Public Safety committee  Yes, I think—this is very much a personal view—the engagement with the private sector needs to be handled very carefully. I am not supportive of wholesale outsourcing, as I previously said. I think there are many issues. We guard the reputation of the police service very precio

Public Safety committee  Yes, I think you're absolutely right. I think crime types are changing, and we need to keep apace of that. We need to keep apace especially around technology and the like, but also, we need to think about how we can use technology to defeat those sorts of crimes and how we can us

Public Safety committee  Thank you very much, and if you do come to England, you'd be very welcome to come to Staffordshire. I'd love to be your host.

Public Safety committee  Three things have happened that have attacked officer morale. Nearly all of them are national interventions. One is that there has been a complete review of police officer terms and conditions. This was a government-led program of work. It was undertaken independently by a guy

Public Safety committee  Yes, on the move to the single commissioner, the thinking behind it from government was to introduce much more democratic accountability: to have an individual elected by the public to hold me to account for delivery. Whether that is best served by one person or by a committee of

Public Safety committee  That was in relation to private sector engagement, and consultancy in particular. Too often, I think, consultants would have a conversation with you that leaves you reliant upon them for delivery of too much. I think the conversation has to be different. It has to be about invest

Public Safety committee  It's an excellent question. This was a real challenge. First of all, police officers in the U.K. do not have a right to strike. It is something that they give up when they join the police force. They have a police federation—it's not a union—that represents front-line rank-and-

Public Safety committee  Absolutely. This is a significant challenge to us. At the moment we are not working enough with key partners. We need to engage the health sector far, far more than we have in relation to resolving these issues with some of the most vulnerable people we come across. There are so

Public Safety committee  Absolutely, resourcing is a major challenge. There is a saying that you shouldn't waste a good crisis. The crisis we are in at the moment is helping us to have very difficult conversations with the health professionals—who are also having financial squeeze—to step up to the pla

Public Safety committee  It's a really important point. We do have officers who work with young people. We look to identify early those people who may be at risk of becoming involved in criminality. There is more to do on this, but there are two significant pieces of work that I'd like to mention. One i

Public Safety committee  It certainly has changed. Over 20 years ago when I joined the police force, the terrorism threat was principally around Irish republicanism in the U.K. It has now unquestionably moved across to radical Islamist threats. That definitely has a significant footprint in the U.K. In m

Public Safety committee  In the principal recommendation I have, I go back to my passion for local policing. These terrorists work in local neighbourhoods. When the London tube bombers bombed London some years ago, we know now that their behaviour changed in their local communities. What we need to have

Public Safety committee  I think your assessment of a tipping point is absolutely right.

Public Safety committee  Yes. I also have a responsibility nationally for leading on this area for the Association of Chief Police Officers in the U.K. I can tell you that the profile of complaints is handled predominantly within local police forces because overwhelmingly they are about things like ruden

Public Safety committee  I think there's a general satisfaction but I think there are obviously people who if they were sitting here would say they're dissatisfied with it because they have some mistrust in policing. The integrity of U.K. policing is something that the home secretary is very focused on