Summary of Evidence by Chief Constable to Justice Committee 8th October 2014- This will be of interest to families awaiting HET reports and/ or investigations The Chairperson (Mr Givan): Let me welcome to the meeting Chief Constable George Hamilton; acting Deputy Chief Constable Alistair Finlay; David Best, the director of finance and support services; and Mark McNaughton, the head of finance. The Committee respects the Policing Boards function — that is primarily where you report to — but the Committee has a remit on budgets. Chief Constable George Hamilton (Police Service of Northern Ireland): I briefed the Policing Board on this issue extensively last Thursday. We are required to save £51·4 million in the next six months. To try to give that some context, that is £5 million more than it takes to run our largest policing district for a year. You will have seen the media coverage last week of the release of over 300 temporary workers, so let me give that some context. The release of those temporary workers will reduce costs by £2·1 million, while the total amount that we need to reduce in year is £51·4 million. Aside from the scale of the cuts, which are challenging enough, the constantly changing picture makes planning how to make the savings unfeasible. I have already notified the permanent secretary of the Department of Justice (DOJ) that, while we are taking all reasonable steps, at this point, I am unable to provide a full assurance that the PSNI can deliver the required budget reductions and live within the revised budget. The loss of agency staff will mean the closure of some functions such as the Historical Enquiries Team (HET) and a significant reduction in the number of staff available to work on legacy issues. Headlines on the early indications for the 2015-16 budget - the PSNI has been asked to assess the impact of cuts next year of between 10% and 15% against the opening 2014-15 baselines. My initial professional assessment is that cuts of this level will mean a police service that is unrecognisable. It is likely to mean a service with virtually no preventative capability. In the Police Service, my officers and I are charged with the duty of keeping people safe. That will remain our priority and will not change. These financial pressures will require the prioritisation of policing to an extent never before experienced in Northern Ireland. I will, of course, work with the Policing Board and with the Justice Minister in deciding what policing activity will be reduced or stopped. The Chairperson (Mr Givan): The situation is chronic…Contracts, obviously, run up to the end of December for your temporary staff. It will take effect only from that point on. I accept that. RK 18.10.14 What calculation was used to arrive initially at a figure of £734 million to fund the organisation? Is that calculation based on how many officers you should have or how many officers you do have? What is the formula? Mr Best: It is not that simple. We had a budget under the Northern Ireland Office (NIO). We had to make savings of £135 million over the four-year period. Chief Constable Hamilton: We also have a Northern Ireland additionality for parades, security issues and trying to tackle the threat of serious harm from violent dissident republicans, fallouts between loyalists and all of that, which is 27% of our budget. The Chairperson (Mr Givan): Will you elaborate on exactly what work the legacy investigations branch will carry out and how its case load will be prioritised? Chief Constable Hamilton: The speed at which all this is happening means that it is slightly chaotic. It is two and half weeks since our final figure was agreed. The idea of the legacy investigations branch is to bring together into one place a number of legacy functions. We had, for example, the work that was previously done by the Historical Enquiries Team. It dealt with Troubles-related deaths but not with catastrophic incidents or tragedies other than deaths. Another investigative function dealt with non-Troubles-related legacy cases. Given that the HET went up only to 1998, there were a number of legacy cases that were not as old, dating from post-1998 through to the creation of the crime operations department in 2004. We would say that, by the time that we got to 2004, we had the benefit of a number of reports and had got ourselves properly organised and structured for serious crime investigations and accountability mechanisms for the various functions, we have a six-year window in which there were a lot of investigations over which we would have question marks about quality and comprehensiveness. That was another pocket of legacy work. We routinely have a huge amount of queries from families, NGOs and lawyers, which are not requesting investigations but are looking for answers to questions about issues from yesteryear. We have tried to create accountability mechanisms and bring together, under one command and in one branch, the work that was previously conducted by all those functions. The HET, for example, was largely a review function, along with trying to provide information to families. Some families were very satisfied, and some, as we know, were unsatisfied. That culminated in the report from Her Majestys Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC), and shortcomings were identified in the practice and inconsistencies in the standards of investigation. The legacy investigations branch will try to bring together all those functions so that we know what our demand is, can prioritise it better and will have in place properly trained, accredited police officers with a review and investigative function as well as a support function for the plethora of other queries RK 18.10.14 that come in. The support function probably does not need to be provided by police officers, but it will pool information from investigations. That will all sit together in one place. We have a very robust tasking and prioritisation mechanism that the HET and other disparate units were previously separate from. That sits under the assistant chief constable of crime operations. Through that tasking and prioritisation model, we will work out what we are going to do and when. So there will be a review mechanism — the previous HET function — an investigative arm and the other support function. We have a number of current live investigations, for example, which we will continue to work on. They have potential, with real lines of inquiry, evidence to be secured and the possibility of a criminal justice outcome. However, all that will have to be done with a lower cost base and, therefore, less human resource. That is just a feature of the predicament that we are in. I did set for the team — after a discussion, we were all agreed — some priorities for how we would handle the financial crisis. The first one of those was that we would deal with keeping people safe today as a priority in a general sense over dealing with legacy issues, but there is a caveat in that we accept our legislative responsibility to deal with historical investigations, and we will not shirk that. We also accept and acknowledge the pain and anguish that still exist for many families out there. We will be honest with them and will deal with their expectations, but we will not pretend that we can do something that we cannot deliver. That is why we have been quite upfront and vocal about that. The Chairperson (Mr Givan): Is it the case that, although resources will be taken from current historical investigations, they will continue? If there are cold cases still to be reviewed that could generate investigations, as per the HET model, are they being put in abeyance, with no new casework being taken? Chief Constable Hamilton: There are a number of live investigations that we need to keep going, albeit they will go at a slower pace. We have been given responsibilities, for example, in the report of the Hallett review of the on-the-runs (OTRs). We want to get that finalised and dealt with, and we will continue to work on it. Up until two weeks ago, we probably had close to 40 people working on that. Likewise, in the Bloody Sunday investigation, we had a significant proportion of investigators — probably not enough — some of whom were temporary workers. All that will start to reduce in size. The investigations will keep going but with fewer people and, therefore, at a slower pace. The review work, which was primarily an HET function, will continue but, again, with fewer people and at a slower pace. RK 18.10.14 The Chairperson (Mr Givan): Could there still be prosecutions for historical legacy-related issues? Chief Constable Hamilton: There could be. Clearly, as time goes by, the potential for securing evidence changes. People get old, die or forget and so on, and the potential reduces over time. We have not taken this decision lightly. We would prefer to put a proper resource to it and deal with a lot of these running sores that go much wider than policing and into communities and grieving families, but we cannot do everything. Mr Elliot: Re the Historical Enquiries Team (HET). What can you tell the families that are waiting on a review to be completed? I understand that some of those reviews were completed by the Historical Enquiries Team but were never delivered. They were on the point of being delivered when the HET was suspended. Some families have been waiting for years, while reviews have been ongoing; others recently got a published report but are awaiting feedback or a meeting. What can you say to those families? Chief Constable Hamilton: What we have tried to do over the last few weeks is to act with integrity, honesty and authenticity, beyond the politics directed to communities and families. What we are doing is just working our way through those families and trying to explain the predicament that we are in and the difficult, almost impossible, decisions that we are having to take. We are giving them the reassurance that we are doing our best with what we have, but what we have is ever-reducing because of the budget cuts. What I do not want to do is to lead people on a merry dance, thinking that there is some inefficiency in policing. Maybe there is a wee bit of inefficiency, but it is not worth £51 million within six, eight or nine months — whatever it is, it is in-year, anyway — which can be squeezed out, so that people will not see or feel any difference. People are going to see a difference in the policing service that is delivered for them, and we have had to prioritise dealing with the present over investigating and dealing with the past. It does not mean that we do that glibly; it is one of the difficult choices that we have had to make. Mr Elliott: Effectively, are you saying to those people, Too bad; you are not going to get your report? Chief Constable Hamilton: I would like to think that we would not use such blunt language, but what we will say — Mr Elliott: Effectively that is what you are saying. Chief Constable Hamilton: We will say that there will be a delay in reviewing your case or in revising your report. You are right: reports were paused on the basis of the HMIC work and the difficulties and challenges that arose out of that. We would like to be working our way through that with the 300 RK 18.10.14 temporary workers. I know that that was a contentious issue anyway, but notwithstanding that, they were doing critical work and we were grateful for it. Of the 320-something workers, around 78 of them worked in HET. By the end of December, they will have gone. We will try to do this in a measured, tidy way. We will try to deal with the work that is ongoing and to get it finished. We will have teams that will be engaging with families so that expectations can be tailored according to the revised, realistic timescales. It is unfortunate. We do not want to do it. I remind members that, of those families, over 200 are the families of police officers who were murdered during the conflict. We have to deal with all that as well with our internal constituency. It is not something that we are doing lightly, and we would prefer not to be doing it. Mr Elliott: Effectively, what I am asking is this: are they going to get the report? Chief Constable Hamilton: The process has been amended and is in a better, more professional place on the back of the HMIC recommendations. Of those, 19 related to the Police Service and one related to the Policing Board. The 19 recommendations for the Police Service have all been completed. We are cooperating with the HMIC in coming back to do a health check on the quality of our work around those. All that is to try to give greater clarity to the role of the police and to ensure that the quality of the reports is of a consistent and high standard. People will get them, but I cannot pretend that they are going to get them at the same speed, as we have let probably three quarters of the staff engaged on it go out the door because we are ending temporary-worker contracts to balance the budget. Interim Deputy Chief Constable Finlay: There will be a dip in performance as we do that in some areas. For example, the legacy support that we give to inquests and suchlike is a legally driven process, and we will be taking people out of there. We have got and had planned to bring people in, but we planned a time to overlap them with the existing provision and then phase out the agency staff, because this was going to be a continuing demand. We will not be able to do that, with the consequence that those people will launch into it instead of being mentored and trained. They will not perform in the same way. So, because of that outworking, we anticipate further criticism from the coroner, for example, about the delay in us providing documents to the inquests. Mr McCartney: Are there issues around article 2 compliance with the new investigation unit to deal with the legacy issues? Chief Constable Hamilton: No, not from our perspective. We have investigative standards and accredited investigators who will be able to complete thorough investigations with independence. There are also accountability mechanisms that will click in now that there is no ambiguity about whether this is at arms length from PSNI and all the rest of it. We will have a head of branch who will be responsible to the ACC crime, who will be responsible to me, and I will be accountable and answerable to the Policing Board. The ombudsman will have full powers over all those police officers. Temporary workers will go, and any ambiguity that there was around accountability arrangements, however nebulous that was, will disappear because temporary workers will disappear. They did a great job for us and, although I know it was contentious, they filled a gap RK 18.10.14 and allowed us to keep police officers on the front line. By necessity, they are going anyway. Article 2 compliance is something that we have confidence in. Interestingly, though, it is not just about me having confidence and being able to technically convince a court that we are article 2 compliant. That is important. I know that there are significant groups in the community who do not have the confidence that there will be an article 2 compliance investigation. The twentieth recommendation of the HMIC report had to do with the Policing Board establishing an oversight panel or an assurance panel of experts. It was not specific about who they should be, but, without wanting to undermine the board, we had envisaged perhaps a lawyer, a senior police officer who understands investigations and potentially people from the victims sector. Their role in this oversight capacity would be to try to breathe confidence into the work of what was the HET. I would be keen that that recommendation is still fulfilled and that it is empowered by the Policing Board to do that oversight and report jointly to me and the board so that we both have a degree of confidence about the impartiality, the independence and the effectiveness — the article 2 compliance, in other words — of the investigations. However, as yet, the Policing Board has not come to a conclusion on whether it is going to establish such a panel. To me, it would really help if it did, because it would give confidence to what I believe to be a high standard of investigation. Mr McCartney: The compliance might be tested; that is something that will unfold. I raised it because, in the past when presentations were made, the HET and the Police Ombudsmans office were part of the package to say, These are article 2 compliant. Now, with the HET away, you have lost a plank, and it is internal to the PSNI, which, I think, will put a bit of strain on it, but that is to be tested. Chief Constable Hamilton: It has to be tested. One of the problems that we had with the HET was mission creep. When Hugh Orde established it in 2005-06, he said that it was not intended to be an article 2 compliant investigative unit. It was going to answer families questions and, if evidence fell out of that, it would be exploited by somebody else and those lines of enquiry would be pursued. So, it was never intended to be related to article 2. We got into difficult waters because, by the time Patricia Lundy came in a couple of years later, the head of HET was trying to convince her that it was article 2 compliant. Something had happened in the meantime, whereby its reason for existence moved from being one of answering questions for families and understanding that, if something fell out of them, it would be investigated because we were still a policing organisation. The primary focus was not to deliver an article 2 compliant investigation; it was to answer families questions. This unit will be compliant with section 32 of the Police Act, that is, where people have committed crimes, we will do what we can to bring them to justice. Sitting alongside that is article 2 compliance around independence and thoroughness of the investigation. Mr McCartney: I am not saying that the Justice Minister had broad support last week, but he certainly had some support. Do you think that there is any sort of case to be made for the British Government taking up some of the legacy costs, similar to those associated with hearing loss, as I said last week? Should some of the money come from here and the excess directly from the British RK 18.10.14 Government? Do you think that there is any case to be made around legacy issues that would help ease particular pressures? Chief Constable Hamilton: I see it as a core policing function. Policing and justice is a devolved matter. If there needs to be negotiation between the Executive — the devolved Administration — and the British Government or anybody else around additional funding, I think it is in the political space and not one for the Chief Constable to comment on. I would be grateful for the money, so long as it was done ethically and lawfully, from whatever source. I do not think it is my position to be pointing the finger and saying who should be paying. My job is to deliver a policing service within the funding envelope that I have. Mr McCartney: I am sure the British Government do everything ethically and lawfully. On a final point, you touched on the fallout, for want of a better term, around the legacy issues and some of the investigations that are taking place. There are a number of cases. I want to talk about the Bloody Sunday families, because I am familiar with their case. At the meeting in December 2012, commitments were made to the families by the then Deputy Chief Constable and the Assistant Chief Constable. Regardless of the impact unfolding, you should explain to the families what is going to unfold. Do that with any family you have made commitments to. If you do not do that, people will have to deal with it unfolding in the media. They will have to deal with media speculation rather than hard facts that you should present to them. Chief Constable Hamilton: I agree completely. I am keen to explain the rationale to families, personally, if needs be, as I have explained it here today. I do not expect that they will be happy, but I think that we owe them the courtesy of an explanation at least. I have explained part of the problem that we have with this to you. Hopefully, I am not sounding as if I am whining and moaning too much, but this is a constantly changing figure. You get a 7% figure on a Friday and are asked to outline how you are going to handle it by the next Friday. In the meantime — a period of four working days — you cannot possibly communicate, consult with and explain to people before it goes public. Of course, our confidential response to the Policing Board and the Department of Justice was leaked to a media outlet. That meant that it was impossible for us to retain control of the information going into the public domain. Mr Poots: Historical institutional abuse is in the headlines. I just think that it would be absolutely appalling if we were not able to provide support for the victims of historical institutional abuse wherever that happened to take place. Can we have some assurance that resource will be applied to that particular issue? Chief Constable Hamilton: Well, resource will be applied to it because there is a statutory responsibility. I know that the chair of the panel would have conversations with me at a very early RK 18.10.14 stage if the flow of information was holding him back at his work. We are not at that point yet. I would not like us to get to that stage, but nor can I give cast-iron guarantees that any aspect of policing will not be impacted by cuts of this magnitude. Like everybody, or most people, in society, the Police Service acknowledges the need for the historical institutional abuse inquiry and for people to get answers and closure. We will do our best to service that. I cannot write blank cheques, as I am sure you understand. Mr Poots: It should lead to people actually being tried for crimes committed against children and young people. There is where my concern comes from, as opposed to actually facilitating the inquiry. Chief Constable Hamilton: There is that facility. There are two bits of demand for us in this. One is that we sit on some information that the inquiry needs. We are doing our best to feed that. I am not getting any serious complaints. There might be the odd glitch here and there, but, generally speaking, we are able to feed the inquiry with information that the police sit on that may be relevant. Then, there are some referrals coming the other way, whereby victims have indicated that they would like to pursue a criminal-justice outcome and there is a starting point for an investigation. Of course, we will take that on board. Mr Hazzard: The briefing states that 27% of the budget is spent on security. Do you have a figure that includes security legacy — generally conflict-related — spend? Chief Constable Hamilton: That figure includes legacy and the efforts that we need to make to keep people safe because of the dissident republican threat and to deal with parades and protest activity. Mr Hazzard: So the 27% is — Chief Constable Hamilton: Sorry, another small top-up that comes largely from the Treasury reserve in London, and a very small proportion from the Executive previously, helped us to address some of the very specific problems that we had hoped would go away but did not. There is, for example, the cost of protecting judges. They need to have protection officers with them because, in our assessment, they will get killed if they do not. There are things like that, but they are sticking plasters or top-ups, whatever the right metaphor is. Of the main police grant, aside from that additional very small top-up, 27% — Mr Best: It represents about £200 million, so, if you are cutting the police grant, which you are, there will be an impact on that. At £200 million, it is a sizeable amount. Interim Deputy Chief Constable Finlay: Twenty-seven per cent of the budget is about £200 million. RK 18.10.14 The Chairperson (Mr Givan): What are the indications from Treasury about being able to continue to access funds from it? Chief Constable Hamilton: There is a squeeze right across the UK Government. There are constant meetings, and colleagues and I make constant representations to London — Treasury, the Cabinet Office, NIO and so on — on our needs and concerns
Posted on: Tue, 21 Oct 2014 14:51:29 +0000