Transcript of public session: Deputy Assistant Commissioner S Roberts, Directorate of Professional Standards, MPS and Commander P Hagon

Wednesday, 25 February 2004
10.30 am

Sir William Morris: Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. A special welcome to you, Mr Roberts, you and your colleague. Can I first of all say thank you very much indeed for accepting our invitation to attend the Inquiry this morning, and to give some evidence to us, and thank you also for your written submission which we found extremely helpful.

I appreciate that for some of our witnesses, and I emphasise "some" of our witnesses, any process of this nature may seem a rather daunting task. That being so, I thought it would be helpful if I set out very briefly how we propose to conduct the hearing this morning.

But first let me introduce myself and the other members of the Panel. I am Sir Bill Morris, recently retired General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union. On my right is Sir Anthony Burden, who has recently retired as Chief Constable of the South Wales Constabulary after a very long and distinguished career in the police service, and on my left is Miss Anesta Weekes, who is an eminent barrister. Anesta sits as a Recorder and part-time chair of the employment tribunals. She was in fact counsel to the Lawrence Inquiry.

Mr Roberts, as you know, we have been asked by the Metropolitan Police Authority to conduct an independent inquiry into professional standards and employment matters in the Metropolitan Police Service. Our focus is the MPS as an organisation, and not the individuals who make up the organisation.

The inquiry that we are conducting is inquisitorial and not adversarial in character or indeed nature. We are keen to enquire into the issues raised by our terms of reference, so that we can make appropriate recommendations for further good practice, rather than concentrating on making criticisms of the Metropolitan Police Service as an organisation or particular individuals within it.

To help us in our task, we are keen to hear from all our witnesses not just what is wrong with the Metropolitan Police Service, but equally, what is right with it; but most importantly, your suggestions in putting things right, assuming some witnesses might identify some things that are wrong.

Let me say that a transcript is being taken so that we have a proper record of the evidence given by all our witnesses, and this will be posted on our website today.

At the end of these introductory comments, I will lead on the questions to you, followed by my colleagues; Miss Weekes first, to be followed by Sir Anthony, and any supplementary questions that I might find necessary. At the conclusion of our questions, I will offer you the opportunity for a brief closing comment.

Mr Roberts, in your written submission, you have identified a number of issues for us, and I just highlight one or two, just for the record. You have indicated to us your role and the work of the Directorate of Professional Standards. You have given us an explanation of the framework in which complaints are handled, and how they actually work in practice. You have indicated the use of statistical information by the DPS, and the MPS process in ensuring that lessons learned are assimilated into best practice, and we are grateful for your views on the appropriateness of the structure that is currently in place to deal with complaints.

Equally, we welcome your comments about the new Independent Police Complaints Commission, and finally, we are grateful for your explanation of the interface between complaints and indeed tribunals.

We would like to ask you questions on these and other related matters and indeed material, but before doing so, it would be beneficial for the record and the transcript if you would, please, formally introduce yourself and your colleague to the Inquiry.

Mr Roberts: Certainly, sir, good morning, Panel members. I am Deputy Assistant Commissioner Stephen Roberts, I am the Director of Professional Standards in the Metropolitan Police. That role encompasses the management of employment tribunals, the investigation of corruption and unethical behaviour, both internally instigated inquiries and inquiries that emanate from public complaints.

We also deal with the processes of taking officers through misconduct proceedings, through to the disposal of the case, and in addition, it is a minor part of the Directorate, we manage the accident claims unit which exists to settle claims where we either have or it is alleged that we have damaged people's property.

I have served for 25 years now, all in the Metropolitan Police, in a variety of roles, both detective and uniformed; in the past I have been a borough commander and a Scotland Yard detective.

Can I just introduce my deputy, Commander Phillip Hagon?

Mr Hagon: Good morning.

Mr Roberts: I have asked Phillip to accompany me today, because although I have only been in post for five months, he has actually been in post in the Directorate as the number two in the Directorate for 26 months, so he has more of the history than I do, if I can put it that way.

Questions by Sir William Morris

Sir William Morris: Could I just right at the outset indicate the sort of range of questions that I will seek to explore with you? They cover some structural issues and some managerial issues and some process issues.

Can I just start by saying that this Inquiry, as you are aware, is tasked in essence to examine the way that the Metropolitan Police Service deals not just with professional standards but with workplace issues, workplace conflicts, and I understand that your Directorate shares some of those responsibilities.

Mr Roberts: Yes, we do.

Sir William Morris: I want therefore to look at the structure in overall terms, and as I look at this structure, I see your Directorate, which also, as you have indicated, has responsibility for employment tribunals; I see the human resource area, with responsibility for Fairness at Work; I see diversity sits where it sits, and, of course, the legal department, as it is, and I understand that accidents as well is very much part of your Directorate. And your Directorate has its prime responsibility for dealing with integrity and corrupt officers, in that sense, complaints.

Just pausing for a minute, and in the light of your own experience, would you see that structure reflecting the best in joined-up management?

Mr Roberts: I think there is probably a distinction that needs to be drawn between the way that we actually operate between the various units that are either part of my Directorate or that we work with, and the formal organisational structure.

For neatness, various branches come under various lines of command. They have to sit somewhere, and in many cases it is at least debatable whether they are sitting in the right places, in terms of the formal organisational structure. I have to say, I do not think that that matters too much, because in practice, when we are dealing with specific cases and with broader issues, what matters is that the expertise drawn from those branches, from the specialists within those branches, is actually brought together in terms of the problem solving approach that we need to take for a particular case.

So I would place much less emphasis on where things sit in the structure and rather more on the way that those units work with each other and interface with each other, to make sure firstly that the problems are solved in the short term, but secondly that we get medium and long-term action to actually improve the whole situation.

Sir William Morris: But for the purpose of continuity, how do you sort of manage the functional dynamics, because in any managerial decisions, they are not just one-off; you do not just call a meeting and have a conversation and there it ends, there has to be follow-up, there have to be reports back, there have to be unforeseen circumstances.

So from a functional perspective, how do you maintain continuity?

Mr Roberts: Probably the best way to illustrate it is in terms of – let me say a hypothetical case, but where we have any sort of incident which we would regard as a critical incident, whether it is an internal one or an externally generated one, we would call together a gold group, which will oversee the strategy that the Met will adopt, not that my Directorate will adopt, but that the Met will adopt, in order to deal with that problem.

Now the chairmanship of that group will vary according to the importance and the complexity of the problem, but the responsibility of that group is both to deal with the immediate incident and to deal with the aftermath, the consequence management, if you like, and then making sure that any learning from that incident actually then feeds back into the organisation.

Now a gold group may meet once, twice or it may continue over many, many months. For example, in order for the Met to prepare for this Inquiry, so that we provide you with the best evidence, we established a gold group to co-ordinate what your requirements were, or our response to your requirements, and the way that the Met wanted to present its evidence. That meets on a weekly basis, and will continue to do so, I would imagine, until well after your Inquiry has finished and reported, to make sure that not only have we responded properly to you, but that we deal with your report in a way that makes sure that what you say is actually carried forward into the organisation, and sees it through to implementation.

Sir William Morris: I have read with interest the gold group, but I am wondering, how does the brass group – how does it manage? Because, you see, this structure seems to replicate itself at different levels. I mean, in the end, someone has to put the words on paper, in different departments.

Mr Roberts: Indeed they do. We actually call them bronze rather than brass, but in reality, from one gold group, you will have many different groups.

For example, if we take the group that is dealing with this Inquiry, it draws expertise from legal services, from human resources, from the Diversity Directorate, from my own Directorate – offhand, I cannot think of which other groups are involved; all the business groups, in fact, and depending on what you report, what you recommend, there will be smaller implementation groups that sit within each of those directorates to actually implement what needs to be implemented, so, if you like, it is like a Christmas tree spreading out, to make sure that each bit of business is actually dealt with, but reporting back to the overseeing group which makes sure that the overall strategy is dealt with.

It is rather similar to the way that we deal with the professional standards strategy. There are five strands to that, each under the control of a separate chief officer, spreading right across the Met. Each has its own working groups, each has its own implementation programme, and each reports back on progress, on problems, on blockages, to the strategic oversight group.

Sir William Morris: Yes, but what the professional standards group has in common is a common terms of reference. They have a common objective. Now can you share with us the rationale for having employment tribunals in the Professional Standards Directorate?

Mr Roberts: The decision predates me taking up this post, but essentially the rationale was to bring within one directorate a whole range of activities where the Met faced a risk that needed to be managed, short-term and long-term, from a suggestion of misbehaviour or unethical behaviour.

So at one extreme you have accident claims, perhaps an officer who had been driving a police vehicle and had an accident, and that needs to be sorted out and compensation paid; at the other extreme, you have employment tribunals, where it is alleged that our officers or staff have behaved improperly, and that needs to be investigated and the case needs to be managed.

So it is really about managing organisational risk, if I can put it that way.

Mr Hagon: If I could add a bit of supplementary information there, the decision, Chairman, actually pre-dated me, but prior to it coming across to the Directorate of Professional Standards, it actually sat within human resources, and logically, you might think that is perhaps where it should be, but quite frankly, it did not work very well within that particular domain, and so the decision, as Steve Roberts has mentioned, was that it came across to, if you like, those people that are best charged with looking and dealing with risk, and moreover, were best versed in dealing with the Directorate of Legal Services.

It is fair to say that DPS, for example, actually are the client for 80 per cent of our legal service work within the Metropolitan Police Service. I suppose the last rationale there was by the time it got to employment tribunal it was fairly late in the day, positions had hardened, and so, you know, the employment of lawyers within that was inevitable. Clearly, the resolution of those matters is best achieved earlier and lower down in the scheme of things.

Sir William Morris: Yes. Sorry, I did not want to interrupt you, I was not quite sure whether you had actually finished.

Mr Hagon: No, I had finished.

Sir William Morris: My question was the rationale for employment tribunal issues in the Directorate of Professional Standards, and what I hear is that it is a feature of the risk management process, and I understand that, the risk management in any situation is a critical part of any degree of managerial approach.

But it seems to me – what I am hearing, we have to get your view about that, because if you have an industrial tribunal, what you are – of course you manage the risk, but you are seeking a settlement ultimately.

Mr Roberts: Not necessarily sir, no.

Sir William Morris: Is that not what an industrial tribunal is supposed to be about?

Mr Roberts: We would only be seeking a settlement –

Sir William Morris: A resolution, so the case is settled one way or another.

Mr Roberts: Yes, a resolution, not a settlement.

Sir William Morris: So what I am basically saying is that if the risk management is a primary consideration, does it, in the instance where it is located, supersede the resolution of the issue?

Mr Roberts: No, it does not. In terms of risk, when we are looking at either an employment tribunal or a civil action against us, or many of the other examples of unethical behaviour, we are also looking at the risk to the reputation of the organisation, and over and above any particular case we are looking at reducing the risk generally by learning lessons out of any particular case, and that has been a very prominent feature of the way that the employment tribunal unit has worked, in terms of actually publicising best practice and learning lessons and getting that out to personnel managers and frontline managers generally.

I think that is the major contribution the unit has made to actually reducing the number of employment tribunals that we face, and reducing the overall costs that we are paying out on employment tribunals.

So when we are talking about managing risk, we are not talking about just the immediate case. If there are lessons to be learned when we have got something wrong, we need to get those lessons back out to the organisation, so they do not do it again.

Sir William Morris: Mr Roberts, it is safe to say that diversity is one of the flagship policy positions of the Metropolitan Police Service, and indeed the Commissioner takes a very personal interest in this.

I am going to draw on the source material that you have provided us with by looking at the chart which sets out the strategic planning for your Directorate, and I would like you to just share with us, where does diversity flow within that particular chart, given that it is one of the flagship policies, and the Commissioner has a personal interest.

That is the chart, it is a planning schematic for 2004 to 2005, and the general thrust of what I am seeking to establish is the functionality of all these units and areas of responsibility running through the Directorate, coming back to the joined-up management question.

So where is diversity here?

Mr Roberts: It is everywhere, sir. If I can take you to the professional standards strategy itself, although one strand of the strategy, managing diversity, is a specific element within our professional standards strategy, we look to get advice and assistance from the Diversity Directorate, from their particular perspectives, around everything else.

For example, if you look at strand one, the leadership supervision and adherence to standards, if we are providing our frontline managers with better training and with a better awareness of how to get it right rather than how to get it wrong, we need to help them around dealing with some of the more difficult diversity issues. They cannot be good leaders if they cannot deal with a very diverse workforce and a very diverse public. So we need that specialist advice in there.

If we look at organisational and individual learning, again, what you have to learn has to encompass diversity. A very specific element within that strand at the moment is that we are about to introduce pre-attestation testing for drugs, drugs use, illegal drugs use, for recruits coming into Hendon.

Now one of the issues that has been raised by our own lay advisors, and by the MPA, the professional standards committee, is whether or not that sort of testing might have a disproportionate impact on some ethnic minorities rather than white officers.

Now there again is something where we need that lay advice, we need that awareness of what we might be doing that might lead us into more disproportionality threaded into that policy. We cannot simply develop it without, and that is why we benefit from the – have you been introduced to the Samurai group, sir?

Sir William Morris: No.

Mr Roberts: The various ethnic minority staff associations, and there are a very large number now. In all our new policies, we actually need to consult with all of those people to get those different perspectives. It is actually very difficult – I think there is 19, from memory. It is actually very difficult to consult with 19 groups, so they have formed themselves into a group known as the Samurai group, which brings together all the minority staff associations in one body, so it makes it easier to consult, so it gives us a mechanism all the time to actually pass our projected policies, our planned policies, through that additional perspective.

So the diversity strategy is not anywhere, it has to be everywhere, because if it is not, we are not going to get things right.

Sir William Morris: Absolutely, and no disagreement on that point. I think what I am seeking to get some information about is – coming back to what I said about the joined-up management that is necessary within the organisation, and looking at the current structure, there is an impression, and I put it no higher than that, that the current structure as it stands develops a culture which mitigates against the joined-up management which I think is important.

Let me just draw on your written submission, just three paragraphs, to try and illustrate a bit later on the point I am seeking to make. I want to look at paragraphs 6, 8 and 12 of your submission.

Just in 6, it says:

"It is true that my Directorate, dealing as it does with unpalatable and complex issues such as corruption, can never be the most attractive place to work within the MPS. We have to work very hard to recruit the people with the necessary talent and experience."

Let us go to paragraph 8:

"We are wedded to continuous improvement and the Panel may hear of some of these innovations in due course. I merely cite the following as examples: integrity testing, our analysis and research programmes, the development of a hi-tech unit, the officer of concern programme, the service confidence procedure ..."

The last one is paragraph 12. There you say:

"My Directorate has to deal with some of the most complex legal and ethical issues in policing. We also have to operate within a framework of regulations which I suggest are in need of further reform."

My point here is to ask a question: is it possible that the rigour and the robustness which is absolutely necessary to defend the integrity of the Metropolitan Police Service against corruption gets in the way of a more sensitive approach of settling conflicts; I have not heard in your submission in full the phrases about resolution, mediation, conciliation, arbitration. I am asking you to comment on the impression that would be given, because it is so necessary to have a robust and vigorous approach to defend the integrity of the Metropolitan Police Service against corruption, and having the other more humane issues, sensitive issues, the people issues, so to speak, which deal with the relationship; that may be taking less than second place.

Mr Roberts: It is absolutely possible that in our determination to root out corruption, unethical behaviour, racism, bullying, sexism, that we could – because we have the capability – become genuinely oppressive. It is my job to make sure that we do not, frankly.

So on the one hand, there is no compromise around going after officers who are corrupt, who are unethical, but the essential point, I think, is that we have to get to facts and to evidence, because if you try to take any action in the absence of facts, as opposed to assertion, as opposed to perception, then you are starting off from the wrong basis.

But in what you describe as the softer people issues, I think having established facts then you actually need to move on to: what is the resolution we are actually trying to achieve here?

At one extreme, we might have highly corrupt officers engaging in criminal activity, being corrupted from the outside. Now it is very clear that we need to go after the corrupt officers, we need to go after the corrupters as well, because if we do not catch them too, that is only delaying the problem. They will come back and try and corrupt other officers.

But all the time we have to ask ourselves – and it is something that is genuinely an almost daily question: what is the endgame we are trying to achieve? Is it simply to convict these people of crime and allow the courts the opportunity to lock them up, or is it simply getting them out of the organisation so that they do no further damage to the public because they are police officers, and very often there are compromises in the operational decisions that we have to make around that. Sometimes we cannot get to the ideal resolution, which is conviction, ideally imprisonment, and then subsequently getting them out of the organisation.

Sometimes, the best we can do is removing them from the organisation, or even, under the service confidence procedure, putting them in a place where they can do least damage, because we do not have the evidence to get them out.

At the other extreme, when we are talking about the softer people issues, once we have got those facts we have to ask ourselves: what is the endgame? The endgame for an aggrieved member of staff is either to compensate them for what has gone wrong that should not have gone wrong, and/or to get them back or keep them working for us with the sense that they are valued, that we accept what has gone wrong, and that if everybody cannot be happy, at least we can all be reconciled to the fact that something has gone wrong, we have done our best to put it right, and that they and we have a future together.

It is in nobody's interest to have aggrieved members of staff; nor is it in anybody's interests to have a section of staff who feel that their interests are not catered for, because frankly, they will not do what the public pay them for, which is provide decent policing.

Sir William Morris: Sure. No one is seeking a compromise. I think everybody recognised and signed up to your credo, integrity is not negotiable, so no one is looking for a compromise insofar as professional standards is concerned.

What the structure leaves us with is an impression that because of the rigour and robustness, as I have said before, in pursuing and defending the integrity issue, the other issues which are encompassed in your department may well be taking second place.

Let me just offer you a phrase that has been running throughout the week that we have been sitting: it is the golden thread of MPS's policies, and there are many strands of it in the diversity issue, in the concept of your own Directorate of Professional Standards – we have yet to hear about HR, but we will be surprised if that golden thread is not there.

What we are left with nevertheless is an impression that it does not run all the way through; it stops at various points. And it is not sort of unreasonable to conclude that to get the best out of the input, that golden thread needs to run through.

Mr Roberts: Certainly.

Sir William Morris: In light of that, my question is: do you see any case for a revision and a review of the structure, given the fact that I started by talking about your Directorate with ET, employment tribunals, with diversity standing on its own, HR standing on its own, encompassing Fairness at Work, and, of course, legal and accident.

I am sort of exploring this whole concept of managerial structure in order that we can get best use of all the resources.

Mr Roberts: I will come back to my earlier comment, that it matters more how it works in practice than how it looks on an organisational chart. I mean, as far as the Diversity Directorate sitting separately, the long-term objective should be for the Diversity Directorate not to exist, because we eventually get to the point where it does not need to exist. I have to say, I think we are a very long way from that, because we cannot be sure yet that that golden thread runs absolutely from top to bottom.

But I think what we can say is that the golden thread penetrates further day by day, and I will give you an example of it. Just before Christmas – we run regular training sessions, two or three days at a time, for our investigators, because we are trying to professionalise complaints investigation. We bring along to that training lay advisors, members of the Police Authority; at the last one we brought along some of the future commissioners of the IPCC, so we get a very rounded view of things.

Those training sessions run on into the evening, so they become relatively less formal as the evening goes by. At one of those, one of our very junior officers from within the command ended up challenging one of the future commissioners of the IPCC around some issues which he had raised which she regarded as actually rather inappropriate, and I have to say I was really rather proud of that. You know, it was actually only a matter of perception; she was not an ethnic minority officer, but she felt that something had been wrongly dealt with, in terms of the discussion.

Now that to me is really good, clear evidence that that golden thread is penetrating further and further.

Sir William Morris: Let us turn to a point that you raised earlier, Mr Roberts. You talked about a compounding factor of disproportionality, and I think the best illustration to start off my comments here is to have a look at paragraph 67 of your submission to us. You start off by giving your personal view:

"My personal view is that, while it would be naive to suggest that intentional or unintentional racism does not play a part in the observed statistics in relation to both public complaints and internal investigations, much of the racial disproportionality at the point of entry into the investigative system arises from the fact that frontline managers are very nervous about giving robust leadership and management when dealing with ethnic minority officers. There is a fear of allegations of racism and in consequence, when faced with minor misbehaviour by an ethnic minority officer, they will either retreat into the formal disciplinary process, with all the protection that the rules provide, or will turn a blind eye to the minor matters and only intervene at some later stage where more serious misbehaviour has occurred and formal investigation is the only possible course. Thus, we either let down our minority officers by failing to administer tough love or we retreat into the safety of formal processes."

I think that is a very honest and blunt statement insofar as what you have actually identified, but I think the statement in itself identifies what appears to be fundamental weaknesses in the context of the managerial culture; people either do not have the competence to deal with the issue, or the confidence to deal with the issue, and some would say it is a damning indictment of managerial weaknesses.

What I want to ask is: what is being done about that?

Mr Roberts: I think the first point, and it goes back to the penetration of the golden thread, actually, is that it is a feature of the fact that our frontline managers recognise the sensitivity of race issues, so perversely, I think it is almost a sign of success on a long and evolutionary road towards us dealing with everybody as we would wish to.

In terms of what we are doing about assisting our frontline managers to get that right, there is a whole range of issues. I do not know if you have been given any evidence yet about the Runge programme, it is for all inspectors, chief inspectors, and it has now been taken down to sergeants. It is run independently of the Met by the Industrial Society as part of the Commissioner's leadership programme.

Now that is very much a programme where we bring in outside instructors to help people to recognise what they are doing and what their impact is on the people that they are managing, to recognise what their own style is in the way that they manage, to recognise how what they are doing might be perceived by people.

I have attended several of those now, both as a participant and as a person helping to run them and helping to comment on what comes out of them, and they are hugely impactive, I have to say. I think we can see that they are bearing fruit in the fact that employment tribunals are declining, but I think that is only part of the answer.

We provide management training to all inspectors and above anyway, routine management training, if I can put it that way, of which diversity issues form a part.

In addition, the employment tribunal unit actually provide feedback, both to individuals and to the organisation as a whole, in terms of lessons coming out of either successful or failed employment tribunals, so you are gradually feeding back into the organisation lessons, but I think there is another element that comes out of it, in that what we are coming to recognise more and more is that when you get an incident where a person feels that they have been discriminated against, it may actually not be about that incident; that incident may simply be the last incident in a series of incidents, which may go back, you know, into their childhood, where they view a particular incident through the lens of their own experience.

If somebody is unpleasant to me, my first thought would be, "There is something about me that they do not like, there is something about what I have done that they do not like", but if I were from an ethnic minority, I might jump to the conclusion, for very good reason, that the reason for that unpleasant behaviour was to do with the colour of my skin, so I think part of giving confidence to our frontline managers is also actually robustly investigating and, where necessary, defending their actions.

If we honestly believe that they have got it right, then we need to tell them and show them, demonstrate to them that they have the organisation's support in the way that they have dealt with something. So it is an ongoing process. I do not think we are remotely at the end of that process yet, but I think what we face now is, you know, a part of the way there, we are a part of the way there.

Mr Hagon: Chairman, this is a really important point that you have made. Could I just have a few words on that subject? Chief Constable Jones illustrated to you the difference between the investigation, the material around – I think it was a case of incivility, as against the investigation of a burglary, and he, I think, very graphically showed you the two different files there.

It is in no one's interest for our people to engage in expensive inquiries, you know, which damage people where there is another method of doing it, so leadership is one element; giving people the tools and the ability to do that particular job at the most appropriate level, in other words locally, is something that we are very keen on.

Recently, we have actually introduced a new written warnings policy, which every borough, every OCU within the Met now has, which has the tools to do that job, and we have seen as a consequence a leap in recent times in the numbers of written warnings that have been administered locally, by something in the factor of 300 per cent.

The effect of that, of course, is that the matter is dealt with, and people can then move on, and that matter is then expunged from their personal records after a year. So I think we are endeavouring to push those particular issues to the level where they can most properly be dealt with, and give people the leadership ability and the tools to carry that through.

Mr Roberts: If I may add, I think there is another piece of evidence that is worth you examining. You will see from the data that we have given you that there has been quite a marked decline in the number of internal investigations that my command has dealt with. Now part of that is a quite explicit set of criteria for accepting investigations, and in many, many cases now, where local managers have actually tried to pass an issue up the line to us to investigate, we have actually said, "No, this is a management issue. You actually have to deal with this yourselves. Use the tools you have got, use the Fairness at Work advisors that we have trained and you have got available to your borough. Use [in some cases] independent people to actually try and come to a resolution here. Try all that first, because that is much more likely to get you a resolution and to get you to a situation where you have not ended up with people damaged in a legal process". Because I have seen it time and time again, people going through a long ET process where, albeit at the end of the day they may even get a very large pay out, but they are damaged, and that is just appalling.

Sir William Morris: The Metropolitan Police is not the only employer who has ethnic minority employees. What it has is its own model of management, and in certainly the experience which is shared collectively, we know of no employer whose managers are so lacking in confidence in dealing with the issue properly than that which has been recorded by yourself.

You have talked earlier about risk management; well, I think this is an area which presents the highest degree of damaging risk to the Metropolitan Police Service; it is the multiplier effect, because the scenario is a simple one: an officer does not have the confidence as a manager to deal with an issue on the basis of fear of being branded as, you know, antisocial or racist or whatever, so he or she quickly retreats by putting it into the formal procedure, rather than having the normal work that might be necessary or could have resolved it.

That goes into a formal process, it becomes a recorded statistic, and it compounds itself, and before you know where you are it is presented as a disproportionate – it is a multiplier.

Now what I want to know, together with my colleagues, is: where is the help that is being given to the sergeant in Croydon that has to deal at first line with this issue, if he is not being given the proper support, and how did we get here in the first place, and how are we going to move ourselves forward?

Mr Roberts: There is not one single piece of help that we give, it is actually a series of things that we have to do in order to provide people with that confidence. We have to back them up as an organisation if they have got it right, not if they have got it wrong, in spite of an allegation of racism. We have to provide them with that awareness training that we are doing at the moment as part of the Commissioner's leadership programme.

I think above all we actually have to get more ethnic minority officers, so it is not so typically the white sergeant dealing with the black constable. We actually need to get more ethnic minority officers into the organisation and get more ethnic minorities further up the organisation, so there is not that potential clash there.

So it is not going to happen quickly, because there are not any easy answers around this; if there were, we would have found them by now, but I think it is that steady but determined process of training people properly, of supporting them properly, of actually dealing with facts before you start to deal with perception and assertion, and actually maintaining our courage, almost.

Yes, we can face the fact that we have this problem, we know that we have to solve this problem, and we know as well that we do not – we should not, even if we were legally allowed to, do what a lot of commercial organisations do, which is, when faced with this sort of allegation, to get out a cheque book, because they will not go to employment tribunals, even where they think that they would have a good defendable case, because they simply do not want to go down that route.

Now we should not be doing that with public money, we should not be paying out where the facts, the merits of the case do not justify it, and were we to go down that route, I think that would reduce the confidence of our managers in dealing properly and robustly with their staff.

Sir William Morris: But it is to be seen whether more ethnic minority managers is the answer to your problem; I think everyone subscribes to a managerial profile which reflects the composition of the service. That is the Kennedy doctrine, "I want my government to look like America". And that is fine, but this issue is not about ethnic minority managers, this issue is about managers having the confidence, the support, the culture to manage.

Mr Roberts: Yes, I entirely agree with you.

Sir William Morris: It seems to me that people do not want more managers, what they want is fair managers, and what they are getting is management by retreat. That is what is happening. It is a retreat management, not –

Mr Roberts: It is what is happening in the cases that go wrong. Of course, none of us ever see the cases that do not go wrong. None of us ever see the matters that are resolved at 4.00 in the morning, where everybody has sat down, actually talked through the issues and dealt with them. So that is the nature of the beast, if you like.

Sir William Morris: I do not disagree with you, in terms of how the issue emerges. What people see, nevertheless, is the comments, in terms of what you say at page 87 of your submission. I think that summarises it – it is at paragraph 87(h).

Mr Roberts: Sorry, sir, you have lost me.

Sir William Morris: It is on the screen. About two thirds of the way down, it says:

"On occasion, we also face criticism that the real motivation for what may ultimately appear as a disproportionate investigation was the ethnic origin of the officer under investigation. Independent scrutiny of these sensitive and long running investigations has been attempted but has not provided sufficient defence of the criticism."

That is the, if you like, summary of the multiplying effect of not dealing with these issues.

Mr Roberts: The end result is that there is a perception that that is what happens. I am quite clear that it does not, but undoubtedly, there is that perception.

Sir William Morris: And your supporters will say that that is the biggest reputational risk that the Met faces, apart from all the other risks which you will manage, and the sergeant in Croydon is looking for your help, to help him or her to manage.

Let me just move on to another area which deals with still the people issue. I think you and I can agree, and we can all agree, that removing a person's livelihood, even in a temporary situation, by temporary suspension, is probably one of the most devastating blows that can be delivered by any employer.

Could I ask, what is the Metropolitan Police Service's policy for keeping suspended officers informed of progress during investigations?

Mr Roberts: When I suspend a police officer, and it is a personal decision of mine, only taken by Commander Hagon if I am absent for some reason, one of the considerations, as part of an established policy, is: what are the welfare arrangements made for that officer? So not just that the officer can be looked after in pure welfare terms, but that the officer can be kept informed of what is going on.

Now I would not say that in every case we do as well as we should do on that, particularly for long running cases where, for whatever reason, the officer has been transferred away from the borough that he was originally working in when the incident happened to other boroughs; it is not perfect, but it is something that we pay attention to, not simply at the point of suspension, where I insist that I can see what the welfare arrangements are, but I review all suspensions on a monthly basis anyway, and checking on those ongoing arrangements, to make sure that they are in place, is part of the process.

In addition, when we convene a gold group for a particular critical incident, which ends up with officers either suspended or having their duties restricted in some way, one of the standard agenda items is: what are the welfare arrangements for those officers affected? So it is very much there as part of the routine thinking, if I can put it like that, although I would not pretend to you this always works properly.

Sir William Morris: But do you not think that it should be perfect? After all, I say again, to take a person's livelihood away, albeit temporary, on suspension, is probably the most devastating blow that you can deliver as an employer.

Mr Roberts: Everything we do –

Sir William Morris: And do you not think that power should be compensated by the simple process of keeping people informed?

Mr Roberts: Everything we do should be perfect, and everything we do is not perfect, but it is one of those areas that we pay an awful lot of attention to, although I am sure you will be able to find examples where it has not worked as well as it should have done.

Could I just bring you back to taking away somebody's livelihood? When we suspend an officer, we suspend them on full pay. Their livelihood – their occupation is removed, if you like, but their pay is not.

Sir William Morris: Well, some people would prefer to be at work without pay.

Mr Roberts: Some people.

Sir William Morris: Because of the damage to their self-esteem and their confidence and their personal feelings and integrity, and pride, and everything that goes with it; money here is not the only consideration.

Mr Roberts: It is not the only consideration, but if I were in a position of having a family and not having money, I think I would regard that as a pretty serious step.

But I think the other point is that suspension really is the last option that is considered in any case. I always look at: what is it that we can do short of suspension to manage the risks around that individual, to manage the risks around an investigation? In the majority of cases where we have to look at some form of restriction on the officer, the answer is, no, he or she will not be suspended, but they will be put temporarily in a position where, for example – and typically, it would be that the officer is removed from the evidential chain, that the officer has no contact with the public, and then additional conditions on the officer to actually directly manage the specific risks around that case.

So as a result of that approach, we have vastly reduced the number of officers who are suspended at any one time, and that is actually not just in the officers' interests, it is also in the interests of the public who pay for them.

If we have somebody suspended on full pay, Londoners get no benefit. If we can have somebody not operating as a full police officer, if I can put it like that, but actually doing something which gives value to the Metropolitan Police and hence to Londoners, then that is far better, so not suspending people is the first thing.

Mr Hagon: In the last four years that has reduced by 60 per cent, but you are right in saying – I do not think our current processes for keeping people up to date are as good as they could be, I think when we get the IPCC, one of the implications of that is the use of the Centurion software, which will enable us to more readily and regularly keep people – both the complainant and the officers complained of – up to date with the progress of the inquiry.

Sir William Morris: Let me make the point here that it is not the suspension which is our issue. Our terms of reference obliges us to have a look at high-profile cases, and what I am seeking to establish is, whether it is high, low or medium profile: is there a protocol in the Metropolitan Police Service where someone is designated to maintain liaison by way of information in terms of progress with the suspended officer?

Mr Roberts: Yes, that is part of the suspension process.

Sir William Morris: That is what I am seeking just to establish. That is fine. Mr Roberts, in your submission at paragraph 93, you say this:

"I believe that the handling of police conduct should move towards one based on a statutory regime of unfair dismissal."

Could you share your deeper thoughts on that statement with us, please?

Mr Roberts: I think what we have at the moment is a situation that satisfies nobody, and I think there is a broad consensus that it satisfies nobody. What we have at the moment just does not work. Complainants do not see that they get speedy resolution of their complaints; officers do not see that they get a fair and speedy resolution when they are complained against.

The only people who benefit out of the current process are lawyers, and that cannot be right. Now I think there are major difficulties, potentially, in moving towards the ordinary employment law, but I think that needs to be the starting point, and before I came here today, I read the comments of Nick Hardwick who spoke to you yesterday, I believe.

Sir William Morris: Yes.

Mr Roberts: I think he has got it pretty well right, that the starting point should be ordinary employment law, and then we have to look at the special things that apply to police officers and police staff, because it is not just relevant to police officers here, that mean that employment law has to be slightly different for them.

We only depart from what is ordinary for everybody else in those cases which – in those areas where you need to depart, to cater for the special role of police officers and police staff, to cater for their constitutional position as officers rather than employees, and to cater for the special position of chief constables and the Commissioner, in terms of their constitutional independence, but at the moment it does not work; at the moment we have an outdated system that is too long, too legalistic, so we have definitely got to shift.

But frankly, if there was an easy answer we would have come up with it by now, so I think what we need to do – and what you may get to recommend – is that a fresh look needs to be taken with a view to a complete overhaul, and moving towards employment law.

Having said that, the issue then, I think, would be that disputes between employees, ex-employees and ourselves could simply shift to employment tribunals, and if all we do is transfer our current misconduct proceedings into employment tribunals, that will not exactly be progress, so I think what would need to go with it would be some consideration of risk around appeal to the defendants, so we do not have simply an automatic appeal to employment tribunals, which I think is what would happen as things stand at the moment.

So bringing in the sort of cost elements that you have in ordinary civil actions might actually provide a balance of risk which would give people something to lose, as well as something to gain, from simply appealing as a matter of course.

Sir William Morris: We have heard evidence that making that shift would somehow impact in some way on the history, tradition, culture of the office of constable. What is your view on that point?

Mr Roberts: Well, I think the issue of the office of constable is crucial. That is why I say we would have to depart from ordinary employment law in certain areas. I am certainly not an employment law expert and I do not know what those areas are; it is an area where you actually need to have some serious legal thinking around it, but the idea of departing from tradition does not worry me in the least. Tradition has got us to a point where it does not work any more, so simply holding onto what we have got for the sake of tradition I think is untenable.

Sir William Morris: Would we be overburdening your department and indeed the service if we ask you to produce further expansive comment on that point?

Mr Roberts: No, I would be happy to provide our thoughts, but I think what also needs to happen is central direction from the Association of Chief Police Officers. The Met's view might differ from a national view.

Sir William Morris: We have got ACPO's view, what we would like to get is yours.

Mr Roberts: Certainly, I would be happy to do so, sir.

Sir William Morris: Just one further area I want to explore, a comment or two with you. You say, at paragraph 94 of your submission:

"Long established practice, reinforced by Home Office guidance, is that in a case with both misconduct and criminal aspects, the criminal process should have primacy."

Then you go on to say:

"This can result in even relatively trivial matters being delayed for months and in some cases several years."

An interesting thought: could you address for us any detriment that you might see in having criminal proceedings and misconduct running side by side?

Mr Roberts: I think there is a perceived risk around double jeopardy, but I actually think that risk is rather less real than people imagine, and I would take it back to – if I were working in a bank and stealing money, I do not think my employment will continue much after I have been discovered, even though the criminal case might take months to be resolved. I think I would rightly expect to be sacked.

If at some future date I appear in a criminal court, the fact that I had been sacked does not need to come into the court, it is simply a matter of, "At the time of this offence I was employed as a bank clerk, and here is the evidence that I stole some money".

Now given the fact that at the moment we have different standards of proof around misconduct proceedings and criminal proceedings, it would not worry me that a criminal court might subsequently find somebody innocent on the criminal standard of proof, even though in employment terms we had found them guilty and had imposed some sort of sanction, even up to and including dismissal.

So I think that idea of double jeopardy is probably flawed, because actually you are working on two different levels of proof.

Sir William Morris: Yes, interesting. Well, thank you very much indeed, Mr Roberts, for your response to the questions that I had to put.

Before I move on to the next of my colleagues who will want to put some questions to you, I am going to suggest that we have a five minute break so that the stenographers can rest their fingers and we can all stretch our legs. Thank you.

11.40 am
(A short break)
11.45 am

Sir William Morris: Okay, I would like to ask Miss Weekes to put a few questions to you, Mr Roberts.

Questions by Miss Weekes

Miss Weekes: Thank you. Can I take you back over some of the areas that the Chairman has already dealt with but that I perhaps would like to look at in a little bit more detail now that I have understood some of your answers.

I would like to go back to the questions of the reform, the statutory reform, that you have suggested. I have taken on board your comments that you read from Nick Hardwick, the director of the IPCC, his comments, that one really needs to look at the statutory provisions quite thoroughly with a view to revising them completely.

Your submission, and we will not turn to it for the moment, but I only have one line to remind myself of, it is, "The framework of regulations is in need of further reform".

Have you moved your position from further reform to wholesale reform? I just need to understand what your case is.

Mr Roberts: Yes, I am sorry, I think when I was talking about further reform, that was quite early on in the submission, was it not?

Miss Weekes: Yes.

Mr Roberts: What I was talking about there were the framework of regulations that allow us to gather evidence; if it is not clear in the submission, I must apologise for that. It was really referring to the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, because from our perspective there are fundamental issues around that which prevent us from dealing as we could with issues of sexism, racism and bullying.

Miss Weekes: Right. Can I then, in that case, perhaps go back to what I consider to be the overall statutory framework for complaints, misconduct, discipline, which clearly comes under your department? Let us just have a look at it. If we can have brought up on the screen so you can see it JXX1, page 21. We were kindly given this document, which you will see in a moment, by the Chief Constable of Dorset, who is an ACPO member; she deals with this area, and she was able to speak to us about it yesterday.

There will be a little bit of a pause because we have to find the document for you. Now this is the legislative framework which she has very kindly set out. We see there the primary employment law legislation effectively; quite a lot of those Acts apply to staff only, not necessarily to police officers.

Mr Roberts: That is right.

Miss Weekes: If we scroll down, we will see employment codes of practice, and then we look here at the relevant police regulations. Now there is an asterisk against those that will be changed by the time we get to April of this year, but essentially – I will give you a moment to cast your eye through it – all of those, to some degree or another, are applicable now; is that right?

Mr Roberts: Yes, as far as I am aware. I have to say I have not read all of them.

Miss Weekes: No, well, I have managed to look at most, but have not read them all in detail. But at first blush, we can see that there are numerous regulations that would come under your umbrella in terms of how you deal with officers who are complained about, in terms of the statutory provisions and procedure.

I think it is right that we should move on slightly to where we will be when we come to report in June. You will have a major statute, which is the Police (Reform) Act 2002, which is going to come into being in April of this year. It brings with it the new Independent Police Complaints Commission, and it will be the principal statute which governs misconduct and complaints; is that right?

Mr Roberts: It will be the principal statute that deals with the administration of complaints and the investigation of complaints, but I do not understand at the moment that it will change the way in which we dispose of a case, so we will still have the current Home Office regulations and the statutes that they come from that will dictate what we do around misconduct hearings, in effect, and the other disposals.

Miss Weekes: I was just about to ask you whether that is right, you have still got the regulations –

Mr Roberts: That is my understanding.

Miss Weekes: There are two draft regulations which are going to come into place, the Police Conduct Regulation, which is still in a consultative state, and there is the Police Misconduct Complaint Regulation as well.

Mr Roberts: And in addition, we will not have statutory guidance from the IPCC until – I believe it is October they are projecting at the moment. We will only have draft guidance in terms of the investigation of complaints.

Miss Weekes: I think any member of the public listening to what I have just summarised only will wonder, why does it all have to be so complex and statutorily driven? First of all, why?

Mr Roberts: I wish I could completely answer that question.

Miss Weekes: You mean you do not know yourself?

Mr Roberts: Bluntly, my answer is I do not think it does have to be, but it is a system that has evolved through history, based on essentially Victorian court martial law, as I understand it, and gradually modified in the light of experience.

I am not aware that there has ever been a genuine radical look at whether it is fit for purpose, if indeed it ever was, and if it is not fit for purpose, what needs to replace it.

Miss Weekes: I am rather interested that you use the word "radical", because we are months away from discussing our final views and what indeed we will recommend. We have a choice to tamper with this statutory framework, add a bit of reform there, take away a bit of a section, add another, or we can consider radical reform. Which one do you want?

Mr Roberts: I would urge you to consider radical reform. There are things that we internally within the current regulations could do and are doing to speed up processes. There is scope for us to do that. There is scope for minor tinkering, I think you called it, that would help to speed up even further, but I think minor process improvements, minor tinkering with the regulations will get us down to a glass floor, if you like, that we simply will not be able to break through without a proper overhaul.

Miss Weekes: Let us just understand the practicalities of such a recommendation. There is no point having a radical look at the regulations now these regulations come from the Home Office, because you have not only a historical relationship with the Home Office but it is almost a legal relationship with the Home Office, for obvious reasons that the public understand.

There is no point dealing with the regulations unless you go back to look at the terms and conditions of employment, if I can use that generally, of your police officers and police staff.

Mr Roberts: That is right.

Miss Weekes: Because the regulations are intricately linked to the terms and conditions. Now what I did not flag up in my summary were the rather detailed complex manuals that police officers also have to work with, and the very detailed complex terms and conditions of employment, completely different for police officers and police staff, that you also have to work with.

Mr Roberts: Yes.

Miss Weekes: So let me take you through what I think the stages will be. If you want this radical reform, you are going to have to go back and look at the distinction between police officers and police staff; do you want to do that?

Mr Roberts: Yes.

Miss Weekes: You will have to look at their terms and conditions of employment. Then you would have to have a conversation with the Home Office.

Mr Roberts: Yes.

Miss Weekes: Is that going to be easy?

Mr Roberts: Whether it is easy or not is almost beside the point, it is whether we need the change or not. Change is never easy, and in some cases it is deeply uncomfortable, but if we come to the conclusion – or if you come to the conclusion that what we have at the moment is not fit for purpose, then we should try and do something about it.

Miss Weekes: Well, let me pause there and understand, because it is not necessarily what I think, it is what you think and the evidential basis for why you think it. What is wrong with having a distinction between police staff and police officers?

Mr Roberts: I think it will become increasingly untenable, as we move to an era where more people who are employed under contract as police staff are doing more and more jobs that look like what we would have traditionally regarded as police officers.

Police community support officers are distinct at the moment from police officers, from sworn officers, but there will be more and more of them, and I believe they will take on wider roles, so that is one area that is forcing us down the line, I think, of coalescing terms and conditions.

The other is what will come in with the IPCC in April, where they will oversee complaints which involve contractors in some cases, police staff certainly, chief police officers, and other police officers. Now to have four different sets of regulations bearing on potentially four different people, who have all been involved in the same incident, who would subsequently be dealt with in four quite different ways, that is just patently absurd.

Miss Weekes: In fact I think the director of the IPCC made that graphic example yesterday; he saw that as being – I use my words – a catalyst for the change.

The impression I get, and correct me if I am wrong, is that there is often uncomfortableness between police officers and police staff about how much respect they give to each other because of the difference in their roles, conditions of employment and the way they are treated; is that right?

Mr Roberts: When things are not going well, that is certainly the case. I think it has improved over the years certainly since I have been a police officer, but it is undoubtedly still there.

Miss Weekes: So how would this root and branch reform of bringing them under the same or similar terms and conditions of employment improve that morale?

Mr Roberts: I do not think it necessarily would, because I think what you are talking about, to improve morale in those terms, is a cultural change rather than simply a change of terms and conditions of employment. The mere fact that you would have similar but not the same terms and conditions of employment would not mean, for example, that a junior clerk was paid the same as a constable who was working 24 hour shifts. So one of the rubbing points is undoubtedly the pay and to some extent the status that that attracts. They are not going to go away. But I think if all our staff were able to see themselves as fitting in the same framework, it would help the process that we have been going through for many, many years of actually trying to get a more cohesive, coherent organisation.

Miss Weekes: I deliberately used the word "similar" because it is clear to any member of the public that a police staff officer, if I may use that term, does not carry out the same duties as a police constable. This change might affect, and tell me if I am wrong or right, what the public have always traditionally seen as being the almost 24 hour commitment of the police officer; whether he is on duty or off duty, he is still someone whom the public would call out, if they knew he was a police officer off duty, in an emergency. Is that going to change that culture?

Mr Roberts: I have to say, I do not think the general public would be remotely interested in the terms and conditions. What matters is the way that police officers behave on and off duty. I simply do not think it would have an impact on the public perception at all.

Miss Weekes: Would it be easy then, if you are looking at the terms and conditions, and you are going to similarly bring them in line, to distinguish the 12 hour shift with a contract of employment that is subject to working time directions?

Mr Roberts: I am sorry, I did not understand the question. 53

Miss Weekes: Do you know about the work –

Mr Roberts: Yes, I do.

Miss Weekes: Well, that undoubtedly applies to police staff, does it not?

Mr Roberts: Yes. It also applies to police officers.

Miss Weekes: Should it apply to police officers?

Mr Roberts: It does already.

Miss Weekes: So that would not matter, and officers' rights to parental leave and things like that, does that apply already?

Mr Roberts: I am sorry, I do not know.

Miss Weekes: You see, those are the sorts of considerations, you understand, one would need to look at if you were going to make them similar, as it were. It is going to require a huge amount of work.

Mr Roberts: It is not a trivial change, no.

Miss Weekes: Is it culturally going to be accepted by your police staff and police officers?

Mr Roberts: If we and Government decide that we have to get away from something which is not currently fit for the purpose to something which is, then part of managing the change is consulting and negotiating with both staff associations, the Police Federation and the unions, to get something which is an acceptable compromise. That is simply part of the process of change where we have to take our staff along with us.

Miss Weekes: So can I try to visualise this change? Is what you suggest possible, that we will have one main condition and terms of employment? They will not be exactly the same, but they will be one main document that distinguishes between what the staff do and what the officers do; is that right?

Mr Roberts: Yes.

Miss Weekes: These regulations, can we reduce them from the 20-odd that exist down to one?

Mr Roberts: It simply must be possible. It is no good to say this is all too difficult. If we accept that what we have does not work, then we have to work our way through this. I agree with you, it is going to be a huge task to do. It will be a very significant piece of work to negotiate with particularly the Police Federation, because I am sure they will have major concerns about it.

Miss Weekes: And the unions might want to have a say.

Mr Roberts: And the unions as well, but we cannot continue to leave it in the "too difficult" tray.

Miss Weekes: Who is going to do this work?

Mr Roberts: I think it will be a combination of the Police Federation, ACPO, the Home Office, I would imagine the Association of Police Authorities would need to be heavily involved in it, but primarily it would be part of the ongoing police reform agenda.

Miss Weekes: Another aspect I did not throw into the summary were policies, because that is another part of the what I call statutory framework; they are not statutes policies, they are guidance in the form of police special notices.

Mr Roberts: Yes.

Miss Weekes: You very kindly told us in your submission that there has been recent excellent work to reduce the number of policies. I think it might be helpful to turn up what you say about it: SXR2, page 34. I hope I have that reference right. If I have not, please forgive me.

Your recommendation at (c):

"Reducing the number of policy documents which relate to complaints and conduct – a process which is already underway as I have explained."

It is one of the specific recommendations you make to us. I have gone to policies because I think it is important to understand again how police officers operate, and what is the bare minimum that must be done to ensure that everybody understands the terms and conditions, the regulations and the professional standard that you want to filter down, and what the public expect.

One of the ways of getting an officer to conduct himself to the required standard is that you issue policies.

Mr Roberts: One of the ways, yes.

Miss Weekes: One of the ways. We know and we have been told that overall there are about 7,000 policies, for different areas, different functions?

Mr Roberts: It would not surprise me if there are 7,000 documents that call themselves policies, many of which – it is an area I used to work in – are frankly long time expired, and ought to have been cancelled and destroyed years ago.

Miss Weekes: All right.

Mr Roberts: That is a process we are going through now, as part of organising the service around the Race Relations (Amendment) Act and the Freedom of Information Act.

Miss Weekes: Policies in relation to your department are now down to about 40 or so.

Mr Roberts: About 40–43.

Miss Weekes: 43, and I have looked at your list of 43; some of them, I counted maybe 14, are about to be discontinued.

Mr Roberts: Yes.

Miss Weekes: "Decommissioned" is the word that is in the document. Why do we not just have one policy document?

Mr Roberts: I think ultimately that is what we should have.

Miss Weekes: Instead of 43.

Mr Roberts: We could have one policy document now, we could just have 43 chapters in it, and that would not help an officer trying to find out what he or she should or should not do, any more than what we have at the moment. I think what we need to get to is a much simpler way of providing people with guidance to deal with defined situations, but perhaps more importantly, providing them with a set of principles and approaches to deal with the situation that the rules do not cater for, because at 4.00 in the morning, when there is not anybody else to help, that is what they are quite often faced with, and I think our duty to all our staff, police staff and police officers, is to provide them with a framework of ethics which allows them to answer the question that the regulations do not answer for them, and that is something we are working towards in terms of the ethical contracts and the expectations of the service, that people get – before they even sign up, when they are at the point of saying, "Do I or do I not want to be a police officer?", part of what they will get in the not too distant future is, "If you want to sign up to be a police officer, this is what we expect of you".

Miss Weekes: There is obvious common sense about not being able to get everything into a regulation, and there is obvious common sense about the officer needing to be told in simple plain English, "This is the practical application of the statute". Some of your policy documents are extraordinarily wordy.

Mr Roberts: Yes.

Miss Weekes: Who drafts them?

Mr Roberts: We do have a policy unit that is drafting the newer work. Frankly, providing policies written in clear plain English has not been a priority in the Metropolitan Police, let alone in my Directorate, for a long time, and it needs to be.

Miss Weekes: Well, that is a recommendation that you think you could push through?

Mr Roberts: Oh, absolutely.

Miss Weekes: Because I would have thought that is precisely what officers want, quite simple plain English, "This is what you do, and this is what you probably should not do".

Mr Roberts: Yes.

Miss Weekes: So we have gone through the terms and conditions of employment, the regulations, the policies, and there are guidance documents as well, are there not?

Mr Roberts: Yes.

Miss Weekes: In this new reformed world, would you still need guidance documents if you have got the other four I have mentioned?

Mr Roberts: I think you probably would, because whatever the brave new world looks like, it will still be very complicated, there will still be issues around interpretation that will need to be dealt with, there will still need to be detailed instructions, standard operating procedures, if you like; there will still need to be – a good example would be the sanction guidelines that we are producing at the moment, advice to people sitting on misconduct boards about what the – we call them stakes in the ground, what they should be in terms of particular forms of conduct in terms of sentence, so I do not think you will ever get away from guidance which is advisory rather than binding, simply because of the interpretation issues and the complexity of some of the areas that we are dealing with.

Miss Weekes: My final question on the statutory framework reform is this: it is clear from our reading of the documents in this Inquiry that the idea for reform is not new.

Mr Roberts: No.

Miss Weekes: Why has it not happened before? Is the Metropolitan Police Service just afraid to take the step, or is it just inertia that has built up?

Mr Roberts: I think you have really rather clearly identified the reasons why it has not happened before. It will be hugely difficult. It is not for the Metropolitan Police to say on its own that the employment terms of police officers across the country need to be changed.

I mean, we are a large proportion of the national police service, but we are not the national police service. I think it is increasingly coming to the fore that we have that consensus that it is not fit for purpose and it has to be done. We simply have to take a deep breath and get on with it.

Miss Weekes: Because it will include 43 police forces.

Mr Roberts: Yes, and 43 police authorities, various government departments, the Police Federation, the Superintendents Association; it will be a hugely complicated undertaking, as police reform is at the moment.

Miss Weekes: Can I turn to the way you do it, the procedure? I think you have touched on one or two of those issues already. Again, it would appear, when one looks at the procedure, that it attracts the same criticism as the criticism for the statutory provision.

Mr Roberts: In many ways, it is the statutory provisions which dictate what has to be done in the investigation, because the ultimate goal of an investigation, if an officer is demonstrated to be at fault, is getting through the statutory provisions that dictate the misconduct board. One follows the other.

Miss Weekes: Your department very kindly, at our request, provided us with flow charts of what it looks like for an officer to go through stages of a complaint. Let us just look at the public complaint process, MPS 353. It is going to come up on your screen, but this looks much better. (Handed).

Now it really did take me rather a long time to read this, and go through the stages, but it does correctly and accurately set out the position now; it may change in April. Will it? Do give yourself a moment to look.

Mr Roberts: It will change in April is the short answer. The detail of how it will change is considerable.

Mr Hagon: Well, immediate informal resolution, for example, disappears, and we have a new process of local resolution, which is an improvement, I have to say.

Miss Weekes: Right.

Mr Roberts: Knowing where to start with the changes is actually –

Miss Weekes: It is quite a bewildering document, is it not?

Mr Roberts: If nothing that I have said so far to the Inquiry demonstrates the fact that we need change, I think that does, does it not?

Miss Weekes: Yes, it really rather frightened me. I am not always easily frightened, but that did.

Mr Roberts: No, I am not surprised. It is the first time I have seen it laid out quite like that, and it is a fairly intimidating document.

Miss Weekes: I think it took a great deal of effort to put it together as well, but I am grateful to whoever it was in your department who responded immediately to our request and provided that document, because we were unable to see the pictorial position, because it simply is not possible just by reading the documents, because there are so many documents that would cover that situation.

Just again, because this is about reform, this is about lessons to be learnt, it is about moving forward, yes, it will change when the Reform Act of 2002 comes into place in April of this year, but will it change sufficiently for your purposes unless you have the statutory change?

Mr Roberts: It will improve, but the fundamental issue around what evidence is gathered in an investigation having to be tested in a misconduct board, or in a criminal court, or both, will still dictate that a lot of the complexity that is in there will remain.

Now the IPCC will bring in some major improvements, I am quite convinced of that. I am very optimistic that there are major improvements there. But essentially, those improvements are around the sorts of investigation rather than the rules of an investigation. So, for example, the completely independent investigation of the most serious complaints I think will be a huge asset to us.

The idea that the IPCC will be able to almost dictate the level, the proportionality of investigative effort independently of ourselves will be hugely helpful.

I hope that they will be able to demonstrate to the public that they are genuinely independent, and that when they say something that complainants do not like, they are saying it from an independent standpoint. I am optimistic around that, but I think that remains to be seen. But the fundamental processes of the misconduct board and criminal trials will remain.

Miss Weekes: Right.

Mr Hagon: I would have to say, Miss Weekes, if you were looking for the IPCC to equate to a simplification of that, I am afraid you will be sorely disappointed, because in essence it will seek to be even a complication of it, with those additional groups of independent inquiries, managed inquiries, supervised inquiries, the local resolution process and the other category of local investigation.

Miss Weekes: So that flow diagram actually will not get better in April?

Mr Hagon: It will get more complex.

Mr Roberts: As will the bureaucracy around administering complaints, and as will the numbers of complaints that will end up being recorded.

Miss Weekes: But it does not have to be complex and bureaucratic, does it?

Mr Roberts: To an extent, I think it does, yes.

Miss Weekes: Why is that?

Mr Roberts: Because we are gathering evidence for a criminal trial, which will be trawled over by prosecution and defence lawyers, so yes, the process of investigation does have to be complex, and there is a bureaucracy that goes along with that, to make sure there is a proper auditable evidential trail, so that complexity I think inevitably remains.

Miss Weekes: Perhaps my question should have been: do all those stages on the flow diagram have to be there? Does the conduct, the complaint, have to go through all those different decision-makers? Can it not just be simpler?

Mr Roberts: If we are to get the sort of quality assurance of all the processes that I think we need, both in the interests of the public, of the service and the individual officers accused, I do think that many of the checks and balances in here which appear as additional bureaucracy are actually necessary.

Miss Weekes: Okay.

Mr Roberts: The purpose of both reactive and proactive inquiries is not simply to convict officers who are guilty, it is also to exonerate officers who are not guilty, and that is a factor that is sometimes missed, particularly in terms of thinking about reform. It is not unknown for complainants to falsely complain because they think it will improve their chances of a not guilty verdict in their own trial. So we have a major role there in protecting officers who have not done anything wrong, as well as convicting officers who have done something wrong.

Miss Weekes: Of course, one must not lose, and this inquiry will not lose sight of the balance of ensuring that the public understand professional standards and see it, but also that those against whom complaints have been made also understand the process and consider it to be fair. It is that balance, is it not, that we are trying to get right?

Mr Roberts: Yes.

Miss Weekes: There has been some movement towards the Metropolitan Police trying to make things better, and one of your recent reforms is Fairness at Work.

Mr Roberts: Yes.

Miss Weekes: I am going to come back to some of the criticisms about misconduct proceedings themselves in a moment. Fairness at Work, I think, is the most recent major reform that you have conducted in relation to grievance.

Mr Roberts: Yes.

Miss Weekes: The Fairness at Work applies to both staff and officers, police staff and police officers, and it is designed to arrive at very early resolution of workplace conflict, the niggling things that happen between an officer and his line manager or staff against staff, staff against officer. How is it working? You tell me.

Mr Roberts: It is too early to be conclusive about it, and frankly, it is not my sphere of responsibility, it is Assistant Commissioner Hogan-Howe.

Miss Weekes: We are going to hear from him.

Mr Roberts: But from the information I have seen, it seems to be working better, because it is simpler, for one thing, and it is because it is possible to get people who are trained and equipped, and independent of the problem, from a different command unit, to come in and address problems quickly in a problem solving way. It seems to be resolving matters quicker and better, to the satisfaction of the people involved, but I think it is far too early to say that conclusively.

Miss Weekes: The Chairman has already touched on training of line managers and supervisors in dealing with resolving workplace conflict. I want to just ask you about best practice in the Metropolitan Police about resolving disputes. We heard from the Commissioner of Dorset yesterday that she has gathered, and we found it very helpful, a number of examples of best practice from around the country. Your example was not there, for good reason, because she was aware that you would be giving evidence directly to this Inquiry, so it would help us to know as an Inquiry, when we come to consider our recommendations, what we build on, in terms of what has worked for you.

So can I have some examples of your best practice in resolving disputes?

Mr Roberts: I think the first point well worth making is that conflict resolution, conflict mediation, is what police officers do as a matter of course. We mediate social conflict. So the idea that until you have trained somebody specifically in resolving staff conflicts they are not capable of dealing with staff conflicts is a flawed idea. Many of our people are actually very skilled in doing that.

I think if we look at what appears to offer some of the best prospects for improving that, beyond the Fairness at Work procedure, the restorative justice process seems to be offering some real benefits now.

Miss Weekes: Well, let us have some concrete examples of what you have tried that works.

Mr Roberts: I am slightly constrained in giving you concrete examples, because I have only been in post for five months, and all the cases that are running are still in effect sub judice, but what we have been able to do on several occasions now – and I have to put this in very general terms – is to use the skills of our restorative justice facilitators who were fully trained for restorative justice in the criminal arena, and actually brought them into a number of disputes, some internal and some emanating from public complaints, where really quite serious critical incidents were there, but where we could bring together the aggrieved and some of the community stakeholders and come to a way forward which was entirely separate from what the discipline process would ever have delivered.

Now all of the cases that I am thinking about are still ongoing, and it is not a matter of, "We will have a meeting and it is all over and done with"; if the meeting is productive, it defines a series of actions that everybody is going to take, and you have to get to the end of those actions before you know you have really dealt with the problem properly.

Miss Weekes: I understand entirely that one does not want to use the example of a case that is not yet complete, and I also understand and appreciate that you have been in post for five months, but when you arrived, was there not something that gave you a very clear understanding of, "This is good practice, this is what is in place and this is what works"; did not somebody tell you that? Were you not able to see it?

Mr Roberts: The clearest example was around the acceptance or non-acceptance of internal investigation, where people were trying to refer matters up the line, and actually turning those back on local management, and saying, "No, this is something you have to solve yourself".

Miss Weekes: And when you turned it back on local management, what happened to it?

Mr Roberts: It did not come back to us, is the first point, and none of the ones we have seen have actually come back to us in terms of employment tribunal claims. So actually forcing people to take responsibility for a local issue does seem to be effective.

Miss Weekes: So that is one clear example.

Mr Roberts: That is one clear example. Another one – and it is part of the process of improving the speed with which we hold misconduct boards – is that the head of the misconduct unit has actually been looking at cases which have previously been heading for a misconduct board, where actually there is no point in having a misconduct board, a written warning is the appropriate way of dealing with it, and keeping everybody hanging around for another six or twelve months in order to get to a written warning is simply absurd. So there are a number of cases that have again been sent back for a borough to deal with, so that that level, the most appropriate level of discipline, is what is dealt with, and the lessons are learned as a result of it, rather than allowing it all to drag on.

Miss Weekes: Right. Thank you, that is one concrete example. Can your colleague give any more? Can you help?

Mr Hagon: It is fair to say that much of our work is actually dealing with things that are not going right, and trying to put them right after the event, so we tend not to focus on the things that have been resolved, for obvious reasons.

You will, of course, get some evidence from George McAnuff, the Fairness at Work advisor, and you will be calling, I think, Esme Crowther, who is within our command, who heads up the employment tribunal. There will be a whole range of examples there where our processes have achieved success, and indeed the Fairness at Work advisors that are now locally trained and doing that service quietly, but delivering that, you know, as we speak, is, I think, a real example of success, because I am, with Steve here – my perception of that, although it is early days, it was only introduced in May last year, early days, is that early intervention, with some degree of objectivity and outside viewpoint, of trained folk, you know, wedded to the concepts of trying to mediate things and prevent them getting to the statutory framework of employment tribunal, is entirely sensible, and the early indications are that it works.

Miss Weekes: Well, thank you for that. It is quite right that it may well be the other colleagues who are going to come can give the concrete examples, but as you are the Director of Professional Standards, is this not something that you should know, "Well, what does work? What is best practice for the Met?" Is that not something you should have at your fingertips?

Mr Roberts: It is something I should have at my fingertips. Our best at the moment that we can put on the table is around restorative justice, around Fairness at Work and around obliging but also assisting and equipping local management to deal with local issues on a management basis.

Miss Weekes: What about sharing best practice with other forces? Is that something that the Met does, and does it do it well?

Mr Roberts: Best practice is shared in a number of ways. We have actually put into the national debate – let us think, integrity testing, the service confidence procedure, the professional standards strategy as a whole; a whole range of things that we have developed, frankly, as answers to our problems, but which other forces have subsequently taken up because they can see the applicability to their problems.

So in terms of us sharing our experience with others, we do a great deal of that; we also do a great deal of providing advice to other forces, in terms of proactive operations against corruption, so in terms of giving our knowledge to others we do a great deal, and it is in fact becoming a problem, because quite a number of the developing countries in Eastern Europe are now asking for our assistance, as is Jamaica, and there does come a point where we are supposed to be providing a service to Londoners rather than the rest of the world.

Miss Weekes: Yes.

Mr Roberts: And that is becoming a distraction; it is something we are going to have to manage quite carefully in terms of getting best practice from elsewhere, which I think was part of your question.

Miss Weekes: It was, definitely.

Mr Roberts: Wherever we have an Inspectorate report, Her Majesty's Inspectorate of the Constabulary report, we actually examine it for the best practice that they identify in other forces in professional standards, and we will take from the national professional standards committees elements that we think are applicable to the Met, and restorative justice is a classic example of that, so we are all the time looking for that.

Mr Hagon: I can give you an example of that, if you like. The mechanics of that process of us giving and learning from others is the two committees that – and you have heard from the chair, Ken Jones, of one of them; the other one is the professional standards committee chaired by Mike Todd, who is the Chief Constable of GMP, Greater Manchester Police, but within that group the National Criminal Intelligence Service is represented, and long ago now, probably 18 months/two years ago, they were clearly wedded to the concept of the national intelligence model; we have adopted that within professional standards, probably the first professional standards unit within the country to do so, and now that is common practice elsewhere.

So that is an example of one body of people telling us about their good practice, us developing that, and then putting it out nationally.

Miss Weekes: I think you will probably see why I have asked about best practice and sharing, because if you genuinely want to go down the route of this major reform, this radical reform, you are going to have to be talking to each other quite a lot more, are you not?

Mr Roberts: Yes.

Miss Weekes: There is anecdotal evidence which may have absolutely no basis at all, that the Met rather thinks itself terribly different from anywhere else around the country, and it does not necessarily look and adopt best practice from other forces. You are bigger, you are more expensive, you have got more murders, that sort of thing. Is that right, or is it wrong?

Mr Roberts: No, it is wrong. We are significantly different from the rest of the country, in terms of the scale of our undertaking, and the scale of the problems that we face, in terms of the complexity of the problems that we face, in terms of the ethnic mix of the capital, as opposed to the rest of the country.

Miss Weekes: But, you know, there are lots of diversity issues and black issues in Manchester, there are in Birmingham, there are in Bristol.

Mr Roberts: And that is exactly what I was going to come on to say. Whilst we are different in terms of scale and complexity, because we are faced with such problems, we are on a constant search for other people's answers to those problems, where they have got something – a problem that is similar to ours. It is not a matter of being too proud to accept somebody else's ideas; frankly, we are desperate for them, because there are some problems we simply do not know the answers to.

Miss Weekes: One of the difficulties, and I accept that you genuinely want to find an answer to this, is the sensitivity around resolving discrimination workplace conflict, whether it be gender or race. Do you know an example of good practice that you could have a look at now, that has worked outside of the Met?

Mr Roberts: Off the top of my head, no, I do not.

Miss Weekes: You see, we found one out, because we were told this by the ACPO officer, the Chief Constable from Dorset yesterday, it was one of our examples; we know it but you do not.

Mr Roberts: No.

Miss Weekes: Well, it might have helped in your resolution of these sensitive disputes had you known that this example existed, and it clearly has existed for quite a bit. Well, let me take you to it, I will see if I can find it. It was in one of her annexes yesterday. We have amazing document staff here, but I am going to have to try and help with the page number. I think it is worth trying to find this, because it is a good example.

SXR2, page 24. This may not be right, so please forgive me if I have it wrong. (Pause). Thank you very much. We have excellent document management here, we always get there in the end.

"Key initiatives and examples of good practice."

Can we scroll down? Here we are, this is Northamptonshire Police:

"The force resolution procedure has proved to be a favoured method of conflict resolution amongst many staff. Emphasis is placed on early intervention and speedy resolution to minimise impact and avoid prolonged anxiety over issues."

It is exactly what you have both been saying that you have genuinely attempted to put in place in the Met:

"In addition, Northants can use restorative conferencing and have a pool of trained facilitators who can run conferences where necessary. This method of conflict resolution is increasing in popularity.

"A media strategy was developed as a specific improvement and early consultation with the BPA on such topic was recognised as critical to the process.

"Northants' experience shows that early intervention at an appropriate level is a key factor in managing conflict resolution, particularly in discrimination or harassment cases. Commitment by senior managers to support a resolution and listen to concerns is also critical. Restorative conferencing is particularly effective for sensitive harassment cases and Northants will continue to promote this option."

Can we just go over the page, in case there was – no, that is fine. Well, it is in the list brought for us by the Chief Constable from Dorset as an example of best practice. I am not suggesting for a moment that you have not made genuine attempts to try, and it is clear from the evidence that we have received that that is the case, but sharing the experience with that police force, and perhaps asking them, "Well, just tell us, how exactly did you do it, and why does it particularly work with discrimination?", might inform your process; yes?

Mr Roberts: It may well do, because they may have been doing something slightly different, but we have had a pool of trained restorative justice facilitators for some 18 months/two years now. We have a pilot running in north-east London of using restorative justice techniques, restorative conferencing with public complainants, and over the last three or four months now we have been using those facilitators in terms of some critical incidents, so I would be very interested if they are doing something that is in addition to that.

Miss Weekes: But you will not know unless you ask them.

Mr Roberts: Indeed, we will not, but they are by no means the first – and in fact, we have spent quite a lot of time with Thames Valley, who were the instigators of restorative conferencing for all sorts of things in this country, including complaints against police, and it was by working with them that we both got the training for our people and the benefit of their experience, so in terms of restorative justice being something that we have not done or we have not shared, we have, it is just that we went to the source rather than Northamptonshire, who have also been to the same source, I would imagine.

Miss Weekes: Not that you have not done it; this line of questioning is designed to help this Inquiry Panel deal with best pra

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	Archive note Important note: This is an archive of the website that was formerly at www.morrisinquiry.gov.uk. It is being hosted on the MPA website for archival purposes only and may contain out-of-date information. Page summary This resource is from the Transcripts section. This section contains a transcript of the public session with Deputy Assistant Commissioner S Roberts on 25 February 2004. Sections available here: Transcript of public session: Deputy Assistant Commissioner S Roberts, Directorate of Professional Standards, MPS and Commander P Hagon Questions by Sir William Morris Questions by Miss Weekes Questions by Sir Anthony Burden Further questions by Sir William Morris Alternative versions This transcript is also available with original line and page numbering: Morning session Afternoon session Content Transcript of public session: Deputy Assistant Commissioner S Roberts, Directorate of Professional Standards, MPS and Commander P Hagon Wednesday, 25 February 2004 10.30 am Sir William Morris: Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. A special welcome to you, Mr Roberts, you and your colleague. Can I first of all say thank you very much indeed for accepting our invitation to attend the Inquiry this morning, and to give some evidence to us, and thank you also for your written submission which we found extremely helpful. I appreciate that for some of our witnesses, and I emphasise "some" of our witnesses, any process of this nature may seem a rather daunting task. That being so, I thought it would be helpful if I set out very briefly how we propose to conduct the hearing this morning. But first let me introduce myself and the other members of the Panel. I am Sir Bill Morris, recently retired General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union. On my right is Sir Anthony Burden, who has recently retired as Chief Constable of the South Wales Constabulary after a very long and distinguished career in the police service, and on my left is Miss Anesta Weekes, who is an eminent barrister. Anesta sits as a Recorder and part-time chair of the employment tribunals. She was in fact counsel to the Lawrence Inquiry. Mr Roberts, as you know, we have been asked by the Metropolitan Police Authority to conduct an independent inquiry into professional standards and employment matters in the Metropolitan Police Service. Our focus is the MPS as an organisation, and not the individuals who make up the organisation. The inquiry that we are conducting is inquisitorial and not adversarial in character or indeed nature. We are keen to enquire into the issues raised by our terms of reference, so that we can make appropriate recommendations for further good practice, rather than concentrating on making criticisms of the Metropolitan Police Service as an organisation or particular individuals within it. To help us in our task, we are keen to hear from all our witnesses not just what is wrong with the Metropolitan Police Service, but equally, what is right with it; but most importantly, your suggestions in putting things right, assuming some witnesses might identify some things that are wrong. Let me say that a transcript is being taken so that we have a proper record of the evidence given by all our witnesses, and this will be posted on our website today. At the end of these introductory comments, I will lead on the questions to you, followed by my colleagues; Miss Weekes first, to be followed by Sir Anthony, and any supplementary questions that I might find necessary. At the conclusion of our questions, I will offer you the opportunity for a brief closing comment. Mr Roberts, in your written submission, you have identified a number of issues for us, and I just highlight one or two, just for the record. You have indicated to us your role and the work of the Directorate of Professional Standards. You have given us an explanation of the framework in which complaints are handled, and how they actually work in practice. You have indicated the use of statistical information by the DPS, and the MPS process in ensuring that lessons learned are assimilated into best practice, and we are grateful for your views on the appropriateness of the structure that is currently in place to deal with complaints. Equally, we welcome your comments about the new Independent Police Complaints Commission, and finally, we are grateful for your explanation of the interface between complaints and indeed tribunals. We would like to ask you questions on these and other related matters and indeed material, but before doing so, it would be beneficial for the record and the transcript if you would, please, formally introduce yourself and your colleague to the Inquiry. Mr Roberts: Certainly, sir, good morning, Panel members. I am Deputy Assistant Commissioner Stephen Roberts, I am the Director of Professional Standards in the Metropolitan Police. That role encompasses the management of employment tribunals, the investigation of corruption and unethical behaviour, both internally instigated inquiries and inquiries that emanate from public complaints. We also deal with the processes of taking officers through misconduct proceedings, through to the disposal of the case, and in addition, it is a minor part of the Directorate, we manage the accident claims unit which exists to settle claims where we either have or it is alleged that we have damaged people's property. I have served for 25 years now, all in the Metropolitan Police, in a variety of roles, both detective and uniformed; in the past I have been a borough commander and a Scotland Yard detective. Can I just introduce my deputy, Commander Phillip Hagon? Mr Hagon: Good morning. Mr Roberts: I have asked Phillip to accompany me today, because although I have only been in post for five months, he has actually been in post in the Directorate as the number two in the Directorate for 26 months, so he has more of the history than I do, if I can put it that way. Questions by Sir William Morris Sir William Morris: Could I just right at the outset indicate the sort of range of questions that I will seek to explore with you? They cover some structural issues and some managerial issues and some process issues. Can I just start by saying that this Inquiry, as you are aware, is tasked in essence to examine the way that the Metropolitan Police Service deals not just with professional standards but with workplace issues, workplace conflicts, and I understand that your Directorate shares some of those responsibilities. Mr Roberts: Yes, we do. Sir William Morris: I want therefore to look at the structure in overall terms, and as I look at this structure, I see your Directorate, which also, as you have indicated, has responsibility for employment tribunals; I see the human resource area, with responsibility for Fairness at Work; I see diversity sits where it sits, and, of course, the legal department, as it is, and I understand that accidents as well is very much part of your Directorate. And your Directorate has its prime responsibility for dealing with integrity and corrupt officers, in that sense, complaints. Just pausing for a minute, and in the light of your own experience, would you see that structure reflecting the best in joined-up management? Mr Roberts: I think there is probably a distinction that needs to be drawn between the way that we actually operate between the various units that are either part of my Directorate or that we work with, and the formal organisational structure. For neatness, various branches come under various lines of command. They have to sit somewhere, and in many cases it is at least debatable whether they are sitting in the right places, in terms of the formal organisational structure. I have to say, I do not think that that matters too much, because in practice, when we are dealing with specific cases and with broader issues, what matters is that the expertise drawn from those branches, from the specialists within those branches, is actually brought together in terms of the problem solving approach that we need to take for a particular case. So I would place much less emphasis on where things sit in the structure and rather more on the way that those units work with each other and interface with each other, to make sure firstly that the problems are solved in the short term, but secondly that we get medium and long-term action to actually improve the whole situation. Sir William Morris: But for the purpose of continuity, how do you sort of manage the functional dynamics, because in any managerial decisions, they are not just one-off; you do not just call a meeting and have a conversation and there it ends, there has to be follow-up, there have to be reports back, there have to be unforeseen circumstances. So from a functional perspective, how do you maintain continuity? Mr Roberts: Probably the best way to illustrate it is in terms of – let me say a hypothetical case, but where we have any sort of incident which we would regard as a critical incident, whether it is an internal one or an externally generated one, we would call together a gold group, which will oversee the strategy that the Met will adopt, not that my Directorate will adopt, but that the Met will adopt, in order to deal with that problem. Now the chairmanship of that group will vary according to the importance and the complexity of the problem, but the responsibility of that group is both to deal with the immediate incident and to deal with the aftermath, the consequence management, if you like, and then making sure that any learning from that incident actually then feeds back into the organisation. Now a gold group may meet once, twice or it may continue over many, many months. For example, in order for the Met to prepare for this Inquiry, so that we provide you with the best evidence, we established a gold group to co-ordinate what your requirements were, or our response to your requirements, and the way that the Met wanted to present its evidence. That meets on a weekly basis, and will continue to do so, I would imagine, until well after your Inquiry has finished and reported, to make sure that not only have we responded properly to you, but that we deal with your report in a way that makes sure that what you say is actually carried forward into the organisation, and sees it through to implementation. Sir William Morris: I have read with interest the gold group, but I am wondering, how does the brass group – how does it manage? Because, you see, this structure seems to replicate itself at different levels. I mean, in the end, someone has to put the words on paper, in different departments. Mr Roberts: Indeed they do. We actually call them bronze rather than brass, but in reality, from one gold group, you will have many different groups. For example, if we take the group that is dealing with this Inquiry, it draws expertise from legal services, from human resources, from the Diversity Directorate, from my own Directorate – offhand, I cannot think of which other groups are involved; all the business groups, in fact, and depending on what you report, what you recommend, there will be smaller implementation groups that sit within each of those directorates to actually implement what needs to be implemented, so, if you like, it is like a Christmas tree spreading out, to make sure that each bit of business is actually dealt with, but reporting back to the overseeing group which makes sure that the overall strategy is dealt with. It is rather similar to the way that we deal with the professional standards strategy. There are five strands to that, each under the control of a separate chief officer, spreading right across the Met. Each has its own working groups, each has its own implementation programme, and each reports back on progress, on problems, on blockages, to the strategic oversight group. Sir William Morris: Yes, but what the professional standards group has in common is a common terms of reference. They have a common objective. Now can you share with us the rationale for having employment tribunals in the Professional Standards Directorate? Mr Roberts: The decision predates me taking up this post, but essentially the rationale was to bring within one directorate a whole range of activities where the Met faced a risk that needed to be managed, short-term and long-term, from a suggestion of misbehaviour or unethical behaviour. So at one extreme you have accident claims, perhaps an officer who had been driving a police vehicle and had an accident, and that needs to be sorted out and compensation paid; at the other extreme, you have employment tribunals, where it is alleged that our officers or staff have behaved improperly, and that needs to be investigated and the case needs to be managed. So it is really about managing organisational risk, if I can put it that way. Mr Hagon: If I could add a bit of supplementary information there, the decision, Chairman, actually pre-dated me, but prior to it coming across to the Directorate of Professional Standards, it actually sat within human resources, and logically, you might think that is perhaps where it should be, but quite frankly, it did not work very well within that particular domain, and so the decision, as Steve Roberts has mentioned, was that it came across to, if you like, those people that are best charged with looking and dealing with risk, and moreover, were best versed in dealing with the Directorate of Legal Services. It is fair to say that DPS, for example, actually are the client for 80 per cent of our legal service work within the Metropolitan Police Service. I suppose the last rationale there was by the time it got to employment tribunal it was fairly late in the day, positions had hardened, and so, you know, the employment of lawyers within that was inevitable. Clearly, the resolution of those matters is best achieved earlier and lower down in the scheme of things. Sir William Morris: Yes. Sorry, I did not want to interrupt you, I was not quite sure whether you had actually finished. Mr Hagon: No, I had finished. Sir William Morris: My question was the rationale for employment tribunal issues in the Directorate of Professional Standards, and what I hear is that it is a feature of the risk management process, and I understand that, the risk management in any situation is a critical part of any degree of managerial approach. But it seems to me – what I am hearing, we have to get your view about that, because if you have an industrial tribunal, what you are – of course you manage the risk, but you are seeking a settlement ultimately. Mr Roberts: Not necessarily sir, no. Sir William Morris: Is that not what an industrial tribunal is supposed to be about? Mr Roberts: We would only be seeking a settlement – Sir William Morris: A resolution, so the case is settled one way or another. Mr Roberts: Yes, a resolution, not a settlement. Sir William Morris: So what I am basically saying is that if the risk management is a primary consideration, does it, in the instance where it is located, supersede the resolution of the issue? Mr Roberts: No, it does not. In terms of risk, when we are looking at either an employment tribunal or a civil action against us, or many of the other examples of unethical behaviour, we are also looking at the risk to the reputation of the organisation, and over and above any particular case we are looking at reducing the risk generally by learning lessons out of any particular case, and that has been a very prominent feature of the way that the employment tribunal unit has worked, in terms of actually publicising best practice and learning lessons and getting that out to personnel managers and frontline managers generally. I think that is the major contribution the unit has made to actually reducing the number of employment tribunals that we face, and reducing the overall costs that we are paying out on employment tribunals. So when we are talking about managing risk, we are not talking about just the immediate case. If there are lessons to be learned when we have got something wrong, we need to get those lessons back out to the organisation, so they do not do it again. Sir William Morris: Mr Roberts, it is safe to say that diversity is one of the flagship policy positions of the Metropolitan Police Service, and indeed the Commissioner takes a very personal interest in this. I am going to draw on the source material that you have provided us with by looking at the chart which sets out the strategic planning for your Directorate, and I would like you to just share with us, where does diversity flow within that particular chart, given that it is one of the flagship policies, and the Commissioner has a personal interest. That is the chart, it is a planning schematic for 2004 to 2005, and the general thrust of what I am seeking to establish is the functionality of all these units and areas of responsibility running through the Directorate, coming back to the joined-up management question. So where is diversity here? Mr Roberts: It is everywhere, sir. If I can take you to the professional standards strategy itself, although one strand of the strategy, managing diversity, is a specific element within our professional standards strategy, we look to get advice and assistance from the Diversity Directorate, from their particular perspectives, around everything else. For example, if you look at strand one, the leadership supervision and adherence to standards, if we are providing our frontline managers with better training and with a better awareness of how to get it right rather than how to get it wrong, we need to help them around dealing with some of the more difficult diversity issues. They cannot be good leaders if they cannot deal with a very diverse workforce and a very diverse public. So we need that specialist advice in there. If we look at organisational and individual learning, again, what you have to learn has to encompass diversity. A very specific element within that strand at the moment is that we are about to introduce pre-attestation testing for drugs, drugs use, illegal drugs use, for recruits coming into Hendon. Now one of the issues that has been raised by our own lay advisors, and by the MPA, the professional standards committee, is whether or not that sort of testing might have a disproportionate impact on some ethnic minorities rather than white officers. Now there again is something where we need that lay advice, we need that awareness of what we might be doing that might lead us into more disproportionality threaded into that policy. We cannot simply develop it without, and that is why we benefit from the – have you been introduced to the Samurai group, sir? Sir William Morris: No. Mr Roberts: The various ethnic minority staff associations, and there are a very large number now. In all our new policies, we actually need to consult with all of those people to get those different perspectives. It is actually very difficult – I think there is 19, from memory. It is actually very difficult to consult with 19 groups, so they have formed themselves into a group known as the Samurai group, which brings together all the minority staff associations in one body, so it makes it easier to consult, so it gives us a mechanism all the time to actually pass our projected policies, our planned policies, through that additional perspective. So the diversity strategy is not anywhere, it has to be everywhere, because if it is not, we are not going to get things right. Sir William Morris: Absolutely, and no disagreement on that point. I think what I am seeking to get some information about is – coming back to what I said about the joined-up management that is necessary within the organisation, and looking at the current structure, there is an impression, and I put it no higher than that, that the current structure as it stands develops a culture which mitigates against the joined-up management which I think is important. Let me just draw on your written submission, just three paragraphs, to try and illustrate a bit later on the point I am seeking to make. I want to look at paragraphs 6, 8 and 12 of your submission. Just in 6, it says: "It is true that my Directorate, dealing as it does with unpalatable and complex issues such as corruption, can never be the most attractive place to work within the MPS. We have to work very hard to recruit the people with the necessary talent and experience." Let us go to paragraph 8: "We are wedded to continuous improvement and the Panel may hear of some of these innovations in due course. I merely cite the following as examples: integrity testing, our analysis and research programmes, the development of a hi-tech unit, the officer of concern programme, the service confidence procedure ..." The last one is paragraph 12. There you say: "My Directorate has to deal with some of the most complex legal and ethical issues in policing. We also have to operate within a framework of regulations which I suggest are in need of further reform." My point here is to ask a question: is it possible that the rigour and the robustness which is absolutely necessary to defend the integrity of the Metropolitan Police Service against corruption gets in the way of a more sensitive approach of settling conflicts; I have not heard in your submission in full the phrases about resolution, mediation, conciliation, arbitration. I am asking you to comment on the impression that would be given, because it is so necessary to have a robust and vigorous approach to defend the integrity of the Metropolitan Police Service against corruption, and having the other more humane issues, sensitive issues, the people issues, so to speak, which deal with the relationship; that may be taking less than second place. Mr Roberts: It is absolutely possible that in our determination to root out corruption, unethical behaviour, racism, bullying, sexism, that we could – because we have the capability – become genuinely oppressive. It is my job to make sure that we do not, frankly. So on the one hand, there is no compromise around going after officers who are corrupt, who are unethical, but the essential point, I think, is that we have to get to facts and to evidence, because if you try to take any action in the absence of facts, as opposed to assertion, as opposed to perception, then you are starting off from the wrong basis. But in what you describe as the softer people issues, I think having established facts then you actually need to move on to: what is the resolution we are actually trying to achieve here? At one extreme, we might have highly corrupt officers engaging in criminal activity, being corrupted from the outside. Now it is very clear that we need to go after the corrupt officers, we need to go after the corrupters as well, because if we do not catch them too, that is only delaying the problem. They will come back and try and corrupt other officers. But all the time we have to ask ourselves – and it is something that is genuinely an almost daily question: what is the endgame we are trying to achieve? Is it simply to convict these people of crime and allow the courts the opportunity to lock them up, or is it simply getting them out of the organisation so that they do no further damage to the public because they are police officers, and very often there are compromises in the operational decisions that we have to make around that. Sometimes we cannot get to the ideal resolution, which is conviction, ideally imprisonment, and then subsequently getting them out of the organisation. Sometimes, the best we can do is removing them from the organisation, or even, under the service confidence procedure, putting them in a place where they can do least damage, because we do not have the evidence to get them out. At the other extreme, when we are talking about the softer people issues, once we have got those facts we have to ask ourselves: what is the endgame? The endgame for an aggrieved member of staff is either to compensate them for what has gone wrong that should not have gone wrong, and/or to get them back or keep them working for us with the sense that they are valued, that we accept what has gone wrong, and that if everybody cannot be happy, at least we can all be reconciled to the fact that something has gone wrong, we have done our best to put it right, and that they and we have a future together. It is in nobody's interest to have aggrieved members of staff; nor is it in anybody's interests to have a section of staff who feel that their interests are not catered for, because frankly, they will not do what the public pay them for, which is provide decent policing. Sir William Morris: Sure. No one is seeking a compromise. I think everybody recognised and signed up to your credo, integrity is not negotiable, so no one is looking for a compromise insofar as professional standards is concerned. What the structure leaves us with is an impression that because of the rigour and robustness, as I have said before, in pursuing and defending the integrity issue, the other issues which are encompassed in your department may well be taking second place. Let me just offer you a phrase that has been running throughout the week that we have been sitting: it is the golden thread of MPS's policies, and there are many strands of it in the diversity issue, in the concept of your own Directorate of Professional Standards – we have yet to hear about HR, but we will be surprised if that golden thread is not there. What we are left with nevertheless is an impression that it does not run all the way through; it stops at various points. And it is not sort of unreasonable to conclude that to get the best out of the input, that golden thread needs to run through. Mr Roberts: Certainly. Sir William Morris: In light of that, my question is: do you see any case for a revision and a review of the structure, given the fact that I started by talking about your Directorate with ET, employment tribunals, with diversity standing on its own, HR standing on its own, encompassing Fairness at Work, and, of course, legal and accident. I am sort of exploring this whole concept of managerial structure in order that we can get best use of all the resources. Mr Roberts: I will come back to my earlier comment, that it matters more how it works in practice than how it looks on an organisational chart. I mean, as far as the Diversity Directorate sitting separately, the long-term objective should be for the Diversity Directorate not to exist, because we eventually get to the point where it does not need to exist. I have to say, I think we are a very long way from that, because we cannot be sure yet that that golden thread runs absolutely from top to bottom. But I think what we can say is that the golden thread penetrates further day by day, and I will give you an example of it. Just before Christmas – we run regular training sessions, two or three days at a time, for our investigators, because we are trying to professionalise complaints investigation. We bring along to that training lay advisors, members of the Police Authority; at the last one we brought along some of the future commissioners of the IPCC, so we get a very rounded view of things. Those training sessions run on into the evening, so they become relatively less formal as the evening goes by. At one of those, one of our very junior officers from within the command ended up challenging one of the future commissioners of the IPCC around some issues which he had raised which she regarded as actually rather inappropriate, and I have to say I was really rather proud of that. You know, it was actually only a matter of perception; she was not an ethnic minority officer, but she felt that something had been wrongly dealt with, in terms of the discussion. Now that to me is really good, clear evidence that that golden thread is penetrating further and further. Sir William Morris: Let us turn to a point that you raised earlier, Mr Roberts. You talked about a compounding factor of disproportionality, and I think the best illustration to start off my comments here is to have a look at paragraph 67 of your submission to us. You start off by giving your personal view: "My personal view is that, while it would be naive to suggest that intentional or unintentional racism does not play a part in the observed statistics in relation to both public complaints and internal investigations, much of the racial disproportionality at the point of entry into the investigative system arises from the fact that frontline managers are very nervous about giving robust leadership and management when dealing with ethnic minority officers. There is a fear of allegations of racism and in consequence, when faced with minor misbehaviour by an ethnic minority officer, they will either retreat into the formal disciplinary process, with all the protection that the rules provide, or will turn a blind eye to the minor matters and only intervene at some later stage where more serious misbehaviour has occurred and formal investigation is the only possible course. Thus, we either let down our minority officers by failing to administer tough love or we retreat into the safety of formal processes." I think that is a very honest and blunt statement insofar as what you have actually identified, but I think the statement in itself identifies what appears to be fundamental weaknesses in the context of the managerial culture; people either do not have the competence to deal with the issue, or the confidence to deal with the issue, and some would say it is a damning indictment of managerial weaknesses. What I want to ask is: what is being done about that? Mr Roberts: I think the first point, and it goes back to the penetration of the golden thread, actually, is that it is a feature of the fact that our frontline managers recognise the sensitivity of race issues, so perversely, I think it is almost a sign of success on a long and evolutionary road towards us dealing with everybody as we would wish to. In terms of what we are doing about assisting our frontline managers to get that right, there is a whole range of issues. I do not know if you have been given any evidence yet about the Runge programme, it is for all inspectors, chief inspectors, and it has now been taken down to sergeants. It is run independently of the Met by the Industrial Society as part of the Commissioner's leadership programme. Now that is very much a programme where we bring in outside instructors to help people to recognise what they are doing and what their impact is on the people that they are managing, to recognise what their own style is in the way that they manage, to recognise how what they are doing might be perceived by people. I have attended several of those now, both as a participant and as a person helping to run them and helping to comment on what comes out of them, and they are hugely impactive, I have to say. I think we can see that they are bearing fruit in the fact that employment tribunals are declining, but I think that is only part of the answer. We provide management training to all inspectors and above anyway, routine management training, if I can put it that way, of which diversity issues form a part. In addition, the employment tribunal unit actually provide feedback, both to individuals and to the organisation as a whole, in terms of lessons coming out of either successful or failed employment tribunals, so you are gradually feeding back into the organisation lessons, but I think there is another element that comes out of it, in that what we are coming to recognise more and more is that when you get an incident where a person feels that they have been discriminated against, it may actually not be about that incident; that incident may simply be the last incident in a series of incidents, which may go back, you know, into their childhood, where they view a particular incident through the lens of their own experience. If somebody is unpleasant to me, my first thought would be, "There is something about me that they do not like, there is something about what I have done that they do not like", but if I were from an ethnic minority, I might jump to the conclusion, for very good reason, that the reason for that unpleasant behaviour was to do with the colour of my skin, so I think part of giving confidence to our frontline managers is also actually robustly investigating and, where necessary, defending their actions. If we honestly believe that they have got it right, then we need to tell them and show them, demonstrate to them that they have the organisation's support in the way that they have dealt with something. So it is an ongoing process. I do not think we are remotely at the end of that process yet, but I think what we face now is, you know, a part of the way there, we are a part of the way there. Mr Hagon: Chairman, this is a really important point that you have made. Could I just have a few words on that subject? Chief Constable Jones illustrated to you the difference between the investigation, the material around – I think it was a case of incivility, as against the investigation of a burglary, and he, I think, very graphically showed you the two different files there. It is in no one's interest for our people to engage in expensive inquiries, you know, which damage people where there is another method of doing it, so leadership is one element; giving people the tools and the ability to do that particular job at the most appropriate level, in other words locally, is something that we are very keen on. Recently, we have actually introduced a new written warnings policy, which every borough, every OCU within the Met now has, which has the tools to do that job, and we have seen as a consequence a leap in recent times in the numbers of written warnings that have been administered locally, by something in the factor of 300 per cent. The effect of that, of course, is that the matter is dealt with, and people can then move on, and that matter is then expunged from their personal records after a year. So I think we are endeavouring to push those particular issues to the level where they can most properly be dealt with, and give people the leadership ability and the tools to carry that through. Mr Roberts: If I may add, I think there is another piece of evidence that is worth you examining. You will see from the data that we have given you that there has been quite a marked decline in the number of internal investigations that my command has dealt with. Now part of that is a quite explicit set of criteria for accepting investigations, and in many, many cases now, where local managers have actually tried to pass an issue up the line to us to investigate, we have actually said, "No, this is a management issue. You actually have to deal with this yourselves. Use the tools you have got, use the Fairness at Work advisors that we have trained and you have got available to your borough. Use [in some cases] independent people to actually try and come to a resolution here. Try all that first, because that is much more likely to get you a resolution and to get you to a situation where you have not ended up with people damaged in a legal process". Because I have seen it time and time again, people going through a long ET process where, albeit at the end of the day they may even get a very large pay out, but they are damaged, and that is just appalling. Sir William Morris: The Metropolitan Police is not the only employer who has ethnic minority employees. What it has is its own model of management, and in certainly the experience which is shared collectively, we know of no employer whose managers are so lacking in confidence in dealing with the issue properly than that which has been recorded by yourself. You have talked earlier about risk management; well, I think this is an area which presents the highest degree of damaging risk to the Metropolitan Police Service; it is the multiplier effect, because the scenario is a simple one: an officer does not have the confidence as a manager to deal with an issue on the basis of fear of being branded as, you know, antisocial or racist or whatever, so he or she quickly retreats by putting it into the formal procedure, rather than having the normal work that might be necessary or could have resolved it. That goes into a formal process, it becomes a recorded statistic, and it compounds itself, and before you know where you are it is presented as a disproportionate – it is a multiplier. Now what I want to know, together with my colleagues, is: where is the help that is being given to the sergeant in Croydon that has to deal at first line with this issue, if he is not being given the proper support, and how did we get here in the first place, and how are we going to move ourselves forward? Mr Roberts: There is not one single piece of help that we give, it is actually a series of things that we have to do in order to provide people with that confidence. We have to back them up as an organisation if they have got it right, not if they have got it wrong, in spite of an allegation of racism. We have to provide them with that awareness training that we are doing at the moment as part of the Commissioner's leadership programme. I think above all we actually have to get more ethnic minority officers, so it is not so typically the white sergeant dealing with the black constable. We actually need to get more ethnic minority officers into the organisation and get more ethnic minorities further up the organisation, so there is not that potential clash there. So it is not going to happen quickly, because there are not any easy answers around this; if there were, we would have found them by now, but I think it is that steady but determined process of training people properly, of supporting them properly, of actually dealing with facts before you start to deal with perception and assertion, and actually maintaining our courage, almost. Yes, we can face the fact that we have this problem, we know that we have to solve this problem, and we know as well that we do not – we should not, even if we were legally allowed to, do what a lot of commercial organisations do, which is, when faced with this sort of allegation, to get out a cheque book, because they will not go to employment tribunals, even where they think that they would have a good defendable case, because they simply do not want to go down that route. Now we should not be doing that with public money, we should not be paying out where the facts, the merits of the case do not justify it, and were we to go down that route, I think that would reduce the confidence of our managers in dealing properly and robustly with their staff. Sir William Morris: But it is to be seen whether more ethnic minority managers is the answer to your problem; I think everyone subscribes to a managerial profile which reflects the composition of the service. That is the Kennedy doctrine, "I want my government to look like America". And that is fine, but this issue is not about ethnic minority managers, this issue is about managers having the confidence, the support, the culture to manage. Mr Roberts: Yes, I entirely agree with you. Sir William Morris: It seems to me that people do not want more managers, what they want is fair managers, and what they are getting is management by retreat. That is what is happening. It is a retreat management, not – Mr Roberts: It is what is happening in the cases that go wrong. Of course, none of us ever see the cases that do not go wrong. None of us ever see the matters that are resolved at 4.00 in the morning, where everybody has sat down, actually talked through the issues and dealt with them. So that is the nature of the beast, if you like. Sir William Morris: I do not disagree with you, in terms of how the issue emerges. What people see, nevertheless, is the comments, in terms of what you say at page 87 of your submission. I think that summarises it – it is at paragraph 87(h). Mr Roberts: Sorry, sir, you have lost me. Sir William Morris: It is on the screen. About two thirds of the way down, it says: "On occasion, we also face criticism that the real motivation for what may ultimately appear as a disproportionate investigation was the ethnic origin of the officer under investigation. Independent scrutiny of these sensitive and long running investigations has been attempted but has not provided sufficient defence of the criticism." That is the, if you like, summary of the multiplying effect of not dealing with these issues. Mr Roberts: The end result is that there is a perception that that is what happens. I am quite clear that it does not, but undoubtedly, there is that perception. Sir William Morris: And your supporters will say that that is the biggest reputational risk that the Met faces, apart from all the other risks which you will manage, and the sergeant in Croydon is looking for your help, to help him or her to manage. Let me just move on to another area which deals with still the people issue. I think you and I can agree, and we can all agree, that removing a person's livelihood, even in a temporary situation, by temporary suspension, is probably one of the most devastating blows that can be delivered by any employer. Could I ask, what is the Metropolitan Police Service's policy for keeping suspended officers informed of progress during investigations? Mr Roberts: When I suspend a police officer, and it is a personal decision of mine, only taken by Commander Hagon if I am absent for some reason, one of the considerations, as part of an established policy, is: what are the welfare arrangements made for that officer? So not just that the officer can be looked after in pure welfare terms, but that the officer can be kept informed of what is going on. Now I would not say that in every case we do as well as we should do on that, particularly for long running cases where, for whatever reason, the officer has been transferred away from the borough that he was originally working in when the incident happened to other boroughs; it is not perfect, but it is something that we pay attention to, not simply at the point of suspension, where I insist that I can see what the welfare arrangements are, but I review all suspensions on a monthly basis anyway, and checking on those ongoing arrangements, to make sure that they are in place, is part of the process. In addition, when we convene a gold group for a particular critical incident, which ends up with officers either suspended or having their duties restricted in some way, one of the standard agenda items is: what are the welfare arrangements for those officers affected? So it is very much there as part of the routine thinking, if I can put it like that, although I would not pretend to you this always works properly. Sir William Morris: But do you not think that it should be perfect? After all, I say again, to take a person's livelihood away, albeit temporary, on suspension, is probably the most devastating blow that you can deliver as an employer. Mr Roberts: Everything we do – Sir William Morris: And do you not think that power should be compensated by the simple process of keeping people informed? Mr Roberts: Everything we do should be perfect, and everything we do is not perfect, but it is one of those areas that we pay an awful lot of attention to, although I am sure you will be able to find examples where it has not worked as well as it should have done. Could I just bring you back to taking away somebody's livelihood? When we suspend an officer, we suspend them on full pay. Their livelihood – their occupation is removed, if you like, but their pay is not. Sir William Morris: Well, some people would prefer to be at work without pay. Mr Roberts: Some people. Sir William Morris: Because of the damage to their self-esteem and their confidence and their personal feelings and integrity, and pride, and everything that goes with it; money here is not the only consideration. Mr Roberts: It is not the only consideration, but if I were in a position of having a family and not having money, I think I would regard that as a pretty serious step. But I think the other point is that suspension really is the last option that is considered in any case. I always look at: what is it that we can do short of suspension to manage the risks around that individual, to manage the risks around an investigation? In the majority of cases where we have to look at some form of restriction on the officer, the answer is, no, he or she will not be suspended, but they will be put temporarily in a position where, for example – and typically, it would be that the officer is removed from the evidential chain, that the officer has no contact with the public, and then additional conditions on the officer to actually directly manage the specific risks around that case. So as a result of that approach, we have vastly reduced the number of officers who are suspended at any one time, and that is actually not just in the officers' interests, it is also in the interests of the public who pay for them. If we have somebody suspended on full pay, Londoners get no benefit. If we can have somebody not operating as a full police officer, if I can put it like that, but actually doing something which gives value to the Metropolitan Police and hence to Londoners, then that is far better, so not suspending people is the first thing. Mr Hagon: In the last four years that has reduced by 60 per cent, but you are right in saying – I do not think our current processes for keeping people up to date are as good as they could be, I think when we get the IPCC, one of the implications of that is the use of the Centurion software, which will enable us to more readily and regularly keep people – both the complainant and the officers complained of – up to date with the progress of the inquiry. Sir William Morris: Let me make the point here that it is not the suspension which is our issue. Our terms of reference obliges us to have a look at high-profile cases, and what I am seeking to establish is, whether it is high, low or medium profile: is there a protocol in the Metropolitan Police Service where someone is designated to maintain liaison by way of information in terms of progress with the suspended officer? Mr Roberts: Yes, that is part of the suspension process. Sir William Morris: That is what I am seeking just to establish. That is fine. Mr Roberts, in your submission at paragraph 93, you say this: "I believe that the handling of police conduct should move towards one based on a statutory regime of unfair dismissal." Could you share your deeper thoughts on that statement with us, please? Mr Roberts: I think what we have at the moment is a situation that satisfies nobody, and I think there is a broad consensus that it satisfies nobody. What we have at the moment just does not work. Complainants do not see that they get speedy resolution of their complaints; officers do not see that they get a fair and speedy resolution when they are complained against. The only people who benefit out of the current process are lawyers, and that cannot be right. Now I think there are major difficulties, potentially, in moving towards the ordinary employment law, but I think that needs to be the starting point, and before I came here today, I read the comments of Nick Hardwick who spoke to you yesterday, I believe. Sir William Morris: Yes. Mr Roberts: I think he has got it pretty well right, that the starting point should be ordinary employment law, and then we have to look at the special things that apply to police officers and police staff, because it is not just relevant to police officers here, that mean that employment law has to be slightly different for them. We only depart from what is ordinary for everybody else in those cases which – in those areas where you need to depart, to cater for the special role of police officers and police staff, to cater for their constitutional position as officers rather than employees, and to cater for the special position of chief constables and the Commissioner, in terms of their constitutional independence, but at the moment it does not work; at the moment we have an outdated system that is too long, too legalistic, so we have definitely got to shift. But frankly, if there was an easy answer we would have come up with it by now, so I think what we need to do – and what you may get to recommend – is that a fresh look needs to be taken with a view to a complete overhaul, and moving towards employment law. Having said that, the issue then, I think, would be that disputes between employees, ex-employees and ourselves could simply shift to employment tribunals, and if all we do is transfer our current misconduct proceedings into employment tribunals, that will not exactly be progress, so I think what would need to go with it would be some consideration of risk around appeal to the defendants, so we do not have simply an automatic appeal to employment tribunals, which I think is what would happen as things stand at the moment. So bringing in the sort of cost elements that you have in ordinary civil actions might actually provide a balance of risk which would give people something to lose, as well as something to gain, from simply appealing as a matter of course. Sir William Morris: We have heard evidence that making that shift would somehow impact in some way on the history, tradition, culture of the office of constable. What is your view on that point? Mr Roberts: Well, I think the issue of the office of constable is crucial. That is why I say we would have to depart from ordinary employment law in certain areas. I am certainly not an employment law expert and I do not know what those areas are; it is an area where you actually need to have some serious legal thinking around it, but the idea of departing from tradition does not worry me in the least. Tradition has got us to a point where it does not work any more, so simply holding onto what we have got for the sake of tradition I think is untenable. Sir William Morris: Would we be overburdening your department and indeed the service if we ask you to produce further expansive comment on that point? Mr Roberts: No, I would be happy to provide our thoughts, but I think what also needs to happen is central direction from the Association of Chief Police Officers. The Met's view might differ from a national view. Sir William Morris: We have got ACPO's view, what we would like to get is yours. Mr Roberts: Certainly, I would be happy to do so, sir. Sir William Morris: Just one further area I want to explore, a comment or two with you. You say, at paragraph 94 of your submission: "Long established practice, reinforced by Home Office guidance, is that in a case with both misconduct and criminal aspects, the criminal process should have primacy." Then you go on to say: "This can result in even relatively trivial matters being delayed for months and in some cases several years." An interesting thought: could you address for us any detriment that you might see in having criminal proceedings and misconduct running side by side? Mr Roberts: I think there is a perceived risk around double jeopardy, but I actually think that risk is rather less real than people imagine, and I would take it back to – if I were working in a bank and stealing money, I do not think my employment will continue much after I have been discovered, even though the criminal case might take months to be resolved. I think I would rightly expect to be sacked. If at some future date I appear in a criminal court, the fact that I had been sacked does not need to come into the court, it is simply a matter of, "At the time of this offence I was employed as a bank clerk, and here is the evidence that I stole some money". Now given the fact that at the moment we have different standards of proof around misconduct proceedings and criminal proceedings, it would not worry me that a criminal court might subsequently find somebody innocent on the criminal standard of proof, even though in employment terms we had found them guilty and had imposed some sort of sanction, even up to and including dismissal. So I think that idea of double jeopardy is probably flawed, because actually you are working on two different levels of proof. Sir William Morris: Yes, interesting. Well, thank you very much indeed, Mr Roberts, for your response to the questions that I had to put. Before I move on to the next of my colleagues who will want to put some questions to you, I am going to suggest that we have a five minute break so that the stenographers can rest their fingers and we can all stretch our legs. Thank you. 11.40 am (A short break) 11.45 am Sir William Morris: Okay, I would like to ask Miss Weekes to put a few questions to you, Mr Roberts. Questions by Miss Weekes Miss Weekes: Thank you. Can I take you back over some of the areas that the Chairman has already dealt with but that I perhaps would like to look at in a little bit more detail now that I have understood some of your answers. I would like to go back to the questions of the reform, the statutory reform, that you have suggested. I have taken on board your comments that you read from Nick Hardwick, the director of the IPCC, his comments, that one really needs to look at the statutory provisions quite thoroughly with a view to revising them completely. Your submission, and we will not turn to it for the moment, but I only have one line to remind myself of, it is, "The framework of regulations is in need of further reform". Have you moved your position from further reform to wholesale reform? I just need to understand what your case is. Mr Roberts: Yes, I am sorry, I think when I was talking about further reform, that was quite early on in the submission, was it not? Miss Weekes: Yes. Mr Roberts: What I was talking about there were the framework of regulations that allow us to gather evidence; if it is not clear in the submission, I must apologise for that. It was really referring to the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, because from our perspective there are fundamental issues around that which prevent us from dealing as we could with issues of sexism, racism and bullying. Miss Weekes: Right. Can I then, in that case, perhaps go back to what I consider to be the overall statutory framework for complaints, misconduct, discipline, which clearly comes under your department? Let us just have a look at it. If we can have brought up on the screen so you can see it JXX1, page 21. We were kindly given this document, which you will see in a moment, by the Chief Constable of Dorset, who is an ACPO member; she deals with this area, and she was able to speak to us about it yesterday. There will be a little bit of a pause because we have to find the document for you. Now this is the legislative framework which she has very kindly set out. We see there the primary employment law legislation effectively; quite a lot of those Acts apply to staff only, not necessarily to police officers. Mr Roberts: That is right. Miss Weekes: If we scroll down, we will see employment codes of practice, and then we look here at the relevant police regulations. Now there is an asterisk against those that will be changed by the time we get to April of this year, but essentially – I will give you a moment to cast your eye through it – all of those, to some degree or another, are applicable now; is that right? Mr Roberts: Yes, as far as I am aware. I have to say I have not read all of them. Miss Weekes: No, well, I have managed to look at most, but have not read them all in detail. But at first blush, we can see that there are numerous regulations that would come under your umbrella in terms of how you deal with officers who are complained about, in terms of the statutory provisions and procedure. I think it is right that we should move on slightly to where we will be when we come to report in June. You will have a major statute, which is the Police (Reform) Act 2002, which is going to come into being in April of this year. It brings with it the new Independent Police Complaints Commission, and it will be the principal statute which governs misconduct and complaints; is that right? Mr Roberts: It will be the principal statute that deals with the administration of complaints and the investigation of complaints, but I do not understand at the moment that it will change the way in which we dispose of a case, so we will still have the current Home Office regulations and the statutes that they come from that will dictate what we do around misconduct hearings, in effect, and the other disposals. Miss Weekes: I was just about to ask you whether that is right, you have still got the regulations – Mr Roberts: That is my understanding. Miss Weekes: There are two draft regulations which are going to come into place, the Police Conduct Regulation, which is still in a consultative state, and there is the Police Misconduct Complaint Regulation as well. Mr Roberts: And in addition, we will not have statutory guidance from the IPCC until – I believe it is October they are projecting at the moment. We will only have draft guidance in terms of the investigation of complaints. Miss Weekes: I think any member of the public listening to what I have just summarised only will wonder, why does it all have to be so complex and statutorily driven? First of all, why? Mr Roberts: I wish I could completely answer that question. Miss Weekes: You mean you do not know yourself? Mr Roberts: Bluntly, my answer is I do not think it does have to be, but it is a system that has evolved through history, based on essentially Victorian court martial law, as I understand it, and gradually modified in the light of experience. I am not aware that there has ever been a genuine radical look at whether it is fit for purpose, if indeed it ever was, and if it is not fit for purpose, what needs to replace it. Miss Weekes: I am rather interested that you use the word "radical", because we are months away from discussing our final views and what indeed we will recommend. We have a choice to tamper with this statutory framework, add a bit of reform there, take away a bit of a section, add another, or we can consider radical reform. Which one do you want? Mr Roberts: I would urge you to consider radical reform. There are things that we internally within the current regulations could do and are doing to speed up processes. There is scope for us to do that. There is scope for minor tinkering, I think you called it, that would help to speed up even further, but I think minor process improvements, minor tinkering with the regulations will get us down to a glass floor, if you like, that we simply will not be able to break through without a proper overhaul. Miss Weekes: Let us just understand the practicalities of such a recommendation. There is no point having a radical look at the regulations now these regulations come from the Home Office, because you have not only a historical relationship with the Home Office but it is almost a legal relationship with the Home Office, for obvious reasons that the public understand. There is no point dealing with the regulations unless you go back to look at the terms and conditions of employment, if I can use that generally, of your police officers and police staff. Mr Roberts: That is right. Miss Weekes: Because the regulations are intricately linked to the terms and conditions. Now what I did not flag up in my summary were the rather detailed complex manuals that police officers also have to work with, and the very detailed complex terms and conditions of employment, completely different for police officers and police staff, that you also have to work with. Mr Roberts: Yes. Miss Weekes: So let me take you through what I think the stages will be. If you want this radical reform, you are going to have to go back and look at the distinction between police officers and police staff; do you want to do that? Mr Roberts: Yes. Miss Weekes: You will have to look at their terms and conditions of employment. Then you would have to have a conversation with the Home Office. Mr Roberts: Yes. Miss Weekes: Is that going to be easy? Mr Roberts: Whether it is easy or not is almost beside the point, it is whether we need the change or not. Change is never easy, and in some cases it is deeply uncomfortable, but if we come to the conclusion – or if you come to the conclusion that what we have at the moment is not fit for purpose, then we should try and do something about it. Miss Weekes: Well, let me pause there and understand, because it is not necessarily what I think, it is what you think and the evidential basis for why you think it. What is wrong with having a distinction between police staff and police officers? Mr Roberts: I think it will become increasingly untenable, as we move to an era where more people who are employed under contract as police staff are doing more and more jobs that look like what we would have traditionally regarded as police officers. Police community support officers are distinct at the moment from police officers, from sworn officers, but there will be more and more of them, and I believe they will take on wider roles, so that is one area that is forcing us down the line, I think, of coalescing terms and conditions. The other is what will come in with the IPCC in April, where they will oversee complaints which involve contractors in some cases, police staff certainly, chief police officers, and other police officers. Now to have four different sets of regulations bearing on potentially four different people, who have all been involved in the same incident, who would subsequently be dealt with in four quite different ways, that is just patently absurd. Miss Weekes: In fact I think the director of the IPCC made that graphic example yesterday; he saw that as being – I use my words – a catalyst for the change. The impression I get, and correct me if I am wrong, is that there is often uncomfortableness between police officers and police staff about how much respect they give to each other because of the difference in their roles, conditions of employment and the way they are treated; is that right? Mr Roberts: When things are not going well, that is certainly the case. I think it has improved over the years certainly since I have been a police officer, but it is undoubtedly still there. Miss Weekes: So how would this root and branch reform of bringing them under the same or similar terms and conditions of employment improve that morale? Mr Roberts: I do not think it necessarily would, because I think what you are talking about, to improve morale in those terms, is a cultural change rather than simply a change of terms and conditions of employment. The mere fact that you would have similar but not the same terms and conditions of employment would not mean, for example, that a junior clerk was paid the same as a constable who was working 24 hour shifts. So one of the rubbing points is undoubtedly the pay and to some extent the status that that attracts. They are not going to go away. But I think if all our staff were able to see themselves as fitting in the same framework, it would help the process that we have been going through for many, many years of actually trying to get a more cohesive, coherent organisation. Miss Weekes: I deliberately used the word "similar" because it is clear to any member of the public that a police staff officer, if I may use that term, does not carry out the same duties as a police constable. This change might affect, and tell me if I am wrong or right, what the public have always traditionally seen as being the almost 24 hour commitment of the police officer; whether he is on duty or off duty, he is still someone whom the public would call out, if they knew he was a police officer off duty, in an emergency. Is that going to change that culture? Mr Roberts: I have to say, I do not think the general public would be remotely interested in the terms and conditions. What matters is the way that police officers behave on and off duty. I simply do not think it would have an impact on the public perception at all. Miss Weekes: Would it be easy then, if you are looking at the terms and conditions, and you are going to similarly bring them in line, to distinguish the 12 hour shift with a contract of employment that is subject to working time directions? Mr Roberts: I am sorry, I did not understand the question. 53 Miss Weekes: Do you know about the work – Mr Roberts: Yes, I do. Miss Weekes: Well, that undoubtedly applies to police staff, does it not? Mr Roberts: Yes. It also applies to police officers. Miss Weekes: Should it apply to police officers? Mr Roberts: It does already. Miss Weekes: So that would not matter, and officers' rights to parental leave and things like that, does that apply already? Mr Roberts: I am sorry, I do not know. Miss Weekes: You see, those are the sorts of considerations, you understand, one would need to look at if you were going to make them similar, as it were. It is going to require a huge amount of work. Mr Roberts: It is not a trivial change, no. Miss Weekes: Is it culturally going to be accepted by your police staff and police officers? Mr Roberts: If we and Government decide that we have to get away from something which is not currently fit for the purpose to something which is, then part of managing the change is consulting and negotiating with both staff associations, the Police Federation and the unions, to get something which is an acceptable compromise. That is simply part of the process of change where we have to take our staff along with us. Miss Weekes: So can I try to visualise this change? Is what you suggest possible, that we will have one main condition and terms of employment? They will not be exactly the same, but they will be one main document that distinguishes between what the staff do and what the officers do; is that right? Mr Roberts: Yes. Miss Weekes: These regulations, can we reduce them from the 20-odd that exist down to one? Mr Roberts: It simply must be possible. It is no good to say this is all too difficult. If we accept that what we have does not work, then we have to work our way through this. I agree with you, it is going to be a huge task to do. It will be a very significant piece of work to negotiate with particularly the Police Federation, because I am sure they will have major concerns about it. Miss Weekes: And the unions might want to have a say. Mr Roberts: And the unions as well, but we cannot continue to leave it in the "too difficult" tray. Miss Weekes: Who is going to do this work? Mr Roberts: I think it will be a combination of the Police Federation, ACPO, the Home Office, I would imagine the Association of Police Authorities would need to be heavily involved in it, but primarily it would be part of the ongoing police reform agenda. Miss Weekes: Another aspect I did not throw into the summary were policies, because that is another part of the what I call statutory framework; they are not statutes policies, they are guidance in the form of police special notices. Mr Roberts: Yes. Miss Weekes: You very kindly told us in your submission that there has been recent excellent work to reduce the number of policies. I think it might be helpful to turn up what you say about it: SXR2, page 34. I hope I have that reference right. If I have not, please forgive me. Your recommendation at (c): "Reducing the number of policy documents which relate to complaints and conduct – a process which is already underway as I have explained." It is one of the specific recommendations you make to us. I have gone to policies because I think it is important to understand again how police officers operate, and what is the bare minimum that must be done to ensure that everybody understands the terms and conditions, the regulations and the professional standard that you want to filter down, and what the public expect. One of the ways of getting an officer to conduct himself to the required standard is that you issue policies. Mr Roberts: One of the ways, yes. Miss Weekes: One of the ways. We know and we have been told that overall there are about 7,000 policies, for different areas, different functions? Mr Roberts: It would not surprise me if there are 7,000 documents that call themselves policies, many of which – it is an area I used to work in – are frankly long time expired, and ought to have been cancelled and destroyed years ago. Miss Weekes: All right. Mr Roberts: That is a process we are going through now, as part of organising the service around the Race Relations (Amendment) Act and the Freedom of Information Act. Miss Weekes: Policies in relation to your department are now down to about 40 or so. Mr Roberts: About 40–43. Miss Weekes: 43, and I have looked at your list of 43; some of them, I counted maybe 14, are about to be discontinued. Mr Roberts: Yes. Miss Weekes: "Decommissioned" is the word that is in the document. Why do we not just have one policy document? Mr Roberts: I think ultimately that is what we should have. Miss Weekes: Instead of 43. Mr Roberts: We could have one policy document now, we could just have 43 chapters in it, and that would not help an officer trying to find out what he or she should or should not do, any more than what we have at the moment. I think what we need to get to is a much simpler way of providing people with guidance to deal with defined situations, but perhaps more importantly, providing them with a set of principles and approaches to deal with the situation that the rules do not cater for, because at 4.00 in the morning, when there is not anybody else to help, that is what they are quite often faced with, and I think our duty to all our staff, police staff and police officers, is to provide them with a framework of ethics which allows them to answer the question that the regulations do not answer for them, and that is something we are working towards in terms of the ethical contracts and the expectations of the service, that people get – before they even sign up, when they are at the point of saying, "Do I or do I not want to be a police officer?", part of what they will get in the not too distant future is, "If you want to sign up to be a police officer, this is what we expect of you". Miss Weekes: There is obvious common sense about not being able to get everything into a regulation, and there is obvious common sense about the officer needing to be told in simple plain English, "This is the practical application of the statute". Some of your policy documents are extraordinarily wordy. Mr Roberts: Yes. Miss Weekes: Who drafts them? Mr Roberts: We do have a policy unit that is drafting the newer work. Frankly, providing policies written in clear plain English has not been a priority in the Metropolitan Police, let alone in my Directorate, for a long time, and it needs to be. Miss Weekes: Well, that is a recommendation that you think you could push through? Mr Roberts: Oh, absolutely. Miss Weekes: Because I would have thought that is precisely what officers want, quite simple plain English, "This is what you do, and this is what you probably should not do". Mr Roberts: Yes. Miss Weekes: So we have gone through the terms and conditions of employment, the regulations, the policies, and there are guidance documents as well, are there not? Mr Roberts: Yes. Miss Weekes: In this new reformed world, would you still need guidance documents if you have got the other four I have mentioned? Mr Roberts: I think you probably would, because whatever the brave new world looks like, it will still be very complicated, there will still be issues around interpretation that will need to be dealt with, there will still need to be detailed instructions, standard operating procedures, if you like; there will still need to be – a good example would be the sanction guidelines that we are producing at the moment, advice to people sitting on misconduct boards about what the – we call them stakes in the ground, what they should be in terms of particular forms of conduct in terms of sentence, so I do not think you will ever get away from guidance which is advisory rather than binding, simply because of the interpretation issues and the complexity of some of the areas that we are dealing with. Miss Weekes: My final question on the statutory framework reform is this: it is clear from our reading of the documents in this Inquiry that the idea for reform is not new. Mr Roberts: No. Miss Weekes: Why has it not happened before? Is the Metropolitan Police Service just afraid to take the step, or is it just inertia that has built up? Mr Roberts: I think you have really rather clearly identified the reasons why it has not happened before. It will be hugely difficult. It is not for the Metropolitan Police to say on its own that the employment terms of police officers across the country need to be changed. I mean, we are a large proportion of the national police service, but we are not the national police service. I think it is increasingly coming to the fore that we have that consensus that it is not fit for purpose and it has to be done. We simply have to take a deep breath and get on with it. Miss Weekes: Because it will include 43 police forces. Mr Roberts: Yes, and 43 police authorities, various government departments, the Police Federation, the Superintendents Association; it will be a hugely complicated undertaking, as police reform is at the moment. Miss Weekes: Can I turn to the way you do it, the procedure? I think you have touched on one or two of those issues already. Again, it would appear, when one looks at the procedure, that it attracts the same criticism as the criticism for the statutory provision. Mr Roberts: In many ways, it is the statutory provisions which dictate what has to be done in the investigation, because the ultimate goal of an investigation, if an officer is demonstrated to be at fault, is getting through the statutory provisions that dictate the misconduct board. One follows the other. Miss Weekes: Your department very kindly, at our request, provided us with flow charts of what it looks like for an officer to go through stages of a complaint. Let us just look at the public complaint process, MPS 353. It is going to come up on your screen, but this looks much better. (Handed). Now it really did take me rather a long time to read this, and go through the stages, but it does correctly and accurately set out the position now; it may change in April. Will it? Do give yourself a moment to look. Mr Roberts: It will change in April is the short answer. The detail of how it will change is considerable. Mr Hagon: Well, immediate informal resolution, for example, disappears, and we have a new process of local resolution, which is an improvement, I have to say. Miss Weekes: Right. Mr Roberts: Knowing where to start with the changes is actually – Miss Weekes: It is quite a bewildering document, is it not? Mr Roberts: If nothing that I have said so far to the Inquiry demonstrates the fact that we need change, I think that does, does it not? Miss Weekes: Yes, it really rather frightened me. I am not always easily frightened, but that did. Mr Roberts: No, I am not surprised. It is the first time I have seen it laid out quite like that, and it is a fairly intimidating document. Miss Weekes: I think it took a great deal of effort to put it together as well, but I am grateful to whoever it was in your department who responded immediately to our request and provided that document, because we were unable to see the pictorial position, because it simply is not possible just by reading the documents, because there are so many documents that would cover that situation. Just again, because this is about reform, this is about lessons to be learnt, it is about moving forward, yes, it will change when the Reform Act of 2002 comes into place in April of this year, but will it change sufficiently for your purposes unless you have the statutory change? Mr Roberts: It will improve, but the fundamental issue around what evidence is gathered in an investigation having to be tested in a misconduct board, or in a criminal court, or both, will still dictate that a lot of the complexity that is in there will remain. Now the IPCC will bring in some major improvements, I am quite convinced of that. I am very optimistic that there are major improvements there. But essentially, those improvements are around the sorts of investigation rather than the rules of an investigation. So, for example, the completely independent investigation of the most serious complaints I think will be a huge asset to us. The idea that the IPCC will be able to almost dictate the level, the proportionality of investigative effort independently of ourselves will be hugely helpful. I hope that they will be able to demonstrate to the public that they are genuinely independent, and that when they say something that complainants do not like, they are saying it from an independent standpoint. I am optimistic around that, but I think that remains to be seen. But the fundamental processes of the misconduct board and criminal trials will remain. Miss Weekes: Right. Mr Hagon: I would have to say, Miss Weekes, if you were looking for the IPCC to equate to a simplification of that, I am afraid you will be sorely disappointed, because in essence it will seek to be even a complication of it, with those additional groups of independent inquiries, managed inquiries, supervised inquiries, the local resolution process and the other category of local investigation. Miss Weekes: So that flow diagram actually will not get better in April? Mr Hagon: It will get more complex. Mr Roberts: As will the bureaucracy around administering complaints, and as will the numbers of complaints that will end up being recorded. Miss Weekes: But it does not have to be complex and bureaucratic, does it? Mr Roberts: To an extent, I think it does, yes. Miss Weekes: Why is that? Mr Roberts: Because we are gathering evidence for a criminal trial, which will be trawled over by prosecution and defence lawyers, so yes, the process of investigation does have to be complex, and there is a bureaucracy that goes along with that, to make sure there is a proper auditable evidential trail, so that complexity I think inevitably remains. Miss Weekes: Perhaps my question should have been: do all those stages on the flow diagram have to be there? Does the conduct, the complaint, have to go through all those different decision-makers? Can it not just be simpler? Mr Roberts: If we are to get the sort of quality assurance of all the processes that I think we need, both in the interests of the public, of the service and the individual officers accused, I do think that many of the checks and balances in here which appear as additional bureaucracy are actually necessary. Miss Weekes: Okay. Mr Roberts: The purpose of both reactive and proactive inquiries is not simply to convict officers who are guilty, it is also to exonerate officers who are not guilty, and that is a factor that is sometimes missed, particularly in terms of thinking about reform. It is not unknown for complainants to falsely complain because they think it will improve their chances of a not guilty verdict in their own trial. So we have a major role there in protecting officers who have not done anything wrong, as well as convicting officers who have done something wrong. Miss Weekes: Of course, one must not lose, and this inquiry will not lose sight of the balance of ensuring that the public understand professional standards and see it, but also that those against whom complaints have been made also understand the process and consider it to be fair. It is that balance, is it not, that we are trying to get right? Mr Roberts: Yes. Miss Weekes: There has been some movement towards the Metropolitan Police trying to make things better, and one of your recent reforms is Fairness at Work. Mr Roberts: Yes. Miss Weekes: I am going to come back to some of the criticisms about misconduct proceedings themselves in a moment. Fairness at Work, I think, is the most recent major reform that you have conducted in relation to grievance. Mr Roberts: Yes. Miss Weekes: The Fairness at Work applies to both staff and officers, police staff and police officers, and it is designed to arrive at very early resolution of workplace conflict, the niggling things that happen between an officer and his line manager or staff against staff, staff against officer. How is it working? You tell me. Mr Roberts: It is too early to be conclusive about it, and frankly, it is not my sphere of responsibility, it is Assistant Commissioner Hogan-Howe. Miss Weekes: We are going to hear from him. Mr Roberts: But from the information I have seen, it seems to be working better, because it is simpler, for one thing, and it is because it is possible to get people who are trained and equipped, and independent of the problem, from a different command unit, to come in and address problems quickly in a problem solving way. It seems to be resolving matters quicker and better, to the satisfaction of the people involved, but I think it is far too early to say that conclusively. Miss Weekes: The Chairman has already touched on training of line managers and supervisors in dealing with resolving workplace conflict. I want to just ask you about best practice in the Metropolitan Police about resolving disputes. We heard from the Commissioner of Dorset yesterday that she has gathered, and we found it very helpful, a number of examples of best practice from around the country. Your example was not there, for good reason, because she was aware that you would be giving evidence directly to this Inquiry, so it would help us to know as an Inquiry, when we come to consider our recommendations, what we build on, in terms of what has worked for you. So can I have some examples of your best practice in resolving disputes? Mr Roberts: I think the first point well worth making is that conflict resolution, conflict mediation, is what police officers do as a matter of course. We mediate social conflict. So the idea that until you have trained somebody specifically in resolving staff conflicts they are not capable of dealing with staff conflicts is a flawed idea. Many of our people are actually very skilled in doing that. I think if we look at what appears to offer some of the best prospects for improving that, beyond the Fairness at Work procedure, the restorative justice process seems to be offering some real benefits now. Miss Weekes: Well, let us have some concrete examples of what you have tried that works. Mr Roberts: I am slightly constrained in giving you concrete examples, because I have only been in post for five months, and all the cases that are running are still in effect sub judice, but what we have been able to do on several occasions now – and I have to put this in very general terms – is to use the skills of our restorative justice facilitators who were fully trained for restorative justice in the criminal arena, and actually brought them into a number of disputes, some internal and some emanating from public complaints, where really quite serious critical incidents were there, but where we could bring together the aggrieved and some of the community stakeholders and come to a way forward which was entirely separate from what the discipline process would ever have delivered. Now all of the cases that I am thinking about are still ongoing, and it is not a matter of, "We will have a meeting and it is all over and done with"; if the meeting is productive, it defines a series of actions that everybody is going to take, and you have to get to the end of those actions before you know you have really dealt with the problem properly. Miss Weekes: I understand entirely that one does not want to use the example of a case that is not yet complete, and I also understand and appreciate that you have been in post for five months, but when you arrived, was there not something that gave you a very clear understanding of, "This is good practice, this is what is in place and this is what works"; did not somebody tell you that? Were you not able to see it? Mr Roberts: The clearest example was around the acceptance or non-acceptance of internal investigation, where people were trying to refer matters up the line, and actually turning those back on local management, and saying, "No, this is something you have to solve yourself". Miss Weekes: And when you turned it back on local management, what happened to it? Mr Roberts: It did not come back to us, is the first point, and none of the ones we have seen have actually come back to us in terms of employment tribunal claims. So actually forcing people to take responsibility for a local issue does seem to be effective. Miss Weekes: So that is one clear example. Mr Roberts: That is one clear example. Another one – and it is part of the process of improving the speed with which we hold misconduct boards – is that the head of the misconduct unit has actually been looking at cases which have previously been heading for a misconduct board, where actually there is no point in having a misconduct board, a written warning is the appropriate way of dealing with it, and keeping everybody hanging around for another six or twelve months in order to get to a written warning is simply absurd. So there are a number of cases that have again been sent back for a borough to deal with, so that that level, the most appropriate level of discipline, is what is dealt with, and the lessons are learned as a result of it, rather than allowing it all to drag on. Miss Weekes: Right. Thank you, that is one concrete example. Can your colleague give any more? Can you help? Mr Hagon: It is fair to say that much of our work is actually dealing with things that are not going right, and trying to put them right after the event, so we tend not to focus on the things that have been resolved, for obvious reasons. You will, of course, get some evidence from George McAnuff, the Fairness at Work advisor, and you will be calling, I think, Esme Crowther, who is within our command, who heads up the employment tribunal. There will be a whole range of examples there where our processes have achieved success, and indeed the Fairness at Work advisors that are now locally trained and doing that service quietly, but delivering that, you know, as we speak, is, I think, a real example of success, because I am, with Steve here – my perception of that, although it is early days, it was only introduced in May last year, early days, is that early intervention, with some degree of objectivity and outside viewpoint, of trained folk, you know, wedded to the concepts of trying to mediate things and prevent them getting to the statutory framework of employment tribunal, is entirely sensible, and the early indications are that it works. Miss Weekes: Well, thank you for that. It is quite right that it may well be the other colleagues who are going to come can give the concrete examples, but as you are the Director of Professional Standards, is this not something that you should know, "Well, what does work? What is best practice for the Met?" Is that not something you should have at your fingertips? Mr Roberts: It is something I should have at my fingertips. Our best at the moment that we can put on the table is around restorative justice, around Fairness at Work and around obliging but also assisting and equipping local management to deal with local issues on a management basis. Miss Weekes: What about sharing best practice with other forces? Is that something that the Met does, and does it do it well? Mr Roberts: Best practice is shared in a number of ways. We have actually put into the national debate – let us think, integrity testing, the service confidence procedure, the professional standards strategy as a whole; a whole range of things that we have developed, frankly, as answers to our problems, but which other forces have subsequently taken up because they can see the applicability to their problems. So in terms of us sharing our experience with others, we do a great deal of that; we also do a great deal of providing advice to other forces, in terms of proactive operations against corruption, so in terms of giving our knowledge to others we do a great deal, and it is in fact becoming a problem, because quite a number of the developing countries in Eastern Europe are now asking for our assistance, as is Jamaica, and there does come a point where we are supposed to be providing a service to Londoners rather than the rest of the world. Miss Weekes: Yes. Mr Roberts: And that is becoming a distraction; it is something we are going to have to manage quite carefully in terms of getting best practice from elsewhere, which I think was part of your question. Miss Weekes: It was, definitely. Mr Roberts: Wherever we have an Inspectorate report, Her Majesty's Inspectorate of the Constabulary report, we actually examine it for the best practice that they identify in other forces in professional standards, and we will take from the national professional standards committees elements that we think are applicable to the Met, and restorative justice is a classic example of that, so we are all the time looking for that. Mr Hagon: I can give you an example of that, if you like. The mechanics of that process of us giving and learning from others is the two committees that – and you have heard from the chair, Ken Jones, of one of them; the other one is the professional standards committee chaired by Mike Todd, who is the Chief Constable of GMP, Greater Manchester Police, but within that group the National Criminal Intelligence Service is represented, and long ago now, probably 18 months/two years ago, they were clearly wedded to the concept of the national intelligence model; we have adopted that within professional standards, probably the first professional standards unit within the country to do so, and now that is common practice elsewhere. So that is an example of one body of people telling us about their good practice, us developing that, and then putting it out nationally. Miss Weekes: I think you will probably see why I have asked about best practice and sharing, because if you genuinely want to go down the route of this major reform, this radical reform, you are going to have to be talking to each other quite a lot more, are you not? Mr Roberts: Yes. Miss Weekes: There is anecdotal evidence which may have absolutely no basis at all, that the Met rather thinks itself terribly different from anywhere else around the country, and it does not necessarily look and adopt best practice from other forces. You are bigger, you are more expensive, you have got more murders, that sort of thing. Is that right, or is it wrong? Mr Roberts: No, it is wrong. We are significantly different from the rest of the country, in terms of the scale of our undertaking, and the scale of the problems that we face, in terms of the complexity of the problems that we face, in terms of the ethnic mix of the capital, as opposed to the rest of the country. Miss Weekes: But, you know, there are lots of diversity issues and black issues in Manchester, there are in Birmingham, there are in Bristol. Mr Roberts: And that is exactly what I was going to come on to say. Whilst we are different in terms of scale and complexity, because we are faced with such problems, we are on a constant search for other people's answers to those problems, where they have got something – a problem that is similar to ours. It is not a matter of being too proud to accept somebody else's ideas; frankly, we are desperate for them, because there are some problems we simply do not know the answers to. Miss Weekes: One of the difficulties, and I accept that you genuinely want to find an answer to this, is the sensitivity around resolving discrimination workplace conflict, whether it be gender or race. Do you know an example of good practice that you could have a look at now, that has worked outside of the Met? Mr Roberts: Off the top of my head, no, I do not. Miss Weekes: You see, we found one out, because we were told this by the ACPO officer, the Chief Constable from Dorset yesterday, it was one of our examples; we know it but you do not. Mr Roberts: No. Miss Weekes: Well, it might have helped in your resolution of these sensitive disputes had you known that this example existed, and it clearly has existed for quite a bit. Well, let me take you to it, I will see if I can find it. It was in one of her annexes yesterday. We have amazing document staff here, but I am going to have to try and help with the page number. I think it is worth trying to find this, because it is a good example. SXR2, page 24. This may not be right, so please forgive me if I have it wrong. (Pause). Thank you very much. We have excellent document management here, we always get there in the end. "Key initiatives and examples of good practice." Can we scroll down? Here we are, this is Northamptonshire Police: "The force resolution procedure has proved to be a favoured method of conflict resolution amongst many staff. Emphasis is placed on early intervention and speedy resolution to minimise impact and avoid prolonged anxiety over issues." It is exactly what you have both been saying that you have genuinely attempted to put in place in the Met: "In addition, Northants can use restorative conferencing and have a pool of trained facilitators who can run conferences where necessary. This method of conflict resolution is increasing in popularity. "A media strategy was developed as a specific improvement and early consultation with the BPA on such topic was recognised as critical to the process. "Northants' experience shows that early intervention at an appropriate level is a key factor in managing conflict resolution, particularly in discrimination or harassment cases. Commitment by senior managers to support a resolution and listen to concerns is also critical. Restorative conferencing is particularly effective for sensitive harassment cases and Northants will continue to promote this option." Can we just go over the page, in case there was – no, that is fine. Well, it is in the list brought for us by the Chief Constable from Dorset as an example of best practice. I am not suggesting for a moment that you have not made genuine attempts to try, and it is clear from the evidence that we have received that that is the case, but sharing the experience with that police force, and perhaps asking them, "Well, just tell us, how exactly did you do it, and why does it particularly work with discrimination?", might inform your process; yes? Mr Roberts: It may well do, because they may have been doing something slightly different, but we have had a pool of trained restorative justice facilitators for some 18 months/two years now. We have a pilot running in north-east London of using restorative justice techniques, restorative conferencing with public complainants, and over the last three or four months now we have been using those facilitators in terms of some critical incidents, so I would be very interested if they are doing something that is in addition to that. Miss Weekes: But you will not know unless you ask them. Mr Roberts: Indeed, we will not, but they are by no means the first – and in fact, we have spent quite a lot of time with Thames Valley, who were the instigators of restorative conferencing for all sorts of things in this country, including complaints against police, and it was by working with them that we both got the training for our people and the benefit of their experience, so in terms of restorative justice being something that we have not done or we have not shared, we have, it is just that we went to the source rather than Northamptonshire, who have also been to the same source, I would imagine. Miss Weekes: Not that you have not done it; this line of questioning is designed to help this Inquiry Panel deal with best pra