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Appendix 2
Devolution Working Group – 26 February 2015
Transcript of Agenda Item 3 – Devolution and Public Service Reform
Darren Johnson AM (Chair): We will now turn to the second part of our meeting which is
looking at possible changes to the criminal justice system as part of the devolution agenda.
Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM: Stephen, can you outline what specific changes to the criminal
justice system you would like to see, perhaps to create greater efficiencies?
Stephen Greenhalgh (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): Yes, sure. I was just saying to
Mayor Jules Pipe as he left - and before answering your question - about the importance of
thinking they are two sides of the same coin; fiscal devolution and public service reform. The
message that has come from the Mayor, but also the Commissioner [Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe,
Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis], around looking at the scope for making further savings
through devolution of the criminal justice system is one where we face the financial reality of
policing having to find greater savings irrespective of who walks through the door in May, and
£800 million worth of savings need to be found, it is estimated. Maybe it is £750 million, maybe
it is £850 million but it is a significant amount of money and the question is if you cannot do that
through the current savings, where else are you going to look? The criminal justice system seems
to be a good place to start.
I think we need to understand relative budgets first and that is that the vast majority of the
criminal justice system cost to the taxpayer sits within the police budget at or around £3 billion
and the remaining agencies do not really total up to much more than £1 billion, if you add
everything together as budgets. I have met my counterpart in New York who works for [New
York Mayor Bill] de Blasio. The Mayor's office there has budgetary and performance oversight
over the entire criminal justice system, including the youth justice but also the adult justice system.
Now, there is obviously justice above the level of the city. There is state justice and federal justice
but as soon as you have budgetary control and you look at performance across a system and you
use mayoral exertion, you can get a more responsive system for the citizen. But what this is not is
a mayor running courts, interfering with the judiciary, and that is not what happens in New York.
The District Attorney is completely independent and operates its own staff and offices and is the
Chief Prosecutor in Manhattan or one of the other places; Queens or Brooklyn. But you get
significant opportunities for efficiency if you see devolution of budgets.
I will give you one example around that. At the moment - admittedly this is before we moved to
better IT - you have 1,000 police staff responsible for supporting the police in preparing a digital
file within criminal justice services, within the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) and then a much
smaller budget within the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). They will have 900 staff - CPS staff,
not lawyers - again handling the same file and you would have thought that with greater
devolution there would be opportunities for efficiencies by devolving the budgets closer to the
citizen.
Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM: Do you see it more as financially beneficial and that is why you are
supporting it, or do you see changes in accountability would lead to greater improvements and
perhaps speed in the criminal justice system?
Stephen Greenhalgh (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): I think both, actually. I think
spending more money than you need out of the taxpayer, especially when their budgets are set to
go down you want to squeeze every penny. But equally, you want accountability and I think we
know that when we look at the complex interplay between City Hall and what City Hall could do
well and a town hall, one of the things that City Hall is able to do - and Len [Duvall] uses the
phrase ‘strategic’ - is just look at what is going on across London and start to ask the difficult
questions around why does it take so much longer to deal with a domestic abuse case in this part of
London as opposed to this part of London. That is not to say they are running the services there
but they can ask the difficult or thorny questions. Having a point of accountability is, I think, as
important as ensuring that you get a more efficient use of budgets.
Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM: Do you think it would speed up the criminal justice system if you
had control of all aspects?
Stephen Greenhalgh (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): This is not a power play; this is
very much a managerial thing. It is really important we get this across because I am a little bit
conscious of the way people that are running services will take this as politicians wanting more
power. Absolutely not; it is politicians wanting to do what politicians come into politics for, which
is to see systems work for the victims, ensuring that offenders do not come back for the 44th time.
At the moment, if we start off where we are, which is, if you ask Lord Burt who tried to do this
when he was advising Tony Blair [former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom] or you ask
people today and you look at the data, the reality is that there have been some improvements
around effective trials but court delays are increasing. London has a slower justice system than the
England and Wales average and we are trying, as you know, through our ambition, to speed that
up. But we do not have any more than a performance lever and I think a budgetary lever would
help tremendously.
Helen Bailey (Chief Operating Officer, Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime): I think it
might be helpful to reflect on what my erstwhile Treasury colleagues used to call the “counterfactual”. If we are going into a world in which their budgets are going to be sliced, we are either
going to think of it as the London criminal justice system and think about efficiency within that
context, or we are going to have the four or five Government departments that are most interested
in this all making their own choices about where those cuts fall, having to absorb and do what we
do at the moment, which is to try to find the join up in a world that becomes more difficult. I think
you both have to think about the world we live in now but also the world we might live in if we did
not seek to get this sort of oversight.
Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM: How do you think devolving the criminal justice system would
actually help reduce reoffending?
Stephen Greenhalgh (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): That is a different question but
let us start off with where we are today. Crime is coming down; therefore, the number of
defendants that appear in the courts is going down. Delays are not improving and reoffending
rates are going up. With the system where you do not have a greater and clearer accountability for
a system, we are not winning and that is at a cost. There are improvements - I do not want to
knock the improvements that we have seen - particularly in youth justice where the number of first
time entrants has come down dramatically. But it is not good enough that in 2014 64% of proven
offences committed by young people were reoffenders; that is two-thirds are people who have been
in the system already and it is nearly 80%, 77% for people within the adult system.
I think the interesting thing here is actually something that would interplay with boroughs. The
play is not about a City Hall grab but the calculations from Helen Bailey’s team show that a small
number of offenders, 3,800 habitual criminals convicted not once or twice but 15 times or more,
costing the taxpayer £153 million if you use Home Office calculations. Just imagine those
numbers when you start thinking about them at a borough level. You can really get to grips with
those people and that is going to require the town hall, the cops, all the local agencies, that provide
the through-the-gate services, to recognise that these are people you have got to keep a close eye
on otherwise they will cause unbelievable harm in communities, whether it is violence or acquisitive
crime. Having the ability to have someone that has a strategic oversight but then recognising that
delivery happens closer to home and involves the town hall, involves the local borough commander,
involves the local agencies, the third services, is kind of important. These are small enough
numbers that you can grip them. But at the moment we do not have that.
Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM: As part of this view of the criminal justice system, do you include
the prison services in this or just the courts and that?
Stephen Greenhalgh (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): Controversially, yes, I do.
Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM: You do include prisons as well?
Stephen Greenhalgh (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): We do want through-the-gate
services. We do not want people going in there for a short sentence going out with absolutely no
support and then causing problems, and then one part of the system does not know that they are
now in the community needing support. We know that good policy would be, where possible, to
think about custody as reparation but also then providing the support that is needed to ensure they
do not come back again. It is hard to do that when you are in a national service and offenders are
moved miles away and then you lose track of them and they come back on to the streets of London.
There has been legislation passed recently in New York which was all about closer to home. I
think the policy here is closer to home and sometimes closer to home is closer to mayhem but I
think the policy of just having a national prison strategy and not having one that is focused on
what works; London is an opportunity missed. That is not having the Mayor run prisons. Prisons
have prison governors and staff that do an excellent job providing that. But I think oversight over
that at a London level, a strategic level, would make sense.
Darren Johnson AM (Chair): In terms of devolving service functions like this, does it really in
the longer term need to go hand-in-hand with fiscal devolution? Because surely if it is just
dependent on central Government grant, we could be setting ourselves up for failure.
Stephen Greenhalgh (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): The answer is yes. My whole
slide of what I believe good government is, OK, and Eddie and I co-authored a pamphlet. We are
800 years after the Magna Carta; it was a Magna Carta for localism and good government links
taxation and spending. The tax raised would see that money spent on public services. When you
have what I would almost describe as “infantile government”, you get a command arm from a
central state saying, “That is what we think 'good' is” irrespective of whether you live in
Scunthorpe or in east London, or wherever Andrew [Boff AM] lives, just randomly. You have got
then a control arm of people that think they know what good is, that run around busily telling you,
as inspectors - what we call the “inspection industry” - who have come back from a local
Government background, saying, “This is what good is. Make sure you do it otherwise you will
get a slap on the wrist”. Then, because it is all then run from Whitehall, you have all the services
in silos.
This is what we are seeing with the criminal justice system, of course, because there are three
Whitehall departments that think they are running all of this stuff. You have got the Home Office
that have their Integrated Offender Management Board and policies, you have got the Ministry of
Justice doing their bit and you have got the Attorney General’s office doing their bit, all running
national programmes. Then the worst bit of it is you then get financial dependency, which is why
you have Philippa Roe saying, “I have to go in and get a deal done in order to cobble together a
deal that enables us to show that we are grown up enough to run something”, which is frankly
infantile. That is not good government. Good government provides a golden link between what
you raise in money from the taxpayer and what you spend on public services; recognising that there
are areas where you will need to do some distribution, but let us be transparent about that. Find
simple ways of incentivising growth.
I think good government also devolves decision-making and that is actually what you are hearing
from the boroughs and from Sir Edward. It is not about City Hall taking all the power but you
recognise where the decision is best taken, and you want to keep it as close to the citizen as
possible.
Darren Johnson AM (Chair): Is there a sub-regional element on this as well?
Stephen Greenhalgh (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): It depends on what the question
is. There are some areas where the boroughs are too small and you want to have cluster
commissioning because, simply, it does not work. You are looking at trafficking, and if you were
looking and doing some of that work without having some cross-borough working it would not
work. If you are looking at gang exit, which are small numbers that you are commissioning
services around, it probably -- the boroughs themselves recognise you need to cluster together.
That is about commissioning and that is where City Hall can provide a supporting hand.
Helen Bailey (Chief Operating Officer, Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime): I think we are
building on that, on what we have already been doing informally without that oversight, where
what we have been doing when we have been commissioning services, bringing boroughs in and
ensuring that they share in those decisions and that they share in the shaping of the outcomes and
what is going to work locally where they are. Because absolutely, as the Mayor’s Office for
Policing and Crime (MOPAC) stands at the moment, what would the point be of creating
something like this? What we do not want to be doing is second-guessing the outcomes the
boroughs can influence locally in the places where they are but we do want to be creating critical
mass by working together. I think that we will be absolutely sitting behind what Stephen
[Greenhalgh] said.
Darren Johnson AM (Chair): You see the cluster model being useful then?
Helen Bailey (Chief Operating Officer, Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime): I think the
principles that sit behind it are what are useful. If you are imaging a different world and a different
devolution structure, what I think we are saying is where you have got people who are delivering
services, practically, on the ground, which in London is the boroughs, you have got to absolutely
work with them and you have got to build coalitions of interest around the service objectives that
the Mayor has and the service delivery capacity that they have. Otherwise you will end up treading
on each other’s toes.
Stephen Greenhalgh (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): I will give you a picture, I will
paint a picture of what could work and it is not to say it is going to happen. But you do not want
criminals to continually pass through the criminal justice system, time and time again in the
borough, nor do you want to see that in City Hall. If you can find a way of incentivising people to
reduce reoffending so that they could then reinvest, instead of just continually downstream but
think about preventative measures so they could bank the benefit of lower reoffending levels
locally, that will be a good thing. I think it is called “justice reinvestment”. It is not a particularly
exciting concept, no one is going to get elected on the back of it but actually budgets that are then
devolved, that encourage people to think about what it takes to stop someone going round and
round and round offending again. Maybe nothing will work, in which case you have got to find a
way of keeping them off the street.
Len Duvall AM (Deputy Chair): Paint a picture for me of the youth justice system then; how
would that model work? At the moment, from what you are saying to me, I only get a picture
saying, “Actually give us oversight over it, we will work with the boroughs. They will deliver but
we will make sure that they deliver appropriately and we will check the reoffending model”. But it
is more than that, what you are trying to paint. Tell me how it works on youth justice if you had
your way. How would it work?
Stephen Greenhalgh (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): I have got down here “early
thinking” but I have spoken about youth justice at three party conferences and had a chance to
reflect on it and actually there is a large commonality about what might work. Remember that the
Youth Justice Board is a quango. I am not saying it is doing bad things but it is a quango of the
MOJ and it is a national quango, and recognises that London has its particular challenges. What
you do --
Len Duvall AM (Deputy Chair): Sorry to interrupt, Stephen. It is a “quango” like the National
Health Service (NHS) England so we should just put it in its context.
Stephen Greenhalgh (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): Yes, it is very similar to NHS
England. Yes, absolutely. Although a lot smaller than NHS England in terms of budget.
Len Duvall AM (Deputy Chair): Of course.
Stephen Greenhalgh (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): As Helen would probably testify
£100 billion is probably not the youth justice budget, it is probably nearer £100 million or
£90 million, in London; it is not a big load of money. What you do is, with that £90 million, let us
say it is £100 million, you would say, “Well, actually we’ve got these number of young kids that
are at risk or in the criminal justice system and at the moment the objective must be to reduce
reoffending”. The start point is not just those kids that go into custody, which is about 350, but
also those kids in the community; and the reoffending rates are broadly the same. Then you get a
borough cut of what the reoffending rate is in a particular borough, therefore what it costs, and you
would try to have a situation where a borough is incentivised over time to work on those things
that reduce youth reoffending and that they benefit, they get a dividend that they can reinvest in
local communities on things that will strengthen that particular community or the areas that need
strengthening and are continually incentivised to come up with the local solutions that make a
difference.
Len Duvall AM (Deputy Chair): Really, it is about dealing with the red herrings because already
some people have said, and I think you have answered it, about the independence of prosecutors,
magistrates and judges and we know it is not. But in terms of some of the other arguments about
postcode lotteries because I think you are making arguments about saying, “I’ll get rid of those
postcode lotteries around outcomes”. It does sound a bit like command and control from a different
point of view. I know you said to relate the tax and what good governance looks like. How do you
counter the arguments that devolution like this, like this approach, will lead to postcode lotteries
developing around the services? Do you know what I mean?
Stephen Greenhalgh (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): I think there are going to be lots
of arguments about the status quo. I love this phrase: “never underestimate the power of the status
quo”. We find it very difficult, do we not, to make a case for change? The thing that we can do and I am glad that I have accepted your invitation to come here but I am not sure I am the greatest
advocate for common sense - what we have got to do is find people who are not seen as people that
are in the game, as politicians trying to make the best of what they can do with the time they have
got as part of the executive, to make the case for devolution. It is not something I would ever think
I am best placed to do. But let us get people who are in the system that are doing this in other
cities. They say that this is not about power, this is just managerial common sense and it can work.
This is how it works over here and this is how it works over here.
Compare it to where we are in this country and say, “Well, actually within youth justice” - let us
take youth justice - “within the community there’s clearly a problem”. We might have a reduced
number of kids going into Feltham or Isis but the reoffending rate in the community is now as high
- for those many thousands of kids that are on community sentences - is as high as it is for those
leaving custody. That cannot be something that can go unchallenged and that is not what is
happening in other cities. How do they operate? If we are interested in a mayoralty, irrespective of
who is mayor, working and adding value to London, this may be somewhere where the Mayor’s
office can get Government to work properly.
Helen Bailey (Chief Operating Officer, Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime): I would want
to pick up that first important point that I think you have already said, about not getting control
over the court system. If you look at the MOPAC structure at the moment, we do not have
operational control over the policing. It would not be right. There is no capacity to tell police
officers who to investigate and who not to. In the same way if you -Darren Johnson AM (Chair): You would use the same model basically?
Helen Bailey (Chief Operating Officer, Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime): -- if you had
oversight over the criminal justice system you would not be setting thresholds for prosecutions for
the CPS, nor would you be trying to tell judges.
Stephen Greenhalgh (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): Trying, you could try.
Helen Bailey (Chief Operating Officer, Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime): -- which cases
to hear in what way. That would be for them and there would continue to be the sort of
professional lines of accountability that they have around those things. The second point about -Len Duvall AM (Deputy Chair): But you would be, in terms of saying actually the hours of work
they expect them to do and how they rearrange their work life balances, you would be directly
challenging some of the vested interests to make things up and then change, is it not? It is like
making the case for change. Judges would see that as a direct impact on their working conditions.
Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM: They would have to.
Helen Bailey (Chief Operating Officer, Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime): I think if you
came to that, you would be, yes.
Len Duvall AM (Deputy Chair): Oh, right.
Helen Bailey (Chief Operating Officer, Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime): But I think
you would start somewhere else, would you not?
Len Duvall AM (Deputy Chair): Yes.
Helen Bailey (Chief Operating Officer, Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime): You would
start around what are the blockages in the court system, what would speed them up. You might
then get into things like the way in which IT would speed up justice and that might drive the way
in which people did listing. As to which cases you listed in which order on which day and how
those cases were judged and what sentencing guidelines were, there is a very clear line, and I agree
there are some fuzzy lines between there and here.
Len Duvall AM (Deputy Chair): As in operational policing.
Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM: Absolutely.
Helen Bailey (Chief Operating Officer, Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime): That takes us
back into this morning’s territory.
Stephen Greenhalgh (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): That was this morning actually,
yes.
Len Duvall AM (Deputy Chair): There are fuzzy lines, are there not?
Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM: Yes, we were there. We were there, were we not?
Helen Bailey (Chief Operating Officer, Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime): I am going to
go back to the postcode lottery, if I may, Len, and just say that in London at the moment, what we
are seeking to do as MOPAC is to build coalitions around, as Stephen has already said,
commissioning but different things in different places. There are 19 gang boroughs. Not every
borough is commissioning gang services because not every borough perceives itself to have a
significant enough gang problem for that to be worthwhile. Not every borough is involved in the
Prevent programme around counter-terrorism, and we are supporting those boroughs who are, but
that is not all of them. I think there is a really fine line in this conversation between horses for
courses and responding to appropriate local needs, one size fits all and postcode lottery, and I am
just always a bit nervous about getting those things confused. That was all I wanted to say on
that.
Len Duvall AM (Deputy Chair): Thanks very much.
Andrew Boff AM: Could you tell me what is preventing a more radical approach to joint working
between London’s emergency services? Many people have had many conversations about how it
would work much better if they all worked together. What is preventing that happening?
Stephen Greenhalgh (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): I would love to hear what Len
has to say. Len, you chaired the Metropolitan Police Authority, are you not on the London Fire
and Emergency Planning Authority (LFEPA)? No, you are not? Oh, right. OK, maybe you are
not.
Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM: No, no.
Len Duvall AM (Deputy Chair): Most of us have been on it at one time or another.
Stephen Greenhalgh (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): Yes but you all have a view on
this. I am the new boy here in City Hall but what I would say is, it seems to me you start off with
-- if you create three sovereign silos, you keep three sovereign silos. You have got the Department
of Communities and Local Government that has the oversight of fire in the old-fashioned, dare I
say it, police authority-type structure, called LFEPA. I am not saying it is right or wrong but that
is one model. Then you have got health sector, which has reformed everything and London
Ambulance Service sits within health and they are commissioned now by 32 clinical commissioning
groups, and then you have got obviously the police and we have the Mayor’s Office of Policing and
Crime rates have been used since 2011 as oversight of the cops, and that is where we are. It is
amazing how when you are the commissioner for one of those blue light services, how you can
rappel borders when you are told to find ways of working with people from another service.
I will give you an example. I went over to the United States, as you know, with the Mayor and I
met a guy who -- because you know what [Rudolph] Giuliani [former Mayor of New York City]
did, do you not? He basically, by mayoral direction, merged ambulance service with fire. The guy
was a paramedic and he said, “Well, one day I was wearing green pants, the next day I was wearing
blue pants” and that is what it took in New York.
Andrew Boff AM: Sorry, I have missed the point of that.
Stephen Greenhalgh (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): The point is that if you can get
oversight of something and you can direct it and you control the budgets, you can bring things
together. If you do not have control of the budgets and they are answerable to different Whitehall
departments and different rules it is harder to bring them together.
Andrew Boff AM: Somebody might argue that this is possible without having been given the
legislative levers.
Stephen Greenhalgh (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): Everything is possible.
Andrew Boff AM: For example, are the Metropolitan Police and MOPAC pursuing voluntary
sharing arrangements with the ambulance service and the fire service?
Stephen Greenhalgh (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): But Andrew, think about it. I
am being rude. Think about it, you are right, OK? You have got ambulance services, and I have
got a huge respect for paramedics. I am the son of a surgeon, grandson of a cop. My father spent
loads of time training people who are paramedics, OK. They do a massively important job.
Ambulances are 85% to 90% utilised, OK? They are run off their feet. On a New Year’s Eve, you
get the brief; they will run out of ambulances, right? You have fire - you all know this - a
utilisation rate of less than 10%, 7%, OK? A lot of them are Red 2 trained, they are not just trained
to be first aiders they are trained to deal with cardiac arrests. They will not help, OK? On the
other hand you have got police officers that, if someone dies in the back of a police vehicle, they get
two years of blight and are referred to the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC).
OK.
There are lots of things you can do on a really voluntary cuddly basis but it is not going anywhere
until you get a grip of the money that commissions these services on behalf of Londoners and think
about one emergency service as opposed to three silos. There are elements of good practice in
small parts of the country and I point you to look at Northamptonshire. There is a Police and
Crime Committee there that is doing some really interesting work. Hertfordshire is doing some
interesting work. I went up to a control room. I think the start point for London must be to come
up with a super control room. It is not beyond the wit to be able to get the control rooms together,
you would have thought, and that, I saw in Gloucestershire. But London deserves better with the
money that is being spent on these things.
Andrew Boff AM: Are you saying that the promised land of bringing these emergency services
together, from what you are saying, is that they should come under the control of the GLA or the
Mayor; the commissioning of them?
Stephen Greenhalgh (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): I think it is logical that blue
light services should have the mayoral oversight and effectively two of the three do already. I think
you heard from that Sir Edward as well.
Andrew Boff AM: How likely is it, do you think, that we can be persuading government to move
along those lines?
Stephen Greenhalgh (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): We have all got to do our bit,
have we not?
Andrew Boff AM: Yes.
Stephen Greenhalgh (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): We all have a bit of influence,
maybe we have got no influence but it is just common sense for me.
Darren Johnson AM (Chair): The Mayor already has oversight of the budget for two of the three.
Stephen Greenhalgh (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): Yes.
Darren Johnson AM (Chair): But any progress on shared services over the past 15 years has been
painfully, painfully slow even when the Mayor does have that. There has got to be more than that.
Stephen Greenhalgh (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): The Mayor has some degree of
oversight over two-thirds but the one that is falling over is the London Ambulance Service, let us
be clear, and the Mayor has no oversight over the London Ambulance Service.
Darren Johnson AM (Chair): Thank you. Any more questions from Members? OK. Thank you
very much, both Stephen and Helen, for coming along this afternoon.