For item 2, we have with us witnesses from the Scottish Police Services Authority. David Mulhern is the chief executive, Mervyn Rolfe is the convener of the board and John Vine is a member of the board.
Thank you for your introduction and welcome, convener. We are pleased to be here to provide brief details about what the SPSA has achieved so far in its brief history.
Thank you. Mr Mulhern, is there anything that you wish to add?
Not at this time, thank you.
Mr Vine?
No, not at this stage.
I was going to ask members of the panel what their priorities were for the next 12 months, but Mr Rolfe has clarified them in great detail. He said that the SPSA was satisfied with the organisation's response to date, but the organisation must be concerned about there being some objectives in the strategic priority plan that are not being met. Are there any about which you are willing to have the humility to say that they are not going according to plan?
Perhaps I should answer that. We are confident that we moving towards delivery of the four strategic priorities that were laid down by the previous Administration. We recognise that, due to the way in which the organisation was set up, which was a significant factor, we had difficulty in recruiting and selecting staff to lead back-office service provision. As recently as yesterday, our final member of staff, the head of human resources, started with us. It is true that we have faced difficulties and challenges in filling some posts and that we have had some false starts, but—as of yesterday—our entire corporate services team is now in place, and it will start to deliver. I have given a personal commitment to the board that, by the end of the calendar year, our corporate services will be fully functioning. I have set my own people the task of delivering on that by the end of October. I would like to think that, by the end of next month, our corporate services will be fully established.
The development of a communication strategy that fits in with the SPC and the integration of police information services is one area of your future plans where you may be concerned about your ability to deliver. You are committed to delivering that by April 2008. Do you think that you will meet that target?
Are you asking about our ICT integration?
Yes.
This Friday, our implementation board will meet for the first time. The implementation board comprises me; Colin McKerracher, who is the chief constable of Grampian Police, the lead on ICT for ACPOS and a member of the SPSA board; and Christie Smith, who will lead for the Scottish Government. They will be supported by the current head of ICT for Scotland and the business change director for Scotland. I am confident that the implementation board will work well. We have learned many lessons from the creation of the SPSA. For example, in the build-up to April, there was much debate about how the forensic service would be delivered. We have learned lessons from that, as has ACPOS, and we realise that, this time, we must ensure that we move faster and sequence the process much better than we did previously. I am confident that we will do that and that we have the full support of ACPOS, which has been getting the organisation ready for transition. I am confident that we will have a smooth transition next April.
So you are confident that you will be able to tick that box next April to say that the integration of the police information and communications technology services is complete.
Yes, I am. As Mervyn Rolfe mentioned, we submitted an implementation plan on 30 June, which was endorsed by ACPOS and which outlined how we envisage the integration happening. We have stakeholders' full buy-in.
What will be the benefits of the integration?
As the convener of the SPSA board said, one of our tasks and goals is to remove duplication and replication from Scottish policing. Overduplication and overreplication exist—a good example is in the area of ICT, on which we have eight different approaches. The Audit Scotland report on call management that was published this week identifies 25 information technology systems that are associated with call management in the eight forces. That is after an investment of more than £30 million since 2001 in standardising and rationalising the approach to call management in Scotland. The fact that we have 25 systems just to cope with the single aspect of IT for call management suggests that we require rationalisation and a single, standard approach. That is a good example of what I envisage the SPSA will deliver—a single approach to call management, with full buy-in from ACPOS on delivering that.
On the systems that are in place, the Strathclyde contact centre has had publicity as a result of bedding-in and development issues. Might we have to start again from the beginning with a brand-new system that fits in with all the police authorities throughout Scotland?
At this time, it is not intended to move the call and service centres that exist throughout the country to the SPSA next April—they will remain with the forces. However, we must have a debate about call management. Audit Scotland published its report on call management yesterday or at the end of last week. The debate will not be resolved by 1 April next year, but we will consider taking over the systems that support call management. We currently have 25 such systems—that must change. I like to think that, especially after the Audit Scotland report, everybody who is involved will recognise that we must consider and address the matter. I want us to be a major part of the debate on call management.
You said that recruitment difficulties held back the completion of the operation to an extent. Do any particular issues arise from that, which you could share with us?
Not really. Last week, we met representatives of what we can call quite loosely our sister organisation, the National Policing Improvement Agency, which is our English and Welsh equivalent. The NPIA came into being on the same day that the SPSA did and it is interesting to note that its representatives talked about exactly the same issues, including the difficulties with recruiting the right people and false starts in interviewing certain individuals. Sometimes interviews did not work out, either because we did not like the pack that we were presented with or because some candidates did not like the package that we were offering in return.
Good morning, gentlemen. Mr Rolfe stated that the SPSA is working on the development of a national training strategy. Indeed, that is one of the organisation's prime objectives. To what extent is training localised at the moment? What progress has been made towards achieving a national strategy?
I will give you some background to that. At the start of 2007, Her Majesty's inspectorate of constabulary for Scotland published a report on the Scottish Police College and its delivery of training. That report was supported by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Education—it was the first time that HMIC and HMIE had taken a joint approach to the Scottish Police College and training. The report included a significant number of recommendations and suggestions about how the Scottish Police College and Scottish policing might reflect on how training is delivered.
So although that training is delivered locally, it is based on a national standard.
Yes, it is a national standard that is delivered locally, taking into account the capacities of the various forces. The ability of Strathclyde Police, which covers half of Scotland, to deliver local training using dedicated resources in various areas is fairly easy to realise. However, smaller forces, such as Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary and my force, Central Scotland Police, would have difficulty maintaining the constant, permanent presence required to deliver such training. Those forces' operational resource constantly gets abstracted to deliver the training for a period, before officers return to operations.
Well, could you do that? You say that you want to tackle replication. Could officer safety training, for instance, be centralised?
I think that it could be. We could examine how it could be delivered. I do not think that we would want to take that training to the Scottish Police College and make everybody go there, given the travel involved. However, it would be much more efficient to have a collective approach whereby a nationally co-ordinated central cadre of non-police officer personnel could move around and deliver the training for us locally.
I understand.
The important point is that, as with any idea, there must be a proper business case for such an approach. The idea needs to be properly evaluated. After the evaluation, we would have to have a genuine dialogue with our partners in ACPOS. We would not say, "We think we can do it, so we're going to do it"; we would negotiate with our partner organisations, on the basis that we had done the arithmetic that showed that the evidence stacked up and the approach would deliver improvements in efficiency.
Improvements in efficiency are the aim. What is your timeframe for doing the arithmetic and achieving the national training strategy that you described in your opening remarks, given that debates are continuing and questions remain to be answered?
I will field your question to David Mulhern, but, first, it is important to acknowledge the other responsibilities that we have been handed by the Scottish Government, which we need to address in priority order.
Will Mr Mulhern talk about priorities and timescales?
On the national training strategy, a two-day event was held at the Scottish Police College, which included the Scottish police training providers from all eight forces and the college. We think that the business should develop the strategy—it is keen to do so—and hand it to us for delivery. We would deliver the strategy directly or co-ordinate delivery, as appropriate. We will work with our partners on how we develop that work.
Committee members should realise that training in Scotland is already very centralised, in comparison with training in England and Wales. More than 90 per cent of all training is centralised on the Scottish Police College. It is important to have a national strategy, but we must be careful not to centralise for the sake of it. We need to centralise to make efficiency savings and to keep police officers on the street. However, it might be more sensible to deliver training to a national standard in my training centre, for example, or in those of Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary or Central Scotland Police.
There can be centralisation with in-built flexibility, to take account of operational requirements.
That is right. Training is important, but it represents an abstraction from front-line service. Every time that we take police officers and staff into a training centre—wherever it is—for one or two days or a week, those people are not available to be deployed on the streets. If the SPSA training strategy can help us to squeeze out extra efficiencies and maximise the time that police officers can be on the street, it will bring benefits. Each bit of training needs to be considered individually, to ensure that it offers best value.
That is absolutely right. I do not think that you will hear any member of the committee argue with the positive aims that you have described.
The recently published Howat report says that there is an opportunity to centralise blue-light services, or uniformed services, around the Scottish Police College. We are keen to examine and develop that idea but we do not feel empowered to do so on our own.
With whom would you examine the idea?
We would like to think that the other services that are involved, such as the Scottish Prison Service, are willing and have an appetite to consider the idea with us, because there are synergies between our organisations. We are all uniformed services; we are all semi-disciplined; we have similar values; and to some extent we have a similar customer base. For example, we deal with the victims of crime who are picked up by the Scottish Ambulance Service and taken to hospital. The prison service is another obvious example, because we detect offenders and the prison service then has to incarcerate them.
As I mentioned, we are looking at our three-year strategy. At an early meeting of the SPSA board, we hope to look a little further and do more blue-sky thinking. I hate that phrase, but we want to do—
Imaginative work.
Yes—thank you. I prefer that phrase.
So do I.
One of the limitations is the fact that we have the word "police" in our name, but at our away day we may well be prepared to come out of our silos and consider our responsibilities to the shared service agenda.
I support the principle of what has been said. However, we need a reality check. The Scottish Police College has a limited capacity and demographics show that we will lose a lot of police officers in Scotland in the next few years because they joined in the late 1970s and, after 30-year careers, they will leave between now and 2011, potentially in large numbers. We will have to use the estate that we have as we recruit probationers and, of course, if any more police officers join the service during the next few years, that will put additional pressure on the college.
I am obliged.
I am a little confused about what I heard about the development of your training strategy. Mr Mulhern suggested that it was up to the eight police forces to suggest what should happen next, whereas I am not convinced that Mr Vine has suggested that it is up to him. Perhaps it is up to the police authority to decide on the way forward. I am wondering where the push and pull are on the development programme.
It is both push and pull. Recently we had a useful meeting with chief constables and SPSA board members. We want to find an event where we can do some—I am sorry to use this phrase—blue-sky thinking and map out mutually where we believe the synergies might be for the future development of the SPSA. That would be the best way forward—it would be unfortunate if the board went away and produced a list different to the one that ACPOS produced.
We move on to questioning on fingerprint and forensic services.
How effective has the integration of the Scottish fingerprint service and the forensic service been?
It is one of the successes of current Scottish policing. As Mervyn Rolfe said earlier, it is unprecedented to have a system that goes from crime scene straight through to the court.
So there will be full integration by the end of this year.
We are fully integrated now, but our intention is to work to a single operating practice and quality standard within a year.
How are you interacting with the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service to ensure that the information that you are able to provide is consistent with what it expects to receive?
I would say that that has been one of the SPSA's early successes. The feedback from the COPFS is that it is now able to have a single dialogue with a single entity towards a single outcome. Previously it had to engage not only with eight forces, but with ACPOS, whose structure is based on 11 separate business areas. This is not meant to be a criticism but, with such a structure, various interested parties can become involved and issues can bounce around different committees. We were finding that, when the outcome emerged quite far down the line, the original question—never mind the answer—had changed. The COPFS feels that it now has one port of call and can effect change fairly quickly, and we can point to this model as the standard that we want to employ and ask, "How can we work with you to ensure that it can be presented to and accepted by the courts?" The system is working extremely well and has been one of our huge successes within the first six months.
That sounds very encouraging.
As you know, I led on the action plan for excellence for the year before the SPSA was created, and I have remained in very close contact with what was the fingerprint service and what are now the four fingerprint bureaux. In recent months, I have visited all four bureaux.
You might not feel able to answer this question, but, given what you have just said, I will ask it anyway. Morale in the service is important to us all. You said that there is a desire to leave the McKie issue behind; however, we have received communication from the Cabinet Secretary for Justice that there will be a public inquiry into that issue. Will that adversely affect morale in the service?
In recent weeks, an inference made from my comments on this matter has been reported in the press. Obviously, we will fully support the Scottish Government in every way we can with regard to an inquiry. However, I hope that such an inquiry will not try to reopen the question whether the McKie print was a misidentification. I do not think that we will ever resolve that matter. The former Justice 1 Committee considered the issue in some detail and came to conclusions. The question for me is whether raising it yet again will have an effect on my staff. The answer is yes, it will. We will have to manage it—we will manage it.
We come to questions on service delivery.
In your annual plan, you set out your intention to work closely with ACPOS and the police forces to ensure that service delivery meets their needs. What are the SPSA's formal methods of engagement with ACPOS and the eight forces? What response have you had thus far from them on the work of the SPSA?
If I may, I will set out the technical process, after which Mervyn Rolfe may want to outline the event that we held last week with the chief constables, before handing over to John Vine.
Like any business, it is important for us to keep a close eye on how our customers perceive us and our products. Obviously, that takes place at all levels in the interface between the SPSA, ACPOS and the police forces. The board has a stakeholder engagement policy, which ensures that we regularly meet chief police officers, individually and collectively. That allows us to pick up feedback on any differences in the performance level of our organisation. The important thing is to keep a close eye on quality assurance and to listen to anything that we get back from ACPOS, either on an individual or collective basis. John Vine may want to add to that, partly from the other side.
Yes. I suffer from mild schizophrenia these days: on the one hand, I am a chief constable; on the other hand, I am a member of the SPSA board. That said, when one thinks about it, the SPSA is part of the Scottish police service.
You have anticipated some of the questions that I was going to ask, which is helpful. We can move on to the relationship with the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency.
How does the SPSA's relationship with the SCDEA differ from its relationship with other agencies?
The statute is fairly precise on that relationship. The director general of the SCDEA enjoys full operational autonomy, including operational autonomy from the board and the corporate business of the SPSA, from the Scottish Government and, to a great extent, from the chief constables. That is fundamental to the delivery of a police service in Scotland and recognises that, in that operational context, the director general enjoys full direction and control of his resources.
Just to get my head round that a little, is the director general of the SCDEA a member of staff of the SPSA?
He is. The SCDEA's current director general is a deputy chief constable and no organisation other than a police organisation can employ a police officer. I am on secondment to the SPSA from Central Scotland Police and our director general is on secondment from Strathclyde Police. Any police officer has to be on secondment. The legislation allows for direct recruitment, but that provision has not been implemented. We are looking forward to its implementation, as it will bring a very different dimension to our organisation, whether in how the director general and deputy director general are recruited or in how the police officers in the SCDEA are recruited. We look forward to that. Right now, however, those people are on secondment.
So, he or she—if it was a woman—is at the moment an employee of the SPSA. The SCDEA police and support staff are recruited through the SPSA, although that will change. Ultimately, the director general is answerable to the Scottish ministers.
Yes.
Did we get the legislation right? Is it working effectively?
The organisation in its current form is only six months old, so the jury perhaps needs a little more time to deliberate on that. To my mind, the accountability and governance aspect is covered by the board. The director general reports to the board in that respect.
Okay. The agency also has to produce an annual plan that it presents to the SPSA. I know that the board is new, but have you had an opportunity to look at that plan? If so, have you made any modifications to it?
No, we have not made any modifications to it. The annual plan was presented in advance of 1 April, before the board came into being, and was presented directly to ministers. We were set up with a big bang on 1 April and business had to start on that day. The board came on stream fairly quickly in the build-up to 1 April and the annual plan was not presented to the board, as the board was effectively not in existence at the time. The annual plan was presented directly to ministers, but that was a quirk of timing.
Will the board consider the annual plan or has it considered it?
It will consider it. The statute lays out in detail how the annual plan will be considered and consulted on, and that consultation will include the board of the SPSA and ACPOS.
What are the strengths and weaknesses of the arrangements between the two organisations?
I have tried to demonstrate the strengths of all our organisations. In the debates about what was intended and expected when the Police, Public Order and Criminal Justice (Scotland) Bill was published, the Justice 2 Committee's consideration of the SPSA in the build-up, and the parliamentary debates that followed, a lot of consideration was given to how the bill would work. You asked whether the legislation is right. I think that it is right. As you have heard from Mervyn Rolfe and John Vine, it is business as usual and we are delivering. We have introduced the organisation and have done what we set out to do, which was, if nothing else, to deliver business as usual. I hope that, as we move forward, we will enhance our business; however, right now, we are delivering business as usual.
Who is the budget controller in the organisation?
Our overall budget is just under £85 million, including capital. Within that, there is a ring-fenced, red-circled budget that is predetermined by ministers and dropped into the SCDEA. The rest of the budget is in effect dropped on the table of the board, and the board, the business heads and I determine how it is distributed.
This is an unusual financial set-up; I cannot think of another example of that drop-down approach in the public sector. Could the chief executive of the SCDEA decide to take a particular course that had expenditure consequences that brought him into conflict with the accountable officer?
Fortunately, I have never had the experience of saying to the board that it has made expenditure decisions about which I, as the accountable officer, am concerned. If we propose something that is unaffordable or spending whose legitimacy is questionable, it will be my responsibility to bring the matter to the attention of the Scottish Government. We have not encountered any such difficulty—long may that continue.
The director general could argue that, as long as he does not control the purse strings, he does not have full autonomy.
I do not know how that would be a legitimate argument.
We will move on from that point.
I am still a bit unsure about the issue, as I was not a member of the Justice 2 Committee when it considered the Police, Public Order and Criminal Justice (Scotland) Bill. As the accountable officer, are you accountable for the total budget of the SPSA, including the budget of the SCDEA?
Yes.
Who is responsible for spending the SCDEA's budget? Who decides how many administrative staff can be employed and how much can be spent on operational matters?
The director general has control of those matters. The same is true of all our businesses. The director of the Scottish Police College, which has a budget of £12 million to £14 million, has the right to determine how that money is spent, within certain constraints. The biggest constraint, which applies across the public sector, is affordability. That constraint applies to every non-departmental public body in Scotland.
Good morning. We understand that the director general of the SCDEA will be retiring from his post in November. What role, if any, will the SPSA have in the appointment of a successor?
It is laid down clearly in the statute that the board of the SPSA will make the appointment. We have submitted to HMIC, through the Scottish Government, proposals on how the selection process will be progressed. We will follow the same process that we would follow for the appointment of any other chief officer to any police force in Scotland.
You said earlier that most of the senior staff are seconded from other police forces in Scotland. You have the authority to make direct appointments. Would the board be minded to make a direct appointment to the director general post?
I apologise for giving a technical answer, but the board of the SPSA will make the appointment. However, legislation is not currently in place to allow the board to employ a director general directly. It is the only post in our entire organisation that requires to be filled by a deputy chief constable. Similarly, the deputy director general must be an assistant chief constable. Those posts are the only two in the SPSA that must be filled by a police officer. We do not have the statutory entitlement to make a direct appointment. The board will make the appointment, but the post will be filled as a secondment, just as the current director general and deputy director general, the director of the Scottish Police College and I are on secondment. That is purely a quirk of the current legislation. Another part of legislation has to be enacted—not the part that creates the SPSA but amendments to police regulations. Current police regulations say that a police officer can be employed only in the office of constable—in effect, he is not an employee. Such appointments can be made only by a police force.
Does that mean that any successor to the current director general could only come from Scotland and that we could not make an appointment from outwith Scotland?
No. An appointment from outwith Scotland would require a certain subtlety to be attached to it to make it legitimate, but it would be administrative subtlety. We are not precluded from looking outwith Scotland to attract the best recruits. We are optimistic about attracting applicants from both within and outside Scotland, because the job is seen as extremely prestigious in policing in the UK.
I am tempted not to pursue that line of questioning in case I reveal something of which I would disapprove.
Thank you.
It is intended to set up a multi-agency law enforcement campus at Gartcosh. I am sure that we all appreciate that such developments do not take place overnight. What is your understanding of the progress that is being made towards establishing that campus?
I sit as one of five people on the project board that is considering the Gartcosh campus. My interest is primarily in the potential to create a forensic laboratory on the campus and to locate part of SPSA corporate services there. Also on the board are the director general of the SCDEA and other stakeholders who are looking to co-locate on the site.
You said that you felt that you were delivering against your three-year efficiency plan, which you said would deliver savings of more than 1.5 per cent a year. Where do you hope to get those savings from?
I chair an efficiencies group that comprises each of our business areas. All those business areas have now quantified where they would attempt to deliver efficiencies. Without pre-empting the plan, which was delivered to the cabinet secretary only yesterday, I can say that we are optimistic that we can deliver savings of 1.6 per cent in our first year and that we can deliver recurring cashable efficiency savings of at least 1.5 per cent in the following two years. However, those savings are not fully detailed yet because our organisation is only six months old. We hope to gather enough knowledge about the business during year 1 to enable us to consider the specifics of how we will deliver.
How many of the 1,200 people in the SPSA are civilians?
Currently, 80 per cent of our resources are civilians.
This session has been most helpful. It has been interesting to question you so early in the history of the authority. This morning, we have learned about various matters, ranging from the retention qualities of clingfilm to the complex relationships that arise when people work on an interagency basis. I do not think that we are entirely satisfied on the latter point, but we will see what emerges over time.
I look forward to that.
I will briefly suspend the meeting to allow the witnesses to leave.
Meeting suspended.
On resuming—