Appendix 1 Police and Crime Committee – Wednesday 4 March 2020
Transcript Item 6 – Question and Answer Session with the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime and the Metropolitan Police Service
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): We now come to our main item of business, which is a monthly question-and- answer session with the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC) and the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS). I would like to welcome our guests, Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime Sophie Linden and Assistant Commissioner Nick Ephgrave, [MPS]. I hope I have pronounced your name correctly.
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): Perfectly, thank you.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): This is the first time that you have come to a meeting of this Committee?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): In this role, that is correct, yes.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): In this role, yes. We last met at Notting Hill Carnival last year.
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): Yes, that is right.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): We do have a series of questions to ask you about a number of issues but, Assistant Commissioner, if I can spend 10 to 15 minutes asking you questions about an item that has been added to the agenda at the very last minute, which is about the events of 29 August last year [2019] when a senior civil servant, Ms Sonia Khan, was asked to leave Downing Street? Can I make it very clear that the questions I am going to be asking you are solely about how the police acted that day and I believe that you are aware of the discussion --
Tony Arbour AM: I am sorry, Chair. We have very important problems to discuss that affect all Londoners. This is an amazingly trivial, minor matter that occurred ages ago.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): I hear your --
Tony Arbour AM: Why should the Greater London Authority (GLA) and the Deputy Mayor for Policing [and Crime] need to spend time on dealing with these matters?
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): I hear what you are saying, Tony. I do not share your view and so I am now asking my questions. Assistant Commissioner, just setting the scene generally, if an officer were to be called inside Number 10 to assist with an incident, who would give the authority for an officer to be removed from their post and to be sent to assist? Who holds the authority to direct Number 10’s internal security custodians to instruct your officers on what to do? Just tell us the general position.
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): In general terms, Chair, of course, we do not discuss security arrangements in sensitive premises. You understand that.
Tony Arbour AM: That is the way to deal with it. There you are.
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): However, in general terms, police officers are encouraged to act on their own initiative and their discretion and to deal with incidents as they see them unfold in front of them.
That is what the officer, as I understand it, did on this occasion. He was asked to assist with a small matter, he assisted, and that was the end of the issue.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): I am coming to that, but I still had to establish the general position.
In what circumstances could an MPS officer remove Government-issued security clearance and passes from an official? Under whose authority can they do this?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): I have no idea whose authority is required to remove passes. I imagine the pass issuer is the authority for removing passes. My understanding is that the pass that the member of staff had was required to be surrendered because their employment had ceased.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): The employment had ceased?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): I was not there, of course, Chair, but my understanding is --
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): You were not there but you surely must have been briefed. There have been reviews carried out. I shall be asking you questions about the review as well.
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): I can tell you what I know. Maybe that is the best way to approach this. What I know --
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): Sure, tell us what you know.
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): What I know is that the officer who was outside 10 Downing Street as part of their standard duty was asked to step inside to assist escorting Ms Khan, who is the person we are talking about, out of the Downing Street complex because she ceased to have a pass and could not operate the gate.
Susan Hall AM: That is fair enough. That is a fair enough comment.
Tony Arbour AM: Close it down.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): Sorry, I am asking the questions, please.
Tony Arbour AM: No.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): I did not interrupt. Can you just bear with me? Sorry, there is something --
Susan Hall AM: This really is not on. It’s not on.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): Can I actually ask you? You said, “Asked to assist”. Who gave the instruction for an armed officer to enter 10 Downing Street, remove some of Ms Sonia Khan’s security passes and escort her from inside 10 Downing Street to the House Guards [Road] exit of Downing Street? You said, “Asked to assist”. By whom?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): As I understand it, the officer at 10 Downing Street is there to provide security and facilitate 10 Downing Street’s business as far as the security is concerned. As I understand it, this person was required to be escorted out because they no longer had a pass, which is standard security procedure, and could not have operated the gate at the end of the road. Therefore, the officer was asked if they could assist, which is what they did.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): No, sorry, I am not criticising the individual officer.
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): No, I appreciate that.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): What I am trying to establish, Assistant Commissioner, is the line of command. That armed officer entered the building under someone’s instructions. There must be some sort of accountability. Was it a police officer who asked this particular armed officer to enter the building? Did they take authority from someone? Who?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): My understanding is that an official from Downing Street - I do not know who - asked the officer to step inside to assist. I can offer you no more information at this stage than that.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): I think you have answered my question, “an official”, and I will leave it at that. All right. As I said, my questions are solely about how the police acted that day. The wider issues I am not interested in. That is not the remit of this Committee. We are looking at the policing on that day.
Just moving on, there was a press release issued by the MPS and Sir Stephen House [QPM, Deputy Commissioner, MPS] subsequently admitted that there were some untruths in the press statement issued by the MPS on 30 August 2019. As contrary to the statement, the officer involved in the incident, did enter 10 Downing Street on 29 August --
Tony Arbour AM: What is your agenda on this? This is preposterous that we should be concerned with this.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): I am going to ask my questions and I do resent… Can I ask Assembly Members to show the Chair some respect? I am going to proceed with my line of questioning and if you do not like it you can go --
Tony Arbour AM: We are entitled to say whether we think you are in order or not.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): You should not be interrupting my line of questioning. You can ask your questions later and so I am going to carry on.
Tony Arbour AM: Outrageous.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): Assistant Commissioner, Ms Khan contests that there are further discrepancies in the MPS’s account of what happened on that day.
Susan Hall AM: I do not know what the agenda is.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): Do you therefore feel it would be most appropriate to conduct another review of what occurred on 29 August, including gathering witness statements from those who saw what occurred inside 10 Downing Street? You have had one review already, which you say has been fully reviewed, but if you can tell us what that review entailed, but more importantly in the light of, as we now know, untruths in the press statement issued on 30 August? An armed officer did enter Downing Street. Do you not feel the need now to have another review and take witness statements from people who were inside Downing Street? You were not there. I was not there. None of the Committee Members were there. We need to know what happened inside that building.
Tony Arbour AM: No, we do not.
Susan Hall AM: No, we do not.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): Some of us do.
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): Chair, it is hard for me to answer in detail, but - and forgive me if this is simplistic - it seems to me fairly common sense that an officer who is at Downing Street in order to provide security is asked to assist in escorting somebody who no longer has a pass out of the --
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): That is precisely what I am trying to establish. Who instructed? You already answered that question, but there must be something in your review to prevent something like this happening again. When an armed officer is called to assist, Joe Bloggs out there, certainly someone like myself, would think, “What has happened? An armed officer is being involved in an incident. Has someone been attacked? Has there been some untoward incident?”
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): The reason the officer is armed is not because of what happened at Downing Street but because all officers who are involved in protective security in that part of Westminster --
Susan Hall AM: Are armed.
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): -- are armed.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): Let me make this very clear. I am not criticising the individual officer in question. What I am trying to establish is that they have learned some lessons from this incident. Who gave the authority? Surely there must be a line of command. It is fairly serious. It seems to me this is a straightforward human resources issue. There are procedures in this building, for instance, if someone has to be asked to leave the building.
Susan Hall AM: These things happen.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): No.
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): No, my understanding is that it was a straightforward request for assistance and our job is generally to facilitate requests such as that, which appeared reasonable in the circumstances.
In terms of deployment of resources, it was a very short-lived incident, in my understanding, a matter of minutes, and a perfectly reasonable request in my view that was made.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): Indeed.
Susan Hall AM: Absolutely.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): It might be a short incident, but it certainly has had consequences for Ms Khan. Do you acknowledge that your actions with regard to this incident contributed towards Ms Khan receiving a torrent of vile abuse including death threats and have significantly damaged her professional reputation?
Tony Arbour AM: Disgraceful.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): The police are aware of that. She has had death threats. She has been a subject of vilification on social media. You are aware of this. Do you feel that the actions on that day contributed to what has happened to her and the damage to her professional reputation?
Tony Arbour AM: Chair, this is not on, asking questions about an individual person --
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): My question is to the officer. Please do not obstruct my line of questioning.
Tony Arbour AM: No, you are wrong, Chair.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): All right. I will put the question to you, Assistant Commissioner. Do you accept that the actions that day --
Susan Hall AM: This is completely wrong.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): -- did not help and that Ms Khan, as you are well aware --
Tony Arbour AM: Ridiculous.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): -- has received a torrent of vile abuse, as I have said, messages on social media and death threats and her professional reputation has, in her opinion, certainly be damaged?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): If we had not assisted Ms Khan she would have been wandering up and down Downing Street unable to get out, which probably would have been worse.
Susan Hall AM: Exactly.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): No. The press briefing that you now accept was wrong --
Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM: Put it in writing.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): -- yes, she was escorted to the House Guards Road exit of Downing Street, but what I am just trying to establish is how the actions contributed to what happened subsequently.
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): I am not fully briefed on the issues that you refer to that Ms Khan has suffered. I am very sorry to hear that she has received those kinds of unpleasant communications. Clearly, we will need to understand what those are and, if there is a crime alleged, then we will investigate it. I am unaware and unable to comment about whether or not the escorting of Ms Khan from Downing Street to the exit at Horse Guards [Road] contributed in any way to that behaviour.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): I am certainly pleased that you acknowledge that you personally feel that --
Tony Arbour AM: No, you are putting words into his mouth. This is abuse of process.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): No, you did say that you feel sorry about what happened to her.
Tony Arbour AM: Chair, this is abuse and it is not on.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): I think I will leave it that. Any other questions?
Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM: Follow up in writing, Unmesh, if you need to.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): Thank you. All right. We now move to the first item on the briefing as printed, sexual offences. Who is going to lead on that? Assembly Member Hall?
Susan Hall AM: I am leading and, Chair, this is so unlike you. This is so unlike you because there is an agenda here somewhere that I have not quite worked out but --
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): Assembly Member Hall, your questions are on sexual offences, all right? We have now moved on. Can you ask your --
Susan Hall AM: Yes, because these are important issues. I am very surprised at you.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): Can you please ask your questions?
Tony Arbour AM: You are running the meeting badly.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): That is your opinion. I do not think that is shared by other people.
Susan Hall AM: All right. I am going to ask a question of you both. Obviously, these are important issues. Can you explain why reports of sexual offences and rape have increased so dramatically over the last few years while successful prosecutions are almost non-existent?
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): Sorry, who is that to?
Susan Hall AM: Both of you. Whichever one of you wants to take that on first. I will be happy to hear the answer.
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): Thank you. It is absolutely correct that rape and serious sexual offences - which we refer to by the unfortunate acronym RASSO, but I will use that as a shorthand if that is OK - that category of offences has risen dramatically over the last decade or so. In the recent 12 months, maybe 18 months, certainly in the MPS - and I believe this is replicated in many other forces - there has been a slight levelling off of those offences, but there has absolutely been a dramatic rise.
There are a number of factors that have driven that rise. Firstly, the police services work very hard with other agencies and third-sector organisations to try to improve the confidence of victims of RASSO offences to come forward, confident in the knowledge that their allegations will be taken seriously and will be robustly investigated. We work really hard to drive that confidence agenda and that has contributed to people being able to come forward and report.
The second thing that has happened is that the whole debate around RASSO, particularly the historic offending that is now coming to light, has brought this into the public eye much more than it ever was and that has also contributed to a willingness or more of a willingness for people to speak out about what happened to them, both recently and historically. Those two things have happened.
Thirdly, the police service is much more rigorous now - and this has been a process going on for the last 10 years at least - in its crime recording accuracy and that has assisted also in getting a true picture of the problem or the offending that we see in this country. All of those things have contributed to the rise.
In terms of the declining detection rate, it is clearly a huge concern to the police service. We talk about it a lot both in the MPS and nationally. There is a national lead, Simon Bailey, in Norfolk. He is the Chief [Constable] there who works relentlessly on trying to reverse this decline, but there are a number of very complicated factors that have driven that decline.
The most obvious one, which I am sure you will be familiar with, is the tension that exists for an investigator between fulfilling their obligations under the Criminal Procedure Investigations Act, the disclosure obligations, and protecting where they can the private life and privacy of the complainant or the victim. There is a very real tension between those two duties. This was brought even more into focus, as you will remember, in the winter of 2017 when a number of rape cases failed to proceed based on failures around disclosure. The most often quoted one is R v Allen, which was an MPS case, but there were many others not just in the MPS but up and down the country. What that revealed was that the police service had not understood properly its duties under disclosure and therefore was not affording the best chance of a fair trial, which of course is what we are all interested in, a fair trial and justice being done. The complication that the exponential growth really in the use of mobile phones and particularly digital devices to record one’s actions and thoughts and communications has added to the burden of a disclosure duty enormously.
It is very difficult to get a sense of the scale of this issue. The best thing I can give is, if you take a typical smartphone, it has something like --
Susan Hall AM: We are going to talk about the information technology (IT) a bit more later.
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): OK. This is one of the drivers for the fall in detection rates because part of the work - if you want to talk about digital later, I will park that for now but part of the drive to improve disclosure has resulted in the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) quite rightly being more stringent in its requests of officers at an earlier stage in the investigative process. Now officers are expected to have completed much more disclosure work before a decision to charge
is given and that inevitably slows down the investigative process. Apart from the issue around digital material that can take a while to recover and analyse and present, you also have the factor that is growing exponentially as well of third-party material being potentially relevant. This could be doctors’ records. It could be adult social care, children’s social care, school records, any number of other organisations that hold data about the individual or the complainant that may, depending on the circumstances of the offence and what the suspect has said and a whole number of other elements, may become relevant in terms of disclosure.
I will stop at that point because I have said quite a lot. I am very happy to explore any of those areas further.
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): Could I just add in terms of the work that the --
Susan Hall AM: Yes, please. If you could address both the issues? I will put it this way. For as long as I have been involved in domestic violence - and I was involved in Harrow and I got interested - for as long as I have been involved in this, it has always been told to me that the reason the numbers are going up is because we can report it better. I accept that to an extent, but we cannot say that forever. That is one part.
Really, I am looking for answers as to what you are going to do about the fact that successful prosecutions are almost non-existent. What are we doing about that? I am thinking of the victims here.
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): I could just answer that in two parts, what we know and what we are going to do about it.
In terms of the reporting, there has been an increase in confidence, but you will also know that MOPAC did quite a focused piece of work into why we have seen the reports going up in the Beneath the Numbers reports, which was published --
Susan Hall AM: Yes, I will be asking you on that in a minute.
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): Some of it was about Operation Yewtree. We could see an increase in reporting after Operation Yewtree. A lot of historical cases of sexual violence and abuse came forward then at that point. The Beneath the Numbers report also showed that one of the things that has driven the increase in recording is the ability and the way that the MPS is recording crime has really improved. The crime data integrity has improved. It is also down to much better recording of those incidents and those women who are coming forward and they are being treated in the right way.
Victims Commissioner Claire Waxman has done a lot of work, as has the MPS, in terms of looking at what is happening to the cases when women come forward to report rape in particular. Why have we seen such a drop in cases? Disclosure is absolutely part of it, but the report and the in-depth analysis that the Evidence and Insight Team did and was published by Claire Waxman with recommendations was pre the issue of disclosure and we still saw that real drop-off in prosecutions. That was about victim support and the real importance of ensuring that victims have the right support through the process, around video evidence and early evidence kits. She had a number of recommendations that have been taken forward through the Rape Gold Group, which is chaired by Assistant Commissioner Mark Simmons. There is a lot of work being undertaken here.
There is a second phase of the rape review that Claire and MOPAC’s Evidence and Insight Team will be undertaking to really do that deep dive into cases now as to how much of it has been driven by the burdensome and often, from the victim’s point of view, invasion of privacy in terms of the disclosure and the amount of records and digital evidence that they are having to hand over. That review is just starting now. It will take a little bit of time in terms of a real deep dive into the cases to really understand at what point are the
real problems around disclosure and what might be done to help and to support that disclosure process. Clearly, there is the process of justice and we do have to have disclosure, but it has to be done in an appropriate and proportionate way.
Susan Hall AM: That deep dive review you are talking about now, what is the name of that?
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): It is the second phase of the rape review. The first phase has been published and the recommendations from Claire Waxman have been published. The second phase is to look at more recent cases - they will be looking at about 400 cases - which will make sure that they can pick up the issue of digital disclosure, which was not such a big issue in the first rape review because it was pre digital evidence.
Susan Hall AM: OK. When are they going back to? What is the date of those reviews?
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): I can come back to you with the dates, but it is the more recent cases that will pick up the issues of digital evidence and digital disclosure. We will have a much better view of what is causing the problems around digital disclosure and also Claire will be able to give recommendations as to how to try to support victims in the process when they do have to disclose and when their evidence is needed either for the prosecution or for the defence. There clearly has to be a fair trial and fair disclosure.
Susan Hall AM: My colleague Assembly Member Pidgeon is going to go into the digital aspect of this more. Given these various things that you are looking at, when can we hope to be sitting in this Committee - or whoever is sitting in this Committee – and start to see prosecutions going up?
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): One of the other things I would say is that it is not just the review of the rape cases and the recommendations around that. There has been a lot of work and also a lot of investment into the services that support victims of sexual violence when they are brave enough to come forward. We have had an increase in Independent Sexual Violence Advocates. We have a New London Victims and Witnesses Service. We have also invested in Rape Crisis Centres and the Havens. All that is part of the process of trying to ensure that victims have the support they need because we know that victims are falling out of the process because they have not had the appropriate support. We are investing in it.
On your question as to when that will start to make a difference, I would hope that the Rape Gold Group - there is a real focus on this at the moment through the Rape Gold Group - will start to see that change in terms of a real step change as soon as possible, but it will take time because these are complicated and difficult issues. It is multiagency --
Susan Hall AM: I understand all that. I am just looking for some hope here for these victims. Give me a rough idea. When are you projecting that this will start to make a difference?
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): As I said, this is multiagency. Part of the process as well is around the CPS --
Susan Hall AM: I know all of that. I am just --
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): -- and finding the issues. All I can say, Susan, genuinely, I am not trying to --
Susan Hall AM: No, Sophie, the problem is --
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): -- is as soon as possible because, from my view, it is so important that victims get justice and those who are so dangerous --
Susan Hall AM: Sophie, I understand. Every one of us understands all of this. The problem we have is that we cannot ever get dates out of any of the mayoral team for anything. You will not ever tell us when you are hoping to get something done by. If something happens and therefore you cannot deliver, then we are here to listen to reasons, but we cannot get answers to anything as to when you think something is going to make a difference.
Throwing all these different things in is applaudable and we are really happy because this is a very serious situation. However, we want to have hope on the horizon. Just give us a broad-brush look at when you think --
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): My broad-brush look at when I want to see change is from now and as soon as possible. In terms of optimism, the Independent Sexual Violence Advocates are there and in place. The Rape Crisis Centres have had their waiting lists opened because of the Mayor’s investment. The change and the difference that makes to victims is now.
Can I promise that that will immediately make a step change? It is difficult to know. We are doing all we can to push this through as quickly as possible. I am not prepared to give you arbitrary dates which we do not know can be met when what we are doing is focusing on this really intensely.
Tony Arbour AM: We do not know whether they are succeeding or not.
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): We have a Rape Gold Group. We have a lot of work from the Victims Commissioner. We also have an issue with making sure the CPS does its role and the courts do their role in the right way. Adding all that together, we expect, and we want really quick progress and as soon as possible. Nick [Ephgrave] chairs the London Criminal Justice Board, which is looking at all the other aspects around case file quality and driving change there as well.
Susan Hall AM: Do you have any standards that you are holding the MPS to? Do you have any timelines that you are going to hold the MPS to that this will start to work? If not, if we say, “As soon as possible”, as soon as possible can go so quickly and suddenly, five years down the line, as soon as possible does not have there. You do not have any metrics in place to say, “We really need to be at this level at this stage”.
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): We have metrics. We have performance management in place, as does the MPS have operational performance management in place around that. We know about the detection rates at the moment and they are woefully low at 3% of prosecution rates for rape. That is woefully low. What we do is we chart progress and we can see what the progress needs to be. There is no sense that there is not a focus on trying to improve and drive change.
What you are asking for is to pick arbitrary numerical targets out of the air. I am not prepared to do that because I do not want to skew the work that is happening. There is no --
Susan Hall AM: No, we actually just want a yardstick that we can look at and hope that you have some sort of metrics that you are holding them to. If all of your aims are around “as soon as possible” and “we hope
for”, none of us have anything that we can actually judge you by. I do wonder how you would judge if you were looking at it. “As soon as possible”, yes, we all hope that, but we often have to keep to targets.
What progress has been made in taking forward the recommendations in the Beneath the Numbers report?
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): The Beneath the Numbers report was not a report that had specific recommendations. It was an analysis of --
Susan Hall AM: Really?
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): It was an analysis of what is happening with recorded and reported incidents. You might have - as I did - had a look back at it today and in the preparation for this Committee. It was really about what is happening and an analysis of that. As I have said previously, what it shows is that the increase in recorded incidents is -- the evidence there is mostly about an improvement in crime data integrity. What there has been is recommendations in the rape review that Claire Waxman [Victims Commissioner] published, as I have discussed, and that was published in the autumn. There is now an action plan in place and part of that is through the Rape Gold Group that the improvements in that have been driven.
Susan Hall AM: Yes, the Committee wrote to you recommending that MOPAC report back to the Committee by December 2019 with its plans to address the issues identified in Beneath the Numbers.
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): The rape review is part of taking that forward and the recommendations of the rape review are around better victim support, a more trauma-informed approach with training for officers, which has been taken forward, and also some of the issues around guidance have been taken forward.
Also, some of the issues that we know are happening around rape and the lack of prosecutions in rape are not only to do with the police but to do with the CPS as well. We have been calling consistently for a joint inspection of the police and of the CPS in rape cases so that we can understand exactly what is happening. We have not yet got to that position. That is out of our hands. Claire Waxman and I have written. Claire has written to the Attorney General. I have also written about this. We are calling for that inspection so that we have a better understanding of what needs to happen.
It is not that the CPS is not at the table. It has been part of Justice Matters. We do have that action plan and we are taking forward those recommendations.
Susan Hall AM: I hear what you say there. What possible transformation options are being proposed to address issues relating to the welfare, recruitment and of course retention of these specific sexual offence investigation trained officers? When we went on our visit, we were told that there were all sorts of issues on them. If you can answer, Nick?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): I will address that, if I may. You are right. The Sexual Offence Investigation Technique (SOIT) officers are critical to supporting victims through all the trauma of the initial reporting, the subsequent examination if there needs to be one, the questioning and so on and so forth, right the way through the wait for decisions around charge and then the wait for trial dates and then the trial. That support is often extended over many months, sometimes years, depending on the complexity of the investigation, and it is a very intense role. Funnily
enough, I was one of the first male SOIT officers many years ago when there was an issue with male rape. I have done it and I know exactly how emotionally stressful --
Susan Hall AM: Yes, it must be.
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): -- it can be. The situation we have now is that we are expecting our current batch of SOIT officers to carry more and more cases because we are struggling to recruit and retain because of exactly that stress and strain. We are currently under-strength, but the Gold Group is addressing this issue aggressively.
One of the suggestions that is being taken forward, which might actually have some degree of merit, is to try to alleviate the burden on the long-term SOIT officers by having different SOIT officers allocated to the Havens so that, in the initial reception and the initial first few days or couple of weeks maybe of that victim’s encounter with the police service, they have a SOIT officer who deals with the initial trauma and takes all of that strain. Then, once that initial burst of activity is concluded and we get into the longer-term investigative work and the inevitable criminal justice process, at that point the SOIT officer who will be with that victim through the rest of the period is introduced and there is a handover. The idea behind that is to take that initial stress and strain away and to have people who are co-located at the Havens and can receive the victim and do that initial support and care and then hand over to somebody who can take the slightly longer-term steady- state support forward.
That is being pursued as the strategy currently to try to address this issue, but there are all sorts of other things about recruitment and retention. How can we make the role more attractive? It is a voluntary role. You cannot post somebody to be a SOIT. It requires a desire to do it. It has to be the right sort of person, clearly. They need to be very strong emotionally and have great empathy but also be very competent police officers. It is quite a skill mix we are looking for.
It is ongoing work. That initiative I described is one method that the Gold Group is actively pursuing, but the more longer-term recruitment and retention remains a struggle for us.
Susan Hall AM: All right. That is a worry with perhaps - and I quote the Deputy Mayor - the “woeful” results that we are seeing. Perhaps I can ask you. When are you aiming to get people in place? How many officers are you short of in this particular role?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): On our strength, there should be 213 SOIT officers based on the Basic Command Units (BCUs). In terms of deployable SOIT officers, people we can actually put out to work tomorrow, we have currently 140 deployable SOIT officers and so we are significantly under.
Tony Arbour AM: More than half.
Susan Hall AM: It should be 230?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): No, 213.
Tony Arbour AM: That is much more than half.
Susan Hall AM: It should be 213 and you have 144?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): We have 140 deployable. There are more SOIT officers trained than that but some of them are, for example, undeployable for various reasons. They may be ill, they may be on maternity leave, they may be on leave and so on and so forth.
Susan Hall AM: Yes, I understand. Really, this is an emergency for you to get these people in place?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): That is why we are addressing it through the Gold Group principally and why there is this new approach in terms of splitting the SOIT responsibility so that it is less onerous on one individual. It is quite an innovative approach and --
Susan Hall AM: This could absolutely be the reason that these successful prosecutions are failing so miserably?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): It is certainly an ingredient, absolutely. It always has been. A critical factor in successful prosecutions is that the victim feels supported all the way through. That is why SOITs were created 25 years ago to do this job.
However, of course, as you said at the very beginning of this particular subject matter, the number of offences we are investigating has probably doubled, I should guess, in the last 10 years or so and trying to keep up with that with training and deploying SOIT officers has been a struggle for the reasons I have explained.
Susan Hall AM: Yes. That is even worse than I had feared. I am going over to my colleague.
Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM: I would like to pick up the issue around digital forensics, which you have already touched on. Deputy Mayor, when you wrote back to us, you said:
“The MPS continues to invest in innovation and cloud-based software, which will significantly reduce waiting times when reviewing kiosk data and disclosure searches.”
That was launching in the spring. Do you want to provide us with an update on the investment that is going in and what you are investing in and when it is going to be fully rolled out?
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): That is the Magnet Review of digital evidence that was being piloted. The decision has been taken to roll that out. It has encountered some technical problems in terms of rolling it out across the MPS and so it is slightly delayed. We are hoping that it will be rolled out in the summer. It is a couple of months delayed. The investment is there, and we are working to regain the time. It was --
Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM: Do you want to explain simply to us? This is the forensics at stations?
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): This is the first stage. There are 96 kiosks in police buildings for the first line of reviewing digital evidence when the password or the PIN number is known so that the officer can download the evidence as soon as possible. What happens to that evidence - and there is a hell of a lot of it and there is a massive amount of information - is that previously an officer would have to physically trawl through it themselves. The Magnet Review is a solution that enables it to be all uploaded and to be electronically gone through. I have been to have a look at it. It can search for key words, search for key dates, search for - as you would imagine - any search and pull it together. That means that it is much quicker.
It has been used in some cases already and there is been some case studies where, if an officer had had to look through that manually, it would have taken months and months. It still did take a long time and it was not done immediately, but the amount of time that it took was seriously reduced. It has had a few technical problems in terms of rolling it out across the MPS and we hope for that to be solved and for the rollout to start in the summer.
Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM: Perhaps I will come to you, Assistant Commissioner. There has been a huge backlog in digital forensics. I am talking about when you send things off to your digital labs. Previously, we have been told that the MPS was outsourcing additional work to third-party suppliers to try to reduce the huge backlog. We heard this first-hand when we did a visit. I think it was one of the visits we did to Brixton. Can you update us on the progress in reducing this huge forensics backlog?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): Yes, thank you. Just to touch on the kiosk approach first, our first point of call for any of this downloading activity is the kiosks because they are based across the BCUs. You have heard there are 96. In fact, Charing Cross has just enhanced its kiosk to a whole technical unit within the police station that does more than just download, but that is perhaps a side issue.
Where we know the PIN number, where we can access the phone, which is typically where you have the complainant’s or the victim’s permission and you are dealing with a compliant individual, the kiosks are used and there is no significant delay and it is a matter of hours for the download to happen.
Where we do not know the PIN or there are other technical issues with the unlocking the phone, we then have to go to level 2, which is an insourced in-house facility within our forensic laboratory. That will go there, and they will do what they can to access the contents of that phone, defeating the PIN or the security. We work really hard to reduce the backlog. Sadly, I can only apologise. I do not have the current waiting times, but it is a matter of weeks, sometimes a couple of months - I can get you the exact figures - for the level 2 in-house.
Where we have had the biggest issue, however, is where the phone is either encrypted in some particularly clever way or damaged so that standard investigations are impossible. That is where we often have to send to third-party providers to do a much more detailed often deconstruction of the phone and extraction of the chip and all of that kind of thing. That is where we have often the longest delays because there is a high demand and there are not many providers.
We have developed an in-house ability to do that. In fact, I visited it a couple of weeks ago. It is very impressive, but we could do with enhancing that provision. That is what we are working on as part of our Digital Strategy.
Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM: OK, but there is this huge backlog and there are issues - I understand the stuff you are doing at a lower level - when you have something where data has been deleted. That is where you need more specialists to really retrieve that information.
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): That is right.
Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM: Are you investing more in third-party providers and boosting your contract to clear this backlog and to make sure then things are being dealt with in a more timely manner?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): I do not have figures for you, but I have spoken to our Director of Forensic Services. He has been very focused on reducing that backlog and that has involved, as part of activity, investing more in outsourcing. I can write to you with the current figures.
Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM: Yes, and I would really like to understand where the management board has actually discussed this and said, “We have got this problem. We are not getting cases to court. Part of it is because of this forensics backlog. Let us put some money into this contract to get it working seven days a week rather than five days a week to clear the backlog”. Are you aware of any of those discussions?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): I know that that has been a real plank of what Chris Porter, our Director of Forensic Services has been doing. I cannot give you the facts and figures of the top of my head, but I can provide them.
Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM: That would be really helpful. I note also that I saw - and I am wondering what action the MPS is taking in response - a report from the Forensic Science Regulator that came out on 25 February [2020] and which picked up a number of these issues.
It also picked up that over 1,000 DNA profiles on the national DNA database have been contaminated by police officers and staff and are having to be removed. Is that also something that is having an impact on this work? How are you responding to that?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): DNA profiling is not directly related to the examination of phones and I am not aware of the detail on that particular issue and so I will have to come back to you on that, I am afraid.
Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM: Perhaps you could come back to me on that. That would be really helpful. Thank you.
In terms of then the CPS, we have seen national figures in terms of - and Assembly Member Hall has already mentioned this - fewer and fewer cases being passed to the police in England and Wales. We heard this from the CPS when we went to Kingston on that visit. They were saying, “We are just not getting the files passed over to us for us to take forward”.
Do you know what the situation is in London in terms of numbers of files and how far it has fallen?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): Yes. The percentages I cannot quote you from memory, but I am aware that the referral rates from the police to the CPS has declined. What has also declined by a similar amount is, of those cases that are referred to the CPS, the number that the CPS then charges. There is a double step here. We are currently referring fewer for decision and, of those that are referred, the CPS is deciding to charge fewer. There are two levels of attrition here.
One of the reasons that there is a decline in the submission or the referral rate to the CPS is because of all the work that has been done, actually, to address the disclosure issues. I chair the National Disclosure Delivery Board with Max Hill [QC, Director of Public Prosecutions] and so I have been right at the forefront of this national work and understand it very well. I will not bore the Committee with it, but we have done an awful lot to try to get the balance right between progressing investigations but not presenting cases that fall apart because disclosure has not been properly addressed because that does not help victims, either.
A lot of the work that we have done has been to try to frontload investigative and disclosure thought from where it used to be done, which is post charge, to pre charge decision. Rather than getting a decision for the CPS to charge on the basis of the evidence alone and then worry about the disclosure as the case progresses towards the court date, which is what the traditional method has been, what we are seeking to do is bring as much thinking as we can prior to the charge decision about what the disclosure implications would be so that we do not end up charging cases that would later fail and so that lawyers are better informed when they make their decisions because the impact of that means that officers have to do more work prior to referral. I am aware that there are a number of cases that are sitting and waiting to go to the CPS, but we have a long list of things that we need to do before they can go for charge.
Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM: That includes the detailed digital --
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): Part of that will be digital. A large part of that is also third-party material, doctor’s statements, social care, a whole load of ingredients. There is nothing wrong with that approach because, ultimately, that will get to a steady state where the referral rate improves, but it is definitely a sticking point at the moment. We are debating with the CPS and this is where the Attorney General’s guidelines are going to be very important, which are out for consultation now, as I am sure you are aware. They - and our joint guidance to officers - really stress the importance of adopting a reasonable-lines-of-inquiry approach to disclosure.
Post R v Allen, everybody swung a little bit too far to looking at absolutely everything, which caused this logjam in the system. Everything went into stasis because everybody thought they had to look at every single thing that could possibly be looked at just in case. We have worked back from that to this approach where we are taking a reasonable-lines-of-inquiry approach. There is a whole bunch of documents that we have created nationally to assist officers in understanding what the disclosure strategy is and informing the CPS of it and having earlier case conferences. The Attorney General’s guidelines made it absolutely clear that the expectation is not that officers look at absolutely everything in every case. You have to take it on a case-by- case basis. You have to take a reasonable-lines-of-inquiry approach.
You have to have earlier consultation with CPS lawyers. That in itself is problematic because the CPS numbers have declined over the last 10 years. It does not have the number of lawyers it used to have. Hopefully that will start to change now with investment, but all of these things have conspired against us in terms of expeditious investigation.
I have rambled on a bit. I am sorry, but it is a multifaceted thing and there are many moving parts and I do believe progress is being made. We have started to free up the logjam. Officers are now more confident in taking a reasonable-line-of-inquiry approach rather than being frightened of missing something. The Magnet tool that the Deputy Mayor has talked about is a fantastic innovation that assists in that. The Attorney General’s guidelines that are going to come out will further cement this reasonable-lines-of-inquiry approach. We are running seminars up and down the country for investigators. I often speak at them personally. We have champions at tactical, strategic and chief officer level driving this message. It is an unprecedented effort across the criminal justice system nationally to try to address these things.
Going back to Susan’s [Hall AM] point on how quickly this will all change, it is hard to say for exactly the reasons that the Deputy Mayor said, but we are not going to suddenly get to a point where there is a step change. This is a war of attrition. We just need to nibble away and get better and better. My expectation is that next month is going to be better than this month and the month after that is going to be better than that. Where that leads us to and what the ultimate point is, I am unable to say. How long and what the steps are going to be is very difficult to judge.
There are some green shoots. Our detection rate, woeful as it is, is improving, very slowly but it is improving rather than declining. I take comfort from that. I am confident that all of the things I have talked about or touched on in combination with slightly different timeframes will come together and individually and collectively help us move this process on. My people work their socks off, as I know you know because you have spoken to them. I know you have spoken to SOIT officers. I know you know exactly how stressed and how hard-working they are. Detective Constables (DCs) are running 15 cases. There is a whole bunch of stuff that we are addressing. We are moving in the right direction but, clearly, we always want to be quicker and we always want to be more impactive.
Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM: Is there one way that you could look to measure this? I understand it is difficult, but at the moment you have average lengths for certain investigations. Is a way that you could look to say, “In six months, given we are putting all this in, we would hope to see that reduce by a month or something”, and try to start looking at the length of cases? I was looking at online child sexual abuse and exploitation investigations. Currently in the BCUs it is 185 days for a no-further-action and on average 465 days for a positive outcome. That is just unacceptable. Is that not a way you could try to measure this to try to drive the improvement? As a victim, you want to see justice done in whatever way it is and the length of time is 465 days. It is not acceptable. Is that something you would consider, Deputy Mayor, as a way to measure this?
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): Those waiting times are for online sexual abuse and we all know that, in terms of the volume that is coming through, we have real problems in terms of meeting that demand in terms of what is being uncovered and the capacity to deal with that. There is extra investment. There are extra officers working on this.
Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM: I was thinking more widely in terms of this whole area. I am trying to just bring together all sexual offences. We are talking about all this investment. Is there a way? Perhaps that might be a way you could measure to try to reduce the length of time before cases are concluded.
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): In any performance management or, from my point of view, oversight of performance management, there is always a discussion to be had as to the best metrics you put in. How do you make sure that the performance and the progress is quick enough? I am always interested in having discussion about what the right metrics are. I am not interested in setting arbitrary targets, saying that therefore it is a 20% reduction by this or whatever when there are so many, as the Assistant Commissioner talked about, moving parts.
If you take child protection, one of the things there from the Oversight Board that I chair is absolutely that discussion. I need to know. When should I know that the progress has been fast enough and has been swift enough and where are we getting to? That has been a conversation for the last two years around what those metrics would look like because it is so incredibly complicated. The discussion has been with the College of Policing, Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services (HMICFRS) as well as the MPS as to what is good enough and what is fast enough. There has not been an easy answer to that because there is not an easy answer. We just have to constantly keep driving the progress and looking, as the Assistant Commissioner says, at whether we have made progress and whether we feel in the professional judgements of those who are operationally expert in this that this is about right and this is good.
Those are not necessarily about a numerical target. I know it can be frustrating from where you are sitting because there is not a numerical target there, but we are having those discussions. I am having those
discussions with those experts who can advise - HMICFRS, the College of Policing, the MPS - and we are constantly looking at whether this is good enough and fast enough.
Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM: Thank you. I will leave it there, but maybe for the next Committee it would be interesting to potentially do a visit to this new digital facility and also to look at the new IT, if that is possible. Perhaps I could put that on the bring-forward agenda for the next Committee.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): Assembly Member Whittle?
Peter Whittle AM: Sorry, just to come in on the end of this, Deputy Mayor, I do understand Assembly Member Hall’s frustration about this relentless rise and why they seem to be so clueless about it. I asked you about this, about --
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): Sorry, clueless about --
Peter Whittle AM: There is a rise in sexual offences and rape that never quite seems to be explained.
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): That is what the Beneath the Numbers report did. It analysed the rise and the difference or the gap between the Crime Survey for England and Wales and the recorded incidents that we had from the MPS. There is a really in-depth piece of reporting which said that whilst you can look at some confidence in people coming forward, the evidence shows that it is about the crime data integrity and better recording. We do have an understanding of what is happening --
Peter Whittle AM: It is entirely that? If you remember, about three years ago you were saying, “There is something going on that we do not quite understand. It is not just about reporting”. That was three years ago. Then I met some people from your office to talk about this. It is entirely down to reporting? Is that what it is?
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): No. Recording is different to reporting. When people were coming forward to the police previously, pre-2014, they were not always having their allegations and their complaints properly recorded. What Beneath the Numbers has shown is that a lot of the increase in recorded incidents is to do with much better crime data integrity. That is much better recording.
Peter Whittle AM: In three years’ time, it is likely, despite what you say, that we will be here asking exactly the same questions, somehow.
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner, Metropolitan Police Service): Can I try to assist? This may not be helpful, but I will put it forward in the hope it will be. I am just thinking back, I was a Detective Inspector (DI) running a main office where we dealt with RASSO 20 years ago. The majority of rapes we investigated were what you might call stranger rapes or fleeting acquaintance rapes, where either somebody had been attacked completely randomly and raped, or they had met someone that night for the first time and gone off with them and ended up getting raped. We rarely had what are now called domestic rapes, rapes within marriage or rapes within long-term relationships reported. Make your own judgement about why that was, but we rarely got those.
If you look at how the rape allegations we deal with now are made up, I think I am right in saying - I need to check this figure - that something like 7% are what I have referred to as the things I used to deal with, stranger rapes or fleeting acquaintance rapes. The overwhelming majority are rapes that happen within relationships
that are established, either marriage or civil partnerships or just partners. That is where we have seen the huge step change.
Why is it that people are now talking about that? All the reasons that we touched on here. That, from my personal experience, is what is behind some of this along with better reporting of course and confidence. These things were rarely talked about 20 years ago and now they seem to be. That is a healthy thing. It is good for victims generally, but it presents the problems we have been talking about for the last 40 minutes or so.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): Moving on to the next set of questions on the MPS estate, Assembly Member Pidgeon?
Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM: Thank you very much. We have discussed this at recent Police [and Crime Committee] meetings and also the budget [Plenary] meeting. I am wondering whether, Deputy Mayor, you can provide us with any update on when you are going to make a decision on the MPS estate.
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): I am afraid there is not much of an update to be given since last month. The MPS is still reviewing the Estate Strategy in the light of the growth of police officer numbers, as we have discussed before. I am expecting for proposals to come forward for next year around the estate shortly. Whether we all agree them all or not is to be seen depending on the proposals.
I want to be really clear that what will come forward as a proposal from the MPS will not be that this is the Estate Strategy for the next five years because we cannot do that at the moment.
Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM: No, I understand that.
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): As you understand, the reasons the MPS cannot do that and come forward with proposals is that what we know going forward in terms of police officer numbers is not enough in order to be able to really rigorously plan. We know we have 1,369 extra officers from Government money for next year. We do not know what will happen in years two and three. That is incredibly important in terms of trying to plan an estate and plan where officers will go. What I expect to come forward will be proposals as to the small number of buildings that the MPS knows, whatever the scenario for growth, will not be needed. Then we will have to keep reiterating what we do with our buildings because we cannot pin it down at this stage because we do not have those numbers. We do not have the certainty about funding. We do not know what is going to happen apart from in the next financial year.
Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM: At the last meeting or the meeting in February [2020], Robin Wilkinson [OBE, Chief of Corporate Services, MPS] said that they were working through this and, “We expect to be completed this month in reviewing our estate and our buildings”. He was very clear about that.
Are you telling me now that that has slipped? The Mayor previously to me had been very clear - and you had - that you expected to be signing off some decisions before purdah kicks in in a couple of weeks’ time. Are you telling me that is now not going to be the case?
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): I am not sure. I will be honest with you. I am not sure whether that would be the case and whether the proposals will come forward in time for the pre-election period.
As I said, they will not be proposals for the whole of the Estate Strategy like we went out with in consultation in 2017 because we had fairly good certainty around decreasing police officer numbers and we knew what we were having to deal with. What I expect to come forward - and, as I said, I do not know whether it would be pre-election or post-election - will be proposals from the MPS for a small number of buildings that they absolutely know they will not need whatever happens in terms of growth and whatever happens in terms of operational decisions that the Commissioner [MPS] will have to take as to how that growth will be utilised and where they will be placed.
Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM: Yes, I understand the logic of what you are saying: that they are going to come forward with a handful of building sites that clearly are not going to be used and then you are going to pause everything else, but that is very different. In January [2020] the Deputy Commissioner was very clear when I questioned him, saying:
“Our expectation is we do not need to reverse it. We do not need to stop the Strategy. We need to go ahead and reduce the number of buildings.”
He was very clear that the Strategy was going ahead as was. Robin [Wilkinson] then said, “We are reviewing it, but it is going to come to you very quickly”. We are now in March with no sign of it. It sounds like the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing.
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): That is not the case. As I have said before at this Committee, this is a genuinely incredibly complex situation with the number of police officers. We just do not know what will happen after the next financial year. I do know, as the Mayor has said and as I said last time as well, that we will have a small number of buildings coming forward. We know that Paddington, Hendon and Wembley will come forward and we will be taking decisions around that. Then we will have a small number of buildings that we are sure will be able to be put on the market for sale.
It is difficult. I understand that over the course things have changed. We have to get this right because - I do not need to tell you - once you have sold a building, it is gone. It is absolutely gone, and we have to get it right. There are some really complicated property decisions to be taken, and complicated and a complex operational decisions the Commissioner is going to take about where she wants to deploy officers and where they will go physically in London as well as within different command units.
Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM: If I have this right, you are going to probably have a decision that may or may not come through before purdah to sell off a handful of buildings and everything else is in limbo for many months until you have some confirmation from the Government about police funding?
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): Yes.
Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM: OK. Thank you. That is very clear. Thank you very much.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): The next set of questions is on antisocial behaviour (ASB). I will start off and then Assembly Member Hall will come in.
Knife crime, terrorism and terrorist attacks quite understandably dominate the news agenda and the political agenda, but ASB is what Londoners have to put up with day in and day out. I want to ask both of you. Reports of ASB are increasing in London. What are the reasons behind this increase? Perhaps you might wish to start off, Deputy Mayor.
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): The increase in terms of ASB in London last year? There can be a number of reasons as to why ASB and reports of ASB have increased. The increase was last year. Overall the trend has been downwards. You are right. There was an increase from last year, but actually overall the trend is downwards.
In terms of what is driving it, I would say there are a number of things that are driving it. There has been an improvement in the ability of Londoners to be able to report ASB. The website now allows people to be able to report online.
I would also say - and I know some members of this Committee will not like this - that if you have a situation where the number of police officers in London has gone below 30,000 and you have a situation, as we had last year in 2019, where a number of local police officers had to be abstracted because of real demands on policing and we had a real focus on the large number of demonstrations and large number of international events in London with declining police officer numbers, some things unfortunately will not get tackled in the way that they should get tackled. That has been driving some of the issues around ASB as well.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): Sorry, can I just clarify your point? I may have misheard you, but did you say that the trend is going down?
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): The overall trend in reports of ASB since 2010 overall --
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): Can we just clarify that, yes?
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): -- yes, has fallen. We have seen an increase last year. We do not know whether that is going to be a trend that will continue. Last year we did see an increase in reporting.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): Your thoughts, Assistant Commissioner?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): I broadly echo the Deputy Mayor’s thoughts on this. There has been a 29% reduction in ASB over the longer period and it is only, as you say, in this last year that we have seen an uptick in it, which is regrettable. There are a number of reasons. I will not repeat what the Deputy Mayor has said, but we have been very stretched, as you will know, clearly, with all of the extra activity that we have had to manage, protests being one of them but not the only thing.
I would stress, however, that we do consider of course ASB as a really important part of confidence building, in fact, our ability to deal with it and recognise it, which is why we have 1,700 officers who are dedicated to the 629 wards and that is not changing. Those officers are our first line of response to ASB problem solving. That is the approach that we think is the right approach.
We also have, on top of those Dedicated Ward Officers across London, particular locations where we have additionality. The West End is one example and there are others where we have a dedicated team over and above response and our neighbourhoods who deal with things like the night-time economy. The obvious one is the West End, as I have said, but we also have a similar team working in the Shoreditch area to deal with the night-time economy issues there. Alongside people like schools’ officers and licencing officers, all of these officers have a role to play in addressing ASB.
I am sure you will know this intuitively if not from the facts and figures, but the vast majority of ASB happens between 4.00pm and 8.00pm in the evening, often associated with schools exiting and pupils being on the streets and that kind of thing. Within that period, the busiest time of course is Friday and Saturday, when in addition to all of that you have the night-time economy, people going out in the evening and being out and about much more. We understand the pattern and we do take, as I said, ASB extremely seriously and we expect our neighbourhood teams to be the first line of response in dealing with it.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): You mentioned your work in the Shoreditch area. I was going to ask you a question about what you are doing in Shoreditch and so perhaps I should ask you now.
To what extent is ASB an issue for the night-time economy in London? Very specifically, can you tell us more about what goes on in Shoreditch in terms of the partnership with the Council? You also have the City of London Corporation. What is the police response and strategy generally in terms of London’s nightlife?
I should add that I have been to a number of meetings in Tower Hamlets, as recently as about three weeks ago, of the local Safer Neighbourhood Board and people are not against the night-time economy. It is just that they feel that there is a total lack of empathy and understanding of ASB and the consequences of it. They certainly welcome the trade and the vibrancy, but unfortunately there are more negative aspects that they feel still do not resonate, if I may say so, with the police or with the council or indeed with this building.
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): If you have been there, you will know that there has been a partnership approach with Hackney and Tower Hamlets to create this Neighbourhood Improvement District Team, which is part of the response to dealing with the ASB associated with the night-time economy there.
We also have an operation running, Operation Lagana, which is again predominantly focused in Shoreditch around the night-time economy. It is a combination of visible patrolling, visiting licensed premises, working in partnership as you would expect with the Council’s enforcement officers. It is early days for that team, but I want to reassure you that we are taking that issue in Shoreditch incredibly seriously alongside our partners in the local authority. It is too early to say what long-term effect that operation will have but it certainly has some encouraging results in terms of stop and search, arrests and venues that have been visited so far in its life.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): Perhaps you could give us some more details of what is going on in terms of the ongoing operation? Obviously, the local Assembly Member but the Committee as well would welcome further details of what exactly the operation entails, figures for arrests and so on.
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): It entails a mixture of visible patrols, as I said, and visiting licensed premises with enforcement officers and licensing officers. There have been a number of dispersals implemented by our officers when the situation merits it. We have had a number of stop and search operations targeting knife carrying and violence, as you would expect. A number of fines have been issued, I think 20 thus far, in terms of breaches of various licensing regulations. There is a plainclothes asset as well that is sweeping in behind the very visible on-street activity to pick up the more covert ASB that is perpetrated. It is a mixture of activity across mainly overt and visible but some covert activity as well involving local officers as well as some of our taskforce assets. The Territorial Support Group (TSG), for example, has been tasked into there as well.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): Thank you for that. Before I bring Assembly Member Berry in, can I ask you, Deputy Mayor? Do you think there is a need for more defined messaging so that we do not just see the night-
time economy in terms of the pound sign? I have been to a meeting where the Night Czar, Amy Lamé, attended about 18 months ago and that was the feeling of local residents and businesses in and around Brick Lane in Shoreditch and at a meeting I attended three weeks ago of the local Safer Neighbourhood Board. This is getting this thing over that we do care about them and we do care about their concerns. They are certainly not not-in-my-backyarders.
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): We work very closely with Amy Lamé, the Night Czar. A really important part of her work is about the economy and about having a vibrant night-time economy, but absolutely core to the work that she is doing and the work that we do with her is that that has to be a safe and secure night-time economy that is balanced and cannot impact residents in the way that a night- time economy can.
I feel a bit like I have stepped back into my Hackney days talking about Shoreditch. I spent a lot of time in my Hackney days trying to tackle ASB in the night-time economy in Shoreditch. I know this area incredibly well.
In the work we are doing with Amy Lamé, we have funded and invested in a Safer Sounds Partnership, which is basically a partnership arrangement between businesses, night-time venues and police as well to ensure that the night-time economy and its impact is safer, especially around ASB. That is incredibly important. We have the Women’s Night-Time Safety Charter. Again, it is about increasing the safety particularly of women and working with businesses. Amy chairs a monthly meeting with the MPS in terms of Licensing Champions and also has a Night-Time Borough Champions Network. There is a real strategic approach to trying to not only ensure that London is vibrant at night, but that London is safe at night and that the level of ASB is reduced as much as possible.
Then of course there are the individual operations and individual work with boroughs. That is incredibly important because, as we all know, this is not just about policing. This is about licensing, which is a borough responsibility. It is also about some of the ASB that is not really a policing matter but is about noise, about debris after a night-time economy, about the cleansing after in those areas as well. There is a real strategic approach across City Hall and across the MPS, working with the boroughs.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): Coming back to you, Assistant Commissioner, in terms of the Shoreditch area, is there any joint working with the City of London Police?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): I cannot answer that directly. I do not have a briefing on that, other than to say that, funnily enough, my first posting as a police constable (PC) was Shoreditch and I remember dealing with ASB back then. We were right next to the City [of London] police station there and we used to work all the time with officers from that. That is anecdotal and I know it is 30 years ago, but the point is that we have collaboration on the agenda. We do work closely with our colleagues in the City where we can get value from it because it affects the City as much as it affects us.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): I am going to hand over to Assembly Member Berry shortly, but last Friday - and actually this is something I was quite pleased about - the Night Czar had what she calls a monthly surgery.
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): A night-time surgery, yes.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): We went around meeting people who work in the night-time economy at the bank across the river and then they carried on, but I finished off at the Bishopsgate Police Station with City of London police officers who have to deal with the consequences of the night-time economy. I was impressed. I
know there are other criticisms in terms of how the Night Czar addresses the ASB side of the night-time economy, but I was also impressed with the visit and the officers who attended.
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): Good.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): I will hand over to you, Assembly Member Berry.
Siân Berry AM: Yes, sorry, I had my hand up for this section just to ask a quick question about data, if that is OK. I know the Deputy Mayor was just talking about this exact question, really, which is the overlap between council responsibilities and police responsibilities when it comes to ASB. We have looked at this before in the Committee and talked to councils and definitely, in terms of knowing whether it is increasing or not and knowing where it is increasing and where it is not, I know that councils are taking this issue quite seriously, too. They are also improving their data collection.
Is MOPAC doing anything to improve overall combined data collection on ASB, particularly when it is noise and environment related? Actually, all of it overlaps. Neighbour disputes and all of these things overlap.
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): The dashboard that we have that everyone can look at is around police data on ASB and we are going to keep it on police data. You have asked me before in relation to whether MOPAC will collect the data from the councils. I have said before that this is an area that we are not going to be stepping into. As you know, it is not just about boroughs. ASB data is also about the social landlords - I always get my terms mixed up with social landlords - because it is some of those about noise and about people clattering above. That is really intrusive, and I am not downplaying it at all, but clattering from living in flats with people above them. No, we are not going to be collecting data for those areas that we do not have a responsibility on.
Siân Berry AM: Yes. The Mayor has responsibility for London, and you said you were taking a strategic approach. I am not asking you to do anything that is too onerous, but where councils are now collecting data - and I know they are doing things like issuing iPads now to their own noise officers and that kind of thing - it might be sensible to be looking at it. Also knowing, for example, a council running a very good communication campaign about how to report things to the council could lead to an artificial drop in reports to the police because they are now being reported to the council instead.
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): At the moment our dashboard is on the MPS ASB and that is the way we are going to stick it. I would be interested in terms of looking forward in the next Police and Crime Plan, if I am still here post-election. It would be worth looking at it. It is a London-wide priority on ASB. What do we know about that?
Siân Berry AM: Great. Can I move on to roads and transport?
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): No, Assembly Member Hall has some questions.
Susan Hall AM: Yes, I do. Deputy Mayor, you mentioned police numbers again as being a possible issue with ASB. Can you tell me? Over the last nearly four years, have you ever suggested to the Mayor that he stops putting money into public relations (PR), bicycle ballet and beach parties and puts more of his money - because he has a considerable budget of £18 billion - into police to make Londoners safer?
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): As you know, the Mayor has done everything he can to put extra money into the MPS --
Susan Hall AM: No, he has not!
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): -- far more than the previous Mayor, far more. He has raised the precept. He has taken difficult decisions to move business rates into the MPS. Over £234 million extra has gone into the MPS budget because of the decisions the Mayor has taken.
The problem with your premise around Shaun Bailey’s [AM] budget for his mayoral candidacy talks about --
Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM: Point of information, it was not his budget because it was not in his name. It was Susan Hall’s.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): One second. Hold on. Sorry, Assembly Member Hall, could you just let her finish?
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): What the Mayor has done is he has invested in the MPS far more. As I said, £234 million was diverted into the MPS. What really importantly he has also done is he has invested in tackling the drivers of crime.
Susan Hall AM: It is going well, is it not, Deputy Mayor?
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): You may flippantly cast aside things like Boroughs of Culture but we know that what happens when young people do not have good things to do and good programmes to be on and do not have the opportunities that they need. They are much more likely to go into crime and into violence. What the Mayor has done is invest in that through the Mayor’s Young Londoners Fund and other things as well. He is not only putting money to the police, but he is also putting money into making sure that he tackles the drivers of crime. That is really balanced and that is what Londoners think as well.
Susan Hall AM: I therefore take it that the answer then is no and that you have not asked him to look at his own budget. I accept he is charging Londoners out there more money and we are putting more money into the police, which everybody is happy to because we want to feel safer, but I actually asked you if you have asked him to look at his own budget and his own amount of spending on PR, bicycle ballet, We’re All Bats and all this rubbish that goes on? Have you ever asked him to look at his own budget to put more money into police officers, yes or no?
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): The Mayor has looked at his own budget. He has invested £15 million extra into violence against women and girls. He has put £234 million extra into the police, £17 million into diversionary activities for young people and more police officers.
Susan Hall AM: Maybe for more police officers when you have been whinging about the fact that the numbers are going down points to the fact that, at that point, we should have put more police officers on the street. The Mayor --
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): I totally agree with you and the Government cut the police budget drastically. We have had to take over £850 million out of the MPS budget --
Susan Hall AM: He has an £18 billion budget. He could have found some more money in there. You blame the Government constantly, but it begs the question if there is any point in a Mayor because he has a massive
budget. He could have put his hand in his own pocket and given us more police officers because we all know we need them.
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): He has. There are 1,300 extra police officers been recruited into the MPS because of mayoral funding.
Susan Hall AM: All right. Let us talk about his policies. Has the Mayor delivered on his promises to tackle ASB in London and what do you think have been his successes? More importantly, where do you think he has failed?
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): In terms of tackling ASB, it is a London-wide priority that we expect and the MPS are tackling. As the Assistant Commissioner has talked about, the first line in tackling ASB is neighbourhood policing. What the Mayor did when he came in and part of his manifesto was to restore neighbourhood policing, which - I know you do not like this, Susan - was drastically cut under the previous administration. Neighbourhood policing became not a priority.
Susan Hall AM: He should have put his hand in his pocket --
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): He has doubled the numbers of Dedicated Ward Officers across London so that every ward can have two Dedicated Ward Officers and one Police Community Support Officer (PCSO). Yes, the Mayor has delivered on his commitment for neighbourhood policing and that is incredibly important in tackling ASB.
Susan Hall AM: I am sure residents will feel very happy about that when they are having to cope with ASB, which is an absolute blight on the lives of communities.
What work do you think the Mayor is undertaking to ensure that Londoners feel safe in their communities when they go out at night? Many of them unfortunately do not.
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): Susan, I do not know if you have been -- we have just had a long discussion about what the Mayor and City Hall and the MPS have been doing in terms of tackling ASB and not just the ASB that is associated with a night-time economy. If you want, I can go through it again about the strategic approach, what we are doing, the work of MOPAC and the work of Amy Lamé, the investment we have put into the Safer Sounds Partnership, the investment we have put into --
Susan Hall AM: I hear what you say --
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): -- ensuring that there is the right approach to ASB --
Susan Hall AM: -- but it is how people feel. You could say you are making a cake, Deputy Mayor, and have all the ingredients on the table. It does not mean at the other end of it you are going to have a cake. It just means you have lots of different things in different positions, but the end --
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): I know you do not like --
Susan Hall AM: I am just trying to bring it down to a level that we can all understand.
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): Yes, absolutely, and the thing that Londoners absolutely understand is that the Government and the Party that you are a member of has consistently cut police officers since 2010 and that has had an impact on the feelings of safety of Londoners.
Susan Hall AM: No, no.
Tony Arbour AM: No, they understand we have the highest level of murder, knife crime and all the rest of it.
Susan Hall AM: Yes, are you just ignoring that.
Tony Arbour AM: That is what they understand, and they know it is the Mayor’s responsibility, not the Government’s responsibility.
Susan Hall AM: Yes, and if they do not, it is our job to make sure that they know that this Mayor has £18 billion and should have put his hand in his pocket. We all accept we need police officers and more police officers, Assistant Commissioner. Be assured we all understand that. What we do not understand is when millions and millions of pounds go to PR when it should be going to make Londoners safe. I will leave it there, Chair.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): Thank you. I just want to make one final point on this because it is an important issue, Assistant Commissioner. About three or four years ago there was a survey that was reported in one of the nationals about how police officers actually saw ASB. For a career-minded officer, it was not exactly the area they would wish to concentrate upon.
Has there been a change in police culture? I am sure you will say yes, but how do you get the message over that ASB is what Londoners experience day in and day out and it is an important part of policing work?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): I will start by saying that most police officers - I think I can speak for them; I am one, after all - join the police service to help people and are happy to do that wherever and however they can. If helping people is solving a neighbourhood issue that is working with partners, noise or litter, they will very happily do that and see that as just as successful as solving a crime. All of these things are important. There is not a stigma attached to neighbourhood policing any more than there is to any other part of policing. I have done all sorts of policing in my career. Many officers move through all of these disciplines.
Of course, our priority right now - and every officer if you ask them will tell you - in London is bearing down on violence. Of course, that is our priority, but it does not mean we stop doing absolutely everything else, which is why we have our dedicated teams and why we are trying to focus on ASB in the way that we have described in Shoreditch, for example, and the West End. These things do not exist in isolation. Everything links to everything else. You have to take the approach that you bear down on the biggest priority, which is violence, but you are cognisant to the fact that activity around ASB or low-level crime also will impact, maybe not directly but indirectly. The short answer is that there is not an issue with it.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): Thank you. We will move on to the next set of questions to be led by Assembly Member Berry on road and transport policing.
Siân Berry AM: Thank you. Yes, I wanted to follow up and do a proper session on some questions we have asked in recent meetings about the moving of the officers from the Roads and Transport Policing Command (RTPC) into the Violent Crime Task Force (VCTF), which was in September 2018, if I recall correctly. The
discussion we last had with the Commissioner was that this was more or less permanent now and that the RTPC was going to be restocked with officers that were being newly recruited.
I want to ask a couple of factual questions first of all. What is its current strength now compared to its previous strength in the RTPC? We do not seem to have that data anywhere.
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): All right. I can give you reasonably accurate figures. I do not have today’s figure for the RTPC strength. The budgeted workforce target is 1,500 and something officers. We know that we are running a 6% vacancy rate on top of that. Of course, there are about 520 PCSOs on top of those officers. It is a combined strength of just over 2,000. Overall, we are running something like a 6% vacancy rate. If you include the 111 officers that were abstracted to work on violence, then that vacancy rate extends out to about 11%.
Siân Berry AM: Those are officers to the VCTF and that leaves you with an effective 11% vacancy rate?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): Approximately, yes.
Siân Berry AM: That is what the Commissioner was talking about refilling from new recruits, effectively?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): Yes.
Siân Berry AM: That is really useful. In light of Vision Zero, which is our goal to have zero deaths on the roads, and any changes in demand, which I do not know is up or down at the moment, has this affected road safety and the ability to tackle road crime, this vacancy rate, this lack of officers?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): I will try to answer that if I can. Everybody accepts that Vision Zero is exactly what we should be aiming for. It is a fantastic aspiration. Everybody I think would accept that the 4,000 or so killed or seriously injured on our roads every year is unacceptably high, no one more than the Commissioner and the Mayor. The Roads and Transport Policing Command (RTPC) is dedicated resource that works towards achieving Vision Zero as well as doing other enforcement activity, but it is not the only asset. Every police officer is enabled and entitled to deal with road traffic incidents and often does, but the spearhead would be the RTPC, absolutely.
The abstraction of 111 officers to focus on violence was the right decision and that is why the Commissioner has extended that indefinitely because we are making an impact on violent crime. It is hard yards it is really difficult and attritional work, but it is important work and we feel it is right. RTPC officers are often more experienced and more skilled than your average member of a response team because they have been in the job, typically, longer and they have driving skills and so on and so forth. They are very valuable assets and so it is right that they stay where they are to tackle violence because that is absolutely our number-one priority.
What are we therefore doing to fill the gap? That is probably what your question boils down to. Some of what we have been doing is to fill that gap using overtime. We have worked the existing officers a bit harder. We have asked them to work longer hours. We have asked them to work on their rest days. We have bought some extra capacity with our existing officers and that, of course, is not something we can do forever. Officers become tired and burnt out and so we are carefully monitoring our use of overtime, but it is one tactic that we are using to make sure that we do not lose focus on Vision Zero.
Secondly - and you would expect me to say this - we have to take a prioritised approach to how we are going to tackle our approach to Vision Zero. There are three tiers, really. We look primarily at tier one, our prolific repeat road traffic offenders. Tier two are repeat prolific locations that always come up and then tier three is general visibility.
In terms of tier one, we really are focusing on some very significant offenders using things like the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency and revocation of licensing, an Achilles-heel type of approach to attack these individuals and try to remove them from the roads.
In terms of high-profile locations, we have some great results from two very notorious difficult areas in terms of accidents, the A10 and the A12. The A10 was notorious for street cruising and racing and ASB. A lot of speeding enforcement [has been done] up there. I cannot quote you the figures but the number of serious incidents there in terms of [people] killed or seriously injured has dramatically reduced. The A12 similarly had a speeding issue and a lot of enforcement activity has been done there. Where we focus our activity on these kinds of locations, we can make an impact. Of course, if we had more officers, we could do more of that, but it is right that we focus on the highest profile areas first because they will have the most significant impact in the overall drive towards reducing [people] killed and seriously injured.
Then overall the visibility of course is important as well. Whenever our officers are out, they are marked, they are visible, and they are engaging with road traffic users.
Siân Berry AM: That is really useful. In terms of the tiers that you just outlined, which is a really very useful way of describing what you are doing, I follow Superintendent Andy Cox, who is the lead for Vision Zero within the MPS. He has been talking this week about, for example, being out looking for uninsured vehicles. We know from previous work that looking for uninsured drivers is a really good way to find people who you are wanting for other things. It is a very effective way of screening, looking for people who are driving without insurance.
He has been highlighting that 497 uninsured vehicles were seized in London last week. Is that up or down? Are you cutting back on that prevention activity? Is that tier one, tier two or tier three? It is not clear from what you just said.
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): I would probably put that into tier 3, sort of overall --
Siân Berry AM: That is down? That has been cut back on, essentially, as part of your prioritisation?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): It depends. If there is a particular location where we know we have significant numbers of these then it would fit into tier 2, but generally speaking of uninsured vehicles across the capital, that activity is something that officers would do in their general patrol. I can tell you a story, actually. I was out with road traffic policing a month ago and I seized an uninsured vehicle. We were not aiming to do it; we just happening to be driving along the road, we were using our onboard Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) and the ANPR indicated that the vehicle in front was not insured. We pulled over and we spoke to the driver. The driver assured us they had the documentation. We went back to their address, which was not far away. They did not have the documentation. Car seized. This kind of seizing of uninsured vehicles happens as part of normal duty.
We also have an ANPR interceptor team, as I am sure you know, which is also used in specific locations to target vehicles that are known to the system. It may be for no insurance; it may be for all sorts of other issues.
That often has a very high success rate in terms of identifying individuals not only who are breaking the road traffic law but often, as you said, who will be involved in other types of criminality as well. It has a benefit beyond just the road traffic element.
Siân Berry AM: Yes. Thank you. Obviously, I get a bit of debate sometimes in this Committee about surveillance-type issues but this is truly intelligence-led surveillance, in a way. This is a way of using things like ANPR in a way that is targeted genuinely at people who might be worth pulling over.
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): I am a member of the public, of course. I would rather be pulled over because there was a reason for it than not, and of course that is what things like ANPR give us the ability to do.
Siân Berry AM: Great. OK, thank you. Just a couple more questions about other things that we are not really seeing enough off, I do not think, and one of them is data. There is an annual report that Transport for London (TfL) publish on collisions and casualties and that is currently overdue. That is a TfL responsibility. There is the Road Policing Enforcement Statistics bulletin which also comes out. Now, these are statistics that come from the police. I have been asking the question I ask every year, which is about hit and run casualties, and I have had not a great service from the MPS yet on this. Are you behind on the admin part of the road and transport policing?
There is a problem with the data because the data collection method was changed in 2017, for 2017, so 2017 data is the first of a new set of data. We have not had 2018 and obviously we have not had 2019 yet as it just finished. There is currently no way of seeing if there is a trend in road casualties because the last comparable year we had, which we could compare to earlier years, was 2016. That is four years ago.
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): I do not doubt you are right. My understanding is that we are able to know, for example, the breakdown in killed and seriously injured in terms of pedestrians, cyclists, motorcyclists and drivers. Whether we are able, within that, automatically to extract, for example, a case where a driver has hit somebody and made off without stopping, I am unable to say. Clearly manually we could do that. I will need to go away and find out.
Siân Berry AM: I have had it in previous years and now there is suddenly a problem. That seems to be possibly not a data issue but an admin issue. We get the STATS19 data still so we can see how many people are being killed on the roads and 2019’s total was 130. That was up on 2018, which was 112. That is not subject to any kind of reporting. We know how many people have died. So far this year in 2020, 13 people were killed in the first month, January. That compares with 10 the previous January. Although these are not statistics, they are numbers that are far too high when they represent individual people. I hope that by discussing it in public and pointing it out to you, we can urge you to bring people on as soon as possible. It concerns me that new recruits are being brought in, for example, given what you said about them being more highly skilled. They may not be as highly skilled if they are new recruits.
The final question on resources is about TfL, who partly fund the RTPC. Are they satisfied with the service they are getting for the money that they pay? What proportion of the funding comes from TfL?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): I guess that is a question for TfL to answer, whether they are satisfied or not.
Siân Berry AM: Have you received any feedback from them?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): I was in their offices recently and chatting to senior people there. They did not raise any concerns with me. I am sure they would if they had them, but I was not there for a huge amount of time, so I am unable to answer that, I am afraid.
Siân Berry AM: OK.
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): Can I just clarify one thing? I do not want people to be under any misapprehension. The 111 officers that are currently with the VCTF, in the first wave of new recruits coming in, we will not be putting new recruits into road traffic policing.
Siân Berry AM: That is the implication of what the Commissioner was saying to us last time.
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): I have not seen what the Commissioner said but my understanding is that the --
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): Will they free up others? My understanding was that new recruits may free up other officers, other experienced officers, but I will let the Commissioner talk for herself.
Siân Berry AM: OK. If we could get some clarity on that because I may have misunderstood but I understood that the transfers of officers to the VCTF was made permanent. I do not know what the wording was.
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): The transfer to the VCTF is open-ended, so there are no plans to bring those individual officers back. The recruitment that we are going through now brings brand new officers into the MPS, absolutely, but we would not be posting them directly into the RTPC. What I think the Deputy Mayor was referring to is the ability then, as those people fill the vacancies elsewhere, to free up experienced officers to move to and fro. But this is all work in progress at the moment as we understand what the recruitment looks like and where those officers will be posted. We try to put them where they are going to have the most impact, of course.
Siân Berry AM: A quick question on speed enforcement, which is the second part of the section I was given, Chair. I will carry on, if that is OK.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): Just very quickly.
Siân Berry AM: Great. We know that TfL has introduced new 20-mile-per-hour roads on red routes within the Congestion Charge zone. This is something like 9kms of road, but obviously the MPS is expected to enforce speed on these new roads. Will this increase demand on police? I will combine all my questions. Have you made any representations to the Mayor about this, have you been asked to comment on policy such as whether or not this could be rolled out to a wider area and have you made any kind of argument about police resource and costs to prevent this? Obviously, the Congestion Charge zone is quite small.
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): I have made no representations to the Mayor about the 20-mile-per-hour zone. I have not been asked to. In terms of resource implication, it is very difficult to know. Clearly our job is to enforce the law and the traffic part of that is the speed restrictions. I think we have to fall back on our principles that I outlined earlier. If a 20-mile-per- hour zone becomes a problematic area then it will benefit from a focused response, the same as any other sort
of problematic area. If, however, it does not, then I guess it would receive the same sort of general visibility patrolling that any other area of London would get. We will have to see what develops as these zones become effective.
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): Just to add to that, Vision Zero was not dreamt up by TfL in isolation.
Siân Berry AM: No. There was a long campaign for it, yes.
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): Sorry, of course there were all the outside influences but the RTPC were very much part of Vision Zero, setting the strategy, setting the vision, so all of this is not, “We are doing Vision Zero. What do you think, MPS?” It has been done in collaboration.
Siân Berry AM: Yes. This is a specific question about the extent of the 20-mile-per-hour roads.
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): No, I understand, but strategically RTCP have been very much working with TfL, on part of TfL, to develop and deliver Vision Zero. This is not a separate issue for them.
Siân Berry AM: OK. Thank you.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): Thank you. We have three sets of questions and I am conscious a couple of Members want to leave at lunchtime, at 12pm, so if we can go to finances for the next set of questions. Assembly Member Arbour?
Tony Arbour AM: These are questions about fraud, and they are really quite simple questions, I think. The first one is to both of you. About a third of all crime is fraud and I would like to have a handle on the numbers that are dealt with in London. Do either of you know how many cases of fraud were reported to the MPS last year, or indeed in any year?
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): The figures I have from Action Fraud, which are for the period from April 2018 to March 2019, are that there were nearly 4,000 cybercrimes reported in London and 160,000 fraud crimes reported. Those are the figures for London from Action Fraud that we have.
Tony Arbour AM: I missed that. What was the total of those figures? The only one I actually caught was the 160,000.
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): Almost 3,800 cybercrimes reported in London. Basically 160,000 total fraud crimes reported.
Tony Arbour AM: That is the total number of fraud crimes reported?
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): Yes.
Tony Arbour AM: Do you think that figure is correct, Assistant Commissioner, given that the total number of fraud crimes which allegedly occurred last year was in excess of 3.8 million?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): I think what we have here is an example of the phenomenon of the difference between the Crime Survey for England and
Wales and recorded figures. Clearly if the figures are so different, people are choosing not to report formally to the police. I can only go on the figures that are reported to the police and then obviously on to Action Fraud, which are the figures that have been quoted. Do I think there might be a rump of offences that are not formally recorded? I am sure that is correct. I am sure.
Tony Arbour AM: Right. Now, the position is this, and perhaps you can confirm this. If somebody defrauds a Londoner and a Londoner wants to report it, he is directed to Action Fraud. Is that right?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): My understanding of the process is the report will be received by the MPS and we refer it on to Action Fraud. Action Fraud is a national arrangement hosted by the City of London [Police]. I know you know this, Mr Arbour. Because of the vast number of these types of allegations and because fraud is different in many ways to other crimes inasmuch as it is often committed remotely and it is not clear exactly where the offender may be, it is important that we get a global view of what is going on so that patterns can be picked up, which is one of the reasons why Action Fraud collects all of this. What Action Fraud then does is look at viable lines of inquiry that may exist in that allegation --
Tony Arbour AM: I am not asking questions about the solution to fraud, I am asking questions about the numbers which are reported in London. Now, I am told, and I have a note here which says that victims of fraud are directed to Action Fraud. In other words, they do not necessarily go via the MPS. Since, in effect, the MPS has outsourced this to the City - and I suppose this one is really for the Deputy Mayor - ought we not know how much of that service which we are paying for -- we should have some idea of the numbers of Londoners who are reporting the offences? It beggar’s belief that it is only 160,000.
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): Those are the figures that I have from Action Fraud, as I said. From April 2018 to March 2019, there were basically 160,000 fraud crimes reported in London. Your question: should we know the number of crimes that were reported? Yes, we should, and we do. Your secondary question: do I think that is all the crimes that happen in London for fraud? I am sure that is not the case.
Tony Arbour AM: It is manifestly not.
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): No.
Tony Arbour AM: If there are nearly 4 million incidents of fraud reported in a given year, the chances are -- and indeed we know that Londoners are more likely to be victims of fraud than anywhere else.
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): I am not sure we do know that, do we, that we are more likely to be victims of fraud?
Tony Arbour AM: I think we do. I have a note here.
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): The volumes for London will be bigger because London is bigger.
Tony Arbour AM: “More fraud incidents are reported per person than anywhere else in the country.”
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): The question will be whether that is visitors, tourists, people working in London. As you know, we have a huge influx. I do not know the details of that.
Tony Arbour AM: No, I think that is a way of getting out of it. Can I suggest to you that we ought to know? Certainly, the MPS ought to know, even if MOPAC does not know. We are, in effect, paying somebody else, ie the City, to investigate crime on our behalf. We ought to know how much value for money we are getting and therefore we ought to know the numbers. Do you agree with that?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): I can assist with some of the numbers --
Tony Arbour AM: Please.
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): -- and I understand the thrust of your question. Action Fraud is something that is a national response to this. You know that.
Tony Arbour AM: Yes.
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): In terms of the numbers of crimes that are reported to us through Action Fraud, or directly to us that go to Action Fraud, the number is 160,000. We have established that. I do need to explain a bit of the process just to give you a sense of the numbers and the value for money question that you asked. What happens in Action Fraud for those 160,000 crimes is that they look at whether it is a viable line of inquiry, whether it is related or the same methodology for other crimes that might be reported into the City, to Essex or Kent or anywhere else, and where they feel there is a realistic prospect of a productive investigation they will refer back out to whichever force is the most appropriate to investigate.
Unlike other crimes, the receiving force from the referral is the force that has the highest chance of following up the line of inquiry. In every other crime type, it is where the offence happened, but with fraud, because of the peculiarity of it, sometimes you do not know exactly where in the ether it happened. You have to take the approach that the force that has the line of enquiry is the one that takes the crime. In the year 2018/19, just to give you some numbers around it, we got 17,674 referrals for investigation from Action Fraud in the MPS. Our detection rate out of those 17,674, is 15%, which is better than most other forces, actually.
On top of the standard borough response, to try to get a handle and try to give a better level of service, particularly to the high-end fraud victims, we have created an Economic Crime Hub across our BCU model. The target is 190 specially trained officers in that. We are currently running at 145 that are trained. Those are the officers that take the lead in anything that is more than a very straightforward inquiry to action all of those referrals.
Tony Arbour AM: Forgive me if I say this. You are saying you are very successful on the basis of the numbers of offences which are referred to you by Action Fraud. Action Fraud are referring to you, I would have said, a statistically insignificant number of cases. 70,000 of 3 million is statistically insignificant. Something is clearly happening at Action Fraud which for some reason or another means that they are not referring matters to the MPS and conceivably to other forces where they think it is happening.
It is alleged - I wonder if you care to comment on this - that Action Fraud run a triage service: you ring them up and they listen to you and they say, “Yes, sir, terrible thing”, and somebody at the other end of the line is effectively saying, “No further action will be taken”. On the face of it that appears to be true. If there are 3 million-odd cases, you would need probably more people working at Action Fraud than the 30,000 people
we have working for the MPS to deal with that number of offences. The thing I am really asking you to comment on is this: do you believe that Action Fraud, on the basis of the figures that you have given us, the tiny number of cases which are referred back to the MPS, are performing a service to Londoners?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): I think that is a question that you would have to ask Action Fraud. It is not my area of expertise.
Tony Arbour AM: All right.
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): I deal --
Tony Arbour AM: Let me ask the Deputy Mayor.
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): Just on that point, clearly fraud is a huge issue and it is under-reported. There is no debate about that. We deal with the actuality we have in front of us now, which are the referrals we get, and we try to do the best that we can with those, but fraud is such a difficult thing to detect. Better effort should be associated with the prevention and education to stop it happening in the first place, which is a whole different thing.
Tony Arbour AM: Yes, I understand. Do you not think, Deputy Mayor, that Londoners deserve a better service from Action Fraud if, on the face of it, this very tiny proportion of the number of frauds committed on Londoners is referred back by Action Fraud to the MPS? Maybe there ought to be some other way in which fraud is tackled in London rather than farming it out to Action Fraud, who I understand have farmed it out to somebody else?
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): As you probably know, there have been press reports about Action Fraud and about their performance, and some negative press reports around that. Sir Craig Mackey [QPM] has undertaken a review into serious organised crime. Action Fraud is part of that review. We are expecting that review quite soon and I expect there to be some recommendations as to the best way that fraud can be tackled across the country, not just in London. I am basically waiting for Sir Craig Mackey’s review. Fraud is part of that, and we will have a much better understanding of what could be done better in terms of tackling fraud.
Tony Arbour AM: That, I am afraid, is kind of kicking it into the long grass --
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): It is not, because he is just about to report.
Tony Arbour AM: You pay council tax. I pay council tax. We all pay the police precept. The crime which a Londoner is most likely to be a victim of is a fraud crime and the chances of anything happening as a result of that are very tiny. What I am suggesting to you is that Action Fraud, operated by the City of London Police, who I understand have farmed it out to some American conglomerate who, for all I know, have offices in New Delhi, somewhere of that sort, are in effect not providing any service to those victims of crime. Therefore, ought we not to be looking at the fact that we seemingly are not getting value for money?
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): I am sorry, I do not really understand why you think that is kicking it into the long grass. Sir Craig Mackey [QPM] has done a review --
Tony Arbour AM: You said it was talking about -- you referred to organised crime. Most fraud is not organised crime.
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): Sir Craig Mackey’s review into serious and organised crime is looking at what is the best way to tackle fraud. We obviously have a very good relationship with Sir Craig, who has been Deputy Commissioner for the MPS and is an expert in this area. I am waiting for what he says rather than individually going off and thinking, “Well, this is the best way to do it. This is the best way to do it”. When we have his recommendations, and I understand that is going to be very soon - it is not in my hands; it is a report the Home Secretary has asked for - we will look at that. I am sure it will have some good recommendations because Sir Craig is such a professional and expert person.
Tony Arbour AM: You are not willing to say, even on the face of it, that Action Fraud, to whom we have farmed out this service to Londoners, is performing a very poor service?
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): We know that there are problems with Action Fraud. We know there have been problems. There have been exposés in the papers. We know that their victim satisfaction is not what it should be. We do know there are problems with Action Fraud. What I am saying is that as part of Sir Craig Mackey’s review, this is being looked at. He is the expert and I am going to wait for that. It is only going to be in the next couple of weeks. It is not kicking it into the long grass. I am answering your question. Is it what it should be? No.
Tony Arbour AM: Will it come back before purdah?
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): I have no idea. It is totally out of my hands.
Tony Arbour AM: You just said a couple of weeks.
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): You can ask the Home Secretary when it is going to come back. Sir Craig Mackey was asked to do the review and to do it quickly. I have no control over that.
Tony Arbour AM: Well --
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): You can sigh. It is not --
Tony Arbour AM: I am certainly willing to say on behalf of the people that I represent, many of whom have been victims of fraud of one kind or another, we are getting an appalling service.
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): Tony, I did say that we know that there are problems with Action Fraud.
Tony Arbour AM: Yes.
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): The solutions to those problems are not ones I am prepared to suddenly delve into when I know there is an expert looking at this who is going to come back with recommendations. I think that is a perfectly reasonable position to be in.
Tony Arbour AM: The corollary --
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): Can I just also say, in terms of what MOPAC has done as well, we have funded the Economic Crime Victim Care Unit and we are funding through the London Victims and Witness Service, care and support for victims of fraud. I am not downplaying this at all, especially
as we know that for those victims of fraud who are incredibly vulnerable, this is not a minor matter. People are losing their savings, losing the savings that they have worked very hard for. It is not a minor matter. There is real vulnerability here and they deserve and need to have a proper service.
Tony Arbour AM: I am pleased to hear you say that. Now, your function is - to use a cliché - to hold the MPS’s feet to the fire. Our function is to hold MOPAC’s feet to the fire. I can tell you this, and I do not think I have missed a meeting in I do not know how many years: it is the first time we have ever discussed Action Fraud.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): No, we have.
Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM: We did an investigation into it.
Tony Arbour AM: Pardon?
Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM: With Roger [Evans, former Assembly Member] we did a big investigation.
Tony Arbour AM: Yes, we visited them, but in the sense of having --
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): I am sorry, I did not know I was meant to bring subjects here to discuss. This is your Committee. You decide what you want to ask me about.
Tony Arbour AM: Of course, it is. The point I am just about to arrive at -- my peroration is this. We have discussed it and suddenly, as far as I can tell, completely out of the blue, we are told in a fortnight we are going to get this report all about the weaknesses --
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): It is not out of the blue. This is a public inquiry, a public review that Sir Craig Mackey was asked to do by the Home Secretary and part of it -- this is not the only thing --
Tony Arbour AM: So, it is our fault we do not know?
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): No, I am not saying that. It is not my review. It is not my report. It is a report that is going to go to the Home Secretary, but it is not out of the blue.
Tony Arbour AM: I will leave it there, Chair. I am happy that just before I go, I was able to air this grievance which my constituents have.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): Yes. There are certainly issues about Action Fraud. We have some more questions around this topic, but we will write to you, Assistant Commissioner. Yes?
Andrew Dismore AM: I very much share Tony’s criticisms on this. I think part of the problem is that a lot of the financial institutions simply put it down as a business expense rather than putting money into trying to deal with it. I also fully accept what Tony said about triaging. It is just not credible that this is the number of offences that should be investigated. One of the problems that I have come across several times - and I suspect this is outside any investigation into serious and organised crime - is where you get a bogus tradesman who comes along and says, “I will do your double-glazing”, or whatever, “Please give me a deposit”, and he is never seen again. Then they make a complaint and they are told, “It is a civil matter. We cannot look into it.
It is not a crime”. That happens time and time again, and it is usually vulnerable people who are caught out like that. That is not serious and organised crime, that is just a crooked --
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): No, and that is also to do with, as you will know, trading standards at local authority level, which have been - I am sorry, Susan [Hall AM], to say it again - absolutely cut. That type of doorstep fraud is often picked up by trading standards officers and we have so few in London now.
Andrew Dismore AM: It is not just that, is it? People do report it to the police and the police say, “It is a civil matter, go somewhere else”, and frankly it does not get dealt with. If fraud counts for so much of crime generally and in London, I have to say I just do not think it is given the right priority. The net result is people think they are just going to get away with it, and they do, like we have seen with other types of crime, like burglary, where we have this terrible -- was it 2% of burglaries that actually end up in a conviction? It is just not acceptable. I hope [Sir] Craig [Mackey QPM] does come up with something. No doubt the Home Secretary will shout at him if he does not come up with something promptly. Something has to be done and from my experience of what people have told me, Action Fraud simply is not fit for purpose. Something radical needs to change.
Tony Arbour AM: Thank you.
Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM: Quite right.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): I think that was the view of the West Midlands Police Commissioner as well, who described Action Fraud as “not fit for purpose”. Anyway, shall we move on? The next set of questions led by Assembly Member Dismore on the Babcock International training contract.
Andrew Dismore AM: Yes, a few questions about this. You may know that the last meeting of the Fire, Resilience and Emergency Planning Committee we went into the Babcock contract with the fire service in some detail and I will come to that in a minute, but could I ask first of all how long it took to negotiate the contract with Babcock?
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): The contract took a little bit longer because there were some real extra assurances undertaken and a review by an independent expert around the contract. It had good assurance processes. It took some time to negotiate it.
Andrew Dismore AM: How long?
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): I cannot tell you from start to finish. I know when it was signed but I cannot tell you from start to finish. I would have to go back and look into the full business case and when the decision was taken to put it out to tender. It is there on record. I just do not have it in my head.
Andrew Dismore AM: Right. Well, if you write and let us know about that.
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): Yes.
Andrew Dismore AM: How many people bid for the contract? How many companies bid for it?
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): Gosh. I do not have the ins and outs of the contract, who bid for it and how many people bid for it. Obviously, the contract was eventually let to Babcock.
Andrew Dismore AM: Yes. There are very few companies in this --
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): We did have a competition and my recollection is that the numbers dwindled, but it was not that they were the sole provider.
Andrew Dismore AM: Is this contract just for new recruits or does it include other forms of training?
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): Beg your pardon, I did not catch that.
Andrew Dismore AM: Is this contract just for new recruit training or does it --
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): Yes, it is just for new recruit training.
Andrew Dismore AM: Not for other forms of training?
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): No.
Andrew Dismore AM: I presume you read the HMICFRS report on the fire service Babcock contract on training.
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): Before the contract was let we were aware, as were the MPS, of the problems and the issues in the Babcock training for the fire service. This contract is very different. It has been through a lot of assurance. It is not the same type of contract that was let for the Fire Brigade, which in my understanding - I am not an expert in it in any sense - was let in 2011 for 25 years. This contract is for five years with a possibility of extending it for two years. It is a completely different type of contract. Babcock are not providing the same service to the MPS as they are providing to the London Fire Brigade (LFB).
Andrew Dismore AM: What flexibility is built into the Babcock contract?
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): What do you mean, “What flexibility”?
Andrew Dismore AM: Well, flexibility in the sense of, “Oh, we would like to change the modules in the training”, or the numbers involved are either more or less than it was before.
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): There is flexibility because, just taking a step back in terms of what the contract is, it is the contract to deliver - and I know you know this - the Policing Education Qualifications Framework (PEQF), the professional education qualification for policing. One of the reasons the contract did take longer is the element of risk around this because we are recruiting very quickly, which is really good news, and we wanted to make sure that in letting this contract we did not have any problems in terms of the training of those new recruits. We had to really look and the MPS had to really look and look very carefully at how they can ensure that with growth, recruitment and training kept place.
This is not the only channel for people to come in and be trained into the MPS. We will have the PEQF. We will also have graduate training and non-graduate training. There are three entry routes. It is very different to the LFB contract in that sense. There is flexibility in there because we are still testing to see how many recruits
will want to go down the PEQF route, how many will be graduates already or how many will not want to go down that route. There is flexibility within the contract.
Andrew Dismore AM: From time to time the MPS will review its training programme and decide it wants to do something different.
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): Yes.
Andrew Dismore AM: Do it in a different way. Does the contract include flexibility to do that, actually changing the specification of the contract about what you are delivering?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): The important thing to remember here is that this is not an MPS-designed training package; this is a College of Policing national curriculum which has been developed alongside academic institutions with whom Babcock have to partner. We have four universities in London that are responsible for the academic rigour of that element of the training. We have MPS officers that are working alongside Babcock to deliver some of the practical aspects, the officer safety and those types of things. The national curriculum will only be changed if the College of Policing change it and I am aware that Babcock’s contract was gone over in immense detail to make sure it was able to flex if there were a change, but there is not anticipated to be, and it would not be a MPS decision in any event. It would have to be something that would be going through the College of Policing and involve all of those other partnerships that I have described.
Andrew Dismore AM: Are there any other large police forces contracted to Babcock?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): I do not have that information, I am afraid.
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): There are other similar organisations that are contracted to Babcock, yes, there are.
Andrew Dismore AM: Perhaps we could know which major police forces are contracted to Babcock in due course.
You talked about MPS officers working with Babcock, secondees. Are they actually involved in the training itself or they just doing some oversight, like you mentioned?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): Depending on what type of training is being delivered, my understanding is that some of the practical training - for example officer safety training, which is about self-defence, how to detain and safely escort and all that kind of activity - will be delivered by police officers because they are experts in that, some of the academic elements of the PEQF will be delivered through the universities, and Babcock will do the remainder. It is a mixed economy of delivery across educational establishments, Babcock’s people and the MPS. The PEQF, as the Deputy Mayor has said, is only one of three entry routes into the service and it is the only one that Babcock is involved in. The other is the standard entry route we currently have, and then there is a degree-holders’ entry programme which is in addition to that. There are three ways in. Babcock are involved in the contract to deliver the PEQF route, as we have said.
Andrew Dismore AM: Why do you think Babcock can do it better than the MPS in-house?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): There is an issue of volume. A large provider can provide more efficiently, very often, than individual forces. There is the degree of expertise involved. There is a degree of drawing on a bigger team than the MPS could muster. There is the partnering with the academic institutions, which is not our core business. I guess - and this is not my area of business - one has to look at what is the most appropriate way of delivering the package that we are required to deliver from the national curriculum. The decision was taken that we need a partner to work with, a procurement process was run with those specifications and Babcock ended up being the people who best fitted that requirement that we set out.
Andrew Dismore AM: Talking about flexing numbers, I hear what you say about the Fire Brigade contract but the Fire Brigade this year is having to contract an extra 300 places at the Fire Service College in Moreton-in-Marsh because Babcock could not flex to take the extra numbers in training that they have been asked to do. That is an extra £1.3 million that has to come from somewhere.
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): I can deal with that because clearly, as the Deputy Mayor said just now, there is uncertainty about the volume and flow of recruits in. We are still not clear how quickly and how many and when. One of the flexibilities that I do know about that has been built into the Babcock contract is that it is not dependent on the number of recruits. The cost is not based on the number. We have flexibility so that we can increase or decrease, and the cost will not vary.
Andrew Dismore AM: It is not a question of the cost, it is a question of the capacity. The real problem for Babcock is that they simply did not have the capacity to flex the contract.
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): That is why this contract is very different, because those four higher education institutes are where the flex is needed. You will need flex within Babcock but -- and this has been tested and one of the things that I was really concerned about in letting this contract. Is there enough flex in this for growth? That has been tested. It is not just Babcock where flexibility has to be had, it is also needed in the higher education institutes (HEIs) that we are partnered with. It is very important to bear in mind that with the PEQF route, it is not that other routes into policing will now be shut down. We have three routes into policing. There will be flexibility within each of those three routes and the contract that we have with Babcock allows that flexibility. It has been tested with Babcock and it was tested with the HEIs.
Andrew Dismore AM: What key performance indicators (KPIs) have you put in the contract?
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): I do not have that here. There are a number of KPIs. That has been gone through very carefully. In terms of assurance of the whole process of this, we had some independent assessment of that as well because it is such a crucial element of recruiting officers and not having problems within it. We can let you know. You might know.
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): I do not have them to hand but I do know that part of the negotiation of the contract was the ability, every six months, to swap out two of the KPIs for different KPIs if we felt that the KPIs we were currently were for whatever reason not giving us the information we needed to judge the value and efficacy of the contract. I cannot, I am afraid, off the top of my head, give you chapter and verse of all the KPIs that have currently been agreed but I do know - to repeat myself - that part of the contract agreement is that we can swap two KPIs every six months, I think it is, so that we can monitor and adapt our performance regime as it becomes necessary.
Andrew Dismore AM: Perhaps when you write to us about those other things, you can let us know what the KPIs are. Just to finish, the criticism that HMICFRS had of the Brigade contract was that it was both inflexible and expensive for what they were getting. Did you have any discussions with the LFB before you looked at the Babcock contract?
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): Yes, there were.
Andrew Dismore AM: With HMICFRS?
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): I would have to go back and check about HMICFRS. There were definitely discussions between the MPS and the LFB.
Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM: What did the LFB say?
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): Pardon?
Andrew Dismore AM: What did the LFB say?
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): Well, I do keep stressing this is a completely different type of contract. This is not Babcock delivering the training. The HEIs are delivering the training that is set nationally by the College of Policing. Babcock are part of the package. They are an important part of it, but it is a very, very different type of contract.
Andrew Dismore AM: If the training is being delivered by the universities, what are Babcock actually doing then?
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): The MPS felt - and the business case stacked this up - that they needed somebody to help them to develop and manage this. The volume and the complexity of London is very different to outside forces who might be able to and have contracted with just one HEI. London is so huge we do not just have one HEI that we can contract with.
Andrew Dismore AM: The relationship between the MPS/MOPAC and the HEIs, is that a direct relationship or is effectively Babcock subcontracting to them?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): I do not know, is the short answer. My understanding is that we have a package that delivers the training we are required to deliver. The academic institutions we are partnered with, alongside Babcock, provide the academic rigour and the quality assurance of the training. Most of the classroom training is delivered through Babcock’s trainers, which is their element of it, the quality of which is administered, checked and assured by the academic institutions, the four that I have talked about, and the very practical elements of the police training that have to be done, such as officer safety and all of those bits, are delivered by police officers. As I said at the beginning, it is a mixture of those three and it was felt that was the most cost-effective, most efficient way of delivering this curriculum which is set nationally. There is a long lead-in time to all this, as I am sure you know, and I was at two or three testing sessions at Management Board where we had all of the what-ifs and the questions, and we spent a long time --
Andrew Dismore AM: I did ask what the lead-in time was and nobody could tell me.
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): Well, I was not there at the beginning.
Sophie Linden (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): The what, sorry?
Andrew Dismore AM: My first question was what the lead-in time was and Sophie said she did not have that information.
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): I do not know when it started. What I am trying to describe is that it is a process that has taken many months, which I was involved in some of as part of Management Board, and much else happened with our experts that were developing it in --
Andrew Dismore AM: Going back to my original question, you cannot tell me whether the arrangements between the universities and the police are a direct contractual relationship or whether effectively they are subcontractors of Babcock?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): I can find out. I cannot tell you here and now, I am afraid.
Andrew Dismore AM: I am surprised. Thank you.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): OK. Last set of questions on non-crime hate incidents to be led by Assembly Member Whittle.
Peter Whittle AM: Thank you very much, Chair. Assistant Commissioner, what is your opinion on the requirement made by the National Hate Crime Operational Guidance to record hate incidents irrespective of whether there is any evidence to identify the hate element?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): This has clearly been in the news recently. This approach, I guess, stems back - certainly in the MPS - as far as the Stephen Lawrence inquiry [1993]. This is where much of this had its initiation. There have been celebrated cases since then where a lack of recording of non-crime but hate-related issues has contributed to a failure in service. The [Fiona] Pilkington case is the most obvious one that comes to mind.
The approach that we take in the police service is that if we are called to deal with an incident and a person alleges offensive language has been used of whatever type based on their personal characteristics but it does not amount to a crime, so it is not an assault, a crime of violence, formal harassment or a public order offence but nevertheless that type of language was used, our commitment is that we will record that not as a crime but we will record that as an incident. The idea behind that is first to provide some reassurance to people who want reassurance that we take what they say seriously, and secondly so that should there be recurrence of that - it is an obvious point - and we send officers again to the same venue three weeks later or a month later, they are aware or should be aware that this has happened before. That might temper their response. It might give them extra food for thought about how they are going to deal with it and ideally allow them to make a better risk assessment about the situation they are going into. For all of those reasons the guidance was produced, and I think it is still fit for purpose.
Peter Whittle AM: Commissioner, you support the College of Policing guidelines on this then, that basically these incidents, even though they are not crimes, should be recorded as hate incidents? You support that?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): We follow the College of Policing guidance.
Peter Whittle AM: Right. Those hate incidents basically then can be seen by advance checks even though they are not crimes. They can be seen by advance checks for people maybe going for certain types of jobs. They will come up even though there is no crime involved. That is fine by you?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): They will occur if a particular type of security check is taken, yes. They will be available to be disclosed.
Peter Whittle AM: Do you know very much about the case of Harry Miller, which I think you referred to at the beginning, in the High Court? You know about the case?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): I know about the case. I am not an expert in it.
Peter Whittle AM: Right, OK. You know that because of various tweets he liked, as it were, he was called by a policeman who said that he had come to check his thinking? Check his thinking. What is your view on that?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): The circumstances of that particular case are a matter for Humberside Police, of course. I cannot comment on whether the officer did the right thing or not. I was not part of that decision-making process. My point is --
Peter Whittle AM: All right, but you are a very senior policeman.
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): Yes, and I am giving you my opinion.
Peter Whittle AM: This just happens to be a case where Harry Miller had the perseverance to go to the High Court. We have no idea how many times this might be happening. He was told that he had to check his thinking, and basically, he came back and said, “This is Orwellian”. Basically, when it came down to the case - I think he liked some sort of limerick about a transwoman, something like this. Essentially the policeman then went into all sorts of strange details about why he had come and then said, “I have been on a course about it”. Your policemen are going on courses about this sort of thing. The end result is that this man was taken to a level of depression because of what was happening, because someone felt that they could check his thinking. Do you not find that that is an extremely frightening prospect that we are facing now?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): It is a matter for Humberside. I cannot comment on the Humberside Police case. All I can talk about is what the MPS’s approach to this is because that is relevant to Londoners, and the MPS approach is in line with the College of Policing guidance, which is that we recognise that it is important to understand incidents which may amount to some form of --
Peter Whittle AM: Yes, you have already been through that. You have already told me. The judge, Mr Justice Knowles, in this particular case compared the actions of the police to the Gestapo or to the Stasi. He said it was very, very worrying. There is the assumption made somehow that if someone says something that is a hate incident, this will automatically possibly lead to a hate crime. He said that in this particular case there was absolutely no evidence to suggest that at all, but it has still been reported. He is still on the statistics.
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): I do understand the point you make, of course I do. Disproportionality is unwelcome wherever it occurs and maybe this was disproportionate. I am not giving a view on that. What I am trying to say -- I am trying to reassure people that --
Peter Whittle AM: Disproportionate?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): You are suggesting it is disproportionate. I am saying that the MPS --
Peter Whittle AM: I am suggesting that it is more than that actually, sir.
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): Right. I am trying to get to what you want to hear from me. Is it important for the MPS to recognise these kinds of issues as potentially important? Yes, it is. When we go to a neighbour dispute, for example, or any other kind of dispute, should we know that previously when officers have been there, one or other of the parties has used offensive language for whatever reason based on a personal characteristic of the other person? Is that an important thing for the officer to know in understanding how best to deal with the incident in front of them? I would say yes. I think the principle is correct. If you speak to many officers, you will know that they go back time and time again to these kinds of things and they escalate. This is the whole purpose of making the record, so that we understand --
Peter Whittle AM: This was a case that was not going to escalate. The judge made that perfectly clear. You are making this assumption and as a result going down a very, very dangerous road, a very dangerous road indeed, I would say. If I could just ask you as well in that case to go back to the guidelines. Whether we are talking about hate crime or hate incidents, what is your view on the definition? For example, the words, “the victim”, in the victim’s perception that this is possibly a hate crime. First of all, the word “victim” is used immediately. Why do you not use the word “complainant”? Would that not be legally far safer?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): These are all issues that have been debated and thought about, clearly, and there are different approaches one can take, but what I come back to is that our job is to provide a service that people can be confident in, and I think if we start to use technical language with members of the public they may not fully understand what “complainant” exactly means, whereas “victim” is a commonly understood term which is --
Peter Whittle AM: It is assuming already that there is a problem.
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): I am afraid --
Peter Whittle AM: If you put “victim” in the definition it is assuming already.
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): This is a national position that has been adopted. It is not for the MPS, unless there is reason to, to divert from it. The terminology “victim” flows through everything that we do these days. There is the Victims’ Code, the Victims’ Charter. The Home Secretary talks about victims’ rights. That boat has sailed, I am afraid. We use the term “victim” to describe a range of people. In technical terms, if you are approaching a court case you are a complainant, but we choose to use the word “victim” because that is the common parlance. That is what
people understand. Some people do not like that, I understand that, but we have to use the word that is most acceptable to most people and “victim” happens to be that word.
Peter Whittle AM: It does not worry you, for example, if you go on with that definition, that basically it requires no evidence whatsoever and this is a unique thing in that it actually requires no evidence? In fact, it requires not only no evidence, but it is the perception of the victim or anybody else. What does that actually mean? As a policeman, how would you define that, “Or anybody else”?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): The purpose of the wording as it is is to make sure that there is a degree of subjectivity. The important thing to understand about harassment and victimisation is that there is the physical act but then there is the perception and the effect it has on the individual. These are very difficult things to get right in exact language, but we try, and this definition is designed to recognise the subjectivity that if you feel that the motivation behind the commentary is based on your personal characteristics and is offensive, then that is how you feel. That is your reality.
Peter Whittle AM: But therefore, it immediately should become a crime statistic or a hate incident statistics, even though you feel that?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): That is how --
Peter Whittle AM: I could feel something you are saying to me now is somehow hateful. Can I go and report it? Yes, I can.
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): I would like to think I am not being offensive.
Peter Whittle AM: I am just using that as an example. You know full well what I mean, sir, here.
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): No, no, but --
Peter Whittle AM: Listen, the fact is that it seems to me that you are now policing people’s thoughts. If a police officer turns up and says, “I need to check your thinking”, the mere fact - even if he was going above and beyond these guidelines - that he felt he could do that -- and what worries me is how many people who do not have the personal perseverance of Harry Miller would just simply go along with it because they are none the wiser.
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): I am not sure what you want me to say. I am trying to set out the general position. The specifics of the Humberside case are difficult for me to comment on, for obvious reasons. It is not my force. I do not understand the fine detail. I am not saying you are wrong; it is just not something that is familiar to me. What I can do is describe the approach the MPS takes and explain the reasons why we take that approach, and that is pretty much the approach most police forces take. The College of Policing guidance is evidence of that, and I think it is the right approach, for reasons I have articulated. Will there be occasions where somebody gets it wrong? Undoubtedly. There are all the time, not just with this type of thing but with all sorts of things. We are all human. But it does not mean that the principle is wrong, I think.
Peter Whittle AM: I think the principle is wrong. I am alarmed to hear you say that you have no problem with the guidelines. I am very alarmed because this is making you into the thought police, you know. It is making you the thought police, not just the police. When you think as well of what we have been discussing here today about sexual offences and about violent crime going up, the mere fact that whether it is the MPS or whoever is doing this kind of thing will make most people very frustrated at the very least.
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): If I may just make one comment, my only motivation is to try to provide the best service and protect people the best way we can. We feel in the police service that this approach does that. Are there disadvantages with it? Will people get it wrong occasionally? Of course. But fundamentally, I think it is really important that we recognise these issues and try to do something about them because they do lead, time and time again, to crime. Anything we can do to prevent crime and reduce risk, we should do. That is the driving force behind this.
Peter Whittle AM: Yes. Look, no one is suggesting that we do not understand these incidents because we all do. It is just this particular approach. This feels like the tip of the iceberg a bit and I think this is extremely worrying.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): Assembly Member Hall and then Assembly Member Dismore.
Susan Hall AM: Yes. I will be brief because Peter [Whittle AM] said at the end what I was thinking. You said, Nick, that you want to have a service that people can be confident in and I do assure you that the vast majority of us are very proud and grateful to police officers, seriously, but there is an increasing concern about the thought police.
I think that is exaggerated more by the fact that if shops have burglaries for under £200 it is not looked at as much. Burglaries are going absolutely sky-high and there is not the policing to deal with it. It is a case of prioritisation of what you do do. The media picks up on the thought police far more than other things but to my mind it does damage the force somewhat when we hear about these sorts of stories about the thought police and what people may be thinking or doing when there are other elements. Peter mentioned this as well. The very first section we had was that prosecutions are nearly non-existent on sexual offences and the Deputy Mayor herself said it was woeful. When we are in a situation like that and yet police time is spent on what we would call “thought police”, that does not actually help the MPS, which is what we are concerned with. Do you see and understand that?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): I spend my whole time trying to prioritise the resources we have to deal with the things that are most important, but it does not mean you throw away everything and just focus on one thing. The trick is to try to focus on the most important thing most but still provide a service to the broad range of Londoners who have other issues that have to be dealt with.
Effectively what we are talking about is antisocial behaviour with a potential personal characteristic/hate element thrown in, and that is important. We talked half an hour or an hour ago about how important antisocial behaviour is. This is an element of it. We cannot just ignore it and say, “Everything is about burglary, everything is about robbery”, or, “Everything is about violence”. We do have to make decisions and we try really, really hard to get that prioritisation right. We talked about another example right now with the RCTP. I would love to have a full complement in my traffic command, of course I would, but I recognise that actually I would rather them work slightly harder and there be a bit more overtime spent and focus on violence,
because, of the two, I want to focus on violence the most. You understand this. I know you understand this. What I am trying to explain is that prioritisation is something we do all of the time.
Susan Hall AM: I totally understand that. Our concern, very many of us, is this going to a whole new area of “the thought police” and looking at, “Well, does this person really mean this or that?” We spend a lot of time on things around Twitter that is, well, maybe they have pressed a “like”, when someone is being murdered down the road or somebody is not getting prosecuted properly for a rape or something like that. You have to look at those elements and think: what is more important?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): But what we do know - and I do not want to keep quoting this particular case because like the Humberside case it is one case in many, many thousands - is that the [Fiona] Pilkington case is an example where lack of understanding of the history of the constant but sub-criminal behaviour led to the death of a mother and child. I am not suggesting every case is going to be like that, of course not, but it is impossible to predict the future. In responding to a call for assistance from the public - it might be about a dispute, it might be an argument with a neighbour, it might be a noise complaint - if, as part of our response to that, it comes to light that one of the people involved has used that type of language then it is entirely right that we make a record of that, so that when we go back again and again we are not going to it for the first time again and again and again, and then when you go the fifth time, there is a tragedy. That is the purpose behind it.
Susan Hall AM: OK. We are talking of different elements. I will leave it there, but you can see the concern for very many of us.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): Assembly Member Dismore, and then it is time for lunch.
Andrew Dismore AM: Yes, OK. Talking about history, I remember when I was studying sixteenth-century history Queen Elizabeth I, who said in relation to the Reformation, “I don’t want to open windows onto men’s souls”. The issue of thought police goes back an awful long way. What she meant by that was, “If you keep your views on Catholicism to yourself that is all right by me, but if you start trying to promote it, we will be after you”. I think what we have here is a modern version of that.
What strikes me as a bit uncomfortable is that this ends up coming up on a Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check when somebody has actually not committed an offence. That is what gets me. I do not have any problem with somebody being warned, “This is not a very clever thing to do”. That could be beneficial to the individual concerned and that is not thought police because somebody has actually done something or said something, rather than what they actually believe. There is a lot of subjectivity in this. If you look at the rules it says, “Any action deemed to be motivated”. Who is doing the deeming? “Even if there is no evidence”. Those two phrases -- and, “Any action”. Those three phrases or three subclauses, to my mind, do create some problems.
If it was not going to be end up on the DBS, I would not be so concerned about it, but I think there is an issue here. Somehow, we have to try to square the right to free speech, as the judge said -- I would not go as far as saying it was like the Gestapo. That is ridiculous.
Peter Whittle AM: Not that ridiculous.
Andrew Dismore AM: I think perhaps some of the phrasing in the College of Policing needs to be looked at, and also what actually happens. I fully accept what the Assistant Commissioner is saying that officers need to know if there is a history, but does the whole world need to know?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): I do understand the concern. Again, opinion is split but if you think about the purpose of a DBS check, these are checks that are done on people who want to work with particular groups of people who are deemed maybe vulnerable, children, vulnerable adults or other groups like that, where it is really important that a proper risk assessment is made. A DBS check will show what is show on police intelligence databases as opposed to crime, so it is not conviction data, it is not something anyone is guilty of; it is something that has happened and has been recorded.
We are required to provide that information to the requester. It is up to the requester to make a judgement, based on the information, whether or not they think that is relevant to the application that is being processed. If you are a headmaster of a school, an infant school, and someone applies to be a teaching assistant, for example, and the DBS reveals that on four occasions they have used racist language towards a neighbour, you might consider that that is not the sort of person you want as a teaching assistant. I do not know, but that is a decision for the person making the request, not a decision for the police service.
Andrew Dismore AM: I accept that, but if it has not been proven that they actually said it, it is an inference. If it had been proven, you may well have prosecuted. That is the point. It is when there has been no crime that it ends up on the DBS. As I say, I have no problem with the police knowing about this because obviously you do need to have an idea of what is going on. Are there are any other crimes where no crime gets recorded on the DBS, not just hate crime but more generally?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): Police record criminal intelligence all the time. What we are told --
Andrew Dismore AM: On the DBS system?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): No, the DBS is not a system. The DBS is just a check.
Andrew Dismore AM: Exactly. That is the point.
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): It is the name of a check that goes across a number of databases.
Andrew Dismore AM: Right. That is the point I am putting to you. Are there any other non-crimes that end up on DBS?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): Quite possibly. Who knows? The point is that we record criminal intelligence thousands of times a day, information that we receive from members of the public. It may not be specific to individuals or it may be specific to individuals.
Andrew Dismore AM: I am not talking about a particular case. We have dealt with the Humberside case and I am not going to raise the facts of that. What I am asking about is: if somebody has not committed a crime but there has been some sort of allegation that has been found not to be proven, or there is no evidence to support it, or there is just an allegation where somebody deems X, Y or Z, can that end up on the DBS as well?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): If it is on the criminal intelligence system, potentially yes. That is the whole purpose of an enhanced DBS check.
Andrew Dismore AM: That is a line of questioning we may want to follow up on another occasion.
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): Let me give you a real-life example, if I may, because it may assist in understanding why it is important for these DBS checks to be conducted. Ian Huntley, who murdered the two schoolgirls in Soham, had no convictions but he was known for allegations against him for that type of thing. Now, that was not known because it was not shared because it was not a conviction, and that led to a review of the approach we take in sharing information that is non-conviction data. Arguably, had the school known that he had had previous allegations against him for sexual offending which for whatever reason never got to court, would they have employed him in that school? Who knows? We do not know. The point is that that is the kind of risk we are trying to mitigate with these DBS checks. The police’s responsibility is to provide the information. The action that is taken on that information received is that of the person who has asked for the check.
Andrew Dismore AM: Sorry, I do not want to -- is there any sort of appeal by the individual concerned against these things other than judicial review, which is what happened in this particular case --
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): No, there is.
Andrew Dismore AM: -- and which is obviously not a practical solution for 99% of cases, particularly --
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): There is an appeals process. As Chief Constable in Surrey I used to administer them. Individuals can request that the particular piece of information, whatever it is, is removed or not disclosed, and it is a judgement for the chief officer to make if that request is made on whether or not they are willing to do that. Again, it is a judgement call based on the circumstances of each individual request. Sometimes it is granted and sometimes it is not.
Andrew Dismore AM: That is a decision for the Chief Constable?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): Or their delegated authority. Sometimes it will be a Chief, sometimes it will be someone who is delegated by that chief officer.
Andrew Dismore AM: But at that sort of level?
Nick Ephgrave (Assistant Commissioner – Met Operations, Metropolitan Police Service): It is at that sort of level, yes. I did them personally when I was Chief because it is so important. I do not dispute the importance of this, absolutely. Whichever side of the argument you are on, it is really important we get this right.
Unmesh Desai AM (Chair): Fine. Thank you. Can I now thank our guests for attending today and for the answers to our questions.