Resources (Supplementary) [3]

Kit Malthouse (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): We do, and in fact we have a special retention scheme for particular officers in critical roles to make sure, and incentivise them to stay beyond the Games. John Biggs (AM): So there will be quite a bulge after? I think we know that there will be quite a bulge. Kit Malthouse (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): Yes, and I should also add that there are 338, I think, officers who are specifically paid for by the Home Office for the Games, and the intention is that, post the Games, those numbers would go. John Biggs (AM): The way that would work, I guess, is that 338 retirements would help to take the number down to that post-Games number. Kit Malthouse (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): Yes, effectively, because obviously we cannot make people redundant, so we would have to wait for 338 people to leave. John Biggs (AM): At the last meeting, we talked at length about the £90 million - some people call it a 'bung' - you got to help Kit Malthouse (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): I think you called it a 'bung', John. James Cleverly (AM): Some people did not. John Biggs (AM): You just did as well, actually, but there we are. The £90 million which helped fill the budget hole, and we have talked about there being problems with the budget and the need to achieve savings during this year. Part of the dialogue was that there is a £25 million budget resilience, but the report in front of us today tells us that the £25 million budget resilience is now allocated to early departures, so there is no longer a budget resilience. Do you want to comment on that? Kit Malthouse (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): It is certainly the case that we have put a large amount of the budget resilience into reserves and into specific earmarked reserves, which is effectively to pay for early departures. That is what we have done. Depending on what the budget looks like, although the workforce strength on the staff side has a budgeted amount, we are holding a vacancy level at the moment on that, and if we can persist in holding that vacancy level, it means that some of that reserve that is required for early redundancy may not be needed. Effectively, we have put it aside just in case. John Biggs (AM): The report in front of us says, 'It is proposed to transfer this provision into early departures'. OK, I understand what you are saying, but it may well be Kit Malthouse (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): We may have redundancy payments next year, so it has gone into a reserve for that just in case. Otherwise I would have a huge underspend. John Biggs (AM): Indeed. One of the other ways in which you are attempting to achieve an underspend is through savings, I think, on the police staffing budget. Is that correct? Kit Malthouse (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): That is right, yes. What happens on both staff and police is what is called a vacancy factor, which is where they will hold vacancies for a period while they reassign staff to fill them. I do not know if you are aware, but there is a Star Chamber process at the moment, where if there is a vacancy John Biggs (AM): I was going to come to that in a second. Kit Malthouse (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): Sorry. John Biggs (AM): I have always been intrigued by the Church of England, which I have nothing much to do with, but whenever a vicar retires they seem to leave it vacant for about a year before they appoint another one, and you are saying Kit Malthouse (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): It is called an interregnum. John Biggs (AM): Yes, indeed, and you are saying that within the MPS there is a similar culture emerging where you leave the desk empty for a while before deciding whether to fill it. Kit Malthouse (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): Yes. What they are doing at the moment is, for every post that falls vacant, if you want to fill it again, it has to go through what they are calling a Star Chamber process, which is run by the head of Human Resources (HR). Every single reappointment is tested as to whether it is required. That process obviously takes a little bit of time, but that means that we can hold it for a bit. To be honest, in an organisation the size of the MPS if you take your hand out of a bucket of water, the water tends to close up behind the shape that your hand was in, so it is quite good with a big organisation to see if that happens anyway and whether you therefore need to fill the job in reality. John Biggs (AM): The question in my mind is that I assume there are some police staff jobs which are necessary, and when people leave those jobs you will say, 'Goodness me, we had better fill that pretty damn quickly', and there are others which turn out to be less necessary because two people can do the jobs of three people or something, and the Star Chamber process examines and elucidates that. You are saying that when someone resigns as a police staff employee, the presumption is that you will not fill their post unless you can find a good reason to do so. Kit Malthouse (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): If somebody leaves, there are a number of things that can happen. First of all, you have to decide whether the function is required, and obviously there has been structural change in functions on the staff side which has resulted in significant departures, not least the catering, for instance, or the change in training process. Those people have either been made redundant or they have left in advance of those changes, and that means that the job is no longer to be filled. The second thing is whether the responsibility of that job could be divided up between other positions. John Biggs (AM): To cut the debate a little shorter, is there a decision-making matrix that applies that could be sent to us so we can understand how you are making decisions as an authority? Kit Malthouse (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): Yes, I am more than happy to arrange for the head of HR to come and talk to you about the process. John Biggs (AM): In the same piece of paper or an adjoining piece of paper, could you also advise us how many officers are waiting to retire until after the Olympics? I think that would be very helpful as well. Kit Malthouse (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): Yes. John Biggs (AM): Having bought myself a bit of time, I have one and a half other questions. One is about Eversheds. There is a reference in the papers we have in front of us to the use of Eversheds, which I am sure is a budgetary resource that has a resource implication. My question is, how much is being spent on that? The second question is, are they there to advise the MPS corporately or individually within the MPS, and are they there to advise the MOPC rather than the MPS? Kit Malthouse (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): I think Eversheds are our lawyers, are they not? Which bit are you talking about, sorry? John Biggs (AM): It says, 'Eversheds are retained in relation to the Leveson Inquiry'. Kit Malthouse (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): Yes, sorry. Eversheds are advising the MOPC. John Biggs (AM): All right. Are they providing advice to individuals or to the MOPC corporately? Kit Malthouse (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): They are providing advice to the MOPC corporately and they are providing, I think, advice to me and the Chief Executive and the Head of Internal Audit with regard to our evidence and appearances, but critically what they have been doing for us is helping us to fulfil our obligations for production of documentary evidence for the inquiry, and trying to make sure that we are in shape to do that. As you know, we do not have at MOPC an in-house legal. We contract that out. I do not think that expertise can be provided by Transport for London legal, so we have gone to Eversheds. John Biggs (AM): I am sure that we would be interested to hear about that in a third piece of paper which I can Kit Malthouse (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): Yes, sure. Separately, though, I should just say for full disclosure, separately the Department for Legal Services (DLS) are advising the MPS on their participation in the Leveson Inquiry, and I have been asked to approve - I think it is in my list of decisions - financial assistance for certain former and current police officers who are appearing at the inquiry, particularly where they believe there is a conflict of interest in DLS advising them, and therefore they want to engage external solicitors and we have been asked to pay for that. John Biggs (AM): You anticipate my other obvious question, which is tangential to resources but it flows from what you have just said, which is whether a similar thing applies to the MOPC, because clearly there may be differences in advice to individuals as against MOPC corporately. Kit Malthouse (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): I think none of the three of us who have been called felt the need to engage external advice, because we did not feel that we needed to do so for our own protection. John Biggs (AM): I imagine the Chair might want to write to you and pursue further details on this interesting area. I had one final question, which could have a 17-hour answer, but I guess for the purposes of this meeting a one-paragraph answer would be fine. Kit Malthouse (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): I will do my best. John Biggs (AM): ACPO (Association of Chief Police Officers) produced a document recently which talked about radical change being required in policing nationally, including the involvement of private companies and the provision of a range of services, including, in the media, services which might be perceived as being pretty close to policing services. Obviously you are aware of that. You would be a pretty poor Deputy Mayor if you were not aware of that. Is work taking place within the MPS to interpret that and to promulgate its philosophy? Kit Malthouse (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): I think there is a bit of misunderstanding here. We are signatories to the OJEU (Official Journal of the European Union) notice that gave life to this, and what the Government did was stick in this all-encompassing notice that would allow people to call off services and contracts under it if they so required. We have not done, so far as I am aware, any specific work on the route that Surrey or West Midlands have done, but obviously we watch with interest, as we watch with interest in Cleveland, what they are doing as well. My personal view is that I cannot quite see how you would privatise proper policing functions in that way or contract out proper policing functions in that way, not least because I am a great fan and proponent of the protection of the Office of Constable. At the same time, I do think there is scope within an organisation like ours, as I think I said last time, to think how we might be able to do things in a different way and try to preserve the public service nature of policing while seeing who can best perform non-policing functions. There has been a lot of fuss about patrolling, that patrolling is a police function and that should go elsewhere, but of course some people would say, 'Actually, PCSOs: effectively, every one of them has a private contract to perform a policing function. They are there to patrol and be out on the streets', but they are not a constable. They do not have the power of the constable. They have some limited powers, although they have been enhanced, but initially they did not. I had a lot of people object to them, calling them 'plastic policemen' and all the rest of it. Nobody around this table undervalues their contribution. I would be nervous about going down a slippery slope towards policing functions being performed by a private company, but there are a lot of functions in the MPS that can be done by non-police staff. The ownership of those staff is a separate issue. Thank you.