Transcript of public session: Sir Michael Lyons

Wednesday, 9 June 2004
10.30am

Sir William Morris: Sir Michael, good morning and welcome.

A. Thank you.

Sir William Morris: Can I on behalf of my colleagues and myself say thank you very much indeed for accepting our invitation to attend the Inquiry this morning and to give us some evidence.

I say for the record that whilst I appreciate that for some of our witnesses the process that we use might seem somewhat daunting, I suspect that will not apply to your good self. Nevertheless, I think it would be helpful if I set out very briefly how we propose to conduct the hearing this morning.

First of all, let me just make the formal introductions. I am Sir Bill Morris, recently retired General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union, and I have been asked to chair the Inquiry. 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 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 also as a part-time chairperson of employment tribunals, and she was in fact counsel to the Lawrence Inquiry.

Sir Michael, 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. The Inquiry that we are conducting is inquisitorial and not adversarial by nature or character. Our focus is on the Metropolitan Police Service as an organisation and not so much the individuals who make up the organisation. We are very keen to enquire into those issues raised by our terms of reference so that we can make appropriate recommendations for further good practice rather than concentrating on making criticisms.

Among other things, we are asked in our terms of reference to establish whether the policies, the practices, the procedures, the convention and the structure of the Metropolitan Police Service in relation to professional standards and employment matters represents best practice when compared to other public organisations.

We want to hear from all our witnesses not just what is wrong with the Met but what is right with it, what is good about it. But most importantly, we hope that our witnesses will tell us and help us to identify what needs to be done in order to make it better.

In that context, we are particularly keen to hear from you as an eminent leader of organisational change, having notedly in your past career been chief executive of three local authorities and having held a number of non-executive directorships of organisations which are making a contribution to the national wealth.

We are keen to hear from you about your contributing experience in respect of the public sector and also the private sector. At the end of these introductory remarks I will lead on the questions to yourself, followed by my colleagues, who may have some supplementary questions. When we have completed the questions that we want to put to you, Sir Michael, I will offer you an opportunity to make a brief closing comment, if you wish.

For the record, let me just draw to your attention that a transcript of this session is being taken so that we have an accurate record of the evidence that is given to us by all our witnesses, and this will be published on our website shortly after the end of this session.

In your career in local government, you took up the position of Chief Executive of Birmingham City Council, where you led a very large institution, providing services to one of the largest populations in the United Kingdom, with a budget, I understand, of in excess of £2 billion, and your subsequent career is a testament to the success with which you ran Birmingham City Council.

Before I begin our conversation, can I ask you for the benefit of the transcript to just formally introduce yourself to the Inquiry and give us some further details about your background and expertise, please.

Sir Michael Lyons: Thank you very much, chair.

Well very briefly, I joined the local government in 1978 after short periods in the Civil Service, working for the Department for the Environment as an economist and as a university lecturer in industrial relations and labour economics.

I really joined local government to work on urban regeneration and indeed the introduction of Peter Shore's Inner Urban Areas Act in 1978, and led to economists working in that area. I went on to become Director of Economic Development for the West Midlands Metropolitan County Council, which was of course also a Police Authority, so I worked closely with Geoffrey Dear at that time as a fellow chief officer. Then I went on to become Chief Executive first of Wolverhampton Borough Council in January of 1985, then Nottinghamshire County Council, again Police Authority, in 1990, and then Birmingham City Council in 1994, which, as you said, is the largest local authority business in the country, serving a population of about 1 million, and with a turnover then of about £2 billion, taking account of its wide range of activities.

I retired from local government in September of 2001, as much to mark a change to follow other interests as for any other reason, and now have a portfolio career. I am Professor of Public Policy at Birmingham University and I head the Department of Local Government Studies. I spend much of my time talking and helping organisations to address issues of leadership and corporate governance. I have just finished chairing the Cardiff City Council corporate governance review, and indeed a year long exercise for the Chancellor on the relocation of the English Civil Service.

I am also on the Audit Commission and, as you say, I have a number of non-executive roles helping to shape the direction of public and private organisations. I am very pleased to be with you. I hope I can be helpful.

Sir William Morris: Thank you so much. You get all the good jobs.

A. Not all of them.

Sir William Morris: Thank you so much and that is a very impressive career profile that you have just outlined to us.

Questions by Sir William Morris

Sir William Morris: What I want to do, as a start, is to just paint a picture of a number of key challenges that we see emerging from the evidence that we have gathered in respect of the Inquiry. I want to just highlight those challenges and then perhaps ask you to comment and there will perhaps be a question or so at the end.

Under the heading of leadership, for example, let me say that there are about four or five challenges there, as we see them. First of all, the Metropolitan Police Service is responsible for policing almost all of London, with the exception of those areas which come under the control of the Police Service in the city and the British Transport Police and the Royal Parks Constabulary. Everything else falls to the Met.

Challenge number two: the job of the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police is, without doubt, the most challenging police job in the United Kingdom, and indeed some would perhaps say anywhere in the world. One of the issues which emerged as a challenge as we see it is that on the one hand the Commissioner has to deliver strategic executive managerial leadership to an employee for in excess of £40,000, and the Commissioner is responsible for a budget of £2.5 billion. The property portfolio at, if you like, book value is about £2.7 billion, and everything about the Met is big numerically.

On the other hand, the Commissioner is also charged with delivering strategic executive operational decisions, so he has got managerial decisions on the one hand and operational decisions on the other.

The fourth challenge which I think is worth highlighting is that London as, if you like, the policing patch, is changing beyond all recognition, not just in the context of the demographic and the citizens' profile, but the policing challenge is in terms of prevention and detection of crime. We have got issues around global terrorism, we have got debates about public orders on the street, we have got new issues such as sky marshals in aeroplanes, and it is perhaps right to conclude that the frontiers of the MPS's boundary and the Commissioner's task is no longer the borough boundaries of London as we know it.

We have three airports; we started with Heathrow, we have developed Gatwick, we have the City Airport, and the territory now encompasses a world in terms of traffic and mobility. That is the sort of picture that is emerging here.

So when the Commissioner came to give us some evidence at the beginning of the Inquiry, I canvassed to him whether he could see an alternative way of managing the Metropolitan Police Service in terms of strategic executive management. I suggested that perhaps when I call the Commissioner the general in charge of the strategic operational matters, with a sort of senior non-police officer, as a chief executive, in the mould of, shall I say, Sir Michael Lyons, to manage the organisation, that sort of experience, tried and tested expertise, he commands the authority and the managerial competency.

I think it was fair to say that Sir John was not particularly taken with the idea, and in response by way of summary he said that he thought that what was needed in complex times is, as he put it, simple leadership, and he did not think that you could separate the resource issue and how the MPS delivers its resources from the operational end of the business; he sees the two as complementary.

So that is the picture. That is the architecture, if you like, within which the Met has to deliver its mission, all the challenges that I have indicated.

What I believe that you can offer to my colleagues and myself is your experience of running large organisations, and just give us your response to the challenges as I have tried to offer them, and just indicate what alternatives there may be or whether or not any other organisation within the public sector is run on the same lines of these two key responsibilities, operational and managerial, all resting on the shoulders of one single individual.

I know there are a lot of issues there, but we know that your experience will take you through to inform our Inquiry.

A. Thank you. As you say, it is quite an agenda. Perhaps the starting point is to follow your line, firstly to acknowledge that the Metropolitan Police Service provides an important and complex service, not only for London but for the country as a whole because of the capital relationship. So it is a large and complex organisation. At one and the same time, it is unique, but it is important that we do not get tripped over by how unique it is, because I think that there is a natural propensity for large organisations, partly because they are large and they are confident and they have lots of skills inside, to assume that actually they have all the answers, and so there is -- I think all large organisations have a weakness, as it were, in perhaps not looking outside, not being willing to learn from sometimes very much smaller organisations, where you can find some exceedingly good examples of fleetness of foot, or a quick, speedy response to changing circumstances.

The first lesson I learned is to be careful when you are running a large organisation, to keep the windows open, keep looking outside and not to get too pompous about where you might learn lessons from, indeed, it is endemic in local government that local authorities are very often, I think, guilty of suggesting that they can only learn from those that are larger, when in fact actually I think there is learning from all the way down the size chain.

Leadership. I am going to emphasise the word "leadership" at different times, although you use leadership and management, they are both important, but I am going to emphasise leadership. I do believe that having a clear leader is important for an organisation. This is complex in any public organisation, because there is at one and the same time almost inevitably more than one leader. I mean, there will be a decision maker, a politician, who is a leader, and there will be somebody actually managing the service. Then within a multifunctional organisation, which I think is a reasonable way to describe the Met Service, you will have a whole set of leaders for different functions.

I have some sympathy with Sir John in saying that if you are going to have a Commissioner, that everybody needs to be clear the Commissioner is the leader of the officer body, of the paid body, and there should not be any confusion about that. But I think the spirit of your comment -- whilst I might therefore suggest that you could not have somebody called the chief executive because the term itself has a clear message of the top of the tree, it does seem to me that your comments introduce two quite important -- vital issues.

One of them is, having established that the Commissioner is the leader of the Police Service, you then need to get the structure right beneath that to look after both operational and business matters, and the two are not always the same thing.

The second issue I think you implicitly raise is whether this service has to be led, and can only be led, by somebody who has served in the Police Service.

I do not want to be too revolutionary and suggest that that second one is an easy question to answer. I think it is much easier to answer, and we come across this in the Bain Review on the fire service, where much less has been done in the fire service to develop managerial and leadership skills, and therefore I think there is a rather weaker pool to choose from than there is in the Police Service, where there has been some investment over a number of years in developing the skills and experiences of potential members of high command.

But still, I think there is a question there, and if you are going to get the best out of our public services, then I think you need excellent leadership and managerial skills, and you do run a risk, if you limit yourself, to saying, "And you have also got to have done this, and this and this", because in the end you have actually got a rather narrow field to choose from.

So in short, I think the important issues I draw from this is, one, that I hope you are talking first and foremost about leadership of the Service; that, I think, is the most important issue. Secondly, that recognition of that is complex in a politically managed organisation, whatever it is really, and I do think the Metropolitan Service has these pressures. The role of the Home Secretary, the role of the Mayor of London -- there are issues around -- the chair of the Police Authority. Those issues are live here, as they are elsewhere.

I would strongly support Sir John, as I have understood his comments, in saying that the Commissioner should be unequivocally the head of the Service, but there are issues to be resolved about how you make sure you draw on a wide range of skills and do not limit the ports of entry to senior levels of the service.

Is that a fair opening response?

Sir William Morris: It is. What we want to know is how. We understand the problem and the comments about leadership and the importance of the message that it sends throughout the organisation, and nationally as well as internationally it is an irrefutable one. That, nevertheless, still leaves unresolved the issue about the resource management and how that is managed, not just in procurement terms but in deployment terms, to support what they are in business to do, that is to prevent and detect crime.

If I might make a point here, because I think that we are neutral on any suggestion which says that every good police officer is a good manager and every good manager is a good police officer. So unless you crack that knot and make a separation, you are still left with that thought. We are neutral on the point and that is why we want to explore issues around that with yourself.

A. I think we could fairly safely dispense with the proposition that every good police officer is a good manager because that is unlikely to be the case. The sorts of skills that make for a really excellent policeman might not be the same skills -- in fact I do not think they are -- as make a good manager.

The contention that amongst all of the policemen that we recruit every year there is a wide enough pool of talent to draw and develop many of the managers that Metropolitan Police Service needs seems to me a pretty safe assumption, as long as you are good at identifying the aptitudes and you are good at training people and giving them the experiences.

It does seem to me we quickly get into the area of devolution here, both in terms of how you do it and the model you need to develop, and I am a strong believer that the only way you can run a large organisation is to devolve, and I think the Police Service has moved a long way with its empowerment of occupational command units. Although I have to say in the West Midlands, which is where I draw my direct experience, from there was a period when devolution went, I think, too far, and there was a lack of recognition that a large organisation needs a strong centre as well as strong units of delivery.

There we begin to get into your role: well, how do you do this? And looking through the inspectorate's last report of the Metropolitan Police Service, they clearly emphasise the ambition to have two tiers only and a lean centre. It seems to me that is a good model and gives the opportunity to develop managerial skills at the occupational command unit level.

But let us be clear, they do not happen just by giving people the job; you have to develop their skills and support them. I think there are some key components of good devolution, and these are all responsibilities that I attach to the leader of a service. One is, are you clear about what your objectives are and are they clearly communicated across the organisation? That is the most important job of a leader, to help people in an uncertain, fragmented world to understand what is most important.

Secondly, have you got in place good control and monitoring systems so the people to which you give responsibility know for themselves how they are performing, have reliable information coming available to them?

Thirdly, do you have a good central function that is capable of good strategic planning and special intervention -- and I guess this is particularly important for the Metropolitan Service -- for all those range of issues that cannot be dealt with at local delivery level.

Sir William Morris: Could we look at one of the issues that you have touched on: governance. When Sir John came to address us, we raised governance with him, and his quick retort was that he is probably the most accountable police officer in the world. I think he indicated that there were 22 separate authorities in aggregate terms to which he was somehow accountable.

But just in terms of the political centres of accountability -- and you have touched on the Home Secretary, obviously the Metropolitan Police Authority, the Mayor, because the Mayor has some influence about budgets and what have you, and of course the boroughs, the Greater London Authority itself. That is an awful lot of political constituencies to which accountability is required.

Could we have your comments on that? Do you see any way that some sort of streamlining could be achieved which makes governance of the MPS, in terms of its accountability, a more simple affair?

A. You are taking me into dangerous territory, I suspect.

Sir William Morris: Yes, local authority.

A. Clearly there is speculation about whether the current structure of local government and regional government for London is ideal and whether it should be changed, and there are different views on that. I do not think you need me to comment on that, really.

Let me say that firstly I think that accountability is a word that is used widely and I think it is important that we are clear about what we mean by it. It seems to me that it is important for every public service, that the public should be satisfied that those who make decisions can be held to account. Perhaps more so for a service like the police where we are talking about infringements of people's liberty. So it is an absolutely critical principle for me.

But we then get into issues about whether that can be done at lots of fora -- there is a clarity about where that accountability is discharged, and I think also an issue about: is it effectively discharged?

So the sorts of issues that I would be interested in exploring here, rather than being sure that I know the answer, is, one, the Commissioner ought to be clear that there is one forum in which he is held to account; I think there is room to have lots of fora, where he can reasonably be expected to give open answers to questions, because that is part of the governance, but are we all clear that there is only one place where he is held to account. My understanding is that that is the Police Authority, and whilst ever that is clear and he is clear about it, then I think the equation works. But I do not think there is any hiding from the fact that it is not going to stop, the boroughs or indeed the neighbourhoods of London, wanting straightforward answers about policing issues in their area.

That does not always work well, and, again, going back to the Birmingham experience, I can remember a really fractious -- I went to an award committee meeting in Handsworth, the purpose of which was just for me to see how the city council's own ward meetings were going on. That ward meeting was one of immense energy; representatives of the community, 50 or 60 people in a pretty draughty church hall, haranguing three councillors about street crime in the area, and the councillors trying valiantly to argue that they were not responsible for the Police Service, and the members of the public, quite properly, I think, saying, "Well, actually, we elected you to be our representatives. We do not want to know about the divisions in the public service".

So how do I translate this in terms of responsibilities for the Chief Constable? I think it is important that whoever is leading the service instills the principle, puts in place the machinery, so that even at that local level someone can answer for the service and show empathy for a community which is clearly under pressure. So I think it is quite an important part of leadership. Not doing it yourself all the time but having in place confident arrangements to deliver it.

Sir William Morris: Can I just explore with you this relationship issue around partnerships, because there was not too long when every self-respecting employer or organisation should have a partnership, and I wondered whether you see any scope for partnerships with, say, a police service on a private sector, or the private sector. Because I still believe that the principle of cross fertilisation in what is best in both, so the ethos of the public service, cross fertilising the best values within the private sector, values around customer care, values around efficiency and satisfaction, I think both private and public would benefit from a combination of both.

I do not know whether you can share any experience with us where that sort of, if you like, common approach to deliver public service is happening and, if it is, can the Met benefit from that, and if it is not, would you advocate that an attempt be made to construct that sort of model going forward?

A. I suspect, when we look back, maybe in ten years' time, In the 1990s, one of the things that we will see very clearly is that we got preoccupied with partnerships for their own sake, and I think there is already a growing concern that pursuing partnerships too freely, certainly in the late 1990s, confused accountabilities, ended up with people putting a lot of energy into partnership arrangements rather than delivering.

But it is important that we do not throw the baby out with the bath water. I think there are two strands that I want to address under the heading of partnership.

Firstly, the one that you have drawn me to, which is essentially partnerships between public and private to deliver. I think there is a growing healthy lack of ideology about public service delivery, and that seems to me the key test: how do you deliver complex difficult services as well as possible? Where that is well done within the public service, and sometimes it can only be done -- for instance, I would find it very difficult to imagine us subcontracting much of the direct policing of this country to private agencies, and all sorts of questions have been raised where we have just experimented around the edges of that, and we are seeing that both here and abroad at the moment, about the dangers of relying on contracted staff over which you have less control to deliver a state function.

But coming back from that, nonetheless, I think there is less ideology and many more opportunities, really, to develop good service delivery in good dialogue between client and supplier. I think that is one of the things we are seeing with a growth of outsourcing companies, an amalgamation of outsourcing companies. As they become more mature, one of the things they are stressing -- and I have first-hand experience of this -- is the importance of good relationships with customers, to understand what their clients need in terms of public delivery, and indeed the culture of those companies is changing as they absorb more ex-public employees.

I will not say any more about that, but I am happy to come back on that issue.

So yes to partnership arrangements, but with a very clear view, led by the client, as to what is best for delivering that service.

The other side of partnership that I particularly want to pick up with you is the one about partnership between public services when you are dealing with complex problems, issues, which are not the responsibility of one service alone, and I have got a very strong view there that we do not put enough energy into developing a one-system view of the public service in this country. We are still far too preoccupied, and indeed I see some evidence of this, for instance in the Metropolitan Police's presumption that they have their own in-house training. I would be much happier if I could see clear evidence -- and it may exist -- that police officers working in Lewisham, for instance, were having part of their training, part of their development work, in conjunction with the social services of Brixton, other emergency services, so that what we develop is much more of a one-system approach where you follow delivery chains down, even in different public sector organisations, and end up with people who understand the rationality of different services. Because there is this dreadful mythology that we are dogged with, that all accountants are only interested in saving money; all social workers are profligate; all education workers are only interested in the holidays. All of that mythology is because people do not understand the different rationality of different services and their contributions.

Sir William Morris: I think that is an interesting point because part of the culture that we see is -- and it derives from certain practices of appointments where appointments are made on the competency of the operational command experience, skills and qualities, and when you assume a significantly high operational command you are suddenly thrust as an inheritor of intricate managerial responsibilities, thousands of people in some instances, with huge resource, and to what extent the operational requirements which drive the appointment can in fact be buttressed and supported by the managerial function which is within that particular command is not evidently clear, because even on some of the command training, strategic and others, it is fine in the classroom but on the front line life is a little bit more complex.

I am sure you take my drift.

A. I do, but just in case I have appeared too abstract in my comments, I would emphasise that even for the operational, if the Police Service is going to be effective in child protection, if it is going to be effective in community relations, in complex diverse communities, then the people who deliver the service, the constables and other police officers of today, need to be trained for at least part of their training with other people whose contribution is just as critical to the delivery of those services. That is the point I am struggling to get to.

Sir William Morris: Another issue which we value your views on is, you touched on it, communication, getting the message down. In some instances communication can be a motivating experience; it can be an inspiring one; in others it can be: well, we hear what you say, boss, end of story. You, with your million citizens in Birmingham and your 40,000 plus employees, delegating responsibility, still had to get the message down even to Handsworth. Can you share with us how that is best achieved, getting the message down to right at the delivery point?

A. I think it is one of the big difficulties running any large organisation. Frankly, by that I mean organisations much, much smaller than either Birmingham or the Metropolitan Police Service, they still have these difficulties. Whenever the organisation is too large for you to go and meet everybody or to draw them all together in one room then you start, I think, to have difficulties in communication.

The sorts of things which I use -- and I would advocate -- I do think that an important tool of communication is the chief officer team in a council, the command team in the Police Service, the forum of drawing the OCU heads together, the borough commanders together. It is an important part of the leadership role, that that should meet regularly, that the Commissioner -- I am seeking to make a direct parallel with the chief executive role; I recognise that is not easy given the Commissioner's other responsibilities, but whoever it is who is providing and wants to provide leadership needs to be seen in that forum, telling the story of what the organisation as a whole is seeking to achieve, the progress that it has made and the priorities for the next step.

I regard one of the critical roles of the leader as the story telling of the organisation. And gradually you build up a trust that you -- even if it looks chaotic to people on the ground, that the person that they can look to, the leader person, has a sense of how to make some pattern out of this and to take them forward. That seems to me a critical issue.

I do think that it is also important to find some mechanisms for touching the tips of the services yourself, and I think the people all become a bit weary really of the state visit from the chief executive who everybody has been told about in advance, all the briefs have been sent out, a bit like a ministerial visit, and then you float in for a quick in and out. I think you have to break through that cynicism by trying to do it in a more direct way.

I held a series of gatherings in Birmingham over my time there under the heading of "Staying on Track", drawing together on each occasion 150 people, drawn at random from across the services, to say, "This is what I set out to do; what I am looking for is feedback about whether it feels any different to you at your point in the organisation".

The first of these meetings were dreadful. People thought there must be some ulterior motive, that they had been singled out for poor timekeeping or something, and their all comments were going to be taken down. But by the time we got to the third one it was clear that -- and big organisations have great grapevines -- it was clear that people had recognised that this was genuine. So people were actually coming to the third meeting, they did not want to wait for the presentation, they wanted to get into the discussion session and raise their concerns. So that can be an important tool.

Perhaps I should just end this with one further comment. When I was first appointed as chief executive in Wolverhampton I was given some advice by Professor John Stewart at Birmingham University which really served me well, and it was that if you are seeking to give some sense of direction to a large organisation, then you have to deal with symbols. People watch your behaviour, they watch the things that you see as important, they watch the people that you spend your time with, they watch the way you deal with doormen, tea ladies, and out of this they draw some conclusions about what you really believe and what is really important to you. And I think that is a very important lesson that I learned, that if you want an organisation that is caring, that has integrity, that is open, you have to live that and you have to constantly reflect on the signals that you are sending out by your day-to-day activities.

So if you set up a visit to a front line service and at the last minute send a message saying you have been called to the mayor's office, the leader's office, the message it sends out, it will take many more visits to overcome about where your priorities lie.

Sir William Morris: Just one final area for me before I pass to my colleagues. I said earlier that, yes, we want to know what is bad, what is good, but more importantly we want help and suggestions and advice, guidance, to make things better. But for things to be made better then obviously it implies change, and what I call the psychology of change, the first factor which induced change, what we would be interested in getting your experience on here is: is it an organisational crisis? Does it require a high paid consultant to be brought in, or is it a sort of organic and orderly development?

Whichever it is, how do you manage it and what are the pitfalls to be avoided? Because at some point we will have to deliver a report to our commissioning body and I am assuming we will make some suggestions for change. If we do, I suspect they will have the responsibility of implementing change, and it will be helpful, even if it is a side letter, to be able to say, "Well, we have heard information and we have heard some very important hints as to how change can in fact be effected or driven, but here are the pitfalls to be avoided", so we look to your experience to share with us on that one.

A. Once again, you are specialising in some wide and ambitious questions for me this morning.

Sir William Morris: I am drilling into your experience, Sir Michael.

A. Let me try to be helpful on that. I am unashamedly an advocate of organic change. I think there is far too much talk about transformation of organisations, and the danger with -- and I understand the reasoning, which is that you should not seek to just solely make incremental changes if you want to change the complexion of a public service. I think the danger is, actually, that our public services are so complex and they are so interleaved with each other that actually big changes just break off lots of roots, leave lots of people who thought they had some idea of what they were doing completely uncertain. So there are enormous risks in big change, particularly because it is difficult to communicate with people who need simple messages and reassurance about the role that they are playing.

So a starting point, I guess, would be a strong presumption in favour of organic change, absolute clarity about what you are trying to do, and honesty. I think, again, one of the things that dogs a lot of change in the public sector is we are not always willing to be honest about what it is that we are trying to achieve, because of small political concerns. So we do not tell people really what we are trying to achieve, and as a result of that we miss the opportunity, really, to get a coalition of common interest.

One problem with using consultants is that sometimes we give them the wrong job to do. If you want to use consultants, to use an independent voice, an independent mechanism, of which a commission might be a very good mechanism, to explore an area because you are genuinely interested and you want it to have a degree of independence, that is a very useful way of using an external independent voice.

Trying to use an external independent voice as the cutting edge of change seems to me a mistake, really. This is something you have to do for yourself, because otherwise the learning actually just evaporates outside the organisation. So if you want to change an organisation it is best to choose from people who know it, perhaps supplement them, maybe from another group of people who knows something about it, another police force, for instance.

If you want to bring in a really challenging view, add to that team people who know nothing about the Police Service so that they ask the naive questions, but make sure that it is made up, it has got at its heart people who actually know about this organisation and are going to be around afterwards, after the sort of initial change, to make sure that it is rooted and carried through.

So those are some thoughts that occur to me, but there is a big literature on this and many diverse views.

Sir William Morris: Thank you so much. Thank you very much indeed. Can I invite my colleague, Sir Anthony, to put a few questions to you.

Questions by Sir Anthony Burden

Sir Anthony Burden: Good morning.

You were very clear, thank you, on the fact that the Commissioner must be the leader of the organisation. Could I move down to the next tier of that, please, because from your personal knowledge, having been involved in policing, you will realise that there is a very strong need to manage the operational side of the policing function. But in support of that, a very diverse group which is very similar to any other organisation: finance personnel, IT, property management, fleet management, communications, media.

You indicated that you have read the HMI report and you will see in there some criticism of the way some of those functions are managed?

A. Yes.

Sir Anthony Burden: Would you please give your view on how you feel, at management board level, those support functions can be best managed in support of the operational delivery of services.

A. I do not think there is a unique solution to this, but I suspect that one of the problems -- and this would be my first-hand observation in watching other police forces -- is that there has been a recognition of the need for good managerial skills and a recognition that you cannot only rely on training up from the service, and that you need some specialist skills. So increasingly police services have, starting at the top, and sometimes now not only at the top, begun to recruit people with financial skills, with procurement skills, with human resource skills. However, they are still being recruited into a model which I think far too often -- not universally but far too often sends the very powerful message that you are not really part of the team; you are here to do a professional job, you are a hired hand, you are not really part of the team.

I have seen that. It is amplified, of course, when you turn up to a management team and some people are in uniform and some people are not, and that tool is used sometimes; I have seen it used to reinforce the difference and who the real core of the service are. You see it sometimes actually structurally reflected; so in terms of two teams you have this team meets and this is strategic command, and this team is about resourcing.

The conclusion I have reached is actually that you just cannot get that to work, really. There needs to be a sense that this is one team. There might be clear recognition that the different demands on the different individuals may require different day-to-day working arrangements, but there has to be some investment in that as a team. I think that means, in the same way that we invest in helping constables with the right aptitude to see themselves moving on up and taking on wider responsibilities, I think we have to do the same sort of training for the non-uniform white collar staff about the core tasks of policing.

My experience in talking to people who have held those senior posts is that they have been given very little exposure to the challenge of policing. So there has to be something which says: okay, you are in the Police Service now, this is not the same as working for the BBC, or whenever you have come from; you are going to have to do some tough learning to understand the realities of this service. That might involve you going on the beat. I do not know. It is a bit difficult to imagine saying that to a 45 year-old person, but nonetheless we have to find mechanisms for doing that.

Sir Anthony Burden: Maybe commanding an OCU for a couple of months.

A. Yes, why not.

Sir Anthony Burden: All of those support functions, when they sit at a management board and the best model to actually deliver for the Commissioner, all of those diverse support responsibilities, in your experience, can that effectively be vested in one person? Would that be a better model of ensuring that you do not get this sort of functional silo system, where people are actually battling amongst themselves, or do you actually have to have at management board a Miss Finance, a Mr Personnel, a Ms IT? Or can you have a structure that says: Commissioner/leader; one deputy operations; one deputy support that will deliver everything in support terms.

A. I think you can. And what is more, if you look across local government over the last probably ten years really, there has been quite an appetite for the introduction of what they call strategic directors to reduce the size of the central management team. And there have been some exotic cocktails of responsibilities put together.

So I think you can show that that works. I do not think it even has to be a strict delineation: here are the support functions, here are operational. And there have been some good experiments to show that actually mixing operational and support functions actually brings a better breadth of view to the management team.

The only thing that I would say to that, if you are going to do that -- and I think it has all sorts of merits -- the high command, all members of the high command, have to have access to somebody who at the end of the day is an expert in that area, just so that they can get -- when they need to, they can actually get an authentic view on that.

I think we have, again in local government, partly as a result of outsourcing, sometimes ended up without adequate expert voices in some of these areas, and then ended up paying a lot of money to buy it in on a short-term basis.

Sir Anthony Burden: Thank you. Can I move on to my second big area: you have already alluded to your support for devolution, and you will be conscious of the fact that devolution is a political imperative within the Police Service, but good sense, in the fact that it brings coterminosity of services, particularly at borough or local authority level, and so you get chief officers working closely with each other, which is very, very effective in my experience.

But the model that is undertaken to devolve, I think, is important. I would certainly welcome your views on that. We hear a lot about the loose/tight relationship between the centre and the devolved unit. That relationship and the factors for success would also be very helpful, please.

A. I think I am probably going to go back to some of my earlier comments on this, because it seems to me that at the heart of good devolution is clarity about (a) what you are seeking to achieve, and (b) exactly what it is that you have devolved. And that is a contract, is it not?

We have not talked about performance management yet; I suspect we will spend some time on it, but it seems to me that very often it is talked about as if it were a one-way accountability, holding people to account, not whether they have delivered or not. Good performance management is about dialogue, about what has been delivered, and where the delivery falls short of the expectation why that is the case. And good performance management is as interesting in resource constraints and the things that inhibit its delivery as the personal performance of the individual.

Right at the heart of good devolution is a contract and a complete conversation about performance of that contract, which does not just hinge on whether the individual has done the job but actually understands -- gets feedback at the same time, which then shapes both policy and resourcing.

So for me that is the heart of making the OCU model work, and being clear about what you have not devolved, and therefore what things have to be referred up, because it certainly is not cutting focus adrift to deal with complex and demanding issues without a very clear recognition that some things are beyond their level of competence. That does not mean they are incompetent, but just that it would be unsafe to make the decision at that level. I think we could quickly identify issues that fitted into that category.

To some extent, it seems to me that some of the debates about policing of drug abuse, we have not been clear enough about whether you can actually delegate them to one patch in a city, and if you have, whether that is an explicit experiment and everybody understands that it is an experiment.

Sir Anthony Burden: The tensions which may or may not inevitably develop with devolution with the perceived loss of power at the centre, has that been something which you have personally experienced and had to manage through, and, if so, what lessons did you learn from that?

A. I would say that the seven years that I spent at Birmingham -- I mean, literally the very first day I spent in Saltley College with the members of the labour group discussing their strategy for devolution. I think at that time there were 43 members of the labour group and I think there must have been 52 definitions of devolution that day. It goes on as a challenge.

My successor Lynn Homer is involved in a new push to try to devolve more engagement -- to achieve greater engagement with the different communities of the city, a greater feeling of influence over public services and a greater efficiency with the delivery of public services by political and managerial devolution; the two are part of that equation for the city council, they may not be for the Police Service.

I think the first lesson I would learn out of that is that the inertia involved in that is immense. Everybody is fearful. There is a coalition of fear, really. The people that hold the power at the centre are fearful of losing it, although I think that is a myth, actually. I think you become more powerful if you empower the organisation because you can do so much more.

So there is anxiety about losing power and there is anxiety about taking power on people who feel -- and it is back to this, what are they held accountable for, and particularly in public service, where things are transparent, expectations always exceed what can be delivered, that what you are really devolving is the ability to be blamed. So this is an area where nobody is rushing to effect it. People are very anxious.

But when it works -- in Nottinghamshire, for instance, we took the first phase of devolving site budgets to people who ran residential care for children and the elderly. When we got it right, it just completely changed those organisations. People who spent their time whingeing and writing endless memos complaining about the centre just started looking out, took responsibility. That is what we are trying to achieve.

I will just come back to say I think it is really difficult and it is a grinding job to take it through, and therefore people who talk about it as if it could be done with a magic wand are not helpful to those who end up having to do it.

Sir Anthony Burden: I guess there has to be a starting point with devolution, and that starting point might mean that there may be person power allocation, a manpower allocation strategy which has not allocated staff effectively beforehand, the budget might not be fairly allocated, and all the obstacles would stand in the way.

A. I would absolutely agree with that.

Sir Anthony Burden: So there would have to be a structured analysis of the way resources are allocated to make sure that those given the task can actually deliver.

A. That is absolutely right, except that that, again, can become a reason for not doing it.

Sir Anthony Burden: Absolutely.

A. So as long as you say, "Look, there is going to be some rough justice here, but we are open and responsive and we are going to get this right", and I think that is the point; if you can back up the early stages of devolution with the information, with the openness of dialogue, with real performance dialogue, and the people who are leading it are visibly seen to be -- they have not just washed their hands of this and said, "It is over to you now", they are working it through. That is where I have seen the most valuable and successful devolution take place.

Sir Anthony Burden: And I guess it is implicit in what you have said that if you devolve, for example, human resources, personnel functions, you must supply the expertise along with the devolution; it is not good just letting people have the function without the skills to do it.

A. I could not agree more. And that is why you need a strong centre. One of the jobs of a strong centre is to have those expert people to, on occasion, step in to lend a hand. But they have to see themselves as support functions. Too frequently we use the term "support functions" but actually when they arrive they do not feel like it; they feel as if they have come in to take over.

Sir Anthony Burden: That nicely brings me on to my last area and that is performance management and what comes with devolution. I think you summed it up very nicely, the ability to be blamed. The Police Service has adopted a performance management regime which involves COMSTAT. I do not know whether you are familiar with that, it is the New York model of being put under 300 watt bulbs and grilled for three hours as to why you have not succeeded.

How do you hold people to account, in your view, without further developing a blame culture where people actually try and slip and slide and avoid the difficult questions, and put up smoke screens, and are absolutely honest at these meetings as to why they have not delivered, and the organisation learns from that and moves on, as opposed to looking to put heads on blocks?

A. I think it is difficult. I have had some experience, both as a participant of this and in trying to put systems up, and more recently by advising organisations that are carrying this through. The first thing is you have to invest in it. The people who are going to do the holding to account have to be helped to prepare for that job, and that preparation takes place a long way in advance.

In any relationship I am back to the fact that you need to be clear about the contract, what has been contracted to, and that is really contracted to, both sides have agreed: this is what we want to achieve, I am agreeing that I am going to seek to achieve what we have laid out here. So there is ownership of it, and it is written down, it is there to be monitored.

Then when you come to hold to account, firstly you have to have done the research so that there actually is an evidential base about what has been achieved and what has not. That the people who are going to do the holding to account have had some training in how you get the best out of a performance dialogue and are supported by a good information system so that there is no slipping away about, "Well, we cannot really tell what has happened", and that the person who is being assessed feels that they are involved in a dialogue which is not just about what they have personally done, but that personal performance is put in the context of whether the objectives were realistic, what we have learned about trying to deliver those objectives and what that has told us about resourcing, public reaction.

Too frequently, I think, we set the dialogue up as a narrow dialogue, as if it was all about personal endeavour, whether all of us know that personal endeavour is actually such a small fraction of what is important to deliver a successful job.

I hope that is helpful.

Sir Anthony Burden: Absolutely. Just one final question from me. In all of your experience, over many years in organisations, how damaging to organisational success and delivery is a blame culture?

A. It is deadly and it is endemic in the public service. It is made worse -- I choose my words carefully here -- it is made worse when people seeking elected office promote the impression that more can be delivered for any given level of resource than can actually be delivered. And so we have lived, and perhaps continue to live, in a period where expectations of public services are being forced up much faster than we can improve productivity to respond to them; or even increase funding, because there is inevitably a limit to the appetite that there will be for funding public services. That is a terribly frustrating time, I think, and gets translated into blame.

We could spend a whole commission talking about that, the role of the press, the debasement of the regional press, so that once we had a better quality of journalists, reduction in overheads in almost every regional newspaper, it means that people are out for the quick story, and a quick story is one that has identified someone and is able to turn it into their fault.

It is a very difficult climate and one that has got more complicated, worse, harder to work in.

Sir Anthony Burden: But a real responsibility on the leader of an organisation to actually promote the ground rules and what he or she is looking for in terms of delivery.

A. Yes, and it does not stop at the head of the paid service; it is also something about politicians themselves recognising that the earlier that responsibility is accepted in the chain -- it does not stop you exploring down the chain what went wrong, but the quicker somebody actually says, "This is my watch, I am responsible for this", frankly, the quicker the thing is shaved off, the longer there is to go, "Well, it is not really my fault, it is further down the chain", the more difficult, the more corrosive it becomes, and the more frightened people become the next time round.

Sir Anthony Burden: Thank you, that is most helpful.

Sir William Morris: Thank you. I will just ask Miss Weekes to go straight into her line of questions.

Questions by Miss Weekes

Miss Weekes: Management. I would like to, if I can, seek your assistance on some more details about selection of good managers, training of good managers and monitoring of the performance level that is required for the Metropolitan Police for managers.

If I can just summarise where we are at the moment in terms of the evidence we have received. There are pockets of good practice and pockets of bad practice, but there is significant evidence of bad practice which has damaged morale, it has damaged retention, it has damaged the internal trust and confidence, and it has clearly had a knock-on effect to the financial detriment of the public purse; employment tribunals, settlements, for example. That is a very short summary of where we are at at the moment, hence the need, I suspect, for this Inquiry, because, credit to the Metropolitan Police, they recognise that there is a problem.

It is mostly seated in the method of discipline complaints, because that is the central part of our terms of reference, which I know you have read.

A. Yes.

Miss Weekes: Can I begin, then, with the selection of good managers within the context of the Metropolitan Police, and linked immediately to the selection is the fact that the right to manage comes with promotion. You are a sergeant, you are an inspector, a chief inspector, superintendent. The further up the line you go, the greater number of people you manage.

A. Yes.

Miss Weekes: But there is an exam, of course, and there is the issue of training. I will come back to training in a moment.

We were very helpfully given, by ACAS, who came to help us, criteria for good management, but I would like from you whether you agree with it and what you would like to add to it, again in the context of the Metropolitan Police. The helpful Mr Taylor from ACAS said this:

"... there are two levels of skills or attributes that we are looking for. The first one, if I could describe them, is intellectual; someone needs to have the capacity to quickly cut through the detail and understand what the issues are in a variety of very different industries...

"One is this capacity to be objective and not to be a prisoner of the past, in terms of what your experience or what your history says...

"The second personal attribute, I think, is judgment, sound judgment, which I would say is rooted in common sense ... It is just the capacity to sit down and make a sensible judgment based on common sense.

"The third one is impartiality ..."

He summarised:

"... it is good forensic intellectual skills. You do not have to be a brain surgeon by any stretch of the imagination, but you have to be able to understand things. The capacity to be impartial; and good judgment."

Do you want to add to that?

A. I might explore it a little bit.

Miss Weekes: Yes, please.

A. I think two points particularly occur to me. One is that I might have added to the attributes outstanding listening skills, because management is essentially about human interaction.

You yourself talked about the right to manage. For too many managers that is assumed to be something which is sort of pinned on to your lapel, I think, by somebody else. Really, the critical issue is do you have the qualities, can you develop the qualities that people will agree to you having authority over them. That is slightly different. It is not pinned; it is something you have to develop in yourself. One important component of that is whether you really listen to what people are saying to you, or alternatively whether you have made up your mind in advance -- you might say that is implicit in Mr Taylor's suggestion of sound decision-making.

So I would emphasise listening skills. I think there is also just a sort of implication that this is just common sense, and I think I would recognise, particularly in the Police Service, but not alone there, that actually for a person to be a credible manager they may have to be more than just a bright layperson. They may have to know something quite specific about the organisation and the service that they are working with, and that would differ from -- and back to my point in discussion earlier on, that just bringing in someone from an accountancy background to work within OCU might help you to improve the financial skills, but if you want to improve the overall management they have got to have some understanding of the fact that this is not Tesco's. And indeed Tesco's would be absolutely emphatic, if you joined them, that you understood that company and what was distinctive about it.

So I would just be a bit wary about this just being good common sense, and I would certainly emphasise listening skills. But otherwise, it seemed to me a pretty good supply.

I do think we have made big headway in management in both public and private sectors in this country over the last ten years by trying to distil down the key competencies rather than getting lost in job descriptions which are highly specific to the organisation. I think in a competency approach, what are the key competencies, but not losing sight of the fact that to have credibility and to be the most effective, you have to have some understanding of the context as well. That would be my response.

Miss Weekes: Well, that conveniently takes me, then, to a possible difficulty. The Metropolitan Police, understandably, do have a good reputation, operationally, and it is well deserved. And because the right -- and I choose that deliberately, and I know you picked that up deliberately -- to manage comes with promotion, part of the exam, if I can put it that way, in inverted commas, "the promotional aspect", you are identifying the good placement. But it may be that there is not a sufficient emphasis put upon the core personnel management skills that comes with the promotion up the ladder.

A. Yes.

Miss Weekes: How could the Met better promote and identify those management skills so you are not just getting a good sergeant, a good superintendent; you are making yourself identify, because he has got to manage those skills?

A. We are here focusing on operational issues, are we not, but management in operational issues?

Miss Weekes: Yes, absolutely.

A. I will follow your lead on that. I have to be careful because actually it seems to me that to answer this fully I need to have more knowledge than I have, and so I will be cautious. But it does seem to me that an important issue is actually to separate, at least intellectually, the one job from the other.

It may be that you need to -- I would accept that you would need to have been a constable, you would need to have spent some time on the beat or in direct service, to have the necessary experience to go on to be a sergeant or somebody of more senior rank. But it would be important for me to emphasise that actually the job at this point becomes a different job. It is not just a glorified version of that job. We are now saying, "Right, you have got to this point, you have reached base; now the development and training actually is around a completely different job where, step-by-step, you stop doing things yourself and you rely on other people to do them for you".

So really, all of that early experience, it is a key, but it is not actually in any way equipping you -- it is a necessary set of experiences to have, but it is not sufficient to do the job that is now being asked of you. So it is a completely different set of competencies that we are now going to develop at this stage, and we are going to test to make sure that you have got the aptitude for this, but actually we do not expect you to at this point have developed these skills to a very high level. That is our job, as your employer, to now prepare you for.

Miss Weekes: It is very interesting the emphasis "it is a different job", because perhaps part of the problem is that the constable, the inspector, simply continues with being the grand, very good inspector and does not really develop the different job.

A. Absolutely, and it is not unique. It is a special setting but it is not unique. You find it in any area of public service, and probably we look to lots of areas of the private sector as well, where people come out of a professional area where they are prized for their individual contribution in this work, and then you say, "You have done so well there, we now want you to manage other people to do that job", as if somehow those skills have been developed, and there is absolutely no reason to believe they would have been.

Miss Weekes: That conveniently then leads me to training, which is the employer's responsibility.

A. Yes.

Miss Weekes: We have heard many different things about training, and training is not new to the Met because every other huge public organisation has to do that, and I draw very much on your background and experience with training managers.

You first of all require the commitment for training. You secondly require the correct priority of training; a huge number of training courses within the Met -- there is training for everything. You require the time off to train, and then you require update. Is that about right? I may not, because I do not have your experience, have put it in the correct summary.

A. They are all important components. Would you mind if I used slightly different vocabulary?

Miss Weekes: Of course.

A. I think the vocabulary that I would use would be one of development rather than training. And I would very much emphasise your first point, that this essentially is about commitment to make the journey. Partly you have to identify that this is a person capable of doing it, but also that they want to make the journey of self-development. And then I would place beside the list of issues that you have raised very strongly development opportunities, because I am personally sceptical about the extent to which off-the-job training can play more than a small part in this process.

So, if I were seeking to develop someone for a managerial role, my first job would be, "This involves a journey; is this something you want to undertake? Are you committed to this? Because it is you that is having to change; you know, it is not something that is being done to you. Secondly, how can we give you learning opportunities? Many of those will actually be just different jobs opportunities to begin to develop these skills, but we will do it in a way where you are not just left to struggle. You know, we have got a context here where we are watching what you are doing, we are concerned to help you make this journey".

That little test of "is my employer really interested in what I am doing here?" would be failed, I think, in most development experiences by both members of the public services, I think.

Miss Weekes: Whose responsibility is it to ensure that the new manager who is going to learn this new different job has the bottom line level of training, experience?

A. Their immediate supervisor.

Miss Weekes: Some of the evidence suggests that training is left to whenever you can do it.

A. Yes.

Miss Weekes: Whenever the operational duties do not come first. How can we get round that?

A. I think I am back to performance management: if you have a good performance management system, if everybody understands that there is an annual dialogue, if we are clear about development needs, and I think you touch on a really important point. People have to understand that development actually affects what they are doing. I think there is a danger that training is seen as either a prize, you know, "You have done very well this year, why don't you go off on this course, it gets you away from the hurly-burly", or something that is just whimsy, "Oh, we happen to have some places here; why don't you have one of these?"

There needs to be a sense that actually there is some purpose here; people can relate this array of development opportunities to what the service is trying to achieve and what any individual has in terms of a map of self-development.

Miss Weekes: How would we, as a panel, assist in getting the Metropolitan Police to promote management skills to the level of operational skills so that at least they are equal? Because some of the words used to describe dealing with people, "Can I have time off?", "Can I go and look after my children?" -- soft skills. Does that send the wrong signal, in your view, using the words "soft skills"?

A. I understand the point you are making, and I do understand the sensitivity of this issue in the Police Service, which prides itself on having a very clear sense of what it is doing and of inculcating some quite tough operational skills, how this can be seen as a contrast with it.

I think part of the task which you face is to make it clear that actually the most frightening thing that most people do as managers is actually confronting a member of staff. Actually, it is not a soft exercise, it is a very hard exercise. And the fact that most people bottle out, as it were, is well illustrated in the debris that we see reflected in employment tribunals.

Invariably, when cases get to public gaze, what you are looking at is the final chapter in something which dates right back to people being unwilling to employ quite firm skills in person management at the beginning, and good listening skills as well.

How can we go about getting these things put on to a more equal footing? For me, this is about the narrative of the exercise. I do think that -- and I think I see myself as having been guilty of this at times -- we are not good enough at developing the picture that shows that development fits in to the operational world that we are trying to achieve, and so a Chief Constable who can articulate the link between what it was that most people who joined the Police Service to do, to deal with community safety, crime, all of those really hard issues, that regionally motivated people to join up, can articulate what is the link between doing that and developing people to being good people managers, so that the whole thing is seen in operational terms; it is not seen as somehow separate and a different terminology. That seems to me the heart of the task, really.

Miss Weekes: Can I move on, then, to monitoring performance, because in the structure of devolution to the boroughs where there is a smaller group or area that conducts the performance and the operational duties you have local resolution of workplace conflicts, and often from within the boroughs you will get not enough monitoring of what the managers are doing by the senior management. That is obviously not unique within the Metropolitan Police. Other big companies often do not know what floor 8 is doing as opposed to floor 1.

A. Yes.

Miss Weekes: What is the best method of monitoring? What have you come across in terms of good practice, as it were? Because knowing where the pitfalls are, and knowing where management is falling down upon implementing your policies, is obviously the first step.

A. I absolutely agree, and I would go further and say that most conflicts can only really be resolved at that level, at that first level. And so that is an important principle for me, not to allow things to be elevated inappropriately. That is to avoid weak managers saying, "Oh, I don't really want to be dealing with this, I'll ask somebody else to deal with it", and also the vexatious litigant, as it were -- and it is important to acknowledge that employees do not all have universal goodwill in these matters -- equally seeking to elevate an issue rather than having it resolved because it might be resolved to their dissatisfaction.

So for any organisation I think what you need to do is to emphasise that, "Actually, I think you dramatically limit the rights of appeal and onward reference", so that more and more is sorted out at the first stage, at the local level.

That may need a number of other steps to make that possible: it may need training, it may need clarity about the power to decide, because sometimes that is not as clear as it could be.

That was certainly the case in Birmingham, where we had -- and partly it being an elected organisation -- a very strong culture that eventually you would be able to appeal to members. Well, what we had to do was to basically change the machinery so that that was seen as much more exceptional, because what was happening was the whole organisation was getting clogged up and you were having these ludicrous delays of 18 months to have a hearing, in no one's interests at all, least of all the employees, because I think we would agree that actually disagreements within the workplace can be incredibly corrosive for family and career, so everybody's interest suggests getting them sorted out straightaway.

Sorry, I am riding a hobby horse here; stop me.

Miss Weekes: No, but you have anticipated a very important point I was about to come to.

Can I just, before coming back to that point, because it is rather central to some of the evidence we have received, just ask you this -- and you have partly touched on it with one of your answers to Sir Anthony: what do you do with bad managers? Because not everybody is going to be good at it, no matter how much you train and no matter how good your selection processes are. It is about taking responsibility for the accountability that actually you have now got a bad manager.

Within the Metropolitan Police it is not that easy. There is a superintendent; he is of a superintendent rank; he is well respected for his operational duties, but he just is not a good manager. Some say, "Well, why don't not sack him?" Others say, "Well, I don't think that is necessarily appropriate". There is, understandably, no consensus about what to do with the bad manager.

I am not expecting you to be an angel and provide me with an answer, but could we just have some comments from your experience.

A. I think I have a lot of experiences to draw on of people being accused of being poor managers, and I think the first thing I would say is that it inevitably raises a very substantial threat to the managers themselves. And so you need processes that do not leave the impression that this is a sort of do or die outcome; that you can make mistakes, you can have weaknesses, and the first presumption is that these are things that can be changed and sorted out. And so you need that, because otherwise the whole thing just becomes completely locked by fear and anxiety, and then reassertion, because actually there is no room here not to be right because it is a terminal offence.

So back to: can you get a climate where people can make mistakes, where people can admit weaknesses and it is not seen as devastating if they do? That, I think, is about the next line of supervision and judgment and good judgment, so all the qualities we are looking for at the first line of management, really, and the next line up.

Having said all of that, I think there has to be a recognition that, if people do not want to move, they do not want to change, there is further evidence that things have not moved on, then just ignoring it is an immense waste of public expenditure. Even one example is passed by word of mouth around the whole organisation and brings the chain of command into discredit. I think we have all had experience of that, and I do not think it is unique in any one public service or perhaps even in the public sector. Everybody knows that this is a problem, this person is outrageously sexist, and the people above them do not do anything about it. I think then it is incredibly corrosive because it starts to eat away at the values of the whole organisation.

So a climate of looking for positive outcome, one; but, two, a recognition that actually, if it is not moving, you have to intervene because you are dealing with something much more important than that individual; you are dealing with the health of the whole organisation.

That gives me the chance just to add on one comment which we have not touched upon. I do think that the Police Service is made more complicated -- and it is not the only service, but I think it has had some particular complications -- from the limited availability of options into which to promote people. So you end up with a sort of assumption that everybody is going to move on, and then: you have only got these jobs available; well, let us put this person in that job. If they do not make a go of it, what do you do with them?

And so I think there is something about being very much clearer that there comes a time for any of us when exit might be the most appropriate thing in the interests of both the service and ourselves. I am a very strong believer, actually, that redundancy is not the worse thing that can happen to you in your life. You know, if you do not fit in to what is available, then, actually, properly handled, the chance to go and find something else to do in your life is actually a healthier option than being put in a job which is the wrong one for you.

Miss Weekes: I would like to move on to a topic you quite correctly touched on, and it is the weak manager who actually does not want to deal with the issue and is going to send it up to a supervisor. Within the boroughs we have received significant evidence that managers who deal with difference -- race, gender, sexuality, disability, religion -- are often frightened by it, some genuinely so, and rather than blight their own ability for performance and promotion later, they will not line manage a visible ethnic minority; they will not take on board an issue of race or gender discrimination; they will ring the commander and say, "Look, this is too difficult, this is a special case, can you deal with it?"

The evidence we have had raises a number of issues which you may be able to help us on. Our terms of reference requires us to look at the Amendment to the Race Relations Act and the fact that now every public authority, including all the ones that you have dealt with, have an obligation to promote racial equality. But the wider aspect of dealing with difference, which is not just about race, has sometimes given difficulties to the Metropolitan Police, as I suspect it has with others. All public authorities are moving towards dealing with the statutory provisions and the rights at work to respect difference.

How, in your experience, can managers better relax, be less fearful of dealing with difference? It is a terribly difficult question but a hugely important one.

Sir William Morris: Before Sir Michael answers, I am very conscious that the stenographer has been going for some time now. Could we just ask your forbearance that we have about five minutes for the stenographer to have a break?

A. Are you happy for me to answer after the break?

Miss Weekes: Absolutely?

A. Yes, that is fine. It will give me a chance to gather my thoughts.

12.10 pm
(A short break)
12.15 pm

Miss Weekes: Could I just add to the question I asked before. The evidence that we have received indicates that there are sectors of employees who have for some time felt a total lack of trust and confidence on the issue of respect for difference -- and I do not think I put that too highly -- and it includes all of the different aspects -- gender, race, disability, sexuality and religion -- that I have mentioned. So, therefore, there is a significant number of employees that are awaiting our recommendations for change, which is obviously quite a tall order, but we will rise to the occasion.

I welcome your experience of how local authorities have had to change in how they have had to respect the statutory provisions, flexi-time, part-time work for women, the issue of promotion of racial equality. Just generally, what can you say on that?

A. Well, the first thing is to acknowledge how important it is, the issue of shaping public services for a diverse community. And a critical component of that is recognising that you can only deliver to a diverse community if you seek to ensure that your workforce reflects more effectively the characteristics of the community. That is the heart of it. The heart of it is about good service delivery, and that has to be the point at which we start the dialogue.

This is about the organisation being more effective. It has to have these skills, these experiences, these understandings. So it is rooted in efficiency, not fairness. Not that it is not a fairness issue, but just, I think, in terms of helping people to understand what it is we are doing here, it is back to my concern that people should understand that what they are being asked to do relates to what they came to do, as it were.

But there is no doubt that actually this has produced some of the most testing experiences for managers, and my own past -- lots of learning, both good and bad, about things that I feel I did right and some things I wish that I could turn back the clock and start with again; some very painful episodes.

And so, firstly, just the recognition that this is very difficult; that there are some great difficulties involved here; and that what we are very often dealing with, in terms of personal interaction, is actually a much bigger history; a history of the way this organisation has behaved in the past; a history of the disadvantages, or the obstacles, that that member of staff may have faced, or their parents may have faced; really complex other issues. The management of difference has got immense energy and pain associated with it, I think, and so recognising that it is difficult is the first step.

It is, I think, for me about clear messages of the values that the leaders of the organisation hold, in terms of wanting equality of access. Equality of access, of course, sometimes is not quite the right set of words, because it is back to that what we want is a diverse organisation, and equality of access can actually just sound a little bit too mechanical, a little bit too sanitised, to achieve that.

It is, I think, about helping people to develop confidence and skills. I think we have done some very painful learning around how not to go about that. Some of the early race awareness training, for instance, was destructive of individuals and of any sense of common commitment. But we have got better, in the public sector, at monitoring, and are clear that actually just straightforward statistical monitoring of how people deal with promotional opportunities, how they deal with the shortlist, introduces a climate of transparency, and so you can begin to have the dialogue about, "Why are these figures different to what you would expect?"

So we have got now a stronger emphasis on an evidential base, and I think most public organisations now have got leaders who handle more clearly, both in terms of the storyline but also their decisions, what they do when people are found wanting. I do not say we are through it, but we have travelled over a period where far too frequently the assumption was that the problem was with the employee rather than with the manager, and I think we have learned to our cost that that is not always the case.

So there is something from me in terms of what I would be encouraging you to look at: I think it is very important for the leaders of the organisation to clearly espouse their ambition to have an organisation which reflects the community that it serves and that does not just say that; actually that that is palpably reflected in the decisions and actions that they take.

There is something about recognising that this is a complex area of management which needs both training but also the development -- I think there is a long way to go in introducing mediation skills. I am back to, let us try and deal with this as close to the point where the friction arises as possible, rather than it being passed away, because by the time it is passed away positions are adopted, time is lost, damage is done.

Miss Weekes: Can I, because I was rather interested and I liked your terminology, "the whole issue of recognising difference must be rooted in efficiency and delivery of service" -- I wonder if I can just put this to you, and it is my personal thoughts, not the thoughts of the panel, so you can feel free to knock it down.

Some managers -- some people in this country may feel: well, there is just so much about diversity, there is so much about race, the Met have a gender agenda; they describe people as visible ethnic minorities. I am now hitting here at language and the separation of groups of people from within an organisation where often the very thing they want is not to be seen as different at all.

Some of the women who came to speak to us in the forum said, "Why haven't you invited the men? Why didn't you not just have another forum for women?"

The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry allowed all of us to have a particular discussion.

Is it time to move on to use the rather interesting neutral language you used, which was, "Well, let's have a look at the efficiency of the delivery of our service to our diverse community, as opposed to some of these words which turn up in lots of training courses which no doubt you have been on?

A. Yes. I am absolutely with you. I think language is a very important issue here. Part of what we would agree, that this is difficult, it is a perceived area of difficulty, is people are very uncertain -- I have had this experience -- of the right terminology to use.

To give you a less charged example, my first three years in Wolverhampton were spent under a Labour administration which felt very strongly that I should use the gender-free term "Chair" to refer to somebody who was chairing a committee. I thought I had got that off pretty smoothly, really; I did not make any mistakes on that; I knew what people wanted. We then had an election and in came a Conservative and Liberal administration, and every time I used the term "Chair" they took this as very visible evidence that I was not committed to them. And so a year later, I had just got back to using "Chairman" every time when it went back to Labour again.

So not charged, a small example, but just that, if one has to think about which terminology to use, do we know what is the right terminology, you start to introduce immediately hesitation when you want confidence.

Inevitably, I do not think there is a simple solution to this. I think that language is very important here, but the art is -- because it is not one or the other, is it? People do want to have their differences recognised but they do not want that to be the only thing you see when you look at them. And they are very sensitive to the difference becoming a barrier to their promotion, to their being listened to, for their only being seen to be interested in one issue; all of these things.

I do not have a solution to this, other than to say, (a) I am convinced that language is very important and that has to be part of the training and development, and on both sides people just need to be -- I think we need to move away from the sort of mind-set model that says: if you do not use this terminology, then it betrays something else about you.

Miss Weekes: I think I have got time for my final question, and it is the climate of employment law cases and settlement of them.

There is some evidence that sometimes the employer will settle at the very last minute and money is thrown at it just to get rid of it so that actually there is no publicity of the employment tribunal case going forward. I noticed your point about mediation. Is mediation one of the key answers?

A. I think it can be. It is back to my very strong presumption that you have to sort things out at the beginning, locally. The interesting thing is that there is a lot of interest in the private sector about trying to reduce legal transaction costs by using mediation; a whole set of settings. So there is a growing interest in it outside of the employment sphere, but I think it has a particular use there.

So, yes, I think mediation is important, but, again, it is about having people who are skilled in that and who come into a situation quickly, where manager and employee cannot finds a resolution themselves, to help them to resolve it.

Just a comment in passing. I do think there has been a period when, because we have known of so many weaknesses and failures in our employment practice in dealing with difference, we have allowed things to get to court, where, actually, the handling of the case itself was so bad that the clear recommendation was, "You are going to lose here", and so rather than lose people have settled.

Sometimes, in cases which, back in the original complaint, the original complaint did not have as much substance as it might have appeared, it is actually the subsequent handling of it that has done the damage. Again, it points me towards early resolution.

Miss Weekes: Thank you very much for your help.

Sir William Morris: Mr Michael, thanks very much indeed. Before I record our formal thanks to you, you will recall that in my introductory comments earlier on I said that when we had completed our questions I would offer you the opportunity to offer us a final comment, if you so wish, so please feel free to do so, if you wish.

Closing comments by Sir Michael Lyons

Sir Michael Lyons: Thank you.

If I were to just pick one point, it would be to go back and just extract a point I made earlier on and just elaborate on it a little bit. It is my very strong belief that what we should be aiming to achieve in the public sector in this country is a one-system view of what we are trying to achieve. That would lead me to encourage many more shared development opportunities across the public sector; much greater fluidity in moving people between -- encouraging people to look for jobs so that they might come out of the Civil Service and into a Police Authority; they might go out of a Police Authority into a local authority; into the social services. My strong conviction that that will give us a better pool of public service managers to draw on, because they will have been much clearer about the context in which they have to work, much clearer about the contribution of other parts of the public sector.

At the end of the day, that could produce for us a wider choice of our Chief Constables for the future; not of people who have come straight from industry but have actually come up from the public sector but have had some experience in their careers outside the Police Service alone, which might have included a period in industry -- I would not for a moment decry that.

That is just one thing I would underline it has been an ambition on my part to move towards, and I think the work that Andrew Turnbull is doing as Cabinet Secretary is moving in this direction. There is a lot of debate about this at the moment, and maybe your conclusions can help take us a step further.

Sir William Morris: Thank you very much, providing it does not delay us too long.

Can I, at this point, say we are immensely grateful to you for coming along and sharing your thoughts with us, and indeed answering our questions. It is a big task, we recognise that. We know your commitment to public service, and your presence this morning we see as a contribution to that end.

So once again, on behalf of my colleagues and myself, thanks for being here and thanks for the work that you are doing and thanks for the contribution you are making to our work. Thank you again.

Sir Michael Lyons: Thank you very much. I have enjoyed dialogue.

Sir William Morris: We will adjourn until 2 o'clock.

12.30 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 Sir Michael Lyons on 9 June 2004. Sections available here: Transcript of public session: Sir Michael Lyons Questions by Sir William Morris Questions by Sir Anthony Burden Questions by Miss Weekes Closing comments by Sir Michael Lyons Alternative versions This transcript will be available with original line and page numbering. Content Transcript of public session: Sir Michael Lyons Wednesday, 9 June 2004 10.30am Sir William Morris: Sir Michael, good morning and welcome. A. Thank you. Sir William Morris: Can I on behalf of my colleagues and myself say thank you very much indeed for accepting our invitation to attend the Inquiry this morning and to give us some evidence. I say for the record that whilst I appreciate that for some of our witnesses the process that we use might seem somewhat daunting, I suspect that will not apply to your good self. Nevertheless, I think it would be helpful if I set out very briefly how we propose to conduct the hearing this morning. First of all, let me just make the formal introductions. I am Sir Bill Morris, recently retired General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union, and I have been asked to chair the Inquiry. 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 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 also as a part-time chairperson of employment tribunals, and she was in fact counsel to the Lawrence Inquiry. Sir Michael, 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. The Inquiry that we are conducting is inquisitorial and not adversarial by nature or character. Our focus is on the Metropolitan Police Service as an organisation and not so much the individuals who make up the organisation. We are very keen to enquire into those issues raised by our terms of reference so that we can make appropriate recommendations for further good practice rather than concentrating on making criticisms. Among other things, we are asked in our terms of reference to establish whether the policies, the practices, the procedures, the convention and the structure of the Metropolitan Police Service in relation to professional standards and employment matters represents best practice when compared to other public organisations. We want to hear from all our witnesses not just what is wrong with the Met but what is right with it, what is good about it. But most importantly, we hope that our witnesses will tell us and help us to identify what needs to be done in order to make it better. In that context, we are particularly keen to hear from you as an eminent leader of organisational change, having notedly in your past career been chief executive of three local authorities and having held a number of non-executive directorships of organisations which are making a contribution to the national wealth. We are keen to hear from you about your contributing experience in respect of the public sector and also the private sector. At the end of these introductory remarks I will lead on the questions to yourself, followed by my colleagues, who may have some supplementary questions. When we have completed the questions that we want to put to you, Sir Michael, I will offer you an opportunity to make a brief closing comment, if you wish. For the record, let me just draw to your attention that a transcript of this session is being taken so that we have an accurate record of the evidence that is given to us by all our witnesses, and this will be published on our website shortly after the end of this session. In your career in local government, you took up the position of Chief Executive of Birmingham City Council, where you led a very large institution, providing services to one of the largest populations in the United Kingdom, with a budget, I understand, of in excess of £2 billion, and your subsequent career is a testament to the success with which you ran Birmingham City Council. Before I begin our conversation, can I ask you for the benefit of the transcript to just formally introduce yourself to the Inquiry and give us some further details about your background and expertise, please. Sir Michael Lyons: Thank you very much, chair. Well very briefly, I joined the local government in 1978 after short periods in the Civil Service, working for the Department for the Environment as an economist and as a university lecturer in industrial relations and labour economics. I really joined local government to work on urban regeneration and indeed the introduction of Peter Shore's Inner Urban Areas Act in 1978, and led to economists working in that area. I went on to become Director of Economic Development for the West Midlands Metropolitan County Council, which was of course also a Police Authority, so I worked closely with Geoffrey Dear at that time as a fellow chief officer. Then I went on to become Chief Executive first of Wolverhampton Borough Council in January of 1985, then Nottinghamshire County Council, again Police Authority, in 1990, and then Birmingham City Council in 1994, which, as you said, is the largest local authority business in the country, serving a population of about 1 million, and with a turnover then of about £2 billion, taking account of its wide range of activities. I retired from local government in September of 2001, as much to mark a change to follow other interests as for any other reason, and now have a portfolio career. I am Professor of Public Policy at Birmingham University and I head the Department of Local Government Studies. I spend much of my time talking and helping organisations to address issues of leadership and corporate governance. I have just finished chairing the Cardiff City Council corporate governance review, and indeed a year long exercise for the Chancellor on the relocation of the English Civil Service. I am also on the Audit Commission and, as you say, I have a number of non-executive roles helping to shape the direction of public and private organisations. I am very pleased to be with you. I hope I can be helpful. Sir William Morris: Thank you so much. You get all the good jobs. A. Not all of them. Sir William Morris: Thank you so much and that is a very impressive career profile that you have just outlined to us. Questions by Sir William Morris Sir William Morris: What I want to do, as a start, is to just paint a picture of a number of key challenges that we see emerging from the evidence that we have gathered in respect of the Inquiry. I want to just highlight those challenges and then perhaps ask you to comment and there will perhaps be a question or so at the end. Under the heading of leadership, for example, let me say that there are about four or five challenges there, as we see them. First of all, the Metropolitan Police Service is responsible for policing almost all of London, with the exception of those areas which come under the control of the Police Service in the city and the British Transport Police and the Royal Parks Constabulary. Everything else falls to the Met. Challenge number two: the job of the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police is, without doubt, the most challenging police job in the United Kingdom, and indeed some would perhaps say anywhere in the world. One of the issues which emerged as a challenge as we see it is that on the one hand the Commissioner has to deliver strategic executive managerial leadership to an employee for in excess of £40,000, and the Commissioner is responsible for a budget of £2.5 billion. The property portfolio at, if you like, book value is about £2.7 billion, and everything about the Met is big numerically. On the other hand, the Commissioner is also charged with delivering strategic executive operational decisions, so he has got managerial decisions on the one hand and operational decisions on the other. The fourth challenge which I think is worth highlighting is that London as, if you like, the policing patch, is changing beyond all recognition, not just in the context of the demographic and the citizens' profile, but the policing challenge is in terms of prevention and detection of crime. We have got issues around global terrorism, we have got debates about public orders on the street, we have got new issues such as sky marshals in aeroplanes, and it is perhaps right to conclude that the frontiers of the MPS's boundary and the Commissioner's task is no longer the borough boundaries of London as we know it. We have three airports; we started with Heathrow, we have developed Gatwick, we have the City Airport, and the territory now encompasses a world in terms of traffic and mobility. That is the sort of picture that is emerging here. So when the Commissioner came to give us some evidence at the beginning of the Inquiry, I canvassed to him whether he could see an alternative way of managing the Metropolitan Police Service in terms of strategic executive management. I suggested that perhaps when I call the Commissioner the general in charge of the strategic operational matters, with a sort of senior non-police officer, as a chief executive, in the mould of, shall I say, Sir Michael Lyons, to manage the organisation, that sort of experience, tried and tested expertise, he commands the authority and the managerial competency. I think it was fair to say that Sir John was not particularly taken with the idea, and in response by way of summary he said that he thought that what was needed in complex times is, as he put it, simple leadership, and he did not think that you could separate the resource issue and how the MPS delivers its resources from the operational end of the business; he sees the two as complementary. So that is the picture. That is the architecture, if you like, within which the Met has to deliver its mission, all the challenges that I have indicated. What I believe that you can offer to my colleagues and myself is your experience of running large organisations, and just give us your response to the challenges as I have tried to offer them, and just indicate what alternatives there may be or whether or not any other organisation within the public sector is run on the same lines of these two key responsibilities, operational and managerial, all resting on the shoulders of one single individual. I know there are a lot of issues there, but we know that your experience will take you through to inform our Inquiry. A. Thank you. As you say, it is quite an agenda. Perhaps the starting point is to follow your line, firstly to acknowledge that the Metropolitan Police Service provides an important and complex service, not only for London but for the country as a whole because of the capital relationship. So it is a large and complex organisation. At one and the same time, it is unique, but it is important that we do not get tripped over by how unique it is, because I think that there is a natural propensity for large organisations, partly because they are large and they are confident and they have lots of skills inside, to assume that actually they have all the answers, and so there is -- I think all large organisations have a weakness, as it were, in perhaps not looking outside, not being willing to learn from sometimes very much smaller organisations, where you can find some exceedingly good examples of fleetness of foot, or a quick, speedy response to changing circumstances. The first lesson I learned is to be careful when you are running a large organisation, to keep the windows open, keep looking outside and not to get too pompous about where you might learn lessons from, indeed, it is endemic in local government that local authorities are very often, I think, guilty of suggesting that they can only learn from those that are larger, when in fact actually I think there is learning from all the way down the size chain. Leadership. I am going to emphasise the word "leadership" at different times, although you use leadership and management, they are both important, but I am going to emphasise leadership. I do believe that having a clear leader is important for an organisation. This is complex in any public organisation, because there is at one and the same time almost inevitably more than one leader. I mean, there will be a decision maker, a politician, who is a leader, and there will be somebody actually managing the service. Then within a multifunctional organisation, which I think is a reasonable way to describe the Met Service, you will have a whole set of leaders for different functions. I have some sympathy with Sir John in saying that if you are going to have a Commissioner, that everybody needs to be clear the Commissioner is the leader of the officer body, of the paid body, and there should not be any confusion about that. But I think the spirit of your comment -- whilst I might therefore suggest that you could not have somebody called the chief executive because the term itself has a clear message of the top of the tree, it does seem to me that your comments introduce two quite important -- vital issues. One of them is, having established that the Commissioner is the leader of the Police Service, you then need to get the structure right beneath that to look after both operational and business matters, and the two are not always the same thing. The second issue I think you implicitly raise is whether this service has to be led, and can only be led, by somebody who has served in the Police Service. I do not want to be too revolutionary and suggest that that second one is an easy question to answer. I think it is much easier to answer, and we come across this in the Bain Review on the fire service, where much less has been done in the fire service to develop managerial and leadership skills, and therefore I think there is a rather weaker pool to choose from than there is in the Police Service, where there has been some investment over a number of years in developing the skills and experiences of potential members of high command. But still, I think there is a question there, and if you are going to get the best out of our public services, then I think you need excellent leadership and managerial skills, and you do run a risk, if you limit yourself, to saying, "And you have also got to have done this, and this and this", because in the end you have actually got a rather narrow field to choose from. So in short, I think the important issues I draw from this is, one, that I hope you are talking first and foremost about leadership of the Service; that, I think, is the most important issue. Secondly, that recognition of that is complex in a politically managed organisation, whatever it is really, and I do think the Metropolitan Service has these pressures. The role of the Home Secretary, the role of the Mayor of London -- there are issues around -- the chair of the Police Authority. Those issues are live here, as they are elsewhere. I would strongly support Sir John, as I have understood his comments, in saying that the Commissioner should be unequivocally the head of the Service, but there are issues to be resolved about how you make sure you draw on a wide range of skills and do not limit the ports of entry to senior levels of the service. Is that a fair opening response? Sir William Morris: It is. What we want to know is how. We understand the problem and the comments about leadership and the importance of the message that it sends throughout the organisation, and nationally as well as internationally it is an irrefutable one. That, nevertheless, still leaves unresolved the issue about the resource management and how that is managed, not just in procurement terms but in deployment terms, to support what they are in business to do, that is to prevent and detect crime. If I might make a point here, because I think that we are neutral on any suggestion which says that every good police officer is a good manager and every good manager is a good police officer. So unless you crack that knot and make a separation, you are still left with that thought. We are neutral on the point and that is why we want to explore issues around that with yourself. A. I think we could fairly safely dispense with the proposition that every good police officer is a good manager because that is unlikely to be the case. The sorts of skills that make for a really excellent policeman might not be the same skills -- in fact I do not think they are -- as make a good manager. The contention that amongst all of the policemen that we recruit every year there is a wide enough pool of talent to draw and develop many of the managers that Metropolitan Police Service needs seems to me a pretty safe assumption, as long as you are good at identifying the aptitudes and you are good at training people and giving them the experiences. It does seem to me we quickly get into the area of devolution here, both in terms of how you do it and the model you need to develop, and I am a strong believer that the only way you can run a large organisation is to devolve, and I think the Police Service has moved a long way with its empowerment of occupational command units. Although I have to say in the West Midlands, which is where I draw my direct experience, from there was a period when devolution went, I think, too far, and there was a lack of recognition that a large organisation needs a strong centre as well as strong units of delivery. There we begin to get into your role: well, how do you do this? And looking through the inspectorate's last report of the Metropolitan Police Service, they clearly emphasise the ambition to have two tiers only and a lean centre. It seems to me that is a good model and gives the opportunity to develop managerial skills at the occupational command unit level. But let us be clear, they do not happen just by giving people the job; you have to develop their skills and support them. I think there are some key components of good devolution, and these are all responsibilities that I attach to the leader of a service. One is, are you clear about what your objectives are and are they clearly communicated across the organisation? That is the most important job of a leader, to help people in an uncertain, fragmented world to understand what is most important. Secondly, have you got in place good control and monitoring systems so the people to which you give responsibility know for themselves how they are performing, have reliable information coming available to them? Thirdly, do you have a good central function that is capable of good strategic planning and special intervention -- and I guess this is particularly important for the Metropolitan Service -- for all those range of issues that cannot be dealt with at local delivery level. Sir William Morris: Could we look at one of the issues that you have touched on: governance. When Sir John came to address us, we raised governance with him, and his quick retort was that he is probably the most accountable police officer in the world. I think he indicated that there were 22 separate authorities in aggregate terms to which he was somehow accountable. But just in terms of the political centres of accountability -- and you have touched on the Home Secretary, obviously the Metropolitan Police Authority, the Mayor, because the Mayor has some influence about budgets and what have you, and of course the boroughs, the Greater London Authority itself. That is an awful lot of political constituencies to which accountability is required. Could we have your comments on that? Do you see any way that some sort of streamlining could be achieved which makes governance of the MPS, in terms of its accountability, a more simple affair? A. You are taking me into dangerous territory, I suspect. Sir William Morris: Yes, local authority. A. Clearly there is speculation about whether the current structure of local government and regional government for London is ideal and whether it should be changed, and there are different views on that. I do not think you need me to comment on that, really. Let me say that firstly I think that accountability is a word that is used widely and I think it is important that we are clear about what we mean by it. It seems to me that it is important for every public service, that the public should be satisfied that those who make decisions can be held to account. Perhaps more so for a service like the police where we are talking about infringements of people's liberty. So it is an absolutely critical principle for me. But we then get into issues about whether that can be done at lots of fora -- there is a clarity about where that accountability is discharged, and I think also an issue about: is it effectively discharged? So the sorts of issues that I would be interested in exploring here, rather than being sure that I know the answer, is, one, the Commissioner ought to be clear that there is one forum in which he is held to account; I think there is room to have lots of fora, where he can reasonably be expected to give open answers to questions, because that is part of the governance, but are we all clear that there is only one place where he is held to account. My understanding is that that is the Police Authority, and whilst ever that is clear and he is clear about it, then I think the equation works. But I do not think there is any hiding from the fact that it is not going to stop, the boroughs or indeed the neighbourhoods of London, wanting straightforward answers about policing issues in their area. That does not always work well, and, again, going back to the Birmingham experience, I can remember a really fractious -- I went to an award committee meeting in Handsworth, the purpose of which was just for me to see how the city council's own ward meetings were going on. That ward meeting was one of immense energy; representatives of the community, 50 or 60 people in a pretty draughty church hall, haranguing three councillors about street crime in the area, and the councillors trying valiantly to argue that they were not responsible for the Police Service, and the members of the public, quite properly, I think, saying, "Well, actually, we elected you to be our representatives. We do not want to know about the divisions in the public service". So how do I translate this in terms of responsibilities for the Chief Constable? I think it is important that whoever is leading the service instills the principle, puts in place the machinery, so that even at that local level someone can answer for the service and show empathy for a community which is clearly under pressure. So I think it is quite an important part of leadership. Not doing it yourself all the time but having in place confident arrangements to deliver it. Sir William Morris: Can I just explore with you this relationship issue around partnerships, because there was not too long when every self-respecting employer or organisation should have a partnership, and I wondered whether you see any scope for partnerships with, say, a police service on a private sector, or the private sector. Because I still believe that the principle of cross fertilisation in what is best in both, so the ethos of the public service, cross fertilising the best values within the private sector, values around customer care, values around efficiency and satisfaction, I think both private and public would benefit from a combination of both. I do not know whether you can share any experience with us where that sort of, if you like, common approach to deliver public service is happening and, if it is, can the Met benefit from that, and if it is not, would you advocate that an attempt be made to construct that sort of model going forward? A. I suspect, when we look back, maybe in ten years' time, In the 1990s, one of the things that we will see very clearly is that we got preoccupied with partnerships for their own sake, and I think there is already a growing concern that pursuing partnerships too freely, certainly in the late 1990s, confused accountabilities, ended up with people putting a lot of energy into partnership arrangements rather than delivering. But it is important that we do not throw the baby out with the bath water. I think there are two strands that I want to address under the heading of partnership. Firstly, the one that you have drawn me to, which is essentially partnerships between public and private to deliver. I think there is a growing healthy lack of ideology about public service delivery, and that seems to me the key test: how do you deliver complex difficult services as well as possible? Where that is well done within the public service, and sometimes it can only be done -- for instance, I would find it very difficult to imagine us subcontracting much of the direct policing of this country to private agencies, and all sorts of questions have been raised where we have just experimented around the edges of that, and we are seeing that both here and abroad at the moment, about the dangers of relying on contracted staff over which you have less control to deliver a state function. But coming back from that, nonetheless, I think there is less ideology and many more opportunities, really, to develop good service delivery in good dialogue between client and supplier. I think that is one of the things we are seeing with a growth of outsourcing companies, an amalgamation of outsourcing companies. As they become more mature, one of the things they are stressing -- and I have first-hand experience of this -- is the importance of good relationships with customers, to understand what their clients need in terms of public delivery, and indeed the culture of those companies is changing as they absorb more ex-public employees. I will not say any more about that, but I am happy to come back on that issue. So yes to partnership arrangements, but with a very clear view, led by the client, as to what is best for delivering that service. The other side of partnership that I particularly want to pick up with you is the one about partnership between public services when you are dealing with complex problems, issues, which are not the responsibility of one service alone, and I have got a very strong view there that we do not put enough energy into developing a one-system view of the public service in this country. We are still far too preoccupied, and indeed I see some evidence of this, for instance in the Metropolitan Police's presumption that they have their own in-house training. I would be much happier if I could see clear evidence -- and it may exist -- that police officers working in Lewisham, for instance, were having part of their training, part of their development work, in conjunction with the social services of Brixton, other emergency services, so that what we develop is much more of a one-system approach where you follow delivery chains down, even in different public sector organisations, and end up with people who understand the rationality of different services. Because there is this dreadful mythology that we are dogged with, that all accountants are only interested in saving money; all social workers are profligate; all education workers are only interested in the holidays. All of that mythology is because people do not understand the different rationality of different services and their contributions. Sir William Morris: I think that is an interesting point because part of the culture that we see is -- and it derives from certain practices of appointments where appointments are made on the competency of the operational command experience, skills and qualities, and when you assume a significantly high operational command you are suddenly thrust as an inheritor of intricate managerial responsibilities, thousands of people in some instances, with huge resource, and to what extent the operational requirements which drive the appointment can in fact be buttressed and supported by the managerial function which is within that particular command is not evidently clear, because even on some of the command training, strategic and others, it is fine in the classroom but on the front line life is a little bit more complex. I am sure you take my drift. A. I do, but just in case I have appeared too abstract in my comments, I would emphasise that even for the operational, if the Police Service is going to be effective in child protection, if it is going to be effective in community relations, in complex diverse communities, then the people who deliver the service, the constables and other police officers of today, need to be trained for at least part of their training with other people whose contribution is just as critical to the delivery of those services. That is the point I am struggling to get to. Sir William Morris: Another issue which we value your views on is, you touched on it, communication, getting the message down. In some instances communication can be a motivating experience; it can be an inspiring one; in others it can be: well, we hear what you say, boss, end of story. You, with your million citizens in Birmingham and your 40,000 plus employees, delegating responsibility, still had to get the message down even to Handsworth. Can you share with us how that is best achieved, getting the message down to right at the delivery point? A. I think it is one of the big difficulties running any large organisation. Frankly, by that I mean organisations much, much smaller than either Birmingham or the Metropolitan Police Service, they still have these difficulties. Whenever the organisation is too large for you to go and meet everybody or to draw them all together in one room then you start, I think, to have difficulties in communication. The sorts of things which I use -- and I would advocate -- I do think that an important tool of communication is the chief officer team in a council, the command team in the Police Service, the forum of drawing the OCU heads together, the borough commanders together. It is an important part of the leadership role, that that should meet regularly, that the Commissioner -- I am seeking to make a direct parallel with the chief executive role; I recognise that is not easy given the Commissioner's other responsibilities, but whoever it is who is providing and wants to provide leadership needs to be seen in that forum, telling the story of what the organisation as a whole is seeking to achieve, the progress that it has made and the priorities for the next step. I regard one of the critical roles of the leader as the story telling of the organisation. And gradually you build up a trust that you -- even if it looks chaotic to people on the ground, that the person that they can look to, the leader person, has a sense of how to make some pattern out of this and to take them forward. That seems to me a critical issue. I do think that it is also important to find some mechanisms for touching the tips of the services yourself, and I think the people all become a bit weary really of the state visit from the chief executive who everybody has been told about in advance, all the briefs have been sent out, a bit like a ministerial visit, and then you float in for a quick in and out. I think you have to break through that cynicism by trying to do it in a more direct way. I held a series of gatherings in Birmingham over my time there under the heading of "Staying on Track", drawing together on each occasion 150 people, drawn at random from across the services, to say, "This is what I set out to do; what I am looking for is feedback about whether it feels any different to you at your point in the organisation". The first of these meetings were dreadful. People thought there must be some ulterior motive, that they had been singled out for poor timekeeping or something, and their all comments were going to be taken down. But by the time we got to the third one it was clear that -- and big organisations have great grapevines -- it was clear that people had recognised that this was genuine. So people were actually coming to the third meeting, they did not want to wait for the presentation, they wanted to get into the discussion session and raise their concerns. So that can be an important tool. Perhaps I should just end this with one further comment. When I was first appointed as chief executive in Wolverhampton I was given some advice by Professor John Stewart at Birmingham University which really served me well, and it was that if you are seeking to give some sense of direction to a large organisation, then you have to deal with symbols. People watch your behaviour, they watch the things that you see as important, they watch the people that you spend your time with, they watch the way you deal with doormen, tea ladies, and out of this they draw some conclusions about what you really believe and what is really important to you. And I think that is a very important lesson that I learned, that if you want an organisation that is caring, that has integrity, that is open, you have to live that and you have to constantly reflect on the signals that you are sending out by your day-to-day activities. So if you set up a visit to a front line service and at the last minute send a message saying you have been called to the mayor's office, the leader's office, the message it sends out, it will take many more visits to overcome about where your priorities lie. Sir William Morris: Just one final area for me before I pass to my colleagues. I said earlier that, yes, we want to know what is bad, what is good, but more importantly we want help and suggestions and advice, guidance, to make things better. But for things to be made better then obviously it implies change, and what I call the psychology of change, the first factor which induced change, what we would be interested in getting your experience on here is: is it an organisational crisis? Does it require a high paid consultant to be brought in, or is it a sort of organic and orderly development? Whichever it is, how do you manage it and what are the pitfalls to be avoided? Because at some point we will have to deliver a report to our commissioning body and I am assuming we will make some suggestions for change. If we do, I suspect they will have the responsibility of implementing change, and it will be helpful, even if it is a side letter, to be able to say, "Well, we have heard information and we have heard some very important hints as to how change can in fact be effected or driven, but here are the pitfalls to be avoided", so we look to your experience to share with us on that one. A. Once again, you are specialising in some wide and ambitious questions for me this morning. Sir William Morris: I am drilling into your experience, Sir Michael. A. Let me try to be helpful on that. I am unashamedly an advocate of organic change. I think there is far too much talk about transformation of organisations, and the danger with -- and I understand the reasoning, which is that you should not seek to just solely make incremental changes if you want to change the complexion of a public service. I think the danger is, actually, that our public services are so complex and they are so interleaved with each other that actually big changes just break off lots of roots, leave lots of people who thought they had some idea of what they were doing completely uncertain. So there are enormous risks in big change, particularly because it is difficult to communicate with people who need simple messages and reassurance about the role that they are playing. So a starting point, I guess, would be a strong presumption in favour of organic change, absolute clarity about what you are trying to do, and honesty. I think, again, one of the things that dogs a lot of change in the public sector is we are not always willing to be honest about what it is that we are trying to achieve, because of small political concerns. So we do not tell people really what we are trying to achieve, and as a result of that we miss the opportunity, really, to get a coalition of common interest. One problem with using consultants is that sometimes we give them the wrong job to do. If you want to use consultants, to use an independent voice, an independent mechanism, of which a commission might be a very good mechanism, to explore an area because you are genuinely interested and you want it to have a degree of independence, that is a very useful way of using an external independent voice. Trying to use an external independent voice as the cutting edge of change seems to me a mistake, really. This is something you have to do for yourself, because otherwise the learning actually just evaporates outside the organisation. So if you want to change an organisation it is best to choose from people who know it, perhaps supplement them, maybe from another group of people who knows something about it, another police force, for instance. If you want to bring in a really challenging view, add to that team people who know nothing about the Police Service so that they ask the naive questions, but make sure that it is made up, it has got at its heart people who actually know about this organisation and are going to be around afterwards, after the sort of initial change, to make sure that it is rooted and carried through. So those are some thoughts that occur to me, but there is a big literature on this and many diverse views. Sir William Morris: Thank you so much. Thank you very much indeed. Can I invite my colleague, Sir Anthony, to put a few questions to you. Questions by Sir Anthony Burden Sir Anthony Burden: Good morning. You were very clear, thank you, on the fact that the Commissioner must be the leader of the organisation. Could I move down to the next tier of that, please, because from your personal knowledge, having been involved in policing, you will realise that there is a very strong need to manage the operational side of the policing function. But in support of that, a very diverse group which is very similar to any other organisation: finance personnel, IT, property management, fleet management, communications, media. You indicated that you have read the HMI report and you will see in there some criticism of the way some of those functions are managed? A. Yes. Sir Anthony Burden: Would you please give your view on how you feel, at management board level, those support functions can be best managed in support of the operational delivery of services. A. I do not think there is a unique solution to this, but I suspect that one of the problems -- and this would be my first-hand observation in watching other police forces -- is that there has been a recognition of the need for good managerial skills and a recognition that you cannot only rely on training up from the service, and that you need some specialist skills. So increasingly police services have, starting at the top, and sometimes now not only at the top, begun to recruit people with financial skills, with procurement skills, with human resource skills. However, they are still being recruited into a model which I think far too often -- not universally but far too often sends the very powerful message that you are not really part of the team; you are here to do a professional job, you are a hired hand, you are not really part of the team. I have seen that. It is amplified, of course, when you turn up to a management team and some people are in uniform and some people are not, and that tool is used sometimes; I have seen it used to reinforce the difference and who the real core of the service are. You see it sometimes actually structurally reflected; so in terms of two teams you have this team meets and this is strategic command, and this team is about resourcing. The conclusion I have reached is actually that you just cannot get that to work, really. There needs to be a sense that this is one team. There might be clear recognition that the different demands on the different individuals may require different day-to-day working arrangements, but there has to be some investment in that as a team. I think that means, in the same way that we invest in helping constables with the right aptitude to see themselves moving on up and taking on wider responsibilities, I think we have to do the same sort of training for the non-uniform white collar staff about the core tasks of policing. My experience in talking to people who have held those senior posts is that they have been given very little exposure to the challenge of policing. So there has to be something which says: okay, you are in the Police Service now, this is not the same as working for the BBC, or whenever you have come from; you are going to have to do some tough learning to understand the realities of this service. That might involve you going on the beat. I do not know. It is a bit difficult to imagine saying that to a 45 year-old person, but nonetheless we have to find mechanisms for doing that. Sir Anthony Burden: Maybe commanding an OCU for a couple of months. A. Yes, why not. Sir Anthony Burden: All of those support functions, when they sit at a management board and the best model to actually deliver for the Commissioner, all of those diverse support responsibilities, in your experience, can that effectively be vested in one person? Would that be a better model of ensuring that you do not get this sort of functional silo system, where people are actually battling amongst themselves, or do you actually have to have at management board a Miss Finance, a Mr Personnel, a Ms IT? Or can you have a structure that says: Commissioner/leader; one deputy operations; one deputy support that will deliver everything in support terms. A. I think you can. And what is more, if you look across local government over the last probably ten years really, there has been quite an appetite for the introduction of what they call strategic directors to reduce the size of the central management team. And there have been some exotic cocktails of responsibilities put together. So I think you can show that that works. I do not think it even has to be a strict delineation: here are the support functions, here are operational. And there have been some good experiments to show that actually mixing operational and support functions actually brings a better breadth of view to the management team. The only thing that I would say to that, if you are going to do that -- and I think it has all sorts of merits -- the high command, all members of the high command, have to have access to somebody who at the end of the day is an expert in that area, just so that they can get -- when they need to, they can actually get an authentic view on that. I think we have, again in local government, partly as a result of outsourcing, sometimes ended up without adequate expert voices in some of these areas, and then ended up paying a lot of money to buy it in on a short-term basis. Sir Anthony Burden: Thank you. Can I move on to my second big area: you have already alluded to your support for devolution, and you will be conscious of the fact that devolution is a political imperative within the Police Service, but good sense, in the fact that it brings coterminosity of services, particularly at borough or local authority level, and so you get chief officers working closely with each other, which is very, very effective in my experience. But the model that is undertaken to devolve, I think, is important. I would certainly welcome your views on that. We hear a lot about the loose/tight relationship between the centre and the devolved unit. That relationship and the factors for success would also be very helpful, please. A. I think I am probably going to go back to some of my earlier comments on this, because it seems to me that at the heart of good devolution is clarity about (a) what you are seeking to achieve, and (b) exactly what it is that you have devolved. And that is a contract, is it not? We have not talked about performance management yet; I suspect we will spend some time on it, but it seems to me that very often it is talked about as if it were a one-way accountability, holding people to account, not whether they have delivered or not. Good performance management is about dialogue, about what has been delivered, and where the delivery falls short of the expectation why that is the case. And good performance management is as interesting in resource constraints and the things that inhibit its delivery as the personal performance of the individual. Right at the heart of good devolution is a contract and a complete conversation about performance of that contract, which does not just hinge on whether the individual has done the job but actually understands -- gets feedback at the same time, which then shapes both policy and resourcing. So for me that is the heart of making the OCU model work, and being clear about what you have not devolved, and therefore what things have to be referred up, because it certainly is not cutting focus adrift to deal with complex and demanding issues without a very clear recognition that some things are beyond their level of competence. That does not mean they are incompetent, but just that it would be unsafe to make the decision at that level. I think we could quickly identify issues that fitted into that category. To some extent, it seems to me that some of the debates about policing of drug abuse, we have not been clear enough about whether you can actually delegate them to one patch in a city, and if you have, whether that is an explicit experiment and everybody understands that it is an experiment. Sir Anthony Burden: The tensions which may or may not inevitably develop with devolution with the perceived loss of power at the centre, has that been something which you have personally experienced and had to manage through, and, if so, what lessons did you learn from that? A. I would say that the seven years that I spent at Birmingham -- I mean, literally the very first day I spent in Saltley College with the members of the labour group discussing their strategy for devolution. I think at that time there were 43 members of the labour group and I think there must have been 52 definitions of devolution that day. It goes on as a challenge. My successor Lynn Homer is involved in a new push to try to devolve more engagement -- to achieve greater engagement with the different communities of the city, a greater feeling of influence over public services and a greater efficiency with the delivery of public services by political and managerial devolution; the two are part of that equation for the city council, they may not be for the Police Service. I think the first lesson I would learn out of that is that the inertia involved in that is immense. Everybody is fearful. There is a coalition of fear, really. The people that hold the power at the centre are fearful of losing it, although I think that is a myth, actually. I think you become more powerful if you empower the organisation because you can do so much more. So there is anxiety about losing power and there is anxiety about taking power on people who feel -- and it is back to this, what are they held accountable for, and particularly in public service, where things are transparent, expectations always exceed what can be delivered, that what you are really devolving is the ability to be blamed. So this is an area where nobody is rushing to effect it. People are very anxious. But when it works -- in Nottinghamshire, for instance, we took the first phase of devolving site budgets to people who ran residential care for children and the elderly. When we got it right, it just completely changed those organisations. People who spent their time whingeing and writing endless memos complaining about the centre just started looking out, took responsibility. That is what we are trying to achieve. I will just come back to say I think it is really difficult and it is a grinding job to take it through, and therefore people who talk about it as if it could be done with a magic wand are not helpful to those who end up having to do it. Sir Anthony Burden: I guess there has to be a starting point with devolution, and that starting point might mean that there may be person power allocation, a manpower allocation strategy which has not allocated staff effectively beforehand, the budget might not be fairly allocated, and all the obstacles would stand in the way. A. I would absolutely agree with that. Sir Anthony Burden: So there would have to be a structured analysis of the way resources are allocated to make sure that those given the task can actually deliver. A. That is absolutely right, except that that, again, can become a reason for not doing it. Sir Anthony Burden: Absolutely. A. So as long as you say, "Look, there is going to be some rough justice here, but we are open and responsive and we are going to get this right", and I think that is the point; if you can back up the early stages of devolution with the information, with the openness of dialogue, with real performance dialogue, and the people who are leading it are visibly seen to be -- they have not just washed their hands of this and said, "It is over to you now", they are working it through. That is where I have seen the most valuable and successful devolution take place. Sir Anthony Burden: And I guess it is implicit in what you have said that if you devolve, for example, human resources, personnel functions, you must supply the expertise along with the devolution; it is not good just letting people have the function without the skills to do it. A. I could not agree more. And that is why you need a strong centre. One of the jobs of a strong centre is to have those expert people to, on occasion, step in to lend a hand. But they have to see themselves as support functions. Too frequently we use the term "support functions" but actually when they arrive they do not feel like it; they feel as if they have come in to take over. Sir Anthony Burden: That nicely brings me on to my last area and that is performance management and what comes with devolution. I think you summed it up very nicely, the ability to be blamed. The Police Service has adopted a performance management regime which involves COMSTAT. I do not know whether you are familiar with that, it is the New York model of being put under 300 watt bulbs and grilled for three hours as to why you have not succeeded. How do you hold people to account, in your view, without further developing a blame culture where people actually try and slip and slide and avoid the difficult questions, and put up smoke screens, and are absolutely honest at these meetings as to why they have not delivered, and the organisation learns from that and moves on, as opposed to looking to put heads on blocks? A. I think it is difficult. I have had some experience, both as a participant of this and in trying to put systems up, and more recently by advising organisations that are carrying this through. The first thing is you have to invest in it. The people who are going to do the holding to account have to be helped to prepare for that job, and that preparation takes place a long way in advance. In any relationship I am back to the fact that you need to be clear about the contract, what has been contracted to, and that is really contracted to, both sides have agreed: this is what we want to achieve, I am agreeing that I am going to seek to achieve what we have laid out here. So there is ownership of it, and it is written down, it is there to be monitored. Then when you come to hold to account, firstly you have to have done the research so that there actually is an evidential base about what has been achieved and what has not. That the people who are going to do the holding to account have had some training in how you get the best out of a performance dialogue and are supported by a good information system so that there is no slipping away about, "Well, we cannot really tell what has happened", and that the person who is being assessed feels that they are involved in a dialogue which is not just about what they have personally done, but that personal performance is put in the context of whether the objectives were realistic, what we have learned about trying to deliver those objectives and what that has told us about resourcing, public reaction. Too frequently, I think, we set the dialogue up as a narrow dialogue, as if it was all about personal endeavour, whether all of us know that personal endeavour is actually such a small fraction of what is important to deliver a successful job. I hope that is helpful. Sir Anthony Burden: Absolutely. Just one final question from me. In all of your experience, over many years in organisations, how damaging to organisational success and delivery is a blame culture? A. It is deadly and it is endemic in the public service. It is made worse -- I choose my words carefully here -- it is made worse when people seeking elected office promote the impression that more can be delivered for any given level of resource than can actually be delivered. And so we have lived, and perhaps continue to live, in a period where expectations of public services are being forced up much faster than we can improve productivity to respond to them; or even increase funding, because there is inevitably a limit to the appetite that there will be for funding public services. That is a terribly frustrating time, I think, and gets translated into blame. We could spend a whole commission talking about that, the role of the press, the debasement of the regional press, so that once we had a better quality of journalists, reduction in overheads in almost every regional newspaper, it means that people are out for the quick story, and a quick story is one that has identified someone and is able to turn it into their fault. It is a very difficult climate and one that has got more complicated, worse, harder to work in. Sir Anthony Burden: But a real responsibility on the leader of an organisation to actually promote the ground rules and what he or she is looking for in terms of delivery. A. Yes, and it does not stop at the head of the paid service; it is also something about politicians themselves recognising that the earlier that responsibility is accepted in the chain -- it does not stop you exploring down the chain what went wrong, but the quicker somebody actually says, "This is my watch, I am responsible for this", frankly, the quicker the thing is shaved off, the longer there is to go, "Well, it is not really my fault, it is further down the chain", the more difficult, the more corrosive it becomes, and the more frightened people become the next time round. Sir Anthony Burden: Thank you, that is most helpful. Sir William Morris: Thank you. I will just ask Miss Weekes to go straight into her line of questions. Questions by Miss Weekes Miss Weekes: Management. I would like to, if I can, seek your assistance on some more details about selection of good managers, training of good managers and monitoring of the performance level that is required for the Metropolitan Police for managers. If I can just summarise where we are at the moment in terms of the evidence we have received. There are pockets of good practice and pockets of bad practice, but there is significant evidence of bad practice which has damaged morale, it has damaged retention, it has damaged the internal trust and confidence, and it has clearly had a knock-on effect to the financial detriment of the public purse; employment tribunals, settlements, for example. That is a very short summary of where we are at at the moment, hence the need, I suspect, for this Inquiry, because, credit to the Metropolitan Police, they recognise that there is a problem. It is mostly seated in the method of discipline complaints, because that is the central part of our terms of reference, which I know you have read. A. Yes. Miss Weekes: Can I begin, then, with the selection of good managers within the context of the Metropolitan Police, and linked immediately to the selection is the fact that the right to manage comes with promotion. You are a sergeant, you are an inspector, a chief inspector, superintendent. The further up the line you go, the greater number of people you manage. A. Yes. Miss Weekes: But there is an exam, of course, and there is the issue of training. I will come back to training in a moment. We were very helpfully given, by ACAS, who came to help us, criteria for good management, but I would like from you whether you agree with it and what you would like to add to it, again in the context of the Metropolitan Police. The helpful Mr Taylor from ACAS said this: "... there are two levels of skills or attributes that we are looking for. The first one, if I could describe them, is intellectual; someone needs to have the capacity to quickly cut through the detail and understand what the issues are in a variety of very different industries... "One is this capacity to be objective and not to be a prisoner of the past, in terms of what your experience or what your history says... "The second personal attribute, I think, is judgment, sound judgment, which I would say is rooted in common sense ... It is just the capacity to sit down and make a sensible judgment based on common sense. "The third one is impartiality ..." He summarised: "... it is good forensic intellectual skills. You do not have to be a brain surgeon by any stretch of the imagination, but you have to be able to understand things. The capacity to be impartial; and good judgment." Do you want to add to that? A. I might explore it a little bit. Miss Weekes: Yes, please. A. I think two points particularly occur to me. One is that I might have added to the attributes outstanding listening skills, because management is essentially about human interaction. You yourself talked about the right to manage. For too many managers that is assumed to be something which is sort of pinned on to your lapel, I think, by somebody else. Really, the critical issue is do you have the qualities, can you develop the qualities that people will agree to you having authority over them. That is slightly different. It is not pinned; it is something you have to develop in yourself. One important component of that is whether you really listen to what people are saying to you, or alternatively whether you have made up your mind in advance -- you might say that is implicit in Mr Taylor's suggestion of sound decision-making. So I would emphasise listening skills. I think there is also just a sort of implication that this is just common sense, and I think I would recognise, particularly in the Police Service, but not alone there, that actually for a person to be a credible manager they may have to be more than just a bright layperson. They may have to know something quite specific about the organisation and the service that they are working with, and that would differ from -- and back to my point in discussion earlier on, that just bringing in someone from an accountancy background to work within OCU might help you to improve the financial skills, but if you want to improve the overall management they have got to have some understanding of the fact that this is not Tesco's. And indeed Tesco's would be absolutely emphatic, if you joined them, that you understood that company and what was distinctive about it. So I would just be a bit wary about this just being good common sense, and I would certainly emphasise listening skills. But otherwise, it seemed to me a pretty good supply. I do think we have made big headway in management in both public and private sectors in this country over the last ten years by trying to distil down the key competencies rather than getting lost in job descriptions which are highly specific to the organisation. I think in a competency approach, what are the key competencies, but not losing sight of the fact that to have credibility and to be the most effective, you have to have some understanding of the context as well. That would be my response. Miss Weekes: Well, that conveniently takes me, then, to a possible difficulty. The Metropolitan Police, understandably, do have a good reputation, operationally, and it is well deserved. And because the right -- and I choose that deliberately, and I know you picked that up deliberately -- to manage comes with promotion, part of the exam, if I can put it that way, in inverted commas, "the promotional aspect", you are identifying the good placement. But it may be that there is not a sufficient emphasis put upon the core personnel management skills that comes with the promotion up the ladder. A. Yes. Miss Weekes: How could the Met better promote and identify those management skills so you are not just getting a good sergeant, a good superintendent; you are making yourself identify, because he has got to manage those skills? A. We are here focusing on operational issues, are we not, but management in operational issues? Miss Weekes: Yes, absolutely. A. I will follow your lead on that. I have to be careful because actually it seems to me that to answer this fully I need to have more knowledge than I have, and so I will be cautious. But it does seem to me that an important issue is actually to separate, at least intellectually, the one job from the other. It may be that you need to -- I would accept that you would need to have been a constable, you would need to have spent some time on the beat or in direct service, to have the necessary experience to go on to be a sergeant or somebody of more senior rank. But it would be important for me to emphasise that actually the job at this point becomes a different job. It is not just a glorified version of that job. We are now saying, "Right, you have got to this point, you have reached base; now the development and training actually is around a completely different job where, step-by-step, you stop doing things yourself and you rely on other people to do them for you". So really, all of that early experience, it is a key, but it is not actually in any way equipping you -- it is a necessary set of experiences to have, but it is not sufficient to do the job that is now being asked of you. So it is a completely different set of competencies that we are now going to develop at this stage, and we are going to test to make sure that you have got the aptitude for this, but actually we do not expect you to at this point have developed these skills to a very high level. That is our job, as your employer, to now prepare you for. Miss Weekes: It is very interesting the emphasis "it is a different job", because perhaps part of the problem is that the constable, the inspector, simply continues with being the grand, very good inspector and does not really develop the different job. A. Absolutely, and it is not unique. It is a special setting but it is not unique. You find it in any area of public service, and probably we look to lots of areas of the private sector as well, where people come out of a professional area where they are prized for their individual contribution in this work, and then you say, "You have done so well there, we now want you to manage other people to do that job", as if somehow those skills have been developed, and there is absolutely no reason to believe they would have been. Miss Weekes: That conveniently then leads me to training, which is the employer's responsibility. A. Yes. Miss Weekes: We have heard many different things about training, and training is not new to the Met because every other huge public organisation has to do that, and I draw very much on your background and experience with training managers. You first of all require the commitment for training. You secondly require the correct priority of training; a huge number of training courses within the Met -- there is training for everything. You require the time off to train, and then you require update. Is that about right? I may not, because I do not have your experience, have put it in the correct summary. A. They are all important components. Would you mind if I used slightly different vocabulary? Miss Weekes: Of course. A. I think the vocabulary that I would use would be one of development rather than training. And I would very much emphasise your first point, that this essentially is about commitment to make the journey. Partly you have to identify that this is a person capable of doing it, but also that they want to make the journey of self-development. And then I would place beside the list of issues that you have raised very strongly development opportunities, because I am personally sceptical about the extent to which off-the-job training can play more than a small part in this process. So, if I were seeking to develop someone for a managerial role, my first job would be, "This involves a journey; is this something you want to undertake? Are you committed to this? Because it is you that is having to change; you know, it is not something that is being done to you. Secondly, how can we give you learning opportunities? Many of those will actually be just different jobs opportunities to begin to develop these skills, but we will do it in a way where you are not just left to struggle. You know, we have got a context here where we are watching what you are doing, we are concerned to help you make this journey". That little test of "is my employer really interested in what I am doing here?" would be failed, I think, in most development experiences by both members of the public services, I think. Miss Weekes: Whose responsibility is it to ensure that the new manager who is going to learn this new different job has the bottom line level of training, experience? A. Their immediate supervisor. Miss Weekes: Some of the evidence suggests that training is left to whenever you can do it. A. Yes. Miss Weekes: Whenever the operational duties do not come first. How can we get round that? A. I think I am back to performance management: if you have a good performance management system, if everybody understands that there is an annual dialogue, if we are clear about development needs, and I think you touch on a really important point. People have to understand that development actually affects what they are doing. I think there is a danger that training is seen as either a prize, you know, "You have done very well this year, why don't you go off on this course, it gets you away from the hurly-burly", or something that is just whimsy, "Oh, we happen to have some places here; why don't you have one of these?" There needs to be a sense that actually there is some purpose here; people can relate this array of development opportunities to what the service is trying to achieve and what any individual has in terms of a map of self-development. Miss Weekes: How would we, as a panel, assist in getting the Metropolitan Police to promote management skills to the level of operational skills so that at least they are equal? Because some of the words used to describe dealing with people, "Can I have time off?", "Can I go and look after my children?" -- soft skills. Does that send the wrong signal, in your view, using the words "soft skills"? A. I understand the point you are making, and I do understand the sensitivity of this issue in the Police Service, which prides itself on having a very clear sense of what it is doing and of inculcating some quite tough operational skills, how this can be seen as a contrast with it. I think part of the task which you face is to make it clear that actually the most frightening thing that most people do as managers is actually confronting a member of staff. Actually, it is not a soft exercise, it is a very hard exercise. And the fact that most people bottle out, as it were, is well illustrated in the debris that we see reflected in employment tribunals. Invariably, when cases get to public gaze, what you are looking at is the final chapter in something which dates right back to people being unwilling to employ quite firm skills in person management at the beginning, and good listening skills as well. How can we go about getting these things put on to a more equal footing? For me, this is about the narrative of the exercise. I do think that -- and I think I see myself as having been guilty of this at times -- we are not good enough at developing the picture that shows that development fits in to the operational world that we are trying to achieve, and so a Chief Constable who can articulate the link between what it was that most people who joined the Police Service to do, to deal with community safety, crime, all of those really hard issues, that regionally motivated people to join up, can articulate what is the link between doing that and developing people to being good people managers, so that the whole thing is seen in operational terms; it is not seen as somehow separate and a different terminology. That seems to me the heart of the task, really. Miss Weekes: Can I move on, then, to monitoring performance, because in the structure of devolution to the boroughs where there is a smaller group or area that conducts the performance and the operational duties you have local resolution of workplace conflicts, and often from within the boroughs you will get not enough monitoring of what the managers are doing by the senior management. That is obviously not unique within the Metropolitan Police. Other big companies often do not know what floor 8 is doing as opposed to floor 1. A. Yes. Miss Weekes: What is the best method of monitoring? What have you come across in terms of good practice, as it were? Because knowing where the pitfalls are, and knowing where management is falling down upon implementing your policies, is obviously the first step. A. I absolutely agree, and I would go further and say that most conflicts can only really be resolved at that level, at that first level. And so that is an important principle for me, not to allow things to be elevated inappropriately. That is to avoid weak managers saying, "Oh, I don't really want to be dealing with this, I'll ask somebody else to deal with it", and also the vexatious litigant, as it were -- and it is important to acknowledge that employees do not all have universal goodwill in these matters -- equally seeking to elevate an issue rather than having it resolved because it might be resolved to their dissatisfaction. So for any organisation I think what you need to do is to emphasise that, "Actually, I think you dramatically limit the rights of appeal and onward reference", so that more and more is sorted out at the first stage, at the local level. That may need a number of other steps to make that possible: it may need training, it may need clarity about the power to decide, because sometimes that is not as clear as it could be. That was certainly the case in Birmingham, where we had -- and partly it being an elected organisation -- a very strong culture that eventually you would be able to appeal to members. Well, what we had to do was to basically change the machinery so that that was seen as much more exceptional, because what was happening was the whole organisation was getting clogged up and you were having these ludicrous delays of 18 months to have a hearing, in no one's interests at all, least of all the employees, because I think we would agree that actually disagreements within the workplace can be incredibly corrosive for family and career, so everybody's interest suggests getting them sorted out straightaway. Sorry, I am riding a hobby horse here; stop me. Miss Weekes: No, but you have anticipated a very important point I was about to come to. Can I just, before coming back to that point, because it is rather central to some of the evidence we have received, just ask you this -- and you have partly touched on it with one of your answers to Sir Anthony: what do you do with bad managers? Because not everybody is going to be good at it, no matter how much you train and no matter how good your selection processes are. It is about taking responsibility for the accountability that actually you have now got a bad manager. Within the Metropolitan Police it is not that easy. There is a superintendent; he is of a superintendent rank; he is well respected for his operational duties, but he just is not a good manager. Some say, "Well, why don't not sack him?" Others say, "Well, I don't think that is necessarily appropriate". There is, understandably, no consensus about what to do with the bad manager. I am not expecting you to be an angel and provide me with an answer, but could we just have some comments from your experience. A. I think I have a lot of experiences to draw on of people being accused of being poor managers, and I think the first thing I would say is that it inevitably raises a very substantial threat to the managers themselves. And so you need processes that do not leave the impression that this is a sort of do or die outcome; that you can make mistakes, you can have weaknesses, and the first presumption is that these are things that can be changed and sorted out. And so you need that, because otherwise the whole thing just becomes completely locked by fear and anxiety, and then reassertion, because actually there is no room here not to be right because it is a terminal offence. So back to: can you get a climate where people can make mistakes, where people can admit weaknesses and it is not seen as devastating if they do? That, I think, is about the next line of supervision and judgment and good judgment, so all the qualities we are looking for at the first line of management, really, and the next line up. Having said all of that, I think there has to be a recognition that, if people do not want to move, they do not want to change, there is further evidence that things have not moved on, then just ignoring it is an immense waste of public expenditure. Even one example is passed by word of mouth around the whole organisation and brings the chain of command into discredit. I think we have all had experience of that, and I do not think it is unique in any one public service or perhaps even in the public sector. Everybody knows that this is a problem, this person is outrageously sexist, and the people above them do not do anything about it. I think then it is incredibly corrosive because it starts to eat away at the values of the whole organisation. So a climate of looking for positive outcome, one; but, two, a recognition that actually, if it is not moving, you have to intervene because you are dealing with something much more important than that individual; you are dealing with the health of the whole organisation. That gives me the chance just to add on one comment which we have not touched upon. I do think that the Police Service is made more complicated -- and it is not the only service, but I think it has had some particular complications -- from the limited availability of options into which to promote people. So you end up with a sort of assumption that everybody is going to move on, and then: you have only got these jobs available; well, let us put this person in that job. If they do not make a go of it, what do you do with them? And so I think there is something about being very much clearer that there comes a time for any of us when exit might be the most appropriate thing in the interests of both the service and ourselves. I am a very strong believer, actually, that redundancy is not the worse thing that can happen to you in your life. You know, if you do not fit in to what is available, then, actually, properly handled, the chance to go and find something else to do in your life is actually a healthier option than being put in a job which is the wrong one for you. Miss Weekes: I would like to move on to a topic you quite correctly touched on, and it is the weak manager who actually does not want to deal with the issue and is going to send it up to a supervisor. Within the boroughs we have received significant evidence that managers who deal with difference -- race, gender, sexuality, disability, religion -- are often frightened by it, some genuinely so, and rather than blight their own ability for performance and promotion later, they will not line manage a visible ethnic minority; they will not take on board an issue of race or gender discrimination; they will ring the commander and say, "Look, this is too difficult, this is a special case, can you deal with it?" The evidence we have had raises a number of issues which you may be able to help us on. Our terms of reference requires us to look at the Amendment to the Race Relations Act and the fact that now every public authority, including all the ones that you have dealt with, have an obligation to promote racial equality. But the wider aspect of dealing with difference, which is not just about race, has sometimes given difficulties to the Metropolitan Police, as I suspect it has with others. All public authorities are moving towards dealing with the statutory provisions and the rights at work to respect difference. How, in your experience, can managers better relax, be less fearful of dealing with difference? It is a terribly difficult question but a hugely important one. Sir William Morris: Before Sir Michael answers, I am very conscious that the stenographer has been going for some time now. Could we just ask your forbearance that we have about five minutes for the stenographer to have a break? A. Are you happy for me to answer after the break? Miss Weekes: Absolutely? A. Yes, that is fine. It will give me a chance to gather my thoughts. 12.10 pm (A short break) 12.15 pm Miss Weekes: Could I just add to the question I asked before. The evidence that we have received indicates that there are sectors of employees who have for some time felt a total lack of trust and confidence on the issue of respect for difference -- and I do not think I put that too highly -- and it includes all of the different aspects -- gender, race, disability, sexuality and religion -- that I have mentioned. So, therefore, there is a significant number of employees that are awaiting our recommendations for change, which is obviously quite a tall order, but we will rise to the occasion. I welcome your experience of how local authorities have had to change in how they have had to respect the statutory provisions, flexi-time, part-time work for women, the issue of promotion of racial equality. Just generally, what can you say on that? A. Well, the first thing is to acknowledge how important it is, the issue of shaping public services for a diverse community. And a critical component of that is recognising that you can only deliver to a diverse community if you seek to ensure that your workforce reflects more effectively the characteristics of the community. That is the heart of it. The heart of it is about good service delivery, and that has to be the point at which we start the dialogue. This is about the organisation being more effective. It has to have these skills, these experiences, these understandings. So it is rooted in efficiency, not fairness. Not that it is not a fairness issue, but just, I think, in terms of helping people to understand what it is we are doing here, it is back to my concern that people should understand that what they are being asked to do relates to what they came to do, as it were. But there is no doubt that actually this has produced some of the most testing experiences for managers, and my own past -- lots of learning, both good and bad, about things that I feel I did right and some things I wish that I could turn back the clock and start with again; some very painful episodes. And so, firstly, just the recognition that this is very difficult; that there are some great difficulties involved here; and that what we are very often dealing with, in terms of personal interaction, is actually a much bigger history; a history of the way this organisation has behaved in the past; a history of the disadvantages, or the obstacles, that that member of staff may have faced, or their parents may have faced; really complex other issues. The management of difference has got immense energy and pain associated with it, I think, and so recognising that it is difficult is the first step. It is, I think, for me about clear messages of the values that the leaders of the organisation hold, in terms of wanting equality of access. Equality of access, of course, sometimes is not quite the right set of words, because it is back to that what we want is a diverse organisation, and equality of access can actually just sound a little bit too mechanical, a little bit too sanitised, to achieve that. It is, I think, about helping people to develop confidence and skills. I think we have done some very painful learning around how not to go about that. Some of the early race awareness training, for instance, was destructive of individuals and of any sense of common commitment. But we have got better, in the public sector, at monitoring, and are clear that actually just straightforward statistical monitoring of how people deal with promotional opportunities, how they deal with the shortlist, introduces a climate of transparency, and so you can begin to have the dialogue about, "Why are these figures different to what you would expect?" So we have got now a stronger emphasis on an evidential base, and I think most public organisations now have got leaders who handle more clearly, both in terms of the storyline but also their decisions, what they do when people are found wanting. I do not say we are through it, but we have travelled over a period where far too frequently the assumption was that the problem was with the employee rather than with the manager, and I think we have learned to our cost that that is not always the case. So there is something from me in terms of what I would be encouraging you to look at: I think it is very important for the leaders of the organisation to clearly espouse their ambition to have an organisation which reflects the community that it serves and that does not just say that; actually that that is palpably reflected in the decisions and actions that they take. There is something about recognising that this is a complex area of management which needs both training but also the development -- I think there is a long way to go in introducing mediation skills. I am back to, let us try and deal with this as close to the point where the friction arises as possible, rather than it being passed away, because by the time it is passed away positions are adopted, time is lost, damage is done. Miss Weekes: Can I, because I was rather interested and I liked your terminology, "the whole issue of recognising difference must be rooted in efficiency and delivery of service" -- I wonder if I can just put this to you, and it is my personal thoughts, not the thoughts of the panel, so you can feel free to knock it down. Some managers -- some people in this country may feel: well, there is just so much about diversity, there is so much about race, the Met have a gender agenda; they describe people as visible ethnic minorities. I am now hitting here at language and the separation of groups of people from within an organisation where often the very thing they want is not to be seen as different at all. Some of the women who came to speak to us in the forum said, "Why haven't you invited the men? Why didn't you not just have another forum for women?" The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry allowed all of us to have a particular discussion. Is it time to move on to use the rather interesting neutral language you used, which was, "Well, let's have a look at the efficiency of the delivery of our service to our diverse community, as opposed to some of these words which turn up in lots of training courses which no doubt you have been on? A. Yes. I am absolutely with you. I think language is a very important issue here. Part of what we would agree, that this is difficult, it is a perceived area of difficulty, is people are very uncertain -- I have had this experience -- of the right terminology to use. To give you a less charged example, my first three years in Wolverhampton were spent under a Labour administration which felt very strongly that I should use the gender-free term "Chair" to refer to somebody who was chairing a committee. I thought I had got that off pretty smoothly, really; I did not make any mistakes on that; I knew what people wanted. We then had an election and in came a Conservative and Liberal administration, and every time I used the term "Chair" they took this as very visible evidence that I was not committed to them. And so a year later, I had just got back to using "Chairman" every time when it went back to Labour again. So not charged, a small example, but just that, if one has to think about which terminology to use, do we know what is the right terminology, you start to introduce immediately hesitation when you want confidence. Inevitably, I do not think there is a simple solution to this. I think that language is very important here, but the art is -- because it is not one or the other, is it? People do want to have their differences recognised but they do not want that to be the only thing you see when you look at them. And they are very sensitive to the difference becoming a barrier to their promotion, to their being listened to, for their only being seen to be interested in one issue; all of these things. I do not have a solution to this, other than to say, (a) I am convinced that language is very important and that has to be part of the training and development, and on both sides people just need to be -- I think we need to move away from the sort of mind-set model that says: if you do not use this terminology, then it betrays something else about you. Miss Weekes: I think I have got time for my final question, and it is the climate of employment law cases and settlement of them. There is some evidence that sometimes the employer will settle at the very last minute and money is thrown at it just to get rid of it so that actually there is no publicity of the employment tribunal case going forward. I noticed your point about mediation. Is mediation one of the key answers? A. I think it can be. It is back to my very strong presumption that you have to sort things out at the beginning, locally. The interesting thing is that there is a lot of interest in the private sector about trying to reduce legal transaction costs by using mediation; a whole set of settings. So there is a growing interest in it outside of the employment sphere, but I think it has a particular use there. So, yes, I think mediation is important, but, again, it is about having people who are skilled in that and who come into a situation quickly, where manager and employee cannot finds a resolution themselves, to help them to resolve it. Just a comment in passing. I do think there has been a period when, because we have known of so many weaknesses and failures in our employment practice in dealing with difference, we have allowed things to get to court, where, actually, the handling of the case itself was so bad that the clear recommendation was, "You are going to lose here", and so rather than lose people have settled. Sometimes, in cases which, back in the original complaint, the original complaint did not have as much substance as it might have appeared, it is actually the subsequent handling of it that has done the damage. Again, it points me towards early resolution. Miss Weekes: Thank you very much for your help. Sir William Morris: Mr Michael, thanks very much indeed. Before I record our formal thanks to you, you will recall that in my introductory comments earlier on I said that when we had completed our questions I would offer you the opportunity to offer us a final comment, if you so wish, so please feel free to do so, if you wish. Closing comments by Sir Michael Lyons Sir Michael Lyons: Thank you. If I were to just pick one point, it would be to go back and just extract a point I made earlier on and just elaborate on it a little bit. It is my very strong belief that what we should be aiming to achieve in the public sector in this country is a one-system view of what we are trying to achieve. That would lead me to encourage many more shared development opportunities across the public sector; much greater fluidity in moving people between -- encouraging people to look for jobs so that they might come out of the Civil Service and into a Police Authority; they might go out of a Police Authority into a local authority; into the social services. My strong conviction that that will give us a better pool of public service managers to draw on, because they will have been much clearer about the context in which they have to work, much clearer about the contribution of other parts of the public sector. At the end of the day, that could produce for us a wider choice of our Chief Constables for the future; not of people who have come straight from industry but have actually come up from the public sector but have had some experience in their careers outside the Police Service alone, which might have included a period in industry -- I would not for a moment decry that. That is just one thing I would underline it has been an ambition on my part to move towards, and I think the work that Andrew Turnbull is doing as Cabinet Secretary is moving in this direction. There is a lot of debate about this at the moment, and maybe your conclusions can help take us a step further. Sir William Morris: Thank you very much, providing it does not delay us too long. Can I, at this point, say we are immensely grateful to you for coming along and sharing your thoughts with us, and indeed answering our questions. It is a big task, we recognise that. We know your commitment to public service, and your presence this morning we see as a contribution to that end. So once again, on behalf of my colleagues and myself, thanks for being here and thanks for the work that you are doing and thanks for the contribution you are making to our work. Thank you again. Sir Michael Lyons: Thank you very much. I have enjoyed dialogue. Sir William Morris: We will adjourn until 2 o'clock. 12.30 pm (The short adjournment)
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Transcripts > Sir Michael Lyons (09 Jun 04)
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