Home Affairs Committee
Oral evidence: Policing for the future, HC 515
Tuesday 14 November 2017
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 14 November 2017.
Members present: Yvette Cooper (Chair); Rehman Chishti; Stephen Doughty; Sarah Jones; Tim Loughton; Will Quince; Naz Shah.
Questions 171-242
Witnesses
I: David Lloyd, Police and Crime Commissioner for Hertfordshire, Chair of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners, Kathryn Holloway, Police and Crime Commissioner for Bedfordshire, Sue Mountstevens, Police and Crime Commissioner for Avon and Somerset, and Paddy Tipping, Police and Crime Commissioner for Nottinghamshire.
II: Rt Hon Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London.
Examination of witnesses
Witnesses: David Lloyd, Kathryn Holloway, Sue Mountstevens and Paddy Tipping.
Q171 Chair: Welcome to this session of the Home Affairs Select Committee and our inquiry into the future of policing. I welcome our witnesses today. As you will be aware, we have a tight timetable and we want to get through a series of different issues. While some of the questions will clearly be addressed to all of you, in others there will be issues that some may want to answer and not others so that we can get through as many issues as possible. Can I ask you to introduce yourselves and also to answer my first question, which is: the Government have told us that the police budget is being protected. We have already heard from the Metropolitan Police Commissioner about the £400 million of cuts that they expect to make. Could you introduce yourselves and your force and tell us what budget you are expecting over the next few years, whether you are expecting it to be protected or reduced?
Kathryn Holloway: I am Kathryn Holloway and I am the Police and Crime Commissioner for Bedfordshire. I have a budget in the lowest quartile for central government funding and also in the lowest quartile for council precept because of the scarcity of houses at band D and above in Bedfordshire, which will not be altered even though we are expecting a population explosion coming our way. Central Bedfordshire alone is predicting a rise of 50,000 in the next three years, bringing with it, of course, accompanying policing demand.
Bedfordshire Police has made £34.7 million worth of cuts and if I tell you that our overall annual revenue is £102 million, you will see that that is about a third of the annual revenue of the police force. It is no wonder that Bedfordshire Police has an open secret as being in the worst position of any of the 43 police forces of England and Wales. If things remain unchanged—and I have had no guarantee whatsoever that they will not be unchanged—we face £11.4 million to £12.5 million more of cuts within the next four years, when instead we have provided this document to evidence to the Government exactly what is required. What is required, according to the evidence, is £10 million extra per year to fund 300 frontline officers and 80 specialist detectives as the absolute bare minimum to bring us up to the level of comparable forces facing similar threat.
The one ray of light was perhaps in the adjournment debate last night when Nick Hurd referred to the fact that forces like mine, and specifically Bedfordshire Police and its PCC, are looking to the Government for action and not words. He said that he hoped he would see some soon, but no such guarantee whatsoever has been offered to me thus far.
Q172 Chair: To quickly clarify on your figures, when you said you need an additional £10 million, that is on top of also not having the further cut of £11 million?
Kathryn Holloway: Precisely.
Q173 Chair: If the £11 million to £12 million cut goes ahead, what do you expect to happen to your workforce? The Met told us they expect a 10% reduction in the number of police officers. What would your expectation be?
Kathryn Holloway: Currently I am desperate to protect every single officer on the front line because I do not see how Bedfordshire can be policed safely with fewer and, bearing in mind that it has had a footprint in every single one of the London terror attacks this summer, nor can the capital be protected, this seat of government and UK plc. Bedfordshire, of course, has the back door to London even though it leads spectacularly successfully in the regional counter-terror intelligence unit. You will have seen reported, so I am not in breach of any confidence, that some of the individuals who have been involved this summer have been at a lower level than those who would have been expected to be imminently involved in terror activity.
The chief constable has started talking in very similar terms to Cressida Dick when she came before you and gave evidence that we would have to look at what we were not able to do as a police force. Two examples that have been suggested are that we would not be attending vehicle crime. I suppose there could be an argument that people are insured and should not be leaving valuables in cars, vans and so on. However, it has also been suggested that we, unlike the Met, would not be going to retail thefts of £50 and under but £100 and under. I have no appetite whatsoever, as the PCC for Bedfordshire, in seeing my county become the retail theft capital for the UK. I already know and can point to a practical example of what happens when you have less security. I am not going to name the location, for obvious reasons, but there was recently a shopping centre that was open near one of our main arterial routes and the word spread very quickly into the capital and surrounding areas that they had not invested in CCTV and security. It will not surprise anybody in this room that immediately it became an away day destination for thieves. I do not want that to be the case for my entire county.
Q174 Chair: Do you have a figure as to what you would expect the police officer reduction to be?
Kathryn Holloway: At the moment, it depends entirely—I have been criticised recently by HMIC for not having a long-term plan for Bedfordshire. I cannot start to plan in the long term until after 22 November and the spending review.
Q175 Chair: Thank you. Mr Lloyd?
David Lloyd: Good morning, Chair, and thank you for inviting me and all of us to give evidence this morning. I am David Lloyd. I suspect that I have been called in my role as Chair of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners but I also have a day job of being the PCC for Hertfordshire. I will try to reflect more nationally than locally. I know that the Policing and Fire Minister has been diligent in visiting every single police force in the land and I think there is now broad agreement that we are seeing an unprecedented rise in the demands placed on our police service and we continue to ask them to do more. Crime is changing and becoming more complex. This is a very real challenge for us with our current financial arrangements. The range of views that you will hear today show that there is not a one-size-fits-all arrangement. We are all in different places. I am not looking to make any cuts in my frontline police officers in Hertfordshire but that is not the story across the whole of the land.
We are the directly-elected representatives responsible for policing and I think that we probably need the freedom now to use that democratic mandate effectively to resource our police forces. Whether that is through central government grants or local council tax is to be decided probably more in this place than locally with ourselves but that is what we will look at. With the demand that is out there, probably over the next couple of years we will be about £1.4 billion short. We do not spend a lot on policing. We spend about the same on policing as is spent on international aid, about 0.7% of GDP. This amount of money sounds quite a lot but locally in Hertfordshire £1 a week on council tax, which I would not be able to do without a change in the regulations, would make all the difference that was needed. We are not talking about huge sums of money but I think that we do have an opportunity now to make a difference and to ensure that our population is safe, which both you as MPs and we as PCCs take priority on.
Q176 Chair: What is the £1.4 billion that you referred to based on?
David Lloyd: We have done a fairly detailed piece of work for the Home Office, which has gone out to see where we are short in officers and how we need to put more officers in place. It is really looking at the demand profile. As I am sure you are aware, and everyone is aware, the nature of crime is changing. This morning HMICFRS has brought out a conclusion on domestic abuse. The work that we are putting into domestic abuse is complex. Crime is moving from the Friday night fracas outside the pub, where it is all cleared up fairly quickly, into very detailed and complex investigations.
Q177 Chair: Sorry to interrupt, but is the £1.4 billion a response to rising demand or changing demand or is that to fill a shortfall because you identify that police forces are going to face budget cuts over the next few years?
David Lloyd: About half of that is inflation, and clearly there are increases in police pay and other inflationary issues, and about half of that is to meet the increasing demand. What we have done is look at where we are at today. We must not forget that in 2015 there was a suggestion that we were going to have to cut police budgets significantly and they were not cut significantly. We were given that flat cash settlement and that was very helpful. We are in a better place than we might have been but now, with that extra demand, we need to put more money in.
Q178 Chair: Thank you. Ms Mountstevens?
Sue Mountstevens: Good morning, Chair, and thank you for inviting us. I am Sue Mountstevens. I am the Police and Crime Commissioner for Avon and Somerset. I get the feeling that the police are looked upon as having a bottomless pit of resources. To add to what my two colleagues have said, the service is often referred to as the service of last resort. I believe it is being looked at as a service of first resort now.
We have already found savings of £65 million. We have to find additional savings of £17 million. I have been able to ring-fence neighbourhood policing teams, because I think they are so essential, for the last two years but I am very concerned about what will come out in the autumn statement. Having met Nick Hurd, we produced the tipping point that is basically showing all the demand and looking to the future. We are saying that this is a tipping point for us and we can see what is happening with austerity and the fact that it is affecting many other services as well.
Can I give you a very quick example of a mental health case? This was a really fragile, vulnerable woman who had left a psychiatric bed three times in one week dressed in pyjamas and a blanket. It ended up with police officers in her own home having to look after her for 20 hours before they could get a mental health assessment. During those 20 hours they had to stop her from hanging herself, from biting herself, from stuffing her used toilet paper down her throat. That is something that these police officers were not trained to do and I think one of the real issues going forward is that demand on police time. I would like to ring-fence neighbourhood policing because I think it is so essential because of the impact it has on our communities.
Q179 Chair: To clarify, are you expecting your budget to go down over the next few years or to stay the same?
Sue Mountstevens: My annual cost pressures are more than £7 million a year. If I can raise the council tax precept that is going to bring me only an additional £1.5 million, so I have a £5.5 million gap every year. That is the equivalent of 100 police officers.
Q180 Chair: Do you have a projection of how many police officers you will lose over the next few years if this goes ahead?
Sue Mountstevens: We have said that we will have to lose 80% of our budget for people and we are already cut to the bone. We do not have numbers.
Q181 Chair: Thank you. Mr Tipping?
Paddy Tipping: Good morning, Chair. Kathryn and Sue talked about the local situation. Let me follow David and talk about the national situation and remind the Committee where we have got to. We have the lowest number of police officers now for 30 years, 20,000 officers have gone since 2010 and the police grant has been cut by £2.3 billion since 2010. As David said, at CSR 2015 we were asked to model further cuts of 40% and we had a relatively good settlement, which was flat cash. Let me explain what flat cash means. It means a reduction in grant from the Government, which is made up by the 2%, generally, precept from the council tax. I estimate that each year for the next two years we are underfunded by £350 million nationally. That is the difference between flat cash and growing pressures. Inflation is probably about half of that pressure. On top of that there is national insurance contributions, the apprenticeship levy, increased insurance costs and others. But a £350 million gap nationally over the next two years implies a cut nationally of 6,000 police officers on top of the 20,000 officers that have been lost.
I have shared with your clerk a joint submission made by chiefs and PCCs making a bid for £440 million next year rising to £845 million the following year. That would maintain the situation but give us sufficient money to do things, principally. One is the point that all my colleagues have been making, which is to reinforce neighbour policing. You will be aware of the HMIC report that talks about the erosion of neighbourhood policing nationally. Secondly, there is an issue about armed officers. £44 million has been made available by the Police Transformation Fund and that is time limited to 2021. There is a funding gap for armed officers of about £80 million a year, which we need to fill. The bid is with the Home Office. The Home Office has been sympathetic, to be fair to them. They have asked us to make the submission.
We did not pick up our pens, as the Home Secretary would put it, in response to rising crime figures, but crime figures have gone up and we face a perfect storm of changes in demand, more complex demand with fewer resources. In effect, we are asking police officers to do more with less.
Q182 Chair: Is your assessment of 6,000 police officers by the end of the period or is it a year?
Paddy Tipping: That is over the next two years.
Q183 Chair: Over a two-year period, 6,000 police officers could be lost. Mr Lloyd, you may add further points on this. Do you have any assessment from the APCC point of view about what proportion of that nationally is likely to be neighbourhood police officers, whether neighbourhood policing will be particularly affected or not affected if there is that further reduction?
Paddy Tipping: The only place for the police to go, as well as making efficiencies—and I am more than happy to talk with the Committee about efficiencies and about reserves, which is a big issue for the Government—is to look further at neighbourhood policing. In a sense, that is the flexible part of the police resource and that is the bit that is eroded. The Government’s own ONS crime survey says that in 2010 40% of people saw visible neighbourhood policing on our streets; last year that had gone down to 20%, and there is a crisis there. Members will know from their own casework that people are saying, “We don’t see officers on the beat and that is the British tradition”.
Q184 Chair: We have seen reports of Norfolk Police, for example, talking about reducing or ending neighbourhood policing. Do you know of any other forces that are in that situation?
Paddy Tipping: In my own force, at its peak we had 264 PCSOs. With budget reductions, they have reduced to 200. We hope to be able to maintain that, but nationally over the past five years around 4,000 PCSOs have gone and they are a very effective way of giving people reassurance on the streets.
David Lloyd: We need to reflect on that some of the reduction in frontline officers has been because we have been very good at collaborating. For example, in Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire we run our roads policing unit and serious organised crime unit together. That does mean we do not have enough murders in Hertfordshire to have a murder squad, but if we do it across three counties there is enough work for that serious organised crime unit to do. Some of the reduction to date has been through greater efficiency and has not necessarily meant that that reduction in police officers in itself has been the end of the world. The problem is that having done a lot of that collaboration, it is the next point and how quickly we do that. We are at a different point.
Q185 Naz Shah: The Home Secretary told PCCs and chief constables recently that, “When crime statistics go up, I don’t just want to see you reaching for a pen to write a press release asking for more money from the Government. I want you to tell your local communities and the victims in your areas what your plan is to make them safer.” What is your reaction to that statement? Are PCCs doing enough to reassure local communities about crime and making efficient savings?
Sue Mountstevens: Thank you for your question. We did not just turn to our pens. We had a meeting with Nick Hurd and he asked for evidence. That is why we produced the tipping point. In Avon and Somerset, we are doing the very best we can with the resources where we are now. The issue that we are talking about now is going into the future and we believe that if we do have to find another £17 million—we have already identified a capability gap of £15 million, which is 350 officers. If we are going to have to make more cuts to that, policing is going to look very different and we have to have a public debate about what are the police not going to do. The whole point of policing by consent is that we need to be transparent and open and be able to explain to our public what the police are not going to do.
As far as our force is concerned, what they are not going to do is early intervention. What we have seen over the last 20 years is that police have worked really hard with neighbourhood policing in some hostile environments and we have now got to the point where some of our communities, particularly our BAME communities in some areas, are saying, “We want to see more officers. We used to see them”. We are seeing them only just about now but if there have to be more cuts it is going to be that retraction from some of our more vulnerable areas that will really impact.
Paddy Tipping: I think the Home Secretary’s comments are, to put it frankly, a bit rich. She and the Police Minister asked us to prepare a submission. We have worked very closely with the Minister and his officials. There has been a lot of interchange of ideas. The reality is that volume crime has gone down, burglary, car crime has gone down, but I think it has reached its bottom and is now beginning to rise. The essential thing to raise is that the nature of crime has changed fundamentally. Terrorism is a real and immediate threat. The crime survey does not include the figures for online fraud and online crime and that is increasing very significantly. I think all chief constables would say to you that we are behind the curve on that. Importantly, women particularly are now more confident about reporting rape and serious sexual crime. Reporting of rape has gone up 20% over the past 12 months, so it is clear that a rape investigation is going to take a lot more time than a shed break-in, for example.
David Lloyd: I think we were all in the room when she made that speech. It did not sound as it read, and sometimes that is the case. My understanding of what she said—and context is everything—is, “We have heard what you have been saying. You have written to us, we have heard what you are saying”, but it was actually a restatement of what our primary duty is and I think it is quite helpful to have a restatement. Our primary duty is to serve the victims of crime in our constabulary areas and we must never forget that. That is the reason we are put there, that is why we are elected, and I think we also need to reflect on that. I did not hear it the way it was written up—and The Guardian especially had a piece to say, “This is an affront”—and, having heard it, I did not read it that way either.
Kathryn Holloway: Bedfordshire is not in a situation of trying to look into the future but of trying to catch up with the past. Five years ago critically community policing was all but stripped out of Bedfordshire Police. I am trying to repopulate insofar as I can afford, with 96 new recruits last year and 100 new recruits this year who, importantly, look and sound much more like the communities they serve because we are achieving an unprecedented 30% to 34% diversity in policing in Bedfordshire. But this is catch-up and there are consequences of it.
Q186 Naz Shah: While you are talking about consequences, Ms Holloway, Bedfordshire was the only force to receive an inadequate assessment by the HMIC in 2016 and is still categorised as requiring improvement in the latest efficiency assessment. What factors are behind this level of performance?
Kathryn Holloway: It is an excellent question. I have to confirm that in July of this year very regrettably I had to take the first complaint in its history against HMICFRS to question a lack of impartiality, balance and fairness in properly recognising the context in which my force operates. I contend that there is nothing fair about putting together a report that includes a handful of phrases that point to the acute financial challenges, the lack of resources, the lack of officers, and then makes recommendations implied or stated as actions to take that are known to be unaffordable and, as a result, unachievable, suggesting to the public that this is a matter of choice rather than, as is the case, a matter of necessity.
Incidentally, in the report that you introduced on effectiveness, there were two datasets used by HMIC, one of them about victim satisfaction and the other about recorded crime and proof that Bedfordshire Police achieve miracles based on the budget they have. In neither of those areas was or is the force an outlier, so you will see why I sought that investigation. The Chief Inspector of Constabulary now assures me that there will be an independent investigation led by a QC.
Q187 Stephen Doughty: I wanted to be absolutely clear from all of you briefly, if it is possible, on neighbourhood policing. Has it gone down in the last few years and do you expect it to go down further or do you expect it to stay the same? Can I have a brief answer from each of you?
Kathryn Holloway: In my case it was virtually absent entirely. We are trying to include it. Why it is important is that we discovered through our CTIU counter-terror activity over the last year to 18 months what is in effect a lost generation of children being brought up in households where there is jihadist material and so on. They were unknown to police, education, social services and health.
Q188 Stephen Doughty: Do you expect never to go down further with the settlement you have?
Kathryn Holloway: We cannot avoid it going down further if we do not get an increased settlement.
Q189 Stephen Doughty: Could I hear everyone else briefly on that?
David Lloyd: In Hertfordshire it is a different picture. I stood for reelection on making sure that local policing is at least as strong as it always had been in that first term and it continues to be so. My first increase in council tax was put entirely into ensuring that neighbourhood policing was saved. I do not foresee that changing in the short term but I think that we need to ensure that the funding that we get gives us the flexibility to ensure it continues. Nationally the picture is very variable, as you have already heard today. In some places it has not been affected and in others it has been significantly affected. A lot of that is down to individual PCCs with their chief constable deciding where savings need to be made if they have made any.
Q190 Stephen Doughty: Has it gone down or up or stayed the same?
Sue Mountstevens: In Avon and Somerset, we have ring-fenced our neighbourhood policing teams for the last two years. I cannot guarantee that. If we have further cuts we will see a reduction.
Paddy Tipping: In Nottinghamshire we still have neighbourhood teams but they are more limited, with fewer resources than we have had in the past. The real demand areas are public protection, vulnerability, children and people with special needs, online crime and terrorism. With a limited pot, you need to move resources to the area of greatest need and that is happening nationally. Mr Doughty, you will know HMIC’s report about the erosion, I think they called it, of neighbourhood policing.
Q191 Stephen Doughty: That is very helpful. Touching on some of those areas, particularly counter-terror resources in both prevention and, more especially, resources, sexual crime, which is very topical at the moment, and online and cyber crime, could you give us a brief overview of the real frontline impacts of your current situation? Kathryn, maybe you would start. You have touched on this slightly already but it would be useful to understand from the public’s point of view what the actual impact is in those areas.
Kathryn Holloway: If I turn to CSE—we are looking into the future—there are victims who are much more willing to come forward, which is greatly to the credit of policing overall. Currently in Bedfordshire there are six major CSE investigations, all with the type of nuances of those we have seen previously in Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxford and Manchester. If I could refer briefly to the evidence that has gone before the Home Office for two of them, one historic, one current.
The historic investigation covers offences involving girls from a children’s home being taken to parties and raped by groups of men. Four females reported this abuse when they were children. As a result there were 100 people of interest to be seen and professionals also spoken to in relation to the case and 25 new disclosures have emerged. These sorts of investigations ferociously absorb resources. In our case, this requires one senior investigative officer, SIO, of detective chief inspector rank, one deputy SIO, two detective constables, one trainee investigator and one analyst.
By contrast, we have a current case with two young teenage victims who have been repeatedly raped by multiple gang members while semi-conscious through drink and drugs. The investigation is continuing with 12 persons of interest. Forensic evidence taken from vaginal swabs indicates a mixed profile linking three of those suspects. To build the case, because of the limits on resources and all of the six investigations ongoing, it means that those assigned to this important case are so limited that there is one deputy SIO, one detective constable and one analyst working on it part-time. I have asked the local authorities to give us social workers to go out with our officers so that we can interview more but without them it will take us five years to interview and properly investigate. This is one of the wealthiest countries on earth. How can that be acceptable?
Q192 Stephen Doughty: That is a very clear example. Could I have some examples from the other areas, for example cyber and online crime, and the increasing profile of crime changing, how you are dealing with that in terms of resources?
David Lloyd: I think the issue is that we do not police in individual pots. I was looking back at a note and in Manchester £9.1 million was spent over seven days as a result of the Manchester attack and only 9% came from counter-terrorism funding. Policing is a team job, not an individual job. It starts at the neighbourhood policing and then goes through to specialist units but you cannot really say that all comes out of that budget, so the strain is across everything. When you have specific surge incidents the strain is across all police officers because you have to backfill and make sure that there is the right protection in place. It is not something where we say, “That will come out of that department”. We act as teams.
Sue Mountstevens: There are two areas I want to talk about. In Avon and Somerset we have 8,000 missing persons a year: 5,000 of those are children, 1,000 are elderly missing because of Alzheimer dementia, and the middle group is those who are trying to self-harm. We have the equivalent of 400 officers looking for those missing people a year. Going back to early intervention, which is really key and is so fragile at the moment, we have a problem-solving team looking at child sexual exploitation within just one area in Avon and Somerset for only four months. In that time they have identified 174 victims, of whom 23% were not flagged at all of being at risk; they have identified 124 suspects, 30 private locations to CSE and 19 businesses. That is talking about the hidden crime. We have all heard of serious case reviews looking at the missed opportunities. That is just one tiny area that we have found and that is what we have dedicated resources to.
David Lloyd: There is quite a bit there that we need to dig into, and I know we will not have time today. If you just said missing children, you think the primary agency would be the local council. If you think about adults with complex needs, Alzheimer’s, it may be the health service or the local social care. But very often, not just on the Friday night, for the whole week, our police forces are becoming the first provider not the last provider.
Q193 Rehman Chishti: I get the point about resources, and I think everyone gets the point. What you can do and what you cannot do is linked to the resources that you have. We recently had the Chair of the National Police
Chiefs’ Council give evidence to this Committee and she said that police forces should not be hoarding money with regard to the reserves they have. Starting with you, Mr Tipping, how much reserve do you have in your police area? Going across to Ms Mountstevens, Mr Lloyd and Ms Holloway, a simple question: if police forces should not be hoarding money, we have, in her figure, about £1.6 billion in reserves. How much do you have in your reserve?
Paddy Tipping: We have £5 million of useable reserves on a budget of £192 million. Let me take you through the national figures. I have shared them with the clerk. We wrote to the Home Office on several occasions in recent months about reserves. We need to remember that revenue reserves have come down since 2015 by 22%, as we predicted. We are predicting by March 2020 they will come down by another 50% from £1.6 billion now to £806 million. People use reserves to enable change. We need to build a new bridewell, a new custody facility, and a new control room in Nottinghamshire. Both of those are significant projects and when they are in place will enable us to save money, so we are using reserves to fund those.
Q194 Rehman Chishti: I totally get that, moving forward using those reserves to be on the front line and go where they need to go. For example, from 2010 to where we are now, your argument would be that those reserves that are now being used and being brought down should have been used on frontline policing and that could have reduced crime that was taking place then, but are you right on that?
Paddy Tipping: I think there is an important discussion to be had about reserves. They can be used only once. The sum of money is divided between forces, it is not one pot, so some forces have significant reserves and some have very limited reserves. The cost of the police pay settlement is £70 million.
Q195 Rehman Chishti: I get that but you have £500 million in reserves at the moment; is that right? What is yours?
Paddy Tipping: £5 million, but of course those are revenue commitments that go year on year on year. One of the things that forces have done, and particularly chief constables have done—the amount of funding from the Government has gone down by 25% over five or six years and making cuts on that scale has been extremely difficult—is used reserves to cushion the blow, to have a glide path to enable it to happen.
Sue Mountstevens: In Avon and Somerset when I was first elected in 2012 we had useable reserves of £23 million. By 2020 that will come down to £12 million, which is 4% of our budget, which is the minimum that we have been advised to have. We are spending reserves every single day.
David Lloyd: It is an interesting and good question. In Hertfordshire overnight cash, which is not the same fund, very often will have £50 million sitting in it, but that is the gross reserve. If you look at the net reserve, we have borrowing of £30 million, so it is £20 million.
Rehman Chishti: £20 million that can be used.
David Lloyd: But, as I am sure you are well aware, local government finance is rather complex, so you have revenue funding and you have capital funding. I think it was in the early 1980s that it was decided that capital funding could not be used for revenue. The money that sits as capital reserve cannot be used as revenue reserve. On top of that, I have said that over the next four years we will be spending 80% of those reserves and if we do not use that then we will have to look at cutting—
Q196 Rehman Chishti: You have £20 million you are talking about at the moment. Is that right?
David Lloyd: Yes, net.
Kathryn Holloway: To clarify, I have £3 million in general reserves that are available to spend for any purpose. HMIC has just clarified in the efficiency report that that is the minimum level that is considered prudent for any public sector organisation at 3% of revenue. To read my chief finance officer’s words, over any additional reserves that are all earmarked, to do what it says on the tin, for a purpose now, “In 2020-21 the force will use its reserves again but if no additional funding can be found it will have a £1 million shortfall that cannot be alleviated through savings”.
David Lloyd: There is an issue that we need to come to within that. In some ways Government policy of various colours has forced us into a rather extraordinary way with reserve, which is that because we cannot increase council tax by more than the recommended limit of 2%, or £5 in my case, very cautious Treasurers will say, “You can’t, over the next four years, increase that sufficiently for the problems that we have in four years’ time”. Were we to remove the limit on raising revenue at that point, we may well be able to use the reserves in a far more appropriate way.
Q197 Tim Loughton: One of the advantages of police commissioners was a force that could set policing and crime objectives in tune with what local people wanted, who elect you, after all, or at least they do when they show up to elect you. To what extent has that been compromised by the financial pressures and other pressures that you are now under?
Paddy Tipping: If you talk to local people, and all the survey work does it, they want to see a uniformed presence on our streets. I was in Harworth, the mining community that the Chair will know extremely well, talking to local residents last night. That was a really strong view. They said to me, “It is all right to talk about online crime and vulnerability but we want to see officers on the street and that is not happening”.
Q198 Tim Loughton: But as we all know as constituency MPs—I remember 20 years ago when I first became an MP I would go out with the police on patrol and the first thing people would say is, “Gosh, we haven’t seen a police officer around here for ...” 15 years was usually the threshold that they gave.
Paddy Tipping: You live in a really affluent area, Mr Loughton.
Tim Loughton: Not at all. This is nothing new. The trouble is, as you all know, whether we like it or not, that is not the most efficient way of doing policing. Some of the things that you have referred to, the biggest rises in crime are in fraud, for which you do not need somebody in a uniform going around; murder—and we have heard your appeal for more murders in Hertfordshire, Mr Lloyd—does not tend to come up as a top priority of people; the CSE pressures and the mental health pressures, which we know are real problems, do not tend to come up on people’s expectations of what their police officers should be doing. Is there not a disconnect? How do you try to present that disconnect between what policing needs to do and what people think policing should be doing?
Kathryn Holloway: I think that one of the roles of a police and crime commissioner is to explain to the public what is possible. There is absolutely no doubt—Mr Tipping is absolutely right—that there is a disconnect, just as you said, between what the public expect to see in policing and what is available and the best use of resource. With online crime, for example, we have invested £1.1 million in a cybercrime hub and we have an internet child abuse team that sits within that. We have connected with the University of Bedfordshire to work with 160 businesses throughout the county so we can explain some of the potential problems. But it is for me to get myself out there and speak at public meetings and say, “Yes, you have legitimate concerns about low level antisocial behaviour, speeding, particularly with nuisance bikes, mopeds and quads and so on”. I have to explain the world of Bedfordshire Police, as I am hopefully doing today to the Committee, so that we all understand the policing world that we operate in while not, of course, sitting on our hands in trying to deal with some of those areas.
Q199 Tim Loughton: Ms Mountstevens, you mentioned a particularly alarming incident with mental health. Does your force have CPNs seconded to patrol officers?
Sue Mountstevens: We fund it. It comes out of our funding with the clinical commissioning groups. We have mental health nurses working in our call centre and going out with our response officers, but one of the problems I am facing next year is that those clinical commissioning groups are thinking of withdrawing some of that funding, so what is going to happen then? I think you can see that it is impacting on our most vulnerable. You talk about mental health and that is an issue that is often raised with me in public forums. We have to be very much aware that as far as members of the public are concerned, if we are not going to police in the way that they expect us to, we have to have that conversation and say what we are not going to do. I am concerned about the early intervention that we have really built on: working with our young people, members of drugs gangs, working on a whole range of issues with early intervention. If we come away from that the police will get overwhelmed with demand, as will other services.
Q200 Tim Loughton: I do not disagree with any of that. Why did that incident happen if you have CPNs under your control out on patrol already? We pioneered it in Sussex and it works exceedingly well and saves an awful lot of money, let alone the distress to those people who should be under clinical supervision not under police supervision. Surely it should be a financial priority and a policing priority, regardless of what the CCG do. They should be absolutely a partner agency wanting to sign up to it and part of the role of CCGs is to bring partner agencies together. Why shouldn’t you be treating that as more of a priority so that sort of incident is not happening now?
Sue Mountstevens: I think we are already treating it as a priority. The issue there was that we did have members of the NHS come in and they said there was nothing further they could do and they walked away. The police were advised by the NHS that they should leave that very vulnerable woman because she was seeking attention. If the police had left that woman, the chances are she would have died. It would have been tragic for her and it would have been a real issue for those police officers, because they would have been under the scrutiny of IPCC.
Q201 Tim Loughton: I understand that. I do not want to labour the point but the whole point of having CPNs seconded to working side by side with police officers is that they understand the policing priorities and the situation. It is not a case of ringing up the local mental health trust to say, “Can you send somebody down?” because you have somebody out there with you who is part of the interagency team. You have used that as a prime example and I can see why. What I do not understand is why it happened if you are effectively using CPNs as part of an integrated police patrol force now.
Sue Mountstevens: They were involved. We were looking for someone to come and do a mental health assessment and there was no one available for 20 hours.
Q202 Tim Loughton: If we did not have the CSE historic abuse issue now—which I absolutely recognise as being a serious drain on resources—and that were to disappear, what effect would that have on your resource level now?
Kathryn Holloway: There would still be an enormous stretch, but apart from our duty to victims, which is a major part of our role, one of the reasons why we could never turn our backs on it—and I know for certain from the distant past when I used to cover endless paedophile cases, as an investigative reporter at national news level—is that if you turn your back on a victim from yesterday you are failing to protect one today and several tomorrow. They are career paedophiles.
Q203 Tim Loughton: I completely agree. That is not my question. I am not saying that we should do that, of course not. What I am saying is that if you did not have that new pressure, which has come about post-Savile—I am not saying it was not a problem before, it was not dealt with by police and all sorts of other agencies—if you did not have to, effectively, top-slice your policing in order to contribute to the whole national effort on historic CSE, how much of your resources, very roughly, would it free up to be getting on with everyday policing?
Paddy Tipping: It would make a difference, Mr Loughton.
Tim Loughton: How big?
Paddy Tipping: We have increased our public protection team around these issues from a dozen people to 40 but you know Simon Bailey, the Chief Constable in Norfolk, extremely well. He will say to you—it is a point you were making earlier on—where is the action now? It is not on the streets, it is online, and he will say to you that there are 200,000 people who are abusing young people online in this country. That is not the bottom of it and we need to invest more in that and we need to move—it was your initial point—from the Peelian principles of police officers on streets to policing the new frontier and it is going to grow.
Chair: If there is any more evidence you could send it to us as written evidence.
Q204 Will Quince: I note at the back we have the Essex Police and Crime Commissioner here as well, which is where my experience largely lies. To follow up on one of Mr Loughton’s points about interagency working, I would be interested to know what you are doing with interagency work. We touched on mental health and Essex is running a very similar scheme. I am conscious, Mr Lloyd, that you, like Essex, are looking at working cross-governance with the fire and rescue service. What are you doing on sharing estates? What can you do to try to create efficiencies by working together with other agencies?
Kathryn Holloway: We have one of the most extensive collaborative arrangements in the entire country with fire and we are colocated. Where there are community fire stations, particularly in areas that have lost their police station, like Ampthill in central Bedfordshire but also down in Leighton Buzzard where the police station was at a distance from where the main policing problems of the town had grown up around its pubbing and clubbing centre and marketplace and so on, we have colocated with community fire. But not only that, we have agreements with fire where they are picking up various areas of activity that have kept my 999 response officers away from the front line. A prime example of that is making forced entry for paramedics in medical emergencies where clearly individuals are not going to be able to get to the front door themselves. That used to hold police officers at a location for hour after hour. Fire have been doing that since 1 July and they tell me that they have been saving lives as well as police time every single day.
Paddy Tipping: At the time of CSR 2015 the Minister challenged us to make £350 million of efficiency savings through back office. We are on £219 million and we will far exceed the £350 million. A lot of that is from estates work. In Nottinghamshire, most of our officers are based with the local authority but there are problems. The fragmentation of the probation service has been most unhelpful and the way that the NHS is organised at the moment with the provider-purchaser split makes life with the NHS difficult. There is a big campaign with the Ministry of Justice about whether police and crime commissioners could do more to tie up the criminal justice system and we could if we were given the opportunity.
David Lloyd: There is the cultural step change that if we bring together the criminal justice system we can start investing far earlier on and allow fewer crimes to occur, and that is what the public expect us to do. I think the work that we are doing across the criminal justice system is the most interesting. I have to say that other parts of the criminal justice system are not as up for that joint working as I would like them to be. There are a lot of problems with the CPS and the court service. As has been referenced, we could and should be doing a lot more work with probation and the CRCs, which came out of probation. There is a reluctance among many CRCs to work more closely together and we should be involved with that.
In Hertfordshire, as you have said, I have worked very hard to try to join up with fire because I can see a lot of operational reason to come together. I think that would be a very good outcome. It would be helpful if the Home Office got on and decided who was going to review the case, because they have not done so yet. In planning for next year, it is rather difficult if you do not know whether you will be in charge of it, so if others can take that away I would be very pleased to hear. Joining up is one thing that we have to do.
Sue Mountstevens: We invited Avon Fire to come up and we now have a joint police and fire headquarters in Avon and Somerset. There is a number of fire stations that we are using jointly with the police. The police are also with civic centres. If I could emphasise what David said about the criminal justice system, there are savings to be made and investment needed but when there are a myriad of agencies, someone who has invested here does not see the savings. Until we can find a way of bringing that together we are not going to be making a better position for our victims.
Kathryn Holloway: That is absolutely right. I have mental health street triage with a mental health nurse, a paramedic and a police officer in a car going out to individuals who are in absolute crisis, threatening to harm themselves or others. To go back to Mr Loughton about the clinical commissioning groups, all of a sudden Luton Clinical Commissioning Group has effectively held a metaphorical gun to my temple to say that they require £34 million[1] extra or they are going to pull back because they have not seen the cashable savings so far that they had hoped to see from the project.
Q205 Sarah Jones: I have a follow-up question from the previous one, which is: given the financial situation that you are all facing, is the 43-force model in need of changing now? Do we need a restructure to get to the levels of efficiency that you are going to have to deliver?
Kathryn Holloway: Could I please speak for Bedfordshire for a moment? One of the kneejerk reactions that there might be within the Home Office is that Bedfordshire already works collectively with Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire and they do so very successfully. Why on earth wouldn’t you simply merge? The answer would be, whether we merge or whether we stand alone, there will need to be an uplift in funds. David can confirm but I very much doubt that in either Hertfordshire or Cambridgeshire the council taxpayers would see that it was acceptable to them to have the police resources that they pay for disappear into the void of Bedfordshire generally and Luton more specifically.
David Lloyd: I think the answer is that we are already doing a lot of collaborative work. We are merging many of the serious crime functions in many ways. We need to continue doing that, but I think we are doing it. But when you knock on doors—and we are all politicians, we all knock on doors—one of the things that people very much like the idea of is having their own police force based in their locality with someone who can reflect what that locality is in the policing. Policing in the West Midlands is very different to policing in Bradford and to policing in Hertfordshire. That is a brilliant outcome. If we only had one police force or a regional police force we could not reflect that and we need to be able to.
Sue Mountstevens: I believe local policing is absolutely key but I do believe that in five, 10, 15 years we may well have regional forces because I think that is how we will be able to get the savings invested in our local neighbourhoods. I do believe that that is a direction but unless it is centrally mandated it is not going to happen.
Paddy Tipping: There are all kinds of regional collaborations. Our back office costs are shared with Northamptonshire and Cheshire. Avon and Somerset are going to come in on 1 April. Serious crime, homicide, a lot of cybercrime is all done on an East Midlands basis. That is the direction of travel and I think it will continue into the future but ultimately, if we are to move in that way, we will require more assistance from the Home Office and the Home Secretary. The present Prime Minister has made it clear that regional forces will not be mandated. It will be interesting to see how the Devon and Cornwall-Dorset situation develops, but I think Sue is right that in the longer term we will see an increasing move towards greater integration.
Q206 Chair: Thank you very much. Mr Lloyd, if I could ask you, through the APCC, to help us with further information that we may seek, particularly on, for example, the impact on neighbourhood policing or some of the wider issues on reserves and so on. That would be very helpful. Could you also, Mr Lloyd, please convey from us, through the APCC, our thanks to all police forces across the country for the immense amount of work they do to keep us all safe.
David Lloyd: I will do that. Thank you very much.
Chair: Thank you very much to the witnesses for giving us evidence today.
Examination of witness
Q207 Chair: I welcome the Mayor before us. I think it is your first appearance before us and you are very welcome at our evidence session today. We had evidence from the Commissioner a few weeks ago who told us that she was expecting that about £400 million of savings needed to be made and that this could mean about 3,000 police officers being cut. Is that also your assessment?
Sadiq Khan: It is. Let me start by saying my top priority has to be keeping London safe. As a consequence of cuts year in, year out, I think we have reached a tipping point for our ability to keep our city safe. I am the first person to give recognition to and show my gratitude to our police officers. We lost £600 million from 2010 to 2015 and the Commissioner was right, we have to find a further £400 million between now and 2020. That is £1 billion worth of cuts and it is not conceivable there is not going to be impacts on the safety of Londoners.
Q208 Chair: Do you also think that will mean about 3,000 fewer police officers? If so, do you have any sense yet about what that means for neighbourhood policing or different kinds of policing, given the pressures that you face?
Sadiq Khan: The context is that we have already lost more than 65% of community support officers, more than 3,000 approaching 4,000. We have already lost more than 30% of our civilian police staff. We have already sold off 170 police buildings. We have closed down, roughly speaking, 120 police stations and front counters. We think by the end of next year on current trends we will be below 30,000 police officers for the first time since 2003. In 2003 our population was 7.3 million and it is now 8.8 million and crime is more complex. You will know that the biggest volume of crime now is online crime and the terror threat is severe. According to the words of the counter-terror experts, we are seeing a shift in the spike of terror threats. If you go forward ahead of next year, I think by 2020 we will have about 27,000 officers. The last time we had that few officers was 2001.
I met recently the New York police commissioner. New York’s population is smaller than ours. It has similar problems, a global city. Its police number is about 35,000 versus ours, by 2020, of 27,000.
Q209 Chair: I want to come on to the counter-terror issue in a second but looking at the wider impact on crimes and investigations, we put to the Commissioner some of the reports about the Met not being able to investigate lower levels of crime or crimes with a value of less than £50 and so on. Do you think there is a concern that if that kind of approach is taken that it will lead to the development of higher level crimes or more serious crimes, because the police are not able to nip small crimes in the bud or catch people at an earlier stage?
Sadiq Khan: One thing that I have appreciated fully for the first time, really in the last 18 months, is how policing is a system. You cannot disaggregate counter-terror from online crime from neighbourhood policing. It is all linked. Neighbourhood policing is the front line in preventing all forms of crime, but also giving the public confidence in reporting things, becoming witnesses, providing intelligence. The concept of policing by consent is an important one.
Also, if you look at the evidence—I know you have in the past—whether it is the New York broken windows theory to the evidence we have here over the last 15 to 20 years with the reduction in crime up until 2014, if you address and nip the small things early on and the public has confidence, you can then reduce the small things but also the big things from terrorism to online fraud to the serious crimes against women and young girls to sexual abuse. It is all linked.
That is why I think reducing frontline police officers, reducing neighbourhood policing, making it meaningless, will have a real impact on all forms of crime.
Q210 Chair: Can I ask you specifically about the counter-terror? The Met gets specific funding in addition for counter-terror. You have had to deal with some deeply distressing attacks in London and the emergency services’ response to them. What is your view about what will happen to counter-terror funding over the next few years and what the consequences will be?
Sadiq Khan: I am very fortunate. I have regular briefings with the Commissioner, but also the Assistant Commissioner, Mark Rowley, and meet some of the fantastic team who work so hard day in, day out.
The context is that in the last year in London we had four terrorist attacks. We have also had in London seven terror attacks thwarted because of the brilliant work of the police ancillary services but also because of the intelligence coming from the public because they have trust and confidence in the police service.
We did some work after the first attack in March, the Westminster attack, and roughly speaking two-thirds of the response to the terror attack came from ordinary policing. In Manchester they did some work after the Ariana Grande bombing and 80% of the response to the attack in Manchester was from “ordinary policing”. Even if it is the case, which it isn’t, that counter-terror funding was protected—by the way it is not, it is going to go down by 7% over the next three years—that shows a lack of understanding of how policing works. That is the view of Cressida Dick, Mark Rowley, Neil Basu and all the counter-terror experts. You cannot reduce funding by 20% to 25% from the general police funding budget, reduce the funding for counter-terror by 7% and expect things not to be affected.
We all know that the previous Commissioner had a phrase in relation to terror attacks—he said this last year—that it is a question of when not if. You will also be aware that the threat levels remain severe. I am increasingly worried about our ability to keep Londoners, businesses and visitors safe in the context of the cuts being made to not just the counter-terror budget but also the policing budget overall.
Q211 Chair: Your assessment of the tipping point covers both the response to terror attacks and the response to the day-to-day crimes the police have to deal with?
Sadiq Khan: Absolutely. I will give you an example. You will know from a publicised case how a member of the public, because he had confidence in the police, reported suspicious behaviour of somebody buying fertiliser. That led to a terror attack being thwarted. Also in the public domain there was one case where, as a consequence of intelligence from a British Muslim, a terror attack was thwarted. That is part of the concept of policing by consent. The British public have confidence in the police service, have a relationship with the local police officer and report things.
Neil Basu, who is the national co-ordinator of counter-terrorism, said this week that one of the reasons why there are no shockwaves—his words not mine—when there is a counter-terror operation is because of the brilliant work done by local police officers with the community, which ameliorates any potential shockwaves when counter-terror police officers come in and make arrests. It is very important to understand the close collaboration there is between CT operations and local police officers.
The point I make about we are at a tipping point is if the Government proceed with their plans to make the reductions over the next three or four years—unless Philip Hammond changes the mind of the Government and increases, in real terms, revenues we receive via the police grant—as far as London is concerned, we need to receive the full amount of money we are entitled to as an international capital city. Also, the Government need to abandon their funding formula. Unless those things happen, I am seriously worried about our ability to keep our city safe.
Q212 Tim Loughton: Mr Mayor, what suggestions do you have about the way the funding is skewed between conventional policing and counter-terrorist policing, and is London a completely artificial picture in that respect? Do we need to completely review the whole funding formula?
Sadiq Khan: That is a question in relation to the link between funding and counter-terror. When I look at London’s population, I think we are more comparable and more a global city to New York. I say this not with arrogance to other cities around the UK but, just in size terms and potential target terms, we are different. That is the context in which I want to answer the question, which is that traditional, conventional policing funding is very important and there are the additional pressures we face as a national and international capital city: the number of state visits we have; the number of protests we have; the number of sporting events we have. The complexities of a young, diverse population mean policing London is different—and I say that with respect to the four colleagues we had before me—to policing other parts of the country.
I welcome the fact that the Met has a lead in relation to national counter-terrorism. I saw great collaboration between us and Manchester during the Manchester bombing but also I have seen great collaboration from other police forces with London as a victim of terrorism. My view is that none of the models that we have seen in relation to the two suggestions for a new funding formula recognise the needs of London, and add to that the fact that, roughly speaking, we receive half the amount of monies that experts calculate we should receive as an international capital city. I think there needs to be a whole review in relation to how London is funded, bearing in mind the challenges we face as a national and international capital city.
Q213 Tim Loughton: It was noticeable that the police commissioners earlier mentioned their contribution towards counter-terrorism operations, which came out of their mainstream funding. If you go down the path you have just mentioned, it is going to make their position even worse because that funding has to come from a limited budget. It was a year or so ago after the Westminster attacks that you said that terrorism is part and parcel of living in a big city. Was that a slightly complacent comment to make and how does that feature with other areas round the country? Take mine in Sussex, for example, where we have Gatwick Airport. We are in a rural county but it is potentially a serious terrorist hotspot. Should there not be greater co-operation, greater sharing of the expertise that is concentrated in the capital and other parts of the country that are having to bear the financial pain and do have some of the risk features, and yet do not get a share of the terrorism funding cake, which is rather more generous?
Sadiq Khan: You raise four different points there. I will try to deal with each. First, I think it is important for politicians not to take out of context what other politicians say. I did not say that part and parcel of living in London is the receiving of terrorism. The full quote—which I am sure you have read as a responsible senior politician—is part and parcel of living in London is us being vigilant. We have to recognise that terrorists will attack capital cities and cities across the world, from London to Berlin to Paris to New York to Nice to other cities, and we have to make sure that we are being vigilant and being the eyes and ears of the police. 30,000 officers can do a good job but 30,000 officers, aided and abetted by 8.8 million Londoners can do an even better job. Part and parcel of living in London is to be the eyes and ears of the police and to be vigilant at all times.
I think you are right to remind us that London is not the only target of terrorists. We saw it obviously in Manchester, and you know from your experience with Gatwick, but also Heathrow and other hubs. We have also seen how terrorists have evolved and found new ways to cause us damage from crowded areas, potential sporting events to shopping centres, which is why we need to design for the possibilities of terrorism when we can.
My point is very simple, Tim. I think that the slice of the pie that policing receives is too small. You have to increase the slice of the pie. The point you are making is how we divide up that slice of the pie between London and your police force and other police forces. All of the four witnesses you have seen before, previous experts you have had, I think all agree with me that the slice of the pie has now become too small and it is shrinking. My point is it is not London versus Crawley or London versus Nottingham or London versus Manchester. It is all of us who have some expertise in policing and lead great cities or regions saying to the Government, “Enough. You have to change the way policing is funded and increase considerably the amount of police grant we get”.
My point about London is different to the others in the context of being a national and international capital city. There is a formula already set up that says that national and international capital cities should get an additional sum of money, for the reason I have said. That is a separate discussion. Roughly speaking, that figure is £440 million. We receive £170 million. We are short by half. That is a separate discussion from the police grant.
There is a third discussion, which is the point you refer to in your first question about the funding formula. That funding formula is in the context of an ever shrinking slice of the pie. My point is that once we have decided the size of the slice—and I think it should be bigger than it currently is—there is a discussion to be had about not penalising capital cities because of the complexities we have being a capital city.
Q214 Tim Loughton: I understand that and I am sure everyone will say—and many of us on this Committee will agree—there is an argument to be had over the overall budget of policing. But what I am asking is about how you organise the way that pie is parcelled out. If you have terrorist targets such as nuclear power stations, there is a separate nuclear police force that is separately funded. But when you have police forces around London, and this is particularly germane to the south-east of England—and again I am pleading my own case for Sussex—and there is a serious terrorist call in the capital then it is Sussex, Surrey and other forces in the immediate vicinity who will have the greatest call on those resources, purely because of geographical proximity. Should we not have some approach that recognises the inevitable geographical greater demand caused by London’s position as a terrorist hotspot and the additional funding pressures we are going to have?
Sadiq Khan: Sorry, it is my fault. I misunderstood your question. You make a very good point about mutual aid brings bigger pressures on the neighbouring police forces for the reasons that you have said. I think that is right. Also bearing in mind the stat I gave you, which is a stat based upon evidence, two-thirds of the response to Westminster was non-CT funding and part of the mutual aid would have been from the neighbouring police forces. That is right.
The problem is because of the cuts the neighbouring forces have faced, when called upon to provide aid of course there is a willingness but there is a problem because you have to backfill what they are giving up and stuff. The point you are making is a good one, which is it is not just the CT team that responds. It is also traditional policing as well. Obviously you will appreciate, God forbid, if there was an attack on Gatwick or any other place in Sussex, you would see reciprocal mutual aid from the Met police, and that relationship does exist.
Q215 Rehman Chishti: Mr Mayor, with regards to London being an international capital city in the world, would you still say that London is the safest international capital city around the world, taking into account the recent Visit London figures that clearly show the number of people coming here, year on year, is increasing? Would you agree with that?
Sadiq Khan: We are one of the safest global cities in the world, but I think we are at a tipping point.
Q216 Rehman Chishti: Thank you. Linked to that, just touching upon the tipping point, the issue of countering extremism and terrorism, I totally agree with you on the point that you make with regard to Assistant Commissioner Rowley when he said it is communities on the frontline that help defeat extremism. It is often members of the individuals’ own communities who notify the police authorities, which leads to the police taking appropriate action. With that being the case and looking at countering extremism—the key part of that being Prevent—would you say, looking at London, the public we are engaging with to help defeat extremism and terrorism have the confidence and trust in Prevent that they should have?
Sadiq Khan: The big question. By and large, some parts of the community have confidence in the police and in Prevent but a significant minority do not. The good news in relation to the figures published last week, which should give you a source of optimism, is roughly speaking more than 10% of the referrals made to the authorities in relation to Islamist radicalisation came from friends and family. These are Londoners and British Muslims. That should be good news. By the way, the number of referrals from friends and family from right wing groups was 5%, so it could be argued that British Muslims are doing far more in relation to reporting friends and family than the far right are. But you will appreciate that there are some parts of the community that worry about Prevent and the impact it has on labelling certain sections of the community.
Q217 Rehman Chishti: From your experience with the extensive community engagement that we have, how do we get it right? How do we build that trust? How do we get the strategy to work and do what we all want to do, which is get everyone engaged and have our confidence in place?
Sadiq Khan: Prevent polarises people. On the one extreme there are people who say if you criticise Prevent you are giving succour to the terrorists and condoning terrorism. On the other hand you have those people who think, if you participate in Prevent, you are criminalising the community and it is guilt by association. I do not subscribe to either. I think Prevent is the only show in town. The intention is to help those who are vulnerable, who are being exploited and who are being targeted by charismatic preachers, by radicalisers.
The publication last week of the data shows progress. It shows willingness on the part of the Government and the police to be transparent. There are lessons we can learn from there, but the best way to build confidence in the public is neighbourhood policing, policing by consent. If you are a young person and you have lunch with a police officer in your school, if you are a mum and dad and the police have given you advice to keep your home safe, if you are a youth leader and the police have come and organised a five aside football tournament, your relations with the police is different to the traditional one where you are seeing the police drive around. You never see them. You only see them when they are arresting you or stopping and searching you.
That trust and confidence is crucial because it means that mum, dad, uncle, aunt, youth leader, friend of somebody at school, can say to the police, “Look, I am a bit worried about my friend or my nephew or my niece or my son or my daughter. What is your advice? What can you do?” That is really important because we now have a situation where people are being radicalised and groomed in their bedroom from 3,000 miles away, so we need to continue to build that relationship.
My worry is that if there are further cuts made, as the Commissioner said last week the thing that they are going to have to stop doing is preventative, proactive work. The evidence tells us that the preventative, proactive work makes you safer and that is why I am worried.
Q218 Rehman Chishti: I am grateful to you when you were a Member of Parliament for supporting the campaign to ensure that we used the correct terminology to refer to the terrorist organisation as Daesh, because it was neither Islamic nor a state, and they have deliberately chosen those words to suck in people who are disillusioned and vulnerable. One of the biggest challenges that we have, despite that people say that Daesh is defeated in Raqqa, is we have to defeat the idea, the ideology, the appeal that sucks people into extremism and then into terrorism in some circumstances. How do we defeat that?
Sadiq Khan: It means all of us playing a role. That means the internet service providers playing a role to take down stuff that is glorifying hatred or that is giving space to preachers. They do not just have to take it down, they have to report it. That means that is giving the confidence to communities to take on these perverse interpretations of a form of Islam that you and I—and I am sure most—do not recognise. It means giving teachers—the biggest referrals came from education to Prevent, the second was police and then was family and friends—the confidence to have a conversation about some of these things with young people. Part of it is people like you as role models have a role to play, to say to young people, “Listen, you can be a westerner and be a Muslim and be successful. We are respected and treated with courtesy and respect”. It means providing safe spaces for people to express concerns, whether it is concerns about foreign policy or other issues, so that they can be active citizens.
The idea that the police by themselves can solve this is ridiculous. The idea that good preachers by themselves can defeat this is not realistic. All of us have a role to play.
Q219 Rehman Chishti: With regards to role models, I think you do a great job in terms of being British.
Sadiq Khan: That is very kind, thank you.
Rehman Chishti: Having just come back from Pakistan as a trade envoy, they are very much looking forward to having you back in that country. Touching on that, you talked about seven terrorist attacks being thwarted. Would you agree with me that in part, whether it is a terrorist attack here in London, or whether it is in the United States or Tunisia or Pakistan, countries when working together, if they have information that could lead to preventing a terrorist attack around the world, whether they have access to a database or not, those countries will share that information with us?
Sadiq Khan: Agreed, and we have very good bilateral relations with all sorts of countries around the world. There is additional value added by our relationship with the EU, and I am sure we will come on to that later.
Q220 Naz Shah: On the subject of Prevent, the statistics that you have just referred to that came out last week were predominantly around education, children, and young people. According to those statistics, a terror threat from Islamist extremism is five times greater, actually, you are 40 times more likely to be referred to Channel if you are a Muslim. Given that the majority of those children, young people that were referred to Channel, were “no further action”, and those that had further actions had other issues of mental health, bereavement in the family, families breaking up and were not necessarily extremist, are you confident with how Prevent is working in London with young Muslims in particular?
Sadiq Khan: I welcomed the publication of the report last week. It is the first time it has happened with that much detail. My view is Prevent is not perfect but it is the best we have and we have to improve it. There are huge improvements that can be made and are being made. What is good—and this has not always been the case—is the Government are receptive to ideas of how to improve it.
In relation to referrals to Prevent, one of three things is happening. First, people have no further action taken against them; somebody is referred to Prevent and there is no need for further action. Secondly, there has been a referral to other agencies. Mental health is the obvious one, social services or others. Thirdly, it is Channel. I am of the view that as long as you deal with people sensitively—and it is important that you are sensitive—you should err on the side of caution rather than not referring and, God forbid, that person had been radicalised. These people are vulnerable. They can be exploited and they are being exploited by the bad guys, so we need to counter the radicalisation coming from the bad guys. That is why I think err on the side of caution, as long as there is sensitivity and joined-upness on this part of things.
What we have to accept, and I do, as somebody like me who engages with the diaspora across the country, is that there is some suspicion around Prevent from some communities. There is concern that it is labelling entire communities as potential terrorists, and that has caused some anxiety. We have to rebuild that confidence with these communities and explain there is no ill will intended by the police, the education sector and others who refer. It is simply concern about vulnerability.
The comparison I give is around sexual abuse and safeguarding. I think this is analogous to safeguarding in relation to sexual abuse and grooming. If it was the case that any of us knew about a nephew or a niece or a pupil or somebody we knew who was being groomed in a sexual nature, either via the internet or via an elderly uncle or whatever, we would not hesitate to report it to the authorities, err on the side of caution. That is the way we have to think about this now because what is happening is young people are being groomed to become radicalised. It could be through the internet. It has happened sexually with the other grooming we are talking about, or it could happen with a paternal figure. That is why I think we have to err on the side of caution.
The reason why we should be confident about progress made is the attitude of the Minister now compared to in the past. Ben Wallace is saying, “Look, it is not perfect. Progress has been made and us publishing this is an attempt to build trust and confidence”. That is part of that we are having a massive cut in our budgets. My ability to commit more time and resources to Prevent is not what it should be because of the cuts to our budgets, and the same goes with police officers. The context also is that health services, youth services and schools are having cuts, and so you cannot desegregate counter-terror or policing from what is happening across the public sector generally.
Q221 Naz Shah: That brings me on to my next question, which is your assessment of the current distribution of the counter-terrorism budget between the police, security services and Government Departments. Does the national counter-terrorism network receive a sufficient proportion of that budget?
Sadiq Khan: If you had a counter-terror expert here, he or she would be saying, of course, they could do with more resource. They are not getting enough. They would also say, “There was no point in ring-fencing or any cut in our budget by 7%, and these guys, the traditional policing budget, conventional policing having massive cuts. They are linked. It is a policing system”. I think there is a separate discussion to make sure counter-terror gets the resourcing she needs.
The workload has gone up by 30% for counter-terror. Funding has gone down by 7% but, also, the relationship between conventional policing and counter-terror policing. My worry is there is an assumption made by the Government—and I include the Prime Minister and Chancellor, and the previous Prime Minister and Chancellor—simply by saying, “We are going to ring-fence cuts in our funding” that somehow means we are safe from terrorists. It is not the case. You cannot cut conventional policing by more than 20%, ring-fence, which they are not dong by the way, counter-terror policing and expect things to be safe vis-à-vis the risk we face from terrorists.
Q222 Naz Shah: When we took evidence in the last Parliament on counter-terrorism and Prevent, what teachers were saying—and what these research figures from last week are saying—is that they were not confident in implementing the contest duty. How are you managing that interrelationship, as the Mayor of London responsible for policing, in having that confidence with education where you talked about cuts and the confidence with policing and marrying that up to preventing violent extremism? How are you doing it?
Sadiq Khan: You are right to remind us that teachers want to do the right thing but they lack confidence because of a lack of training, so we have to make sure there is more joined-upness. There is a good ethos among public servants to try to help each other deal with the issue of safeguarding but a lack of confidence, and so that is a resources issue. We have to build in time for teachers to be trained, mental health professionals to be trained, GPs to be trained, public sector officials to be trained, and youth workers. Youth clubs in London have closed down. They are being lost. Young people are being lost to the youth services, and so there is a whole resources discussion there about the public sector area in London. It is very difficult. I am not going to pretend that the Mayor by himself or the police by themselves can address this issue. There are examples in London.
An example that is in the public domain is in the east of London, where there are real questions about safeguarding and the role of supplementary schools and what children are being taught there and shown there that has caused big concern. The Mayor has got no locus in relation to that. Local authorities have no locus in that, and that it is an example of things falling through the cracks. We are probably more joined up than we have been but it is in the context of massive, massive constraints on our resources because of the cuts we are facing.
Q223 Naz Shah: Would it be fair to say that your concern you referred to is not a matter of if, it is a matter of when, that those concerns that we have had previously are heightened with all the budget costs in policing and everywhere else?
Sadiq Khan: You cannot disentangle the two. If a police officer has less time to befriend families in the community, to visit the local mosque or places where people congregate, if teachers have less time to be trained and do not have the confidence to talk about this to young people or are risk averse to report on, if governors are not being trained or aware of this as an issue—look, two weeks ago I had a summit with educators about knife crime. The point I made there is, just like we assess safeguarding when it comes to Ofsted, we should be assessing safeguarding when it comes to knife crime. The same goes with Prevent. We should be saying to governors, “You have the responsibility to keep our children safe”. That should include issues of knife crime but also issues of radicalisation and Prevent.
Q224 Stephen Doughty: Mr Mayor, I want to come on to some other issues regarding counter-terror and also the international/transnational crime that London sees by nature of being a global city. Are you concerned that if we ended up in a no deal or a poor deal Brexit situation, where our access to EU security databases was compromised, either permanently or temporarily, or we had interruptions in the applicability of arrest warrants, extradition proceedings, ongoing transnational investigations, that that would have a significant impact on London’s ability to deal with that type of issue?
Sadiq Khan: If we had no deal with the European Union, it would lead to those who visit our city, those who live in our city being less safe. That is the reason why the Home Secretary used the word “unthinkable” when there came to being a no deal.
In answer to the question that Rehman asked me, I made the point that we have very good bilateral links with a number of cities and countries around the world. Met police officers are in Paris, New York, other places around the world. Those are the bilateral links we have. But you cannot underestimate the role the EU plays from the extradition, European Arrest Warrant. In real time we share data via the Schengen data system to wanted requests being passed through Europol, to the EU passenger list in relation to the watch list, to Prüm, and I could go on.
Of course we have great bilateral relations but the value that is added by the European Union is huge. The idea that we can have no deal, where all this stuff is replaced straightaway from day one when we are in the EU to day two when we are not, is, to quote the Home Secretary, “unthinkable”.
Q225 Stephen Doughty: Have you had discussions with the Home Office and with the Met about this particular concern?
Sadiq Khan: In addition to making representations to the Home Secretary and giving evidence to the EU Select Committee, I have also met David Davis. I meet with him on a regular basis and I made it quite clear to him. In a different context I call these red lines. These are red lines that we cannot go below.
The content of the conversation is there will be a deal and we want these things to be in the agreement. That was my fall-back position. I just thought the idea of there being no deal was so bad for us as a country economically that it would not need to be said. It now needs to be said and I am pleased you are raising it. The idea of there being no deal with the EU community, bearing in mind the evidence I have seen of how it helps cross-border crime and prevention, is extremely worrying.
Q226 Stephen Doughty: We are mainly focusing on policing today but, as a Committee, we have also been looking into other aspects of the Home Office capacity to deal with, for example, the registration of EU citizens. You have been very clear in speaking out about the role that EU citizens play in London. Are you concerned about the Home Office capacity to, for example, register the hundreds of thousands of French citizens, or others, in the city in the way that they are suggesting in order for them to be able to go about their business?
Sadiq Khan: The reason why I spoke, Stephen, is anybody who has been a Member of Parliament, had surgeries and has had to deal with the case work in relation to making representation to UKBA just knows how confident we are about the Home Office’s ability to process some of these things. It is just unrealistic to suggest they will suddenly become the most efficient Government Department in the history of HMG and process the registration in the way it needs to be done.
Let me give you an example. In London we have more than 1 million Londoners—more than 1 million Londoners—and there are Londoners, by the way, who are EU citizens. They are very worried. They are very scared. They are not sure about their future. That they will somehow have a smooth process of registration to lead to them being able to continue their life afterwards as they did before is not realistic.
Q227 Stephen Doughty: Related to that we have had some questions raised with us about, for example, the capacity of border staff and customs staff—in particular, at ports of entry—to deal with a no deal situation or an unclear transition. Given the importance of, for example, St Pancras, Heathrow, the City and so on, have you had concerns raised with you about, for example, the ability to suddenly ramp up enhanced customs or border checks in the event of a no deal contingency Brexit?
Sadiq Khan: Putting aside, for example, the number of Londoners who regularly visit the Republic of Ireland, and the concerns they will have in relation to their passage. I was in Dublin a couple of weeks ago for what is common: a Londoner going back to Dublin for a baptism. The idea that it is going to be smooth in the future is not realistic, bearing in mind how easy it is now. Also, you will know that London is a global city and we regularly have, on a daily basis, people coming here just for the day and then going home.
Around St Pancras it is the knowledge quarter. Google have announced an expansion. The British Library is there; universities are around there; the Crick Institute is around there. Literally, on a daily basis, people come from Europe, spend the day in St Pancras in knowledge quarter and return to mainland Europe. I am concerned that, if there is no deal or if there is not a good relationship with the EU, the ability to move freely, our ability to attract talent, our ability to be a successful, thriving, flourishing global city will be diminished.
Q228 Stephen Doughty: This is a completely unrelated question and a slightly parochial one but an important one for myself. I have raised on a number of occasions, including to the Home Secretary, concerns about capital city funding in general. You will be aware that London gets very significant additional resources, Edinburgh, Belfast. Cardiff do not and, although obviously we are a lot smaller, we are dealing with hosting major events, very serious concerns, for example, the Champions League and so on. Would you be sympathetic to the cause that we have been making to the South Wales Police Commissioner that we need to review the specific responsibilities of capital cities, as seats of government, as hosters of major events and so on, for additional resources?
Sadiq Khan: Look, can I say this? Cardiff three weeks ago had 70,000 people in one space watching Anthony Joshua retain his world championship. I will not give away a state secret but, if you are a bad guy, if you are a terrorist that is an obvious target. Think about the Ariana Grande concert, people going in and out. We have to look across the country at how we keep our citizens safe but I think, places like Cardiff, Edinburgh, London, other places where people congregate and there are lots of people in one place, are obvious places for the Government to relook at how those cities are funded because it is really important we keep everyone safe.
Q229 Chair: One quick follow up question on Brexit. The Security Commissioner said publicly about the security treaty—and I paraphrase—something along the lines of just because everybody wants something to happen does not necessarily mean to say that it is easy or that it does happen in practice. Have you done any contingency planning on the possibility of no deal from the point of view of security and, given there is only another 16 months remaining, at what point in the next 16 months would you expect to start contingency planning or to be putting contingency plans in place, if you have not had the reassurance that security arrangements were going to be included in the withdrawal agreement?
Sadiq Khan: Thank you for that. Two things: I met Julian King, the Security Commissioner, in Brussels. He is another example of us exporting expertise to the rest of Europe, and he is doing a good job. It boils down to whether we get certainty around a transitional deal. If, for example, before Christmas the Prime Minister or David Davis was to say, “We are going to have a transitional deal for two years, three years post-March 2019” that takes the pressure off. By the way, that is the same issue there is for businesses who are making plan Bs for the reason they are not sure about what happens in March 2019. Businesses are saying they will give it until the first quarter of next year before making plan B.
Those of us in charge of security are probably also looking at that sort of timeline. Towards the first quarter of next year, we would know if there is going to be a transitional deal, what it is going to be. I would be astonished if a transitional deal did not include security and, by the way, I do not think we should be bargaining with security. I do not think we should say, “Unless you give us this we are going to take away security co-operation”. If by the end of the first quarter we do not have certainty from the Government about a transitional deal being done that would mean the cliff edge is March 2019 rather than March 2021, 2022. That will lead to an increase in urgency, I think, from us.
I know the Commissioner said to you last week she would do you a note in relation to this. But we are optimistic that the Government will provide some certainty this side of Christmas, if not shortly afterwards, if for no other reason than the chief executives that I speak to, the businesses I speak to, will be making plans to leave very shortly afterwards if they don’t.
Q230 Sarah Jones: I want to turn to knife crime and serious youth violence. We saw Cressida Dick last week and she told us that 25 teenagers have lost their lives so far in London this year, 21 of them black and four of them Asian, mostly boys. We saw yesterday on Channel 4 that there has been a 160% increase over the last two years of the threat to life notices that have gone out, with children as young as 14 getting threat to life notices. What do you think is driving this recent increase that we have seen?
Sadiq Khan: There has been an increase in violent crime since 2014. In the last year, in particular, there has been a massive spike in London; and I am sorry to report another death by stabbing last night in Hackney.
There are a number of reasons given by the experts. The age profile of Londoners is quite young now, quite low. I am not blaming the cuts in public services but you cannot not see the link between youth services closing down, services around schools after hours closing down, cuts in mental health services, overcrowded families living in parts of London, and so young people do not have constructive things to do, cannot stay at home and they hang around street corners.
At the same time we have seen in some of the internet service providers, YouTube, the glorification of a certain lifestyle and violence is quite complicated. That is one of the reasons why I say the way we are going to stop knife crime is not simply going to be a policing issue. It has to be joined up: schools, youth leaders, civic society, policing, hospitals, mental health, families all have a role to play. Tomorrow we will be launching our latest part of that package of measures around young people. The campaign is very simple. It is young people speaking to young people saying—I will paraphrase—London needs you alive. And it is young people saying to other young people why they should not be carrying knives and stuff. You are right, there has been a big spike this year but it is worth reminding ourselves that across England and Wales, since 2014, there has been an increase in violent crime now.
Q231 Sarah Jones: When Cressida Dick was talking about the impact of the £400 million cuts that she is going to have to make, I asked her about the impact that would have on knife crime and she talked about some of the prevention side of what you provide, some of the investigation into serious organised crime and potentially cutting frontline policing. What impact do you think that budget cut is going to have on your ability, and the London police force’s ability to tackle knife crime and serious youth violence?
Sadiq Khan: If the Government continue with their plans to make cuts over the next four years, if the Government fail to increase the monies the police receive via the police grant, our ability to stop knife crime is seriously hindered. I worry about knife crime getting even worse, if that is conceivable, over the next period.
As a Londoner, you will remember that knife crime was extremely bad in 2011-12. The context, though, is if it is the case that we cannot invest as we are currently doing—so we currently invest in Redthread around A&Es making sure of that teachable moment to turn people around. We invest in gang exit strategies and in giving schools knife wands. We are invested in every school having a school safety officer. We are invested in police officers being in the community, two dedicated ward officers, plus a CSO in each ward. We did all this work in relation to keeping public transport safe with BTP officers on public transport. We are working in relation to the Government Crime Prevention Fund with the councils, giving them £5 million to invest in facilities for young people. We have a separate pot of money for seed funding.
All of that is in the context of the massive cuts made in the whole public sector ecosystem but, I tell you, if the Government does not change their mind and the Chancellor does not announce increased investment in public funding, I made the point we are at the tipping point. I am incredibly worried—not just as the Mayor, I have two teenage daughters—about our ability to keep youngsters safe in London with this level of cuts.
Q232 Sarah Jones: Do you think the powers that you have to tackle knife crime are sufficient? Do you think you should be given more powers? How could you have a better system?
Sadiq Khan: You have to be careful when you say more powers plus resources. We do not want a situation where we get the powers but not the resources following the powers. I would love to be in charge of youth services. I would love to be able to work with young people in relation to providing them with a structure for things to do. We have managed to persuade the Government to devolve their powers around FE education from 2019 onwards. We are doing some really good work around skills for Londoners, but I would like to provide young people with constructive things to do on evenings, weekends and holidays. We would like to have devolution of 16 to 19 year-olds’ funding. It has not even been talked about seriously by the Government. I think we could do a huge amount of good there.
Local authorities have lost 40% to 50% of their funding since 2010, and so it is hardly surprising they are cutting non-statutory services like youth workers. I would like to be in charge of that thing with economies of scale, but also a pan-London approach. We could do a lot of good. I will give you one example. A local authority—I will give you Croydon as an example—will not unreasonably spend its money in Croydon, but you and I both know there is cross-border crime taking place and there is cross-border prevention that could take place. If the Mayor was in charge of some of this work, I could work with Croydon and the neighbouring boroughs to make sure we are joining up the services. We could also remove silos.
In a previous question, Naz talked about mental health. If we were in charge of more of the public health, the NHS funding money and had the powers, we could join up mental health with youth services with policing to bring them together.
Q233 Sarah Jones: Cressida Dick said last week that the online YouTubes, Facebooks and the Googles should be doing more, and you talked about that in the context of the extremism they should be doing more. What more do you think they should be doing in terms of crime and gang-related crime?
Sadiq Khan: The good news is we are having good discussions with Google and YouTube. My criticism of them is this. We have examples of the police saying to Google and YouTube, “Here is a video of a gang member goading members of another gang by filming a video in a playground where somebody was murdered, and you have to take that down, because what this gang member is doing is goading somebody else”, and they have not taken it down despite representations from the police service.
There is a separate issue about I do not think social media companies are investing enough in AI and staff and other ways to stop this bad stuff going up in the first place. We know they have the technology to do so and they have to invest in that. That makes them good corporate citizens. We have good discussions with them. They have helped us, for example, in relation to we have the country’s first online crime hub. I would not want to leave you with the impression that we don’t get on with them, we don’t work with them, but I think they can and should be doing much more in this particular area. You and I both know the medium by which young people get their messages across are via social media, and we have to make sure we try to minimise the ways people can incite others, can glorify certain lifestyles and certain genres but, also, literally goading people to respond.
Q234 Will Quince: Mr Mayor, picking up on the London knife crime strategy and particularly your point earlier about education—and I hope I don’t misquote you—I believe you said Ofsted should judge schools on how effectively they root out knife crime. The first question is: do you stand by that? The second question is: do you think it is fair? The third question is: do you not think it is you that should be judged on that very point?
Sadiq Khan: I will try to unpack your questions. First, the point I was making was that Ofsted has a role in relation to safeguarding. We have been speaking to the London inspector from Ofsted in relation to what roles schools can play. There are examples of some schools doing remarkably good stuff in keeping the young people safe, lessons they give to young people, bringing in ex-gang members. There are now model lessons you can give in relation to schools. Some schools bring in “The Archers”.
Other schools are nervous about being labelled a knife crime problem school by doing this sort of stuff. I understand their concerns, by the way. I am a governor, so I understand their concerns. If we can get all the schools to look at the issue of keeping young people safe from knife crime, it reduces the stigma because everyone is doing it. But the only way it can happen is Ofsted needs to play a role. Ofsted understands it is an issue and it inspects safeguarding and it is willing to talk to schools about this. But it is not an issue I can do by myself. That is the context of the schools. It is the point I made to Sarah that the police by themselves cannot do it. There is a great saying, “It takes a village to raise a child”. I think in relation to knife crime it will take a village to solve knife crime.
In relation to my responsibility, look, I have accepted responsibility for things I have control over. I have no control over the policing budget from central government. 75% of my budget comes from central government and I have no control over that. I have no control over the cuts to youth services. I have no control over the cuts to mental health services. I have no control over the cuts made to local government of between 40% and 50% over the last seven years.
Q235 Will Quince: Mr Mayor, if I can intervene there, what you do have control over is elements of education. Police and crime commissioners up and down the country fund weapons education training. I have read the section on education. You talk about safe spaces and there are lots of warm words about all the things that we expect schools and others to do, but how much are you actually funding in terms of this education and those lessons in our schools in London?
Sadiq Khan: Have you read my knife crime strategy?
Will Quince: Yes, that element of—
Sadiq Khan: The answer is there, more than £7 million.
Q236 Will Quince: In the overall package, but for the weapons awareness education actually in schools?
Sadiq Khan: We are funding a school safety officer, so more than 300 currently funded, more coming, hopefully, subject to what the budget announcement is. We are funding each school to have a knife wand. We are funding a model lesson to be provided in schools. That is the education summit we had two or three weeks ago, and there is other funding in the seven-year package, which I can send you a note about. It should be in your knife crime strategy that if you have there you can see there. I have one here but I can send you a note if you need an exact figure.
Q237 Will Quince: Yes. I would encourage you to look at weapons education training specifically, where facilitators come in, and not just creating model lessons. I would love it to be funded across the country, but you do have the power to do it and I think it would make a huge difference.
Sadiq Khan: All police and crime commissioners have the ability to do more than they have been given the powers to do. In fact, I do not have the powers. I use my convenience power to persuade schools to take these lessons. I cannot force a school to take any lessons, just as I cannot force any school to take a knife wand. What I can do is persuade them, using Ofsted, why it is good for them and their children. I think parents should be saying to their school, “What are you doing to keep my son and daughter safe?”
Q238 Will Quince: Mr Mayor, if I could touch on one more question still related to violent crime. A lot of towns, like mine in Colchester, within an hour’s radius of London are suffering with the county lines issue and many are asking, “What is the Mayor of London? What is the Metropolitan Police?” What are the Metropolitan Police doing to try to break those county lines and work with other forces to try to tackle this unique, major and growing issue, certainly across that radius around London?
Sadiq Khan: One of the things that I soon discovered after becoming Mayor is that there is a big perception about the county lines issue, and it is borne out by evidence that it is an issue, in relation to the lack of a working relationship between the Met Police and other police forces around London. It is linked to Tim’s point, although it is a different point, around better working together.
I have been really impressed with the Commissioner, in relation to her willingness and keenness to work much more collaboratively with police forces around London, and I am happy to speak to you offline if there are particular issues that you want to raise with me that I can raise with the Commissioner. I am keen to play my role as a good citizen to colleagues around London because, you are right, bad people do not respect county lines. Please let me know if there are things you are worried about, things we could be doing that we are not doing, because the Commissioner and I are determined to make sure we are good neighbours.
Q239 Naz Shah: I am going to go back to Prevent, simply because the Runnymede Trust report has come out today. You are probably not aware of it because it is literally fresh off the press. What they have said is they have found substantial evidence of disproportionate, counterproductive discrimination. So it is discriminatory, counterproductive and disproportionate in terms of Muslims. They have also said in terms of racism. What they have called for is an independent inquiry to regain trust and build a way forward that many of us, including the United Nations, Citizens UK and a range of civil society groups have asked for. I put in my declaration of interest I have always asked for that. Would you agree with a call for an independent investigation to rebuild trust, given where we are at with radicalisation?
Sadiq Khan: As you will appreciate, I have a huge interest in this area. I have read the report done by the Home Office Select Committee previously and, also, Louise Casey’s work earlier on this year. I am disappointed it was not published sooner and also the Government have not responded to all the recommendations made by Louise Casey.
We are doing some work in London in relation to—they are just concepts—what we can do going forward. I am hoping before Christmas to publish what we are going to do in response to my concerns about this agenda in London. I have not read the Runnymede report. If I am honest, I am not sure there is a need for an independent inquiry, bearing in mind Louise Casey and the previous Home Office Select Committee gave us a route map of where we go from here. I am hoping our response—which, fingers crossed, will be before Christmas—in relation to what we are doing in London will give the reassurance we need.
I make this point. As impotent as Prevent is, it is the only real show in town. The intention, when you speak to police officers and those behind Prevent, is to help divert vulnerable young people away from radicalisation. By the way, it is the same people that the preachers of hate are targeting, and so I would not want a discussion about an independent inquiry to take us away from the work we have to do to stop these young people being radicalised, but it is happening now in London.
Q240 Naz Shah: You said that before, “It is the only show in town” but that really raises my concerns because what it is saying to me is that just because we have got the only show in town that is the only option we have. But as a Government, as people who lead this, we should have more options available to us. Do you not agree?
Sadiq Khan: To be fair, that is what Louise Casey’s work did. One of the things Louise Casey was asked to look at was Prevent to see the perceptions of community and see how we can improve the work done in communities that were integrated. You know the theory about lack of integration and what it can lead to and stuff. That is some of the work that she did and she did quite a detailed report.
The criticism, I understand from a number of people—including I think Louise Casey—is the Government did not act on the recommendations that she made. I can only speak as the Mayor. As the Mayor, I am quite keen to open not just the Commissioner and the police but also other agencies in London including, as importantly, Londoners particularly of Islamic faith who are targeted by these Islamist preachers.
By the way, there is also a far right issue as well. I do not pretend it is just an issue affecting one section of our community. You will have seen the figures in relation to the numbers referred to by Prevent, but also the numbers referred to Channel and it should be a source of worry. I have suffered a terror attack in London. London has suffered a terror attack in Finsbury Park from somebody who targeted Londoners of Islamic faith.
Q241 Rehman Chishti: Mr Mayor, coming on to a point that Sarah raised, Sarah and I both did the Channel 4 news on tackling knife crime last night. We had Jennifer there from a local charity who said, “Dealing with young people carrying knives is not simply about policing and funding the resources”. You have issues with—this is my work—retailers selling knives. You have legislation, policing and early intervention. If you then look at Kent, my county, and the serious murders that have been committed with knives, these are ordinary knives. They are not zombie knives. These are ordinary knives that people have in their houses, and either been taken out to commit crime or to be in possession of them.
The issue is about cultural change, stopping people in the first place carrying knives and early intervention. How do we go back and get everyone to do a bit more? I know you said parents asking schools what are they doing. But the same question also needs to be asked of parents, what are they doing, because these people who are carrying knives are mostly young people. Some of these 11, 12, 13 year-olds should not be out. The responsibility is for everyone, as well as parents themselves, to ensure their children are not going out at times when they should not be and carrying something that they ought not to be carrying either.
Sadiq Khan: Sure. I don’t think there is anything you have said that I disagree with, until your question. My response is that of course parents have a role to play, as do big brothers and sisters, uncles and aunties and elders. Anybody who has teenage children—how often do they listen to their parents? That is why the campaign we are launching this week is young people speaking to young people, which is one of the most effective ways we have seen. We also have the phrase used “influences”. Who can influence young people? I am afraid the bad news is it is not you and me. We have a number of artists and others involved as influences to try to persuade young people. Any time a young person decides to pick up a knife and leave home with it that is a failure, the idea that a young person is safer by carrying a knife or it gives them respect. It addresses the root causes.
My point is that many young people will not reach the decision not to carry a knife by themselves. They need help. Part of that is persuading them not to carry a knife in the first place, but—and I do not apologise for this—a big part of it is enforcement. Operation Sceptre, which the Commissioner spoke about, is knife sweeps, targeted stop and search, intelligence-led policing, doing all the things that we know can deal with the enforcement side, but we have to try to stop a young person carrying a knife in the first place.
Q242 Chair: Do you think that enough is being done about acid attacks and some of the moped and motorbike enabled crimes?
Sadiq Khan: The bad news is that the moped-related crime, acid attacks are linked with moped crime, and moped crime is linked with other forms of criminality, nicking phones, wallets, and handbags and gang-related as well. I do not think enough is being done about moped crime by the manufacturers. We are trying to persuade manufacturers to do more. You and I remember 20 years ago there was a big issue of stereos being stolen from cars, a common theme: smash the window, nick the stereo, you can sell it. What did manufacturers do? They built them into the dashboard stereos so it became meaningless to break into a car. I think motorcycle manufacturers can do much more to make mopeds safer and I am frustrated at the lack of progress there. One or two have been quite responsible but the others haven’t.
In relation to what we are doing to pursue mopeds, we are doing a lot. It is not true to say the police do not pursue mopeds. They do. We are looking also at how we can use drones. In relation to acid attacks, the big concern is in relation to the increase, particularly in east London. We think some of it is displacement from guns to knives to acid. Some of it is the availability. Rehman mentioned the availability of household knives but acid—all of us have household detergents in our homes. So one of the things I know Stephen Timms has lobbied to change the law on possession. I cannot think of many lawful excuses for carrying acid in possession. We need to target retailers. Under age sales should not be allowed but, also, retailers should be more responsible. Online sale of some of the concentrated stuff needs to be looked into. We need to support victims much more than we are currently doing and we need tougher sentences. It is a package of measures we need to produce.
The good news is that I am not complacent. We have plateaued out the rise of acid attacks and moped crime during the course of the summer. There was a slight increase in October but we are hoping we have managed to address it as part of those targeted operations across London.
Chair: Sadiq, thank you very much for your evidence today.
Sadiq Khan: It is a pleasure.
Chair: This particular inquiry will be looking further into the changing patterns of demands and the changing patterns of pressures around policing and the way in which policing needs to respond. We would welcome any further evidence in this regard, either directly from you or from the Met Commissioner. We will particularly look forward to the Met Commissioner’s response on the preparations for the Brexit arrangements as well. Any further information that you have about contingency planning would also be welcome in future. Can I also ask you to pass on our thanks to the emergency services in London for the work that they do to keep us safe? Thank you very much.