Oral evidence: Financial Sustainability of Police Forces in England & Wales, HC 1513

Oral evidence, 10 October 2018.

Witnesses

Alison Hernandez, Police and Crime Commissioner for Devon and Cornwall; Jane Kennedy, Police and Crime Commissioner for Merseyside; Chief Constable Michael Barton, Chief Constable Durham; and Chief Superintendent Paul Griffiths, Vice President, Police Superintendents Association.

Chair

It is bang on 2.30, so welcome to the Public Accounts Committee on Wednesday 10 October 2018. We are here today to look at the National Audit Office’s report on the financial sustainability of police forces. I have to say, it feels a bit like “Groundhog Day”: one of the first sessions we did when I became Chair of this Committee three years ago was to look at this very issue, and it feels like things have not moved on, except for perhaps becoming more complicated along the way. The report has been looking at whether £12.3 billion is enough money for forces to serve their communities effectively, and how it should be shared out. That is obviously a vital task for Government. Despite having police and crime commissioners—I will introduce our witnesses in a moment—the Home Office still retains many formal responsibilities for deciding how much money individual forces need and ensuring that policing as a whole is accountable to Parliament. We will be keen to challenge our Home Office witnesses after this on the basis of the evidence we have received, the report from the National Audit Office and our pre-panel. That brings me to our pre-panel, and I am delighted to welcome four people who are closer to the frontline, I dare say, than the Permanent Secretary. I think he would agree with that. Chief Superintendent Paul Griffiths is the Vice President of the Police Superintendents Association; welcome to you, Chief Superintendent. I also welcome Chief Constable Michael Barton, from Durham Constabulary, who has been vocal on police funding in recent months; Alison Hernandez, who is the Devon and Cornwall Police and Crime Commissioner, and has equally been in the news recently about your merger, which we will be touching on; and Jane Kennedy, the Merseyside Police and Crime Commissioner. I am going to ask Caroline Flint to kick off.

Caroline Flint

Perhaps I could start with our police and crime commissioners, Jane Kennedy and Alison Hernandez. Could you give us an idea of what impact funding restrictions since 2011 have had on your police force area, and maybe an indication of what trade-offs you have had to make when managing your budgets?

Jane Kennedy

I will talk from the point of view of urban forces more generally, and I will probably use Merseyside for examples, because I know it the best. The impact of austerity has been immense, but I need to give you a flavour of what that actually means. You will have seen from the NAO’s report that the hardest-hit areas, from the point of view of the financial impact of Government policy, are largely urban forces. I am not saying that rural forces have not also been affected negatively. Merseyside Police has been required to change from a fairly standard basic command unit structure to a single force-wide structure, so whereas you might be used to a police force that has a basic command unit based upon a local authority area, Merseyside has rubbed those boundaries away. We have gone from six basic command units with a chief superintendent in charge of what was effectively an all-singing, all-dancing constabulary in that local authority area to one whole force across the whole of Merseyside. That has meant that the force-wide resources we would have had 10 years ago, such as burglary squads, robbery squads and street crime squads—not so much murder squads; we still have those, sadly—are no longer available, because they have been subsumed into the other structures of the force. I want to particularly touch upon the shared vision that police commissioners and chief constables have, Policing Vision 2025, which is part of our bid to you. The NAO are right to say that there is not a vision. The Home Office support this vision, but they do not share the ownership of it. If they shared the ownership with us, we might be able to agree a sensible road through to 2025, whereby funding would become fairer and easier to explain to the public, and everyone would feel as if we had a plan through which we can deliver this vision. May I give you a quick set of examples about what the impact has been on ordinary people? In the vision, one of the five keys is local policing. Neighbourhood policing in Merseyside is now called local policing. Ten to fifteen years ago, there would have been one inspector covering perhaps two wards in our most challenging areas, with a team of police underneath that inspector of sergeants, constables and PCSOs. Now we have one inspector for a whole local authority area, running a slightly bigger team but really restricted in terms of how they can impact locally with local people. What that means is that as well as not being as present on the ground as they used to be—you’ve got all the facts; I won’t repeat the facts or the numbers to you—we have so many fewer officers and PCSOs that that local visibility has become really low. Public confidence, to some degree, is beginning to be affected. I use examples from across Merseyside and I know that this happens elsewhere; this is an urban policing experience. Where an urban street gang begins to develop in a local neighbourhood, developing drug dealing and so on, and what we call antisocial behaviour that goes along with it, which we now classify as criminal damage or abuse or whatever, that urban gang has an impact on ordinary, local, vulnerable people. I will give you an example. Two ladies said to me, “We have to go home before 2 o’clock, Jane. If we’re not inside our front door before 2 o’clock, the urban street gang give us”—they used the phrase—“dog’s abuse, as we make our way home.” These were elderly ladies who were obviously quite spry, and who had quite a lot to say for themselves in lobbying me for changes, but they wanted to be home before that threshold. Unless we understand that that is the real impact on ordinary people of having fewer police and fewer PCSOs in our local policing service, all we are dealing with is figures, and the real impact on human beings is lost. It means a real lifestyle change that some people have to make, in order to cope with the crime pressures in their particular area. Now I’m not saying that, once we find out about that, it isn’t dealt with. It is addressed; the force will send in teams. The local policing team in that area will be asked to focus upon it. But there is little preventive work being done, and the old partnerships that we used to have with youth officers, youth workers, social workers and other community wardens have evaporated, because those people are no longer there. So, the impact of austerity sustained over this period, and the lack of vision about where we would take policing, means that ordinary, vulnerable people in our communities face a much less comfortable and pleasant lifestyle.

Caroline Flint

That is something I recognise from my own area in Doncaster—that you can give something a label of “neighbourhood policing” but it’s not as we used to know it.

Jane Kennedy

Yes.

Alison Hernandez

In Devon and Cornwall, we are an urban, rural and coastal area, on a peninsula, and the only way that we can go to help is one way, because we are surrounded by sea on our edges. In terms of the impact since 2010-11, there have been a range of things. There has been the fact that local people in their council tax pay more for policing than ever before. It used to be that 31% of our budget locally was paid for by precept council tax payers; it is now 44%. There is also the issue around the number of people employed by the organisation; there were 6,117 and now there are 5,139. I will give you the breakdown, just to give you a feel of the change. We had 3,500 police officers and we are down to 2,990 now. We are on an investment path at the moment to go back above 3,000. We had 363 police community support officers; we are now at 229. And we had a police staff of 2,254, going down to 1,920. So the overall capacity of the organisation has reduced, and because of that the bits that have suffered the most have been neighbourhood policing, including the PCSOs, which are part of neighbourhood policing. The neighbourhood beat managers have been pulled into response to deal with emergencies because there is more and more demand on policing. That means that they are not planning their workload, which means that they are not doing all the proactive neighbourhood work that they used to do, so the challenge has really been stretched. One of the bits that has been really impactful is that, since then, Spice has become a really big drug in our towns and cities. Even down in Devon and Cornwall, we have got people who are zombies or twitchers. A number of police and crime commissioners up and down the country are trying to get Spice reclassified as a class A drug. It is becoming a real pain on our streets—it is harmful to our communities. We don’t have the policing we used to have in towns and cities to help those individuals and signpost them to a better future. Violence is increasing, street crime is increasing, and the people who are available to be on the streets is decreasing.

Caroline Flint

Can I ask both of you what you think the Home Office’s responsibility is for assessing need and deploying the right sort of funding from the centre?

Jane Kennedy

The figures in the NAO’s Report clearly demonstrate how the policy of freezing grants and building reliance on council tax income has affected different forces, and the unfairness of those decisions. I believe that the Home Office are developing a better understanding of the pressure that police officers and staff are under. That better understanding ought to show a more nuanced approach to the way the police are financed. The NAO have previously commented on the lack of progress on a fair formula, which also reads across into the lack of buy-in to the vision. We need serious Home Office commitment to help deliver the vision that the police and PCCs have developed between us.

Caroline Flint

Alison, before you answer, I just want to follow on from Jane Kennedy’s point. I am sure you agree with her, although I don’t want to put words into your mouth. Why do you think the Home Office is not doing that?

Alison Hernandez

I think there is an issue to do with the size of the cake and how it is distributed. One of the things I wanted to raise is that I sit before you as the poor relation between Durham and Merseyside. If you were to divvy the budget up per head of population, our force gets 46p per person, Durham gets 51p per person and Merseyside gets 64p per person. In terms of how the cake—the totality of the budget—is shared and distributed, if I had Durham’s 51p per person, I would have an extra £31 million for policing in Devon and Cornwall. In a budget of £300 million, that goes a long way. If I was Merseyside, I would have £112 million more. That is big money. This is about the way the money is distributed. Although they may have higher crime than Devon and Cornwall, we know that about 80% of the work that policing does is about safeguarding and non-crime-related matters. In Devon and Cornwall, which is a very isolated area, we have our fair share of mental ill health, suicide and a range of other factors, and that doesn’t get taken into account. I think they are trying. I think they want to know about it—they are doing the frontline policing review at the moment to better understand what is happening with frontline officers.

Jane Kennedy

Can I just say, however, that that is precisely why the funding is not determined by a purely per capita calculation? If Alison would like to carry the risk and the threat of harm that Merseyside has to carry, she would get a budget similar to the budget that Merseyside has. It is similar for Durham.

Caroline Flint

Let us move across to our operational side—no offence to the PCCs here—and to Michael Barton, Chief Constable of Durham. Paul, I think your force area is Gwent. Is that correct?

Chief Superintendent Paul Griffiths

It is, but my role is to represent nationally.

Caroline Flint

I understand your role, but it would be nice to get a flavour from the area you know best. What impacts and trade-offs are you seeing—either in Durham, Chief Constable Barton, or across the piece, Chief Superintendent Griffiths?

Chief Constable Michael Barton

Where I work, we lost 30% of Government funding. When you take into account council tax rises since then, we have lost 22%, which is the seventh or eighth biggest loss in the country. The only people who have lost more are the big cities in the north and the Metropolitan police. We have lost 400 PCs, which is 25% of all the PCs we used to have. We have lost 180 police staff, which is 18% of our police staff. More importantly, our local government partners, especially Durham and Darlington, are knocking on 40% to 50% funding cuts, and there is more to come. For our top priorities of vulnerability and high harm, we need multi-agency working, and most of that is statutory and mandatory. Those key partners do not have that viability. By the way, I actually think—I know I am not popular on this—that the public sector needed an incentive to change and improve. The budget cuts that we faced in 2010-11 were helpful to the organisation—certainly in mine—because we have become much more private-sector motivated with a public sector heart. The problem has been the length of time of austerity. When it kicked in, we were told that we could cut hard and deep and cut once, and that austerity would end in 2015. That has not been the case, and that has been so traumatic.

Caroline Flint

Do you feel let down by that, Chief Constable?

Chief Constable Michael Barton

The public I serve feel let down, but I just have to be savvy about how I spend that money. I will not start sounding the death knell of policing, because that is not true and it is not helpful to the public. What are the trade-offs? We have lost more cops than we are comfortable with, and that is less visibility. There is less traditional crime investigation. ICT development investment has been delayed, and that is absolutely crucial in the new world of cyber-crime. We have not been able to invest in citizen self-service, which would assist us all. That is a shame, because it allows you to be more efficient. Our proactivity has fallen; we have 43 organised crime groups and I am only deploying high-end tactics on a couple of those. The rest are being disrupted by our partners. Disruption is a good thing, but I would like there to be more high-end targeting of organised crime.

Chief Superintendent Paul Griffiths

On behalf of superintendents and chief superintendents across England and Wales, they have seen the biggest reduction in their ranks across the whole of British policing. They have been cut by 27%, which has a significant impact. We have taken on bigger commands, higher risk in terms of some of the vulnerabilities that have started to come out in our society; technologically enabled crime has started to consume us and we are really struggling to try to cope with the impact of societal and technological changes. Of our members, 93% get a buzz from and enjoy what they do. They try to hold the line with the resources they have and what they have to do to serve the public. But there is a personal impact. When we did the personal resilience survey of our members, which is done anonymously, we found 50% showed signs of anxiety and 27% showed signs of depression. There is a real impact among our membership. They are trying to forge a line to assist and support chief officers with collaboration exercises and programmes, dealing with major serious and organised crime, and there is a real impact where officers from my rank are working longer hours, harder, and are trying to bridge that gap because there are insufficient numbers.

Caroline Flint

Many of the force areas that have submitted comments to us have made the point about the shortages in investigative officers, which presumably goes into your area, too. Are you finding that across the piece? Do you have the right skill set to do the work, even with the pressures that are there?

Chief Constable Michael Barton

The reason I am intervening is that I am crime operations lead and this is my area of expertise. Matt Dukes, the Chief Constable of South Wales, is leading on looking at that on our committee. It is a mixed picture; there is no doubt that it is not a healthy picture nationally, but a third of forces are not showing any shortages in this area. But some of the big metropolitan forces—the Metropolitan police, certainly—are facing that. When Matt did his trawl of police forces, we found that there was a remarkable and rich tapestry of innovation and reform. This is another of those incentives to policing. We are now looking at wider workforce development; we are training people who do not have warranted powers to do investigation into historical cases. There are good things happening, but if you were to speak to two thirds of chief constables in the country, they would paint a very gloomy picture of the number of investigators. That is certainly what Paul would say about his members.

Chief Superintendent Paul Griffiths

Yes. Obviously there is pressure there, particularly around vulnerability, with the rise of modern slavery. I don’t think we have really got a grip on female genital mutilation and some other really serious vulnerability crimes that are going on in our society. It puts an awful lot of pressure on our public protection needs to ensure that we have a workforce mix to deal with these horrendous crimes. It puts personal pressure on people, too, because they want to deliver the best possible service, but there is a significant resourcing issue. There is an imbalance at the moment around this uniform-detective role. There is significant effort in the service to redress that balance, but there is always a lag in trying to respond to this, while continuously serving the public as best we can on these serious crimes.

Chief Constable Michael Barton

Technically, the Winsor reforms mean that people on 24-hour shifts get paid extra, which is fair, but hard-working response drivers who work around the clock and aspire to go on to the CID will find themselves with a pay cut of £1,200 a year when they get to CID.

Caroline Flint

They lose the money—

Chief Constable Michael Barton

That is a disincentive when you have to pay your mortgage. You desperately want to advance your career, but you want to pay your mortgage.

Caroline Flint

That is a really interesting point. Basically, you end up with people potentially plateauing, not because they haven’t the capability, but because the sums don’t add up for them and their families.

Chief Constable Michael Barton

There is an argument that I get the best of both worlds, because I get detectives on 24/7, but frankly this isn’t helpful.

Caroline Flint

Again, Chief Constable and Chief Superintendent, what do you think the Home Office is missing in all this? What does it need to do? What is clear from the NAO Report is a sense that the Home Office isn’t really stepping up and taking on its responsibility for the overarching look at police funding, and, dare I say it, takes a rather spasmodic approach to doing the assessments needed to create some sort of stability going forward. I don’t want to put words into your mouth, but what is it that you want the Home Office to do?

Chief Constable Michael Barton

You can put words in my mouth. The biggest challenge for me is the 11% top-slice, which we have no say over. To put real flesh on the bones here—and, first of all, to give you reassurance—for the national programmes in the inspection and oversight regimes, inspection is really important, but it needs to be proportionate. In my own force, for example, I keep being offered an inspection window, but it seems to me that pretty regularly, every year, I get 14 full weeks of inspection. We have just finished another really deep dive into my force. If I didn’t have that, I could go out to help other forces, or maybe work with HMIC, if that’s what is needed. To put further flesh on the bones—this comes straight from the NAO Report—it refers specifically to the NLED, or national law enforcement data, programme. I was there at the start of this in 2014, and it was to merge PNC, PND and ANPR. This sounds like a good idea, and I think it is a good idea—certainly linking ANPR—

Chair

We should be clear about those initials. Most of us know the police national computer and so on, but do you want to explain?

Chief Constable Michael Barton

I am sorry. PNC is the police national computer, which you can check to see if people have a conviction; the police national database was set up after the Bichard inquiry and allows you to share intelligence; and ANPR is automatic number plate recognition, which allows you to see criminal cars moving around the roads. It is a good idea for those to be linked together, and that is actually what the Bichard inquiry found. Certainly linking ANPR into the two main systems is important. The NLED has been led all the way through by Home Office technologists, civil servants, contractors and consultants. We heard in October 2016 that it would cost £99 million; by February 2017, that cost had risen by £31 million, and by May 2018 by a further £98 million. That is a total of £240 million. My research suggests that 5% is through finding a replacement for PNC, and 40% through finding a replacement for the PND. They have also quietly dropped ANPR out of the programme, even though I asked them not to. The programme has been rated red across the board in the Home Office gateway review. How did NLED react? They reduced their scope, but at the same time they have told us that the benefits are going to improve significantly. They have asked for a cool extra £91 million through to 2023. They said all this would be done by 2018. They are not listening to me as a chief constable, nor are they listening to me as crime operations lead for policing. Why take probably over £300 million off policing when ultimately—if delivered—it will diminish our capability?

Chair

We will be asking the Home Office some questions about that.

Chief Superintendent Paul Griffiths

Early on, in our bilateral meetings with both the Home Secretary and the Policing Minister, it was clear that most things were starting to become “sector-led”—that is the phrase that was regularly used. That is all well and good until you really need a national oversight vision for the future. While the vision was created by NPCC and APCC for 2025, there are a few areas that we suggest would really benefit in terms of a greater impact from the Home Office. We feel that you can look further ahead than that. There are visions around 2050, technology changes are rapidly occurring, and we really need to stretch our thinking around what will happen in the future with an ageing population and so on. We also really need support around the whole-systems approach. We have been really impacted by the austerity that has hit other public services, and while today we are focused on policing, when you look at the mental health situation in society and the real need for health services to assist in that area, that has an impact on us. We really need that cross-governmental drive to try to push and assist in a whole-systems approach. The College of Policing identified that we probably deal with about 12 million incidents a year, and they estimate that 4 million are mental-health-linked. That is really significant for an organisation that does not specialise in it.

Anne Marie Morris

I am going to follow up Chief Superintendent Griffiths’s points about how much police time is spent on doing things not specifically about crime. Ms Hernandez, given that that is the case, is it right that the police should take on jobs that are actually NHS or local authority jobs and get no compensatory funding from those bodies? I guess you could look at ambulance and fire. Are there some governance issues here that are not being properly addressed, with you being asked to do something not in your remit, and not getting any contribution from others whose remit it is?

Alison Hernandez

There are a few things, really. One is that if a police officer were on the street and saw an incident happening, they would want to help. Actually, trying to tell a police officer not to help is very tricky, because they have ethics and standards. They would never walk away from anybody in need—that is the absolute pride of our police force–but some of the challenge is that they need help to be able to step into that space as frequently as they do. It has meant that police and crime commissioners have used police funding to commission mental health services, or aspects of things, but we do it jointly with our partners locally. As a force, we could not work without working with our local NHS partners and our local authority. We do specific services; we are doing one at the moment to support the neighbourhood team with access to NHS staff when they come across people who need help, so that they can better access information from the NHS to help that individual, and even get people from the NHS to help them. There is a challenge around trying to stop a police officer helping someone in need, and I do not think we would ever be able to do that. This bit is: how do we work better collaboratively, locally, with our partners to help deliver a better service to our community? It is World Mental Health Day, so it is very appropriate to be talking about this. There is definitely something around helping officers to understand it. They have been known as social workers for many years—everyone used to joke, “Our police officers have become social workers,” because they spend lots of their time negotiating with our community. Whether another service would be better at negotiating sometimes is definitely something we need to explore further. At the moment, the police service lead on suicide negotiation on our patch, and I am not sure if the police are best placed to do that. The fire service or the NHS—why the police service? We have missing people all the time, and the police are the ones dealing with it. Of course, if we think that something has happened to somebody, the police would search, but there are opportunities to do—

Anne Marie Morris

You are right, but do you feel that the Government does not recognise that contribution in the way it sets the funding formula? Is that one of the things—never mind what has already been said about the funding formula—that needs to be reflected? You are doing somebody else’s job, and you are not getting the support for it. How does that make it efficient and effective?

Chair

Very quick responses from Ms Hernandez and Ms Kennedy.

Alison Hernandez

Just to be clear, a lot of the work that police officers do on the frontline is about prevention. It is prevention from coming into aspects of crime, and safeguarding. It is about protecting the most vulnerable people in our community. There is a shift away from focusing just on offenders to focusing on actually dealing with people who need support. This is about whether or not there is a Government shift on that view. That is what has happened over time: there has been a shift to that prevention and safeguarding role, rather than crime-fighting full-on, 100%.

Jane Kennedy

In terms of measuring crime and reflecting the police response to crime in the formula, bear in mind when considering this that Merseyside police get 23,480 emergency calls a month. That is 5,500 more per month than we used to get even two or three years ago. For some reason, emergency calls have gone right up. Only 20%—one in five—of those calls are crime-related. The vast majority of the emergency calls to the police are for other issues. The force really rigorously triage those calls to see whether an ambulance response or a mental health response is required, but primarily, they are the first responders. Consequently, I don’t believe it would be possible for us to start teeming and lading budgets locally around this. What we do—police forces all make the effort—is close partnership working. Our mental health trust now provide triage staff in cars. They jointly staff mental health response cars, so that where we know there is a mental health issue, a nurse is in the car with the police officer when that car responds to the incident. That is a terrific way of working together.

Chair

Who pays for that?

Jane Kennedy

Both services. Both services stand up to that issue and say, “There is a problem here for both of us to face.”

Chair

In that case, it is just a payment for each member of staff.

Jane Kennedy

It is about staffing.

Chief Constable Michael Barton

In dealing with the budget issue, which you asked about, it is the same picture where we are. We were going to 856 mental health incidents every month in 2016. This year, it was 1,400. On average, they last between six and eight hours, often for two colleagues, because you can’t look after a mental health patient, and we wait for the NHS to take those patients away from us. That’s our picture. The last time the funding formula was looked at, I called it a dangerous experiment. The Home Office wanted it to be simple, so they wanted only four measures. What they did, from my perspective, was trawl around for some figures that might indicate something. There were four baskets. One of them was all about deprivation and societal issues. They looked for hard-pressed families at one point, and then they looked at deprivation, I think it was, which was pretty much how many high-rise flats you had. On one of those indicators, Durham, which is really deprived—one of the poorest counties in the country—was getting an extra £10 million. When they swapped the indicator to high-rise flats, we lost £2 million, because we don’t have any. It was exactly the same with alcohol. Alcohol is a great multiplier for policing, so that was another basket. They said, “Let’s look at the density of pubs.” I’ve got quite a few grouse moors, and Grouse might be a famous whisky, but there aren’t many pubs. We scored negatively on drink, and we have the worst health outcomes for alcohol in the entire country. We have the worst suicide rates in the entire country. We have the worst child liver damage in the entire country.

Anne Marie Morris

So what you are really saying is that even the proposals for changing the funding formula didn’t get it.

Chief Constable Michael Barton

Please don’t make it simple!

Chair

We are going to be touching on this later. I am just going to bring in Layla Moran on mental health issues, and then I will go back to Ms Morris.

Layla Moran

Let me turn to the mental health of our forces themselves—I thank Chief Superintendent Griffiths for bringing it up in the context of chief superintendents. My question is more about the frontline, and there are some pretty awful figures. I have made some freedom of information requests—I am sure it is the same for your forces, too, but only Merseyside came back—about the number of people with long-term mental health issues, and the proportion of them on long-term sickness. Merseyside was better than most. In 2015, 2016 and 2017, it was 8%, 9% or 10%.

Chair

I am sorry, 8%, 9% or 10% of the people on long-term sick leave had mental health problems.

Layla Moran

Indeed. But in 2017, Hertfordshire was on 38%, Humberside was on 35%, Essex was on 37%. That is an increasing trend.

Chair

Just to be clear, these are all percentages of police officers on long-term sick leave.

Layla Moran

Can I ask you, in turn, do you recognise this as being something that is an issue with the forces as they stand now? Do you recognise that it is increasing over time? What can the Home Office and other partners do better to support our forces?

Chief Superintendent Paul Griffiths

I have already given the figures. They were quite shocking for us when we got them from an anonymous poll. That survey was answered by 75% of our members, so there is some consistency and strength in what is coming out. But it is not just our members; it is the federated members. Police staff are showing signs of depression and anxiety. I think this shows an overall strain that officers and staff are taking upon themselves to try to resolve some of the policing problems that they are trying to deal with. An openness has resulted, which is a good thing. People feel more comfortable coming forward with some of their problems. I think there has probably been some degradation of occupational support over the years. There is some effort by the service now to redress that balance, but these things take time. Once we start creating an environment where people can talk about their own mental health, and some of the issues and problems that they have, we need to deal with them as well.

Chair

Are any of you losing officers because of this? These are long-term sick leave figures.

Chief Constable Michael Barton

It used to be the case that when you looked at sick figures—people being off—musculoskeletal was always the biggest threat. Now stress, depression and anxiety have overtaken musculoskeletal.

Chair

Are you losing officers permanently due to mental health?

Jane Kennedy

I don’t have figures, but it might be worth finding figures for you. Instead of policing being a career, where you start as a police constable and stay for 30 years—a career that was rewarding, and that you were absolutely committed to—people are starting to leave and move on to other jobs after three, five or seven years. I am told by long-standing police officers that that never used to happen.

Chair

Such as Chief Constable Barton.

Jane Kennedy

I am told that that is a new phenomenon. I take that as an indication of the pressure that the frontline is facing. They are reaching a point where they say, “This is not what I signed up for.”

Chair

Have you done an analysis of the cost to you—please answer quickly, because we have other areas to cover—of training these highly expensively-trained officers and then losing them? We would be keen to get figures from you about mental health.

Chief Constable Michael Barton

Yes, we have—all forces have—and we will provide that to you.

Chair

Brilliant. If you could provide that, that would be very helpful.

Layla Moran

Can I just ask you to answer the last question: what do you need to better address the mental health issues?

Chief Constable Michael Barton

We are now the lead for suicide. We are now in partnership with “If U Care Share”, which is in the third sector. That was designed by one of our members of staff, who faced suicide in his own family. This is a societal issue and our people live in society, so we should not be surprised. But there have been additional burdens, which I hinted at. If we had had austerity for three or four years, I think our staff would have been able to rebound—they are incredibly resilient people—but this has now gone on for a generation. The society out there is facing austerity and everybody is in it together. Sometimes life gets too hard.

Chair

So what do you need?

Chief Constable Michael Barton

We are investing significantly in this. I cannot be optimistic about this.

Alison Hernandez

May I just add, we have had police officers who have committed suicide and it has been a real challenge. One of the issues is an environment where you are stretched as a resource on the frontline. You cannot take your meal break, you cannot get annual leave, and because we have a summer period that is extended from May to September, you do not ever stop for about nine months of the year. This means that trying to create a culture where you can have the time to have quality conversations with your colleagues about things that are happening outside work, let alone in work, is a challenge. What the Government can do is help us ensure that we have enough police officers and people on the frontline, so that they are not as stretched as they are. The Police Federation did a survey on this last year, and it’s why I supported my chief constable to recruit police officers over PCSOs.

Jane Kennedy

Andy Cooke, Chief Constable of Merseyside, takes wellbeing really seriously and has really promoted wellbeing services within the force, but you are restricted because, overall, resources are restricted. When they first made the change from a BCU structure to a force-wide—

Chair

BCU being basic command unit.

Jane Kennedy

I beg your pardon. When they made the change from a basic command unit structure to a different, force-wide structure, initially there was quite a shock to the morale and wellbeing of many staff, who found themselves being asked to move from jobs that they had been doing perhaps for 15 years, in a relatively sheltered policing environment, and suddenly go back into a more frontline role, public-facing. The force had to reflect on that, adjust shift patterns and allow time for supervisors to have time with their teams, which had initially been broken. So they did listen to that.

Chair

It would be very helpful if you could provide any written evidence on the numbers and the issues, if you haven’t already.

Anne Marie Morris

We are challenged; we have about 10 minutes, and I want to look at collaboration with police forces, police transformation funding and value for money. So without upsetting any of you, can I just ask—

Chair

You can always agree with each other, if someone has said something you agree with.

Anne Marie Morris

Yes, rather than getting full replies to all that—because I am not going to do that in 10 minutes—may I pick on one from each group? If we can have quick answers, that will be really helpful. Ms Hernandez, you will not be surprised if, given your comments on what has happened with the proposed merger between Dorset and Devon and Cornwall, I ask you this question. Can collaboration ever work, and can it ever work at a totally merged level?

Alison Hernandez

I think mergers of police forces can work. We need to make sure there are flexibilities to enable that to work. There have been some barriers to my community being able to support it.

Anne Marie Morris

For instance?

Alison Hernandez

For instance, as you would have with local government reorganisation, you have council tax harmonisation that you have to resolve if you merge as two organisations, which means that you have to end up paying the same amount of council tax on a band D property, averaged out. You have to sort that out. Dorset was £18 more than we pay in Devon and Cornwall. I was willing to pay and encourage my community to want to pay up to the Dorset level, so that I could create a space for—it would have come to a value of around 330 extra police officers. It was frowned upon to consider that as an option. The Home Office were looking at harmonisation to not make excess money through the council tax. So we have an issue about not being able to make money through the council tax process of a police merger.

Chief Superintendent Paul Griffiths

There is no doubt that if certain factors are lined up, collaborations could be very effective, but we started to get, over the last year, a sense from our members, who actually operate in that collaborative zone and dominate the landscape in trying to bring forces together, from an operational perspective, of some concern that was rising across the country. We ended up surveying 110 members who are, or have been, in collaborative roles. Then you find out some of the results around the pressures on them in terms of negotiating and influencing with different partners and the pressures on them around their own time management, leadership, wellbeing and so on; and you start to get quite a negative picture from those who are actually leading these collaborative arrangements. You then look at it from an organisational perspective, and they are really split over whether this is efficient and effective, but, despite their being loyal to their own forces, when you say, “Is this the way forward?” 82% of them say mergers are the way forward. So there is something going on at that level, and you can see publicly, with Nottinghamshire pulling out of certain arrangements and West Mercia and Warwickshire recently announcing a split, that there are so many critical factors that make collaboration work that if some of those factors start failing, it starts being—

Chair

Which brings us to what the role of the Home Office is.

Chief Constable Michael Barton

As a superintendent and as a deputy chief constable, I have tried to merge two sets of forces. I was involved in Lancashire-Cumbria 10 years ago. That failed on council tax precept harmonisation, exactly as Alison has described. I looked at the Northumbria-Durham forces when I first arrived there as an assistant chief constable. It failed on council tax precept harmonisation. Look, you can do this. The problem is that you have a brownfield site. Everybody has different IT and different systems. As soon as you do this, you have got to start funding this with upfront costs. That cannot come from the forces themselves because, as you have just heard, we cannot make any money out of council tax. I think this is a dead duck for a generation because you are looking at something that is a brownfield site, and I don’t think you can fix it unless you pump-prime it.

Jane Kennedy

Don’t get hung up on police force collaborations as being the only way forward. We do really well in some key collaborations—organised crime units being one shining example of how forces work together really well collaboratively. There are many others.

Anne Marie Morris

So it is projects as opposed to the whole shebang.

Jane Kennedy

Where there is organised growth of two forces coming together, there ought to be more help from the Home Office to allow that to happen, but they are not getting it.

Anne Marie Morris

Okay. Can the Committee have a copy of the report that sets out the barriers that you have identified that central Government could fix?

Chief Superintendent Paul Griffiths

It has been sent in.

Chair

We touched on this when we looked at this three years ago, as I said at the beginning. It’s a bit like “Groundhog Day”.

Chief Constable Michael Barton

Since then there have been huge steps in terms of collaboration. The regional crime structure now is completely baked in.

Chair

But the barriers—

Anne Marie Morris

The barriers is what we want to hear about, but we have not got time.

Chair

The council tax barrier was there before and it is still there now, so it is interesting that, three years on, it is still there.

Anne Marie Morris

The next question is about transformation funding. Again, apologies, Ms Hernandez, but I know that you have the Exmouth slavery unit. What do you think has been the success of the transformation fund? Have you got what you needed? Are you worried about the need for more money to make the job effective?

Alison Hernandez

With the modern slavery programme that we are running through Devon and Cornwall, I think the national scheme has changed the way that we police on modern slavery nationally. It was a small pot of funding that has generated quite a lot of change. It is about £3.5 million per year for a two-year scheme that we have had through PTF funding. These are all officers that have come from the frontline of forces, seconded into a national project, so our forces are left with less while they are seconded. It does not matter if we are given money in return. You cannot recruit an officer quickly. You cannot get an agency worker in to replace a police officer. You cannot backfill in the same way. So PTF funding is a challenge around trying to set things up where you are basically bringing people in from different forces to try something new. Also, there is a cliff-edge of funding. We have done a two-year project that we think is really successful. We also think £3.5 million a year is a pittance to actually deliver. For £2 million a year ongoing we could keep this going and do really well. So we would like the Government to help with the cliff-edge that is about to come.

Jane Kennedy

There are good examples of the police transformation fund going to help with the modernisation of IT and some of the other big changes that the police needed, and we did not have the resources and the resilience within police budgets to fund locally.

Anne Marie Morris

Okay. Good idea, but long term rather than short term.

Chair

We have had a lot of evidence from other forces about it being short term and not very good for long-term change.

Alison Hernandez

At one point you would hear forces say, “Just give us the money back. Even if you just divvied it up equally, we get a couple of million.”

Chair

To our frontline colleagues.

Alison Hernandez

Yes, seriously.

Chair

Would you prefer to have the money in your budget, Chief Constable?

Chief Constable Michael Barton

I would always prefer to have the budget.

Chair

But would you be able to do the transformation?

Chief Constable Michael Barton

That is exactly what is happening. There is a quiet revolution on the frontline. If you listen to some commentators in Whitehall, we are the last unreformed service. That is absolute rubbish. Anybody who left policing in 2008 and came back now would not recognise it. You have just heard about the startling changes that we have got in society and in the way that we employ youth workers. For example, I am using the apprenticeship levy. I am the only trainer, the only employer, who is training youth workers in the entire country. And PCSOs are now integral to the way that we manage sex offenders. None of this was envisaged by legislation. None of it has been driven by the Home Office. It has not been driven by me. It has been driven by frontline people who are utterly creative and recognised something in front of them. You give them the freedom and they do it. What I would like people to do is read HMIC reports because, if you read them, you will see innumerable examples of where policing is reforming itself without having to have a parent or guardian or wagging a finger.

Anne Marie Morris

Miss Kennedy, you mentioned value for money and whose value it is. Is it the community’s and what say they have in what happens? Is it the Home Office’s? Is it the experts’ in the policing area? If we are talking about value for money, do you think that those three constituents are all fairly represented? If not, how can it be changed?

Jane Kennedy

No, I don’t think that they are fairly represented. I also believe that it is too easy for the Home Office to hold back funds. For example, many PCCs made representations that the serious violence fund money should just be sent out to them. Despite the fact that it would end up being a relatively small amount of money, we could have done a lot with that with our forces. Instead, we have to pitch bids. Even worse, in some cases, is that we are merely a conduit for bids going to the Home Office. I understand that some forces have sent forward 30 bids for some of the serious violence money.

Anne Marie Morris

Okay, but my question was less about the bid process and more about the extent to which you have asked your constituents—your voters, because you are both elected—what they actually want, and to what extent that goes into your determining how to spend your money.

Jane Kennedy

We consult on the police and crime plan and its priorities with the public. My consultations involve me standing in supermarkets all over Merseyside and asking the public to tell me what they think and holding public meetings and so on. It is really hands on, and the public in Merseyside are very quick to tell me what they think.

Anne Marie Morris

But does that feed in to what you then ask for?

Jane Kennedy

Yes, except that police and crime commissioners are limited to some extent in a bidding process, in terms of what we can send in to support a bid. We cannot triage them in every case; sometimes we can, sometimes we can’t. That comes back to the bidding process being a problem for us. It would be better, quicker and simpler if we simply received the funds in our police budget and then collectively agreed locally, based on what we know the public want, what happens with that money.

Anne Marie Morris

My last question should probably go to Chief Superintendent Griffiths. This whole value for money issue is topical and highly relevant to ensuring that the consumer is actually involved in this. We have had one HMIC report, and as far as I can see, it is about what the police think the need is and has nothing to do with what the consumer thinks the need is. Do you think that consumers or citizens are being properly consulted, and is what they think being reflected in what you then go and do, given that only 5% of them are affected by crime?

Chief Superintendent Paul Griffiths

I don’t think that we can do enough to find out exactly what citizens want from their police service, and I am not sure that we know exactly what the police service needs to deliver. We have so many challenges. We have certainly moved from the public space into the private space. I would just like to come to something around funding. Adverse childhood experiences cuts across all the questions that have been asked today. It is about generational, forward thinking, in terms of public finances. It is about working together and making an impact that goes far beyond contracts or chief constables’ tenures. It is about moving forward, and it is where I feel the Home Office needs to take a step forward.

Chief Constable Michael Barton

When we ask them, the public want these things. They don’t want speeding vehicles through their town, they don’t want dog fouling and they don’t want antisocial behaviour. That is common. They are not being stupid here—far from it; they are being wise—because they recognise that a community free from those antisocial behaviours is actually a cohesive community. Cohesive communities don’t need external policing, because they police themselves. That is the Peelian principle. That is why we listen to people. The problem with listening to people is that they want neighbourhood policing, which we can’t give them because we can’t afford it.

Lee Rowley

You have all made a very loud case that there is a problem here, and some of you have used somewhat politicised terms such as “austerity”. Help me reconcile a few points. Recorded crime fell by 36% between 2011 and 2018, and your budgets reduced by 19%. Those figures are produced by the NAO. How does that impact on what you have done? Surely that suggests that, on a per-crime basis or a per-activity basis, you had more money than you perhaps had a number of years ago.

Chief Superintendent Paul Griffiths

We stated very early on that crime is probably about 20% of what we deal with, and there has been an exponential rise in everything else that we have to deal with, because of the gaps that are appearing in other public services. We are doing a lot of work nationally on a demand analysis. Demand analysis of police services is tricky and challenging, but there is a real attempt to try to work out exactly where the demand lies, where the impact lies, and where best we can deal with—

Lee Rowley

Seven or eight years in, I would have assumed that you knew what your demand was.

Chief Superintendent Paul Griffiths

There is a change in how clear we are about our demand. There is certainly pressure coming from the HMIC through force management statements to have a real look at what the pressures are and how we can foresee—how best to put our resources in the future. As I have also pointed out, demand has spiralled through vulnerability, technological changes and so on, and it is an ever moving feast.

Lee Rowley

Have you quantified any of that?

Chief Superintendent Paul Griffiths

I think there has been some quantifying of it.

Lee Rowley

Do you have the numbers?

Chief Superintendent Paul Griffiths

I have not got the numbers with me, no.

Chief Constable Michael Barton

Yes, it has been quantified, and HMIC actually inspect on this.

Lee Rowley

Do you have them?

Chief Constable Michael Barton

I can provide you with them—I have only got a notepad here. HMIC inspect on this, so if you go to every single police force, you will see that there are value for money profiles on every force, there are CIPFA stats, and we are inspected on it. So it is there for the public to see. In terms of demand, you are absolutely right that recorded crime went down, but everybody agrees that police-recorded crime statistics do not reveal the full picture. Even the crime survey of England and Wales does not reveal the full picture, because when they included cyber-crime in the crime survey of England and Wales two years ago, all our statistics doubled. In terms of what you see in front of you, in terms of your crime figures, you can pretty much double that and that is the actual demand. Fraud is one of those areas that does not always get the focus that it should, because it is not seen as a high vulnerability, but we have a huge problem with cyber-enabled fraud. When you look at the non-crime figures—by the way, 20% of our calls are for crime, but over 50% of our time is crime, because they are more complex—

Lee Rowley

If you cannot measure it, you cannot do anything about it. Your assertion, therefore, is that we have to have a different discussion on how to measure this. Our data is flawed, and until we implement some new data, we cannot have a meaningful discussion about any of this.

Chief Constable Michael Barton

I am not accepting that point.

Lee Rowley

That is the natural extension of your argument.

Chief Constable Michael Barton

I am also challenging the fact that when I used the word “austerity”, it was a politically loaded statement. I did not invent austerity—other people did.

Lee Rowley

Let us just go back to the statement about the data. What is it about the data that is problematic, and what do we need to do to change it so that we do not have these kinds of questions in this discussion in the future?

Chief Constable Michael Barton

Well, the data is all there—

Lee Rowley

It cannot be. If you cannot measure it, the data cannot be all there. You just said that recorded crime does not give us a true picture.

Chief Constable Michael Barton

No, because we have not been recording cyber-crime—because a lot of people do not record their own cyber-crime.

Lee Rowley

So what additional things do you need to put in to record the crime and to make it a true and accurate figure, in your view?

Chief Constable Michael Barton

Many people do not even know that they are the victim of cyber-crime—this is a new phenomenon for society. We must measure things that everybody has agreed on. What we are all working with here is that fog of the new—that fog of what we cannot expect. Just as we do not know what the lottery numbers are tomorrow, we do not know where some of this crime is tomorrow. Now—

Lee Rowley

I am slightly confused about how I can do anything with that statement. If you are saying that you do not know what it is, and you are saying that it is immeasurable, but you are saying it is still a problem, how can I, as a legislator, help you to deal with that? You have got to be able to quantify that for me and for this Committee in order for us to understand.

Chief Constable Michael Barton

One answer to that is that the big problem you have as a legislator is that the internet is international and you are a national legislative body. You cannot help it. That is one of our worries.

Lee Rowley

That does not explain the data point. Commissioners, I will give you the opportunity to speak. I accept that there is a problem in all our areas, by the way, but I really want to get to the bottom of some of these discussions. I do not want to be having these discussions where we talk past each other. How do we move the conversation on?

Jane Kennedy

First, crime data integrity has not been a problem. Most forces have been collecting crime data based on the accepted practice at the time. That practice changes depending on nuances in organisations such as Her Majesty’s inspectorate and others, which require changes to take place. Given that, I accept that, over a sustained period, crime came down. It did not come down by magic; it came down because of a sustained effort on the ground, with partners working together to impact upon crime and to develop crime prevention measures. As the ability and resilience of all those partners to continue to do that has reduced, crime has started to come up again. For the last five years in Merseyside, we have seen a gradual increase in almost every crime type, and now it is all crime types, including antisocial behaviour. That is a national phenomenon. It happens because of things that the Government, local authorities and police forces do. It is not true that we are not measuring these things. Forces are recognised by HMIC as having a good understanding, by and large, of demand and of the way demand is measured, the kind of crime risk and the threat they face. That is generally accepted as being good. That being the case, the funding of policing should be taking that into account. Instead, we are seeing a crude method of holding back spending on police budgets by an overall, across-the-board cut in police money, which is not reflective at all of the new emerging crime types or the overall increase in crime, added to the increase in other demands that we are seeing because of the failures of mental health services elsewhere and so on.

Alison Hernandez

Can I help a little bit with where there is a gap? This is the biggest frustration I have as a commissioner. We get 1 million calls for service a year, but I cannot tell you how many customers, or clients or individuals those were from, .because the data, like for crime, is collected on incident level. It is not collected by person. That is one of the fundamental challenges that policing faces: understanding how many victims we have, how many are repeat victims—they can pull that out sometimes—how many offenders we know on patch and how we are managing them. We run a crime data system called UNIFI, which you cannot seem to pull simple data reports out of—it is really challenging. Other forces have Niche. We have different ways of recording crime using a system that does not pull out data in a helpful way to actually inform the way you might want to manage the service to those individuals.

Chair

Paragraph 17 on page 9 of the NAO Report is what Mr Rowley is really picking up on. This came through strongly when we looked at this three years ago. It says: “There are no common standards for measuring all demands for police services and their costs, and therefore no national picture of what forces need.” One of our focuses today is challenging the Home Office about how they understand demand, but this paragraph lays out clearly some of the challenges about how you do it differently. Alison Hernandez, you have just explained about the different IT systems, but that is not the only answer. Are forces falling short in assessing the demand on their own services? What could you do better, and what could the Home Office do better, to address the issues laid out in this paragraph?

Jane Kennedy

I hold a quarterly performance inspection of Merseyside police. It is held in public. We scrutinise every available area of data. Everything we ask for—we ask for it on a weekly basis—

Chair

That’s what you do. Do you think you do it as well as you could? Do you think that other forces could learn from you, or that you could learn from other forces?

Jane Kennedy

Truthfully, I don’t know what other commissioners do, but I cannot think how I could improve on it, because it is really in-depth, plus we ask for it on a live basis, so as we are going through the quarter we can say, “What’s happening on this day?” It requires me to employ people who can analyse it and ask the questions.

Alison Hernandez

I am not saying the ICT system is the problem. This all starts with the crime recording standards and how you actually record something based on an incident as opposed to a person. That is the priority. There is a real challenge about how we understand our community and how we are helping them, and it is not just about the system.

Caroline Flint

Don’t you need both, though? You might have an incident that was witnessed by five people independently and they all ring in.

Alison Hernandez

Yes, you do, but we do not really have enough data on the people.

Chief Constable Michael Barton

Two things. First, what you count does not always count. The second thing is we now have to get much better on capability. That is a challenge to policing, and we are facing that with the Home Office. It is legitimate for people like you, Mr Rowley, to challenge us about whether we describe ourselves in a way that is coherent for you and the Treasury. I think it is a legitimate challenge that we do not, and we are improving on that. We are now working jointly with the Home Office, and I am leading on one of those with civil servants. So the way that we are describing our capability allows us to have a much more coherent conversation with the Treasury, and I think that is a good thing.

Anne Marie Morris

Ms Hernandez, we have been talking very much about measuring crime, and you said that prevention is now a large part of what the police do. What could or should we measure to understand and value what you doing on prevention?

Alison Hernandez

This is one of the real challenges that I talk to my community about a lot when they are looking at crime-recording information and what it means to them. The police will spend a lot of time safeguarding individuals—vulnerable people—who are likely to be exploited and abused as a crime, but that would never, ever normally get reported. So it would never be in the crime statistics.

Anne Marie Morris

How can it be? There are some proactive—

Alison Hernandez

I don’t know if you can. It is that real public service dilemma of how much you invest in prevention and how much you invest in crisis areas.

Anne Marie Morris

But if you do not measure the prevention, you will never get a tick in a box to invest in it.

Alison Hernandez

We are measuring the prevention—

Anne Marie Morris

But how?

Alison Hernandez

Well, through things like the number of missing people that we have, which is an activity that—

Chair

A number of years ago the Met were looking at doing this investigation about what impact antisocial behaviour had on people’s lives and what behavioural changes they had to make, and they were trying to measure that. I do not know if you are doing anything similar.

Chief Constable Michael Barton

You can measure reducing reoffending. There is now a real push in terms of evidence-based policing, where we are doing randomised control trials to see whether or not this has more of an impact than that. For example, the Checkpoint programme is now rolled out to many forces, and we can now say that the prevention work we have done with our offenders in Checkpoint has reduced their reoffending by between 10% and 20%. That is replicable. So we can say that we have reduced offending by between 10% and 20% with that programme.

Anne Marie Morris

Okay, but there is other work going on. In Newton Abbot, there is a specific focus on identifying the victims of drug trafficking and modern slavery. How can you measure the value of what those police are doing to make sure those victims have the resource to withstand the threat? So we reduce crime—

Chair

That is a very Newton Abbot question.

Alison Hernandez

It goes back to what Chief Constable Barton just said: you cannot measure everything. It is not that everything that you can count counts. So we need to make sure we are measuring the things that are important to be measured and understand why we are measuring what we are measuring. None of us wants more bureaucracy in the police service, and I certainly do not want to do a time and motion study on a police officer and ask him to log what they are doing every five minutes of their time.

Anne Marie Morris

I agree with you, but the problem is: how will you persuade the Government to give you money?

Alison Hernandez

I think it is down to whether the public feel safe and, at the moment, in my community, I know that our communities do not feel safe. We have got public confidence reducing, and actually public confidence in whether we are doing a good job is reducing.

Chair

I will briefly bring in Caroline Flint and Layla Moran. Really quick questions, please.

Caroline Flint

This really speaks to the transformation fund and ideas to get ahead of the curve. If you want to reduce the amount of time police spend on mental health problems, and you, for example, bring in nurses to work alongside them, you would then hopefully see that that reduces the amount of time. Would you agree with that? Also, do you think the transformation fund is really worthy of its title?

Jane Kennedy

Yes.

Chair

One yes from Jane Kennedy. Alison Hernandez?

Alison Hernandez

I am on the fence with it, really. Transformation is about doing something completely differently, and I do not see a lot of the projects doing something differently.

Chief Constable Michael Barton

I am leading on some projects, and I am proud to be leading on them. I just do not think that the process itself has been thought through. For example, when it was first started, evaluation of the impact was not even there. I think that cliff-edge funding, where you cannot roll across, is just really difficult.

Chief Superintendent Paul Griffiths

It is absolutely right that we invest in long-term financial programmes that have a real big impact, but they are difficult to measure, and it is difficult to see the impact of some of the prevention stuff that we do. But there are some examples, such as the violence in Cardiff, where they have demonstrated that, working with health data and so on, they can identify where the hotspots and challenges are and seek to reduce violent crime. Those are the things where we need to use an evidence base to move forward.

Layla Moran

Ms Hernandez, you mentioned dipping public confidence. I do not know whether you saw the “Dispatches” programme the other day, which ended by basically saying they were worried that people will stop reporting crimes to the police because of that dip in confidence. Are your residents telling you that? I would also direct that to Ms Kennedy.

Alison Hernandez

Yes, and the people who complain to me the most are small businesses. One challenge for policing is that it is not funded by business rates, as the fire service is; it is funded only by local council tax precept and Government. I feel that businesses have actually got a disservice.

Jane Kennedy

People do tell me that; local councillors tell me that they hear about things that are not getting reported to the police, yet the calls to us for help are going up exponentially. There clearly are people who are calling the police more often, but other people are saying, “It’s pointless doing that. This is too low-level. We’ll just live with it locally.” That is where you come back to the people living in a community where an urban street gang takes control. Because something can’t be measured—I can give you an example. A gentleman who had no mental capacity became violent in the care environment in which he was being looked after. He had to be taken into custody because of the violent way in which his condition was playing out. He was brought into custody, which was completely the wrong environment for him, and the custody staff had to wait and hold him until a new care package could be put in place by the local authority to take him back into a care environment. Those are the kinds of unforeseen demands on a police force that it is really difficult to budget for, but if the Home Office understands that that is what we mean when we are talking about this vast increase in demand—it is cases like that, which in the end was not “crimed”, because the man did not have capacity, but none the less it happened and occupied hours of police time and resource. Understanding that ought to bring forward a reflection of it in the funding formula.

Chair

My final question is about something that affects the geographical areas. We on this Committee have been following very closely the emergency services network plan for replacement of Airwave, and we learned from the Home Office only this Monday—well, we learned on 21 September in very skeletal terms—that there is now basically a pick-and-mix approach for you out there on the ground. You can pick and choose which individual communication tools you want and need—this was from Sir Philip Rutnam in a letter to me—and decide when you want them, rather than having to wait until every element of the new network is built. So can each of you individually tell me, are you availing yourself of this offer to pick and choose the communication tools you need? If so, which ones are you getting, and do you have confidence that the programme will be delivered, as is now proposed, by 2022?

Chief Constable Michael Barton

My sense from the Chief Constables’ Council last week is that this is probably one of the most pressing concerns facing chief constables. It is not to be toyed with. The way police officers communicate back to colleagues—

Chair

I hate to interrupt you, but we have looked at this six times; this is our sixth time looking at it—

Chief Constable Michael Barton

I’m certainly not taking the pick-and-mix—

Chair

Are you going to be taking any bits of the system and experimenting with those, rather than waiting and going later?

Chief Constable Michael Barton

I don’t even know what the pick-and-mix is. The problem is that you are asking me a question, but none of us know what we are talking about, because it has not actually been designed. If you show me a couple of handsets and whether some officers have to carry one or two, I’ll tell you what officers will say: “We’re not carrying two handsets.” And if the British Transport police run through my force area, I want the British Transport police to be on the same system as I am, and I want all my neighbours to be on the same system, because that is the only safe way to run policing, because the most challenging bits of policing that we do are where pursuits cross county boundaries and force boundaries. This is not to be toyed with.

Alison Hernandez

I agree with Chief Constable Barton. This has been a real challenge. We have been leading regionally; we have collaborated as a region to inform and be part of the development of the ESN. We are last in the queue, so—

Chair

Yes, it’s getting further and further behind.

Jane Kennedy

The north-west is the forerunner region; we are supposed to be the first to go on to the new system. There is deep anxiety, at chief constable and PCC level, across the region about what the implications might be. There are some forces—Merseyside, for example—that might benefit quite quickly, because we are a relatively geographically small area, with no big mountains.

Chair

And no underground.

Jane Kennedy

We can probably manage quite well, but North Wales and Cumbria have other real anxieties. Although that might be overcome, in terms of whether we are ready to make that step forward, as a region, we are holding together, because we want to share the risk between all six forces, rather than forces getting peeled off and starting to experiment.

Chair

Have you been buying new Airwave equipment or are you planning to do that? And what shelf life have you got for the old equipment that you are replacing? How long do you expect the shelf life of that to be?

Chief Constable Michael Barton

Again, we don’t know. We were holding off because we thought—

Chair

That the new one would come.

Chief Constable Michael Barton

This is the problem. This is now investment in a system that is going to be end-of-life. We have now got to invest in that.

Chair

How long do you expect that those new handsets will last?

Chief Constable Michael Barton

I am not confident that we will get anything to replace them.

Chair

Okay, so you are hoping they will last. Alison Hernandez?

Alison Hernandez

I have nothing to add on that.

Jane Kennedy

The same.

Chair

Thank you very much. That was a useful hour. Thank you very much for your time. You are very welcome to stay for the next session, which is when we have our Home Office and inspectorate witnesses. Examination of witnesses

Witnesses

Sir Philip Rutnam, Permanent Secretary, Home Office; Scott McPherson, Director General, Crime and Policing Group, Home Office; and Sir Tom Winsor WS, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary.

Chair

Welcome back to the Public Accounts Committee on Wednesday 10 October 2018. I am pleased to welcome our second panel of witnesses—our Home Office and inspectorate witnesses. From my left to right, we have Scott McPherson, who is the director general of the crime, policing and fire group at the Home Office; Sir Philip Rutnam, the permanent secretary at the Home Office, who is a regular visitor to this Committee; and Sir Tom Winsor, Her Majesty’s chief inspector of constabulary. A very warm welcome to you all. Before we go into the main session, I want to pick up on the issue I raised at the end with the previous panel—I don’t know whether you were in the room, Sir Philip—about what I note is now called the emergency services mobile communications programme. The cynic in me suggests that that is a way of avoiding a Google search, if anyone wants to look up the issue of ESN, given its chequered history. We were dismayed, as a Committee, that on 21 September you put out a written ministerial statement, which is a rather grand term for the few lines that came out, talking about the future of ESN. You suggested that there was going to be a slightly different approach to it. I was looking for the actual document behind the statement, and none existed. On Monday evening, I received the letter you wrote to me, Sir Philip—thank you for that—about the future of the emergency services network and the review whose results we have been waiting for since January. It is good to know that some work has happened, but this letter was, frankly, unbelievable. There isn’t a figure in here about the cost. You talk about signing new heads of terms with Motorola and EE, but there is not any confidence about whether Airwave really will be able to continue. What do the heads of terms cover? Let me run through some of the questions I have as a result of this. First, we heard from our previous witnesses that they are very sceptical about this pick-and-mix approach—picking a communications tool from the ESN and implementing it in isolation. What have you got to say, first of all, about that point?

Sir Philip Rutnam

First, I am sorry you were dismayed. I thought the announcement that was made by Ministers on 21 September—and, indeed, the letter I sent to follow—contained some very important and positive news about the programme. It confirmed that the programme remains. After the review that we have undertaken, the Government is clear that it remains the right strategic direction. We have identified a way forward with introducing what we described as the incremental approach—introducing new services over time—and I can say more in detail about that. We have also concluded heads of terms with two of our key suppliers. There are some very important and positive steps forward in the programme.

Chair

Given that Airwave is on its last legs and has been extended, there wasn’t really much of an option to continue with the programme—we all know it is world-leading, which is always a bit of a worry with IT projects of this nature. You mentioned the positive step of signing heads of terms with Motorola and EE. What do those heads of terms cover? You are going to finalise those contracts by the end of this year—is that right?

Sir Philip Rutnam

They cover what you would expect in terms of the technical delivery of the solution by Motorola.

Chair

Technical delivery. They run, of course, Airwave and the new—

Sir Philip Rutnam

They cover technical delivery of the new solution by Motorola, with a complete set of milestones, and commercial terms that are associated with those milestones. They cover the extension of Airwave and appropriate incentivisation around the extension of Airwave, and they do broadly similar things in relation to EE. This is part of a wider package of changes associated with the programme that we have undertaken over the last 18 months, including greatly strengthening the programme team that is working on this within the Department, and strengthening our ability to integrate the multiple different inputs to produce the service.

Chair

You talk about the incentivisation for Motorola’s solutions to deliver Airwave. What is that incentivisation? Presumably it is money at certain points to deliver on the extension of Airwave? How much will it cost to extend Airwave?

Sir Philip Rutnam

I am not going to go into great detail here around the incentive arrangements with Motorola in relation to—

Chair

Is there a fee that they get at certain milestones for Airwave?

Sir Philip Rutnam

In relation to the new solution that is being delivered, I won’t go into great detail around that.

Chair

We are talking about Airwave here.

Sir Philip Rutnam

In relation to Airwave, yes of course there is a cost associated with extending Airwave. I would put that cost at about £1.1 billion associated with the three years, going to the end of 2022. There is a cost associated with that. The programme as a whole, running Airwave for longer, will cost more, but we have to be really clear. What is the alternative to the programme introducing an alternative to Airwave? It is to seek to rely on Airwave essentially forever. That would be much more costly.

Chair

Okay. Just to be clear, because this is now three years, that is £1.1 billion. That is a number, which is good, because this letter is very light on numbers. One of the other projects you talk about is the network coverage testing product, which is the first ESN project due to appear around the turn of the year. What is a network coverage testing product?

Sir Philip Rutnam

That essentially will be a device that provides automated information on network coverage. We have identified, I think, about 250 participants, initially from across the emergency services, who will be using this device and carrying it around with them. That will provide automated information to us on network coverage, which will go to provide assurance about the actual level of network coverage and also therefore help us to identify if there are particular gaps where the network needs to be strengthened. That is just the first product, which is already in a very advanced state of development.

Chair

Was that originally planned in the original ESN?

Sir Philip Rutnam

No, not to my knowledge. To go to my point about the wider reset, we changed the way in which the programme is working so we will be starting to introduce practical products that provide real benefits and real information much more quickly.

Chair

Given what you heard from our previous witnesses, there needed to be something to prove to people out there using it—which is, I think, more than 300 organisations, including 105 emergency services—that you had something that was going to work. How much is the network coverage testing product costing that was not originally scheduled into the cost of the ESN?

Sir Philip Rutnam

I am afraid I do not know that. I do not think the cost is very large.

Chair

Could you write to us with that, please?

Sir Philip Rutnam

I certainly can. Now the network has essentially been built, testing its availability is not hugely costly.

Chair

We are all delighted that it is being tested. You talk about progress proceeding with the work to build coverage on the London underground and in remote areas. What progress has there been on coverage on the London underground? How far off are we from getting coverage on the tube?

Sir Philip Rutnam

From memory, we now have leaky feeders—the technical term for the device that provides coverage in the tunnels—covering some 256 km of London underground tunnels.

Chair

What does that mean? Is that most of the London underground? I don’t know how many kilometres the underground goes to.

Sir Philip Rutnam

It is most of it, yes. A high proportion.

Chair

Right, so that is now working. You are confident about that?

Sir Philip Rutnam

That is well advanced as an element of the programme, yes. It is not the only element, of course.

Chair

If it is working that well, it is rather underplayed in your letter, I have to say. You are looking to sign revised contracts at the end of the year following the heads of terms. Is there a risk that those contracts will not get signed at the end of the year, given that we have seen so many delays, or are you confident in the end-of-the-year prediction in this letter?

Sir Philip Rutnam

To use a phrase I used at the last hearing on this in June, I am reasonably confident, yes. I think we have a good alignment. We put an enormous amount of work, together with our commercial suppliers, EE and Motorola, into the resolution of the heads of terms. The heads of terms would probably be more detailed and extensive than is common at this stage in the reset of a programme. Most of the big issues will have been resolved through the heads of terms, but you always need to go through the detailed process of turning this into a commercial contract. We have set a realistic timetable for that. I met very senior colleagues from Motorola just the other week to talk about that. We were both clear about our intent to achieve that timetable. We have a very good level of strategic alignment behind the programme, so I am reasonably confident, yes.

Chair

You talk in the next paragraph about the cost of the core system provided by Motorola and EE having not materially changed, and then you say, “the programme continues to refine the plans and costs for other parts of the solution,” which includes, for example, London underground air-to-ground coverage. You are refining the plans and costs, so do you have any figures that you can give us now about the extra costs of dealing with those issues?

Sir Philip Rutnam

I do not have figures I can give you now.

Chair

When will you have figures?

Sir Philip Rutnam

As I also mention in the letter, we are in the process of revising the final business case for this programme, which is intended to be completed in the new year. I would expect to be able to supply figures in connection with the finalisation of the FBC. I know that the NAO is also planning, in any event, to do a review of the programme to roughly that timescale.

Chair

You heard on the ground that a lot of local emergency services and other users have already been buying Airwave handsets because they were concerned about whether this was ever coming and they needed to replace kit. Has the Home Office looked again at what it will do to compensate for the extra cost that had not originally been budgeted in? They are twice the price of the new handsets.

Sir Philip Rutnam

We are in discussion with police forces, fire and rescue services and the other emergency services about that and many other issues. It is a matter for the emergency services. We recognise that this programme has to be very closely co-ordinated with them. Yes, there are costs associated with the acquisition of handsets, whether for Airwave or for the new solution. There will also be costs in control centres that need to be adapted. We are working closely with them. We are not paying for the cost of the handsets. There are costs of this programme that will fall to local emergency services, but, as we all know, and as we have discussed many times before, the implementation of this programme will enable us to get off the Airwave solution, to save in the order of £200 million a year each and every year, and to have a much better solution that is lower cost and higher capability.

Chair

We are capable of doing the maths. If you are spending £1.1 billion to extend Airwave by three years, five years of that £200 million saving is already eaten up. From your business case, can you give us a time when this will hit the sweet spot when you will actually have forces or emergency services out there saving money year on year?

Sir Philip Rutnam

The total cost of supporting policing in this country across central Government and local taxpayers—the same is true for other emergency services—means that as soon as we are able to switch off Airwave, we will be saving very significant amounts of money.

Chair

But you still have extra money going in to Airwave that you had not originally budgeted for when you started this process.

Sir Philip Rutnam

I do not anticipate any extra costs beyond those we had already planned in 2019-20. After April 2020, of course, we do not actually have budgets at the moment. It will be a matter for the spending review next year. The state of this programme will need to be taken into account in the spending review, alongside a number of other things that we will no doubt discuss later in the hearing.

Chair

I think we will. It is interesting: if I were the Treasurer, I might be asking questions about how this was managed and whether you, as the Home Office, deserve the extra money or whether it will have to come out of other parts of your budget.

Lee Rowley

You have just told us that there is about £1.1 billion of cost to the extension of Airwave. In your letter, which I found similarly astounding, as the Chair did, you say that the programme is still good value for money. At what point does the programme cease to be good value for money? How many billions of pounds do we have to lose on it before it stops being?

Sir Philip Rutnam

It ceases to be good value for money at the point at which when we compare it with the alternative, it is not as good as that alternative. The alternative—

Lee Rowley

What is the cost of the alternative?

Sir Philip Rutnam

The only alternative that we can see at the moment is to rely on Airwave for the indefinite future. For Airwave, we pay £1 million-plus a day. One of the purposes behind this programme is to enable us to get off Airwave. There are other purposes that are also very important. The programme remains good value for money. It will take longer to implement the programme—I think we have seen that coming, as we have discussed a number of times. It will take longer than originally planned, but the programme, once implemented, will still—

Lee Rowley

When will it cease to be good value for money?

Sir Philip Rutnam

When it ceases to be less costly and less beneficial than the alternative.

Lee Rowley

The logical extension is never. So we could drop an inordinate amount of money into this—we could drop a trillion pounds into it—and on the line of your logic, it would still remain good value for money. It would explode the national debt.

Sir Philip Rutnam

No, I don’t think the arithmetic would take you that far. Suppose there were another solution that came along—an alternative to this, which was available in the market, would allow us to get off Airwave and was cheaper than this—then of course we would go for that. But having done an exhaustive search on what is happening globally in relation to public service communications—emergency service communications—there is not a better alternative for us.

Lee Rowley

So the Home Office’s approach is that, if it is unable to find an alternative, it is happy to shovel money into any programme indefinitely for a total amount of money that is completely uncosted, because it still represents good value for money? That is the logical conclusion that I can draw from your statement.

Sir Philip Rutnam

From a practical perspective, we face the choice between not investing in this programme and expecting for the indefinite future—until something better comes along, which it may, but we do not know when—to rely on Airwave. We know about the contractual terms we have faced with Airwave, which was a PFI programme from the 1990s. That is the practical option we have, versus investing in this programme.

Chair

We know what the practical option is, but I think you are being very evasive about actually acknowledging that there is a big cost to continuing Airwave—it is as simple as that. Mr Rowley was asking a very simple question. It is not free, cheap or good value to continue Airwave, and it is now extending for three years longer, at great cost to the taxpayer, because the system that was supposed to be replacing it is not up and running. That is the opportunity cost.

Sir Philip Rutnam

I hope I am not being evasive. In fact, I identified earlier in this hearing that we estimate the cost of extending Airwave to be about £1.1 billion.

Chair

Call a spade a spade. You are saying Airwave is going to cost £1.1 billion—that is a cost that extends further. At £1 million a day, we are adding quite a lot of money on to taxpayers’ shoulders.

Sir Philip Rutnam

I would much rather avoid that, but in my judgment it is still better to proceed with this programme, which has a good chance of success and a good of chance of bringing both financial and service benefits, than not to do it.

Lee Rowley

At what point should I expect a permanent secretary to take responsibility for a £1.1 billion-plus overrun and not brush it off as still representing good value for money?

Sir Philip Rutnam

I think I am taking responsibility for the programme and all its elements here.

Lee Rowley

And the £1.1 billion cost that could be being spent on police—

Sir Philip Rutnam

The reason why the programme is extending to the end of 2022 is because that is the realistic timeframe, given the complexity and scale of the programme, and given the criticality of emergency services that talked about earlier—

Lee Rowley

As a member of the Public Accounts Committee for the last six months, and having listened to dozens of these discussions—including a number with yourself on this particular issue—I simply do not understand when I should expect permanent secretaries, as representatives of those who deliver these projects, to take responsibility for dramatic and vast cost overruns on projects that have clearly run into the wall, and why I am supposed to believe, on the basis of a two-page letter that explains nothing, that everything is fine. As a legislator, please explain to me how you and the rest of the Department can possibly expect me to accept that kind of position. It’s ludicrous.

Sir Philip Rutnam

First, the project has not run into the wall. In fact, the project continues to move forward better than it has done at any time in the last several years. It is making good practical progress in a whole range of areas—we touched on some of them earlier. The project has not run into the wall. Secondly, since I became permanent secretary in the Department, I have taken responsibility for this programme. I have spent a significant amount of my personal time trying to ensure that the programme is put into a state where—whether it is in terms of organisational capability, timeframe, resources, the quality of discussion around it or the quality of the relationships around it, including with our commercial partners—it properly matches the scale and complexity of the programme. I do not accept that I have not taken responsibility for the programme.

Lee Rowley

Yet we still have representatives from police forces who will have to use this kit at the end, and who have attended the same committees as you are presenting to, saying they have no idea what is coming and no confidence that it will work.

Sir Philip Rutnam

We actually haven’t had the opportunity to talk to Chief Constable Barton about this. We have, of course, talked to the National Police Chiefs Council. We have talked to the lead for the NPCC, who is Chief Constable Francis Habgood of Thames Valley. We have talked extensively to Sara Thornton of the NPCC and to Cressida Dick of the Metropolitan Police. There is strong support for the programme in policing. There is a recognition of the need to get off Airwave, and a recognition of the strategic driver around technology and technology capability.

Chair

I do not think we are arguing about whether we do it. It is about how we do it, and the fact that it is delayed, and that we have had you and your predecessor here telling us repeatedly—six times—that it is going to be fine, and here we are again.

Sir Philip Rutnam

I am not sure I have been here saying it will be fine. I think I have been talking about the scale of the challenge, but I would take from the previous exchanges with our partners that we have a significant task to do—that is recognised in the programme—in order to bring all members of the emergency services community into ultimately being supporters of the programme. I understand their reservations, because this is an absolutely critical resource. I would just point out, though, that among the products we will be deploying next year will be a new data product, ESN Connect, for which we have support from the fire service. That will enable the fire service to have data capability in a way that they do not at the moment. We have a product that will—

Lee Rowley

How does this programme conclusively remain the right strategic approach to take if you have not completed the full business case?

Sir Philip Rutnam

We have not completed the full business case. The revision of the full business case will be a very significant document.

Lee Rowley

You have been doing the review for a long, long time.

Sir Philip Rutnam

Yes, and as we discussed back in July, we had to get to the conclusion of our commercial discussions with our partners to be confident we could get through that gate. We have done that to the point of heads of terms. I do not have all the detail of the revised FBC. What I do have, though, is enough of the detail—the insight—around the key parameters to be confident that we will get to a satisfactory FBC.

Lee Rowley

That says nothing. Strategically, it is the right thing—strategically, I might want to fly to my constituency, but it might cost me £1.1 billion a time, for example. It is not actually likely to happen, is it, so why would I pursue a strategic imperative of trying to fly to my constituency every Thursday if doing so is not going to be value for money? The division of these two is ludicrous.

Sir Philip Rutnam

I do not accept that. Of course, if I had had the luxury of waiting until the full revised FBC was complete before sharing any information, I might have enjoyed that luxury, but that is not a realistic option that is open to me. I have to be able to communicate—we have to communicate—about the progress of the programme. What we did on 21 September was to communicate that we had concluded commercial negotiations for the heads of terms, and concluded the phase of the review that confirms it is the right strategic intent. We do not have all the detail. There are still details, of course, that need to be filled in for the FBC, but I have 80% or 90% of what I need.

Chair

You are picking up such a mess that I can see that the business plan issue is almost a side issue, given where it started. I am going to bring in Tom McDonald from the National Audit Office on a key point.

Tom McDonald

Just to help to answer Mr Rowley’s question, the original full business case from August 2015 projected quantified benefits of £3.64 billion, so clearly, the more those benefits are eroded, the more the risk to value for money emerges.

Chair

I will bring in the Comptroller and Auditor General in a moment. I just wanted to highlight to you, Sir Philip, if you have not seen it, a survey of 48 forces run by Policing Insight, with input from the Police Federation of England and Wales. It paints a pretty damning picture of the confidence of frontline officers about ICT services generally. I will read out some choice quotes: “Getting a signal is an issue.” Just 2% were completely satisfied with their ICT services, and only 30% felt their force invested wisely in technology. We are coming from a very low base at the frontline, and here we are, layering on this new system. Are you going to be mandating police forces—not just police, but other emergency services—to take this on? This confidence level, and the confidence level we heard from our previous witnesses, suggests that there is not a great willingness to embrace it.

Sir Philip Rutnam

I have not seen that survey, but the survey data you are quoting is unlikely to be about Home Office-supplied services, because we supply relatively few IT services to police forces.

Chair

Sorry, but that is not my point. It does not really matter whether they are Home Office-supplied. The point is that if you have officers out there who are already finding out that they do not have a good IT system, their experience of this is not going to be a positive approach to something new. They will see it as another bit of kit on their belt that sits there not being very effective.

Sir Philip Rutnam

I completely agree. I was trying to make this clear earlier: the confidence of customers in this solution is going to be critical to its success—as important as anything else. That is one reason why I am positive about the more incremental approach, which will allow staff and officers in the emergency services to have practical experience of the products. Ultimately, in order to realise the benefits, we will have to switch off Airwave, which means that there will have to be enough confidence within the emergency services that the new product can be relied on. It is mission-critical that we get that confidence. I would point out that we faced a similar issue with Airwave when it was introduced in the 1990s. We may be critical about the contractual structure of the packet—it is a PFI—but exactly the same issue was faced about the confidence that this new generation of technology would provide the necessary service to police forces and other emergency services. That was achieved through a great deal of hard work.

Chair

I think hard work is an understatement in this case. I will ask the Comptroller and Auditor General to make a comment, because the National Audit Office has been very helpful to us in keeping its beady eye on the numbers.

Amyas Morse

Let us accept that this is the right thing to do, which I think it probably is, and that with your personal involvement and leadership it is being run well now. It does not follow that the way it was run until you took charge has provided value for money—I just do not think that the logic follows through. If it was run with delay and unnecessary expense in the period until you took charge, unfortunately that is not value for money. I think you probably understand that that may be the case, and it is perfectly reasonable to say so.

Sir Philip Rutnam

I cannot make any comment on the period before I became permanent secretary—

Chair

Well, you can—it is your Department. Continuity in the civil service!

Caroline Flint

You have collective memory, I hope.

Sir Philip Rutnam

What I will say is that I found a highly motivated team, many members of which remain in place, including the senior responsible owner. Of course, as with other programmes that you have no doubt seen from time to time, there are always things to be learned about the importance of the conditions when you set the programme up in the first place, of considering—in more depth than perhaps might once have been the case—what could go wrong, of building in a culture of challenge, and of realism. Of course, those are points that the Home Office and other Departments have all sought to take on board in relation to major projects and programmes at large.

Chair

I think you can sense from the atmosphere in the room that the Committee is not impressed with the way this has played out. We heard from our previous witness panel about how the police national database, the police national computer and the automatic number plate recognition systems work, and about how they have spiralled in cost and are causing problems. That raises concern in our minds about the Home Office’s ability to take on, set up, manage and deliver major technological solutions that are essential to our emergency services. Given what you have just said, I wonder what lessons you are now playing through the Home Office in terms of commercial procurement, dealing with partners and making sure that you are scoping these projects so that this does not happen again.

Sir Philip Rutnam

One of my central messages to my colleagues in the Home Office is about the importance of realism in planning—that is the way I tend to put it. In relation to major projects, that will involve thinking about the reference classes and using the best available techniques for things like quantified cost and schedule risk assessment. Recognising the softer, human dimension, it will also involve building a culture that values realism and can hold realism as a value against the optimism that you need in order to believe that you can achieve things. I want to reassure you that in the Home Office this is a very active conversation. It is something that we talk about at our senior management events and senior staff events. I keep coming back to this theme alongside a number of others. I have to say that I think we are actually making good progress, which is not to say that there are no challenges. Of course we tend to focus here on things that do not go so well, but I would give the example of another IT programme: the child abuse image database, which has transformed the ability of police officers to identify victims of child abuse from imagery. It has drastically cut down the time it takes and it reduces the psychological stress and harm that police are exposed to, because it is so much more automated. The project has a relatively small cost, but a huge impact.

Chair

There is no doubt, and the Committee recognises, that there are good projects happening. But our job is to ask you questions about this, among other things that we will move on to in a moment. However, there remains the point, which Mr Rowley was pushing as well, about the cost—this extra £1.1 billion—let alone the other opportunity costs to forces which are now having to invest in older and more expensive kit.

Caroline Flint

Sir Philip, do you agree that the Home Office is responsible for assessing how much funding police forces need, deciding how much the policing system receives as a whole, and allocating grants to police and crime commissioners?

Sir Philip Rutnam

Yes, those are our responsibilities, among others.

Caroline Flint

Do you agree that for far too long the way the Department chooses to distribute funding has been ineffective and detached from the changing nature of policing?

Sir Philip Rutnam

At the moment, part of the mechanism for distributing funding to our police and crime commissioners involves a funding formula which was developed back in 2006-07. That funding formula has essentially been frozen for a number of years now. We accept that it is out of date and that it needs to be updated, but we do not think that now is the time to do that.

Caroline Flint

Why?

Sir Philip Rutnam

To go back a step, we were undertaking a very significant amount of work, including in partnership with police, in the run-up to the 2017 general election—of course, we did not know that there was going to be another general election following the one in 2015. Ministers decided—I think they were right to; it was a wise decision—that the timescale for them implementation of a new formula was too ambitious, and that given the emerging pressures on policing, the more important things to do were twofold. First, doing high-quality work on the demands on policing, and seeking essentially to make and win as strong an argument as possible for a funding settlement for policing, which I can talk about for 2018-19. Those were higher priorities than changes to the funding formula. Secondly, although we recognise the points about the funding formula, what police and crime commissioners and police forces also needed, in order to stand the best chance of responding to those pressures across the whole system, was clarity and certainty in order to plan. So we were prioritising work on demand, work on funding in aggregate, and clarity and certainty for police forces over the very complex task of making any changes to the funding formula.

Caroline Flint

I think you acknowledged there that not enough work has been done on demand. In November 2017, the Department examined available information on demand, but at the moment we do not know whether that examination process is going to be kept up. Is that correct?

Sir Philip Rutnam

I can assure you that it will be kept up. In fact, it is being kept up. We have been very clear that we always intended to maintain that particular piece of work, which was done in 2017. We are maintaining it, and, indeed, we have widened it into a bigger piece of work in the run-up to the next spending review.

Caroline Flint

On page 12 of our last Report from 2015, paragraph 2.18 says that, “A full understanding of the nature of demand for police services, and police productivity, is important because this has an impact on the resources and skills required by forces. However, HMIC found that forces’ understanding of demand varied considerably.” What are you doing to ensure that there is some consistency across the piece when it comes to assessing demand and how is that going to influence a new funding formula down the road?

Sir Philip Rutnam

Going back to 2017, we set up a very sizeable programme of work with partners in police to improve the understanding of demand. Perhaps Mr McPherson might speak to the detail on that, and we can also pick up the role of HMIC.

Scott McPherson

As the permanent secretary said, last autumn we did a comprehensive piece of work to look at demand in police forces, which led to the settlement. We now have a group, which I chair, that has a range of police and crime commissioners, chief constables, the National Crime Agency, HMIC and the College of Policing on it. It is co-ordinating work across the different forces to understand in more detail the demands on different forces, in preparation for putting forward the best possible case to the Treasury for the spending review. As the permanent secretary said, the intention is that that work will continue, so rather than it being a one-off we will do it year on year.

Caroline Flint

When will the next one happen?

Scott McPherson

The work we are doing now is leading up to the settlement for the next financial year and the spending review, which is due to take place next year, but we will continue that work in collaboration with police forces so we are maintaining a really good view of demand and pressures on forces in the way that we have talked about.

Sir Philip Rutnam

From a practical perspective, we will make a financial settlement for police forces in 2019-20, which will be done before the end of this calendar year. The work we are doing now will be a key foundation for that funding settlement, and for our discussions in Government about that funding settlement. We are also looking ahead to the spending review—the Chancellor has said there will be a spending review in 2019—so we are looking to use the work not just for 2019-20 but for further ahead.

Caroline Flint

Can I just stop you? Our report in 2015 highlighted all the gaps in understanding of demand. You are saying that more work needs to be done. What has been going on since 2015? It does not sound to me like there is a grip either on demand or on the changing nature of demand, some of which we heard from the witnesses in the pre-panel.

Scott McPherson

Let me take you through what the permanent secretary said about the work we did last autumn on understanding demand. We looked at three key areas: demand, financial pressures on police forces and performance measures. On demand, the key thing we looked at was a weighted demand in relation to crime—not just individual statistics on the number of offences, but the cost to the police of investigating those crimes. For example, serious sexual offences create a much higher burden on the police’s time and resources, so they show a higher weighted cost. That was the key measure there. We also looked at a wide range of other factors such as crimes per 100,000 of the population, crimes per officer and numbers of 999 calls, as the PCCs talked about earlier.

Caroline Flint

I do not want to pre-empt my colleague, but a lot of the discussion in the previous session was about demands on the police that do not necessarily fit into a nice basket labelled “crime”. Are you looking into that?

Scott McPherson

Absolutely. We have looked at non-crime measures, including things such as missing persons and road traffic collisions, which also place burdens on the police. It is important to understand that although approximately 80% of incidents that the police respond to are non-crime, around 80% of the cost relates to crime. As I said, the crime incidents require significantly more resources.

Caroline Flint

Back to you, Sir Philip. What impact has the 19% funding cut had on police services?

Sir Philip Rutnam

There is a lot of evidence on that in the Report. You can see that police forces have reacted to the cut in a number of ways, but overall there have been significant reductions in the workforce. There have also been some significant positive changes—Chief Constable Barton talked about some of those—to the way in which police forces use technology, drive innovation, and challenge and improve efficiency. It is by no means a complete journey, but there have been some very positive changes to the way in which police forces operate.

Caroline Flint

Chief Constable Barton made the point that for the first three years from 2010 when the public services had to deal with the financial crash, austerity—a word the Prime Minister uses, too—was understood, but that it has gone on far too long. Do you acknowledge that?

Sir Philip Rutnam

I would draw a distinction. Your 19% figure goes back to 2010; we are all familiar with the 2010 spending review, the fiscal environment faced by the Government and the response to that in terms of the challenge for public services. I point out that, in the 2015 spending review, the Government protected funding for police services in the round, constant in real terms, and also assured police and crime commissioners that their funding—a combination of police grant and precept—would be at least constant in cash terms. This is more of a macro political and fiscal question, but the way in which the Government have funded the police service has changed in that period since 2010, and the 2015 spending review was very important. I also point to last autumn’s financial settlement for 2018-19—the year we are now in—in which the Government provided an additional £460 million of funding for police services this year, compared with the previous year.

Caroline Flint

That includes the take from local taxation, doesn’t it?

Sir Philip Rutnam

It does indeed.