, that would change things immediately. But the fact is, much as I wish it was not this way, many crimes are not at all easily solved. In fact, some, however much resource you put in, will never be solved. I do not see this as a major shift. It is certainly not saying, “We’re not interested in minor crimes now.” It is simply—other forces have been doing this for a long time, by the way—in a formal way giving better guidance to the response officer or the neighbourhood officer who is dealing with a crime, about the things that will help it to be solved and the things that just won’t.
Q129 Chair: It appears that the focus in what the Deputy Assistant Commissioner said was on the value of the crime, as opposed to how easy or difficult it is to solve. You raised the issue of prevention earlier. Is there not a concern that if police officers across the Met feel they are being given a steer to back off some of the lower-level crimes or crimes where the value of something that has been stolen is lower, that will allow a build-up, where people who start as low-level petty criminals end up involved in more and more serious crimes because they get away with it and get drawn into something that is much more difficult for the Met to deal with?
Cressida Dick: Given the media coverage the issue has received, I can see why people would be concerned about that. What I would say is that this is not a dramatic change in policy. I do not want to trivialise this, but that we put a huge amount of resource into a homicide investigation or a rape investigation compared with driving away and not paying for your petrol has always been the case. It has always been the case. We are saying to the officers, “If, in the early stages of a crime investigation, there do not seem to be the following things that would help you to solve it, it’s better to say, ‘Stop’ than to say to the victim, ‘I’ll come back and have another conversation with you,’ or, ‘We’ll see. CCTV might turn up something if I can find any.’” This is a more coherent way of giving a clearer and better service to victims, and of ensuring we concentrate on the things that matter most.
Q130 Chair: Do you think there is public consent for this approach?
Cressida Dick: Certainly when I talk about it to people at public meetings they seem to understand it, and they also understand that it is not actually very different from what has always happened in policing, which is that you look at what you’ve got—the circumstances, the victim, the solvability and so on—and you make decisions based on that. That has been happening since time immemorial.
Q131 Chair: Do you think that if you had more resources and were able to investigate more of the lower-level crimes, that would help you to prevent more serious crime later on?
Cressida Dick: I am not saying we are not investigating lower-level crimes; I am saying we are stopping investigating when they do not appear to be solvable. I know what you are trying to get me to say, but I do not think I can necessarily agree with that. The inference that people might take is that this is simply what we are doing because our budgets are shrinking, and it is not.
Q132 Stephen Doughty: Commissioner, it is a pleasure to have you here today. I want to ask some follow-up questions relating to counter-terror operations. We have seen a whole series of very serious events in London and across the rest of the country, and I pay tribute to your officers and staff for the response they have given. We touched on the funding issues, but I wondered whether you could say a little about how the increased tempo of activity and the seriousness of some of the incidents in London have affected day-to-day operations, in terms of shift patterns and the ability to absorb that additional workload, and whether you are having to adapt ways of working, as well as funding, to cope with the increased pressure.
Cressida Dick: If I may, I will just express again the admiration I have for the response of Met people, from those who showed extraordinary courage at the scenes of these ghastly incidents—the compassion, the resilience, the endurance—and the fantastic investigative capabilities that have been on display to all the world. Like everybody else, I so wish that none of this had happened, but it is very clear why I can sit here and say I am very proud of them. I do believe that we have the best global police service in the world, and long may it last.
They, I think, are in very good heart. The determination is clear. Overall, our shape—if I can put it that way—our strategy, is also in good stead. After such terrible events and the demands they put on us, you could imagine an organisation being more put out of shape than we are. That is a bad way of putting it, but that is the phrase I want to use. But some people are tired—there is no doubt about that—and I have been putting an enormous amount of effort into trying to ensure that we look after them, their shifts and their welfare as best we can. There is undoubtedly some tiredness around.
In the short term, for the real generalists we had to shift some shifts around for a while after each of the incidents, but in general most of them are now working in a way that is unaffected by the major incidents. Some of the specialists—firearms officers, counter-terrorism officers—are undoubtedly working at an extraordinary tempo. I know that Mark talked about this. Our best estimate is that, having had seven foiled attacks in seven months, together with the ones that caused devastation and murder, together with Grenfell actually—that has put a huge burden on the organisation, as it has on the city and most of all on the people most affected—the tempo at the moment in the counter-terrorism command is a feeling of about 30% more workload. That is on the investigative and intelligence side.
We then have more effort going into protecting events. Of course we are learning the lessons of preparedness, and we are trying to do what we can on the prevent side as well. So it is putting a considerable strain on the organisation, and on policing generally.
Q133 Stephen Doughty: Which would underline my view about the funding situation—the points have been made already. In terms of that specific specialist capacity, particularly the armed capacity, I have two questions. Are you satisfied with how Operation Temperer operated when it was put into practice? Are you satisfied that the levels of recruitment and retention of armed policing capacity can cope with that increase pressured on the existing capacity?
Cressida Dick: I pay tribute to my predecessor and to Mark Rowley for the way in which they led our firearms uplift, as a consequence of the terrible attacks in Paris in particular. Mark in particular also led the planning for Temperer with the military. There will always be things to be ironed out, but I thought that Temperer worked extremely well. When we went to “critical” and it was decided, in two different circumstances this summer, that it would be helpful to have further armed capacity brought in to certain posts so that police officers with guns could go into different roles, it worked very smoothly and very professionally, I felt, across the country. Also, the fact that we were able to step back down very quickly was very important to me. Clearly, I do not want to go to Temperer ever again if I can avoid it, but we need to learn the lessons and make sure that if we had to, we could.
We are finding in the Met that we have been able to recruit good quality officers for our uplift and we are absolutely on track with that. My sense, when I talk to them, is that their morale is high and that they are obviously very proud of the appalling but necessary actions that their colleagues had to take in the attacks. It brings it home for all of us what that job involves. I think I can also say that historically the firearms officers have felt, and I have lots of sympathy with this, that they are uniquely scrutinised, because they have people’s lives in their hands, and that that scrutiny can take a very long time and not always feel very fair. That is a perspective, and I do not wish to take away from the perspective of the family involved in that either.
I think they feel that their leaders and those who are there to scrutinise them and those who hold them to account understand more the pressures that they are under and the way in which they go about their job. They now have body-worn video on all the uniformed firearms teams, so they know that their professionalism will be displayed. They see that as a very good thing.
We are not struggling to get people in there. They are working hard. They are doing a great job. They are extraordinarily capable. I am very proud of them and they seem to have pretty high morale.
Q134 Stephen Doughty: In terms of the surveillance and intelligence picture, it has been suggested that covert surveillance powers might come under EU scrutiny when the UK applies to have its data protection standards recognised after Brexit, in order, for example, to continue accessing EU databases such as SISII. How would you assess the balance of priorities, Commissioner, between access to EU databases and the freedom to undertake covert surveillance methods, including bulk retention of data, for example?
Cressida Dick: Goodness me. That is a question for society in a sense and for Parliament undoubtedly, and of course for lawyers and for the EU in this instance. We in policing, and I in particular, are absolutely clear that the privacy/security balance has to be something which we can give advice on but, of course, not be the deciders of. We use all sorts of powers all the time and covert surveillance is an incredibly important one for us in a variety of different ways, but clearly the extent to which we use it and the way in which we use it must be always within the law and be ethical. As we go into the negotiations around security, if that is the right word, and Europe, clearly data adequacy is going to be a very important issue. I understand that. It is also an issue which is immensely complicated. I know this Committee has an interest in it.
Q135 Stephen Doughty: Have you had specific conversations with the Home Secretary or any of the Brexit Ministers around the nature of those negotiations as they stand at the moment?
Cressida Dick: In policing and law enforcement, some senior officers and the director general of the National Crime Agency have been very clear to try to talk about the powers that we currently use—powers is a broad term—how we use them and the impact of using them, and to give objective advice about that. We would not dream of getting involved in negotiating; that is absolutely not our job.
Q136 Stephen Doughty: But you set out some red lines, essentially, as to what your requirements are as they stand at the moment?
Cressida Dick: There are many things that we currently do that we feel we need to do in order to provide an effective service in future.
Q137 Stephen Doughty: To continue policing?
Cressida Dick: Absolutely.
Q138 Stephen Doughty: That’s very clear. Briefly turning to hate crime for a moment: we have seen some pretty shocking trends, particularly faith-related hate crime, I think up 230% in the last 10 years, including a specific rise in Islamophobic attacks in London and elsewhere and, obviously, some worrying increases in LGBT+ related hate crime, particularly against the trans community. Can you say anything about where you feel those trends are going and how the Met is responding to those?
Cressida Dick: Hate crime is an area that I have worked extensively in for much of the last 15 years. You rightly mentioned a year-on-year increase overall in hate crime. My view is that that is very largely accounted for by increased reporting and better recording, and by an increase in confidence. There are a number of reasons for that. One is because quite a high proportion now is online. It is still potentially extremely nasty and offensive or worse, but more easily found on some occasions. Just as it is easier for somebody to think, “I will just say that online”—no responsibility—it is also easier sometimes for those to be found. A lot of third parties—for example, the Community Security Trust and Tell MAMA—are getting very good, as are we, at finding online hate crime.
Secondly, a whole variety of measures that we have all taken in society, in policing and in institutions, has increased people’s confidence to come forward and report. A part of that is about us being really clear about the importance of this as an issue, about us taking victims seriously, which we do, and wherever possible bringing people to justice and ensuring we get the outcome that they would like to get.
As you know, we saw a spike in Islamophobic hate crime after the EU vote and we saw another one after each of the attacks, although not so large. Actually, we did not have one after Parsons Green. I can tell you that the London level at the moment is back where it was before the attacks. This is very important and I am not complacent, but when you look at the type of crime we are talking about and the volume that we are talking about, I honestly believe that because we are so transparent and people care a lot in London, which is a wonderfully integrated and diverse city, sometimes the outside world internationally can look in and think, “Goodness me; there is all that hate crime. Have they got gangs of armed thugs going around with shaved heads attacking people?” No, we haven’t. We have a base level of two or three crimes per borough per day online and off, the vast majority of which are at the less serious end of the spectrum, and I do not believe the problem is getting worse. But I am not complacent about that.
Q139 Stephen Doughty: Lastly, on the online aspect, we have asked lots of witnesses. In the previous Session, Parliament had a number of technology companies in. There is still very serious material online. National Action material is still online on one platform. We know there is extremist content as well. Google Drive is now being used as a place where material is shared. Do you think that technology companies are doing enough?
Cressida Dick: I think they have been trying to assist us more recently. If we take terrorist material as an example, you have mentioned National Action, which has been proscribed. When I look back to when we set up the Counter Terrorism Internet Referral Unit, which is in the Met and is the longest-established such organisation in the world, we were getting very patchy assistance. We now get very good assistance, but I think they could do a lot more. I know the technology is complicated and I know they have some ethical issues, but I think they could take the burden of this much further than they currently have, and I hope they do.
Q140 Naz Shah: First, may I congratulate you on your appointment? We have had an election in between and this is the first time I have had a chance to meet you. It is a pleasure to have you here.
Can I also pick up on hate crime? My understanding is that the Met has a sub-group on matters related to LGBT issues, so you have got a Diamond group and working groups underneath that work on LGBT issues—rightly so—and disabilities. However, more than 80% of all hate crime is racially motivated, and there is no committee or sub-group that deals with that. Why has the Met failed to do that?
Cressida Dick: I actually don’t recognise what you are saying. I do not want to argue with you, but what I can say is that, as the new Commissioner, I have taken over personal leadership of diversity, community engagement and inclusion. I will be chairing our strategy board that deals with that. We have quite a lot of experience. We take race hate crime extremely seriously, and we have strong local independent advisory groups. We have a race hate advisory group and a whole series of other groups and standing committees, and we have undoubtedly had Diamond and Gold groups in relation to specific issues. I am not sure what your briefing is. I am not denying it, but I absolutely do not recognise the picture that says we take race hate crime in any way less seriously than other hate crime. We absolutely do not.
Q141 Naz Shah: Would you go away and look at that? I would really value a response to that.
Cressida Dick: I will, certainly.
Q142 Naz Shah: Thank you. I would like to congratulate the Met on being present at the launch of Islamophobia Awareness Month, which was this month. I thank you for coming to that event, but what measures are being taken to tackle the rise of Islamophobia and attacks against Muslims, particularly “visible” Muslims? I am a member of the British Muslims APPG and we took evidence from people who said that it is not just women in hijabs who are being attacked, but men with beards, because they are seen as Muslim even though that isn’t always necessarily the case. What are you doing about that?
Cressida Dick: First, that is obviously completely unacceptable. All my officers are relatively well trained in this issue, and I would expect, and indeed do see, that they take such a matter seriously if anybody reports it to them in the street. In each borough we have specific senior officers and liaison officers whose job it is to improve all the time the way in which we interact with particular communities—in this case, Muslim communities—and to reach out into faith communities and make sure that each individual hate crime that is reported is reported effectively. I myself go out and speak quite often on these issues.
I think we have ever-improving third-party reporting and relationships with communities, neighbourhoods and institutions. We are also quite prepared to highlight this issue when we see something that we think needs fixing. We are not afraid of dealing with it at all. We have a very good relationship with Tell MAMA and other groups. I am absolutely determined that, particularly in the wake of the terrorist attacks, all our communities feel confident in their police service and that, to coin a phrase, the terrorists don’t win by dividing London’s communities. We are mainly very integrated.
Q143 Naz Shah: My colleague Mr Doughty mentioned that we did a hate crime inquiry and talked about online hatred. On the role of print media, do you share my huge concern about damaging headlines saying that one in five British Muslims have sympathy for jihadis, and articles such as the recent Trevor Kavanagh piece in The Sun about the “Muslim problem”? The Jewish Board of Deputies wrote about that piece, and many MPs supported my call for a retraction. Do you agree that such headlines and articles fuel anti-Muslim rhetoric and Islamophobia, and that we should be looking at that, in terms of hate crime?
Cressida Dick: I don’t have your experience, but this is an issue I have wrestled with since 2001. I set up, with my senior colleague, the first Muslim safety forum in the Met in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and I remember very similar things being said about headlines and the inflammatory effect they can have. Throughout my service people have said to me, “Can’t you do more about this, Cressida?” about a variety of different issues. I do feel very strongly that people need their police to be those who enforce the law and who do not become the thought police, as it were. We have to balance human rights, and freedom of expression is a very important one that should be balanced. I do not think these things should naturally lend themselves either to policing, unless it is against the law, or indeed to strong comments from police officers, but I can absolutely see that some headlines written in some print media that are not unlawful can really upset some people and can certainly encourage others to more extreme activities. I absolutely accept that.
Q144 Naz Shah: Thank you, Commissioner. I have a few more questions. I have raised this issue with the former Commissioner, your predecessor, and indeed with the Home Secretary, who is often lobbied on it. I recently returned from Pakistan and I am often asked about Altaf Hussain, the leader of an MQM organisation. Last year Altaf Hussain made a speech in London that incited violence in Karachi, and lots of lives were lost. In addition, I have had it put to me by many journalists that the root of this is two questions really—one is on the politics of it and the other is on the policing. Do British politicians even have the will to deal with MQM and what is going on with that? And are British police even taking the matter seriously? We have a case of money laundering that was stopped. We have, on record, receipts for bought arms in his house, which nothing has happened about. We have a guy who was killed in Great Britain—Dr Farooq—but no charges. We have got incitement to violence, which led to people being killed. And yet, we still do not seem to be doing anything with Mr Hussain. This is happening right here, a few miles up the road, in London. What is the Met doing about it?
Cressida Dick: You started and finished with a particular investigation, and I think it is in the public domain that we are doing that investigation. We are carrying on doing that investigation. We are working closely with the CPS, and such an investigation inevitably involves working closely with authorities in Pakistan. I can tell you that that investigation continues.
I can also tell you that I have had some insight into some of the matters you referred to. It is probably not appropriate for me to say exactly where some of them have got to, but I most definitely know. First—I don’t think you were suggesting this, but just to be clear—in this country the police are operationally independent. On occasion we will rely on the Home Secretary or the Foreign Secretary to make something possible for us overseas or to authorise us to go overseas, but we are most clearly operationally independent, and if crimes have been committed that we can prove and bring to justice, we absolutely would want to and will. We have put a great deal of resource—very skilled and capable people—into dealing with the matters you have talked about, and will continue to do so.
Q145 Naz Shah: Finally, on CSE, I am going to ask you the same question I asked senior officers in the Committee’s previous session. This week I met my constituent Fiona Broadfoot, who is leading a campaign and was convicted of soliciting while she was being groomed as a child. She was a victim of grooming. We have come a long way—as a country, as politicians and as a police force—in seeing victims as victims. She has got a landmark case in January where she is trying to get the convictions quashed because she was committing those crimes as a victim, and not as a perpetrator of soliciting. Do you agree with my support for those victims to have their convictions quashed, given what we understand today about grooming and child sexual exploitation?
Cressida Dick: I saw your question, and I think it was Chief Constable Collins who answered that. Immediately and vehemently: yes. I am not familiar with the circumstances, but as described by you, that sounds to me like a very sensible outcome.
Q146 Sarah Jones: Welcome to the Committee. I want to ask about knife crime, gangs and violent crime. We have seen a big increase in knife and gun crime. Can you run us through why you think that increase has occurred?
Cressida Dick: When I came to the Met, I laid out my priorities. I have probably touched on all of them already. First, raising public confidence even further. I think confidence is very high, but I want it higher in some of our minority communities in particular. Secondly, bearing down on violence in all its forms. Thirdly, having staff who feel well led, well supported and well equipped, and able to take risks and take their decisions. Fourthly, the biggest job in a sense is transforming the Met for the future and to lead us into a future organisation. And, within all that, to do it with a real sense of the diversity that is London and the need for us to be an effective, diverse police service ourselves.
In terms of violent crime, as I have said, knife crime and gun crime were rising quite significantly when I came in. I believe that we have begun to turn the tide, but I am not complacent. It is early days.
Q147 Sarah Jones: It is going up by less, isn’t it? It is not going down.
Cressida Dick: It is definitely going up by less.
Q148 Sarah Jones: It has still gone up by a quarter in the last—
Cressida Dick: Gun discharges, for example, are going up by very much less now. Moped-enabled crime, some of which is quite violent, and some of which involves knives, has come down nearly 25% in the last three months.
Why has it been going up? None of us really know. I wish we absolutely really did know. If we take knife crime as an example, there has been something about the glamorisation of knives, undoubtedly, and the spreading of the message that it is sensible to protect yourself, or “cool”, or a good thing to do, very quickly through social media and some groups. I think we have seen, worryingly, younger people involved in knife crime, for a whole variety of reasons, and people deciding to take a knife and then getting involved in on-street robbery or assaults or worse.
Q149 Sarah Jones: You say that young people are choosing to carry a knife or that it is glamorised. Do you also think that the problem is not just the decisions they are making, but the lack of anybody telling them otherwise or helping them to make the right decisions? Or is it just the decisions that they are making as young people?
Cressida Dick: I am sure that must be a problem. We have a knife crime reference group, and they say that to me that there are some older people who are encouraging them to do that and, indeed, that sometimes parents are not discouraging them from doing that and think that it is the best way to protect themselves. Or some of them will be involved in the street drug market or something like that where you do need to be protected. So I think that sometimes they are being absolutely encouraged to make these bad choices.
I also think that, for many of them, they don’t believe that they are very likely to get caught, and if they do get caught, since they are young they don’t expect to have a punishment that they will take very seriously. I think that is a very significant problem for us.
You will be aware that the proportion of gang-related knife crime is now not very high, we believe.
Q150 Sarah Jones: A quarter, isn’t it?
Cressida Dick: Yes. We think it is about 20% in London. Likewise, with gun discharges, it is probably only about 40% that is related to gangs. Those gang members who carry a knife or carry a gun are absolutely the most dangerous. They are the ones who are causing the most serious crime the most often, and indeed sometimes killing people. But it is changing in its nature. The way I characterised it the other day at the Crime Reporters Association is that I do think in some cases the young person who might have snatched a phone in the past is now snatching a phone but has a knife with them at the same time. They are a bit younger than they used to be as well.
Q151 Sarah Jones: I met people from Operation Sceptre the other day and we were talking about the peaks and troughs of knife crime. They were saying that they are throwing resource at it and it will go down—that will be great—and we will lock some people up, but then it will come back up again because that is what seems to happen. Do you agree with that—that you can’t arrest your way out of this? If that is the case, what do you think is the solution?
Cressida Dick: I do, actually. I suppose that I would describe what we have been doing latterly as suppression. You talked about Operation Sceptre, our knife crime operation. In the last one, we arrested over 800 people, took 330-something knives off the streets and recovered 14 firearms. I believe that repeated operations like that, and a whole variety of other associated tactics, are really beginning to bring it down, but without effective prevention that is not sustainable in the long term. That is why, in London and a lot of other places, a lot of effort is going in from local authorities—in our case, from the Mayor and his knife crime strategy—to look at a whole series of other measures that will have a longer-term, more preventative effect.
Q152 Sarah Jones: Part of Operation Sceptre is about prevention. You commented about the funding issues you will face over the next few years; if you are to make further savings of £400 million, presumably prevention is the bit that will fall by the wayside.
Cressida Dick: Potentially, yes. I should note that the funding that goes into third sector and community groups, which both Trident and Sceptre work really well and really closely with—we have some great things going on—is primarily decided on by the Mayor and the Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime, rather than by me, but it would be a professional conversation about where we think it could go.
Q153 Sarah Jones: To go back to the point about the images online and on social media, it has been suggested to me by the police that the Met has reached a brick wall with online engagement. You may have said that delicately earlier. Do you have anything particular to say on glamorisation, incitement and encouragement to be involved in criminal activity and gangs?
Cressida Dick: If I spoke to Trident, I think they could give me lots of examples of social media companies being both very helpful and very quick to take stuff down, but we know how much it proliferates and how much there is out there. I do not want my people to look at social media after a murder or very serious crime and discover fantastic evidence that would have showed what was likely to happen. Both within my service and in the companies, I want a much more proactive approach to what is on social media: taking down the stuff that is encouraging people to do crazy things, and alerting us to signs that things are going wrong, for example between two gangs.
Q154 Sarah Jones: The number of deaths from knife crime is up, and the nature of knife crime incidents is going beyond just wanting to make a point, to actually trying to kill. That is a particular worry. In my constituency, a young boy was murdered last Sunday.
Cressida Dick: I know.
Sarah Jones: The second in three months in Croydon. There are a lot of issues bubbling around prevention and complications underneath it, such as county lines, what to do with stop and search, and how to deal with hotspots—Croydon is a hotspot because it is a major transport hub for kids coming out of school and going to different places. Taking all those things into account, if you had more resource, what would you do to try to bring those crimes down and stop young people from losing their lives in London?
Cressida Dick: Perhaps unsurprisingly, I was looking at the figures today. Since 1 January, we have had 114 homicides in London, which is up on last year. It is still very considerably below the big American cities, for example—20 or 50 times less than some of them—but each one is bad, from my point of view. To think slightly encouragingly for a second, within that figure is a definite and considerable reduction in domestic violence homicides since last year—not just proportionately but altogether. But we have seen an increase in knife crime homicide, as you indicate, and such offences that affect very young people. Of the 114 homicides, 25 are of people under 20. It may not surprise you that 23 of those 25 are boys, but, shockingly, 21 of them are of African-Caribbean origin: people who—their family—would describe themselves as black; and four are Asian.
So when we talk about disproportionality of outcomes in the race audit, and that sort of thing, this is a very shocking thing—which makes me angry. The knife-crime homicide makes me angry. It happens in lots of circumstances. A considerable proportion is gang-related. Of those, at the moment we think a bit more than half. Some are just a dispute; some are ridiculous, where somebody has just splashed out and because it is such a terrible weapon it can cause death in a very short period of time, which they may not have intended. We are bearing down in all the ways you have described: taking knives and guns off the streets, making it harder for people to get rid of the proceeds of crime, making it harder to deal drugs, to stop guns coming into the country, to deal better with county lines. We are doing all this kind of stuff. I do actually think that, outwith policing, there needs to be more funding for preventive work and educational work. I think we are seeing some good benefits from that. Within policing, at a time when I am looking at maybe having to reduce my resources in some of my serious and organised crime people and my intelligence people, if I had money from heaven and you said, “You can only use it on these crimes”, I would probably put an enormous amount of more effort into my intelligence work and my presence on the streets in some particular areas.
Q155 Sarah Jones: What you said about wanting to stick to your two dedicated ward officers—in parts of Croydon where knife crime is particularly high there is one area that has six police, and that is not enough because the problems are so great. So the idea of you having to reduce that number is very worrying.
On a slightly broader question about legislation, the Home Secretary is looking at legislation on knives that can be carried—at banning certain knives. Looking at that, and also any wider pieces of legislation—to give another example that is completely unrelated, apparently it is not a crime to put a phone under someone’s skirt and take a picture and there have been problems because of the lack of being able to take action on that. Would those two things be good things, and is there any other legislative action that would help you do your job that we as MPs should be introducing?
Cressida Dick: At operational level, and the most senior levels, we have a good working relationship with the Home Office. They are talking to us about violent crime in all its aspects. We have certainly given some ideas about, for example, knives in the way you describe, and we would welcome any change there. We have certainly been talking to them about acid attacks and potential legislative changes there. I am happy to write to the Committee about these as well if it would help. In relation to moped-enabled crime—which has been a particular scourge in London, as you know; over the last 18 months it has gone up exponentially and now is coming down—we have been talking to the Home Office about their looking at pursuit and the protection that there is for a trained police driver when they are engaging in a pursuit, and also with the Independent Police Complaints Commission and the Home Office about how matters would be investigated, should somebody be injured as a result of police pursuit. So those are the sort of areas that are ongoing at the moment that I think are good and would want to support. Obviously, at the end of the day it is a matter for legislature, not for us.
In relation to upskirting—
Sarah Jones: Is that the word?
Cressida Dick: I think that is the word—a new word. Probably not such a new activity, in a way; it is just that people have more covert and powerful ways of doing it now. I think it goes to a whole area of law, which is about how technology can enable certain types of crime, which then end up having much greater impact than they previously would have done. If somebody is filming up somebody’s skirt and is then broadcasting—live streaming—that somewhere else, that is hugely worse than taking an old-fashioned photograph up somebody’s skirt, which I can remember happening 20 years ago. I am not a lawyer, but I think this is a huge challenge for us right now: the law has not quite been able to keep up with technology—and it is much more than the online world—and you then have laws that are, to some extent, technologically agnostic, because technology is going to change all the time. I do not know the answer to that.
Q156 Sarah Jones: It is the anniversary of the tram crash in Croydon on Thursday. In terms of the response, the British Transport police were obviously the people who took the lead, but lots of different emergency services, lots of police, came and responded. I wondered whether you had any thoughts or reflections, a year on, about what happened and about any lessons.
Cressida Dick: I was not in post then. I have been present at commendation ceremonies for the officers who responded, and I know that there were very full debriefs of our police emergency response and then the multi-agency response and that those have been played in to the work of our resilience forum. I think we have a good record of always learning from major incidents and making sure that next time we are even better. You have seen some of that in the response to each of the ghastly events of this summer.
Q157 Stuart C. McDonald: Thank you, Commissioner, for coming along to give evidence. I wanted to ask you first about an issue that has been raised recently with us and has attracted some public concern as well. It is about police forces becoming a service of first resort for incidents that are not really related to crime at all, but more to issues around vulnerability, the most obvious example being mental health crises. To what extent would you say that your force’s time and resources have been taken up with dealing with such issues?
Cressida Dick: We have undoubtedly seen a very large increase. If I was to describe, as my predecessor did, the main role of the police service—and everyone will have their different views—I would say that the main role of the police service is to prevent crime, and if crime happens, to bring people to justice, and if there is a victim, to make sure that they are properly supported. However, throughout history the British police service has done a lot more than just prevent crime and bring people to justice. It is part of our model of policing in this country that we do do more. We have very frequently had a high proportion of the calls that come in to us that are not absolutely crimes, or are not regarded as crimes at that point but are having an impact on somebody—antisocial behaviour, for example. We will go and problem-solve and deal with that in a way that perhaps police services elsewhere will not.
We have, for example, seen a very large increase in missing persons. Last year we had 56,000 missing people. That is up from 40,000-odd in 2012. A high proportion of those are teenagers and the expectation that society, and indeed we, have about how we will deal with those reports is much higher than it was in 2012 as well, because we are extremely aware of child sexual exploitation and grooming.
Turning to mental health, we have now—I am just looking at my figures—about 115,000 calls a year, which have what we call a mental health flag. We are sending officers to one of these calls every 12 minutes in London. That is a 33% increase in the last five years. In the last year alone, we have increased by 18% the number of section 136 interventions that we have become involved in, where somebody is taken from the street to a place of safety because of their mental health—an 18% increase in one year. For me this is of great concern, because at the moment it is going one way, and that is up, and we are frequently the service of last resort, and on occasion—forgive me if you did not say this phrase—we are becoming very much the service of first resort. On mental health, I am very proud of my officers. When I talk to the charities, many of them will say, “They’re brilliant. They’re very sensitive and compassionate. They take time. They start at the beginning. They want to help.” But it is not their job. They are not trained to do it. They have other work to be doing, and I would very much prefer it if people in distress were being supported by others than police officers.
Q158 Stuart C. McDonald: Thank you; that is very helpful. In 2016, however, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary’s report on the Met said that support for vulnerable people was inadequate. It highlighted, for example, failures to understand links between missing or absent children and CSE, and also issues around domestic abuse incidents. What sort of work is under way to respond to those criticisms?
Cressida Dick: We have taken that very seriously indeed. I have an Assistant Commissioner who is very clearly in charge of our response to that. A whole series of things have happened over the last several months in terms of improving people’s training and some of the structures we have to allow greater resilience and bring specialists together with generalists. We have set our standards much more clearly. We have had a great deal of oversight and interest from the Deputy Mayor and other experts around the country, telling us how we are doing. I can see us beginning to shift quite quickly, and that is very much to do with one of the prime criticisms, which was about leadership and the priority that this issue is given in daily business. It is given a very high priority.
If I can just caveat a little bit, it takes quite a while to get from where we were to where we know we want to be. To go back to the beginning of the conversation, we are being exhorted to be very much better—policing generally—at everything, all the time. Every report that comes in is an isolated report that says, “You should be better at that.” It is not a report that says, “In the context of reducing resources, that demand going up or the cost of this change, you might want to think about that.” It just says, “Inadequate—up” or, “Insufficient—more.” I genuinely think, as somebody who has been out of policing for two years and is coming back in, that our waterfront is now very broad, and we are being expected to set excellent standards across that waterfront in a way that I think is unsustainable.
Q159 Stuart C. McDonald: To do exactly what you just warned against and pick an isolated type of work, there was another fairly critical report that was not about the Met in particular but policing in general, in relation to modern slavery. Various criticisms were made, again, about leadership, recognition of when a crime takes place and also intelligence sharing. To what extent do you think those criticisms apply to the Met? What sort of response can we expect from your force?
Cressida Dick: I am sure we are a long way from perfect. This is a subject that my predecessor has been very high-profile in taking seriously, and so have I. Again, our referrals have increased hugely: 270 in 2015, over 1,000 last year, 1,300 already this year. We have a very good training package for all our staff. We are beginning to understand more about labour exploitation, although most referrals at the moment are about sexual exploitation. We have not had a huge increase in arrests or prosecutions, but I have a very capable unit that deals with that. We have a specialist unit that deals with kidnap and modern slavery and can advise our generalists how to respond.
There are some real challenges, as you know, in bringing people to justice: the reluctance of victims sometimes; the fact that they do not see themselves as victims; the fact that they may see themselves as victims, but it is better than where they were; a lack of trust in authorities generally; and there being no other option. It is not easy to get a joined-up approach. I have spoken many times to Kevin Hyland, the Anti-Slavery Commissioner, who I know well, about how we could improve, and we take this really seriously.
Q160 Stuart C. McDonald: That is helpful. May I turn to the issue of Brexit again? Could you tell us briefly how significant for the Metropolitan Police access to EU Justice and Home Affairs institutions and databases is? Could you also tell us whether you have done any work to assess what the implications would be if there was no Justice and Home Affairs agreement for after Brexit?
Cressida Dick: To go to your last point first: no, I haven’t personally. As I said, we have talked to the Home Office and colleagues in DExEU about the measures that we currently have, how they work and the importance of them to us. London is probably the most cosmopolitan and international city, and its police force has a global reach, partly because of organised crime, partly because of counter-terrorism and partly because of our population. I believe we need to maintain that in the future. Whatever our relationships with other countries are at a political level, we will continue to have good police-to-police relationships. We will have counter-terrorism officers working in various different places and we will continue to host—I think at the moment it is 48—law enforcement officers from other countries, working really closely with the Met. We will go on doing that.
I would anticipate that right now in our custody suites, for example, around 30% to 35% of the people in custody will be what we call foreign national offenders. Of those, about half will come from EU countries. We work really closely with colleagues in EU countries, both directly and through the institutions. We use the European arrest warrant heavily. The Met does a very large number of joint investigations and is a big user—the biggest—of that particular arrangement. We, of course, also rely on CIS on a minute-by-minute basis. We are obviously not going to get involved in any politics or negotiations, but we look forward, we hope, to being able to keep London safe in the same kind of way in the future as we currently do.
Q161 Stuart C. McDonald: And I am sure everyone around this table hopes the same, but is there not a degree of complacency if we are not doing any preparation for the event that there might not be a Justice and Home Affairs or security treaty? Would it not be advisable for organisations such as your own to undertake that work? Apart from anything else, if politicians were able to realise the implications of there being no such deal, it might make such a deal more likely.
Cressida Dick: I said that I haven’t personally. What we have done is lay out what we currently do, how it works and how important that is for our work. Take, for example, needing, for either a short or a longer period, to go to extraditions. As it happens, I have had conversations with people in which I have pointed out just how different and difficult that could be. I do not think it is the job of the Metropolitan police to do a full impact assessment, and we have not, but I will listen to what you have said. I take your point. We should think the unthinkable and work out what on earth we would potentially end up doing.
Q162 Stuart C. McDonald: Finally, could I just revisit a question that Mr Doughty put to you in a slightly different way? Among the possible blocks to a deal are concerns about data protection, bulk surveillance powers and so on. Putting aside questions of ethics and what the law should be, operationally what would you say is more important for your force and its work? Would you say it is bulk retention of data or ongoing access to EU databases?
Cressida Dick: I couldn’t answer that question. I just couldn’t. We work, for example, extraordinarily closely with the intelligence agencies on counter-terrorism. They depend on very different things from what we depend on. Both are important. I couldn’t say that one is more important than the other.
Q163 Chair: Might you not need to? If it comes to a crunch in security treaty arrangements and the EU takes a position that it won’t agree data adequacy for the UK, for example, and you are in a position where the Home Office could be choosing between different kinds of data access, might you and the agencies not need to start taking a view about what the most important things are for you?
Cressida Dick: Yes, I agree.
Q164 Chair: This might seem like a tangent, but it is not really. When you were preparing for the Olympics and doing the security preparation for it, how long in advance did that security planning take place?
Cressida Dick: It started before the bid. The bid was in 2005, and there were some elements of it.
Q165 Chair: The reason for asking that question is, if the Brexit date is March 2019 and if it were to reach a point where there was no security agreement in place by March 2019—as Mr McDonald said, we hope that it won’t reach that point—which would have consequences for European arrest warrants, for access to data, potentially for the use of data that you have previously been given in ongoing court cases and investigations, at what point in the next 16 months would you expect to start the detailed operational planning in case there is no deal?
Cressida Dick: Goodness. Well, the first thing to say is that our interaction with the Government is led by the National Police Chiefs’ Council and by the NCA. We would work in concert with them. We are just one part of that, but we are a big part.
I don’t know. I know that the Home Secretary came here and said it is unthinkable that we would be in that position. I can say that we haven’t started to plan for that position in detail at all. I find it hard to say, “Tomorrow” or “Six months’ time”, but I am not dismissing the question. I will go away and have a good think about it.
Q166 Chair: The EU security Commissioner has said—I paraphrase—that just because everybody thinks something is a good idea, that does not necessarily mean that in practice it actually happens. Given that kind of contingency planning and the obligations and duties on the police force to always plan for contingencies and for risks, we would very much appreciate some further evidence from you—maybe some written evidence—about what you think would be an appropriate timetable for Met and other police force contingency planning, in the event of no deal.
Cressida Dick: Understood.
Q167 Stephen Doughty: To follow on from that question, obviously I hope that we don’t get to a “no deal” situation either, but whatever happens, there is likely to be change of some sort, and a lot of debates in this place and out there have been about the transition period. What planning have you made for the practical implications—for example, ongoing investigations that cross across exit day? You mentioned 30% or so of prisoners that are held who are foreign nationals; what about ongoing extradition proceedings and so on that will cross the period from us being within the EU and those processes, to being outside or in a different set of arrangements? What planning have you made for transition?
Cressida Dick: There is a small team at the National Police Chiefs’ Council, oddly, or maybe not, led by a Met officer. Another couple of Met people are engaged in that team. They are looking at those scenarios and what they might mean.
Q168 Stephen Doughty: So it would be important that there was a clear transition period and you knew what was going on.
Cressida Dick: Definitely.
Stephen Doughty: Definitely?
Cressida Dick: We would want a clear transition if we could, of course, yes.
Q169 Stephen Doughty: Because otherwise that could affect live investigations or prosecutions.
Cressida Dick: It could affect live investigations or prosecutions, undoubtedly. Secondly, our officers need to know where they stand within the law. As complicated as it is, it would be more complicated, potentially. Post-2019, it may be more complicated than transition terms. The earlier we know what changes are going to be made, the better for us to be able to train our people and get on top of it.
Stephen Doughty: You would say that is a bigger issue for the Met than other forces, but undoubtedly that would apply elsewhere as well.
Cressida Dick: Absolutely.
Q170 Chair: Thank you. Commissioner, it would be helpful as well to have any further thoughts you have around the response to acid attacks and what more you would want to see from the Home Office, in terms of things that would help you address those.
I have one follow-up question on knife crime issues. Many of the things you said in response to Sarah Jones sounded like the kinds of things that we have all been talking about for 10 or 20 years. Do you think that those crimes are rising again now because there has simply not been sufficient capacity or sufficient focus in response? Or do you think you actually need to do something new to deal with this?
In other words, do we just need more of the same because we have not been doing enough of the things that we know to work, or do we need to do something substantially different? I do not mean necessarily in terms of policing; it could be other things that the Home Office and others should be doing.
Cressida Dick: As I said, I think there needs to be more preventative work in schools with younger people. This is an issue that is affecting younger people, and people are beginning to think about it at very young ages, so that is a difference. We have begun to get on top of it now as the result of a great deal of focus—we have described it as a herculean effort—on doing what we know works really well. Whether it is working with the National Crime Agency on stopping guns coming into the country or working at street level on confident, intelligence-led stop and search, a lot of it is about doing more of what we know works well and giving a real focus to our enforcement and intelligence activity. That is what I believe is bringing down scooter-enabled crime, for example, along with some really thoughtful and new preventative work on scooters, phones and how people can steal them and sell them.
We need a comprehensive approach. We have been trying to bring together everything we know to work, in prevention and enforcement and in intelligence, and give real focus to the parts of our communities and the parts of London that are suffering the most. We are beginning to see some really good results.
Chair: Thank you, Commissioner, for your time this afternoon. I welcome the thoughtful and detailed answers you gave. I think you will have taken from our questions our concern as a Committee about the level of institutional preparation across the country around Brexit issues; it would be helpful to be in further contact with you about that in future. Finally, may I ask you to pass on our thanks, respect and appreciation to all your officers and staff? We know that they have had to deal with immense challenges, not just in the last 12 months, but continually on our behalf. We thank them, and you, for keeping us safe.
Cressida Dick: I will. Thank you.