Transcript of public session: Ms J Champion, Ms A Purkis and Mr W Pickup of HM Customs and Excise

Wednesday, 28 April 2004
10.30 am

Sir William Morris: Good morning. Ms Champion, can I say good morning and welcome to you and your colleagues. Please make yourself as comfortable as you possibly can.

Can I start by saying thank you very much indeed for accepting our invitation to attend the Inquiry this morning to give us some evidence? Thank you also for letting us have your written submission which we found extremely helpful.

I appreciate that, for some witnesses, the process may be somewhat daunting, so I thought it might be helpful if I set out how we propose to conduct the inquiry, and indeed the hearing, this morning.

But first, let me introduce myself and the other members of the panel. My name is Bill Morris, I am the recently retired General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union, but as you can see, there are two other members of the panel. 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 an eminent barrister, she sits as a recorder and a part-time chairperson of employment tribunals. She was also counsel to the Lawrence Inquiry.

As you know, we have been asked by the Metropolitan Police Authority to conduct an independent inquiry into professional standards and employment matters in the Metropolitan Police Service. Our focus is the MPS as an organisation and not the individuals who make up the organisation. The Inquiry we are conducting is inquisitorial and not adversarial in tone, content or character.

We are very keen to enquire into the issues raised by our terms of reference in order that we can make appropriate recommendations for the further good practice within the MPS, rather than concentrating on criticisms of the organisation or individuals.

It is in that context that we have asked you to give evidence today. Can I just draw to your attention that a transcript is being taken, so that we 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 colleague, Miss Weekes, and then Sir Anthony Burden, with any supplementary questions that might be necessary. At the conclusion of our questions, I will offer you the opportunity for a brief closing comment, if you so wish.

You very helpfully provided us with a written submission on behalf of your organisation, the Customs and Excise, and a copy of that submission, together with today's evidence, will be posted on our website as well.

In your submission, you have drawn attention to a number of matters, and, for the record, I will just say that they are the structure of HM Customs and Excise, and how it is organised and managed; the issue of independent scrutiny also emerges; the context of restructuring and organisational change has also been highlighted; and finally, you give us examples of best practice.

We would like to ask you some questions about the material before us, and to explore with you all these issues of particular interest to our terms of reference.

But before we raise these matters, however, for the benefit of the transcript, I wonder if I might invite you to introduce yourself and indeed your colleagues.

Mr Pickup: My name is Bill Pickup and I am head of the Customs and Excise Internal Investigation Division, which has responsibility for investigating all cases of serious misconduct in the department.

Ms Champion: I am Janet Champion, I am head of HR strategy, but currently working on a project with the Inland Revenue.

Ms Purkis: I am Annie Purkis, head of personnel advice and services. We have responsibility for a number of policy areas, including conduct and discipline policy. I am also responsible for the HR service centre, and for the operational areas, including employee assistance services, and grievance and appeals.

Sir William Morris: Thank you very much indeed.

Questions by Sir William Morris

Sir William Morris: Can I just start by saying that, as a panel, we are interested in looking at the governance of the MPS and our terms of reference specifically refer us to best practice in the public and indeed private sector.

Yesterday, we had the privilege of hearing from your sister organisation, the Inland Revenue, and we explored with them their governance arrangements. You may be aware that as an organisation, they operate on the basis of a departmental board made up of a chairperson and three director generals and non-executive directors, I think there are two, and the director generals and the non-executive directors have responsibility for different areas of the business.

I assume that your organisational structure is broadly similar. Please tell me whether that is so, and what other comparisons may be relevant, insofar as the Met is concerned, if there are any.

Mr Pickup: Yes, that structure is broadly similar to Customs and Excise. We have a board consisting of one chairman, two director generals and another director, and we have a number of non-executive directors as well, so the similarity is there with the Inland Revenue.

Sir William Morris: Am I right in assuming that your reporting upwards is obviously direct to ministers, there is no intermediary sort of political governance between the board and the minister?

Mr Pickup: That is correct.

Sir William Morris: Internal complaints: I see from your submission that among other duties, Customs and Excise has a law enforcement function, it is a law enforcement agency. Obviously, the size of your organisation is different from that of the MPS, but there are some parallels in the task, law enforcement. I am assuming that similar issues of internal complaints, similar issues of HR related to misconduct, arise in your organisation as they do elsewhere.

Could you sort of just share with us broadly, because one of my colleagues might want to explore some details, but what are the arrangements for dealing with these matters, such as misconduct?

Ms Purkis: Essentially, if there is a complaint or there is any issue regarding an officer's conduct, it is the responsibility of managers to deal with that. If it is a complaint about a manager, that would be raised with another senior manager in the area.

As soon as someone becomes aware of a potential misconduct issue, that should be referred to our Internal Investigation Division. The Internal Investigation Division has a responsibility to look at the facts of the case at that stage, and establish whether or not they think there is in fact misconduct involved.

If there is misconduct, we have a two-tier process where, if it is misconduct in itself, that would be referred back to local managers for local action, there would be fact finding, there will also be a hearing to determine what should actually be done in terms of a penalty.

In cases of gross misconduct, that would be investigated by the Internal Investigation Division, and for information about how that is pursued, Bill Pickup here can provide more details, and that will then go to a central panel which is convened by our grievance and appeals team; again, they will determine what penalty is appropriate.

If, when the case is referred to IID, Internal Investigation Division, there is a feeling that there is no misconduct, it is still regarded that there is potentially a problem, and so it would be then referred back to local management to consider whether or not it should be dealt with under our internal grievance procedure.

Sir William Morris: There is a propensity here for misunderstanding about what are employment-related issues vis-a-vis the contract of employment, and wider issues of conduct. A number of questions arise in my mind, but, first of all, could you give us an example of what would constitute misconduct – and another example about what would constitute gross misconduct, because the way you have just explained it has left me with the impression, and I put it no higher than that, that there might be different routings for allegations of either misconduct or gross misconduct, and I just need a little bit of clarity, if you can help.

Mr Pickup: Yes, certainly. I should point out that complaints and allegations can come from any source: they can come from members of the public, they can come from managers, they can come from staff, they can come from other law enforcement organisations such as the police, so we receive all complaints that have a discipline nature to them.

What we first do is take an initial view as to whether it is a misconduct issue, and if it is misconduct, whether it is categorised as more serious, ie gross misconduct, or more of a minor matter, which is just ordinary misconduct.

The difference between the two is to some extent – it can be shades of grey, so for example, you can have a complaint of bullying and harassment or discrimination which might be of a minor nature, depending on the context of it, depending on the allegations, depending who was involved, the seniority of the people involved, the nature of the allegations, right the way through to an allegation, for example, of corruption, which would automatically be deemed to be potentially gross misconduct.

So there are really sort of three areas, I suppose. One is something that is obviously misconduct, such as a minor theft of time, if somebody is not completing their worksheets accurately. We have an obvious case of gross misconduct, for example, serious criminality, corruption, that sort of thing. Then we have the grey area in the middle, which depends very much on the context and the nature of the allegation.

Sir William Morris: Can you be a little bit more specific in terms of an allegation of corruption against a Customs officer which would fall under the category of gross misconduct, as I understand your explanation; would that go to your IID directorate or department, or would it automatically be referred, and by whom, to the IID, and what happens to it after that?

Mr Pickup: Most of the cases of corruption we come across are generated through intelligence, and within our own Internal Investigation Division, we have a separate intelligence team, whose responsibility it is to liaise with other law enforcement organisations, and also co-ordinate all intelligence in the department in connection with issues such as corruption, so most of the information becomes self-generating through that intelligence team, or through our own law enforcement people, who are conducting VAT inquiries or drug smuggling inquiries. They can come across examples of corruption and evidence of corruption through that.

But all those cases would come first and foremost to our Internal Investigation Division. We would then look at that and take a decision as to whether – how we were going to deal with that, because first and foremost, it is a potential criminal matter, and the Internal Investigation Division – we only do civil investigations, ie, our concentration is only on the discipline element. We do not do criminal investigations.

So the first thing we have to decide, if it is a potential corruption, is: who are we going to refer the matter to? If it is corruption that is associated with what we would call an assigned matter, ie, a legal matter that is the responsibility of the department, such as a VAT fraud or a Customs fraud, then we would refer that matter to our own law enforcement officers, which is the criminal investigation arm of Customs and Excise, and we would work in consultation with them to investigate the potential criminality.

If it is a corruption matter that is not related to a responsibility of Customs and Excise, we would then speak to our contacts in the local forces, the local police forces, we have a contact in each of the professional standards units, and a protocol with many of the forces, and we would refer the matter to the police.

Sir William Morris: Right. In evidence that we have had offered to us, the issue of proportionality of treatment about issues around complaints has emerged; true or false, we are yet to determine.

Is that an issue within the Customs and Excise organisation, insofar as your ethnic minority staff are concerned?

Mr Pickup: Could you explain "proportionality"?

Sir William Morris: Let me explain it. We have had it advanced to us that black police officers in the Metropolitan Police Service proportionately – or disproportionately, I will put it in those terms, are subject to the disciplinary process, compared with their white counterparts. I rightly or wrongly see your organisation, Customs and Excise, as broadly analogous, in terms of you are a uniformed service, you have got a frontline interface with the public, you have an ethnic dimension to the profile, and I am wondering – well, I suspect the same issues might arise, corruption allegations, issues around how people are treated.

The evidence has been offered to us – as I have said, we make no determination – that the numbers of black staff who are subject to discipline are out of proportion to the numbers of their white counterparts; proportionality, I think, is a summary word.

What I want to just understand is whether or not any of those issues have emerged, insofar as your people management is concerned within the Customs and Excise agency?

Ms Purkis: I think this is something where potentially we need more information. The way we operate at the moment is we have the centralised grievance and appeals system; that is for discipline cases, the level 2 discipline areas, we have the central panels. Also where there have been appeals in grievance cases, where grievances have not been resolved locally, and the idea is that in a grievance, where possible, you would like to get them resolved quickly, locally, and support people working together for the future.

The only stats we have had that we have broken down that give us much information are the stats we actually provided on the grievance and appeals and employment tribunal figures. Those do not suggest there is a disproportionate approach. There are health warnings on those figures, in that we have a relatively low level of reporting of ethnicity, I think we are running at around 60 per cent, so there are health warnings on those figures.

Also, that does not capture all the information broken down by ethnic group for the level 1 discipline issues, or all the information for the grievances which have been resolved locally.

So I think there is more that we could do to capture information, but the centrally captured information, which in a way acts as a control anyway, because if things are not resolved locally, they should come to the central panels, does not suggest there is a disproportionality.

Ms Champion: I would just like to add that, in terms of perceptions of ethnic minority staff, we have a very active ethnic minority network who feed to us on a regular basis the issues of the ethnic minority staff, and certainly complaint handling is not one of the issues that they raise, you know, as a key issue for them, so in that sense, they, as our sort of focus group, are not coming to us and saying, "We think there is some disproportionality in complaints handling".

Mr Pickup: I can also confirm, from an internal investigation point of view, we have never had any representations made from either that group, or the trade union side, or from any individual member of staff, complaining that, as a group, they are disproportionately treated in that process.

Sir William Morris: Just on that same theme, it has been suggested to us that in the Metropolitan Police Service, some managers are somewhat diffident to manage and take tough decisions because they are very concerned and apprehensive of being branded as racist or taking decisions which are racist, and, as a result of that, the tendency is to refer the issues upwards rather than dealing with it, what I call management by retreat.

Have you had any of those sort of problems at all in the Customs and Excise?

Mr Pickup: We get, generally speaking – well, a number of managers who would prefer to refer the matter to the Internal Investigation Division for our judgment, but that is across the whole range of issues. Certainly not – I cannot think of any example specifically which is related to an ethnic – somebody doing management by retreat in relation to a member of the ethnic minorities, no.

Ms Purkis: I think there has been a general issue across the organisation where I think, in the documentation that was referred to you, there was the phrase "active management", which was very much a recognition within the organisation that perhaps we were undermanaged, and that there was a need for people to actually tackle management issues and deal with them.

What I think we have then got to work out is making sure that you have that balance between best practice from an active management perspective and not overstepping the line and suddenly entering an environment where there is bullying and harassment, but I think there was a tendency before for people sometimes to back away from things, which we have tried to address, but achieving that balance is always a challenge, I think.

Mr Pickup: I think for clarity, I should say – I can bring to mind a small number of cases where the individual is what I would classify as a serial complainant, and one or two cases where those people have come from an ethnic minority background, but the managers in those cases certainly managed by retreat, but it was not because of the background of the individual, it was because the individual was a serial complainant, and whoever managed that individual ended up being part of the grievance procedure.

But that was driven really by the individual being a serial complainant more than the nature of the individual themselves.

Sir William Morris: Yes, okay. You indicated earlier that complaints can emanate from a range of sources, and obviously, complaints can emanate from members of the public, you said that. Let me just give you a hypothetical situation and see where that takes us, because I want to ask one or two questions.

Just imagine I am on the overnight flight from Kingston, Jamaica, coming into Gatwick, and when I arrive – it may or may not be one of your targeted flights, but when I arrive, I am kept waiting, and I felt that I had been kept waiting too long, and I felt that the Customs officer did not deal with me appropriately. My allegation is that he or she might have been abusive, offensive, and did not perform at the highest level of public standards which I am sure your officers do.

Could you share with me what are the avenues open to me to complain against that Customs officer, and what are the steps that the service take to investigate my complaint – if it does, I do not know; what is the process taken in that hypothetical situation?

Mr Pickup: Normally what would happen, the individual would write to the department, usually the manager of the person they are complaining about, and we have, in many areas, a local complaints co-ordinator who is responsible for making sure the complaint is dealt with fully and accurately.

The complaints co-ordinators are fully briefed to look for any potential cases of – or allegations of discipline, and if there are any such allegations contained within the complaint – because lots of complaints are to do with business processes rather than complaints against the officer, but if it is actually a complaint against the officer, then in consultation with local senior management, they would refer the matter, in those instances, to the Internal Investigation Division, so although the complaints, generally speaking, do not come direct to ourselves, because individuals out there are not necessarily aware that we exist, there certainly is the process through the local management and the complaints co-ordinator for the matter to be brought to our attention.

In the example that you described, if there are allegations of an individual being abused or threatened or, you know, any sort of difficulties along those lines, that would be a matter that should be referred to us for investigation.

Sir William Morris: That would go to your IID department?

Mr Pickup: Yes, it would.

Sir William Morris: If there is prima facie evidence that I am right, there was inappropriate behaviour on behalf of the Customs officer, what happens to him?

Mr Pickup: Well, we would first take the differentiation between, is it potentially a serious matter or potentially a more minor matter? If it was a more minor matter, we would refer it back to the local senior management, and they would then tackle it under the minor misconduct procedure, so they would deal with it locally; they would do a brief inquiry, they would find out the response from the individual, and then they would take a decision on whether the individual was guilty of the minor misconduct matter.

If at any stage during that process evidence comes to light that it is a more serious case than we first thought, they would refer it back to us. Either way – either we look at it first and decide it is more serious, or it is referred back to us – we would then assign a team of investigators to go – normally, we would go back to the individual who wrote the letter and get further –

Sir William Morris: Can I just ask, would your team of investigators come out of your IID department?

Mr Pickup: Yes. We have a pool – our Internal Investigation Division has a staff of about 30 staff, and they are all trained internal investigation officers, and they are all equal opportunity trained as well, so they are not just ex-criminal investigators brought in, they know what to look for in these sorts of cases.

Normally what we would do is go back to the individual concerned, because people, quite understandably, are quite emotional, the letters they write are quite emotional, and we have to go back and try and get the full facts, in a witness statement format, normally.

Having received that, we would then decide what sort of evidence we need to go and collect, and our internal investigators would then undertake a full investigation, they would then produce a full report of the situation.

They do not make recommendations at that stage; their job is actually quite a clinical investigation, so they do not have to make recommendations, they just gather the facts. Having gathered the facts, the matter is then reported to a senior manager within the Internal Investigation Division, so again, we are maintaining independence away from the local management.

That senior manager in the Internal Investigation Division goes through the report; if there is more information that is required, he retasks the investigators. If not, that senior manager has to decide whether a charge of either gross misconduct, if it is serious, misconduct, if it is more minor, or simply referred back to management for local management action if that is appropriate.

Sir William Morris: Okay, let us assume it is gross misconduct.

Mr Pickup: If it is gross misconduct, we would report the matter to a central disciplinary hearing panel, who would convene, normally, within a two week period; they would go through the same evidence that the senior manager in the IID has gone through, they would give the opportunity to the officer to attend and give evidence if he wished to do so, and then they would take a decision on whether or not that officer was guilty; if he was guilty, they would then set the penalty accordingly.

Sir William Morris: So at what stage in the process would my complaint be serious enough for criminal proceedings to be considered, assuming I have had a broken nose in the process, when he was trying to search me and I objected?

Mr Pickup: Assuming that the complainant has not in fact gone to the police themselves, which in some cases they do, it is right at the start, when the matter is referred to us; so that would not be considered necessarily by the complaints co-ordinator or the local management, they would point it out to us obviously, they would have a view on that, but that is a decision we would take.

But before we actually report matters to the police, we would report the matter to our directors, because our directors have the ultimate say as to which matters go to the police.

I should point out at this stage that we do have what we call an ACPO protocol agreement, which has just been ratified last year with ACPO, which outlines the types of cases that we must automatically refer, and the types of cases that could be either way, depending on the nature and the context of them, so that sets the governance framework for the decisions that the IID take in which cases should be referred to the police.

Sir William Morris: While all this process is in train, do I get any communication from the service to let me know how you are dealing with my complaint?

Mr Pickup: Well, initially, we would go back to you, as I mentioned, and we would explain the process then, and we would explain – we would take the further evidence from you.

After that, it does tend to be more of an arm's length relationship, because this – the investigations can sometimes take several months before they come to fruition, but, at the end of the process, the complainant obviously would be told what the redress, if any, was that had been taken against the individual, but we would not be going back on a regular basis to the individual.

Sir William Morris: One issue which you just touched on has exercised the panel, in terms of evidence offered to us, is time, the time that it takes. Taking a worst case scenario, what is your time experience from a complaint to a settlement resolution, as a worst case scenario, even involving criminal prosecution?

Mr Pickup: Well, a worst case scenario is years.

Sir William Morris: How many years?

Mr Pickup: Many years.

Sir William Morris: How many? Can you beat our eight?

Mr Pickup: No, we have not quite got to that record, but the reason I would say years is because if there is a criminal prosecution in train, it may not be possible for us to conduct an internal discipline inquiry, so we would put that on hold until the criminal prosecution has gone, so we have got examples where investigations have gone for five years or six years where we have not been able to deal with the disciplinary element.

But generally speaking, we would try to deal with 80 per cent of all complaints against an officer within a three-month period, and about 95 per cent, if not higher, are dealt with within a six-month period.

Sir William Morris: And if it is a criminal prosecution, does the officer get suspended whilst the process, say, a criminal investigation, is going on, or what happens?

Mr Pickup: Yes, it is possible to suspend an officer either with or without pay at any stage during a discipline process or a criminal investigation. We usually take quite a robust line on this, and if anybody was subject to a serious criminal investigation, we would automatically suspend them, or a serious discipline investigation.

We do not now do that, because of the length of time involved and the effect it can have on the individual. What we try and do – our first port of call is: can the individual carry on working, bearing in mind the nature of the allegation? If they cannot continue working in the work area, we are a large department, there may be another type of work area, bearing in mind the allegation, that is quite suitable for the individual to remain employed on.

If that is not an option, then ultimately, we would have to suspend the individual, and, as an organisation, we probably have around 15 individuals on suspension at any one time.

Sir William Morris: Okay. Thank you very much, that is extremely helpful. Just moving on to a different area of interest for us is the issue of the employment status of police officers. The office of constable has been long established; it carries certain rights and duties, but it also carries obligations, naturally, and a succinct way of encapsulating these is expressed as "servants of the Crown".

Do Customs and Excise officers have the same sort of status as servants of the Crown?

Mr Pickup: It is not a title that I have heard before.

Sir William Morris: So from an employment perspective, they are deemed and treated like any other employee, with contracts, and they have rights to access industrial tribunals about employment issues?

Mr Pickup: Yes, that is correct.

Sir William Morris: No constraints at all?

Mr Pickup: No. The only slight difference, I think, is that when an individual is dismissed from our department, their initial right of recourse is to the Civil Service Appeals Board. But thereafter, they have the full right of recourse to a tribunal.

Sir William Morris: That is part of the procedure; okay, fine. I am advised, in the overall context of government re-organisation and reform of public service – I am aware that a conversation is taking place for amalgamation between the Customs and Excise and the Inland Revenue, which we were privileged to hear from yesterday.

Can I ask whether that process of amalgamating terms and conditions and structures and governance – have you got a project team that is dealing with that issue, or is it being done by external facilitators? How are you approaching this structural amalgamation? You know, what is the model, what are the benefits?

Ms Champion: There are a number of project teams running looking at various aspects of the work of the two departments, so I think there are nine what are called transition projects running, one of which is looking at HR, another one of which is looking at taxation, and so on and so forth, looking at the nine main areas of the departments' work.

At the moment, until the new chief executive is announced or appointed, in a sense, no decisions are going to be taken about the way forward, because obviously, that will be for the chief executive to do.

So the transition committee is putting work in train towards what the future might look like, in terms of preparing options, by the end of May.

Sir William Morris: Okay. Just a final question from me, just staying with re-organisation: I know that the Customs and Excise, the re-organisation that you face as a result of amalgamation is only one of a series in the last decade that you have had.

Can I ask, in the light of previous change initiatives, whether there are any lessons to be learnt that you would like to offer, and how was the task undertaken?

Mr Pickup: Certainly, from my perspective, one of the lessons is, when there is significant change, there is a need to have a robust complaints procedure in place, and a robust procedure for identifying discipline and potential cases of indiscipline, because when there is a lot of change, there is a lot of uncertainty, people's attitudes to the organisation can change, so I think it is very important that everybody is aware what is expected of them as they go through that process, and what the process is, should they fall short of those standards.

Sir William Morris: Thank you very much indeed, you have been extremely helpful. Can I invite my colleague Miss Weekes to ask you a few questions?

Questions by Miss Weekes

Miss Weekes: Thank you. These questions are going to be for any of the three of you, I will leave it entirely to yourselves. Can I come back, if I may, to an aspect of the difference, if there is any, between frontline officers and those who work on what I would call important admin duties; is that the right terminology to distinguish the frontliners from those who work in the office, or do you have a particular description for your frontline officers and those who work on admin?

Mr Pickup: No, that is acceptable.

Miss Weekes: That is acceptable. In the Met, they are called police officers and police staff, to distinguish their roles. As you have heard from the chairman, police officers do not have employee terms or contracts, they do not have employment contracts, essentially, but they have access to employment tribunals for gender and race discrimination issues. Police staff have full employment law contracts, and they have access to employment tribunals for everything.

I think it would help us as a panel to understand, if there is any, the difference between the duties carried out by frontline officers and admin staff; I wonder if one of you could summarise that. I am, of course, familiar with what frontline Customs officers do, but it might be helpful to see the distinctions between their roles and responsibilities, to see whether or not there is the need to have a distinction in their employment law status, because that is an argument we are looking at at the moment; some officers would like to get rid of the distinction altogether, some officers are very concerned about losing the title of being Crown servants. So what is the difference between frontline officers and staff?

Mr Pickup: Perhaps I could just mention the structure of the department actually gives you quite an insight into the difference of the jobs within the department. We have three main structures headed each by a director general. The first is our law enforcement function, which is your frontline operational officers dealing with issues such as intelligence, investigation and criminality.

The second directorate is our business services and taxation directorate; that really is designed to look after the support of local businesses, it involves the collection of VAT and excise duties, so it is what you could call the law-abiding business side of the department.

The third strand is our corporate services. Now, within our corporate services, that covers a wide range of issues, from basic building management through to our HR support functions, our financial management functions, that sort of thing.

Historically, as a department, we have seen no difference between any of the officers, where they worked, they all worked on the same terms and conditions of contract; some may have got different pay and different types of allowances.

The only distinction I suppose I should make is that operational officers in the past have been deemed to be commissioned officers, ie, they get a specific commission from a director which empowers them to carry out the legal functions of the department, so operational officers in the past have been determined "commissioned officers".

Miss Weekes: In the past?

Mr Pickup: That is still the case at the moment, but as I say, as a department, we have always prided ourselves that officers should and do get experience across a whole wide range of subjects. There has been quite a lot of movement between our frontline services and our admin support services.

The structural changes in the last two years have made a big difference to that, where we now have functions, such as law enforcement, and therefore function streams, so people very much – there is less movement now between frontline and operational services.

Miss Weekes: Is there any difficulty expressing, in a contract for a frontline officer, his rather specific duties of arrest, independence, his powers of discretion during an investigation, for example; for the very officer that is going to have to follow PACE and RIPA, these important statutory obligations.

Mr Pickup: No, it would just be covered by the general terms and conditions of employment, which cover things like discipline and conduct, but my understanding is they do not specifically go into the details of issues like that, bearing in mind the history of the department is all officers were seen to be equal.

Ms Purkis: Those issues would obviously be covered by specific training for the people undertaking particular work, so on an investigation, it would be one particular set of law; if you are looking on the VAT side, as an assurance officer, you have got certain powers, so there is specific training for whatever task people have which would pick up those legal requirements.

Miss Weekes: And you would agree that the frontline officers who investigate are almost identical to police officers.

Mr Pickup: Yes, that is correct.

Miss Weekes: Do you really see any difference between a frontline officer's role and a police officer in the Met?

Mr Pickup: Obviously I think Customs officers are more specialised, but I think the creation of the new Serious Organised Crime Agency, which is going to be a merger of many of our law enforcement officers and police officers, I think demonstrates the fact that there is very little difference between the two.

Miss Weekes: And of course there are specialist sections within the Met who do nothing for a long time but, for example, firearms, and they are specialist, but you are also specialist, in that you deal with VAT, drugs, things like that.

Mr Pickup: That is right, yes, but the basic nature of a criminal investigation, and the prosecution, is exactly the same.

Miss Weekes: Can I move on to one or two issues I would like to raise in relation to the grievance procedure and discipline? You have been asked about the process, I am not going to go back over that, because in fact you outline it very adequately in your written submission, but I would like to raise with you the similarity and to draw on best practice with certain aspects of how you deal internally with officers; I am not so interested in the external, I know you farm out the serious criminal proceedings, as you have explained.

And I think you refer to the issues of grievance in levels, I heard you mention level 1 and level 2.

In the Met, there is Fairness at Work, which is essentially, I think, something that may mirror your level 1. It is really any dispute that might arise between an officer or a police staff and their line manager, and that is the first port of call for dealing with those sorts of internal disputes. I think your system mirrors that, is that right?

Mr Pickup: Yes.

Miss Weekes: I want to ask this: there is sometimes a perception that there is not enough independence in the way the line manager may deal with these issues. Sometimes it might involve the line manager, but the line manager still does have to deal with resolving that dispute, because one of the persons that he or she line manages may have a query, a complaint, about the way they have been line managed; you must also deal with that problem.

Mr Pickup: Yes, that is correct.

Miss Weekes: How do you resolve it, the issue of independence?

Mr Pickup: There are a number of safety nets in the process that we have for that. You mention the different levels, and it can be quite confusing, because we have a grievance procedure which has a level 1 and 2, and we have a discipline procedure that has a level 1 and 2, but from the grievance point of view, do you want to go through what the grievance side of it is?

Ms Purkis: I think there are two things on the grievance side. First of all, if you do not reach resolution, the safety check is that you can actually say, "No, we have not resolved this issue, it needs to be referred centrally to a central panel", and that is what the level 2 process is.

There are also other ways that managers can get help. Our employee assistance service offers a mediation service which we have found has been very successful in helping to resolve some of the grievances we have had, and what they can do is actually bring some independence to the issue, and help people actually see, you know, their way through what can actually be very, very complex issues around it.

So it does not necessarily mean you have to refer up to a level 2 grievance. What we try and do is encourage people that, before you get into the formalised grievance process, let us look at ways we can actually resolve this beforehand, and, as I say, the employee assistance service, they have been doing mediation services for about the last year, and some of the numbers are quite compelling. There are some very good stories about how people have actually come out of those grievances.

Miss Weekes: Can you share one or two of them with us, your best practice?

Ms Purkis: Well, we had literally people who would not travel to meet the mediator on the same train, they would not be anywhere near each other. They met with our employee assistance service, who are all fully trained in mediation skills, and they got to the stage where they were in a room together, and got – you know, it became quite emotional, and they did, they found a lot of common ground, and they left, and there was this confidence they would go on, and afterwards they heard, yes, the issue had been resolved.

So people who were completely diametrically opposed in their views and their perceptions about a situation were brought together. Obviously it will not work in every case, but it has been very, very useful.

Miss Weekes: I was going to go on to mediation, but as you have mentioned it now, perhaps you can just talk us through one or two aspects of it, because mediation has been spoken of in our public inquiry, and there are a number of department heads that are very anxious that the Met use it more.

It is not the first time they have thought of it, but this is an opportunity to revisit whether it ought to become a permanent alternative way of doing things.

Can I ask you, how long have you had a mediation structure in place?

Ms Purkis: To be honest, I am not sure exactly when it started. I know there has been a lot of emphasis over the last year, one of the people who is involved – well, our employee assistance service was restructured a couple of years ago.

What we used to have was a service that was very much a staff welfare service, so individual members of staff would contact EAS to get advice. What happened was we looked at that and decided, okay, having a welfare service was one thing, but what we wanted to do was actually look at providing support to managers as well, because whenever there is a dispute, there are the two parties.

So the emphasis very much now is on managers contacting employee assistance service as well, to actually look at, "Well, what support can I get?", as well as individuals having that route through.

That was a couple of years ago that we changed the nature of the service, and I think, from that, came mediation, and the people who were working on it, the skills they were getting – and the contacts, because they network very much with other governmental mediation groups. So in the last year there has been a lot more emphasis on this.

Miss Weekes: Did you have an overall policy or document that sets out where you get your mediators, how they are trained, and how you incorporate them, which it sounds to me as if you have, into your organisation?

Ms Purkis: What we have actually got is this central employee assistance service, there are about 18 that cover the whole country. They are based across the country, we have groups of them in London and in Salford, but also people dotted around the country as well, so that people can get in contact with those people locally.

As far as the specific training they get, I have not got the specific details of what qualifications they have got, we can obviously provide you with those.

Miss Weekes: Yes, it would be very helpful if you could.

Ms Purkis: And I could find out more in terms of exactly what is required of them, but they have been formally trained, they do have these skills, and, as I say, they do an awful lot of networking and sharing of best practice. I can dig out some documentation on that.

Miss Weekes: I would be very grateful, because I think it would inform us as to the various suggestions for the Met, who are particularly interested in this alternative.

But essentially, this floating number of people, mediators, are available at any time that there has been no resolution at the very first stage that a workplace conflict comes up, so before any formality, before it is sent up, there is that availability.

Ms Purkis: This is what we have tried to do, because I think what we have recognised is that people can get entrenched very quickly, and by the time something gets to a level 2 grievance panel, ie there have been murmurings around whether or not it is a grievance locally, then they formalise that into a grievance locally, then that has not been resolved and it has come centrally; by that time, you have actually made it very, very difficult for people to work together and ever find a way forward.

So a certain number of grievance appeals end up just being capped, and, fundamentally, we cannot find a way forward, but you just have to work with it, so what we have recognised – and we have put a lot more emphasis in our recent guidance, which we have provided you with copies of, on early resolution and actually nipping it in the bud.

That again goes back to the active management issue, that if you are noticing there is some conflict in your area, you have got to get in and start tackling that sooner rather than later.

Miss Weekes: Is it cost effective, using mediators in this way?

Ms Purkis: Definitely. If you get in that early and you have this resolution and you develop an effective working relationship, and you compare that with a grievance process that can go through these two stages and go on for months and months, combined with the fact that sometimes, when you get to the stage where there is, say, a level 2 grievance, that is having an impact on people's work, it is having an impact potentially on people's health; you know, anything that can avoid that sort of trauma for all parties is well worth the input.

Miss Weekes: There might be a criticism from someone who does not understand the system and how it works, or even if they do understand your system: how can a mediator who works outside of your organisation truly understand the issues?

Ms Purkis: There was a certain reluctance in some areas as to the value of mediation. I think what the people have been able to demonstrate is that actually having someone coming in who does not know an awful lot about the day-to-day activities that you are involved in can be quite useful, and it can actually take you away from, you know, some of the obstacles that you are facing.

So although there was some resistance, I think they have done an excellent job within the employee assistance service of promoting this, and sharing some of the successes, going out and talking to senior managers in various parts of the other business areas, to say, you know, this is a way forward. Because we – in your area, you have come across some of the promotional work they have done as well.

Ms Champion: Yes.

Mr Pickup: Can I just mention one particular danger from my point of view of the grievance – the process you have just explained? I am concerned that – the mediation process, as Annie had suggested, in my experience, works very well, if you get in early; it not only prevents potential grievances, but even future internal investigations, which can destroy not just individuals, but sometimes entire offices, when they have to take sides with an individual.

The main danger is there could be a potential serious allegation of discrimination that is actually dealt with under the grievance process and mediated away. Now that is unacceptable, and we have to have checks and balances in place to make sure that that does not happen, and the two that we do have – and we have spoken to our mediators, we have explained, if they are called into a situation, we have explained the types of examples of discipline and serious discrimination, we do not want them to be involved in a resolution to that, that would be unacceptable, because we can even get into a situation where the individual is not prepared to complain, but on the information we have, it is so serious, we would nonetheless conduct an internal investigation into it. So we do have checks and balances, but it is a concern.

Miss Weekes: So essentially, you raise a very important point, which is that the organisation must decide which categories of cases they are prepared to mediate, and which they must take back responsibility for.

Thank you very much for that, but I would welcome as detailed as possible a set-out of your success so far using mediation.

Ms Purkis: It is worth just saying on that point, with the checks and balances, that the same person – the same senior manager is responsible for the employee assistance service as for the grievance and appeals team, so there is that sort of awareness of what sort of cases are coming through, and an understanding of where people are potentially overstepping the line and where mediation is appropriate.

Miss Weekes: Can I move on to communication for all? Again, this has been touched on by the chairman, but I want to take it further into a much more important general area. Like the Met, you undoubtedly are burdened by a huge amount of statute, case law, changes in statute and case law, procedures and policies, and you are a big organisation.

I think you gave us your figures of how many employees you deal with.

Mr Pickup: About 23,000.

Miss Weekes: 23,000. What is your best method of communicating policies, regulations and guidance to your employees?

Mr Pickup: Well, we have a number of – we do not just rely on one strand of communication.

Miss Weekes: Do you have a best method? I can come to the numbers you have got, but is there a best method?

Mr Pickup: I think, from my point of view, the best method is our intranet; we have an internal intranet system, and any main news or information or policy change or procedure change, there is a news site which will automatically come up as soon as you enter the intranet system, and on there, those main changes are notified. So that is probably our most successful –

Miss Weekes: Are you sure that your employees log on and read it?

Mr Pickup: Well, it depends on the nature. We had an example of a discipline matter which was causing us enormous problems, and it was misuse of the Internet and misuse of e-mails, many organisations have this problem.

So what we eventually did – we did try different communication methods, we have a bulletin system to notify managers, we tried going out to individual staff; the message still was not getting home.

So what we did was put a message on everybody's computer system – most people in the department have a computer, and when they log on, before they were entitled to actually get into the system, it automatically transferred them to a statement on the misuse and use of the Internet system, so we were absolutely certain that the vast majority of people read it, because they had to sign that they had read it, and had to go through the procedure of reading it, before they were entitled to access to their system.

That is probably an extreme example, but generally speaking, it is quite difficult in a national organisation of 23,000 to make sure you are getting your communication across. It is quite difficult, we do not succeed all the time.

Ms Purkis: We have a communications and marketing division, and that actually has communications advisors who are dedicated to the particular business streams, and what they will try and do is pick up what sort of patterns of communication there are, so there were certain areas of the organisation where people were not looking to the intranet all the time, so they make more use of particular bulletins.

So really, those communications advisors should understand the best mechanisms for communicating and test those mechanisms as they go along. It does not always work, as Bill says, but that is one of the attempts to get it right.

Miss Weekes: So how do you test that the organisation is aware of changes, or they are aware of the way you wish frontline officers to behave, and staff to behave? How do you change culture from up to down?

Mr Pickup: Yes, it is very difficult. I mean, there is not really one way of doing that, you have to approach it from a whole range of different methods, from, if you are looking to change the culture, we would introduce management training.

For example, when our previous chairman came in three years ago, he instituted a whole range of seminars for all senior managers that he personally attended, to get across the new message and the new culture that he wanted, so there could be no miscommunication.

That was then followed up with a series of bulletin announcements and further training packages, so that was specifically targeted at senior management. Unless you change the senior management culture, you are not going to change the culture below that.

Miss Weekes: Well, you will be pleased to know the Met also use intranet. Do you have any views about what is the next best thing to intranet, because if not everybody has a computer, and you are on a busy, long night shift, the last thing you are going to do is to log on.

Mr Pickup: Well, certainly the feedback from the number of opinion polls that have been done with our department – the feedback is that staff much prefer face-to-face communication.

Miss Weekes: That is rather interesting.

Mr Pickup: By a distance.

Miss Weekes: Do you think you can fulfil that face to face?

Mr Pickup: It has become more difficult, with the way the department is structured, and you can have one senior manager who is responsible for a vast area within the department, so it does make it more difficult.

But a senior manager is not going to necessarily communicate with all the 1,000 members of staff individually, but, as long as that senior manager communicates with the people he is directly responsible for on a face-to-face basis, and then hopefully cascade it through the organisation that way – but that is certainly the method preferred by everybody. In my experience, it is the one that is most effective.

Miss Weekes: Time-consuming but most effective.

Mr Pickup: It is very difficult to get across an attitude in a document, but an attitude can come across when you are talking to someone and communicating with them face to face.

Miss Weekes: Are you convinced that going to the trouble – because it will be quite a lot of trouble, if one thinks about how busy operational officers are – I am not making excuses, I am looking at the reality; how busy some of your frontliners are.

How do you sell that? How do you sell, "Yes, we had better go down the route of face to face, as opposed to intranet"?

Mr Pickup: Well, I think certainly most officers pride themselves on being professional, and the only way you can be professional in a fast changing world is to keep on top of information.

Everybody in our department is not only – well, most people in our department are not only managers but they actually have a manager above them, so all they have to do is provide to their staff in a way that they would expect their manager to treat them.

So if their manager is setting – this is why it is important to change the senior management culture, because if the senior managers take the time and make the effort, despite being extremely busy, like everybody is, to have the face-to-face communication and make the important communications with individuals, that sets the tone, and the individuals would then respond likewise, or most individuals would then respond positively and say, "Well, that is the way to do it, that is the way to go – I am now going to speak to the people who I am responsible for".

Miss Weekes: Thank you for that. Timing, you have mentioned; and it would appear that you are not too different to the Met in having to cope with the longitudal nature of disciplinary hearings and the process. Have you tried to shorten the time?

Mr Pickup: Yes, we have.

Miss Weekes: I expected that answer, but I thought I had better have it from you.

Mr Pickup: Up until three years ago, we did not have an Internal Investigation Division. The responsibility for investigating these cases and dealing with discipline and coming up with the penalty and whether the person was guilty was left to the local managers, and the local managers would just have to find whoever was around or whoever was available to do the investigation.

They perhaps dealt with one of these every 10 or 15 years, they had no experience of it, did not know what the procedures and law was, and it was massively unprofessional.

So we centralised this three years ago, and through centralising, it became more proficient. We certainly had a number of tribunal cases on the basis of the length of time that it was taking to do these investigations. One of the key indicators for us was to be able to demonstrate we progressed these cases as fast as possible.

It does not mean we do not have cases that have lasted a long time, but it means we can show that we have done everything we possibly can to reduce it.

So it certainly has been a success in that respect; we are not there yet, we are never going to get to the stage where we do everything within three months, but we certainly have reduced, generally speaking, the length of time it has taken.

We have also looked to fast track certain cases; instead of waiting for the police, for example, to finish their investigations, we work very closely with the police, and in some cases, they are prepared to release the evidence to us, which we can then use in a discipline process.

Because most of our lengthy investigations are as a direct result of criminal investigations running in parallel with them, so we have specifically targeted those, and we try and introduce the discipline process at the earliest possible stage.

Miss Weekes: As all your employees are employees, with terms of contract, you are entitled to proceed to disciplinary at any stage and you are entitled to sack them at any stage, whether or not there is a criminal proceeding pending; correct?

Mr Pickup: That is correct, yes.

Miss Weekes: Do you wait until a criminal proceeding has been dealt with?

Mr Pickup: We try not to, but it depends whether we have access to the evidence, because there are a number of criminal investigations which are started by the police and not referred by us, and in those cases, we are very much dependent on whether they are prepared to release the evidence or not. In many cases, they are not, because quite naturally, they do not want to compromise the criminal investigation.

Miss Weekes: When you say you have centralised it, is it that it is now all in one department, the question of investigations and the disciplinary process, is that what you mean by centralisation?

Mr Pickup: Yes, it means that the responsibility for conducting the internal investigation is in one place, and the responsibility for taking the decision on whether a charge, a discipline charge, should be laid, is central; and also, the disciplinary hearing panel procedure is centralised in one place now as well, and all that means that because, you know, it is a more slick operation, the time between each of those phases is now a matter of days.

Miss Weekes: One of the issues raised about the way that the Met run this, and it might be similar to your own, is the independence of those who investigate. The officers complained of would often want to have more independence about what is going on. That tends to be communication, but it is also about their ability to trust the system; is that ever raised with those complained of?

Mr Pickup: Yes, I mean, we can never be completely independent of Customs and Excise, because we are employees of Customs and Excise, and we did recognise this when we were set up three years ago. I think there is scope for there being an external overseeing body; I mean, the police have got the Independent Police Complaints Commission, as you well know.

To a great extent for criminal investigations, we already have that independence, ie, it is the police who do the investigation, but generally speaking, the complainants and the managers are very happy to pass over the responsibility to the Internal Investigation Division, and do see us as independent as possible.

We are actually situated in a non-operational directorate; I mentioned that there were the three strands. There is the law enforcement strand, there is the business services strand, and there is the corporate services element. We report within the corporate services element, so we are not involved in any of the line management for the operational staff, and I think that is very important.

Miss Weekes: Would you think it an advantage if there was someone, independent actually of your own centralised system, who was responsible for bringing everybody to book about the time that is spent on disciplinary investigations?

Mr Pickup: Independent from the department? Yes.

Miss Weekes: Simply for this, we are considering it, so we ask everyone about it, because we want to understand the pros and cons of such a suggestion.

A number of witnesses that we have put this to have said, "Yes, we would welcome an individual who was able to say to an investigating officer, 'Well you have now had three months, can you tell me what is going on? How much longer will you need? Why do you need that time?'" another example of what that independent person would do is to make decisions about disclosure of documents. Not all documents in an investigation are often disclosed, because of PII.

Another issue that would come up is the fixing of the date for the disciplinary, quite a bit ahead, so all parties can work towards it; and that person can finally say, "Enough is enough, here is the deadline, you have to go at that stage or you do not go at all".

Now, do you see that as having an advantage – there may be other disadvantages, but it has the advantage of ensuring that you do not decide how long you take, the complainant sees transparency, that he can complain to that independent person, and that person has the responsibility of ensuring that all the cases in your organisation are moved forward?

Mr Pickup: I do not see how any law enforcement organisation can go forward without that independence.

Miss Weekes: I am mirroring, obviously, crown courts, civil courts, and every other court in the land, but you think that is the way forward?

Mr Pickup: I do. Within our organisation, we have done as much as we can. I am brought to book every three months by a committee made up of directors and our chairman, and they go through all the individual sensitive cases, and challenge me on the timescales that have been taken, ask what is going on, ask how we can shorten it. So we do everything we can in the department, up to and including chairman level, to make sure that happens.

But I think from the complainant's point of view, we are only ever going to be seen as officers of Customs and Excise.

Miss Weekes: And the ultimate protection for everyone, I am suggesting, is that this person should have legal qualifications and be subject to JR, because a decision about whether you stop a case, whether you give further time for genuine investigations, is obviously quite an important one.

Mr Pickup: When you say "JR"?

Miss Weekes: Judicial review of the decisions they make. That gives everybody the complete protection, that decisions are being made judicially.

Mr Pickup: Yes, I would agree with that.

Ms Purkis: We have some elements of that within the existing system with the central grievance and appeals team, in terms of keeping track of cases and making sure things are moving forward, but it is not that –

Miss Weekes: Not quite as precise?

Ms Purkis: – high a level; you know, that is ratcheting up the sort of controls and authority you would have over the process.

Mr Pickup: We already have an external complaints adjudicator, but they tend to be complaints that are dealing with business issues and processes rather than –

Miss Weekes: Rather than somebody who just takes control of all of your cases, and watches them and lists them, and deals with adjournments.

If it is something that you do think is the way forward, it would certainly help me if you could write your thoughts on paper about it, and how it would work with Customs, because you are so similar to the Met; you could certainly help us on that, if you did not mind doing that piece of work.

I only have two other small points, if I may, and it is how you deal with the outcome of disciplinaries, the outcome of ET cases. I know you will understand the word "debrief"; do you have a debrief on every single case? I know you have mentioned in your document that there are, in fact, some form of "complete quality decision documents that confirm the rationale, integrity and independence of well-founded management decisions", but I am much more interested in whether you, on a regular basis, monitor why an ET case happened at all; why you settled, what is the trend of what people complain about, and do you gather that information in order to sit round a table to say, "Now this organisation over the last year have had X number of cases, this is the trend, what are we going to do about it?"

Ms Purkis: Our grievance and appeals team does an awful lot of that, and, as I say, they – going back to the previous point you mentioned, in terms of listings and adjournments and things like that, that is their role in the process at the moment.

What they will do is obtain all sorts of information back from employment tribunals. They track the cases as they are going through employment tribunal, they co-ordinate all our input to cases. They work very closely with our employment lawyers as well, in developing cases and determining whether it is something that is appropriate for an economic settlement or whatever, exploring the various options, and, as a result of cases, they will then look back and try and work out, "Well, what lessons are there? What went wrong?"

So I think the one case that we lost last year at employment tribunal was to do with the fixed time regulations, and what we identified was there was some uncertainty about how those applied to people, how did we change things, did we need to issue guidance on this. So they do very much look at what comes out from the employment tribunals to do that.

Miss Weekes: Do you do it across the board, apart from that helpful example you have told us about?

Ms Purkis: What they have is, for all the cases they are monitoring the progress, they get the information back following the employment tribunal, they are co-ordinating the input as well, plus, some of the cases – not all of them, of course, because if they go straight to employment tribunal, it is not something that has been through either our discipline or our internal processes, it might be that we do not know much about that case, but, as soon as the documentation hits the employment tribunal, that team is involved.

Mr Pickup: From a discipline point of view, we keep quarterly statistics which provide us with trend analysis on which cases – if there are any new trends emerging or difficult areas. If I could just mention one important point: as far as I am concerned, we are not here as an organisation to try and investigate more and more serious misconduct cases and find more and more serious misconduct cases. The prime focus for us is to prevent them happening in the first place. So we recognised this when we set up our internal investigation and we have spent a lot of time trying to concentrate on the prevention side of the strategy.

Now that is a key thing for us to do, and what we ask each investigator and each senior manager who comes across a case in our division is they have to identify systems weaknesses that fall out of the discipline case, and many of them do have a systems weakness, and then we would go back to the system owner, we would go back to our auditors, go back to the local managers, point out the system weakness, and try and get them to re-engineer it so that does not happen again.

The last thing we can afford to do is have a series of, say, corruption cases that all revolve around the same sort of area and we have not done anything about it. So our strategy really, in the first instance, is to try and reduce these cases coming, reduce the number of discrimination cases that are brought to us, rather than just continually investigate them, and we use the trend analysis and the management information to see where we should target it.

An example again is the Internet abuse one, which was getting out of hand last year, and, if you look at our trend analysis figures, all of a sudden, it went from nothing to being the biggest bar on the chart, and we finally came across a reasonably successful method now, and that is now reducing. So that is our general approach to all our discipline cases.

Miss Weekes: Okay, thank you very much.

Sir William Morris: Mr Pickup, at this stage, I should be introducing Sir Anthony, but we do have a practice in providing a reasonable rest time for our transcript writers, so I am proposing to adjourn for about five to seven minutes.

11.45 am
(A short break)
11.55 am

Sir William Morris: Thanks for your patience. We will go straight into the questions from Sir Anthony Burden.

Questions by Sir Anthony Burden

Sir Anthony Burden: Good morning. I would like to deal primarily with human resource matters if I may, but can I just – I am sorry to labour this point on the employment status and office of constable, but there is one very important similarity, of course: dealing with the level of criminality that your staff has to, they are susceptible to false allegations, as police officers are, and the further up the criminal chain you go, the more vulnerable you become to that.

Has your workforce ever raised the issue in terms of their employment status of needing added protection?

Mr Pickup: Not that I am aware of.

Sir Anthony Burden: So they feel quite comfortable in working with normal employment status, that provides the protection they feel is adequate in confronting that sort of individual, that sort of organised criminality?

Mr Pickup: Yes, I think it is fair to say that we are facing more and more serious allegations by people going through the criminal justice system, but I think the combination of our own set-up and passing things over to the police to investigate, so far, I think, officers are reasonably content with.

Sir Anthony Burden: Good, thank you. You mentioned earlier your active management culture programme, triggered by undermanagement. Can I ask you to explain a little bit more about that programme, please?

Ms Purkis: Well, essentially, it is when Sir Richard Broadbent joined us. As I say, his initial analysis on looking at the organisation was that managers were not really taking responsibility for managing delivery, managing the staff in their area, dealing with problems, actually bringing in the people they needed to work in their area. It was that taking responsibility for delivery, and bringing management hand in hand with actually needing to do that many visits, or that many knocks, or whatever.

So he recognised that what we need to do is try and overcome that, and some of that was about just telling people that that was what was expected of them, and you would tell managers that they are expected to manage people, but you also, through our performance management system, made it very clear that there were certain behaviours and attributes that were required of you as an individual, and your performance would in part be assessed on that basis.

So part of it was about giving out that message, and then, as Bill said earlier, some of it was about going out, meeting individual staff, targeting groups of senior managers to actually move this forward, and act as role models.

Behind that as well, it was about developing further management training as well, because you can empower people to make all these decisions, but management decisions, like anything else, involve risks, and you need to ensure you are aware of the legal framework, you need to ensure that you are actually being fair, that the way you are behaving is consistent with the principles of natural justice, so there was a need to have further management training, which we are still continuing to develop.

Mr Pickup: I think just to point out the three or four key themes of active management: leadership, not management which is something that many organisations are trying to aspire to, good communication and effective team working, so those are sort of three of the main key points of active management.

Sir Anthony Burden: I mean, to persuade people to manage, their willingness to do so is often dictated by the culture in which they work. At the time this work was undertaken, if we had gone to your managers and asked them the question whether they felt they were working in a risk-taking culture or a blame culture, what do you think they would have said?

Ms Champion: They would have said a blame culture.

Sir Anthony Burden: That is why they kept their heads down on occasions, do you think?

Ms Champion: That is right, absolutely right. I think it is important, though, to acknowledge that in promoting an active management culture, it was pushing against an open door, in the sense that managers actually wanted to take responsibility, so it was not an uphill struggle to get people to actively manage.

It was introduced, I think, as a very sort of – another important strand of active management was about reducing the processes, so there was an overhaul of the whole performance management system at that time, and a lot of bureaucracy was stripped out of the performance management system in order to enable managers to actively manage more effectively.

Sir Anthony Burden: Yes. And, of course, I guess the very clear unequivocal message from your chairman helped.

Ms Champion: Yes, absolutely.

Sir Anthony Burden: And he was willing – I mean, receiving this message that there was a blame culture in existence, and needing to shift that, people received the message, "As long as you do your best, that is okay, mistakes are made, we learn and we move on".

Ms Champion: Yes. I would not say we have absolutely got that right yet; you know, that is quite a long process, that does not happen just because somebody says, "We are not going to have that any more", you know, it actually takes a little bit of evolution to get that worked out.

Sir Anthony Burden: But you are on the journey?

Ms Champion: We are on the journey, yes.

Mr Pickup: And he started that off with face-to-face communication, as I said, with all senior managers, for setting that culture straight away.

Sir Anthony Burden: Good, thank you. You have explained very helpfully that you have got a central grievance and appeals procedure, but in terms of people management generally, would you describe yourself as a devolved organisation or a centrally run HR organisation?

Ms Champion: Very devolved.

Sir Anthony Burden: I am very interested in the fact that you have introduced human resource managers. Can I just ask you, in terms of your structure – the Inland Revenue described themselves as having business units; are you regionally based, in terms of management structures, or functionally based?

Ms Purkis: We are functionally based.

Sir Anthony Burden: So if I am a Customs officer at Felixstowe, looking at my hierarchy, how would I sort of describe the organisation, as it relates to me?

Mr Pickup: Well, we were, up until three years ago, based on the regions, so you probably worked with your line manager, and their line manager, and their line manager above them, but having gone functional now, your line manager can be in a completely different office, different part of the county or even the country, and certainly your senior managers may be 100 miles away from you, so that has been one of the downsides of functional management.

Sir Anthony Burden: If you are a senior Customs officer and you are dealing with an HR issue, a female Customs officer comes to you and says, "I want part-time working", and you are not quite certain about the rules which would apply to that, where would you go to get the human resource expertise on that subject?

Ms Champion: You would go to the service centre.

Ms Purkis: First of all, it would actually be on-line guidance. What we are trying to encourage, in common with a lot of people who are introducing EHR programmes, is that there is an element of self-service, so essentially, you, as an individual, should be looking at what information is available on the intranet.

We have then centralised our HR service provision into a national service centre, so if you cannot get the advice from the intranet, then you would raise it with the service centre. If it is a complex issue, they would then draw on the resources behind them, and the sort of policy teams and centres of expertise.

You can also get information locally or support from your HR managers, they will be helping at sort of the strategic level to work out where the business is going and planning for it, but also in some of the more complex cases, they can provide some support as well.

Sir Anthony Burden: So HR managers, which you refer to in your submission, they are actually devolved out across the country, are they?

Ms Purkis: They are actually resourced within the business areas as well. They are not an HR controlled resource, so the business areas have a role in determining how they want to use those resources.

Sir Anthony Burden: I just want to make sure I am absolutely clear on that. So would it be right to say that there is an HR manager/expert available within a business area?

Ms Purkis: Yes.

Sir Anthony Burden: How many staff would that HR manager be responsible – not responsible for, but responsible for responding to?

Ms Purkis: Well, their focus probably is more on the senior people, is it not, a lot of the time?

Ms Champion: Yes, in terms of how many people would be represented by that HR manager, probably, as a very rough rule of thumb, about 1,000 people, but it varies a bit, obviously, from business to business, and location to location, but roughly, 1,000 people.

Sir Anthony Burden: But it would not be fair to say, though, would it, what you have described, with functional structuring, you have not got this hierarchy now which says, "Business area manager with HR manager responsible to", that does not exist in your organisation, it is much more fluid around the functional structuring.

Ms Champion: Yes.

Sir Anthony Burden: But a very heavy reliance on e-technology to make sure that people are able to access information.

Ms Champion: Yes.

Sir Anthony Burden: Have you put a lot of effort into making sure that that e-technology is user friendly?

Ms Purkis: The programme at the moment is still at the implementation stage. We have a national service centre; we have also launched a new HR intranet site, which has consolidated what was previously on a number of sites. We are also in the process of rewriting and reformatting all the various guidance, because there is a big issue in terms of how user friendly, how accessible the guidance is, and I think the feedback we have been getting on the intranet site is good.

So there is the information provision side, and we have got a central communications team on the HR side, who look to improve that all the time.

You have then got the sort of self-service functionality, so being able to do TMS forms or apply for leave, and that is going through quite an extensive programme of user testing at the moment.

Sir Anthony Burden: So with functional structuring, which tends to deal with the upper end, you have got your service delivery units, or whatever you call them, local offices, like the Customs local VAT and the Customs services VAT; would your local managers who are responsible for dealing with personnel issues, HR issues – would they, do you feel, feel confident that they have a broad band of knowledge provided by you around the policies that would apply in relation to managing people, and for example, family friendly policies?

Ms Champion: Yes.

Sir Anthony Burden: They would. And how have you ensured that they have got that level of knowledge? Has a lot of effort gone into that? Has it been around training?

Ms Purkis: I think there are various levels, are there not, because there has been the need to develop improved management training, and there are various modules being piloted now, but the idea is that we will have improved management training for people.

That will cover all sorts of issues, but some of it will be the HR sort of technical issues, some of the legal frameworks that people are operating within.

There is also the ongoing need to provide decent guidance, and to ensure that that guidance is user friendly, people can understand it.

What we want to do is – having the national service centre provides a real opportunity to have a central point where, if we are getting a whole load of queries on a particular subject, we can identify, well, why, and that, in turn, can help us improve the guidance and identify, "Well, is it because the guidance is not written properly? Is it because the policy is flawed? What is the reason?"

So I think it is that constant revisiting of the guidance and making sure it is actually communicating the message that we want to.

Mr Pickup: I should also mention that on the intranet system, there is a learning management system, which is a database of a whole range of different types of courses, so if an individual wants to learn about HR process or wants to learn about conduct and discipline, they can select the appropriate package on the learning management system and work their way through it on the intranet. So that is another mechanism which they can use.

Sir Anthony Burden: Can I deal finally with the gender agenda? I apologise for not knowing much about the history of your organisation; was it once a male bastion?

Ms Champion: It was, prior to 1972.

Sir Anthony Burden: Right. Then the gender agenda is a very appropriate subject. Is it alive and well, and what supports it?

Ms Champion: In terms of the gender agenda, I would say that we have been very alive to that, because of our history, and our recent statistics show that if we continue the trend of promoting and developing women in the ratio that we are doing at the moment, in about five years time, the balance will flip the other way, there will become a majority –

Sir Anthony Burden: Five years?

Ms Champion: In five years' time, it will become majority female, and the majority of senior management posts will be filled by females, who will be younger, on average, than their male counterparts. So in a sense, we have done very, very well with our gender agenda; in fact, we have started to worry that we are doing slightly too well now.

Sir Anthony Burden: What has been the success factor?

Ms Champion: I think the success factor has got to be about – has been about positive action, a very active programme of positive action. And I think it has been a lot about culture, because of the difficulties that we had with being an all-male organisation, and having those all-male views that were entrenched in the organisation, there has been a lot of positive management decisions about how we manage, you know, the gender agenda.

So in a sense, a lot of effort has gone into it, a lot of cultural emphasis on, you know, what it actually – how it actually impacts on the department if we do not get that right, the sorts of things we should be doing to put things right. So it is just about effort really.

Mr Pickup: I can perhaps give some examples from my own division; when we set it up three years ago, we were very concerned about this male culture, particularly that there is a macho culture, particularly in investigation, so we used the full range of facilities available to us in the department. We introduced time off in lieu facilities, we have flexible working, we have part-time staff, we have term-time working staff, so we have the full benefits available, and we are now in a position where the majority, more than 50 per cent of our staff are women.

Sir Anthony Burden: The way you describe it, if I can say, very sincerely, it seems to me as though there has been an acceptance in your organisation that that brings value, as opposed to being a pain to manage.

Mr Pickup: That is exactly right, yes. Unless you have this diversity and different attitudes and different approaches to things, you do not have a balanced workforce and you do not have a balanced team.

Sir Anthony Burden: Can I just ask you – apologies, ladies, but can I ask you, as somebody who – how long is your service in the Customs?

Mr Pickup: I have done 23 years.

Sir Anthony Burden: So you have come from the old culture, basically, into this new enlightened culture. From a male Customs officer viewpoint, what has been the selling point? I mean, you have suddenly moved from a macho culture, which I am very familiar with, into an enlightened environment that says, "Look, you know, these modern business practices around family-friendly policies are good for this organisation", as opposed to, "Well, if my female colleague is off, the workload swings to me", you know, which is a false premise, let me say, but what has been the deciding factor, do you think, within the male workforce?

Mr Pickup: Well, I think that a team that is well balanced is far more efficient, and I think also, many of the men are married and they see the benefits of people taking maternity leave from their own personal perspective, so they are hardly likely to come to work and say, "Well, actually, that member of staff should not be allowed it either".

Speaking personally, it was easy for me, because my wife was a member of Customs and Excise, and so she has benefitted from that as well, but I do not know, I just think that people see there is a benefit, an efficiency that is gained.

If you have a mono culture in a team or an organisation, you are missing out so much. You are not as efficient. You may think you are, and you will try and preserve that, but the reality is, if you have a mixed team and you put the two teams together, a mixed team against a team that has a mono culture, the mixed team will win hands down.

You have got to challenge the perceptions that it is not wrong to take maternity leave, it is not wrong to work part-time. Part-time people, on a value for money basis, in my experience, are actually better value for money than people who work full-time, because they tend to give far more, and they tend to do more hours than people who are full-time.

So it is a whole range of factors, but I think generally speaking, ultimately, people recognise it is an efficiency factor, it is a more pleasant environment as well, if the team, the organisation you work in, reflects society. It just makes sense.

Ms Champion: I think organisationally, one of the things we did very early was to embrace the diversity agenda, as opposed to the equal opportunities agenda as well, so where the equal opportunities agenda was very often seen as being a very excluding sort of agenda, which focused on minority groups, raising the diversity agenda, which embraced all the different groups, if you like, including the white male majority group, was actually a very positive step. We did that very early on.

Sir Anthony Burden: So moving away from gender or race, do you feel Customs, as an organisation, the culture within the organisation, embraces difference well?

Ms Champion: I think it does. I think I have to say that it is a mixed picture. There are still areas obviously where that works better. I am not saying we have got it right, or we are great, but I think we do pretty well, and it is about culture.

Sir Anthony Burden: In supporting minority groups, let us stay with the gender agenda for a moment, are there network organisations within Customs that are supportive?

Ms Champion: Yes, there are. Funnily enough, there used to be a lot of sort of female only groups, but they are actually dwindling away now, and the more active networks are, in fact, the gay and lesbian group, the ethnic minority group and the disability network, and they are very active and very widespread.

In fact, in dealing with, I think, conduct and discipline cases, they are a route which, you know, is used by members of staff in order to escalate issues, particularly where perhaps the line management relationship has broken down.

Sir Anthony Burden: Thank you very much, that is very helpful indeed.

Sir William Morris: Mr Pickup, Ms Champion and Ms Purkis, can I just say that we want to record our thanks for your help. We have now concluded the questions that we wanted to explore with you, but you will recall that in my opening statement, I said that at the conclusion of our questions, I would offer you a brief opportunity to make any closing comments, if you so wished. If you do wish, now is your moment.

Mr Pickup: Not from me, thank you.

Ms Champion: No, thank you.

Ms Purkis: No, thank you.

Sir William Morris: Right, no takers. Some concluding words that I have to offer, and it is this: as with all our witnesses, it may be that once we have heard from other witnesses, we may want to ask a few more questions of you, either in writing or indeed ask you to have another session with us, in terms of oral hearings.

If we do decide to seek further information from you, we shall do so in a way that causes you and the organisation the least possible inconvenience, but for the moment, I just want to take the opportunity, on behalf of my colleagues, to thank you for your written submission, your very candid and helpful response to our questions this morning, and to thank you and the organisation overall for the contribution that you are making to our work. We are very grateful, thank you all very much indeed.

We stand adjourned until 2.00 pm this afternoon.

12.15 pm
(The short adjournment)

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	Archive note 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. Page summary This resource is from the Transcripts section. This section contains a transcript of the public session with HM Customs and Excise, on 28 April 2004. Sections available here: Transcript of public session: Ms J Champion, Ms A Purkis and Mr W Pickup of HM Customs and Excise Questions by Sir William Morris Questions by Miss Weekes Questions by Sir Anthony Burden Alternative versions This transcript is also available with original line and page numbering. Content Transcript of public session: Ms J Champion, Ms A Purkis and Mr W Pickup of HM Customs and Excise Wednesday, 28 April 2004 10.30 am Sir William Morris: Good morning. Ms Champion, can I say good morning and welcome to you and your colleagues. Please make yourself as comfortable as you possibly can. Can I start by saying thank you very much indeed for accepting our invitation to attend the Inquiry this morning to give us some evidence? Thank you also for letting us have your written submission which we found extremely helpful. I appreciate that, for some witnesses, the process may be somewhat daunting, so I thought it might be helpful if I set out how we propose to conduct the inquiry, and indeed the hearing, this morning. But first, let me introduce myself and the other members of the panel. My name is Bill Morris, I am the recently retired General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union, but as you can see, there are two other members of the panel. 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 an eminent barrister, she sits as a recorder and a part-time chairperson of employment tribunals. She was also counsel to the Lawrence Inquiry. As you know, we have been asked by the Metropolitan Police Authority to conduct an independent inquiry into professional standards and employment matters in the Metropolitan Police Service. Our focus is the MPS as an organisation and not the individuals who make up the organisation. The Inquiry we are conducting is inquisitorial and not adversarial in tone, content or character. We are very keen to enquire into the issues raised by our terms of reference in order that we can make appropriate recommendations for the further good practice within the MPS, rather than concentrating on criticisms of the organisation or individuals. It is in that context that we have asked you to give evidence today. Can I just draw to your attention that a transcript is being taken, so that we 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 colleague, Miss Weekes, and then Sir Anthony Burden, with any supplementary questions that might be necessary. At the conclusion of our questions, I will offer you the opportunity for a brief closing comment, if you so wish. You very helpfully provided us with a written submission on behalf of your organisation, the Customs and Excise, and a copy of that submission, together with today's evidence, will be posted on our website as well. In your submission, you have drawn attention to a number of matters, and, for the record, I will just say that they are the structure of HM Customs and Excise, and how it is organised and managed; the issue of independent scrutiny also emerges; the context of restructuring and organisational change has also been highlighted; and finally, you give us examples of best practice. We would like to ask you some questions about the material before us, and to explore with you all these issues of particular interest to our terms of reference. But before we raise these matters, however, for the benefit of the transcript, I wonder if I might invite you to introduce yourself and indeed your colleagues. Mr Pickup: My name is Bill Pickup and I am head of the Customs and Excise Internal Investigation Division, which has responsibility for investigating all cases of serious misconduct in the department. Ms Champion: I am Janet Champion, I am head of HR strategy, but currently working on a project with the Inland Revenue. Ms Purkis: I am Annie Purkis, head of personnel advice and services. We have responsibility for a number of policy areas, including conduct and discipline policy. I am also responsible for the HR service centre, and for the operational areas, including employee assistance services, and grievance and appeals. Sir William Morris: Thank you very much indeed. Questions by Sir William Morris Sir William Morris: Can I just start by saying that, as a panel, we are interested in looking at the governance of the MPS and our terms of reference specifically refer us to best practice in the public and indeed private sector. Yesterday, we had the privilege of hearing from your sister organisation, the Inland Revenue, and we explored with them their governance arrangements. You may be aware that as an organisation, they operate on the basis of a departmental board made up of a chairperson and three director generals and non-executive directors, I think there are two, and the director generals and the non-executive directors have responsibility for different areas of the business. I assume that your organisational structure is broadly similar. Please tell me whether that is so, and what other comparisons may be relevant, insofar as the Met is concerned, if there are any. Mr Pickup: Yes, that structure is broadly similar to Customs and Excise. We have a board consisting of one chairman, two director generals and another director, and we have a number of non-executive directors as well, so the similarity is there with the Inland Revenue. Sir William Morris: Am I right in assuming that your reporting upwards is obviously direct to ministers, there is no intermediary sort of political governance between the board and the minister? Mr Pickup: That is correct. Sir William Morris: Internal complaints: I see from your submission that among other duties, Customs and Excise has a law enforcement function, it is a law enforcement agency. Obviously, the size of your organisation is different from that of the MPS, but there are some parallels in the task, law enforcement. I am assuming that similar issues of internal complaints, similar issues of HR related to misconduct, arise in your organisation as they do elsewhere. Could you sort of just share with us broadly, because one of my colleagues might want to explore some details, but what are the arrangements for dealing with these matters, such as misconduct? Ms Purkis: Essentially, if there is a complaint or there is any issue regarding an officer's conduct, it is the responsibility of managers to deal with that. If it is a complaint about a manager, that would be raised with another senior manager in the area. As soon as someone becomes aware of a potential misconduct issue, that should be referred to our Internal Investigation Division. The Internal Investigation Division has a responsibility to look at the facts of the case at that stage, and establish whether or not they think there is in fact misconduct involved. If there is misconduct, we have a two-tier process where, if it is misconduct in itself, that would be referred back to local managers for local action, there would be fact finding, there will also be a hearing to determine what should actually be done in terms of a penalty. In cases of gross misconduct, that would be investigated by the Internal Investigation Division, and for information about how that is pursued, Bill Pickup here can provide more details, and that will then go to a central panel which is convened by our grievance and appeals team; again, they will determine what penalty is appropriate. If, when the case is referred to IID, Internal Investigation Division, there is a feeling that there is no misconduct, it is still regarded that there is potentially a problem, and so it would be then referred back to local management to consider whether or not it should be dealt with under our internal grievance procedure. Sir William Morris: There is a propensity here for misunderstanding about what are employment-related issues vis-a-vis the contract of employment, and wider issues of conduct. A number of questions arise in my mind, but, first of all, could you give us an example of what would constitute misconduct – and another example about what would constitute gross misconduct, because the way you have just explained it has left me with the impression, and I put it no higher than that, that there might be different routings for allegations of either misconduct or gross misconduct, and I just need a little bit of clarity, if you can help. Mr Pickup: Yes, certainly. I should point out that complaints and allegations can come from any source: they can come from members of the public, they can come from managers, they can come from staff, they can come from other law enforcement organisations such as the police, so we receive all complaints that have a discipline nature to them. What we first do is take an initial view as to whether it is a misconduct issue, and if it is misconduct, whether it is categorised as more serious, ie gross misconduct, or more of a minor matter, which is just ordinary misconduct. The difference between the two is to some extent – it can be shades of grey, so for example, you can have a complaint of bullying and harassment or discrimination which might be of a minor nature, depending on the context of it, depending on the allegations, depending who was involved, the seniority of the people involved, the nature of the allegations, right the way through to an allegation, for example, of corruption, which would automatically be deemed to be potentially gross misconduct. So there are really sort of three areas, I suppose. One is something that is obviously misconduct, such as a minor theft of time, if somebody is not completing their worksheets accurately. We have an obvious case of gross misconduct, for example, serious criminality, corruption, that sort of thing. Then we have the grey area in the middle, which depends very much on the context and the nature of the allegation. Sir William Morris: Can you be a little bit more specific in terms of an allegation of corruption against a Customs officer which would fall under the category of gross misconduct, as I understand your explanation; would that go to your IID directorate or department, or would it automatically be referred, and by whom, to the IID, and what happens to it after that? Mr Pickup: Most of the cases of corruption we come across are generated through intelligence, and within our own Internal Investigation Division, we have a separate intelligence team, whose responsibility it is to liaise with other law enforcement organisations, and also co-ordinate all intelligence in the department in connection with issues such as corruption, so most of the information becomes self-generating through that intelligence team, or through our own law enforcement people, who are conducting VAT inquiries or drug smuggling inquiries. They can come across examples of corruption and evidence of corruption through that. But all those cases would come first and foremost to our Internal Investigation Division. We would then look at that and take a decision as to whether – how we were going to deal with that, because first and foremost, it is a potential criminal matter, and the Internal Investigation Division – we only do civil investigations, ie, our concentration is only on the discipline element. We do not do criminal investigations. So the first thing we have to decide, if it is a potential corruption, is: who are we going to refer the matter to? If it is corruption that is associated with what we would call an assigned matter, ie, a legal matter that is the responsibility of the department, such as a VAT fraud or a Customs fraud, then we would refer that matter to our own law enforcement officers, which is the criminal investigation arm of Customs and Excise, and we would work in consultation with them to investigate the potential criminality. If it is a corruption matter that is not related to a responsibility of Customs and Excise, we would then speak to our contacts in the local forces, the local police forces, we have a contact in each of the professional standards units, and a protocol with many of the forces, and we would refer the matter to the police. Sir William Morris: Right. In evidence that we have had offered to us, the issue of proportionality of treatment about issues around complaints has emerged; true or false, we are yet to determine. Is that an issue within the Customs and Excise organisation, insofar as your ethnic minority staff are concerned? Mr Pickup: Could you explain "proportionality"? Sir William Morris: Let me explain it. We have had it advanced to us that black police officers in the Metropolitan Police Service proportionately – or disproportionately, I will put it in those terms, are subject to the disciplinary process, compared with their white counterparts. I rightly or wrongly see your organisation, Customs and Excise, as broadly analogous, in terms of you are a uniformed service, you have got a frontline interface with the public, you have an ethnic dimension to the profile, and I am wondering – well, I suspect the same issues might arise, corruption allegations, issues around how people are treated. The evidence has been offered to us – as I have said, we make no determination – that the numbers of black staff who are subject to discipline are out of proportion to the numbers of their white counterparts; proportionality, I think, is a summary word. What I want to just understand is whether or not any of those issues have emerged, insofar as your people management is concerned within the Customs and Excise agency? Ms Purkis: I think this is something where potentially we need more information. The way we operate at the moment is we have the centralised grievance and appeals system; that is for discipline cases, the level 2 discipline areas, we have the central panels. Also where there have been appeals in grievance cases, where grievances have not been resolved locally, and the idea is that in a grievance, where possible, you would like to get them resolved quickly, locally, and support people working together for the future. The only stats we have had that we have broken down that give us much information are the stats we actually provided on the grievance and appeals and employment tribunal figures. Those do not suggest there is a disproportionate approach. There are health warnings on those figures, in that we have a relatively low level of reporting of ethnicity, I think we are running at around 60 per cent, so there are health warnings on those figures. Also, that does not capture all the information broken down by ethnic group for the level 1 discipline issues, or all the information for the grievances which have been resolved locally. So I think there is more that we could do to capture information, but the centrally captured information, which in a way acts as a control anyway, because if things are not resolved locally, they should come to the central panels, does not suggest there is a disproportionality. Ms Champion: I would just like to add that, in terms of perceptions of ethnic minority staff, we have a very active ethnic minority network who feed to us on a regular basis the issues of the ethnic minority staff, and certainly complaint handling is not one of the issues that they raise, you know, as a key issue for them, so in that sense, they, as our sort of focus group, are not coming to us and saying, "We think there is some disproportionality in complaints handling". Mr Pickup: I can also confirm, from an internal investigation point of view, we have never had any representations made from either that group, or the trade union side, or from any individual member of staff, complaining that, as a group, they are disproportionately treated in that process. Sir William Morris: Just on that same theme, it has been suggested to us that in the Metropolitan Police Service, some managers are somewhat diffident to manage and take tough decisions because they are very concerned and apprehensive of being branded as racist or taking decisions which are racist, and, as a result of that, the tendency is to refer the issues upwards rather than dealing with it, what I call management by retreat. Have you had any of those sort of problems at all in the Customs and Excise? Mr Pickup: We get, generally speaking – well, a number of managers who would prefer to refer the matter to the Internal Investigation Division for our judgment, but that is across the whole range of issues. Certainly not – I cannot think of any example specifically which is related to an ethnic – somebody doing management by retreat in relation to a member of the ethnic minorities, no. Ms Purkis: I think there has been a general issue across the organisation where I think, in the documentation that was referred to you, there was the phrase "active management", which was very much a recognition within the organisation that perhaps we were undermanaged, and that there was a need for people to actually tackle management issues and deal with them. What I think we have then got to work out is making sure that you have that balance between best practice from an active management perspective and not overstepping the line and suddenly entering an environment where there is bullying and harassment, but I think there was a tendency before for people sometimes to back away from things, which we have tried to address, but achieving that balance is always a challenge, I think. Mr Pickup: I think for clarity, I should say – I can bring to mind a small number of cases where the individual is what I would classify as a serial complainant, and one or two cases where those people have come from an ethnic minority background, but the managers in those cases certainly managed by retreat, but it was not because of the background of the individual, it was because the individual was a serial complainant, and whoever managed that individual ended up being part of the grievance procedure. But that was driven really by the individual being a serial complainant more than the nature of the individual themselves. Sir William Morris: Yes, okay. You indicated earlier that complaints can emanate from a range of sources, and obviously, complaints can emanate from members of the public, you said that. Let me just give you a hypothetical situation and see where that takes us, because I want to ask one or two questions. Just imagine I am on the overnight flight from Kingston, Jamaica, coming into Gatwick, and when I arrive – it may or may not be one of your targeted flights, but when I arrive, I am kept waiting, and I felt that I had been kept waiting too long, and I felt that the Customs officer did not deal with me appropriately. My allegation is that he or she might have been abusive, offensive, and did not perform at the highest level of public standards which I am sure your officers do. Could you share with me what are the avenues open to me to complain against that Customs officer, and what are the steps that the service take to investigate my complaint – if it does, I do not know; what is the process taken in that hypothetical situation? Mr Pickup: Normally what would happen, the individual would write to the department, usually the manager of the person they are complaining about, and we have, in many areas, a local complaints co-ordinator who is responsible for making sure the complaint is dealt with fully and accurately. The complaints co-ordinators are fully briefed to look for any potential cases of – or allegations of discipline, and if there are any such allegations contained within the complaint – because lots of complaints are to do with business processes rather than complaints against the officer, but if it is actually a complaint against the officer, then in consultation with local senior management, they would refer the matter, in those instances, to the Internal Investigation Division, so although the complaints, generally speaking, do not come direct to ourselves, because individuals out there are not necessarily aware that we exist, there certainly is the process through the local management and the complaints co-ordinator for the matter to be brought to our attention. In the example that you described, if there are allegations of an individual being abused or threatened or, you know, any sort of difficulties along those lines, that would be a matter that should be referred to us for investigation. Sir William Morris: That would go to your IID department? Mr Pickup: Yes, it would. Sir William Morris: If there is prima facie evidence that I am right, there was inappropriate behaviour on behalf of the Customs officer, what happens to him? Mr Pickup: Well, we would first take the differentiation between, is it potentially a serious matter or potentially a more minor matter? If it was a more minor matter, we would refer it back to the local senior management, and they would then tackle it under the minor misconduct procedure, so they would deal with it locally; they would do a brief inquiry, they would find out the response from the individual, and then they would take a decision on whether the individual was guilty of the minor misconduct matter. If at any stage during that process evidence comes to light that it is a more serious case than we first thought, they would refer it back to us. Either way – either we look at it first and decide it is more serious, or it is referred back to us – we would then assign a team of investigators to go – normally, we would go back to the individual who wrote the letter and get further – Sir William Morris: Can I just ask, would your team of investigators come out of your IID department? Mr Pickup: Yes. We have a pool – our Internal Investigation Division has a staff of about 30 staff, and they are all trained internal investigation officers, and they are all equal opportunity trained as well, so they are not just ex-criminal investigators brought in, they know what to look for in these sorts of cases. Normally what we would do is go back to the individual concerned, because people, quite understandably, are quite emotional, the letters they write are quite emotional, and we have to go back and try and get the full facts, in a witness statement format, normally. Having received that, we would then decide what sort of evidence we need to go and collect, and our internal investigators would then undertake a full investigation, they would then produce a full report of the situation. They do not make recommendations at that stage; their job is actually quite a clinical investigation, so they do not have to make recommendations, they just gather the facts. Having gathered the facts, the matter is then reported to a senior manager within the Internal Investigation Division, so again, we are maintaining independence away from the local management. That senior manager in the Internal Investigation Division goes through the report; if there is more information that is required, he retasks the investigators. If not, that senior manager has to decide whether a charge of either gross misconduct, if it is serious, misconduct, if it is more minor, or simply referred back to management for local management action if that is appropriate. Sir William Morris: Okay, let us assume it is gross misconduct. Mr Pickup: If it is gross misconduct, we would report the matter to a central disciplinary hearing panel, who would convene, normally, within a two week period; they would go through the same evidence that the senior manager in the IID has gone through, they would give the opportunity to the officer to attend and give evidence if he wished to do so, and then they would take a decision on whether or not that officer was guilty; if he was guilty, they would then set the penalty accordingly. Sir William Morris: So at what stage in the process would my complaint be serious enough for criminal proceedings to be considered, assuming I have had a broken nose in the process, when he was trying to search me and I objected? Mr Pickup: Assuming that the complainant has not in fact gone to the police themselves, which in some cases they do, it is right at the start, when the matter is referred to us; so that would not be considered necessarily by the complaints co-ordinator or the local management, they would point it out to us obviously, they would have a view on that, but that is a decision we would take. But before we actually report matters to the police, we would report the matter to our directors, because our directors have the ultimate say as to which matters go to the police. I should point out at this stage that we do have what we call an ACPO protocol agreement, which has just been ratified last year with ACPO, which outlines the types of cases that we must automatically refer, and the types of cases that could be either way, depending on the nature and the context of them, so that sets the governance framework for the decisions that the IID take in which cases should be referred to the police. Sir William Morris: While all this process is in train, do I get any communication from the service to let me know how you are dealing with my complaint? Mr Pickup: Well, initially, we would go back to you, as I mentioned, and we would explain the process then, and we would explain – we would take the further evidence from you. After that, it does tend to be more of an arm's length relationship, because this – the investigations can sometimes take several months before they come to fruition, but, at the end of the process, the complainant obviously would be told what the redress, if any, was that had been taken against the individual, but we would not be going back on a regular basis to the individual. Sir William Morris: One issue which you just touched on has exercised the panel, in terms of evidence offered to us, is time, the time that it takes. Taking a worst case scenario, what is your time experience from a complaint to a settlement resolution, as a worst case scenario, even involving criminal prosecution? Mr Pickup: Well, a worst case scenario is years. Sir William Morris: How many years? Mr Pickup: Many years. Sir William Morris: How many? Can you beat our eight? Mr Pickup: No, we have not quite got to that record, but the reason I would say years is because if there is a criminal prosecution in train, it may not be possible for us to conduct an internal discipline inquiry, so we would put that on hold until the criminal prosecution has gone, so we have got examples where investigations have gone for five years or six years where we have not been able to deal with the disciplinary element. But generally speaking, we would try to deal with 80 per cent of all complaints against an officer within a three-month period, and about 95 per cent, if not higher, are dealt with within a six-month period. Sir William Morris: And if it is a criminal prosecution, does the officer get suspended whilst the process, say, a criminal investigation, is going on, or what happens? Mr Pickup: Yes, it is possible to suspend an officer either with or without pay at any stage during a discipline process or a criminal investigation. We usually take quite a robust line on this, and if anybody was subject to a serious criminal investigation, we would automatically suspend them, or a serious discipline investigation. We do not now do that, because of the length of time involved and the effect it can have on the individual. What we try and do – our first port of call is: can the individual carry on working, bearing in mind the nature of the allegation? If they cannot continue working in the work area, we are a large department, there may be another type of work area, bearing in mind the allegation, that is quite suitable for the individual to remain employed on. If that is not an option, then ultimately, we would have to suspend the individual, and, as an organisation, we probably have around 15 individuals on suspension at any one time. Sir William Morris: Okay. Thank you very much, that is extremely helpful. Just moving on to a different area of interest for us is the issue of the employment status of police officers. The office of constable has been long established; it carries certain rights and duties, but it also carries obligations, naturally, and a succinct way of encapsulating these is expressed as "servants of the Crown". Do Customs and Excise officers have the same sort of status as servants of the Crown? Mr Pickup: It is not a title that I have heard before. Sir William Morris: So from an employment perspective, they are deemed and treated like any other employee, with contracts, and they have rights to access industrial tribunals about employment issues? Mr Pickup: Yes, that is correct. Sir William Morris: No constraints at all? Mr Pickup: No. The only slight difference, I think, is that when an individual is dismissed from our department, their initial right of recourse is to the Civil Service Appeals Board. But thereafter, they have the full right of recourse to a tribunal. Sir William Morris: That is part of the procedure; okay, fine. I am advised, in the overall context of government re-organisation and reform of public service – I am aware that a conversation is taking place for amalgamation between the Customs and Excise and the Inland Revenue, which we were privileged to hear from yesterday. Can I ask whether that process of amalgamating terms and conditions and structures and governance – have you got a project team that is dealing with that issue, or is it being done by external facilitators? How are you approaching this structural amalgamation? You know, what is the model, what are the benefits? Ms Champion: There are a number of project teams running looking at various aspects of the work of the two departments, so I think there are nine what are called transition projects running, one of which is looking at HR, another one of which is looking at taxation, and so on and so forth, looking at the nine main areas of the departments' work. At the moment, until the new chief executive is announced or appointed, in a sense, no decisions are going to be taken about the way forward, because obviously, that will be for the chief executive to do. So the transition committee is putting work in train towards what the future might look like, in terms of preparing options, by the end of May. Sir William Morris: Okay. Just a final question from me, just staying with re-organisation: I know that the Customs and Excise, the re-organisation that you face as a result of amalgamation is only one of a series in the last decade that you have had. Can I ask, in the light of previous change initiatives, whether there are any lessons to be learnt that you would like to offer, and how was the task undertaken? Mr Pickup: Certainly, from my perspective, one of the lessons is, when there is significant change, there is a need to have a robust complaints procedure in place, and a robust procedure for identifying discipline and potential cases of indiscipline, because when there is a lot of change, there is a lot of uncertainty, people's attitudes to the organisation can change, so I think it is very important that everybody is aware what is expected of them as they go through that process, and what the process is, should they fall short of those standards. Sir William Morris: Thank you very much indeed, you have been extremely helpful. Can I invite my colleague Miss Weekes to ask you a few questions? Questions by Miss Weekes Miss Weekes: Thank you. These questions are going to be for any of the three of you, I will leave it entirely to yourselves. Can I come back, if I may, to an aspect of the difference, if there is any, between frontline officers and those who work on what I would call important admin duties; is that the right terminology to distinguish the frontliners from those who work in the office, or do you have a particular description for your frontline officers and those who work on admin? Mr Pickup: No, that is acceptable. Miss Weekes: That is acceptable. In the Met, they are called police officers and police staff, to distinguish their roles. As you have heard from the chairman, police officers do not have employee terms or contracts, they do not have employment contracts, essentially, but they have access to employment tribunals for gender and race discrimination issues. Police staff have full employment law contracts, and they have access to employment tribunals for everything. I think it would help us as a panel to understand, if there is any, the difference between the duties carried out by frontline officers and admin staff; I wonder if one of you could summarise that. I am, of course, familiar with what frontline Customs officers do, but it might be helpful to see the distinctions between their roles and responsibilities, to see whether or not there is the need to have a distinction in their employment law status, because that is an argument we are looking at at the moment; some officers would like to get rid of the distinction altogether, some officers are very concerned about losing the title of being Crown servants. So what is the difference between frontline officers and staff? Mr Pickup: Perhaps I could just mention the structure of the department actually gives you quite an insight into the difference of the jobs within the department. We have three main structures headed each by a director general. The first is our law enforcement function, which is your frontline operational officers dealing with issues such as intelligence, investigation and criminality. The second directorate is our business services and taxation directorate; that really is designed to look after the support of local businesses, it involves the collection of VAT and excise duties, so it is what you could call the law-abiding business side of the department. The third strand is our corporate services. Now, within our corporate services, that covers a wide range of issues, from basic building management through to our HR support functions, our financial management functions, that sort of thing. Historically, as a department, we have seen no difference between any of the officers, where they worked, they all worked on the same terms and conditions of contract; some may have got different pay and different types of allowances. The only distinction I suppose I should make is that operational officers in the past have been deemed to be commissioned officers, ie, they get a specific commission from a director which empowers them to carry out the legal functions of the department, so operational officers in the past have been determined "commissioned officers". Miss Weekes: In the past? Mr Pickup: That is still the case at the moment, but as I say, as a department, we have always prided ourselves that officers should and do get experience across a whole wide range of subjects. There has been quite a lot of movement between our frontline services and our admin support services. The structural changes in the last two years have made a big difference to that, where we now have functions, such as law enforcement, and therefore function streams, so people very much – there is less movement now between frontline and operational services. Miss Weekes: Is there any difficulty expressing, in a contract for a frontline officer, his rather specific duties of arrest, independence, his powers of discretion during an investigation, for example; for the very officer that is going to have to follow PACE and RIPA, these important statutory obligations. Mr Pickup: No, it would just be covered by the general terms and conditions of employment, which cover things like discipline and conduct, but my understanding is they do not specifically go into the details of issues like that, bearing in mind the history of the department is all officers were seen to be equal. Ms Purkis: Those issues would obviously be covered by specific training for the people undertaking particular work, so on an investigation, it would be one particular set of law; if you are looking on the VAT side, as an assurance officer, you have got certain powers, so there is specific training for whatever task people have which would pick up those legal requirements. Miss Weekes: And you would agree that the frontline officers who investigate are almost identical to police officers. Mr Pickup: Yes, that is correct. Miss Weekes: Do you really see any difference between a frontline officer's role and a police officer in the Met? Mr Pickup: Obviously I think Customs officers are more specialised, but I think the creation of the new Serious Organised Crime Agency, which is going to be a merger of many of our law enforcement officers and police officers, I think demonstrates the fact that there is very little difference between the two. Miss Weekes: And of course there are specialist sections within the Met who do nothing for a long time but, for example, firearms, and they are specialist, but you are also specialist, in that you deal with VAT, drugs, things like that. Mr Pickup: That is right, yes, but the basic nature of a criminal investigation, and the prosecution, is exactly the same. Miss Weekes: Can I move on to one or two issues I would like to raise in relation to the grievance procedure and discipline? You have been asked about the process, I am not going to go back over that, because in fact you outline it very adequately in your written submission, but I would like to raise with you the similarity and to draw on best practice with certain aspects of how you deal internally with officers; I am not so interested in the external, I know you farm out the serious criminal proceedings, as you have explained. And I think you refer to the issues of grievance in levels, I heard you mention level 1 and level 2. In the Met, there is Fairness at Work, which is essentially, I think, something that may mirror your level 1. It is really any dispute that might arise between an officer or a police staff and their line manager, and that is the first port of call for dealing with those sorts of internal disputes. I think your system mirrors that, is that right? Mr Pickup: Yes. Miss Weekes: I want to ask this: there is sometimes a perception that there is not enough independence in the way the line manager may deal with these issues. Sometimes it might involve the line manager, but the line manager still does have to deal with resolving that dispute, because one of the persons that he or she line manages may have a query, a complaint, about the way they have been line managed; you must also deal with that problem. Mr Pickup: Yes, that is correct. Miss Weekes: How do you resolve it, the issue of independence? Mr Pickup: There are a number of safety nets in the process that we have for that. You mention the different levels, and it can be quite confusing, because we have a grievance procedure which has a level 1 and 2, and we have a discipline procedure that has a level 1 and 2, but from the grievance point of view, do you want to go through what the grievance side of it is? Ms Purkis: I think there are two things on the grievance side. First of all, if you do not reach resolution, the safety check is that you can actually say, "No, we have not resolved this issue, it needs to be referred centrally to a central panel", and that is what the level 2 process is. There are also other ways that managers can get help. Our employee assistance service offers a mediation service which we have found has been very successful in helping to resolve some of the grievances we have had, and what they can do is actually bring some independence to the issue, and help people actually see, you know, their way through what can actually be very, very complex issues around it. So it does not necessarily mean you have to refer up to a level 2 grievance. What we try and do is encourage people that, before you get into the formalised grievance process, let us look at ways we can actually resolve this beforehand, and, as I say, the employee assistance service, they have been doing mediation services for about the last year, and some of the numbers are quite compelling. There are some very good stories about how people have actually come out of those grievances. Miss Weekes: Can you share one or two of them with us, your best practice? Ms Purkis: Well, we had literally people who would not travel to meet the mediator on the same train, they would not be anywhere near each other. They met with our employee assistance service, who are all fully trained in mediation skills, and they got to the stage where they were in a room together, and got – you know, it became quite emotional, and they did, they found a lot of common ground, and they left, and there was this confidence they would go on, and afterwards they heard, yes, the issue had been resolved. So people who were completely diametrically opposed in their views and their perceptions about a situation were brought together. Obviously it will not work in every case, but it has been very, very useful. Miss Weekes: I was going to go on to mediation, but as you have mentioned it now, perhaps you can just talk us through one or two aspects of it, because mediation has been spoken of in our public inquiry, and there are a number of department heads that are very anxious that the Met use it more. It is not the first time they have thought of it, but this is an opportunity to revisit whether it ought to become a permanent alternative way of doing things. Can I ask you, how long have you had a mediation structure in place? Ms Purkis: To be honest, I am not sure exactly when it started. I know there has been a lot of emphasis over the last year, one of the people who is involved – well, our employee assistance service was restructured a couple of years ago. What we used to have was a service that was very much a staff welfare service, so individual members of staff would contact EAS to get advice. What happened was we looked at that and decided, okay, having a welfare service was one thing, but what we wanted to do was actually look at providing support to managers as well, because whenever there is a dispute, there are the two parties. So the emphasis very much now is on managers contacting employee assistance service as well, to actually look at, "Well, what support can I get?", as well as individuals having that route through. That was a couple of years ago that we changed the nature of the service, and I think, from that, came mediation, and the people who were working on it, the skills they were getting – and the contacts, because they network very much with other governmental mediation groups. So in the last year there has been a lot more emphasis on this. Miss Weekes: Did you have an overall policy or document that sets out where you get your mediators, how they are trained, and how you incorporate them, which it sounds to me as if you have, into your organisation? Ms Purkis: What we have actually got is this central employee assistance service, there are about 18 that cover the whole country. They are based across the country, we have groups of them in London and in Salford, but also people dotted around the country as well, so that people can get in contact with those people locally. As far as the specific training they get, I have not got the specific details of what qualifications they have got, we can obviously provide you with those. Miss Weekes: Yes, it would be very helpful if you could. Ms Purkis: And I could find out more in terms of exactly what is required of them, but they have been formally trained, they do have these skills, and, as I say, they do an awful lot of networking and sharing of best practice. I can dig out some documentation on that. Miss Weekes: I would be very grateful, because I think it would inform us as to the various suggestions for the Met, who are particularly interested in this alternative. But essentially, this floating number of people, mediators, are available at any time that there has been no resolution at the very first stage that a workplace conflict comes up, so before any formality, before it is sent up, there is that availability. Ms Purkis: This is what we have tried to do, because I think what we have recognised is that people can get entrenched very quickly, and by the time something gets to a level 2 grievance panel, ie there have been murmurings around whether or not it is a grievance locally, then they formalise that into a grievance locally, then that has not been resolved and it has come centrally; by that time, you have actually made it very, very difficult for people to work together and ever find a way forward. So a certain number of grievance appeals end up just being capped, and, fundamentally, we cannot find a way forward, but you just have to work with it, so what we have recognised – and we have put a lot more emphasis in our recent guidance, which we have provided you with copies of, on early resolution and actually nipping it in the bud. That again goes back to the active management issue, that if you are noticing there is some conflict in your area, you have got to get in and start tackling that sooner rather than later. Miss Weekes: Is it cost effective, using mediators in this way? Ms Purkis: Definitely. If you get in that early and you have this resolution and you develop an effective working relationship, and you compare that with a grievance process that can go through these two stages and go on for months and months, combined with the fact that sometimes, when you get to the stage where there is, say, a level 2 grievance, that is having an impact on people's work, it is having an impact potentially on people's health; you know, anything that can avoid that sort of trauma for all parties is well worth the input. Miss Weekes: There might be a criticism from someone who does not understand the system and how it works, or even if they do understand your system: how can a mediator who works outside of your organisation truly understand the issues? Ms Purkis: There was a certain reluctance in some areas as to the value of mediation. I think what the people have been able to demonstrate is that actually having someone coming in who does not know an awful lot about the day-to-day activities that you are involved in can be quite useful, and it can actually take you away from, you know, some of the obstacles that you are facing. So although there was some resistance, I think they have done an excellent job within the employee assistance service of promoting this, and sharing some of the successes, going out and talking to senior managers in various parts of the other business areas, to say, you know, this is a way forward. Because we – in your area, you have come across some of the promotional work they have done as well. Ms Champion: Yes. Mr Pickup: Can I just mention one particular danger from my point of view of the grievance – the process you have just explained? I am concerned that – the mediation process, as Annie had suggested, in my experience, works very well, if you get in early; it not only prevents potential grievances, but even future internal investigations, which can destroy not just individuals, but sometimes entire offices, when they have to take sides with an individual. The main danger is there could be a potential serious allegation of discrimination that is actually dealt with under the grievance process and mediated away. Now that is unacceptable, and we have to have checks and balances in place to make sure that that does not happen, and the two that we do have – and we have spoken to our mediators, we have explained, if they are called into a situation, we have explained the types of examples of discipline and serious discrimination, we do not want them to be involved in a resolution to that, that would be unacceptable, because we can even get into a situation where the individual is not prepared to complain, but on the information we have, it is so serious, we would nonetheless conduct an internal investigation into it. So we do have checks and balances, but it is a concern. Miss Weekes: So essentially, you raise a very important point, which is that the organisation must decide which categories of cases they are prepared to mediate, and which they must take back responsibility for. Thank you very much for that, but I would welcome as detailed as possible a set-out of your success so far using mediation. Ms Purkis: It is worth just saying on that point, with the checks and balances, that the same person – the same senior manager is responsible for the employee assistance service as for the grievance and appeals team, so there is that sort of awareness of what sort of cases are coming through, and an understanding of where people are potentially overstepping the line and where mediation is appropriate. Miss Weekes: Can I move on to communication for all? Again, this has been touched on by the chairman, but I want to take it further into a much more important general area. Like the Met, you undoubtedly are burdened by a huge amount of statute, case law, changes in statute and case law, procedures and policies, and you are a big organisation. I think you gave us your figures of how many employees you deal with. Mr Pickup: About 23,000. Miss Weekes: 23,000. What is your best method of communicating policies, regulations and guidance to your employees? Mr Pickup: Well, we have a number of – we do not just rely on one strand of communication. Miss Weekes: Do you have a best method? I can come to the numbers you have got, but is there a best method? Mr Pickup: I think, from my point of view, the best method is our intranet; we have an internal intranet system, and any main news or information or policy change or procedure change, there is a news site which will automatically come up as soon as you enter the intranet system, and on there, those main changes are notified. So that is probably our most successful – Miss Weekes: Are you sure that your employees log on and read it? Mr Pickup: Well, it depends on the nature. We had an example of a discipline matter which was causing us enormous problems, and it was misuse of the Internet and misuse of e-mails, many organisations have this problem. So what we eventually did – we did try different communication methods, we have a bulletin system to notify managers, we tried going out to individual staff; the message still was not getting home. So what we did was put a message on everybody's computer system – most people in the department have a computer, and when they log on, before they were entitled to actually get into the system, it automatically transferred them to a statement on the misuse and use of the Internet system, so we were absolutely certain that the vast majority of people read it, because they had to sign that they had read it, and had to go through the procedure of reading it, before they were entitled to access to their system. That is probably an extreme example, but generally speaking, it is quite difficult in a national organisation of 23,000 to make sure you are getting your communication across. It is quite difficult, we do not succeed all the time. Ms Purkis: We have a communications and marketing division, and that actually has communications advisors who are dedicated to the particular business streams, and what they will try and do is pick up what sort of patterns of communication there are, so there were certain areas of the organisation where people were not looking to the intranet all the time, so they make more use of particular bulletins. So really, those communications advisors should understand the best mechanisms for communicating and test those mechanisms as they go along. It does not always work, as Bill says, but that is one of the attempts to get it right. Miss Weekes: So how do you test that the organisation is aware of changes, or they are aware of the way you wish frontline officers to behave, and staff to behave? How do you change culture from up to down? Mr Pickup: Yes, it is very difficult. I mean, there is not really one way of doing that, you have to approach it from a whole range of different methods, from, if you are looking to change the culture, we would introduce management training. For example, when our previous chairman came in three years ago, he instituted a whole range of seminars for all senior managers that he personally attended, to get across the new message and the new culture that he wanted, so there could be no miscommunication. That was then followed up with a series of bulletin announcements and further training packages, so that was specifically targeted at senior management. Unless you change the senior management culture, you are not going to change the culture below that. Miss Weekes: Well, you will be pleased to know the Met also use intranet. Do you have any views about what is the next best thing to intranet, because if not everybody has a computer, and you are on a busy, long night shift, the last thing you are going to do is to log on. Mr Pickup: Well, certainly the feedback from the number of opinion polls that have been done with our department – the feedback is that staff much prefer face-to-face communication. Miss Weekes: That is rather interesting. Mr Pickup: By a distance. Miss Weekes: Do you think you can fulfil that face to face? Mr Pickup: It has become more difficult, with the way the department is structured, and you can have one senior manager who is responsible for a vast area within the department, so it does make it more difficult. But a senior manager is not going to necessarily communicate with all the 1,000 members of staff individually, but, as long as that senior manager communicates with the people he is directly responsible for on a face-to-face basis, and then hopefully cascade it through the organisation that way – but that is certainly the method preferred by everybody. In my experience, it is the one that is most effective. Miss Weekes: Time-consuming but most effective. Mr Pickup: It is very difficult to get across an attitude in a document, but an attitude can come across when you are talking to someone and communicating with them face to face. Miss Weekes: Are you convinced that going to the trouble – because it will be quite a lot of trouble, if one thinks about how busy operational officers are – I am not making excuses, I am looking at the reality; how busy some of your frontliners are. How do you sell that? How do you sell, "Yes, we had better go down the route of face to face, as opposed to intranet"? Mr Pickup: Well, I think certainly most officers pride themselves on being professional, and the only way you can be professional in a fast changing world is to keep on top of information. Everybody in our department is not only – well, most people in our department are not only managers but they actually have a manager above them, so all they have to do is provide to their staff in a way that they would expect their manager to treat them. So if their manager is setting – this is why it is important to change the senior management culture, because if the senior managers take the time and make the effort, despite being extremely busy, like everybody is, to have the face-to-face communication and make the important communications with individuals, that sets the tone, and the individuals would then respond likewise, or most individuals would then respond positively and say, "Well, that is the way to do it, that is the way to go – I am now going to speak to the people who I am responsible for". Miss Weekes: Thank you for that. Timing, you have mentioned; and it would appear that you are not too different to the Met in having to cope with the longitudal nature of disciplinary hearings and the process. Have you tried to shorten the time? Mr Pickup: Yes, we have. Miss Weekes: I expected that answer, but I thought I had better have it from you. Mr Pickup: Up until three years ago, we did not have an Internal Investigation Division. The responsibility for investigating these cases and dealing with discipline and coming up with the penalty and whether the person was guilty was left to the local managers, and the local managers would just have to find whoever was around or whoever was available to do the investigation. They perhaps dealt with one of these every 10 or 15 years, they had no experience of it, did not know what the procedures and law was, and it was massively unprofessional. So we centralised this three years ago, and through centralising, it became more proficient. We certainly had a number of tribunal cases on the basis of the length of time that it was taking to do these investigations. One of the key indicators for us was to be able to demonstrate we progressed these cases as fast as possible. It does not mean we do not have cases that have lasted a long time, but it means we can show that we have done everything we possibly can to reduce it. So it certainly has been a success in that respect; we are not there yet, we are never going to get to the stage where we do everything within three months, but we certainly have reduced, generally speaking, the length of time it has taken. We have also looked to fast track certain cases; instead of waiting for the police, for example, to finish their investigations, we work very closely with the police, and in some cases, they are prepared to release the evidence to us, which we can then use in a discipline process. Because most of our lengthy investigations are as a direct result of criminal investigations running in parallel with them, so we have specifically targeted those, and we try and introduce the discipline process at the earliest possible stage. Miss Weekes: As all your employees are employees, with terms of contract, you are entitled to proceed to disciplinary at any stage and you are entitled to sack them at any stage, whether or not there is a criminal proceeding pending; correct? Mr Pickup: That is correct, yes. Miss Weekes: Do you wait until a criminal proceeding has been dealt with? Mr Pickup: We try not to, but it depends whether we have access to the evidence, because there are a number of criminal investigations which are started by the police and not referred by us, and in those cases, we are very much dependent on whether they are prepared to release the evidence or not. In many cases, they are not, because quite naturally, they do not want to compromise the criminal investigation. Miss Weekes: When you say you have centralised it, is it that it is now all in one department, the question of investigations and the disciplinary process, is that what you mean by centralisation? Mr Pickup: Yes, it means that the responsibility for conducting the internal investigation is in one place, and the responsibility for taking the decision on whether a charge, a discipline charge, should be laid, is central; and also, the disciplinary hearing panel procedure is centralised in one place now as well, and all that means that because, you know, it is a more slick operation, the time between each of those phases is now a matter of days. Miss Weekes: One of the issues raised about the way that the Met run this, and it might be similar to your own, is the independence of those who investigate. The officers complained of would often want to have more independence about what is going on. That tends to be communication, but it is also about their ability to trust the system; is that ever raised with those complained of? Mr Pickup: Yes, I mean, we can never be completely independent of Customs and Excise, because we are employees of Customs and Excise, and we did recognise this when we were set up three years ago. I think there is scope for there being an external overseeing body; I mean, the police have got the Independent Police Complaints Commission, as you well know. To a great extent for criminal investigations, we already have that independence, ie, it is the police who do the investigation, but generally speaking, the complainants and the managers are very happy to pass over the responsibility to the Internal Investigation Division, and do see us as independent as possible. We are actually situated in a non-operational directorate; I mentioned that there were the three strands. There is the law enforcement strand, there is the business services strand, and there is the corporate services element. We report within the corporate services element, so we are not involved in any of the line management for the operational staff, and I think that is very important. Miss Weekes: Would you think it an advantage if there was someone, independent actually of your own centralised system, who was responsible for bringing everybody to book about the time that is spent on disciplinary investigations? Mr Pickup: Independent from the department? Yes. Miss Weekes: Simply for this, we are considering it, so we ask everyone about it, because we want to understand the pros and cons of such a suggestion. A number of witnesses that we have put this to have said, "Yes, we would welcome an individual who was able to say to an investigating officer, 'Well you have now had three months, can you tell me what is going on? How much longer will you need? Why do you need that time?'" another example of what that independent person would do is to make decisions about disclosure of documents. Not all documents in an investigation are often disclosed, because of PII. Another issue that would come up is the fixing of the date for the disciplinary, quite a bit ahead, so all parties can work towards it; and that person can finally say, "Enough is enough, here is the deadline, you have to go at that stage or you do not go at all". Now, do you see that as having an advantage – there may be other disadvantages, but it has the advantage of ensuring that you do not decide how long you take, the complainant sees transparency, that he can complain to that independent person, and that person has the responsibility of ensuring that all the cases in your organisation are moved forward? Mr Pickup: I do not see how any law enforcement organisation can go forward without that independence. Miss Weekes: I am mirroring, obviously, crown courts, civil courts, and every other court in the land, but you think that is the way forward? Mr Pickup: I do. Within our organisation, we have done as much as we can. I am brought to book every three months by a committee made up of directors and our chairman, and they go through all the individual sensitive cases, and challenge me on the timescales that have been taken, ask what is going on, ask how we can shorten it. So we do everything we can in the department, up to and including chairman level, to make sure that happens. But I think from the complainant's point of view, we are only ever going to be seen as officers of Customs and Excise. Miss Weekes: And the ultimate protection for everyone, I am suggesting, is that this person should have legal qualifications and be subject to JR, because a decision about whether you stop a case, whether you give further time for genuine investigations, is obviously quite an important one. Mr Pickup: When you say "JR"? Miss Weekes: Judicial review of the decisions they make. That gives everybody the complete protection, that decisions are being made judicially. Mr Pickup: Yes, I would agree with that. Ms Purkis: We have some elements of that within the existing system with the central grievance and appeals team, in terms of keeping track of cases and making sure things are moving forward, but it is not that – Miss Weekes: Not quite as precise? Ms Purkis: – high a level; you know, that is ratcheting up the sort of controls and authority you would have over the process. Mr Pickup: We already have an external complaints adjudicator, but they tend to be complaints that are dealing with business issues and processes rather than – Miss Weekes: Rather than somebody who just takes control of all of your cases, and watches them and lists them, and deals with adjournments. If it is something that you do think is the way forward, it would certainly help me if you could write your thoughts on paper about it, and how it would work with Customs, because you are so similar to the Met; you could certainly help us on that, if you did not mind doing that piece of work. I only have two other small points, if I may, and it is how you deal with the outcome of disciplinaries, the outcome of ET cases. I know you will understand the word "debrief"; do you have a debrief on every single case? I know you have mentioned in your document that there are, in fact, some form of "complete quality decision documents that confirm the rationale, integrity and independence of well-founded management decisions", but I am much more interested in whether you, on a regular basis, monitor why an ET case happened at all; why you settled, what is the trend of what people complain about, and do you gather that information in order to sit round a table to say, "Now this organisation over the last year have had X number of cases, this is the trend, what are we going to do about it?" Ms Purkis: Our grievance and appeals team does an awful lot of that, and, as I say, they – going back to the previous point you mentioned, in terms of listings and adjournments and things like that, that is their role in the process at the moment. What they will do is obtain all sorts of information back from employment tribunals. They track the cases as they are going through employment tribunal, they co-ordinate all our input to cases. They work very closely with our employment lawyers as well, in developing cases and determining whether it is something that is appropriate for an economic settlement or whatever, exploring the various options, and, as a result of cases, they will then look back and try and work out, "Well, what lessons are there? What went wrong?" So I think the one case that we lost last year at employment tribunal was to do with the fixed time regulations, and what we identified was there was some uncertainty about how those applied to people, how did we change things, did we need to issue guidance on this. So they do very much look at what comes out from the employment tribunals to do that. Miss Weekes: Do you do it across the board, apart from that helpful example you have told us about? Ms Purkis: What they have is, for all the cases they are monitoring the progress, they get the information back following the employment tribunal, they are co-ordinating the input as well, plus, some of the cases – not all of them, of course, because if they go straight to employment tribunal, it is not something that has been through either our discipline or our internal processes, it might be that we do not know much about that case, but, as soon as the documentation hits the employment tribunal, that team is involved. Mr Pickup: From a discipline point of view, we keep quarterly statistics which provide us with trend analysis on which cases – if there are any new trends emerging or difficult areas. If I could just mention one important point: as far as I am concerned, we are not here as an organisation to try and investigate more and more serious misconduct cases and find more and more serious misconduct cases. The prime focus for us is to prevent them happening in the first place. So we recognised this when we set up our internal investigation and we have spent a lot of time trying to concentrate on the prevention side of the strategy. Now that is a key thing for us to do, and what we ask each investigator and each senior manager who comes across a case in our division is they have to identify systems weaknesses that fall out of the discipline case, and many of them do have a systems weakness, and then we would go back to the system owner, we would go back to our auditors, go back to the local managers, point out the system weakness, and try and get them to re-engineer it so that does not happen again. The last thing we can afford to do is have a series of, say, corruption cases that all revolve around the same sort of area and we have not done anything about it. So our strategy really, in the first instance, is to try and reduce these cases coming, reduce the number of discrimination cases that are brought to us, rather than just continually investigate them, and we use the trend analysis and the management information to see where we should target it. An example again is the Internet abuse one, which was getting out of hand last year, and, if you look at our trend analysis figures, all of a sudden, it went from nothing to being the biggest bar on the chart, and we finally came across a reasonably successful method now, and that is now reducing. So that is our general approach to all our discipline cases. Miss Weekes: Okay, thank you very much. Sir William Morris: Mr Pickup, at this stage, I should be introducing Sir Anthony, but we do have a practice in providing a reasonable rest time for our transcript writers, so I am proposing to adjourn for about five to seven minutes. 11.45 am (A short break) 11.55 am Sir William Morris: Thanks for your patience. We will go straight into the questions from Sir Anthony Burden. Questions by Sir Anthony Burden Sir Anthony Burden: Good morning. I would like to deal primarily with human resource matters if I may, but can I just – I am sorry to labour this point on the employment status and office of constable, but there is one very important similarity, of course: dealing with the level of criminality that your staff has to, they are susceptible to false allegations, as police officers are, and the further up the criminal chain you go, the more vulnerable you become to that. Has your workforce ever raised the issue in terms of their employment status of needing added protection? Mr Pickup: Not that I am aware of. Sir Anthony Burden: So they feel quite comfortable in working with normal employment status, that provides the protection they feel is adequate in confronting that sort of individual, that sort of organised criminality? Mr Pickup: Yes, I think it is fair to say that we are facing more and more serious allegations by people going through the criminal justice system, but I think the combination of our own set-up and passing things over to the police to investigate, so far, I think, officers are reasonably content with. Sir Anthony Burden: Good, thank you. You mentioned earlier your active management culture programme, triggered by undermanagement. Can I ask you to explain a little bit more about that programme, please? Ms Purkis: Well, essentially, it is when Sir Richard Broadbent joined us. As I say, his initial analysis on looking at the organisation was that managers were not really taking responsibility for managing delivery, managing the staff in their area, dealing with problems, actually bringing in the people they needed to work in their area. It was that taking responsibility for delivery, and bringing management hand in hand with actually needing to do that many visits, or that many knocks, or whatever. So he recognised that what we need to do is try and overcome that, and some of that was about just telling people that that was what was expected of them, and you would tell managers that they are expected to manage people, but you also, through our performance management system, made it very clear that there were certain behaviours and attributes that were required of you as an individual, and your performance would in part be assessed on that basis. So part of it was about giving out that message, and then, as Bill said earlier, some of it was about going out, meeting individual staff, targeting groups of senior managers to actually move this forward, and act as role models. Behind that as well, it was about developing further management training as well, because you can empower people to make all these decisions, but management decisions, like anything else, involve risks, and you need to ensure you are aware of the legal framework, you need to ensure that you are actually being fair, that the way you are behaving is consistent with the principles of natural justice, so there was a need to have further management training, which we are still continuing to develop. Mr Pickup: I think just to point out the three or four key themes of active management: leadership, not management which is something that many organisations are trying to aspire to, good communication and effective team working, so those are sort of three of the main key points of active management. Sir Anthony Burden: I mean, to persuade people to manage, their willingness to do so is often dictated by the culture in which they work. At the time this work was undertaken, if we had gone to your managers and asked them the question whether they felt they were working in a risk-taking culture or a blame culture, what do you think they would have said? Ms Champion: They would have said a blame culture. Sir Anthony Burden: That is why they kept their heads down on occasions, do you think? Ms Champion: That is right, absolutely right. I think it is important, though, to acknowledge that in promoting an active management culture, it was pushing against an open door, in the sense that managers actually wanted to take responsibility, so it was not an uphill struggle to get people to actively manage. It was introduced, I think, as a very sort of – another important strand of active management was about reducing the processes, so there was an overhaul of the whole performance management system at that time, and a lot of bureaucracy was stripped out of the performance management system in order to enable managers to actively manage more effectively. Sir Anthony Burden: Yes. And, of course, I guess the very clear unequivocal message from your chairman helped. Ms Champion: Yes, absolutely. Sir Anthony Burden: And he was willing – I mean, receiving this message that there was a blame culture in existence, and needing to shift that, people received the message, "As long as you do your best, that is okay, mistakes are made, we learn and we move on". Ms Champion: Yes. I would not say we have absolutely got that right yet; you know, that is quite a long process, that does not happen just because somebody says, "We are not going to have that any more", you know, it actually takes a little bit of evolution to get that worked out. Sir Anthony Burden: But you are on the journey? Ms Champion: We are on the journey, yes. Mr Pickup: And he started that off with face-to-face communication, as I said, with all senior managers, for setting that culture straight away. Sir Anthony Burden: Good, thank you. You have explained very helpfully that you have got a central grievance and appeals procedure, but in terms of people management generally, would you describe yourself as a devolved organisation or a centrally run HR organisation? Ms Champion: Very devolved. Sir Anthony Burden: I am very interested in the fact that you have introduced human resource managers. Can I just ask you, in terms of your structure – the Inland Revenue described themselves as having business units; are you regionally based, in terms of management structures, or functionally based? Ms Purkis: We are functionally based. Sir Anthony Burden: So if I am a Customs officer at Felixstowe, looking at my hierarchy, how would I sort of describe the organisation, as it relates to me? Mr Pickup: Well, we were, up until three years ago, based on the regions, so you probably worked with your line manager, and their line manager, and their line manager above them, but having gone functional now, your line manager can be in a completely different office, different part of the county or even the country, and certainly your senior managers may be 100 miles away from you, so that has been one of the downsides of functional management. Sir Anthony Burden: If you are a senior Customs officer and you are dealing with an HR issue, a female Customs officer comes to you and says, "I want part-time working", and you are not quite certain about the rules which would apply to that, where would you go to get the human resource expertise on that subject? Ms Champion: You would go to the service centre. Ms Purkis: First of all, it would actually be on-line guidance. What we are trying to encourage, in common with a lot of people who are introducing EHR programmes, is that there is an element of self-service, so essentially, you, as an individual, should be looking at what information is available on the intranet. We have then centralised our HR service provision into a national service centre, so if you cannot get the advice from the intranet, then you would raise it with the service centre. If it is a complex issue, they would then draw on the resources behind them, and the sort of policy teams and centres of expertise. You can also get information locally or support from your HR managers, they will be helping at sort of the strategic level to work out where the business is going and planning for it, but also in some of the more complex cases, they can provide some support as well. Sir Anthony Burden: So HR managers, which you refer to in your submission, they are actually devolved out across the country, are they? Ms Purkis: They are actually resourced within the business areas as well. They are not an HR controlled resource, so the business areas have a role in determining how they want to use those resources. Sir Anthony Burden: I just want to make sure I am absolutely clear on that. So would it be right to say that there is an HR manager/expert available within a business area? Ms Purkis: Yes. Sir Anthony Burden: How many staff would that HR manager be responsible – not responsible for, but responsible for responding to? Ms Purkis: Well, their focus probably is more on the senior people, is it not, a lot of the time? Ms Champion: Yes, in terms of how many people would be represented by that HR manager, probably, as a very rough rule of thumb, about 1,000 people, but it varies a bit, obviously, from business to business, and location to location, but roughly, 1,000 people. Sir Anthony Burden: But it would not be fair to say, though, would it, what you have described, with functional structuring, you have not got this hierarchy now which says, "Business area manager with HR manager responsible to", that does not exist in your organisation, it is much more fluid around the functional structuring. Ms Champion: Yes. Sir Anthony Burden: But a very heavy reliance on e-technology to make sure that people are able to access information. Ms Champion: Yes. Sir Anthony Burden: Have you put a lot of effort into making sure that that e-technology is user friendly? Ms Purkis: The programme at the moment is still at the implementation stage. We have a national service centre; we have also launched a new HR intranet site, which has consolidated what was previously on a number of sites. We are also in the process of rewriting and reformatting all the various guidance, because there is a big issue in terms of how user friendly, how accessible the guidance is, and I think the feedback we have been getting on the intranet site is good. So there is the information provision side, and we have got a central communications team on the HR side, who look to improve that all the time. You have then got the sort of self-service functionality, so being able to do TMS forms or apply for leave, and that is going through quite an extensive programme of user testing at the moment. Sir Anthony Burden: So with functional structuring, which tends to deal with the upper end, you have got your service delivery units, or whatever you call them, local offices, like the Customs local VAT and the Customs services VAT; would your local managers who are responsible for dealing with personnel issues, HR issues – would they, do you feel, feel confident that they have a broad band of knowledge provided by you around the policies that would apply in relation to managing people, and for example, family friendly policies? Ms Champion: Yes. Sir Anthony Burden: They would. And how have you ensured that they have got that level of knowledge? Has a lot of effort gone into that? Has it been around training? Ms Purkis: I think there are various levels, are there not, because there has been the need to develop improved management training, and there are various modules being piloted now, but the idea is that we will have improved management training for people. That will cover all sorts of issues, but some of it will be the HR sort of technical issues, some of the legal frameworks that people are operating within. There is also the ongoing need to provide decent guidance, and to ensure that that guidance is user friendly, people can understand it. What we want to do is – having the national service centre provides a real opportunity to have a central point where, if we are getting a whole load of queries on a particular subject, we can identify, well, why, and that, in turn, can help us improve the guidance and identify, "Well, is it because the guidance is not written properly? Is it because the policy is flawed? What is the reason?" So I think it is that constant revisiting of the guidance and making sure it is actually communicating the message that we want to. Mr Pickup: I should also mention that on the intranet system, there is a learning management system, which is a database of a whole range of different types of courses, so if an individual wants to learn about HR process or wants to learn about conduct and discipline, they can select the appropriate package on the learning management system and work their way through it on the intranet. So that is another mechanism which they can use. Sir Anthony Burden: Can I deal finally with the gender agenda? I apologise for not knowing much about the history of your organisation; was it once a male bastion? Ms Champion: It was, prior to 1972. Sir Anthony Burden: Right. Then the gender agenda is a very appropriate subject. Is it alive and well, and what supports it? Ms Champion: In terms of the gender agenda, I would say that we have been very alive to that, because of our history, and our recent statistics show that if we continue the trend of promoting and developing women in the ratio that we are doing at the moment, in about five years time, the balance will flip the other way, there will become a majority – Sir Anthony Burden: Five years? Ms Champion: In five years' time, it will become majority female, and the majority of senior management posts will be filled by females, who will be younger, on average, than their male counterparts. So in a sense, we have done very, very well with our gender agenda; in fact, we have started to worry that we are doing slightly too well now. Sir Anthony Burden: What has been the success factor? Ms Champion: I think the success factor has got to be about – has been about positive action, a very active programme of positive action. And I think it has been a lot about culture, because of the difficulties that we had with being an all-male organisation, and having those all-male views that were entrenched in the organisation, there has been a lot of positive management decisions about how we manage, you know, the gender agenda. So in a sense, a lot of effort has gone into it, a lot of cultural emphasis on, you know, what it actually – how it actually impacts on the department if we do not get that right, the sorts of things we should be doing to put things right. So it is just about effort really. Mr Pickup: I can perhaps give some examples from my own division; when we set it up three years ago, we were very concerned about this male culture, particularly that there is a macho culture, particularly in investigation, so we used the full range of facilities available to us in the department. We introduced time off in lieu facilities, we have flexible working, we have part-time staff, we have term-time working staff, so we have the full benefits available, and we are now in a position where the majority, more than 50 per cent of our staff are women. Sir Anthony Burden: The way you describe it, if I can say, very sincerely, it seems to me as though there has been an acceptance in your organisation that that brings value, as opposed to being a pain to manage. Mr Pickup: That is exactly right, yes. Unless you have this diversity and different attitudes and different approaches to things, you do not have a balanced workforce and you do not have a balanced team. Sir Anthony Burden: Can I just ask you – apologies, ladies, but can I ask you, as somebody who – how long is your service in the Customs? Mr Pickup: I have done 23 years. Sir Anthony Burden: So you have come from the old culture, basically, into this new enlightened culture. From a male Customs officer viewpoint, what has been the selling point? I mean, you have suddenly moved from a macho culture, which I am very familiar with, into an enlightened environment that says, "Look, you know, these modern business practices around family-friendly policies are good for this organisation", as opposed to, "Well, if my female colleague is off, the workload swings to me", you know, which is a false premise, let me say, but what has been the deciding factor, do you think, within the male workforce? Mr Pickup: Well, I think that a team that is well balanced is far more efficient, and I think also, many of the men are married and they see the benefits of people taking maternity leave from their own personal perspective, so they are hardly likely to come to work and say, "Well, actually, that member of staff should not be allowed it either". Speaking personally, it was easy for me, because my wife was a member of Customs and Excise, and so she has benefitted from that as well, but I do not know, I just think that people see there is a benefit, an efficiency that is gained. If you have a mono culture in a team or an organisation, you are missing out so much. You are not as efficient. You may think you are, and you will try and preserve that, but the reality is, if you have a mixed team and you put the two teams together, a mixed team against a team that has a mono culture, the mixed team will win hands down. You have got to challenge the perceptions that it is not wrong to take maternity leave, it is not wrong to work part-time. Part-time people, on a value for money basis, in my experience, are actually better value for money than people who work full-time, because they tend to give far more, and they tend to do more hours than people who are full-time. So it is a whole range of factors, but I think generally speaking, ultimately, people recognise it is an efficiency factor, it is a more pleasant environment as well, if the team, the organisation you work in, reflects society. It just makes sense. Ms Champion: I think organisationally, one of the things we did very early was to embrace the diversity agenda, as opposed to the equal opportunities agenda as well, so where the equal opportunities agenda was very often seen as being a very excluding sort of agenda, which focused on minority groups, raising the diversity agenda, which embraced all the different groups, if you like, including the white male majority group, was actually a very positive step. We did that very early on. Sir Anthony Burden: So moving away from gender or race, do you feel Customs, as an organisation, the culture within the organisation, embraces difference well? Ms Champion: I think it does. I think I have to say that it is a mixed picture. There are still areas obviously where that works better. I am not saying we have got it right, or we are great, but I think we do pretty well, and it is about culture. Sir Anthony Burden: In supporting minority groups, let us stay with the gender agenda for a moment, are there network organisations within Customs that are supportive? Ms Champion: Yes, there are. Funnily enough, there used to be a lot of sort of female only groups, but they are actually dwindling away now, and the more active networks are, in fact, the gay and lesbian group, the ethnic minority group and the disability network, and they are very active and very widespread. In fact, in dealing with, I think, conduct and discipline cases, they are a route which, you know, is used by members of staff in order to escalate issues, particularly where perhaps the line management relationship has broken down. Sir Anthony Burden: Thank you very much, that is very helpful indeed. Sir William Morris: Mr Pickup, Ms Champion and Ms Purkis, can I just say that we want to record our thanks for your help. We have now concluded the questions that we wanted to explore with you, but you will recall that in my opening statement, I said that at the conclusion of our questions, I would offer you a brief opportunity to make any closing comments, if you so wished. If you do wish, now is your moment. Mr Pickup: Not from me, thank you. Ms Champion: No, thank you. Ms Purkis: No, thank you. Sir William Morris: Right, no takers. Some concluding words that I have to offer, and it is this: as with all our witnesses, it may be that once we have heard from other witnesses, we may want to ask a few more questions of you, either in writing or indeed ask you to have another session with us, in terms of oral hearings. If we do decide to seek further information from you, we shall do so in a way that causes you and the organisation the least possible inconvenience, but for the moment, I just want to take the opportunity, on behalf of my colleagues, to thank you for your written submission, your very candid and helpful response to our questions this morning, and to thank you and the organisation overall for the contribution that you are making to our work. We are very grateful, thank you all very much indeed. We stand adjourned until 2.00 pm this afternoon. 12.15 pm (The short adjournment) Internal links On this website: Evidence: HM Customs and Excise Evidence provided by and documents referred to by HM Customs and Excise in its appearance at the Inquiry.
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Transcripts > HM Customs and Excise (28 Apr 04)
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