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 It is being hosted on the MPA website for archival purposes only and may contain out-of-date information.

This resource is from the Transcripts section. This section contains a transcript of the public session with Mr P Aspey and Mr M McAndrew of the Police Superintendents' Association (PSA) on 5 April 2004.

Sections available here:

• Transcript of public session: Mr P Aspey and Mr M McAndrew of the Police Superintendents' Association
  • Questions by Sir William Morris
  • Questions by Miss Weekes
  • Questions by Sir Anthony Burden

This transcript is also available with original line and page numbering.

Transcript of public session: Mr P Aspey and Mr M McAndrew of the Police Superintendents' Association

Monday, 5 April 2004
4.25 pm

Sir William Morris: Mr Aspey and indeed Mr McAndrew, good afternoon to you both. Can I say first of all thank you very much indeed for accepting our invitation to attend our Inquiry and give some evidence, and thank you also for your written submission which we found extremely helpful.

I appreciate, and I say this to all our witnesses, that any process of this nature could in fact be deemed to be daunting, so I thought it would be helpful if I very briefly set out how we propose to conduct the hearing this afternoon.

But first of all, let me introduce myself: I am Sir Bill Morris, recently retired General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union. As you can see, there are two other members of the panel. First, on my right, is Sir Anthony Burden, who recently retired as Chief Constable of the South Wales Constabulary after a very long and distinguished career in the police service. On my left is Miss Anesta Weekes QC. Anesta is a very eminent barrister who sits as a recorder and part-time chairperson of employment tribunals, and she was also counsel to the Lawrence Inquiry.

As you both know, we have been asked by the Metropolitan Police Authority to conduct an independent inquiry into professional standards and employment matters of the Metropolitan Police Service. Our focus, as I have said a number of times, is the MPS as an organisation and not the individuals who make up the organisation.

The inquiry we are conducting is inquisitorial, it is not, by nature or indeed character, adversarial. We are very keen to enquire into the issues raised by our terms of reference in order that we may be able to make the appropriate recommendations for further good practice within the Metropolitan Police Service itself.

To help us in our task, we are keen to hear from all our witnesses not just what is wrong with the Met but what is right with it, but perhaps more importantly, what can be done to make it better.

Just for the record, let me tell you both that a transcript is being taken so that we can have a proper record of the evidence given by all our witnesses, and this will be posted on our website later today.

At the end of these introductory remarks, I will lead on the questions to you, followed by my colleagues, Miss Weekes and Sir Anthony, and I will also reserve for myself the opportunity to ask any supplementary questions that I might find necessary.

At the conclusion of the questions, I will offer both of you the opportunity to make a closing comment if you so wish. However, it will be helpful if I just indicate to you that in your written submissions, you have pointed us in the direction of some extremely helpful information.

You, Mr Aspey, have given us an explanation of the role and purpose of the PSA E&W, and its involvement and development in relevant policies, practices and procedures in the Met, and you have also given us the PSA E&W's views on the policies of the Metropolitan Police Service and the conclusions therefrom.

Mr McAndrew, we have also had from you an introduction to the MPS and the service branch of the Police Superintendents Association, your organisation; views on complaints and conduct, as well as grievance handling and employment tribunal claims; and finally, on non-statutory inquiries.

We would like to ask you both some questions about the pointers that you have given us, but also on a range of issues relevant to the terms of reference and the material that we have had so far.

But before we raise these issues with you, for the benefit of the transcript writers, could you be kind enough, please, to introduce yourselves to the Inquiry?

Mr Aspey: I am Philip Aspey, and I am the deputy national secretary of the Police Superintendents Association of England and Wales. I am a serving police officer with Durham constabulary, seconded to a full-time post at the Superintendents Association national offices in Pangbourne.

I have been involved with the Superintendents Association for over six years now as branch chairman, national executive committee member, lead for the HR business area and then in the full-time role of deputy national secretary; a large part of my role as deputy national secretary is supporting members who find themselves the subject of inquiry.

Sir William Morris: And your colleague?

Mr McAndrew: I am Mike McAndrew, I am a Chief Superintendent in the Met. I previously had operational command in the Met. I am currently the secretary for the association in the Metropolitan Police. I am one of the two national executive members for London. I am London's lead friend. I am a chartered member of the Institute of Personnel and Development. I am a national council representative to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, and I have served in the personnel department in the Met, as both a chief inspector and a superintendent.

Sir William Morris: Thank you both very much.

Questions by Sir William Morris

Sir William Morris: You both represent a large number of superintendents and indeed chief superintendents as I understand it, and that is a group of police officers who are deemed to be very important within the context of line management, the frontline, so to speak, regarding operational policing in London.

Could you tell us how the structure works, how many officers report to the average superintendent, and what is the reporting line for the superintendent going upwards?

Mr Aspey: To take the questions in the order you posed them, we did some research into the structures that our members operate in about a year ago. Unfortunately, there is no simple model. Superintendents are more commonly thought of as BCU commanders or OCU commanders, as they are referred to in the Metropolitan Police, which are the units responsible for frontline service delivery.

There are 272 such units in the country, which means there are 272 OCU commanders. We have 1,500 members; the rest of the members support that frontline delivery, either as subordinates to a BCU commander or by delivering support services, and are often departmental heads of support services.

In terms of their responsibilities, the number of staff they can manage can range from 50 in a support department to over 1,400 in one BCU, which is Nottingham city.

There are no common structures, other than to say that there would be a normal police hierarchical structure, as I have heard described earlier this afternoon, with teams answering to team leaders, and those team leaders feeding into the superintending ranks, who by and large would take responsibility for delivering to an annual business plan, whether that be based geographically or around a support function.

The head of an OCU or a BCU, or a support department, would normally answer direct to an ACPO officer; in territorial commands, that would normally be an assistant chief constable, or a commander in the Metropolitan Police. In terms of specialist departments, outside of the Metropolitan Police, that would be a deputy chief constable; within the Met, I think I am right in saying it would almost invariably be a commander with specific responsibility for that specialism.

Mr McAndrew: Can I give you an example of my last command? My last command in the Met was as traffic OCU commander. I had 1,500 staff working for me, half police officers, half police staff. I had a budget of £75 million, and to assist me in managing that, I had one superintendent, eight chief inspectors, and a range of senior police staff, and we were supported by a personnel manager and an F&R manager so – I mean, that is not a typical size.

At the time, that was the biggest OCU in the country, but the Met varies, I think, between about 400 – and there are a couple of really big ones, but the mean would be round about 600 police officers plus support staff, I think.

Sir William Morris: And the Chief Superintendent would report upwards to –

Mr McAndrew: Yes, it is a fairly complicated relationship in the Met. If I deal specifically with territorial operations, because the majority of my colleagues are employed in – the larger commands are in territorial operations. In territorial operations, the line manager is actually the Assistant Commissioner, but between the Assistant Commissioner and the 32 borough commanders, there are a range of commanders who have linked responsibility – I am not absolutely sure what the current title for them is, but it is something like linked commander for a number of boroughs, and certainly until recently, they had no line command for those boroughs, although they did have responsibility for providing support to the senior staff and for driving performance in their linked boroughs.

Sir William Morris: From, if you like, the vantage point of a national perspective, could you share with us whether or not the experiences which we have been exploring this afternoon are common throughout other police services in the country, or is the agenda of our discussion peculiar to the Metropolitan Police Service?

Mr Aspey: It is not peculiar to the Metropolitan Police Service, but it does not spread across all 43 police forces either. There are some police forces who in terms of support to staff under investigation we never have any contact with. One can assume that certainly any inquiry that is made of superintendents' activities in those police forces does not result in the issue of a Regulation 9 notice, because at that point, we would hear immediately.

There are other police forces who we do an awful lot of business with, and it is recurring business, with quite a lot of our members. In the written submission, we did outline the total number of our members who are registered as being at risk, in terms of our insurance policy, at any one time, and that is an average of 200 out of a national membership of 1,500, which we would say is disproportionate.

Sir William Morris: I said earlier, when we talked to the National Black Police Association, that as part of our work, it is our intention to pay a visit to at least three other police services, the West Midlands, and as I said, Merseyside and Greater Manchester are pencilled in at the moment.

What will be the qualitative difference for the operational – when I say operational, I am talking about how things are managed, I am not talking about the frontline policing, but what would be the essential difference compared to the Met that you think we will experience?

Mr Aspey: The really big difference for our members outside of the Metropolitan Police is the close proximity they have to policy and decision-making. There are many more chief officer ranks and other chief officer layers in the Metropolitan Police Service, and there is a distinction between the district meetings I go to outside of the Metropolitan Police and the one inside the Met, where the Met branch – and I hope Mike will not mind me saying this – quite often spend some of their time trying to understand the policy and decision-making from the chief officer team, whereas in county forces, the branch will have been involved in that policy and decision-making.

Sir William Morris: It is no secret to say that part of the evidence that has been offered to us in the last few weeks ranges across – we have had concerns of varying degrees expressed about the ethos and culture of the directorate for professional standards; we have had criticisms about the "win at all costs" culture, it has been alleged, of the department of legal services; we have had criticisms alleged about the delays in moving forward on employment tribunals; aggressive pursuance, it has been alleged, and not seeking to find any modicum of conciliation until you are on the doorstep. I could go on, but I will not.

Is that a common experience, those critical departments that service the police service – is that a common criticism elsewhere?

Mr Aspey: It happens elsewhere, but it is not common across the whole of the police service. In understanding the different experiences our members have, it is helpful to look at the organisational culture of a police force at any one time. Those which have a learning culture investigate our members a lot less than those which have a more rigid hierarchical and bureaucratic structure, and who resort very early to bureaucratic processes.

Sir William Morris: There is a temptation to ask: where do you place the Met, hierarchical, bureaucratic or learning?

Mr Aspey: I am afraid it is necessarily hierarchical and bureaucratic.

Sir William Morris: I like the qualification; absolutely. But I mentioned legal, the directorate for professional standards, and I also mentioned employment tribunals, and you will have followed the debate here.

Are we getting the same sort of issues, say, in the metropolitan areas like the West Midlands metropolitan area, or South Yorkshire, or Yorkshire and Humberside or whatever? Is there a qualitative difference between, say, police officers and police forces in the more rural areas, like in the Fens, or what they do when you get up to Norfolk and Suffolk, compared with the metropolitan areas like Bradford, West Yorkshire and Merseyside?

Mr Aspey: No, it is not a function of size. There are some large police forces outside of London that in our opinion work very well, and have a very healthy organisational culture; equally, there are some smaller police forces that have an unhealthy organisational culture. It is not of itself a function of size.

Sir William Morris: You talked about the culture; how is the culture of a police service formed? What forms this culture?

Mr Aspey: My experience is it is about leadership at the top, and then subordinate leaders engaging and owning that type of culture, and promulgating it through the organisation, but it has to be from the top and it has to be consistent throughout the organisational structure.

Sir William Morris: Yes. Do you think we have consistency throughout the Metropolitan Police Service in terms of what we do and how we do it?

Mr Aspey: I think it would be very difficult, but I think Mike would have a better view than I, given the size of the organisation.

Mr McAndrew: I think the answer to that has to be no. I can just support what Phil says, I think the man or woman at the top is critical in this, and I do not mean the Commissioner, I mean in a particular OCU. I think if people like me set our stall out, let people know what our standards are, and do not accept people performing below those standards, then people very, very quickly realise that there is a line across which they do not cross, and other people learn that if they have got a problem, they can come and talk to you, where they may not feel able to talk to other managers.

I think the difficulty for people in my position is if we sit here and focus just on HR issues, and we just focus on grievances and misconduct, then it seems very clear that actually, I ought to have time and the will to get on and deal with that.

The problem, of course, is that OCU commanders also have huge operational and performance issues to deal with, and the reality is the thing that they are going to get a kicking for is whether or not they are reducing street crime and burglary, and not about whether or not their grievance rates are going up, or whether or not they are dealing with misconduct properly.

So I think it would be unfair of me not to point out that there is a real dilemma for senior people within the service about balancing the government, the MPA, the Mayor, the Commissioner, management board's desire for performance against key targets, with having the time and the ability to deal with individuals properly. And most of my colleagues are dealing with large units; not as large as the one I had when I was in traffic, nonetheless they are large units.

And I think I said in my evidence that I put in that I really think you should not lose sight of the fact that for an organisation of 40,000 people, the number of ET cases and the number of Fairness at Work issues that are brought forward is pretty small, and the majority of workplace staffing issues are dealt with by managers actually in the workplace, and nobody ever finds out about them.

Sir William Morris: That sort of begs the question – and numbers are always relative, so I do not take any issue there, but there are two issues: firstly, even if we only had one, some would argue it is one too many ET cases, because that represents a failure on somebody's part somewhere, but it is how they are dealt with; it is a real world we live in, so we start from the position that you will get them.

The complaint is not what we get and the numbers we get, the complaint is how they are handled, that is the evidence that has been offered to us, and it has been suggested to us that there is a disproportionate response to the way that cases are being handled, complaints, some of which are conduct issues, some of which are just ordinary employment tribunal issues, how they are being handled.

And to be blunt about it, it has been suggested to us that the black officers and black members of staff – but we will stick with officers for the time being – get treated in a disproportionate way, negatively so; what is your response to that? Is there any –

Mr McAndrew: I think I have made it quite clear in my written evidence to you that I actually believe that that is right. I also ought to be clear that I am not supporting that, I am not saying that it is right, but the perception out there in the Met is that there are some minority groups it is better not to try and manage, because there is a risk that you will end up in trouble if you do.

I do not believe there is any evidence that that is a true state of affairs, but I genuinely believe that that is the perception, and I think it does not help you and your colleagues if people like myself do not come here and tell you what we believe the perception to be out there.

I can support that perception; it is not my personal perception. I engaged in an extensive consultation exercise before I put my evidence in to this Inquiry. The things which are in my evidence have been supported by people who have made comments to me. When I put the evidence in to you, I circulated it to the membership in the Met. My phone was red hot afterwards with people saying to me, "Well done, Mike, it is time somebody said that".

So I repeat: I am not saying that it is right, I am not saying that that is the correct attitude that people ought to have, I am simply saying that that is the perception out there.

Sir William Morris: Okay, perception or reality, what is the answer to change, because it is no good for the Met as an institution, and it is certainly bad news for the individuals, so we are here to find solutions. What is your organisation's suggestion as to how we change this perception?

Mr McAndrew: I think the National Black Police Association gave you the answer this afternoon, it is for managers at all levels in the service to actually do the job they are getting paid to do.

The Fairness at Work issues would not get out of control in the way that they do if managers did the job that they were being paid to do. Black staff and women would not be discriminated against by not being dealt with properly when minor issues arise, and them either being kicked up the line so there is an investigation, which in many cases is wholly unjustified, or they do not know that there is a problem until it is too late for them to deal with it.

I just think it really is as simple as managers doing the job that they are getting paid to do, and there is a reluctance – and it does not only apply to black officers and women – there is a reluctance for some sergeants and inspectors to grasp the nettle and actually deal with difficult customers.

Some of the things which I said in relation to the range of responsibilities that people at my level have apply also to sergeants and inspectors. It is a pretty tough life out there if you are on teams, and you are a sergeant or an inspector, and it may be easy to concentrate on the operational issues, leave the tough staffing issues, and hope that they will go away; the reality is that they are not going to go away.

Miss Weekes asked the National Black Police Association earlier: what can the police service do about this? Well, the police service has an unsatisfactory performance process. It is a pretty poor unsatisfactory performance process, but on any reading of it, it is likely to take 12 months – if you decide that someone is not performing properly – to work your way through to the end of it, and to have a hearing which may result in final action being taken about the unsatisfactory performance.

Nonetheless, there is an unsatisfactory performance process, there is a probationary period for the – certainly there is a probationary period for sergeants, when they are first promoted, and I think that people at my level need to get a grip of this, and actually start dealing with some of these people who are causing us problems.

In my experience, if you walk into any police station, you will know who the good inspectors and the good sergeants are, because their reliefs will be performing well and their staff will be comfortable within themselves, and there will not be racism and sexism problems.

Sorry, can I just say one other thing? I do not believe that where people are working on teams, that if we have racist and sexist officers on those teams, the sergeants and the inspectors do not know about it. I do not believe it goes on without them knowing.

Sir William Morris: Okay, so we have got this mountain of evidence that all is not well, and there is a lot of statistics to support that. I say, by way of a question: what do you think we should do about it? You say, by way of a response: what it needs is for managers to do their job properly.

So I am sort of concluding that they are not doing their job properly, because if they were, we would not have the mountain of evidence. What do we do with the non-performing managers within the MPS?

Mr McAndrew: First of all, I do not want to give the impression that this is the majority. I do not believe it is the majority who are not doing their job properly. But I think there is a percentage at all levels who are not doing their job properly, and there are a variety of reasons why they are not doing their job properly.

Sure as anything, the answer to this is not throwing more training at it. We have tried that, we have tried training people to do this, and training in respect of this simply does not work.

What we do with the non-performing managers is – and again, I think the National Black Police Association said it; we had no tradition of demoting people because they are not doing the job that we pay them to do. It is not seen as the way the police service is.

Now it may seem quite extraordinary for a representative of a staff association to be sitting here and saying, "Maybe we need to make an example of one or two people over this"; I actually think, if we made an example of one or two people over this, the problem would start to disappear, because cops, despite the impression you may have got, are not stupid people, and they know what they should be doing, and sometimes, for a variety of reasons, they choose not to do it.

If they actually thought their job was going to be at risk as a result of not doing it, my view is that the majority of them would do it, and I think Phil wants to say something.

Mr Aspey: I wanted to make a slightly different comment. I thought the chairman was taking us in a different direction, which is about some of the structures within which we try and manage our staff that are not particularly helpful.

Sir William Morris: Part of the criticism that we have heard in evidence is that if police officers, those who are not managers, say, do not do their jobs properly, they pretty quickly find themselves engrossed within the disciplinary process, but when the managers fail to do their jobs, the general position is that nothing happens to them; no manager gets disciplined for poor managerial performance.

What has emerged in the questions and the evidence is that it is almost having two police forces: one excellent in terms of its operational duties and responsibilities; another one far from good in terms of its managerial responsibilities, but the operational policing takes total priority and sets the culture.

One can conclude that would we not be not just good but excellent if the managerial responsibility was being delivered to the same level of efficiency as the operational, because one supports the other.

So it comes back to: you know, what do you think we ought to be saying in respect of managerial performance assessment to those who do not perform to the required standards and criteria? Because they are taking the service down below its optimum level of operational capacity and capability.

Mr Aspey: One very obvious comment I can make is that following our pay deal at the end of last year, the first thing you say to superintendents is, "You are not getting a pay rise", because increments are now tied to performance.

In terms of the wider performance of our members as managers, some of the structures are unhelpful, particularly grievance procedures and Fairness at Work procedures, and also the disciplinary processes.

If I perhaps start with the disciplinary processes, as you are no doubt aware, they are regulated by statute, and I find it quite incredible in this day and age that if a manager takes a view about someone's performance, and wishes to issue a warning at the lower end of the sanction scale, then you can only do that if the person agrees, and that if they do not agree, they can take you right up the scale in terms of sanctions and hearing, and you get into a combative relationship very, very quickly if the person to whom you are trying to give managerial direction will not accept it.

Now I think some of the police regulations are understandable, in terms of where they have come from, but I do not really see what they add to the disciplinary process. There is a wider debate about the employment rights that police officers have, and whilst I acknowledge that we could never have full employment rights, for example we would not seek the right to strike, I think the balance is currently wrong, and we would be better in a lot of respects to be employees for the wider purposes of legislation than Crown servants.

In terms of grievance handling, as a consequence, I think, of internal police culture, a lot of police officers view grievance as sort of the smaller brother to discipline and challenge, and see it as a combative type of activity rather than a way of resolving something that is perhaps unfair.

Now there are some good examples round the country, and you asked earlier; I would point you towards Thames Valley police, who have a grievance procedure which says really two things: one is that all employees are expected to resolve issues at the earliest possible opportunity, and to take some responsibility for making that happen; and secondly, that if they get stuck with the person they are trying to resolve it with, there is immediate access to external mediators who are within the Thames Valley police structures, but are independent to line management.

That seems to me a very healthy situation, and I think that wider context has a lot to do with why some of our members – quite a lot of our members feel frustrated in terms of how they can manage a lot of the issues that you have been hearing about.

Sir William Morris: And the Thames Valley experience is supported by your association?

Mr Aspey: Yes, we understand it well.

Sir William Morris: You must, I am assuming, also hear of the complaints and some evidence given to us by a number of people about line management not having the confidence to manage ethnic minority officers, so the immediate reaction is to refer up the command chain issues of discipline.

The reference up, would that be to your members?

Mr Aspey: It would come to us, and may be resolved by our members, but for the same reasons, may be referred on further. I think –

Sir William Morris: Why can it not be referred back? If a manager gets a reference upwards, and he or she judges it not to have been dealt with properly, why can it not be sent back? If I drafted a letter for my boss and he was not satisfied with it, he would send it back to me to redraft it; why can we not do the same?

Mr Aspey: They can be and they are. We are talking about the instances that have unsatisfactory resolutions, and sometimes they are sent back and people are told, "Try again, do better". But that approach relies, within the current police management structures, on the agreement of the complainant, and quite often complainants will say, "I no longer have any confidence in the first line manager or second line manager to resolve this". And then it passes, as the third part of the process, to our members, and it depends on their experience and on the organisation culture as to how likely they are to find a successful resolution at their level in the organisation.

Sir William Morris: But one of the issues that has emerged – we were told that when there is a reference up the command chain, the person against whom the disciplinary action potentially might be taken does not see the report that goes up, so he or she does not know the details of the case to be answered at that higher level.

Do you think it would help if a report was prepared by whoever is making the reference upwards at any stage, and that report was shared between both parties so that both parties know exactly what the issues were to be explored at the next stage; would that openness and transparency facilitate resolution?

Mr Aspey: What would be ideal – assuming we are not talking about serious misconduct?

Sir William Morris: No, that is going off on a different track.

Mr Aspey: – is that it was kept at the lowest level, and as I have suggested, that managers had the authority – where they had come to a view, based on their experience, to give some sort of direction, rather than what we have at the present time, which is dialogue which, if it is not accepted, can only go onwards and upwards, because there is no mechanism for it to go anywhere else.

So as long as you have a healthy and open dialogue with a subordinate about some piece of misconduct that you wish to give them advice about, and they accept it, then the outcome is quite immediate, and the information is shared from the outset.

There is no reason why, unless we are talking about gross misconduct or criminality, potential corruption – there is no reason why people should not be told from the outset what the complaint is against them, in terms of their behaviour.

Mr McAndrew: Can I just say something about this? I think we need to be quite clear about this. In terms of internal misconduct, as an OCU commander, I am the discipline authority for my people. A report about internal misconduct which originates within my OCU, it is my decision what I do with it, so there really ought to be no buck passing about this, and people saying, "It is somebody else's fault". It rests fairly and squarely with the OCU commander, and the description which you gave is one that I frankly do not recognise; I accept that people have said that here.

I cannot see that if I was an OCU commander, that if it was a fairly low level of misconduct alleged against one of my officers, that I would want to put it up the line for a formal investigation.

That said, I know of at least one case where two of my colleagues, one of whom, I might add, was black and female, made a decision to give a formal warning to an officer about a disciplinary matter, and senior management further up the chain disagreed with that decision, and they ended up subject to a misconduct investigation because of their decision to issue a formal warning.

That sort of decision does not give any confidence to superintendents and chief inspectors that they actually ought to grasp the nettle and deal with things at an appropriate level.

Sir William Morris: Just for the avoidance of any doubt, let me say that I personally have lost count of the numbers of senior MPS officers and managers who sat where you are sitting who have offered us this, if you like, picture of line managers who feel uncomfortable with being accused of being racist, or being accused, "It is only because I am black", and they are failing to manage effectively – the tough love management does not apply, so it is referred up.

So whether or not you recognise it, what I am saying is that we have heard a lot of evidence from very senior managers, directorate leaders and departmental leaders, who have offered that to us.

Mr McAndrew: And I am not saying that is not right, and actually, my evidence supports that. All I am saying is that my experience of management is I personally would not allow that to happen. I cannot speak for other people, and I am not clear how it is managing to wriggle through the system, because the system should stop that happening.

DPS should actually say, "No, this does not justify a formal investigation, have it back and deal with it within an OCU". So it is a systemic failure, if this is actually happening and it is wriggling through the system.

Sir William Morris: From what you have said earlier, I take it that your association would support the general principle of the commander's proposition that it really is about time that we look at a more modern framework of employment law for police officers, whilst at the same time protecting the ethos and culture of the office of constable, and that would mean putting it in the contract of employment.

I just want to be clear that your association either supports or does not, but what you have said, I am taking it you have some modicum of support.

Mr Aspey: That is correct.

Mr McAndrew: It is not a one-way street though. I think we need to recognise that it is relatively easy to talk about moving to a contract of employment, but you actually cannot ignore the fact that there would have to be some kind of regulatory framework to deal with complaints from members of the public.

You can change the end bit, if you like, but so long as you have the IPCC with the ability to order that there should be tribunals and suchlike, it is actually quite difficult to simply throw the whole thing out.

I think also, people that are very keen to go down this line ought to realise that we might actually end up with some commercial decisions being taken about whether or not we want to retain people. If there was no protection within the police regulations for cops, some of the things that you have heard about, about people being suspended for five, six, seven years, I think some managers might think there was a commercial decision there to be made, "Let us get rid of them. Let them take us to an ET, because they are not going to get anything like the same as they would get if they stayed on the books for five, six or seven years". You are talking about a lot of money for people that are suspended for that length of time.

Mr Aspey: Just as an association policy, rather than the Met view of the world, it seems illogical to us to support the IPCC, as we do, and acknowledge that they can investigate some roles in the police service that are performed in some places by sworn officers, and in other places, the same role is performed by police staff, and the IPCC is equally capable of investigating complaints against both, one within the framework of employment law and the other not; I think the time has come to look fundamentally at how we regulate all police staff.

Mr McAndrew: The Met view would be that is fair comment.

Sir William Morris: Thank you both very much indeed. I have explored the questions I personally wanted to ask of your good selves, and I hand you straight over to Miss Weekes to put her questions to you.

Questions by Miss Weekes

Miss Weekes: Thank you, chairman. Can I go back to the dilemma that senior officers of your rank have with operational command issues and personnel issues, and perhaps I will draw on yourself first – in fact, both of you have HR experience.

What is required to be a successful resolver of personnel disputes is not the same as what is required to be good operationally; do you agree?

Mr Aspey: May not be the same.

Miss Weekes: Why do you say "may"?

Mr Aspey: Because the better operational police officers are the ones who pay attention to what their staff need to perform the job well, which includes the way you manage them. So just because somebody is a really, really effective operational police officer does not mean that those skills cannot be directly transferred to managing people. They may not transfer, those skills; those who are relying on a different skill set in a modern police force are doing policing in an unusual and strange way.

Miss Weekes: I will come to you in a moment, but I will take your word "may" as being perhaps the fairer way to express it. What I am concerned about, and it goes back to your views about the performance regulation: when an officer does not perform well as a line manager, and I think one of the suggestions was, "Well, maybe we do need to go down the route of demotion", doing something that ensures that the message goes out that the way you treat people is of prime importance; why do you think that has not happened to date?

Mr Aspey: I think there is a distinction to be drawn between someone who treats people improperly, which can be a disciplinary matter, and we have had members demoted as a result of bullying in the workplace, one quite recently.

Someone who is incapable of managing properly I think is a different issue, and as you heard earlier this afternoon, we would expect them to be offered the opportunity to develop first, perhaps in a place where they would be less damaging, but if they cannot develop into the role they are in, then why should we pay them for doing it? They should move on, and if moving on means moving down, then that may be a reasonable outcome.

Miss Weekes: Does it have to be linked to demotion? If one recognises that sometimes an officer will remain operationally excellent but is simply not very good at personnel issues, why can he not keep his rank but you take away his line manager personnel role?

Mr Aspey: That rather depends where you are in the organisation. Given that our members are towards the top end of the organisation, in some forces, outside of the Metropolitan Police in particular, there are perhaps only 12 superintendents/chief superintendents in the whole police force, and you cannot have a superintendent who is not doing a real job. It is just not viable in terms of the force structure. So I think there are some hard decisions to be made.

Equally, we have had members who have been put into jobs that were created rather than that actually exist within the organisational structure, and they are dreadfully demotivating and do nothing in the long term to help the member concerned.

Miss Weekes: I mean, is it something that you would like to see the Met and outside the Met consider, other options of dealing with the quality of line management? Your colleague said, "Well, training does not work".

Mr Aspey: It rather depends what you mean by "the quality of line management".

Miss Weekes: Line management that is not quality, that does not work.

Mr Aspey: A lot of our people become competent in the role after they have been put there. It is not unusual in the police service to be offered a job that you have not been involved in before, and you have to learn to become competent, and most of our members learn to become competent once they are in the role. Some do not, and then there is a big question: what do you do about their lack of competence?

Miss Weekes: Yes, and it is that that I would like your help with. If you had to make a recommendation on this, what would it be? Because these are the occasions where staff complain and staff are made to feel unhappy, because a line manager is not performing.

Mr Aspey: Yes, I think the position we have taken on a number of occasions in the past – it is said that the current situation is at best undesirable and probably unacceptable, and that people should demonstrate competence for a role before they go into it, not be expected to acquire competence after they have been put in the role.

Now that means a lot for the whole of the service, in terms of assessment and prior training, and is expensive. But that is what we would look for, so that we are not putting people into roles that they are not competent for.

There is a separate question about what the elements of a role should be, and how broad a span of competence you should look for, and there are some roles that really expect you to be good at everything, and there are very few of us who can do absolutely everything across the whole range of competencies within the national competency framework for the police.

Miss Weekes: In an ideal word, you will want your line manager, whatever his rank, to be fair, have judgment, integrity, does not discriminate; all those good things. Well, do the Met test for that before they appoint?

Mr McAndrew: Can you just run through the list again, please?

Miss Weekes: Integrity – well, it is the sort of things I think you would know because of your background, so perhaps I do not need to go through the list for you.

Mr McAndrew: The theory would be that things like integrity are actually tested daily in the workplace, and it would be apparent if people did not have integrity, did not have the judgment, did not have the skills to deal with people, so I think it is fair to say that those are not explicitly tested for in the promotion assessment centres within the Met, which are based on the national competency framework.

I do not think that you suddenly, at superintendent, discover that you cannot manage people. The police service is based on the fact that everybody, from their first promotion, has the responsibility for managing people. I think most of us would accept that we have some people within the organisation who, for a variety of reasons, are not good at managing people, and have not been dealt with over the years.

Now I think it would be a difficult proposition to put forward to say, "Well, if we are better at it now, and if we find a better system of selecting sergeants, and we actually make sure that people who are selected for sergeants can do the job that we want them to do, in terms of managing people, then the problem will go away". It will not go away for a number of years.

So I think in the interim we need to find a way of helping the people that we have already promoted who are not good at this. And it does seem to me, and I guess it will come as no surprise to hear somebody who is a member of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development say this, but we actually have professionals in this field, people who have qualifications in HR on every OCU in the Met.

For me, part of the difficulty is that we have senior managers who are perfectly prepared to take advice from experts about operational decision-making, but who actually think that because they are a manager, they know what it takes to manage people. And I think if you had HR managers from some of the OCUs in the Met in front of you, they would be saying, "I have a very difficult job, I have a very difficult job in maintaining my integrity as an HR manager, because I give advice to these senior managers about what it is that they ought to be doing, and they choose not to take my advice, because they think they know better themselves".

So I think that as an organisation, we need to raise the status of HR, we need to raise the status of the personnel managers within management teams, and we need to try to do something to make senior managers take some notice of them.

Miss Weekes: Well, you help me: what is it that you think then you should do to raise the status of HR? Do you reward an excellent line manager when he or she demonstrates that they can investigate an officer fairly, with integrity, and does it proportionately, to avoid some of the classic errors that have happened on the high-profile cases that we are all familiar with? Do you reward them?

Mr McAndrew: No.

Miss Weekes: If you do not reward them, do you bring some sort of sanction when they clearly get it appallingly badly wrong?

Mr McAndrew: Yes. You do not reward people for doing the job that they are getting paid to do anyway. The description you gave about the way that these matters should be investigated is simple, basic line management, and I really do not believe that people should be getting rewarded for doing their job properly.

If they are doing it exceptionally, and our pay deal deals with that, then they ought to get some reward for it, but actually, the people we should be dealing with are the ones who are not doing it properly, and we need to find a way of making it absolutely clear that this kind of underperformance is not going to be accepted, and that is a job for management.

Miss Weekes: What is the way? Tell me the suggestion, the method.

Mr McAndrew: I really do not think that this is a difficult area. I know we have not been good at it, but I actually think it is about proper line management, and I venture to suggest that people who have served under me in the past knew what my standards were, and knew what was acceptable to me, and either performed to my standards or we had a very serious one-to-one interview about it, and I could name a whole raft of colleagues who are in exactly the same position.

If I wanted to, I could also name to you the colleagues who are not that good at doing that; for obvious reasons, I am not going to.

Miss Weekes: I respect that.

Mr McAndrew: But senior management know who the good managers are, and they know who the poor managers are, and they are not good at dealing with the poor managers.

Miss Weekes: Now we have come perhaps to the gravamen of the problem. Not good at dealing with the managers that we all know are not good, so they perpetuate some of the ET cases and some of the examples that we have heard about today where people feel suicidal, and women, and black women, leave the force.

Now let us try and deal with that; even if it is a minority, it is still pretty bad.

Mr McAndrew: Absolutely.

Miss Weekes: Well, you may come from the privileged rank of somebody who thankfully has got it pretty right so far, but what is your recommendation for the managers that you know, sitting where you sit, are still in the force but are bad managers?

Mr McAndrew: Well, I guess I would ask the question: what is the responsibility of ACPO in this?

Miss Weekes: Yes, that is my question.

Mr McAndrew: ACPO have responsibility for driving performance, for mentoring and supporting and coaching borough commanders and other OCU commanders, and I am sorry, but I can only repeat what I have said already: it is actually the job of senior managers to make sure that the people that work for them are doing the job properly and are not causing more problems than they are solving. And I accept the point that you are making to me, which is that there is – and I would suggest it is quite a small minority, but there is a minority of managers, even senior managers, who create more problems than they solve.

Miss Weekes: Well, sitting where you are, you know who they are; what have you done about it personally? I am not suggesting you carry the whole weight of this problem, but I am trying to reach out at some real practical solutions. Have you gone to anybody above their level to say, "Look, here I am, I am trying to do it right, I know over there X is not doing it right, can you help?" There is a climate of, "Do not squeal on your colleague because you will not be promoted"; does it work at your level too?

Mr McAndrew: I think that is a very difficult question to answer. There are people that I have spoken to about the way that they manage, but that was done as a Superintendents Association representative. If you are asking me: when I was an OCU commander, did I speak to ACPO about people who I was not comfortable with their management style, then the simple answer is: no, I have not.

Miss Weekes: Well, why not?

Mr McAndrew: I guess the answer would be: I did not think it was my problem. That is a cop-out, and I recognise it is a cop-out.

Miss Weekes: Well, if everybody else in your position does that, the bad managers will remain.

Mr McAndrew: I accept that.

Miss Weekes: And unhappy people will remain in the Met; is that what you want?

Mr McAndrew: No.

Mr Aspey: There is a wider cultural issue here. We did some research among our members not too long ago in terms of the amount of contact that members have with us as a staff association, and we found that 70 per cent of our members never have any direct contact with us as a staff association.

We asked why not, and of that 70 per cent, half of them said they were too busy; the other half said that in their opinion, getting involved with a staff association would be career limiting or career damaging, which is not dissimilar from some of the evidence you heard earlier.

Miss Weekes: It is not too dissimilar, but depressing nonetheless.

Mr Aspey: But the culture is there.

Miss Weekes: Well, if an officer of your rank, with clout and a good deal of power and influence does not speak out, do you honestly expect that others below your rank would?

Mr McAndrew: I think I need to clarify a bit what I was saying there.

Miss Weekes: Please do.

Mr McAndrew: I think the association as a whole within the Met has been banging on the drum – sorry, banging on the door of HR to ask for career management and career development for superintendents and chief superintendents, and to be fair, since Mr Hogan-Howe took over, it has largely been an open door, and for the first time, we have a career management and a superintendents' development forum at which we are looking at some of the issues.

So I do not want to leave you with the impression that actually I have stuck my head in the sand and done nothing about it – and I cannot think of a better way of putting this – rather than shopping individuals and trying to deal with it at an organisational level.

Certainly within my own OCU, I would not tolerate management of the kind that we have been talking about, and I think what I was saying was – and I recognise that what you are saying has some force, but I actually think that there are people at a senior level who also have some responsibility in this.

Miss Weekes: Can I just turn to the structure of Fairness at Work and dealing with grievances, et cetera? And I bear in mind that there is some evidence in both your written submissions, and it may be that it is one and not the other, that superintendents themselves, and chief superintendents themselves, are vulnerable to complaint.

But dealing with the superintendents against whom complaints are made, and I just want to home in on the dilemma that ACPO must represent the superintendent against whom the complaint is made and also the complainer –

Mr Aspey: Sorry, can you say that again?

Mr McAndrew: I think you mean the Superintendents Association, rather than ACPO.

Miss Weekes: The Superintendents Association, that is entirely right.

Mr McAndrew: We would love ACPO to represent us.

Miss Weekes: And that is a dilemma which has been highlighted in one of your submissions. Does that tend to suggest that an independent structure to deal with that situation would be preferable? I do not know, but I can see the dilemma myself.

Mr Aspey: In terms of staff association representation, we are sufficiently resilient through the panel of friends which we described in our paper to support both sides, and where necessary, to put Chinese walls in place to maintain the integrity of the service that we offer.

What is depressing, which I commented on in my written submission, is the total proportion of our membership who at any one time are absorbed in enquiring into the activities of superintendents. A lot of it is fairly straightforward managerial stuff.

I mean, to carry on the same thing that we have been talking about, we did some research before Christmas, and asked how frequently our members had performance development review. 45 per cent of our members across the country had not had a performance development review within the last 12 months. The winner for the prize was someone who had not had it in nine years.

There is a lack of managerial contact between us and our line managers who, in a lot of instances, are chief officers, and we have been talking to ACPO through the president about what we feel we are entitled to as superintendents, which is effective line management, and a part of our pay deal was intended to force that and force contact between our members and their first line managers to drive the PDR process.

We find that issues that are straightforward managerial issues, we believe, end up in protracted disciplinary inquiries when they really should have been gripped in the first instance.

Miss Weekes: One final point, and it is about press coverage of some of the cases that would be dealt with by superintendents and chief superintendents, and this falls within our terms of reference from the Virdi Inquiry. Are you both confident, in the Met and outside the Met, that what happened to Mr Virdi, and other black and white officers, is not going to happen again?

Mr McAndrew: No.

Miss Weekes: No, you are not?

Mr McAndrew: I am not; I am not convinced, though, that the responsibility rests with DPA in respect of this. I mean, just over the last six months, I have had a number of serious allegations made against people, and full details have appeared in the press, including the name.

Now I know that was not released by DPA, I know it was not released by people in my office. I am sure as hell it was not the officer himself who was telling the Sunday Mirror or whatever about it. It can only have come from within the Met. So I think there are a number of people within the Met who are feeding information to what they regard as tame reporters.

Why they are doing it, I know not, but I believe that that is taking place, and I think it is actually very difficult for the Met as an organisation to stop.

Miss Weekes: Well, I suspect it is almost impossible, because you can send out the information by e-mail, by text, or by a discreet cup of coffee on the corner of a High Street.

Mr McAndrew: Absolutely.

Mr Aspey: It happens elsewhere in the country as well. It is not just Met-specific.

Miss Weekes: Is there a protocol in place for what the Met can and cannot release?

Mr McAndrew: Yes, there is, and some of the information which has been released to the press in the cases that I am involved with goes way outside the protocol. I mean, we are talking about a detective superintendent with an allegation against him of indecent assault, and the details, including exactly what the woman involved was saying had happened, plus his name, appeared in a Sunday paper. That can only have come from inside the organisation.

Mr Aspey: It is not uncommon for a force press office and ourselves as a staff association to share press releases before a case that would have an obvious high profile is announced to the press. Those releases are in very measured terms, and what you then see subsequently in the press is completely different.

Miss Weekes: One or two of the individuals in high-profile cases might – I do not know, because I have not talked to them, but I just want to use this as a method of airing the discussion; they might say, "Well, this is all a little deliberate, because the Met want to cover their back before things get too difficult". That is not a surprise to you that I have put that?

Mr McAndrew: I would like to believe that it is not the Met as an organisation, that it is individual officers that think they are achieving something by doing it, and that is certainly true in the very high-profile cases. It is hard to see – I mean, I guess it would be possible to make out a case for what the Met thought it might achieve by releasing information in a couple of particularly high-profile cases. That certainly could not apply to the case which I gave you the details of. There is no interest for the Met in that getting out, so that is individual officers.

But I think sometimes people who are engaged in the kind of work which we are talking about maybe feel undersupported by the organisation and decide they will do something about it themselves.

Miss Weekes: So there is not really any recommendation that we could take on board that would really solve leakage on any case?

Mr McAndrew: I think it would be difficult. I think it would be impossible.

Miss Weekes: Thank you.

Sir William Morris: Thank you very much indeed. I will pass you straight over to Sir Anthony to proceed with his group of questions.

Questions by Sir Anthony Burden

Sir Anthony Burden: Just a few sweep-up points if I may. Firstly, your support for the Taylor report, which is unequivocal; can I ask you how you feel this will make a difference in the proportionate investigation of high-profile cases?

Mr Aspey: In the really large expensive cases, it seems to me, from the experience I have had, that it is difficult to stop the juggernaut once it has started moving, and you need an objective view, first of all, as to whether it should start moving in the first place, and then you should allow it to move inch by inch, and not to build up an unstoppable momentum.

I think Mr Taylor gave us a really useful framework for doing that, and for understanding, in the earlier part of an inquiry, what it is you are seeking to enquire into, and to ringfence the inquiry at that point, rather than to try and grab it back later.

Mr McAndrew: Can I say that I know Mr Taylor was talking about serious allegations, but I actually think some of the lessons – what he says about scoping and review does not only apply to serious allegations. It does seem to me that we have a particularly inflexible process where once we have got into investigation, there is never any cost benefit analysis about where we are going with it, and if I am honest, it seems to me, very little interest in whether the complainant gets what they want out of it or not.

What we actually end up with in the majority of cases is dissatisfied complainants and dissatisfied officers, because we are nowhere nearer the truth at the end of the investigation than we are at the beginning, and it really could do with somebody to look at these things and say, "Is there any point in this? Are we going to go anywhere with this, or should we be concentrating the resources on actually dealing with the cases where we might actually get a result at the end of it?"

Mr Aspey: Of course, to pick up the earlier point, where you have the press reporting every last penny spent, it is very difficult to stop an inquiry without some sort of positive outcome being reported through the press.

Sir Anthony Burden: From your experience nationally, are you starting to see the Taylor recommendations being picked up?

Mr Aspey: No. I have to say, I was very disappointed last year to go to the ACPO professional standards conference and find that the Taylor report was not on the agenda at all, and was not something that was given active consideration by my colleagues predominantly, and our members, when they were looking at how they would start an inquiry and where the inquiry might lead, and the methodologies that they might employ during those inquiries.

Sir Anthony Burden: And from the Metropolitan viewpoint?

Mr McAndrew: I think, as I said in my submission to you, the Met is slightly different to this in the way it deals with cases against senior people than other forces, and I do not think that we have had an appropriate case since the Taylor report was published which would apply to senior people, and I do not know the position in relation to junior officers.

Sir Anthony Burden: Could I ask, you may not have experience of gold groups, and there was even a diamond group, I think –

Mr McAndrew: I am a member of the diamond group.

Sir Anthony Burden: Well, perhaps you can help us with the diamond group. I mean, is the diamond group, in your view, currently, without the Taylor recommendations being taken on board – is it minded to consider whether inquiries should continue, or is that group geared towards managing the investigation of the inquiry regardless?

Mr McAndrew: I mean, first of all, I should say, the Met has something called a diamond risk management group, which involves representatives from solicitors' department, the DPS and the various directorates; I am the Superintendents Association rep on that. That is actually about managing risk and not about managing investigations, so I ought to be clear and say I am not involved in the decisions that are taken on the scope of investigations.

Sir Anthony Burden: So the diamond group is about really macro issues' impact?

Mr McAndrew: Yes.

Sir Anthony Burden: Okay, thank you. You have already referred to the Thames Valley independent resolution model. You do, certainly in the Metropolitan submission, support independent elements to resolution. We have heard this morning from ACAS about what they could contribute to the process, and Miss Weekes has already referred to certain elements which ACAS would need to be assured are in place; those, of course, involve resources to deal with this adequately.

Do you feel there is a genuine wish amongst your colleagues, and if necessary, at more senior rank in the Metropolitan Police, to make such a model work?

Mr McAndrew: I think that is a very difficult question. I think I need to roll back a bit and say that yes, I support an independent element in dealing with Fairness at Work issues, but I have to say that my personal perspective – if it is a justified grievance, the person who is best placed to actually provide some satisfaction to the person who makes the complaint is actually a line manager, because a line manager can actually say to somebody, "You are wrong about this, and we are going to do it this way".

The difficulty is where the line manager actually believes that the person bringing the grievance is wrong, and then you get into the difficulty that they assume that the line manager is just supporting the person below because they happen to be line management, and I think we need to recognise that there are some grievances which are not capable of resolution, because people have entrenched positions, before they get anywhere near a grievance procedure, because they actually do not believe that what is being said is right.

I think most of us would quite like to have grievances resolved, and would like a process in place which gave a better than even chance of resolving grievances.

I am conscious that we keep talking about police culture, but the police culture is not particularly amenable to outside interference, if I can put it in that way, so I think the long answer to your short question is that there might be some resistance to ACAS or any other external mediator coming in and trying to mediate a solution, but if it had appropriate support at an appropriate level within the organisation, I am sure you could make it work.

Sir Anthony Burden: And nationally, on mediation models, is there anything to add?

Mr Aspey: The Thames Valley model is not mediation groups that are independent to Thames Valley police; they are employed by Thames Valley police as part of their HR structure, but they are independent to front end service delivery, and step in at a very early stage. And your point is well made: it involves investment, because the unit has to be there and available when people need them.

Sir Anthony Burden: But compared with the cost of dealing with grievances, I would suggest those sums need to be done.

Mr Aspey: You would expect so, would you not?

Mr McAndrew: It does seem to me that the Met's Fairness at Work process or procedure could be accused of being the worst of both worlds. It claims that Fairness at Work advisors are independent, but in the main, selects them from within the same unit as where the grievance arose.

I think if I put in a grievance, and then found that this supposedly independent person was also working within the unit and to the person who I had not got a lot of confidence in, I might be a bit unhappy about that.

Sir Anthony Burden: If I were to attempt, and please – you will, I know – correct me if I am wrong here, but if I were to attempt to produce a synopsis from what you have both told us, it would be: whatever happens, the local manager must retain responsibility for resolution if at all possible, you do not give them an opportunity to cop out from making that decision; however, it is making resources available to them within a chosen model that would assist them to resolve it, but there must be no way in which they can actually pass that upstairs and absolve themselves of responsibility. In terms of performance, it must be a judgment against them, and remain a judgment against them, as to how they resolve workplace conflicts locally.

Mr McAndrew: Yes.

Mr Aspey: There are some things about flexibility of senior management which I think Mike commented on in his submission, in that we have had people take a creative solution to an immediate problem, and then find that it is the creative solution that is causing them problems later on, and they are being investigated for their creativity.

You know, there has to be that level of support behind them that says, "We will encourage solution finding", rather than adherence to processes.

Sir Anthony Burden: Just finally, forgive me if you have answered this point to Miss Weekes, I think she was talking about superintendents – the conflict you have, the dilemma you have in supporting superintendents and supporting those who are investigating. There is a fundamental issue here, you may have answered it already; that is about superintendents investigating superintendents.

Mr McAndrew: Yes.

Sir Anthony Burden: In your view, fundamentally, is that right?

Mr McAndrew: I would quite like in the Met for superintendents to investigate superintendents, because the reality is, although the senior investigating officer in the Met is an ACPO, the majority of the work is sometimes done by inspectors or chief inspectors, and in my view, that cannot be right.

Mr Aspey: Certainly the national picture is that, of course, regulations say that the appointed investigating officer will be an ACC. If you look at the skills of ACCs, very few of them have a background in investigation, and even fewer in professional standards investigations, so the reality is that they appoint an assistant IO, usually at superintendent level, who gets on with the day-to-day running of the inquiry.

Sir Anthony Burden: And in your opinion, they would be responsible for a lot of decisions made during the investigation?

Mr Aspey: Can be responsible for an awful lot of the decisions.

Sir Anthony Burden: So that again is fundamentally wrong, is it not, I would suggest?

Mr Aspey: It is contrary to the current regulations.

Mr McAndrew: It is fundamentally wrong.

Sir Anthony Burden: I think that covers all angles really. My colleague reminds me of one issue that we just need to raise with you, and that is specifically around race, and the fear of dealing with issues where race comes on the agenda.

I think we have dealt with part of it, and that is that managers should manage, and managers not bucking the issue, but we have heard from several sources now that if race does come on the agenda around workplace conflict or more seriously, then eyes glaze over and people, to use one expression, are like rabbits in the headlights, and that causes normal management decisions to go out of the window, and for a less than rational decision-making approach to be applied.

Can I ask both your views, nationally and as far as the Metropolitan Police are concerned?

Mr Aspey: The same symptoms become evident when gender is an issue as well. I think it is something to do with access to employment tribunals, and managers' vulnerability, should they be taken there.

From where I sit, it is not unique to race, it is about employees who have routes to challenge managerial decisions through an external body which makes managers feel doubly vulnerable.

Mr McAndrew: I do not disagree with anything that Phil has said. I think I ought to make the point though that there are actually a lot of – I can only speak for the Met, but there are a lot of managers at all levels who are actually doing the job very well, and who are not freezing in the headlights, as you put it, so we are talking about a minority, but the impact that minority have on both women and black officers is out of all proportion to the numbers that are doing it, so it is a serious issue for the service, and it is an issue we need to grasp and find something to do with.

Sir Anthony Burden: The National Black Police Association, however, would say that is an excuse put forward which is a cop-out for retained racist and sexist views within the service, and that retention is institutionalised still within the police service; your views on that, please?

Mr Aspey: I can only describe what I see on a national basis, which is if you are a superintendent, it is going to be difficult in some places to get a problem enquired into rationally. If you are a black superintendent, it will be a lot harder. If you are a female superintendent, it will be a lot harder.

I think it is something to do with aggravating factors as seen by the IO, and some of the IOs are very conscious of their own position first, and then think about the job they are being asked to do second.

Sir Anthony Burden: Thank you, that is very honest. Superintendent?

Mr McAndrew: I am not black, I am not a woman, I have a real difficulty with knowing the answer to this. I would hope that it is not to do with overt racism and sexism. I cannot, hand on heart, say that I am totally confident that that is not the case.

My experience is that the majority of cops would regard it as very foolish to be overtly sexist and racist in that way. The Black Police Association, I would suggest, know more about this than I do.

Sir Anthony Burden: Thank you.

Sir William Morris: Right. Mr Aspey, Mr McAndrew, can I first of all thank you very much indeed for your help and for the responses to the questions. We have finished the questions that we had intended to put to you both, but you will recall that I said earlier in my opening statement that I would, at the conclusion of our questions, offer both of you the opportunity to make a closing comment if you so wished. If you do wish to do so, then please proceed.

Mr Aspey: There is nothing I wish to add.

Mr McAndrew: And I have nothing I wish to add either.

Sir William Morris: Okay. Thank you both very much. I have some words that I just want to put on the record, and it is this: as with all witnesses, it may be that once we have heard from other witnesses, we will want to ask you a few more questions, either by writing to you or asking you to come back to one of these hearings.

If we need to do so, then we will try and do so in a way which causes you the least possible inconvenience, and that is the formal part of the statement, just in case we have to ask you to come back and see us.

But for the moment, all that I have to do on behalf of my colleagues is to thank you for your responses this afternoon, thank you for your written submission, and thank you for your overall contribution to this Inquiry. Thank you very much both.

We stand adjourned until 10.30 tomorrow.

5.50 pm 
(Hearing adjourned until 10.30 am the following day)

On this website:

• Evidence: PSA
  Evidence provided by and documents referred to by Mr P Aspey and Mr M McAndrew of the Police Superintendents' Association (PSA) in their appearance at the Inquiry.