Civil Servants: Working from Home

Lord Hogan-Howe Excerpts

Thursday 1st February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

I do not see an overreliance on consultants. While I have been a Minister—only just over one year—we have moved to replace consultants with full-time civil servants in areas such as digital, because they represent better value for money. We probably have a certain amount of alignment on that. Clearly, we need to use outside consultants for some things, not least bringing in skills on things such as AI where we do not have the Civil Service skills we need. There has to be a balance; consultants can be valuable. Where I am with the noble Baroness is that there needs to be proper value for money and proper competition and we should not overdo it.

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interests. One thing that has never been properly explained is how people working from home with access to data on their laptops et cetera protect that data when it includes private information. I hear now that the police service is working from home, which I find bizarre. Of course the police are trying to support victims, but how can you be walking around a supermarket or at home with all this data, which other people can see? How do you stop that happening? This includes banks and may include the Civil Service. It is a very important issue, which I do not hear being discussed much.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord for raising this question. Of course, he helps the Cabinet Office a lot through his role as a non-executive director. On security, obviously we had a big move because of Covid, which was favourable in terms of people having more kit at home, allowing them to pick things up. That has been established in a secure way. There are protocols for how you must use office kit; you cannot forward or print things. We are trialling work on devices that allow you to have parliamentary or government access on the same device, to make sure that security is protected. A lot of effort and expense is going into trying to keep us secure, but we need to do more because security is a big challenge.

Public Services: Workforce (Public Services Committee Report)

Lord Hogan-Howe Excerpts

Friday 16th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, for her chairing of our committee, her patience and her common sense in building our at times passionate arguments into an excellent report that we all supported. I thank her. I declare my interest as stated in the register.

The report highlights the significant challenge faced by any Government in planning the human resource needs of our public services, particularly at the moment. We have an ageing population and are still suffering the consequences of Covid, the Ukraine war, energy price rises and the constant inflationary pressure on our economy, particularly wage inflation—all this, ironically, at a time of high employment.

The report argues that, first, we must therefore act imaginatively about how public services are deployed and that, secondly, traditional routes into public service are limiting and that action needs to be taken to make them more accessible. I shall concentrate on those two points particularly in relation to the police service—of which I have some experience—where they occur not quite in the same context as in some of the other public services that we have talked about, for reasons that I hope I will be able to explain if I have time, such as health and social services.

The police service has been challenged about its ability to adapt to society and, frankly, some appalling behaviour by a number of officers, particularly in the Metropolitan Police. I would argue that the causes of the present cultural challenges are to some extent structural, and radical reforms will be needed to produce significant change. I hope to make suggestions as well as identifying problems.

The police remains a male-dominated culture, with two-thirds of them men and one-third women, though half of the recruits now are female, who consistently perform better than men in the recruit selection process. The challenge is that the police, contrary to the rest of the public services, has a very low turnover. A healthy turnover in any organisation is accepted as being between 8% and 12%. That allows new talent to join and the people who are unsuitable to leave. In the police service the turnover is around 5%, and even in London it is only around 6%. In my view, that is too low, trapping people who are unsuitable but too comfortable with the terms and conditions or, as Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley has argued, who cannot be removed by the organisation because of the independent chairing of misconduct panels and other protections that apply.

I propose three major changes that could make a real difference. The first comes under the category of “boring but true”. Police pensions need to become more flexible to be transferable. At the moment, officers pay around 15% of their salary for a good scheme. However, they get the best benefits by remaining in service. The system does certainly not encourage them to leave, even when they are unsuitable, because they cannot take the pension with them and maintain their benefits in other pension funds.

The second is that the time has come to seriously consider whether the office of constable would be better protected as an employee. The office of constable is there to provide two broad protections. First, politicians and senior police officers cannot direct a constable how to use their discretionary powers to arrest and detain, although they can of course be held to account in the courts. Secondly, it is intended to provide a protection against malicious allegations by criminals under investigation. Therefore, the terms and conditions, including misconduct rules, are found in secondary legislation—police regulations. This means an officer can be represented legally at a misconduct hearing which is chaired by a legally qualified person, because in theory they have no access to an employment tribunal. However, should they allege that the misconduct process involves illegal discrimination, they can access an employment tribunal—essentially having two bites of the cherry—and many do.

The office of constable also means that it is impossible for an officer to easily become a police staff member or vice versa. This is particularly inflexible should an officer be physically unable to carry out their role as a constable, for which the principal remedy is a medical pension, when they could easily have transferred to become a police staff member should they have the appropriate skills. I ask the Government to consider the New Zealand model, which protects the office of constable in a contract of employment. I see no evidence that New Zealand’s police are being directed by politicians. It also happens to be a national police force, not 43 forces—but that is probably for another day.

My third point is about the routes of entry into the service, which could be improved. The service is properly proud that every officer, including myself, served on the streets before becoming a chief or commissioner. However, I believe that a diversity of recruitment routes for constables and senior officers produces more diversity of ideas and better representation. The turnover of 5%, followed by 20 to 25 years to reach the highest rank, does not assist that in any way.

During my period as commissioner, we introduced Police Now, which mimicked Teach First. Hundreds of graduates who had not initially thought about becoming a police officer were employed for two years with 85% remaining after those two years. We introduced direct entry for detectives, where people who had never been an officer were recruited only to be a detective, and accelerated promotions for graduates which led to them usually becoming a chief inspector within five years. Those three schemes continue today.

We also introduced direct entry for superintendents. Hospital chief executives, merchant bankers, military officers and directors of counterterrorism for the Home Office were recruited to lead and, after two years of training and mentoring, were given full leadership responsibilities. We had direct entry for inspectors who, within two years of training, were given that role. We also changed the recruitment rules so that people who had lived in London for three of the last six years got priority, as well as those who spoke one of 19 languages which were prevalent in the communities of London. These latter three ideas were abandoned by a service that truly never wanted or believed in them.

My final point is on one thing that we have to guard against with surges in recruitment. The police service lost 20,000 officers as an inevitable consequence of public service cuts. There was then a surge in recruitment, which has led to that 20,000 being pushed back in. About 50,000 will probably be pushed back in within five years. Inevitably, the vetting will be poor. There will be a push against recruiting standards. Numbers will be delivered, but I worry about the standards. We will see the consequences of that over the next 10 years. It is difficult to remedy a gap of 20,000 without rapidly recruiting, but it is an obvious danger we all suffer from.

I not only support the measures I have mentioned, but I support the Home Office strategy on accrediting police training to university standard. This is not saying that all officers who join should be graduates, although half of them are. It means that their training is accredited to an independent standard and that they can use those skills in other employment, should it be accredited to that level. Unless we think more radically and broadly about police training and selection, sadly we will inevitably see some of the challenges of the past in the future.

Covid-19 (Public Services Committee Report)

Lord Hogan-Howe Excerpts

Thursday 22nd July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I declare my non-executive membership of the Cabinet Office. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, a colleague in the police service, the House of Lords and this Select Committee.

I add my own thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, for this debate and her determined and human leadership throughout the Select Committee—no easy task, given that the committee was new, the membership had not worked together and it had to be arranged virtually. I would also like to thank the clerks of the committee, who were flexible and very hard-working, for keeping the committee and the witnesses well briefed and cared for: a great achievement.

I fully endorse this report and our recommendations but wish to talk about only two issues, which were themes running through the evidence. The first is whether prevention is truly prioritised by the Government. The second is the ability of our public services to share data for the benefit of our citizens. Covid and the consequent lockdowns have brought both into sharp relief.

Nearly every public service claims that prevention of harm is its principal objective. This must be true logically; it is better that someone does not contract a disease or become a victim of crime if it can possibly be avoided. They will not suffer harm and the public service can either be allocated fewer resources in the future or—more likely—use the resources for other priorities. However, Covid showed that we did not prevent the spread of the disease and that we did not have a clear plan for how to prevent the spread of the disease.

It is also true that each public service struggles to articulate a detailed plan for how they will implement a preventive strategy. To take policing, all chief constables say they have a clear preventive strategy, but, when you ask for details of how they will do it, there is no detail. They cannot clearly indicate in their budget the resources allocated for this purpose. Yet we know that the design of products, for example cars, and places really helps reduce crime. People could not steal cars until recently because they were designed not to be stolen. Reasonable alcohol-control strategies, not allowing drug markets to get out of control, special measures to help and protect young people, and giving information to potential victims about how to avoid becoming a victim, will all have an impact. Health has a similar list.

The pandemic showed that we do not have clear and measurable preventive strategies and 10 to 20-year plans for either of these particular challenges. The UK was particularly affected by this pandemic because of obesity and diabetes making people more vulnerable to serious and sometimes fatal side-effects; both obesity and diabetes being preventable problems to some extent. So I urge the Government to take prevention seriously. It is not, as it is often portrayed, a soft, woolly subject; it is as hard-nosed a discipline as engineering, and susceptible to hard-nosed, effective measurement.

In terms of data sharing, we heard some excellent examples during the pandemic that local public service partners had found imaginative, effective and radical ways to overcome hurdles to sharing data. This was excellent news, but the question must be asked: why did they need to be so creative? Why did it take a world- wide pandemic to create the perfect circumstances for such a leap forward? The various regulators cannot understand why the public services say they cannot share data. Well, I am afraid, “They would, wouldn’t they?”

The reality is that legislation is designed generally to prevent the sharing of data: we have privacy legislation to protect our confidentiality and data protection legislation to stop the inappropriate sharing of private data held digitally. This is, of course, commendable. However, I do not think Parliament, when seeking to prevent the inappropriate sharing of private data, also intended to inhibit public services from sharing personal and mass data for the purpose of giving benefits to citizens in terms of health and security—as just two example. But this seems to have been the outcome.

At the very least, public service practitioners and leaders believe there is a problem, and there is clear evidence that poor data sharing is leading to poorer outcomes. The regulators say they will produce yet more guidance to reassure the practitioner. I believe that it is time consider legislative change to change the landscape. I propose that a statutory defence should be created for public services that share data. It is a simple “reasonableness” defence. If they share data believing it is to carry out their duties and help a citizen, they should have a full defence in law to any breach of privacy or data sharing breaches.

The pandemic has allowed public servants to take risks on our behalf in the sharing of data. However, they should not have to take those risks and, by providing a clear defence in law, the Government will reassure our public services and improve their efficiency for the collective good.

European Union (Future Relationship) Bill

Lord Hogan-Howe Excerpts

3rd reading & 2nd reading & Committee negatived & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & 3rd reading (Hansard) & 3rd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & Committee negatived (Hansard) & Committee negatived (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 30th December 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I shall speak in favour of the Bill and I congratulate the Government on producing a very good agreement. I decided quite late to vote for Brexit, and at every opportunity in this House have voted to support the Government in delivering on the outcome of the 2016 referendum. That referendum was voted for by both Houses of Parliament, and so leaving the EU had a double mandate: the mandate of the people and the mandate of Parliament which confirmed the outcome of the referendum.

At times, the debates here have left me—and, I believe, the country—very frustrated. If one were to be reminded of various moments of conflict, it highlights that ascending levels of disagreement are marked by signal behavioural changes. One verbal symptom is that one side says of the other, “You would say that, wouldn’t you?” The participants doubt not only what is said but also the motives for saying it. I have often needed to check myself when listening to the contributions of others, and the country did notice this disingenuous behaviour at times, on both sides of the argument. I genuinely believe that it is time to look forward and to try our best to put that behind us and be confident in the future.

I shall concentrate mainly on our future security as described in the agreement. I believe the Government have achieved a good outcome for working together on criminal investigation and general safety. People have criticised our lack of future access to the SIS or Schengen database, used more than 600 million times a year. This is an automatic check running in the background of any UK police national database search, which accounts for the high numbers. There are three types of check, broadly: one on arrest; one while somebody is detained after arrest; and during long-term investigations. The gap is mainly for street checks, where time is tight before the suspect walks away. However, we should not exaggerate the frequency of this event or the seriousness of the outcome, and there are mitigations. I suggest that the Government and the EU, working together, could fill that gap and do far more in the future.

However, I want to highlight the achievements of this agreement. There will still be an extradition process similar to the European arrest warrant—in fact, the Government have strengthened the power to arrest. The UK will still be allowed access to Europol and Eurojust, and we will have as many people there post 1 January as we did before—interestingly, second in number only to the USA. We will continue to have access to Prüm, sharing DNA and fingerprint databases. Ironically, various Governments delayed our access to it until 2016, yet now people are saying that we always needed it for our safety. We will still have access to the convictions of criminals; we will still be able to make mutual assistance agreements on cross-border investigations; and we will have access to passenger name records for travellers.

Finally, on counterterrorism, we will continue to share national security on a bilateral basis, as we always have. There is no European database where the French tell the Germans all the information that each of their security services hold. In short, our mutual security interests in the UK and Europe mean that we have to co-operate on one another’s terms, and we will. There is no benefit to France in allowing UK murderers to wander their country, or to the UK in allowing Dutch rapists to remain at large here. So I support this agreement and commend the work that the Government have put into achieving it. I will support it in the vote tonight.