Reinventing the wheel

The Home Secretary asserted to the Home Affairs Committee in April that he has 'spent the last 11 months in the Home Office producing more reform plans than have ever been done.' Having declared the structure of his department unfit for purpose, Dr Reid has set about reviewing and reforming with zeal. Nor is he alone in driving Home Office reform. At the Labour Party conference last September, John Reid announced that the Prime Minister had commissioned a review of counter-terrorism capacity. And in March 2007, the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit [PMSU] published the discussion paper Building on Progress: Security, Crime and Justice, advocating a “new approach” to policing and security issues.

It is unclear what has become of the September review. Enquiries with various Home Office sources have failed to discover any knowledge of its progress. The extent to which it has informed subsequent ministry restructuring or the PMSU paper is unknown. This begs the question, was the announcement just a headline response to a summer season of reviews?

The season began when the Intelligence and Security Committee published its findings on the London terrorist attacks of 7th July 2005 in May 2006. Recognising the attacks as a 'catalyst for change', amongst other recommendations the Committee called for a coherent counter-terrorism strategy to ensure a 'joined-up' approach across government and the various responsible agencies in dealing with complex and wide-ranging threats; for more coherent and combined effort between police and security/intelligence services in identifying and tackling the ‘home grown threat’; and for the security and intelligence agencies to change and change more quickly in their response to new threats.

There followed the UK’s Countering International Terrorism strategy, published July 2006, which articulated the 4 Ps approach: prevent radicalisation, pursue terrorists through prosecution, protect the public and national infrastructure, and prepare for the consequences of those attacks which are not prevented. In respect of the latter strategic aim, Addressing Lessons from the Emergency Response to the 7 July 2005 London Bombings was published just one week before Dr Reid announced his Prime Ministerial commission accepting the Intelligence and Security Committee call for a 'radical step change' in counter-terrorism. Clearly a government response was expected, and the announcement of yet another review certainly addressed that immediate political need.

In parallel, at sub-government level, the police service has conducted its own reviews into counter-terrorism policing. The specific counter-terrorism policing review undertaken immediately after the July 2005 bombings by Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Andy Hayman seemingly became caught up with the subsequent wider debate about police service structure initiated by the HMIC report Closing the Gap (September 2005), which itself questioned the capacity and capability of current police forces to address seven major policing issues – termed protective services – that transcend local police force boundaries. Protective services policing includes critical incidents, counter-terrorism, and organized crime, the latter frequently linked with terrorism by policy-makers. A national police counter-terrorism structure was debated, although not widely, and three regional hubs established to focus police counter-terrorism collaboration, whilst the Metropolitan Police has created a new counter-terrorism command through internal merging of departments.

To this catalogue of practitioner strategic reviews has been added another, this time from outside the security and policing communities. The recent PMSU paper (March 2007) announces a 'new approach' to policing, comprising three themes: 'more effective prevention'; 'better detection and enforcement'; and 'reform of the criminal justice system'. This new approach is perhaps not as innovative as it is purported to be when one considers that in a major reform of the criminal justice system, the first public police service (the Thames Police) was set up in 1800 to achieve more effective prevention and better detection and enforcement in relation to crime committed on and around the Thames in London’s dockland. Indeed better prevention, detection and enforcement is what the police service and successive administrations have been striving to achieve for 207 years, frequently reforming elements of the criminal justice system in order to do so. Whatever reflection informed this paper, it is difficult not to form the impression that this is merely the wheel being reinvented.

In relation to security and counter-terrorism, the PMSU report repeats the Prime Minister’s March 2006 call for a battle of ideas to win the hearts and minds of the alienated, in order to achieve a more cohesive society functioning around a 'set of common values at both the local level and the national level', recognising that 'cohesive communities are central to many government objectives'. There is no PMSU suggestion that MI5 and MI6 should either merge or coalesce under a single Ministry, an aspiration attributed in the press to Dr Reid and one which he strongly denied to the Home Affairs Committee, arguing that a 'mechanism that maximises the impact' of integration effort was all that was necessary.

Review, report, recommendation, realisation of recommendations and subsequent results analysis are separate and distinct phases of the reflective cycle for any learning organization. Those seeking to deliver joined up government must apply the reflective cycle principles if otherwise separate elements of the administration are ever to work in joined up fashion. As has been outlined above, in relation to counter-terrorism, in recent months strategic review has followed hard on the heels of strategic review giving rise to three questions. Who, if anyone, has the overview of all these reviews ensuring they are joined up? Who will co-ordinate implementation of actions derived from the reviews? And will the outcome of actions implemented be evaluated before further strategic reviews take place? Because long-term results analysis will better inform the real need for review than political reaction to dramatic events.

For instance, all these reviews came in the wake of some significant structural changes in place before 2005. A Police International Counter-Terrorism Unit (PICTU) was created in 2002, as a small centrally organised police support body, to act as intermediary between local policing and MI5 on terrorism matters. In June 2003 the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC) was created as a vehicle for inter-agency intelligence collaboration. JTAC is considered to have improved analysis of terrorism based on enhanced sharing of information (Cm 6492, paragraph 7). Former special advisor to the Home Affairs Committee, Professor Frank Gregory, suggests PICTU is performing useful functions albeit with limited resources. It is too early properly to evaluate the long-term benefits of these initiatives and so such a results analysis cannot have been part of any of the reviews catalogued above. The recent terrorist trial in relation to the failed bomb attacks of July 2005 raises fresh concerns about the reality of inter-agency counter-terrorism intelligence exchange notwithstanding structures in place to facilitate this. And now the family of counter-terrorism intelligence and strategy practitioners has been joined by a National Security Board, a Committee on Security and Terrorism, and an Office of Security and Counter-Terrorism. All these new bodies, together with the recently established National Criminal Justice Board and the Office for Criminal Justice Reform, are intended to enhance integrated effort by bringing together the various different government departments with an interest in the criminal law and counter-terrorism. This represents, according to Dr Reid, added capacity in the revised over-arching mission of the new Home Office.

From another area of policing comes a cautionary tale about how strategic review can, presumably unwittingly, reduce capacity. Following a review of UK capability to intervene against organized crime (Cm 6167), the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU), created in 2001 as part of a national hi-tech crime strategy costing £25M, was subsumed into the Serious Organized Crime Agency, ending significant aspects of the NHTCU’s former functionality (Hansard HC, 23.05.06, col.1702W). This prompted senior police officers to call for a national hi-tech crime unit to be set up to replace the lost capacity (www.computerweekly.com 28.11.06).

There is a danger that reviews alone, i.e. without the subsequent elements of the reflective cycle, can be mistaken for action. Too frequent review can disguise the fact that previous reviews never completed the reflective cycle. Various aspects of counter-terrorism and its relationship to local policing have come under close scrutiny in recent months. The time has come for results analysis rather than further review. Otherwise there is a danger that an abundance of reviews in fact becomes a redundancy of reviews.

Dr Clive Harfield, Academic Leader (Reader) in Policing, John Grieve Centre for Policing & Community Safety, London Metropolitan University www.johngrievecentre.co.uk