Conference 2003 - Chairman's Speech
SPEECH BY CHAIRMAN: MR ALEX ROBERTSON
ON WEDNESDAY 26 March 2003 AT THE
PETERBOROUGH MOAT HOUSE HOTEL
Minister, guests, delegates, I welcome you to our annual conference. You are particularly welcome Minister because, not for the first time, you have taken time out from important parliamentary business to be with us. Last year it was the Chancellor of the Exchequer's Budget: this year you are taking a break from steering the Railway Safety Bill through the House. I shall return to the subject of that Bill later in this address. And if that is not enough to occupy Government, we have a major conflict in Iraq on our hands.
If I look back on how matters have changed for the British Transport Police since our last conference I can point to two things. Firstly, we have had a further year of exercising our extension of jurisdiction powers. The Government eventually saw the light on this much overdue reform and included the necessary legislation change in the Terrorism Act of 2000. However, two problems are apparent, one actual and one potential. In drafting the necessary clauses to extend our jurisdiction, the Government omitted to include the essential phrase "in the vicinity of". This has rendered our ability to act within our jurisdiction, even when off railway sites, less effective.
The second problem will arise only if the Government fails to renew the powers of the Terrorism Act when it comes up for review this year.
No-one was more appreciative than we were that the Government used the Terrorism Act as a vehicle to carry through the clauses extending our jurisdiction.
The problem is that while the Terrorism Act has to be renewed every three years, we have the inescapable risk that should its overall sentiment be no longer needed, then the jurisdiction extension of the BTP will also fall - a classic case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
The arguments for the BTP to have its jurisdiction extended were well rehearsed over many years of conference chairman's addresses and I suspect Minister that you were not only familiar with them but sympathetic towards the point from an early stage. However, the jurisdiction extension, useful as it is among the measures to enable the police service to deal with terrorism, was also essential if the effectiveness of the BTP was to be maximised.
Increasingly my members were unhappy about performing police services but without the protection of the office of constable. The subtlety of this distinction was lost not surprisingly upon the general public but criminals and seasoned hooligans were becoming well aware of the shortcomings in our power and were causing difficulties in processing arrests.
The need is for a more permanent answer and that means mainstreaming our extension of jurisdiction clauses into either a dedicated police bill or the current Railway Safety Bill.
And at the same time Parliament could address the missing phrase "in the vicinity of".
BTP officers can exercise police powers when they see the law being broken or when asked by a member of the public or another police force for assistance. Having gained a sensible improvement in our jurisdiction powers at no cost to civil liberties or to the integrity of other forces, then we need to ensure that the benefit to the public is not lost.
On a similar vein of weakness in the legislation we have a problem with the fact that the BTP has not been stipulated as a police service under the Police Act. The missing reference relates to our powers to deal with asylum seekers and illegal immigrants.
At the moment the only intelligence tool available to the BTP to deal with asylum seekers and illegal immigrants is the Police National Computer. I am sorry to say, and you Minister may be amazed to learn, that too often our request to other intelligence agencies for information is denied.
The requests are being turned down because technically, under the relevant legislation, the Police Act, we are not listed as a police service.
Clearly it makes no sense for any police force, especially a national police service, to be left out of the intelligence loop. Again this is an anomaly which we would like to see removed urgently.
I think all of these difficulties are a combination of Departmental unwillingness to hear the arguments being made to it and secondly, a failure by Government to take a panoramic overview of policing. Where problems such as terrorism and asylum seekers are multi-faceted, then Government needs to take an inter-departmental approach if it is to address all related issues. Of course the Government gets the broad thrust right but issues such as proper jurisdiction measures are left to rankle and are dealt with in an almost band-aid approach.
I can make the same point - and I will - about our funding. As you know Minister the Federation has never been comfortable with the mechanism whereby the Train Operating Companies fund the police service. I fully understand the principle that underpins this approach, that the users are paying for the service. It is my view that the user is the public transport user and that the Train Operating Companies should be taken out of the equation.
There is wider sympathy for this view and Parliament has recently pointed out that it would like to be convinced that funding the BTP through the railway companies does not somehow give them either actual or perceived leverage on how we operate.
It doesn't of course but when the aim of the game is to win over and maximise public confidence then there is surely a strong argument to break the link.
If we had direct funding then I believe the arguments for additional money to pay for new sophisticated training to deal with the biological and chemical terrorism threat, would be more readily accepted. Instead the BTP, which deals with more terrorist incidents than any other force with exception of the Met; which daily protects one of the most prestigious and vulnerable targets, that of the Capital's travel infrastructure, has to find the money from its own resources. All the other 43 forces have been granted additional funds; 90 per cent of them are unlikely to see any terrorist acts. It is a curious logic. And it's exactly the same logic which leaves this Force to find the money from its own resources to meet the competency payments agreed at the Police Negotiating Board. We may not be directly represented at PNB but our terms and conditions are a read across and competency payments are to be made to BTP officers. The BTP has no extra funds within its budget to meet unforeseen demands either to combat terrorism or to meet improved terms and conditions.
Money can be found only by robbing other parts of the overall budget: so somewhere the priorities have to be changed.
The amount of money to be found is quite staggering. Costs will rise 7% over the coming year and further increases are forecast over the next two years on a budget already in a fragile state. The BTP has only been granted a 4% rise from our stakeholders, which will leave our overall budget short by £4.5 million.
If I translate that figure into policing measures, then £2 million will be lost in funding for police posts with the loss of 50 to 60 officers. A further £1 million will be lost to fund overtime and from next week there is to be a total ban on recruitment with the exception of the London Underground.
In the present climate when the nation is at a state of readiness against terrorism, the Government thinks it would be a good idea to weaken police resources. It makes no sense to me, to my colleagues and the public. By contrast the Metropolitan Police is to be fully funded to the tune of £8 million. We are the specialist railway police service. The travelling public and Government will look to the BTP to keep Britain on the move should there be terrorist attacks. It will be for the Government to explain how it thought that handicapping the BTP by reducing our resources at this crucial time contributes to that important objective.
And while we are on the subject of money, we can foresee a problem coming up with regard to the administration of our pensions.
The Federation is represented on a working group which is dealing with changes needed to our pension arrangements. At the moment BTP officers' pensions are part of the larger pension pool of the wider railway industry. This is obviously an historical situation but by being part of a larger arrangement the administration charges relating to our share of the pool have never been onerous.
Now HM Treasury are proposing to take us out of the industry arrangement for what seems to be purely legislative reasons.
There is no financial benefit to Treasury in doing this; perhaps it just suits the Treasury mandarins as being administratively tidier. However, there is a substantial and disproportionate cost to us in managing a smaller fund on our own. Minister, your sympathetic intervention on this would be much appreciated.
Two years ago Minister your Department published a consultation paper entitled "Modernising the British Transport Police". Reaction to that paper was encouraging.
Lord Falconer, speaking on behalf of the Government in the House of Lords, restated the Government's commitment to the BTP when he confirmed that the railways would continue to be best protected by a unified police force that provided security for the whole network.
In particular he pointed out that merging the BTP with local forces would risk the loss of expertise and reduce priority to policing the railways. At that time there was little challenge to the view that the railway has special policing needs and that a national police force for the railways has always been a cost-effective solution.
Minister, I am sure you won't mind if I recall your own words from the foreword of that consultation paper when you wrote of this force: "They have a key role in tackling crime, minimising the fear of crime and increasing the confidence of passengers in a railway environment that is a safe and pleasant alternative to the private motor car." Most crucially you also said: "the BTP are central to the Government's transport policies. They have a crucial role to play in achieving targets for increasing rail use by both passengers and freight."
These were all heady comments which gave us satisfaction that our professionalism was recognised in every quarter and especially by the Government and our parent department.
Our sense of complacency has been shattered by the persistent suggestion that the needs of policing London's underground network would be best met by merging our 400 underground officers into the Metropolitan Police Service.
The Federation has been used in the past to rebutting any calls for the BTP to be subsumed in the county forces and thereby ceasing to exist altogether. The call for removing part of the Force and integrating it into the Met is altogether new.
The idea has a seductive simplicity to it but the reality of the probable consequences is more complex.
For a start I understand the idea came from the Home Secretary, David Blunkett. Merging the underground into the Met has all the hallmarks of a knee-jerk reaction to London's crime statistics.
Despite early consideration by the BTP of the idea showing that it is based on a misunderstanding of how New York tackled its crime, papers and advocates in its support continue to appear: the latest being the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone.
Minister, you will already be aware of the Federation's opposition to the proposition. Our strength of feeling is based on a professional policing assessment of its lack of merit and our concern that politicians may prefer the superficial analysis.
In recommending that the London Underground officers should be transferred to the Met, it is obvious that London would be behaving quite selfishly.
The BTP is a force of just over 2,200 officers. To remove almost a quarter of our operational strength would seriously damage the overall viability of the BTP. We are a civilian, national police force covering from Inverness to Truro. Without responsibility for London and its eight mainline stations connecting to the Tube network, we will lose our operational relevance.
Merging the rump of the Force into the county forces would deprive the railway companies and the travelling public of the decades of corporate expertise which is essential for public confidence in their safety.
Unlike other police forces the BTP has a conscious commercial imperative. We have a strategic partnership with the railway industry, one which is recognised by Government. Our job is to build and sustain public confidence in railway safety so that more people elect to travel by rail than persist with their private car option.
If one looks at the BTP Underground's record in dealing with crime on the network, it is one of success. In recent years overall crime has fallen by almost 21 per cent thanks to tremendous focus and hard work on crime prevention strategies.
When the Home Secretary had his conversation with New York's Mayor Giuliani he could not help but be impressed with the 43 per cent improvement in New York's crime. But Mr Blunkett has failed to understand how the improvement came about. It was not simply a matter of merging the transit police into the New York Police Department.
Further and more detailed conversation with Mayor Giuliani would have told him that in 1990, some five years before the Forces were amalgamated, the NYPD recruited an extra 7,000 police officers. Crime started to fall immediately. None of us here will be surprised at that. But as well as that, the Mayor's department made a number of changes in how their police operated. These included: the preparation of separate detailed crime strategies for the various types of crime; the rigid enforcement of laws against relatively minor crimes; the redeployment of officers on administrative work to frontline duty and the use of sophisticated computer crime systems for managing resources.
When the Mayor of London prioritises the transport systems for extra policing with the promise of an extra £25m per year for a transport policing division, he is on the right lines. When he says that he will seek the backing of the Government to bring London's police strength up to 40,000, he has our undoubted support.
But when he and others seek to grab the London Underground officers, then we must point out that there are other ways of tackling crime than simply thoughtless mergers.
The BTP has several initiatives already underway, initiatives which facilitate the sharing of intelligence and joint operations.
There is always room for improvement but such advances will happen where forces have full understanding and appreciation of each other's expertise and the flexibility and imagination to implement innovative crime prevention programmes. We should not lose sight of the fact that there are three million tube journeys every day but only 40 crimes reported. It is still 40 too many but let's keep the problem in perspective.
My Federation feels that the Home Office and the Mayor's office are ignoring the wise advice of: "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".
No-one has been able to persuade this Force or its Federation - and I hope you share our view - that a case has been made for destroying the BTP because that is just what would happen in order to give the Met another 450 officers whose real skill in railway policing would soon be diluted and then lost. There is no complacency within the Force about how we work.
We believe that evolution is the best way forward so that improvements are not at the expense of existing effectiveness and best practice.
I must also express some amazement that this debate on the future of the underground takes place when London faces its gravest threat of attack since the Second World War.
Not even at the heights of the IRA campaign did the Government announce that there would be full scale disaster rehearsals for our transport infrastructure system.
This conference takes place when the US and its allies are at war with Iraq. No-one wants this war. All wars are bad but some wars need to be fought. I make no comment about the need to fight Iraq but unlike pervious conflicts, such as in the Balkans, Vietnam or Korea, there is a risk to the civilian population of these islands.
There has never been a greater need for "joined up government" or for the government to be fully focused on preparing for any terrorist backlash right here in the UK's major cities and in London in particular. So while attention is on Baghdad in driving forward the need to remove Saddam Hussein, we also must look to the defence here.
In particular our railway network and tube system offer vulnerable and prestigious targets to terrorists.
When all our energy, our management intellect and focus should be concentrated on the current terrorist threat, we are being sidetracked by a hare-brained scheme being promoted by a Home Department which does not even have civic responsibility for either railway transport or its related policing.
The idea needs to be dropped now.
The new railway safety bill will replace our police committee with an independent police authority. We are delighted with this move. We see it as introducing a new and more representative body capable of overseeing policing properly and unencumbered by excessive commercial baggage.
The former police committee could have worked harder to enjoy the confidence of the federated ranks of the BTP.
To their shame and our embarrassment they collectively refused the Federation the right to attend Police Committee meetings. They held to this position, even though our Chief Constable and their Chairman had no objection.
A more enlightened and modern approach to overseeing the management of this Force would not only permit access to the formal meetings but seek to promote dialogue with the Federation. I commend this approach to the new Police Authority. We live in an age where accountability and transparency are key considerations in the managing of public resources. Our concern as a Federation is to maximise our contribution to improving public safety on the railways. We believe that by engaging with the members of the Police Authority, the public interest will be advanced rather than compromised. If necessary, perhaps the Minister might be persuasive on this point.
I also understand that Her Majesty's Inspector of Constabularies supports this view and will shortly say so.
Minister, you will gather from my remarks a sense of frustration about the Government's approach to policing. Crime is complex in its causes and there are no simple off-the-shelf answers such as "here's one I made earlier in New York."
Tackling crime and terrorism is about effective use of proper resources coupled with government determination to ensure that the public are protected. That is the message we want to hear.
Thank you.
