Public Accounts Committee
Oral evidence: Serious and Organised Crime, HC 2049
Wednesday 17 July 2019
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 17 July 2019.
Members present: Meg Hillier (Chair); Douglas Chapman; Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown; Chris Evans; Caroline Flint; Layla Moran; Nigel Mills; Anne Marie Morris; Bridget Phillipson; Gareth Snell; Anne-Marie Trevelyan.
Gareth Davies, Comptroller and Auditor General, Linda Mills, Parliamentary Relations Manager, National Audit Office, Tom McDonald, Director, NAO, and David Fairbrother, Treasury Officer of Accounts, HM Treasury, were in attendance.
Questions 1-117
Witnesses
I: Colonel Peter McCall, Police and Crime Commissioner, Cumbria, and Chief Constable Andy Cooke, Merseyside Police.
II: Sir Philip Rutnam, Permanent Secretary, Home Office, Julia Kinniburgh, Director General Serious and Organised Crime, Home Office, and Lynne Owens, Director General, National Crime Agency.
Report by the Comptroller and Auditor General
Tackling serious and organised crime (HC 2219)
Examination of witnesses
Witnesses: Colonel Peter McCall and Chief Constable Andy Cooke.
Chair: Welcome to the Public Accounts Committee on Wednesday 17 July 2019. We are here today to look at serious and organised crime, which covers a range of activities. This Committee and our sister Committee, the Home Affairs Committee, continue to look at some of those activities, including human trafficking, money laundering, fraud and illegal drugs, but today we are really looking at the overarching strategy from the Government, which is led by the National Crime Agency and the Home Office. We will have witnesses from them on our main panel.
It is worth noting that the social and economic cost of organised crime is estimated to have been about £37 billion in 2015, so we are looking not just at the cost to the taxpayer of tackling it, but at the huge cost of not tackling it. We all represent constituencies where a lot of residents at the frontline see the direct impact and the indirect impact.
We thought it would be helpful to have some clear views from the frontline, so I am delighted that we have two witnesses who are right there dealing with it. They are also not London-based, which we thought was quite important. From my left to right, I would like to welcome Colonel Peter McCall, police and crime commissioner for Cumbria, and Andy Cooke, chief constable of Merseyside police. We are really pleased to welcome you today.
We hope and trust that you will be candid with us about the challenges in balancing national and local, about the funding, and particularly about the impact on your local communities and how you work to balance it. You have the Home Office witnesses behind you, so this is your opportunity to tell us very honestly what you think. They are here to listen, too.
Without further ado, I will ask Anne Marie Morris to kick off.
Q1 Anne Marie Morris: Colonel—do you prefer to be referred to as Colonel or mister?
Colonel McCall: Peter, or mister. I have been decommissioned, as it were.
Anne Marie Morris: Right. I did not want to get it wrong.
In your view, from your time as police and crime commissioner, why do you think organised crime is increasing?
Colonel McCall: It is very difficult to be specific about rising crime. As a PCC, when I am holding my chief constable’s feet to the fire over crime statistics, we often have this conversation: is crime actually increasing, or are we getting better at recording it, are people reporting stuff that has not been reported before, or are we just getting better at understanding what the crime is? That makes it quite difficult to be specific about how crime is increasing. It does not help that we constantly change the way we record crime, but that is another issue.
Making direct comparisons is difficult, but there is undoubtedly a rise in crime—it is inescapable. I sit here as a Tory PCC, but we cannot avoid the issue of resourcing. The bottom line is that policing as a system relies desperately on the frontline. You must have boots on the ground—not necessarily in a Dixon of Dock Green, starry-eyed view way, but we need enough resource.
It is inescapable that over the last five or 10 years, and probably for longer, organised crime has become much more sophisticated, and at a time when austerity has been pruning away at police resource. Inevitably, that widens the gap.
Q2 Anne Marie Morris: Chief Constable, do you have a view on why it is increasing?
Chief Constable Cooke: Peter has talked about resourcing, so I will not say much more about that, other than to state the obvious fact that having so many fewer police officers will have an impact. Austerity has also had an effect.
One of the impacts of the reduction in officers is that the first thing that chief constables will look to reduce is proactivity—targeting certain individuals who are causing the most harm. At the end of the day, we have a statutory duty to answer our 999 calls and deal with our serious incidents, so the staff who are able to go and target the biggest causes of problems in communities are one of the first things to go. I think we have seen that across the country with the reduction in proactivity and the large drops in stop and search. We have seen that in many parts of the country. It is difficult to get that back up to a reasonable amount without the requisite staff involved. I mentioned austerity and deprivation, and it is fair to say that the highest levels of certain organised crime across Merseyside occur in those areas of highest deprivation, where there is more tolerance of organised crime itself and fewer opportunities for young people. One of the few things that they have to get themselves out of the grind of poverty is criminality. They have role models in that criminality of people who they can see have made money out of it. They are driving around in big cars and have fancy clothes. It is those individuals that the police, the NCA and others need to knock off their perch to have a real impact.
There is that lack of opportunity for young people. There is the increasing tolerance of communities to organised criminality, the likes of which we see in terms of illegal car washers, tanning salons and so on. We know that money is being laundered through them—not every car wash and not every tanning salon, obviously, but that is an area where we know it happens. People accept those things in communities because they see fewer police officers and they have less confidence in policing to protect them should they report issues, because there are far fewer police officers now, and the public know that.
Q3 Anne Marie Morris: Would I be right in concluding therefore that your priority is the needs of your community? Given your lack of resource, when it comes to some of the hidden crimes—modern slavery would be an example—because they are not seen and are not a local priority for people, they are therefore not for you. Would that be fair?
Chief Constable Cooke: That would not necessarily be fair. There is a mixture of addressing the traditional and the newer crimes. The very visible crimes that people see on the streets of Merseyside, Manchester and Birmingham are young people being stabbed and shot and the gang issues. That is the visible. Chief constables always have to address those issues forcibly and visibly and maintain confidence in our communities. That does not mean that the other offences such as modern slavery and cyber and so on do not get the requisite attention. They would get more attention with more resource—that goes without saying—but we do put a lot of resource into the hidden crimes, such as domestic abuse, “behind closed doors” crimes and cyber-crime, through local police forces and the regional organised crime units linked through to the National Crime Agency.
Q4 Anne Marie Morris: Do you think you have the data you need, and is that data joined up across all the agencies you describe to enable you to do that job effectively?
Chief Constable Cooke: Data can always be better, and we are always seeking the perfect data coming in, but we do a lot of work locally, regionally and nationally to ensure that we have got as good data as possible. We work very closely with the National Crime Agency on the work they are doing to get better data nationally for the benefit of the national. That has the full support of the National Police Chiefs’ Council and will continue to do so. It is important that that sharing of good data is right through the local, the regional and the national. It is no good having fantastic data at the centre if there is no one to actually deal with that data on the frontline. It is the boots on the ground point that Peter made before.
Q5 Anne Marie Morris: Does that happen?
Chief Constable Cooke: I think with the reduction in the number of police officers that we have at the moment, one of the tricks for the Home Office, the NCA and policing is to ensure that any new resource we get in to law enforcement to deal with SOC is balanced across that local, regional and national level.
Q6 Layla Moran: On that specific point, I was talking to some officers in Thames Valley and they were saying it was only recently that they have had a specific code in the system for logging incidents of child sexual exploitation. That is new in Thames Valley. For that specific example, is that a national thing, or is that something that regional forces will do for themselves? Who is co-ordinating that simple coding that could allow for the comparison of data across the country? Who is responsible for that?
Chief Constable Cooke: At the end of the day, individual forces are responsible for ensuring they have the right codes available to ensure that we have as full information as possible, but once again, there are 43 police forces across the country. There are numerous different IT systems, and sometimes it is not as easy as flicking a switch. It can take a lot of money and a lot of time to do that.
Q7 Layla Moran: County lines cross counties. That is the point. They cross forces. How do we know that we are joining up all the dots?
Chief Constable Cooke: We have good co-ordination in relation to county lines with the county line approach. That is through the NCA with the national co-ordination centre together with the NPCC. We work hand in hand. We have a national tasking approach that works well, linked into regional tasking and local tasking, so we ensure that we are looking at the right people—the highest-risk people—right across the system. It is not perfect. It needs further resource. It needs further work. It needs further cohesion, but we are doing pretty well.
Q8 Caroline Flint: Can you give some specific examples of where the data isn’t working—it is not doing the job? Further to the point you just made about positive working together, if that is the case why is it we are not able to better performance assess what is working and what isn’t working?
Chief Constable Cooke: Specific examples of problems with data: it is not always easiest to get health data, for instance, across the country, in relation to when we want to work together to identify certain things that are happening across various counties, or, indeed, within county. People can always hide behind data protection issues, which isn’t acceptable. The most important thing is keeping individuals and groups in our communities safe. What was the second part of the question?
Q9 Caroline Flint: Actually, further to that, what about, for example, information around tax—HMRC data, so that you are able to see whether someone is living beyond their means, or something like that? What about that, in terms of economic crime, or signs that someone is living beyond their means based on what we think they are doing or not doing?
Chief Constable Cooke: We work closely with HMRC as we have done, in all honesty, going back to when I was a young detective sergeant and had joint operations with HMRC. Those relationships are good on the investigation of individuals that we are believe are involved in criminality. We do attack them on occasions through that tax or illicit finance approach. I would say those relationships are good. That is not the only role that HMRC have, obviously. I would love them to have more resource directed towards investigation, but they have other priorities too.
Q10 Caroline Flint: My second point is if that is all good and there are positive relationships going on, how come the outcomes don’t seem to be reflected in that, and the performance measurements that are used don’t seem fit for purpose?
Chief Constable Cooke: I think the outcomes are very good. I think policing—the National Crime Agency: we are very good at catching people involved in criminality, very good. I could recount hundreds and thousands of successes just in my own force. We put an awful lot of resource into tackling organised crime. There is a long reputation in Merseyside around organised crime and we are one of only four forces in the country that have been graded outstanding by HMIC for dealing with organised crime. I think we do it very well. There is more organised criminality occurring in all its different facets, because organised criminality is such a wide field. It is not like counter-terrorism, which is mainly focused in. It covers so many different types of criminality. It is always difficult to be on top of them all but we have some very good results across the board. It is about making sure that we put our resource where the highest risk is. Now, I don’t have sufficient resource—nor does any other chief constable in the country; nor does the National Crime Agency—to tackle every risk that we have in the way that we would always like to. That is quite simply a financial and resource issue. As mentioned before, £37 billion is the cost of organised criminality to the UK. That is probably a conservative estimate. The amount of resource that we put into it, with all our other priorities, is a tiny fraction of that.
Q11 Caroline Flint: You say you want more resource. What would be your top two priorities to spend the money on to improve your performance on organised crime in your area?
Chief Constable Cooke: As Merseyside chief constable I would put more resources into my communities. I would put more uniformed resources in to target our key offenders, backed up by covert and reactive detectives. That would be a key priority for me as Merseyside chief constable. As the head of crime for the National Police Chiefs’ Council I would look to ensure that the funding that we did have available was distributed right across the system, to make sure that those links between local, regional and national were proper links—that there were proper intelligence networks running right through, and the ability to share sensitive intelligence right across the country, and that we were working as one cohesive team to do so. We work very cohesively together at the moment. We can always improve that. We need to ensure that the 100 departments involved in tackling serious and organised criminality across Government are all working in the same way together. They have other priorities, I know, but getting that coherent, cohesive approach is critical, because policing on its own will never solve organised crime. Society and societal problems are at the root of it, and while we put the sticking plaster on—while we put our finger in the dam and take out some of the iconic people in relation to it—it is five to 10 years’ work to reduce organised criminality across our communities, not the result of one policing operation.
Q12 Chair: And preventing it. Mr McCall, what are your top two priorities? There are probably some other points you want to pick up as well.
Colonel McCall: I will come to my top two priorities. I just want to pick up on a couple of points that were made earlier. One is about the data and making sure that crimes—CSE, for example—are properly recorded. The national crime recording process has changed over the last 18 months or so. Not to be outdone by Merseyside, Cumbria is one of only two forces to have been graded outstanding for getting that right. That is important not just because it is about recording crime. If you are recording crime correctly, the police can understand the nature of crime on their patch and put in the right resource to deal with that. It is still very early days and it is quite resource intensive just to do that, but that is definitely moving in the right direction. It is a complete pain for the police and it takes people away from the frontline to do it properly, but it does need to be done properly.
Q13 Chair: Do you need to have police officers there?
Colonel McCall: To be honest, any force is going to need a system. Even if you put more civilians into that, it all comes out of the same pot.
Coming back to the point about what we might consider to be lower-level crimes versus the serious organised crime we are talking about, as a police and crime commissioner it is my job to deal with the public and hear their concerns about crime in our county. I can almost guarantee you that if I go into any public meeting or session people will talk to me about antisocial behaviour: kids hanging around on the street, kicking footballs where they shouldn’t be kicking footballs; dog mess; and speeding. Those are the things that affect people, because that is what they see, and they see that all the time.
As Mr Cooke said, the things that really keep me awake at night are these serious crimes, which I have to say are happening even in sleepy Cumbria, gorgeous though it is. We do not have those issues on the same scale, but we have our share. We talk about unseen policing, because dealing with the sort of crime we are talking about—getting into the muscle of the serious organised crime groups—takes significant resource. This is where we need co-ordination between ourselves, the regional crime unit and the NCA. That does work, but the council tax precept has risen quite significantly in the last two or three years to fund policing, and the effect of that locally is that residents really want to see where their money is going. People are paying more, and they can see that their council tax bill has gone up significantly. I have had letters from people saying, “Okay, if I’m paying more money, am I going to see another bobby on my street?” The reality is that they probably are not, because we need to resource this serious unseen policing. That is without touching on cyber-crime, which is a whole different ball game.
Q14 Anne Marie Morris: Mr McCall, in the light of what you said and the importance of dealing with this “hidden” crime, as you described it, do you think you need to do a better job of educating the public?
Colonel McCall: Absolutely.
Q15 Anne Marie Morris: What would you do to achieve that?
Colonel McCall: I do it all the time, I can assure you, but it does not cut much ice with the public. Quite reasonably, people want to see their particular problem dealt with. Probably the biggest manifestation of organised crime for most members of the public is on the frontline of organised crime, where they see the effects of drugs—people either selling drugs on the street or under the influence. That is where most residents have any contact with it. People need to understand that this is going on, not least because we need the public to be part of the fight. This comes back to getting that engagement on the frontline and intelligence gathering. That is where the public can really be of help.
Q16 Anne Marie Morris: Would I be right in saying that people do not understand that modern-day slavery, for example, is going on in the nail bars that they take for granted? It is taking place where they wash their cars, and they never ask the question: why is it cheap? I suppose what the chief constable said was that they ignore it. My question to you is: do they ignore it, or do they just not know that if it is cheap it is probably because it is a crime? Also, is there a responsibility on someone like you, who is the community liaison, to open their eyes and make them ask those questions?
Colonel McCall: Absolutely. It is an uphill struggle because there is a lot of naivety out there, but it is absolutely something that we need collectively to be doing.
Q17 Anne Marie Morris: As I understand it, Mr McCall, about 73% is spent on the four Ps under the strategies of 2013 and 2018. The one that gets the most attention is the Pursue bit, which is what you have both been talking about, but isn’t the Prevent bit equally important? Maybe you could explain why so little is spent on that.
Colonel McCall: The Prevent bit is possibly more important. If we can prevent people from being drawn into crime we stop young people destroying their own lives and the victims’ lives. We save the money spent pursuing them and locking them away, so clearly if we can prevent crime that has to be the answer. Quite naturally, give any chief constable or the National Crime Agency a wedge of money and they will naturally be focused on catching criminals because that is what I am going to be giving them a hard time to do.
Q18 Anne Marie Morris: One final question. If it is the case that Prevent is more important than Pursue, what are you doing about it and what are fellow PCCs doing about it, particularly as you liaise with local government and the other people who ought to be working with you?
Colonel McCall: Again, you hit the nail on the head. I sit on a commissioning budget—this is the commissioning part of the title of police and crime commissioner. I do not commission crime, but I do commission other things. The commissioning bit is working on Prevent strategies. That is where we are working with young people, schools and various programmes to try to get people away from crime. Probably the best way of ensuring that the Prevent part of policing—by that I mean policing in the very broadest sense—gets spent on Prevent would be to have a clear allocation for Pursue, so that 100% of Pursue money[1] goes on Pursue and whatever we can afford for Prevent is treated as a discrete thing.
It is not just the role of the police to do Prevent. In fact, the onus for that, I believe, should fall far more on other agencies. We are now talking about local councils making sure that properties are in good order, education and health, third sector and employers as well. If we can create—I know it sounds a bit naive—safe environments where people can prosper rather than be drawn into crime, I think that is the key to success. It is a big ask.
Q19 Douglas Chapman: Thank you for your answers so far. The point that I think Ms Morris was making was about co-ordination. I have a tweet from the Home Secretary here, who visited the Scottish Crime Campus in Glasgow: “Fascinating tour of the Scottish Crime Campus. Impressed with their coordinated approach to tackling serious organised crime. Food for thought”. That was responded to by Lynne Owens, the director general of the National Crime Agency: “Definitely! If we could achieve similar in every region of the country with shared capabilities & national co ordination the impact could be significant”. Significant is an important word in terms of the Report that we are discussing today. Why is that not happening in your view? Is it financial? Is it structural? Is it the politics around it? In Scotland, we have a single police force. Would that be helpful?
Chief Constable Cooke: The co-ordination is good, but we have an issue in relation to funding. In Scotland, the Scottish Crime Campus knows where the next funding is coming from. They know they can plan for three to five years in relation to what they want to do and what they want to achieve. Sadly, out of the £170 million that the ROCUs cost at the moment, £40 million is year-on-year funding. People who are employed as part of that do not know whether they will have a job in April. It makes it really difficult for us to plan regionally and nationally in relation to having a set approach that will take us through the next few years. The cliff-edge funding situation is something that the Home Office, the NCA and we are very much aware of, and we are working together to find the solution to that. No organisation can go on receiving nearly a third of its budget on a year-to-year basis. We need to ensure that ROCUs have a secure footing, so that we can build from the regional into the local. The ROCUs are quite simply an extension of local policing. They are doing a lot of exceptionally good work right across our regions and linked to the national. As soon as possible, we need to ensure that the funding is steady for the next three to five years, and not just on a 12-month basis.
Q20 Chair: Give us an example of a fluctuation that has had a big impact on actual policing on the ground. Where have you seen a change in that funding?
Chief Constable Cooke: If £40 million of your funding out of £170 million is only on a 12-month basis, it is really difficult to retain staff. Your good staff think, “Well, I’m going to go somewhere where I’ve got better job prospects, rather than 12 months of hand to mouth.”
Q21 Chair: You are presumably talking about civilian staff who could go and get a job.
Chief Constable Cooke: Civilian staff, yes. Quite a lot of our ROCUs are civilian staff—our specialists around cyber and other parts of business are civilian staff. The funding quite often only comes through later on in the year, so we do not actually get 12 months; we get six or seven months’ worth of funding and then a rush to spend it, which is never good for balancing budgets at the end of day. Quite rightly, PCCs ask why we have underspends. That is the reason we have underspends, and justification for that can sometimes be difficult. I quite often look at Scotland and think they do this really well. We have exceptionally good relationships around serious organised crime, and we learn from each other about how to take forward not just system strategies, but operational tactics, on a regular basis. I agree with Lynne. A lot of good things are happening around serious organised crime in Scotland that we should keep a very close eye on and utilise on occasion. It does not mean that we are not cohesive ourselves; that cohesion is there, but it could be better with the right funding. It could be better with a little less of the duplication that we see in some places across the country.
Q22 Chair: Mr McCall, if you agree with the chief constable, you don’t need to repeat it. I am just aware of time. If you would like to add anything, please do.
Colonel McCall: You asked for candid earlier, and I do candid. Direct comparison with Scotland is difficult, because of very significant differences. You have a single force in Scotland; you do not have PCCs, and there is a different structure. We are knitted up, but at a fairly formative stage, to be honest. We need, and could have, better co-ordination—I am sure every police officer you speak to would agree with that. We definitely need to do better at delineating where responsibility lies, from NCA to the local level, and where specialist capabilities are best deployed, owned and controlled. That is a work in progress, and I know it is something that the chief, the NPCC and the NCA are working on. It needs to improve. It is not just about resource, but about better working together.
Q23 Caroline Flint: Following on from that, I think the regional organised crime units depend on police and crime commissioners for roughly 72% of their funding. Although I am hearing from both of you how well co-ordinated it is in your patch, that is not necessarily the standard. It is quite variable across the 43 forces, and I presume it is variable in terms of the money and the sense of what is right for the ROCU, as opposed to the local force, to do. How do we better align local, regional and national priorities when we have people making decisions that create things that are out of line with each other and we have disproportionate funding, across the whole of England and Wales in particular?
Chair: Who is that question to?
Caroline Flint: To both. You both mentioned co-ordination, but what do we need to do to stabilise funding for the ROCUs and achieve clarity about what their job is as opposed to what happens at local and national levels?
Chief Constable Cooke: For me, the first step is to strengthen the strategic policing requirement to ensure that PCCs are aware of their requirements in relation to supporting both the regional approach and the national approach. That is something I have discussed with the Home Office and others over the last period of time, and I know it is something they are actively considering changing. I will be totally candid: it is not all sweetness and light right across the country. There are issues in relation to the funding of ROCUs by individual PCCs. Most PCCs—the vast majority, I would say—are very supportive of the ROCU approach, but there is always that tension for a PCC: as Mr McCall said, what the local public ask him for is not more work on the more hidden parts of criminality.
We get very good support from the PCCs in our region. It is not an easy ride. The justification, accountability and governance are right, but you will always have that problem of competition when you have the local versus regional versus national approach and the funding comes in from so many disparate funding streams. That is where SOC sits at the moment. There are numerous funding streams coming in, and the biggest tension is between the direct grant we get and the local PCC contributions, which make up the vast majority of the funding.
Q24 Caroline Flint: Peter, are PCCs a problem?
Colonel McCall: Possibly. I think the answer here goes back to that matrix of responsibilities from the NCA down to the local level, which determines who responds, at which level and what capabilities they need. Then the resource bill is allocated to them. Where PCCs may well be a problem is in areas where they prioritise their local issues over regional issues. They probably do that for understandable reasons. If you are really under pressure on your own patch, it is very difficult to put part of your budget elsewhere. Most of the serious crime in our region happens in Andy’s area. I wish he would keep it to himself, but—
Chief Constable Cooke: And Manchester.
Colonel McCall: And Manchester, too. I know, though, that if it is not contained and dealt with in that area, it very quickly will be my problem. But if we took that discretionary element away, a more scientific allocation of whatever cash is available discretely to those areas might help.
Q25 Caroline Flint: I want to ask about how you communicate the problems with organised crime. To be honest, antisocial behaviour is a feature of organised crime. In some of my neighbourhoods, some very unsavoury people are treating local communities very badly in the way they approach them and live among them. The police provide local authorities with regular reports on what is happening on crime. Do you make sure across your patch that that includes reporting on organised crime? Is that standard across the 43 forces? I found out a little while ago that that was not happening in my area. We were getting all the other crime stuff, but we were not getting the stuff about organised crime. To be fair, South Yorkshire and Doncaster then changed approach, and they now include it. Is that the standard across the piece, as far as you are aware, and is it happening in your area?
Chief Constable Cooke: All 43 forces should be preparing serious and organised crime local profiles, which are shared with CSPs and others in local authorities and local organisations. Those set out the scale of the organised criminality problem, what is being done in relation to it and where the key problems are. That should be consistent. Now, I cannot sit here and say that all 43 forces are preparing them. They should be. HMIC certainly inspects in relation to that. Obviously, the outstanding forces are doing it right across the board, as will be the good forces. There might be one or two patches where forces have been a bit slow to get to that position.
All 43 forces should be providing local communities with that information, but it goes far wider than that. The communication on serious and organised crime has to be constant. We do a lot of work in Merseyside with Everton in the Community, Everton football club, Liverpool football club and numerous other organisations to keep getting that message home, whether that’s through social media, promoting good role models and so on. There are numerous different ways.
In fact, all the money that Merseyside Police get from proceeds of crime—moneys seized from criminals—goes into community engagement, community projects, and it is very much symbolised as, “This is criminals’ money making your communities better.” That is something we’re really proud of. A substantial amount of money has been put back in relation to that. I could spend that money on one or two more police officers possibly. The key issue in this case is promoting the fact that the police have to work together with their communities to defeat organised crime; that is the only way we will do it. I hope that answers the question.
Chair: Colonel McCall, do you have anything to add to that?
Colonel McCall: I’m sorry: I have forgotten what the question was.
Q26 Caroline Flint: It was basically this: are you communicating to the right people? I appreciate that you can’t put some stuff in the public domain, but there are crime reports that go to the local authorities. Are they including what is able to be put in the public domain about the problems of organised crime?
Colonel McCall: I agree with everything that Andy said on that, but I will add this. Again, one of the challenges I have as a PCC is that I constantly am attacked by parish councillors, town councillors—people wanting information about what is happening in their patch. I used to have a police officer coming to our council meeting and telling us about this or that and what was going on in our patch. Here’s the reality: that all takes police time and resource. I often have to say to people, “Look, I’m not going to promise you a police officer coming to every meeting” or whatever, “because that takes a cop away from doing what we need them to be doing, which is catching criminals.” But something that certainly we are doing and working very hard on is improving our internet-available data, because I think that is the answer. The more we can put out there about the realities of these unseen crimes in particular, the better, and the integrity of that will mean that it is better data.
Q27 Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: Chief Constable, I am wondering whether we could use the resources that we have a little more effectively, because serious and organised crime inevitably involves some very specialist officers, with a very high level of training, who inevitably are scarce. This is in disciplines such as cyber, financial fraud, intelligence and so on. I am wondering whether we need to have a smattering of those officers in every force or whether we could deploy them better regionally, with every force calling on them when they need them.
Chief Constable Cooke: It is a fair question. It depends on the force and the specialism.
Q28 Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: Some of them are very small.
Chief Constable Cooke: Some of the smaller forces will rely on the regional organised crime unit to provide that specialism. Some of the larger forces will have their own, in addition, because of the volume that is coming in. That is a good thing for the smaller forces, too, because otherwise the ROCU capability would not be able to service the smaller forces, as it would all go elsewhere—in my region, Manchester is where the key problems are. But something that we constantly look at is whether issues should be dealt with locally, regionally or nationally.
I will give one example of that. For many years, I led on witness protection for policing. Witness protection now, under the UK Protected Persons Service, has gone from being something in numerous forces to something that is in one United Kingdom Protected Persons Service in the National Crime Agency. That was not requested by the National Crime Agency; it was driven by policing, because we understood that taking it under one roof, taking it centrally, would mean that it was more professional. The training would be better in relation to it. It would be more consistent for the people who actually need to use witness protection, which involves one of the highest levels of threat. That should have a national consistency, so it sits well centrally.
There are numerous parts of our business that we have moved to a regional basis. Undercover, for instance, now sits not in forces, but on a regional basis. Technical support units, providing the technical ability to do covert operations, also sit regionally. So with the specialist parts of the business, we are looking all the time at whether they should be regionally or nationally driven. It is part of what we do. Are there some parts of the business still that we could place regionally or nationally? That is a constant conversation between us in policing, the National Crime Agency and the Home Office, and if it makes sense to do so, we are more than willing to do so.
Q29 Chair: I will go to Peter McCall first, but this is to you as well, Chief Constable. The former Met Chiefs of Police, Sir Hugh Orde, who led the police efforts in Northern Ireland, and Sir Mark Rowley wrote a letter last week, saying, “Police and crime commissioners, however well motivated, do not have the skills or resources to address the emasculation of British policing experienced in recent years.” I think in interviews pithier things were said about police and crime commissioners. First, Peter McCall, how do you defend your role? Do you think that there is a broader point that the former chiefs are making here?
Colonel McCall: I am not sure that Sir Hugh Orde ever worked with a police and crime commissioner, which makes it difficult for him to have a—
Chair: He is only one of a number of signatories, I should stress.
Colonel McCall: I think they were all sitting in the same category, actually—very much Metropolitan Police focused and, in that position, would not have had that experience.
Chair: They haven’t had the delight of working with you.
Colonel McCall: Absolutely. I would say this, as a former soldier: I understand the difference between operations and what I do. It is not my business to be an operational police officer. It is my job to represent the public in the matter of policing and to hold policing accountable, set priorities, et cetera. It is not my job, as a police and crime commissioner, to step on to the turf of the operational commander.
It is also my job to engage with the public, talk about commissioning and Prevent, and galvanise other agencies locally. There is still a lot of confusion, frankly. It is a pity that those senior police officers wrote that letter in that way, so publicly, because there is still a lot of public misunderstanding about what police and crime commissioners do. Of course, if I were trying to tell the chief constable how to do policing, they would be absolutely right, but that is not the job of police and crime commissioners.
Q30 Chair: Of course, the main point of the letter was that they felt that it was time for a royal commission on British policing. Chief Constable, do you agree with that point, and do you agree with the terming of the letter? I am sure you have seen it.
Chief Constable Cooke: There are some exceptionally good police and crime commissioners across the country, of which I have one.
Chair: I am sure there are in Merseyside—we had her as a witness a little while ago.
Chief Constable Cooke: I would include Peter in that bunch. On a serious note, do I agree with it? If all police and crime commissioners were like Jane Kennedy and Peter, it would be good for policing, because decision making is quicker than it used to be under the old police authority approach, etc. However, some police and crime commissioners do want to get involve in operational business and do overstep the line. Sadly, some of the appointments that are now down to police and crime commissioners can be affected by that because they want someone who they believe can work in the way that they particularly want to run a police force.
The issue is not necessarily with police and crime commissioners per se. I do not think that what the role of a police and crime commissioner is and is not has ever been clarified to an extent that is agreed and accepted across the country, and accepted by the Home Office too. That is where the confusion lies. If you get a very good police and crime commissioner, that is very good for local communities. If you don’t—if you get one who wants to be the chief constable and not the police and crime commissioner—it is a disaster.
Q31 Chair: We have certainly seen examples. We will not go into that too much. My absolute final question to each of you is: what keeps you awake at night in terms of serious and organised crime, and do you have any one simple message? Probably we have heard resources as the message that has come through for the Home Office and National Crime Agency witnesses. If you had one ask of them, what it would be? What keeps you awake, and what is your one ask of the Home Office?
Colonel McCall: If I had to give one, it would be drugs and the drugs business, which is part of what organised crime is into but tends to be the cash cow. We need to follow the money and chase that down. Those organised criminals are into all sorts of other things as well, but I guess if I had to focus on one, I would say that.
Q32 Chair: Is there any particular ask that you have of the Home Office?
Colonel McCall: Give us more.
Q33 Chair: More money. There we go—rather predictable perhaps. Chief Constable?
Chief Constable Cooke: What keeps me awake at night, other than appearing before the Public Accounts Committee?
Chair: We are friendly—it’s all right.
Chief Constable Cooke: I think it is the responsibility of keeping the communities of Merseyside safe with such limited resource. That is a genuine answer, not a trite answer. It is difficult. I would like to do a lot more for my communities than I am able to do, which is replicated nationally. It is not just a Merseyside issue.
Q34 Chair: And your ask for the Home Office?
Chief Constable Cooke: My ask for the Home Office would be to sort out funding for regional organised crime units, get that stability of funding as soon as possible and mandate, to an extent, in relation to the strategic policing requirement, to ensure that all parts of policing and law enforcement are working together, including PCCs and everybody, to keep the country safer.
Q35 Chair: Thank you very much. Thank you both for giving us clear, candid evidence. You are welcome to stay for the next session. The transcript for this and the next part of our hearing will be up on our website, uncorrected, in the next couple of days and we expect to put a Report out on this in the autumn—it may be October, because of the pace at which we are able to work with the summer recess in between. I thank you very much indeed. I believe, Chief Constable, that you are not staying long as chief constable, is that right?
Chief Constable Cooke: I hope that has not come from my police and crime commissioner.
Chair: I understood that retirement may be looming. Is that true?
Chief Constable Cooke: No, it’s not, unless you have been speaking to my police and crime commissioner.
Chair: Fine—forgive me; I have been misadvised.
Colonel McCall: Jane Kennedy tells me something different.
Chief Constable Cooke: I intend to be around for a bit longer yet.
Chair: We like people who have just retired, because they can usually tell us a lot more. That was behind my questioning. I thank you very much indeed.
Examination of witnesses
Witnesses: Sir Philip Rutnam, Julia Kinniburgh and Lynne Owens.
Q36 Chair: I welcome the panel. From my left to right, we have Lynne Owens, who is the director general of the National Crime Agency; Sir Philip Rutnam, the permanent secretary at the Home Office, who needs a season ticket after the last few weeks; and Julia Kinniburgh, who is the director general for serious and organised crime at the Home Office. Welcome to you all.
You heard the pre-panel, so we will probably pick up on some of that. I want to ask the question we asked the pre-panel at the beginning. Lynne Owens, why do you think the level of serious and organised crime is continuing to increase?
Lynne Owens: I think your two previous witnesses gave a very cogent account about resources, so I will not repeat that, and about the impact of visibility in communities. There are two other significant factors. The first is the impact of technology, whether you look at cyber-crime and the 2.88 million children who are being targeted by abusers from the dark web—so 2.88 million offenders looking to abuse children online worldwide, of whom 5% are based here in the UK—or whether you look at illicit finance and the impact of fraud on the vulnerable. Technology has many great benefits, but it is a massive enabler of crime, so that is the first.
Connected to that is the impact of globalisation. It should really concern us that we are the third biggest exporter nation of sex offenders who want to livestream the abuse of children from the Philippines. That is an indication—certainly, when I joined policing 30 years ago, that was not an option for offenders. They are enabled by technology and the movements of globalisation. Connected to issues of resources, you also have other factors. It is fair to say, on serious and organised crime, the more we look, the more we find. You have to lift up stones to better understand exactly what you are facing.
Q37 Chair: Anne Marie Morris has done a lot of work on human trafficking. In the same way, we would see it as a success when people are talking about presenting more, because it is a sign that it is being found. Sir Philip, is there anything you want to add to that?
Sir Philip Rutnam: I very much recognise the picture that Lynne Owens has described, particularly the significance of technology, which is enabling the rapid growth of new types of harm. It is also significant to recognise that in some types of crime, there is now, thankfully, a greater willingness and propensity to report them as well as to record them. We are seeing the recording of certain types of offences, such as modern slavery and human trafficking, which probably existed 10 years ago but are now much more present in the criminal justice system because there is a greater ability to spot them and willingness to report them. There are other examples that I could I give.
Q38 Chair: In preparation for this session, including from the previous panel, we heard that a lot of it is about the four Ps. There is sometimes less on Prevent than there is on Pursuit. You can catch a criminal physically. Do you think that more needs to be done on Prevent, and how do you approach that? I don’t know who wants to answer that—Ms Kinniburgh?
Julia Kinniburgh: Yes, absolutely. That is one of the key recommendations in our SOC strategy, or a key facet of the strategy. We are putting a lot of effort behind Prevent at the moment. We have a programme of SOC community co-ordinators, for example, who aim to do exactly as Andy Cooke said in terms of facilitating everyone from the community to come together. We also have strands of Prevent work in both cyber-crime, where we have cyber-protect officers, and in child sexual abuse, where we have a lot of awareness raising. We also have Protect work; work with offenders through the Lucy Faithfull Foundation; and a lot of work on Prevent in the modern slavery field, as well as work on protecting those fields. But absolutely it is an area where we want to do more, and it is one of the four objectives of the strategy.
Q39 Chair: On the objectives, we have seen the priorities change. This is probably for you, Ms Owens. If I were on the ground locally trying to deliver your priorities as well as all the statutory stuff that I have to deliver, I might find it quite confusing. Why is that and when will you settle on what the key priorities are?
Lynne Owens: You may have seen, in connection with your previous question about Prevent, that when we published the national strategic assessment this year, which is the National Crime Agency’s annual assessment of serious and organised crime in this country, we did that in a far more public and loud way than we have done previously, because we recognise that we need to raise the profile of serious and organised crime through the public lens. For the first time, we produced a public version that had advice for the public on how they could better protect themselves. In that publication, we thoughtfully took intelligence and evidence from a host of different partners. Although it is published in the National Crime Agency’s name, it takes feedback from every force in England and Wales, from a whole host of law enforcement partners, and from civil society and the intelligence agencies, so it is a very broad-ranging document.
We reflected that the previous way in which we had set priorities was far too linear. We had a list: is it drugs, firearms, modern slavery, organised immigration crime, or CSEA? It actually suggested that serious and organised crime was far more simple than it actually was. So this year we have taken the intelligence product and seen what is happening in our communities. Every day we come to work in the National Crime Agency and we reflect on what the impact is on local communities. We therefore reframed the priorities to reflect that sophistication.
The first thing we learnt this year was that the old school language of organised crime groups actually works for some offending. It works for those who supply drugs and firearms, but it does not work for those who operate online. They are not groups in the traditional sense of the word. They are networked individuals that use technology. The first thing we have done is change it, so we say that we will focus on organised crime groups and high profile networked individuals. Then we have listed three broad categories. One is about those who target the vulnerable. That relates to child sexual abuse, modern slavery and human trafficking, and organised immigration crime, fraud, but it could be any definition of a criminal who impacts on the vulnerable. I am concerned, because if you look at the HMICFRS report on fraud, there is a very big question about why we as a system have not done more for somebody who might have had their life savings taken, with all the implications of that.
The second is a focus on those who dominate our communities through fear or use of violence because of their involvement in drug and firearm supply. The third is those who impact on the UK state and institutions. That is primarily focused on cyber-crime and illicit finance. We think, based on intelligence—if we are an intelligence-led agency, which we are—it is the right way to talk about our priorities, and it stops these ridiculous, linear, “Are you doing drugs or aren’t you doing drugs?” questions.
Q40 Chair: And that came out of the Department’s 2017 review of the 2013 crime strategy. Is that what led you to take this different approach?
Lynne Owens: Every day, every month, we receive intelligence product from our own collection and from many other agencies and organisations. Having done some proper thoughtful strategic analysis of that, we reflected that it was better to reframe them in the way I have just described.
Q41 Chair: On the ground, funding competes for priorities. The NAO Report set out quite neatly the problems of the 2013 strategy in paragraph 1.7 on page 22. We have also heard from our witnesses about funding gaps in the capability of law enforcement, which colleagues will go into in more detail. You are talking about broad categories that sound easily recognisable, but actually delivering a policing solution for it is quite challenging because you have someone having an impact on a vulnerable individual, say, but with fingers in many pies. How do you make sure that you are tracking what is happening and whether you are actually having an impact and disrupting that crime?
Lynne Owens: I will answer that question through two lenses. First, this year—also for the first time—we have not just produced an intelligence product. We have produced an intelligence product and, working alongside policing and the Home Office, we have developed what we are calling—this is a horrible phrase, but we cannot think of a better one—a “capability strategy”, which defines the capabilities that we think need to exist locally, regionally and nationally. Those capabilities and the gaps that we see in them are what we are supplying into the Home Office spending review process.
On your question about how we know whether we are being successful, we have better output data now than we have ever had. We know, based on intelligence, that there are 181,000 organised criminals operating in the UK, and I am able to tell you how many of those we have disruption outcomes against. Those measures are currently very output driven, and until recently, we have not had any system to draw up the brilliant work that is going on in forces locally and regionally, so that we can analyse what we, the regions and local police forces are doing.
In this financial year, we received funding from the Home Office to implement a capture system that will enable us to draw up that data. We then want to do something a bit more sophisticated, because the truth is that not all disruptions are equal. If Border Force does an amazing piece of work and seizes a quantity of drugs at the border, the National Crime Agency will investigate that, and it is likely that a criminal will be put before the court.
If I draw from just one operation example that is quoted in the Report, the case of Matthew Falder, for more than four years that offender targeted vulnerable women and girls through the dark net, through various layers of encryption, subjecting them to blackmail and self-harm. When we finally identified him with a range of support from different partners, we identified that he had 300 victims worldwide, yet that counts as only one disruption.
We need to get to a place where we are counting the outputs but can actually give a much more sophisticated commentary about what that means for harm. A working group is currently working on that—it is made up of policing, us, the Home Office and something like 67 different partner organisations—and we are due to report back into Julia’s group by the autumn about what that model will look like in future.
Q42 Chair: Sir Philip, when Chief Constable Cooke was giving evidence, he said that he wanted to see the Home Office review the strategic policing requirement, which is mentioned in the Report and, at the moment, to quote paragraph 3.16, “is not specific about which serious and organised crimes forces should tackle or how commissioners should invest in capability to tackle serious and organised crime.” Do you have a plan to review that and make it clearer to those on the ground where their focus should be?
Sir Philip Rutnam: We are indeed reviewing the strategic policing requirement at the moment. We made that commitment in our serious and organised crime strategy and that work is going on. We see that work as a very important part, linked to the wider—
Q43 Chair: Yes but you committed to doing that in 2018 and we are halfway through 2019, so what is the timing for this?
Sir Philip Rutnam: Let me explain. We see that as a very important part and linked to the wider set of issues around the future funding model and the prioritisation and tasking process that also needs to be taken forward. At the moment, I foresee the review of the strategic policing requirement concluding at the same time as we reach decisions on the future funding model for ROCUs. Ms Kinniburgh is leading that work and might want to—
Q44 Chair: Before we get to that—other colleagues will pick up on funding—there is a more basic question on the spending review. Ms Owens, you talked about the need for the spending review to do certain things. I do not think that I will even ask Sir Philip when the spending review will be, because we asked him last time and we get grimaces or laughter from permanent secretaries accordingly. Seriously, we do not know what is going to happen; we have heard that it will be postponed or delayed. What would be the practical impact for the National Crime Agency if the spending review does not take place or is a truncated version that perhaps rolls forward funding more or less from last year’s settlement?
Lynne Owens: One of the things that the Report concludes very rightly is the complexity of the funding streams. We have nine different funding streams into the National Crime Agency. Many of them are one-year rolling streams—
Chair: A summary of that is in figure 10 on page 35, for anyone following us.
Lynne Owens: Some are one-year rolling streams, and we have some direct funding from the Home Office. In a roll-over year, our concern would be what happens to those one-year pots of money, because currently those are doing some really important things: the work we are doing on cyber, on child sexual abuse, to build a national strategic assessment centre and to develop our approach to data, which will be king or queen in the new world; the launch of the national economic crime centre; and £10 million invested in undertaking covert interrogation; and looking at child abuse. That is all reliant on that one-year funding.
Q45 Chair: As well, of course, the Minister is committed to reviewing police funding, but at the time of the spending review—words he may wish he had never uttered. I think he had faith that the spending review would take place at the normal time. It was all with good intent, no doubt.
Sir Philip, it is quite serious, isn’t it? You have a police funding review and what Ms Owens has just outlined, but no certainty about what will happen, so how will you argue your case with the Treasury to ensure that there is no operational impact or impact on communities on the ground if the spending review is delayed?
Sir Philip Rutnam: From the perspective of planning, of being able to set clear plans that will span multiple years, it would be desirable to have the spending review sooner rather than later. However, as you have implied, we are not in charge of that, and the decision will be made no doubt at the right time about what form of fiscal event there is this year, and what form of fiscal event next year. What I would say, though—this is the approach very much taken inside the Department, and with the National Crime Agency and other partners, including the police service nationally—is that the first thing that we need to work out is our priorities within our strategy. What are the set of things that we really need to advance?
We are doing that, very much taking a multi-year approach and not even just a time horizon of three years but looking more at four or five years out. Whether we are faced with a one-year settlement or a multi-year settlement, we will, I expect, be making the argument that we should be trying to take forward those priorities in that timeframe, not just making decisions for the short term. However, any financial decisions made in the short term need to be taken with a view to the long-term effect—so not regarding it as just a one-year roll-over, if indeed that is what it is, or a one-year fiscal settlement.
Q46 Chair: That sounds like a great plan but the longer it goes on, the harder it will be to achieve. Is there a point of no return, I suppose I am asking? What would be your point of no return? This is your chance to bid to the new Chancellor.
Sir Philip Rutnam: I am a great believer in starting with what needs to be achieved and the evidence base supporting it. There is a tremendously powerful evidence base around the importance of SOC, the need to give a higher priority to it, and the need to do all sorts of things, which Lynne has just talked about. If we end up faced with a financial framework that only goes one year forward, I still think we can make significant progress in that one year. In fact, even in the dying days of the last spending review period, we managed to make some significant decisions. We invested an additional £90 million in the fight against serious and organised crime, just at the tail end of last year, which has allowed some significant things to happen. I am not giving up by any means. This is a really important topic.
Chair: You put a great civil service gloss on it, but we know about—Ms Owens was very candid about this, and other witnesses were—late funding, you cannot recruit or hold on to staff, and all those things. You get the message that the Committee is quite worried about the spending review, which comes up at every session. I will ask Caroline Flint to pick up on that and other issues.
Q47 Caroline Flint: I want to go back to the four Ps, but while we are on the funding, the Department takes away 11% of police funding to fund national programmes. That top-slicing has not always been seen as a very effective way to use money. I think the Department has recognised that the transformation fund has not worked as well as it might have. I have two questions. First, why do you not just give that money to the force areas or even, for that matter, the regional organised crime units, while the Home Office or the National Crime Agency focuses on performance management? Secondly—and/or—why do you not ensure that funding for serious and organised crime is ring-fenced?
Sir Philip Rutnam: This is a question we have touched on before—the 11% used for national priorities. My answer is that most of that funding—I would not necessarily use the PTF as an example—is in order to deliver national capabilities. Because of the way in which the police service is organised, with 43 individual police forces, plus others such as the British Transport police, there is not, in truth, an entity within that structure capable of taking forward those national capabilities.
Let me give you a practical example. Next week, I am hoping to visit Hendon, where the Home Office has a significant base, because we operate the police national computer and police national database. It will be, I think, the 45th year of their operation. At the moment, we are engaged in a significant refresh of the police national computer in particular, which is still reliant on very old technology. That is a national capability, and you can argue whether it should be in the Home Office or not, but it certainly needs an organisation of national scale to deliver it.
Q48 Caroline Flint: Is it fair to say that, in the mix of what you top-slice, as well as national things such as a database, you also hand out money to smaller projects, which could maybe be done on a regional basis, or by police forces if we had fewer than the 40-plus we have at the moment?
Sir Philip Rutnam: My answer related to that 11% for the most part. A debate could be had about something like the police transformation fund. The intent, which I believe has been carried through the execution of the police transformation fund, was to accelerate the delivery of a range of capabilities. On the whole, those are probably better delivered at scale, nationally, but in that case were to be delivered through partner forces. I will give an example. I visited—
Caroline Flint: I will come back to how effective that is in performance management a bit later.
Q49 Anne Marie Morris: On the police transformation fund, one project was the slavery unit in Exmouth. One challenge was that its funding was for only two years, and although it was ultimately extended for another year, you extended it too late and so we lost pretty much all the force, and we had to start again. That seems to me a complete waste of skill, never mind anything else, and not a sensible use of resource.
I totally take on board and agree with the points that Ms Flint made, but if you are going to top-slice it, don’t you need to take a longer-term view, certainly not getting into the position where you do not review the project before it gets right to the end of funding and saying, “Oops! We need another year”? I ask you to look at this again more closely—
Chair: We refer you to our previous witness.
Anne Marie Morris: Indeed—to make sure that the same thing does not happen again if we want more money for this slavery issue.
Sir Philip Rutnam: I would love to take a longer-term view, and I regret any belated funding decisions. That project in Exmouth, which I have visited, has done some outstanding work in raising capability—taking a “train the trainers” approach—across policing nationally around modern slavery and human trafficking. Although it is a time-limited programme, I believe its effects will be embedded across the structure of our forces.
Q50 Anne Marie Morris: I disagree. We had the first group. They collected the skill and the information, and they left. There was no handover. The new people came in, but they learned what was on the computer, not what was in people’s heads. Frankly, that is not optimising the skill that was developed. Having been there recently, they are collecting guides on the different types of slavery, which are being promulgated to the different police areas, but they have not covered all the areas of modern-day slavery, they haven’t rolled it out, in terms of running the training, and they have not looked at how that training can then be used within local government or within the other, if you like, front-end bits of local government, where we need that knowledge and expertise, because those are the ones that will report in.
Sir Philip Rutnam: I am not familiar with exactly what has happened over the last few months. One of my colleagues may be.
Chair: More to the point is the loss of skills.
Sir Philip Rutnam: The wider point I make is that modern slavery and human trafficking is a very good example of why, in many of these areas and for these new crime types, you need to take a national capabilities approach. On the expertise around modern slavery, we need a national capability of understanding that threat and the most effective responses to it. We need regional and local expertise as well, but the importance of having a national capability is the point I make. Some significant achievements have come out of Exmouth. It may well be that more could have been done, and there is more to be done, but I pay tribute to the work of the people I saw down there.
Chair: I do not think there is going to be doubt about what has happened, but I think the continuity point, the loss of skills and the sudden stop are problems. However, we won’t go down that path any further.
Q51 Caroline Flint: Modern slavery has been a very topical, high-profile priority. What gets lost in that in terms of other capability? On a lot of different fronts of organised crime—financial crime, for example—that is another area where there is probably not enough resource regionally or locally to deal with that.
Let’s go back to the issue on Prevent. It was decided after the review of the 2013 strategy in 2017 to carry on adopting the four Ps, based on the counter-terrorism model, but it is quite clear—I think something like 4% of funding is actually going on Prevent, compared to something like 72% on Pursue. What does that 4% funding on Prevent include and cover, and what is stopping you giving more focus not just to Prevent, but the Protect and people work strands as well, and is it actually fit for purpose?
Sir Philip Rutnam: I think Ms Kinniburgh should answer on the 4%.
Julia Kinniburgh: I did mention some of this in my earlier comment, but we have a variety of programmes that are funded, and they range between being threat-agnostic—they range across all of the SOC threats—and threat-specific. One of the specific ones that we have highlighted in our strategy is the SOC community co‑ordinators pilot, and that is something that we just announced we are growing from five areas to eight areas, because we are starting to see really good success. That is about embedding an individual within—
Q52 Caroline Flint: What is a community co‑ordinator? What do they do?
Julia Kinniburgh: It is an individual within the community who knows that community, who draws in all of the other services and local public services, the local authorities—
Q53 Caroline Flint: Who are they?
Julia Kinniburgh: In Merseyside, for example, it is a member of the police force who is doing a secondment in to do this role while we run the pilot. They are having a really solid effect. They are using the evidence from other projects of those types, for example—
Q54 Caroline Flint: We had something called neighbourhood policing teams, where you had key people who actually understood their community. They were working with the local authorities and others; they were working with the troubled families programme and all these sorts of things. Those were undermined, and in some respects got rid of. They are now being re-formed in one way or another, but usually that means there are fewer people covering a larger area, so how can this community co‑ordinator replace that sort of intervention?
Julia Kinniburgh: Their intent is, as you were saying in the previous session, to make sure that serious and organised crime gets the focus and attention from all of the other public services in that area. When you are talking about prevention, you are having to look at how we avoid children looking at their peers in their communities who do end up with the money and the wealth, and how you avoid them going down that track. They are attempting to do it in that way.
Q55 Caroline Flint: Aren’t the police already involved in the family hub programmes? We have a family hub programme in Doncaster that involves various agencies.
I suppose what I am trying to get at, Julia, is that a lot of intervention work goes on with families where potentially, the children and young people are most at risk of falling into crime, not being in school and so on. I am trying to understand whether we are just re-inventing the wheel, or whether we are adding on to something here. Clearly, everyone has raised the concern that the Prevent side does not seem to be working as well as it might, and that changes from area to area, so I am trying to understand what that is going to offer.
Julia Kinniburgh: I could give you some other examples; that is just one of the examples I was going to give you. If you think of the other Prevent work that we are undertaking—some very different work—we help to fund something called the Lucy Faithfull Foundation. The Lucy Faithfull Foundation does very difficult work with child sexual abuse offenders who are trying to change their behaviour and turn that around. That is one of the areas of serious organised crime where prevention is incredibly hard, in terms of offenders.
Q56 Caroline Flint: We used to have community workers funded by local authorities; we used to have more social workers funded by local authorities. Would you agree that the cuts that have happened in those areas have had an impact on the prevention strand of young people becoming either the victims, or involved in organised crime themselves?
Julia Kinniburgh: We are attempting to ensure that when we put the strategy into practice, as you said at the start, we make sure that the prevention element has the right balance against the Pursue element.
Q57 Caroline Flint: So what is the right balance, and what proportion of effort should be applied to the Prevent strand, as opposed to the 79% of funding that is going to Pursue?
Julia Kinniburgh: The answer to that question is not necessarily purely in terms of funding. Absolutely, funding is important, and as I say, we have made a commitment to that in the strategy; one of our four priorities is in the Prevent strand. In prevention, the funding is there and that is important, but bringing the other services in your communities together around those individuals is incredibly important. Working very closely with non-governmental organisations is very important. The collaboration through Prevent is very important, so I am not saying that the funding is not important, but it is not the only answer; it is not the only measure of whether we are doing enough on prevention.
Q58 Caroline Flint: How will you measure whether what you are doing is working?
Julia Kinniburgh: As Ms Owens said earlier, we are building the next iteration of the serious and organised crime performance framework. The current iteration was improved in 2017. Our work at the moment with the NCA and the NPCC, and all the other partners around Government, is ensuring that the performance framework looks not only at outputs, but, most importantly, at outcomes. We are making sure that the work with the performance working group, which Ms Owens mentioned, is building a quite complex model, which will allow us to say what impact we are having in terms of outcomes, including in the Prevent space.
Q59 Caroline Flint: How will you assure communities? There is a danger of overlapping and duplicating efforts. People cannot see the wood for the trees, so to speak. Having children in school, rather than out of school, is one way to prevent them being involved in crime and being vulnerable to adults who draw them into gangs and organisations. Youth activities are important, too, but across the country there is hardly any statutory youth service. I am trying to understand how that fits in with those other programmes. Are you not worried that there will be an overlap and you will have slightly different titles, and it will create more confusion and muddle for the people on the ground, who are doing the best they can to prevent crime?
Julia Kinniburgh: One of the benefits of my role as a senior responsible officer for SOC—a role that reports in to the National Security Adviser—is that I can convene across all those different Government Departments, to bring them together, so that we have one conversation and one mechanism for understanding what we are doing on SOC. That involves bringing in, for example, the Department for Education, my previous Department.
Q60 Caroline Flint: Do you think you have the authority to do that? Do you seriously think you have the authority to tell the Department of Edcuation—
Julia Kinniburgh: We work together collaboratively in that organisation. I have a specific authority given to me by Mark Sedwill, as the SRO, to convene those organisations together. That is in addition to my role as a director general within the Home Office, which has a reporting line up to the Home Secretary.
Q61 Chair: Can you give us a practical example of when you have convened an action and there has been a good outcome in a particular strand of the work you are dealing with, particularly around children?
Julia Kinniburgh: Yes, absolutely. In the prevention strand, for example, we recently had a session on prevention. We brought some colleagues from Scotland to give us an example of what they have done in the prevention space, where they have seen good results. We had the various Government Departments around the table. We agreed that our colleagues from MHCLG and the Department for Education would work collaboratively with us to understand how we can translate some of that into our Prevent programme.
Q62 Chair: What was the example from Scotland? In human terms, what was it doing?
Julia Kinniburgh: They used a model—it is very similar to our community co-ordinators model—of working within and with communities over a long-term period to drive prevention, so we brought their expertise in—
Q63 Chair: That doesn’t seem like rocket science. I have been in elected office for 25 years—I have seen that a few times before.
Lynne Owens: Could I give a practical example? We have worked jointly with the Department for Education to change the PHSE agenda—I can’t remember what the letters stand for, what was sex education in old-school language.
Chair: We don’t know either—we are too old to remember!
Lynne Owens: That was to teach young people how to keep themselves safe online, particularly—perhaps this is less well publicly known—around cyber. We know that some young men, who are very good at using cyber tools, operate on the edges of criminality. The next round of PHSE that comes out will have those two elements to it. It is a great example of where we have taking learning from the Pursue agency, the National Crime Agency. We have influenced the Department for Education, with the support of the Home Office, to deliver a very different product, which hopefully will protect children, as both victims and offenders, in the future.
Q64 Caroline Flint: I want to move on to some more questions on the data. From what you have said, it seems that you are trying to grasp this problem. Is there anything more you want to say about the framework that you need to ensure that there is consistency and effective use of data that you have not mentioned already but that it would be helpful for us to know?
Lynne Owens: I think data has two implications. First, we need performance data so that I, as the national operational lead for serious and organised crime, can be directly accountable to the Home Office and Home Secretary, and reassure the Home Secretary that we are performing. As I have already said, that has not been a cohesive plan and picture; through the work that Julia is leading we would hope to get there.
It is important. The questions that were asked about if there are overlapping capabilities in different bits of the system and would there be a more efficient and effective way of doing it—Andy Cooke gave you the example of the protected persons service, which is a great example of policing coming to us and saying, “Actually, this would be much more effectively and efficiently run nationally.”
It is interesting that the funding for that came out of the £90 million that Sir Philip articulated to you a few moments ago. The money that had been spent by individual forces on that capability was left in forces. So, there is still a complexity about how funding moves around the system and that is why we welcome the recommendations of the serious and organised strategy to look at—again, horrible anonymous language—the target operating model. That’s why we need data performance.
We also need data to understand serious and organised crime. I think the public expect us to use the data that we already hold across the law-enforcement family and with other partners. Ms Flint, you raised a question about HMRC. In this financial year we have established the national data exploitation capabilities. That is looking at working with a whole load of different partners—up to 140 partners over time, although we are not there yet—to legitimately and with public consent draw conclusions from data.
There are some early successes. We have looked at 7,000 missing people reports and through comparing data from different organisations we have been able to find 50 real-world leads. We have looked at all sorts of different sources of data that relate to child sexual exploitation, often anonymous IP addresses. Through comparing different data feeds we have been able to identify about 250 leads to real-world identities—people who are trying to abuse children.
As our first pilot with HMRC, we are working with HMRC and City of London to see whether if we compile our data through that approach we can identify the serious and organised criminals involved in fraud.
Q65 Douglas Chapman: I have a quick question. We have heard today why public confidence in the local police force, police morale that exists within the force and value for the taxpayer are important. I thought those three strands were really important to the work that you do.
I am thinking about the one-year funding and some of the projects that are now being organised over a multi-year term, but maybe had to stop after a year or 18 months. Can you give the Committee any examples of experiences that you’ve had, where you’ve thought that it was a good project that was going to make a huge—or to use your word, significant—difference in what you are doing, yet the project has collapsed or failed? Anne Marie gave a good example earlier in terms of trafficking. Is there anything that you’ve seen in your most recent career, and you’ve thought, “It is just mad to stop that, at this stage, because it doesn’t build confidence do anything for the morale, or provide good value for the taxpayer.”? Is there anything you can think of?
Lynne Owens: We have a very positive working relationship with the Home Office, but there is no doubt that the funding has been slow to arrive for some of the projects funded through the police transformation fund.
The best example from a serious and organised crime perspective is modern slavery and human trafficking, but there are some lines in my current budget I am worried about. We have been give £10 million in year, as Philip has said, to respond to child sexual abuse. That is very much focused on the worst dark web offenders. We are also providing funding throughout the system, both to the National Crime Agency and regionally to the cyber-crime units and some of their Protect activity. I am nervous about what will happen to that very effective cyber-network.
We were talking about prevention a few moments. I thought you might be interested to know that the regional organised crime units network and the national network have delivered 470 interventions into young people on the cusp of cyber-crime; 303 of those were delivered by the regional teams. We have highlighted 129 million compromised credentials that we have identified through that cyber-network. We completely understand that we are in this complicated spending review process, but there are some dark clouds hanging if we can’t receive some certainty.
Sir Philip Rutnam: Plainly, like Lynne, I would much prefer certainty and stability provided by a multi-year spending review. That would plainly be preferable. I am not disagreeing with anything that Lynne has said, but it is important to recognise that things can still be done, even in an environment where financial decisions are being made in a shorter time horizon. For example, we took the decision with the National Crime Agency to fund the establishment of the national economic crime centre, which is a really important national capability. We put money into it. This is a capability that I am confident will endure. Money for it will be found, even though our financial plans at the moment only run to March 2020, which is not far away.
It is partly, to be honest, about the attitude you take to risk. It is also partly about strategic clarity about what needs to be done, and the evidence base underpinning it. We could allow ourselves just to be frozen by uncertainty, or we can say, “These are things that need to be done. We will make the case for them. Even in an environment of some political and funding uncertainty, we will get on and do these things and get them going.”
Q66 Douglas Chapman: Is there anything further anyone wants to add?
Julia Kinniburgh: The recommendation in the Report and the recommendation in our strategy on sustainable funding—this is why that is so important. The examples that you have had today and the examples you had from Andy Cooke show that the year-on-year funding rhythm is just unhelpful in tackling something as corrosive and embedded as serious organised crime. That is why sustainable funding is part of our strategy and part of what the NAO found, which we agree with.
Q67 Caroline Flint: We used to have something called the national hi-tech crime unit. We have had various other units. In some ways, these are not new ideas. The tech has moved on and become more advanced, but I find it difficult sometimes, having been a Home Office Minister, when things get regurgitated as if they are something new. The national hi-tech crime unit got absorbed into SOCA and then the NCA. Then someone decides, “We have to have something else that we need to define.” Is that not part of the problem here? If you look back over the collective memory, a lot of these areas of serious and organised crime have been looked at before, but there has been too much chopping and changing and not enough done to develop the capability nationally, regionally or locally to get the sustainability or flexibility to adapt to new technology as it arrives and presents itself. Is that not part of the problem here? You do accept that these are areas that have been looked at and that units have been set up.
Sir Philip Rutnam: I know enough about the history to know that many of these topics have been discussed for years in different forms. Serious and organised crime has a prominence in the whole architecture of national security that it has not had before. We are focused on a whole-system approach. That may sound like a hackneyed phrase, but it is meaningful if we can get, as we are seeking, more and better alignment with the other institutions—the health system, the education system and the other Departments and the organisations that can bear down on the problem of serious and organised crime. It is about a whole-system approach, a focus on building national capabilities, of which we have mentioned several already today, and then in the right way getting the right balance between Protect, Prevent and Pursue.
Q68 Caroline Flint: Very quickly, in order to have that better alignment with the health service and everyone else, is it not important to get better alignment with what is happening nationally, regionally and locally? That seems to be out of kilter according to the NAO Report, and we heard that from the pre-panel witnesses as well.
Sir Philip Rutnam: I think I will ask Lynne to say something on that. We have already heard from the witnesses in the pre-panel that co-ordination is good.
Caroline Flint: In their areas they said it was good.
Sir Philip Rutnam: All the evidence I have seen suggests there is good alignment on the whole between policing locally, regionally and nationally. I get very consistent messages when I talk to the National Police Chiefs’ Council, as I do when I talk to Lynne, who is DG at NCA. I get quite good evidence of a healthy alignment there. Of course things can be better. In particular, Lynne has been taking forward work on the national tasking model, which is an important piece of architecture. Things can be better, but I think the bigger prize—the biggest prize, actually, in relation to alignment—is making sure that we build capabilities at the right level, so that if we have a key capability need we look at whether that is going to be delivered most efficiently nationally, and the alignment with those who do not naturally see themselves as part of law enforcement.
Q69 Caroline Flint: Okay. To build capabilities you have to know what capabilities you want to build, and what they will look like, how many staff there will be and what specialist skills they will have. You also then have to know what that is going to cost. The 2018 strategy, as far as I am aware, was uncosted. We have talked a bit about the lead-up to the spending review. It sounds to me, to be honest, that, having reviewed the 2013 strategy and developed the 2018 strategy, which was uncosted—I don’t want to say it is a new strategy; I am not going to say that it in a “having a go” way—it needs to develop to a strategy that incorporates elements that clearly were not there in 2018. Is that a fair point?
Sir Philip Rutnam: So, you are—
Caroline Flint: Yes or no—is that a fair point?
Sir Philip Rutnam: Yes, we need to develop detailed, costed proposals that will deliver the 2018 strategy. That is exactly the work that has been going on and Lynne could speak to that in more detail, as could Julia. That is exactly what has been going on.
Q70 Caroline Flint: Okay, but given that there are clearly some problems about the 2018 strategy that have been highlighted in the NAO Report about lack of alignment and of performance management, presumably as part of your pitch for the spending review you are going to try to up your game in those areas to prove that the strategy has had to develop even further to take into account some of the gaps or problems that are clearly still there.
Sir Philip Rutnam: The 2018 strategy was a really important step forward. I can talk about the 2013 strategy, which was very important too, but the 2018 strategy was a really important step forward. It was not intended to be the answer to everything, and if we take something like performance measurement we can give you abundant information on activities. Five years ago, we probably couldn’t. We can give you abundant information on numbers of arrests, numbers of disruptions and amounts of money seized—all sorts of information about that, which is actually quite good for the law enforcement system.
What we really want to be able to say is what difference that is making to the threat. Yes, we need to do more there, but we should also recognise that it is intrinsically a really hard question because these threats are often doing their best to keep hidden. Getting the dimensions of the threat is itself a challenge. Being able to tell in an informed way the difference that our action is making to that threat is also hard, but we are making progress.
Q71 Caroline Flint: So that goes back to better understanding across the criminal justice system about what form organised crime presents itself in, and better understanding among the wider community of partners and the public about what it is about—where you can see it and where you can’t see it. Are you doing enough to be able to identify that and, in identifying it, to be able to measure how much of that is happening, where it is happening and whether the interventions that are being made are actually having an impact? Is that something that is going to underpin your pitch for the spending review?
Sir Philip Rutnam: I will give you my answer, but my colleagues should feel free to add. I think it varies by threat type. If you look at firearms, there is a very good understanding, including, I think, of the effect that we have. If you look at child sexual abuse and exploitation the UK has, I think, the best understanding in the world, at least according to The Economist’s Intelligence Unit. If you look at modern slavery and human trafficking, I would say that it is still developing. If you look at fraud and money laundering, there are some very big analytical challenges about getting the dimensions of the problem. It varies by threat type, but it is a picture that is improving in each area.
Q72 Caroline Flint: Going to the regional organised crime units again, I understand that you are looking at various models about what form they should take. Could you share with the Committee which models you are most interested in, in terms of any changes there?
Julia Kinniburgh: We are looking at how we ensure that the system operates as a whole system most effectively, as you were just saying. One of the issues that we have through the regional organised crime units is that it is not always the same in each area in terms of what is put into the regional organised crime units. It is not always the same in each area in terms of the capabilities of those regional organised crime units.
Exactly as you were just saying, the strategic capabilities work we are doing at the moment is looking not just at capabilities at national level but at which capabilities we need at regional level and which capabilities we need at local level. Those regional capabilities will be key to informing what we want and need to have in the ROCUs and what that looks like. The other thing we need to look at, therefore, is the relationship between those capabilities at national, regional and local level. How do they interact? How do we ensure that we do not have any duplication, that we maximise our effectiveness, that we have the right capabilities in the right place and that we have the ability to task throughout the system?
Q73 Caroline Flint: And what about the funding model? Whatever you come up with following that exploration, what funding model are you leaning towards?
Julia Kinniburgh: The funding model we want is one that is much more sustainable and not based on an annualised system—Lynne said she had nine different funding sources. The ROCUs are in the same place: funding comes in from a lot of different places. That makes it very difficult for people to plan and to see the entirety of their budget.
Q74 Caroline Flint: What would you do differently?
Julia Kinniburgh: What we are looking for is how we build a more sustainable model. That is a critical part of our spending review pitch.
Q75 Caroline Flint: Okay, and how will you do that?
Julia Kinniburgh: We are doing that through the spending review, in terms of—
Q76 Caroline Flint: What are you looking at? What would give the practical sense that this is more sustainable? There is obviously the question of how long a budget covers, and the question of where the funding comes from, so ROCUs do not have to run around pleasing all the people all the time with different demands. What is the architecture of this funding? How do you see it going for your spending review proposals?
Julia Kinniburgh: It is connected to the capabilities, so there is a question about which capabilities we would want collectively—with the NPCC; we work with Andy on this—to say we wanted at regional level. If we are clear that we want those capabilities at regional level, there is then the question, how do we ensure we have clarity on the funding? The funding is not separate from the capabilities; it is led by which capabilities we need.
Q77 Caroline Flint: No, but are you moving towards more of it coming from the centre or more of it coming from PCCs? That is what I am trying to grapple with. We have heard today in evidence and elsewhere that there is fragmentation, and there is the issue of the time you have to develop the capabilities. You need to know that someone is not going to come along once you have developed the capabilities and say, “Oh, by the way, that was a great idea but we’re now going to take the rug from under you.”
Julia Kinniburgh: That is exactly the question we have to answer. We are doing that in tandem with the NCA and the NPCC. Those conversations are ongoing at the moment, and we hope that the spending review will give the answer to that question.
Sir Philip Rutnam: I should add that, obviously, this is a matter for Ministers. Ministers will need to take a decision. There will no doubt be a range of options. There is a range of options out there already in the world of law enforcement. The counter-terrorism policing system obviously operates in quite a different way, with essentially all the funding coming from national Government.
Q78 Caroline Flint: I accept that, Sir Philip. Given that something like 72% of funding for the ROCUs comes from PCCs, do you share the concern that it may be weighted too much in that direction and that that may not be helping with consistency and may be causing too much variability across the piece?
Sir Philip Rutnam: We certainly think there needs to be significant change in the funding model for ROCUs. I do not want to anticipate the spending review, and I do not want to anticipate Ministers’ decisions on this. It is properly a matter for them. It also, of course, has to be thought about with and linked to the question of police funding in the round, because of course police and crime commissioners are seeking to fund multiple activities.
Q79 Gareth Snell: What happens if a police and crime commissioner decides to change their spending priorities before the comprehensive spending review kicks in?
Sir Philip Rutnam: At the moment, the police and crime commissioners have a funding settlement for 2019-20. That’s right, isn’t it?
Julia Kinniburgh indicated assent.
Sir Philip Rutnam: So we will need to make another funding settlement for 2020-21, which will be alongside the local government finance settlement, which will be this autumn—by the end of November or early December. Within the law, including the strategic policing requirement, which PCCs must take into account, PCCs have quite a lot of discretion. I am not sure there is going to be any change to that position before the settlement this year.
Q80 Gareth Snell: But there is no contingency. Say a police and crime commissioner decides they want to move away from the ROCU and put more into frontline neighbourhood policing, what contingency does the Home Office have to replace that funding in the short term if you are not looking at the overall funding package until the mythical CSR?
Sir Philip Rutnam: That is already an issue that can arise from time to time. Julia could perhaps say something about that.
Q81 Gareth Snell: What are you doing about it?
Julia Kinniburgh: If that were to occur, we would first want to engage and understand the issues, trying to ensure that we were clear that the ROCU had the sufficient capabilities and contribution from the forces. Where we have had instances of PCCs potentially not wanting to commit the same level as previously, those issues have been resolved through conversations—not just with national Government but through working as a partnership, regionally. Those are conversations that PCCs will want to have with each other, regionally, as well as our having a view and ensuring that we can facilitate that from a national level.
Q82 Caroline Flint: My last point is actually about data but also about online, because obviously we know that child sexual exploitation, fraud, the selling of goods—firearms, drugs and everything else, including prescription drugs that should not be available—and everything else happens online. What more needs to be done with those online platforms? Nick Clegg, who has moved to work for Facebook, said recently: “Regulate us.” In your view, is there more that they could do, regardless of regulation? If there has to be regulation, what do you want to see? Presumably, in terms of data, some of that work would save your spending a lot of time on things that they could do, and so save money for the public purse as well.
Lynne Owens: We absolutely see that technology companies have an essential role to play here. Their platforms enable offending, as I outlined at the very beginning. We welcome the online harms White Paper, which we think is a good first step. I think it would be a sad indictment of those companies if you had to regulate; you would have thought that protecting children and stopping illegal drugs and firearms being sold online would be important for their bottom line.
We have good tactical engagement, but we would like to see them doing more with their research and development funding to actually design their systems to design out crime. We expect people to design out crime in their buildings, and we think that technology companies should be expected to do the same. At the moment, if they identify a sexual child image, we have to do all the background work ourselves. We think they should put more investment into intelligence functions, so they could legitimately provide us with packages without requiring us to do the work. So we want a mixture of research and development investment, designing out crime and applying their artificial intelligence tools to prevent crime.
Q83 Anne Marie Morris: Sir Philip, Ms Flint has been grilling you about the finances. I will now grill you about governance, which goes to the points that some of you have been talking about, Ms Owens. How are you—as Government, as that is effectively your role in this—going to make this strategy work over 100 different organisations when you don’t necessarily have reporting lines to hold people to account?
Sir Philip Rutnam: I would say several things. First, we will simplify where possible. There has been some simplification. For example, we have an important top-level group in Government devoted to serious and organised crime, which Julia chairs and which we can say more about in a moment, and we had another on modern slavery and human trafficking. We have merged the two.
Secondly, we will recognise that it will inevitably be complex. There are, as listed in the NAO Report, something like 100 organisations—probably more—already engaged in the fight against SOC, or that we want to be engaged, or more engaged, in the fight against SOC. Even with the best simplification, we will have a very complicated landscape, with other Government Departments involved, which will have their own accountabilities to their own Secretaries of State and their own accounting officers and the like. We need to recognise that complexity.
Thirdly, we will take the approach of maximising alignment. There are many synergies between the agenda of fighting SOC and the agenda of reducing harm to young people, for example. There are many points at which we can bring about more synergy between our work here and the work of, say, the Department for Education, the Department of Health and Social Care or local government.
Q84 Anne Marie Morris: How will you do that, because as you say, the reporting lines and incentives are different?
Sir Philip Rutnam: Have a really clear strategy, communicate it and, critically, have a reporting line for that strategy that runs through Julia, who is the senior responsible officer for ensuring that this cross-Government, cross-public sector working operates—
Q85 Anne Marie Morris: How is she going to get the rest of the Departments to do what she said?
Sir Philip Rutnam: First, by creating the right structures and working groups—Julia should speak on that in a moment. Importantly, there is a direct reporting line that runs from Julia, with my support, to the Cabinet Secretary and the National Security Adviser and therefore to the National Security Council, which is one of the most important Cabinet Committees and which the Prime Minister chairs, which has SOC as an agenda item and can therefore ensure that there is the cross-Government co-ordination and focus on SOC that is needed.
Q86 Anne Marie Morris: “Can” and “will” are two different things. I understand the point you are coming from, but there is still education and local government, which I suspect are seen as tail-end Charlie in all this, but if we are going to do a bit more on the Prevent rather than just the Pursue bit, they are going to be fairly mission-critical, aren’t they? Maybe we should ask Ms Kinniburgh.
Julia Kinniburgh: Exactly as Sir Philip says, those different Departments sit as part of my group and I am able to work with them and hold them to account in that group for what they are delivering.
Q87 Anne Marie Morris: And that is with the consent of the relevant Secretary of State?
Julia Kinniburgh: Yes. This strategy has a whole range of different commitments in it. We have a very detailed implementation plan for each of those commitments that comes to my group, which is called the NSSIG, twice a year. As SRO, I go through that plan every quarter. In that it is very clear who is responsible for each of those different commitments, and each individual knows that. They know that we have that conversation every six months and that I look at that every quarter, and that, if any of those areas are not on track to deliver, I will be able to have an individual conversation with the person responsible.
They are also aware that my chain of accountability goes not only to Philip but to Mark Sedwill and, as Philip says, to the National Security Council. For example, we have had discussions at the National Security Council on specific issues, and those issues will come through my NSSIG. Therefore, everybody will understand and we will have a collective discussion about what we are asking for and agree that, but it will go up through the National Security Council with their Secretaries of State there.
Q88 Anne Marie Morris: What powers do you have? What sanction do you have if they do not play ball?
Julia Kinniburgh: That is where I am able—if I need to, and I have not yet needed to—to go straight to Mark Sedwill, the Cabinet Secretary, and use his powers across the whole of the civil service to bring various entities back into line with what we are trying to achieve.
Q89 Anne Marie Morris: Provided he agrees.
Julia Kinniburgh: We have not had to do that; the working relationship around my NSSIG is incredibly good and works very well.
Q90 Anne Marie Morris: Are there any examples of where you have had to use that power, whether with Mark or anybody else?
Julia Kinniburgh: I just said no, there have not been to date.
Q91 Anne Marie Morris: Even at a lower level? It cannot be a perfect world. There must be some parts of this huge—
Julia Kinniburgh: There are always issues where I would want to use my influence to encourage entities to put more emphasis on or effort into various aspects. I have done that with various different bodies—I am not sure it would be fair to call them out in the Public Accounts Committee, as it is not as high-level as that, but I am able to talk to different Government Departments if I feel that they are not committing in the way I would expect them to commit. But I have no one at the moment who is not playing ball with this. The group that I chair is very well attended; it includes both the NCA and the NPCC, and all the major Departments who have a link into this. We have an extended group that we hold twice a year, which also includes the devolved Administrations and the PCC representatives on SOC.
Q92 Chair: I think Ms Morris is trying to get at the point that you are having all these meetings, and Sir Philip has just laid out a process, but can you give us a practical example? On child sexual exploitation, how is the Department for Education getting schools to co-operate, for example? Forced marriage seems to have worked quite well and might be a good model. Can you give us a real-life example of where it actually hits a real issue at the end?
Julia Kinniburgh: For CSEA we have had—
Q93 Chair: Child sexual exploitation?
Julia Kinniburgh: Sorry, yes, child sexual exploitation and abuse. We have had a working group—a smaller committee group of our NSSIG—that has been working on the online harms and how we can take a concerted approach to individuals in that space. I have been able to convene partners from the UK intelligence community with partners from DfE and the NCA, and we have made a really strong commitment to a different tactical approach. There is only so much I can say at this classification, but that has been a real shift.
Q94 Chair: We understand that. So, in summary, these meetings are leading to actions?
Julia Kinniburgh: Yes.
Sir Philip Rutnam: Can I give another example that is very much in the same spirit? From many years’ experience in Whitehall, I am a great believer that if you have clear objectives, and you get other Departments to understand those objectives and have a mature relationship with them about the synergy between these objectives and their objectives, you can achieve great things—notwithstanding the differences in ministerial responsibility. In the realm of economic crime, for the last year or so I have been jointly chairing with the second permanent secretary in the Treasury, who is a very senior official, a delivery board on economic crime, which also works with Julia’s structure—Julia sits on it as well—to ensure that, across all the many parties in this landscape that are focused on economic crime, we are really clear about what we will be delivering in the next six or nine months. This reports to an economic crime strategic board that is referenced in this Report and chaired jointly by the Chancellor and the Home Secretary—it met just the other week and also involves a partnership with the leading financial institutions in UK finance. Partnership working, clear objectives, a focus on delivery, and information that tells you whether you are delivering what you set out to do.
Q95 Anne Marie Morris: What about the regional organised crime units at the next level down? They have absolutely no power over the commissioners and forces, yet you are expecting quite a lot to be delivered by them.
Sir Philip Rutnam: ROCUs fit very well into the structure of the delivery of law enforcement, which I think Lynne should speak to.
Lynne Owens: The ROCUs carry out some absolutely outstanding work, and I have touched on some of it already. You are right. The governance model for individual ROCUs is very different. It is one of the things that Andy Cooke, Peter Goodman and I regularly talk about. At the moment, an individual police and crime commissioner, or an individual chief constable, could choose to make a disinvestment from that which is currently there. The work that we are doing with the Home Office under the strategy, to look at what is called—a horrible term—the target operating model, needs to deal with what governance looks like at a local level. One of the things that we are quite reliant on in the strategy at the moment is my tasking powers. Those tasking powers were given to me through the Crime and Courts Act 2013. For me to be able to task effectively, I can task only into a capability that exists. There is a really good example. You referred to the hi-tech crime unit. Actually, we have the national cyber-crime unit, which is an extension of the hi-tech crime unit. The great leadership shown by Peter Goodman has built cyber capacity regionally, and Prevent and Protect co-ordinators locally, but that has come through a dedicated controlled funding stream that individuals cannot back away from. As we do this joint work, we have got to get to a place where we have clarity that governance locally, regionally and nationally follows a capability strategy that is very clear on what needs to happen locally, regionally and nationally.
Q96 Anne Marie Morris: So can I take it that you are preparing such a governance structure?
Lynne Owens: The piece of work that is looking at the target operating model looks to address all those things. If you deal with only one thing—only with tasking or funding—the system does not work. It needs to work as a system, right down to the very valued local neighbourhood officer.
Sir Philip Rutnam: The work that I referred to earlier, in relation to the funding model for ROCUs, will also address the governance model for ROCUs. You cannot think of money without it.
Q97 Anne Marie Morris: And what about the timing? When might we see that?
Sir Philip Rutnam: It has thus far been part of our spending review preparations. If there is not a spending review this autumn—I do not know what the plans are—we will obviously none the less seek to advance the work. We will need to discuss with our Ministers how we will do that in the context of the time, but the need for reform is, as I said earlier, clear. Exactly what form that change takes is something that Ministers will need to take a view on and decide. Even if there is not a spending review, I would anticipate trying to get as far as we can.
Q98 Anne Marie Morris: Good. I think Ms Kinniburgh indicated that not everything is about money. There are many things that you can do without it, so I am pleased to hear that. Can you make better use of the strategic policing requirements to contribute to the serious organised crime effort? How might you do that better or differently?
Sir Philip Rutnam: Yes, we can. I will ask Julia to say something about that. We are in the process of reviewing the SPR, or strategic policing requirement. We see that as being linked to what we have just been talking about, in terms of the targeted operating model. There are some choices to be made about the content of a new strategic policing requirement. Julia might say something about our work.
Julia Kinniburgh: At present, serious and organised crime is part of the strategic policing requirement, as is child sexual abuse, but there is not much more specificity that sits below that. One of the issues that that creates is that it makes it harder for the inspectorate to inspect against it. So, one of the questions is whether it would help to be more specific in the SPR about what we are looking for from the local forces, in terms of serious and organised crime, and also child sexual abuse.
The answer we gave earlier was that we were doing that as part of looking at the entire system. That is important, because, as Lynne just said, we want to look at tasking powers, funding and how the system works as a collective whole. The strategic policing requirement is part of that. So, to separate it off and take decisions about it separately could potentially lead us into a position where we end up taking different decisions with Ministers, which means that we have potentially taken the wrong decision on the SPR. So we want to make sure that we are doing that as part of that look at the system.
Q99 Anne Marie Morris: Okay, so let me then ask Ms Owens, because you talked about how you had reviewed your priorities and instead of being linear you have kind of got them in bold, or in buckets, or however you want to describe it—three of them, I think. How will you work with Ms Kinniburgh to get those buckets, if you like, clearly defined, so that they can be used within the system and within this piece, and we get some co-ordination in terms of who does what?
Plus—before you give your answer—is there going to be a difference between the priorities that you set for the different forces, given the different nature of the crime in those different areas?
Lynne Owens: I think the strategic policing requirement is a really important document. It is a legal document that chief constables and police and crime commissioners must have regard to.
My request of the review that is ongoing is that there is a link between the national strategic assessment intelligence product and indeed other products that feature on areas that are in the SPR, and the product. That is one of the challenges with the SPR. It has been static; it has not been modernised and it has not moved on. For example, drugs is in the SPR but modern slavery and human trafficking isn’t.
Also, the requirement is only as good as the capability that accompanies it. So, my view would be—others may take a different view—that the SPR should also encompass the findings of the capability strategy, because what the capability strategy will do is to make that assessment of the different local needs in different places.
Q100 Anne Marie Morris: Then, when the individual forces are required to do stuff, will it recognise the differences in their capabilities, so that everybody is not given a one-size-fits-all task and target?
Lynne Owens: We are working really hard with the NPCC, because we do not need a one-size-fits-all model; different regions will need slightly different things. And the local responses, because of the nature of local communities, will need to be different.
So, when we say that we are trying to define capabilities that should exist locally, regionally and nationally, it is based on that difference—proper demand modelling and proper intelligence analysis—because it is not a one-size-fits-all model.
Q101 Caroline Flint: I take on board the point about a one-size-fits-all approach, but there must be some commonality across the piece. Also, if you come across something that is not seen as a big issue in your area, you can be signposted to get resource quickly and effectively to back you up. We touched on that earlier, with the ROCUs filling in for some of the smaller force areas.
Lynne Owens: Absolutely. So, when I say that it is not one size fits all, I mean that you are not going to have 10 people in the north-west and 10 people in the south-east, if that is not what the profile says. But the actual capabilities—i.e. what they can do—need to be there, and there must be a clear tasking system that works up and down.
A really good example of that is the work that we have done in the national county lines co-ordination centre. Before we established that, we thought there were 700 county lines; we now know that there are 2,000 county lines. And that is because individual forces and regions just were not physically able to join the dots from their own linear view of the world.
Andy Cooke supported me in putting in place national tasking for two things. One was to share the intelligence product. Then, as a result of that intelligence product, we identified two investigations that needed to take place that had not been spotted, which enabled a very straightforward conversation. Those two investigations were tasked to two different ROCUs; they actually affect seven of the nine ROCUs and many other forces. However, our role in that was providing some specialist capability. So, some of the most covert capabilities that we have were fed into those two investigations.
So we are really clear that this has to be a system where it is not the National Crime Agency just dumping work on other people, and similarly it cannot be an environment where individual forces just choose not to take serious and organised crime seriously.
Fraud would be another example. You will all have inboxes full of individual fraud victims saying they have not received a very good service from law enforcement. One of our responsibilities, working with the City of London Police—
Chair: Who are the national lead for fraud.
Lynne Owens: Who are the national lead for fraud, is to work out the profile of fraud and to make sure that what we call orphan cases do not just keep getting pushed around the system. We take a view about whether they are dealt with by policing or whether they are better dealt with by another partner, such as HMRC or the Serious Fraud Office, or whether there should be a referral to the regulator, which is the Financial Conduct Authority.
Q102 Anne Marie Morris: Ms Owens, I hear that PCCs are supposed to take account of the SPR, but we asked the police and crime commissioner who was here what his postbag is full of? Dog shit, as it were, and antisocial behaviour, not these, in many cases, hidden crimes. Yes, we do get letters from individual constituents who have been hit. How are you going to get him and his police chief to do what you need when locally people are screaming out for something completely different?
Lynne Owens: We are working very hard to build a very constructive relationship with individual police and crime commissioners and with the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners. We were delighted that this year the APCC and the PCCs themselves recognised that the changing nature of the serious and organised crime threat was so significant that they ought to allocate two lead PCCs. Marc Jones from Lincolnshire and Bev Hughes from Greater Manchester are now leads who interact very regularly with the agency, and that is a very welcome development.
Every year, we run the annual PCC day, and this year we deliberately hosted that AGM at the National Crime Agency building, so that we had the PCCs in one place. Notwithstanding that, not all of them came to the day. We briefed PCCs on the changing nature of the threat and on the capabilities that we thought they ought to be thinking about funding. I think that 15 PCCs came and stayed for the day. That included the two leads and, indeed, your previous witness, Peter McCall; 14 more sent representatives from their individual offices. But you will add those two numbers up and work out that they do not amount to 43. So that continues to be a challenge, but we will work tirelessly.
We have also—so you do not think that we have been asleep on the job—allocated a director, or above, as lead for every single one of the policing regions in the UK. We asked for invitations to go to the policing region meetings, which involve the regional chief constable and the regional PCC. Again, those offers of briefings, support and, indeed, two-way challenge on performance have been variably accepted. Of the nine offers we have made, five have been accepted.
Q103 Anne Marie Morris: Do you think that you have some responsibility to require PCCs not to terrorise people but to raise the profile of serious and organised crime and make it real? At the end of the day, we are not going to get people happy with the way the money is being spent. We understand intellectually and we have the information, but frankly local communities don’t. Without that understanding, we are never going to get their support, so do you think you ought to be having a requirement locally to get that message out?
Lynne Owens: As director general of the National Crime Agency, I have no power to require any politician, including police and crime commissioners—
Anne Marie Morris: Okay, but you could be using persuasion.
Lynne Owens: But we absolutely have persuading and influencing ability, and that is why that day was really important to us. That is why we sent the national strategic assessment to all PCCs, with pointers for communities.
There have been some great examples of where they have really supported us. We have recently had the modern slavery and human trafficking exhibition. It has been to nine different venues and in almost all, if not all, cases, the PCCs and their offices have been really good at advertising it. It gained hundreds of thousands of visitors, and the referrals to the modern slavery helpline went up significantly when we took that out there. There are some good examples, but I agree with you. It is important to remember that police and crime commissioners have a commissioning responsibility, which Peter McCall referred to, across the system, and I think there probably is more they could helpfully do to commission services in this area.
Q104 Anne Marie Morris: Do you think there is more that the Government could do to raise awareness? Jamie Oliver had a remarkable effect on school meals. If we had some sort of champion for tackling modern-day slavery, do you think that would make a difference? I’m talking about somebody explaining, maybe with adverts, exactly what serious crime—we could chunk it off into its different bits—actually looks like, so that people realise the impact that it has on people’s lives and, indeed, how they have a role in relation to it.
Lynne Owens: We do, of course, have a modern slavery commissioner in the form of Dame Sara Thornton. She is relatively new in post; in fact, I am due to see her next week.
One of the things Philip and I talk about quite regularly is how we as an agency and, indeed, we as a system engender a very public conversation that is meaningful to the very local level. Our CEOP team do that brilliantly on child sexual abuse. They have the Jessie & Friends campaign, which is really warmly welcomed. Many ambassadors are operating in schools, youth clubs and other environments. A product was launched this year for the four-year-old age group—four to seven—because we now know that four to seven-year-olds have tablets. However, you are right that this is not going to be done by law enforcement on its own; it is going to be done by the public, private and voluntary sectors all coming together, and police and crime commissioners have a really important role to play in that.
Q105 Anne Marie Morris: I totally get that we have a new police and crime commissioner, but I am not sure that her role is to go on television. I suspect that the Government have to take the lead on that because she will not have a budget for it. If this really matters, and you really want to raise awareness, it seems to me that that can be done only at Government level. Is that something that you would agree with?
Julia Kinniburgh: We have a number of what we call strategic communications campaigns. We have our Take Five to Stop Fraud campaign. We have our Flag It Up campaign, which is about money laundering. We have cyber-aware campaigns. Is there more that we could do? Absolutely. Do we want to do more? Absolutely, but it is something that we do. We see good impact from those that we have. Often the best impact comes where we do it in partnership. Many of our fraud campaigns, for example, are done in partnership with the banking sector. That is how it works to best effect, but absolutely we want to do more.
Q106 Anne Marie Morris: Are these campaigns leaflets or television?
Julia Kinniburgh: They are a mix of different channels.
Q107 Anne Marie Morris: Which ones go on television?
Julia Kinniburgh: We have a modern slavery campaign: the Unseen campaign. I am not sure whether you have seen it. It is mainly not television, but we have standing adverts in the street and so on. We have them in particular places. We will often put them in places where we think victims of modern slavery may be. We might have them in doctors’ waiting rooms. It is a campaign that is quite impactful, with photographs of people made invisible. That is one of the campaigns that we run that is quite clear and quite open.
As you say, there is always scope to do more and this is an area, as we said in the strategy, where that is what we want to do. We want to increase not only our activity on serious and organised crime but the profile of what we are doing. Part of the prevention is in ensuring that the population are working with us. We have seen that work incredibly well in modern slavery. As you were saying earlier, the number of referrals to the NRM is not a sign of failure; it is a sign of success—of raising the profile of this as a major issue.
Chair: Then when you have them, you need to make sure that you are tackling them. I think Anne Marie Morris is nearly at the end.
Q108 Anne Marie Morris: Oh, she absolutely is—she is getting the message. For my last question, I would like to hear from each of you what you feel your wish list would be—not financially. If you are actually going to deliver on what is a very important objective—to deliver a real force to deal with serious and organised crime—what is the one thing that you would like to see the Minister stand up in the House and give you?
Lynne Owens: It is a cheeky approach to resources, but this is a genuine point: we need a whole variety of skillsets if we are going to take this seriously. Absolutely, we need a workforce that is very visible and engaged, with uniformed neighbourhood officers, who are so valued by our communities, but they must be supported by high-end investigators, intelligence specialists and data analysts. It is a wish list that focuses on the skills of the workforce that we need to do this high-end work.
Anne Marie Morris: Right, so it is skills for you.
Sir Philip Rutnam: I am not going to say what a Minister might say in the House. I will answer the question slightly differently, if you’ll let me off that bit. Organised criminals are the biggest threat to our national security in terms of the number of people they kill, the communities that they harm and the corrosive and chronic effect that they have on our society. I would like all our public service leaders, and all the leaders of our more significant businesses—our larger businesses—to get that in the same way that they understand that there is a threat from terrorism. If we could achieve that in 10 years’ time, the alignment that I talked about earlier will be achieved many times over.
Anne Marie Morris: Very good point. I totally agree with you.
Julia Kinniburgh: To add something different from the other two, and very much to complement what Lynne was saying, for me it is about having a clear set of capabilities that enable us to tackle the threat. As the threat evolves, our capabilities have to evolve. We have to be able to keep up. That is what we need.
Q109 Caroline Flint: I have two questions. Have you done any work on the impact of freedom of movement on the ability of criminals to come to the UK, and also to move victims into the UK?
Sir Philip Rutnam: Yes is the answer. Lynne might want to give a more detailed answer, but broadly, if I can refer here to leaving the European Union—that is the point at which a change to freedom—
Q110 Caroline Flint: Before we get into that, I am interested in whether free movement has enabled more criminals from organised groups, or those connected to those groups, to come into the UK. Also, has it made it easier for the movement of individuals who could then be exploited in the UK? Has work been done on that? What is the answer?
Lynne Owens: Yes. As part of the intelligence work we do, we look at it through the lens just as you have described: people who are being trafficked for whatever purpose, or people who are criminals themselves. We have a detailed picture. As Sir Philip said, we are reconsidering that in the context of whatever the arrangements might end up being.
Q111 Caroline Flint: Would you say, Lynne, that free movement may have benefits, but it has also had an impact in creating more opportunities through that route for others to cause harm?
Lynne Owens: A number of things cause opportunities for serious and organised criminals, who are flexible and agile. Technology is one. An ability to hide in the back of a van or to travel on our airways is another. We know that in the context of the changing environment we now operate in, they are actively looking to see what the plans are so that they can adapt their criminal models.
Q112 Caroline Flint: This is my last question. We have heard a lot about meetings, chairing meetings and process. If we had £5 for every meeting that has been mentioned, we could all have a good curry out tonight. A lot of interdepartmental activity seems to be going on among civil servants. Is there an equivalent sub-Cabinet committee of Ministers from those Departments meeting? When I oversaw the drugs strategy, I used to meet every quarter with the Prime Minister and associated parties in other Departments to talk about the implementation of that strategy. Does a ministerial committee overlay what you are doing, with you reporting in the product of all these meetings?
Sir Philip Rutnam: The ministerial committee that oversees the strategy in the round is the National Security Council. Yes, there are many ministerial groups that meet in support of that. In fact, figure 11 in the Report provides a pretty good list of ministerial meetings. There may be some it has missed out, but there are inter-ministerial groups in particular on some high-harm types of crime such as the modern slavery taskforce, the inter-ministerial group on drugs and so on. There is a lot of effort at ministerial level. Yes, I am afraid that it does mean a lot of meetings, but if it needs lots of meetings to get things done, that is the right way to progress.
Q113 Caroline Flint: I have heard a lot is being done by the National Crime Agency. I do not think I have heard much about what the delivery outcomes are. Looking at figure 11, there are an awful lot of different boards all working to a certain extent in the same area. The danger in all this is that you lose the commonalities with IMG on gangs, an IMG on serious violence, an IMG on violence against women and girls, prostitution and all these other things. Will you look at rationalising some of these governance arrangements to ensure that they are fit for purpose and delivering outcomes that are then fed through? Ultimately, whatever you are deciding on these boards, it is when you go with your wish list to those either at the National Crime Agency or those on the ground in policing or outside of it to deliver on these discussions that problems start occurring, don’t they? Your expectations are not deliverable on the ground because the people, the capacity and the capability are not there.
Will you look at these governance arrangements, see whether they should be rationalised and check that they are actually delivering, rather than just talking?
Julia Kinniburgh: We continuously do that and consider whether we have got the right boards and what they are delivering.
Q114 Caroline Flint: When did you last have a review of all those boards?
Julia Kinniburgh: We are doing it at the moment. We are going through. As we said earlier, one of the consequences of that was that we took a decision not to have a separate national security strategy implementation group on modern slavery and to roll that into the same entitled group on serious and organised crime. That is one that we have moved out.
We are continuing to look at that. We are looking at the governance we have. We are looking actively at our governance on economic crime at the moment to ensure that it is fit to deliver the economic crime strategy that we published—
Q115 Caroline Flint: So that there is transparency in this process, if you are reviewing these various board and the arrangements, once you have made a decision could we have a more holistic view of the decisions you are making and on what basis? It is all very well saying, “We will get rid of this board, and we are going to do that,” but you do not see the sum of all these discussions and what the impacts are and why you have come to the conclusion that some changes need to be made. Will we see anything that can give a more total picture of any changes that you will be making as a result of this review and, if you decide to keep it all as it is, your rationale for doing that?
Sir Philip Rutnam: Perhaps we could write to you with anything further we can give on that point. If I may, I would like to include in the letter—you challenged Julia and me just a moment ago that you had not heard much about delivery from the Home Office. I have immediately started to think of a whole range of things, including: fantastic work from our criminal and financial investigations team in the Home Office, which focuses on immigration crime; fantastic work by Border Force, which seizes more class A drugs in the UK than any other—
Q116 Caroline Flint: To be fair, Sir Philip, throughout the questioning we asked, “Can you give us some practical examples?” Time and time again we asked that to see how the strategy, which has changed from 2013, is making the difference. We did give you the chance to do all that, but if you want to write to us with that, that will be fine.
Sir Philip Rutnam: What I was going to say was, if I may write in response to your challenge—
Q117 Chair: You certainly can. It is not about meetings or who is chairing them. That is very processy, and we are interested in what the impact is on the ground for chief constables—
Caroline Flint: And the impact of the decisions on the ground.
Sir Philip Rutnam: I will pick up on the point about our work. Essentially with things that are not pursue, protection and prevention, most of that has to be led by the Home Office, because we are the ones who can do our best to lead the wider systems to that end. I will try to give some practical examples, including very significant changes coming in relation to fraud, such as “card not present” fraud and authorised push payments, which we talked about at an earlier appearance.
Chair: We have a little bit of a back catalogue on this, so we can probably draw from that, but in an hour and a half we have just got to it in the last minute. As we have been going for an hour and a half, I will let you go. Thank you very much for your time. The transcript will be up on the website as ever in the next couple of days, and we will be producing a Report in the autumn.