Curious case of a broken Home and the missing answers

Colleagues of Home’s Mary Lowe, Rob Prow, Marc Leadbeater, Victoria Oliver and Richard Graham are keen to pursue the report’s findings, which highlighted worrying breaches of governance in the way the politicians dealt with its senior professional staff.

This desire to hold Home to account lies especially in relation to the report’s claim that the committee demonstrated little or no strategic leadership and wanted to interfere not only in operational matters but also in specific police cases.

These are grave charges. If a political board doesn’t set policy, what purpose does it have? Yes, it’s also there to hold officials to account and monitor performance and outcomes against objectives, but HMIC found that Home Affairs wasn’t doing that properly either.

Scrutiny Management will be holding a public hearing on this matter and questioning why a committee commissions a top-flight review of its performance and then chooses to ignore the findings when it’s criticised.

After all, as we’ve become accustomed to over the years, this is a States that allegedly likes to learn from its mistakes.

Home truths if you’re Home Affairs, however, are something to be ignored.

This is problematical. What confidence can taxpayers and voters have in politicians if they’re not externally held to account? If deputies refuse to acknowledge the independent, expert assessments that have been made of their capabilities and conduct?

This is like a Guernsey school – or Education itself – refusing to accept the findings of an Ofsted review. In short, unthinkable.

Home, of course, is already on the receiving end of an earlier unfavourable report from PwC, which benchmarked its financial performance and found it wasn’t pursuing efficiencies and economies from further mergers of law enforcement and the emergency services.

So there are actually two separate but significant threads from what HMIC has uncovered. The first is whether, or to what degree, personal political bias instead of evidence prevents service development that’s in the public interest.

Police and Customs may have come together under a single head, but they haven’t merged. This looks like an opportunity missed. Home Affairs opposes it without saying why, has produced no review of success or failure to date or said what the next step is. Yet we’re told further savings are available through a complete merger.

The second thread is what motivated the committee in some of its actions or inactions. Its lack of preparedness for criticism by HMIC, especially over the fundamental area of governance, suggests it didn’t commission the review to learn anything about itself or its political performance. If so, why spend £75,000 on a report?

If it was to get a third party to criticise law enforcement generally and the unwillingness of service chiefs to bow to political pressure specifically, then it backfired spectacularly.

Is there any evidence to suggest this might be the case? Well, apart from interference in operational matters, HMIC’s two next biggest concerns were Home not quantifying the boundaries between its legitimate involvement in oversight and strategy and operations, to prevent accusations of meddling, and not producing an enforcement delivery plan.

This last element is disturbing, as one had been prepared which defined the core business objectives of the services for which the committee was responsible.

However, as HMIC says, ‘…since that plan’s publication, the membership of the committee has changed and a new chairperson has been appointed. At the time of our inspection, the current committee had neither adopted the Delivery Plan… nor produced a new plan to replace it. As a result, [Bailiwick law enforcement] did not know what business objectives the committee had set for it. Subsequently the plan was adopted, but it has since been superseded by a plan from the States of Guernsey.’

In effect, Home Affairs was inviting HMIC to review how Police and Customs had performed against objectives it had failed to set them.

So was that due to incompetence, or something more calculated? Scrutiny Management will struggle, I think, to tease this out in a public hearing without access to all the relevant paperwork – or questioning service chiefs who come under Home Affairs’ mandate.

Scrutiny also needs clarity on why Home withheld minutes from the reviewers, the timescale and events that led to some being released and why those that were had been redacted.

In an email to me, a spokesman said: ‘For obvious reasons [the committee] agreed to provide the minutes only in respect of those law enforcement related items or where officers of law enforcement attended a meeting, or recording a discussion where the committee (or a member) had been contacted by a member of the public about a law enforcement matter. Redactions: Minutes were redacted only where they related to matters unrelated to law enforcement.’

Sorry, it’s not obvious. Home’s governance remit – which HMIC had been asked to review – runs across areas such as prison, probation, the family proceedings advisory service, fire, and so on, all or any of which could have had relevance to law enforcement.

Additionally, HMIC, which independently assesses the effectiveness and efficiency of police forces and fire and rescue services in the public interest in the UK, is a confidential organisation which can be relied upon to ignore anything that’s not relevant to its inquiries.

The point is that it didn’t have to redact or hold back potentially relevant material – it chose to do so, so we must ask why.

In concluding, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, if you remain persuaded by none of the case against Home consider this: the facts show it failed to set boundaries on oversight vs. interference and still hasn’t produced a delivery plan for its officers to work against.

What confidence can you have that it is a fit and proper committee to do so now?