14. Submissions on Behalf of the National Police Chiefs’ Council by Mr Phillips KC

Mr Phillips: My Lady, as you know, the National Police

Chiefs’ Council is a national co-ordinating body that represents all UK police forces, and of course in this Inquiry it is a core participant representing UK policing. The police were, on any view, one of the key frontline organisations during the pandemic.

In his oral evidence to you, former assistant commissioner Martin Hewitt, who chaired the organisation throughout, noted two particular impacts of the pandemic on policing.

First, the NPCC recognised very early on that the pandemic required a dedicated police response. The national co-ordination of that response, established in

March 2020, was Operation Talla. As you know, Operation Talla covered just about every area of policing activity, and deployed the available resources of the NPCC.

Secondly, it was clear to the NPCC that normal policing activity, including the prevention and detection of crime, would have to carry on despite the challenging conditions and would, of course, continue after the end of the pandemic, whenever that was.

As I said in my brief opening submissions, the pandemic of course posed a wide range of challenges in every aspect of public and private life. Policing and police officers faced many such challenges, as the pandemic affected every part of the service.

On the one hand, there was the impact of the virus itself. Officers had to discharge their duties without knowing how long the pandemic would last, what the impact of infections and isolations would be on police resources, how the safety and welfare of individual officers and members of staff, as well as the people they came into contact with, could be effectively ensured; and you may remember Martin Hewitt succinctly put it that you can’t police at 2 metres’ distance.

On the other hand, the police were expected, under the Coronavirus Act and the Covid regulations, to interfere with people’s lives and with their freedom of movement in a way that neither the police nor the public had ever experienced before.

In his evidence to you, Mr Hewitt described seeing, at the start of the pandemic, the policing measures implemented in other countries where the virus had spread ahead of the UK, and thinking that such measures had not been seen since the Second World War.

Operation Talla was therefore an unprecedented national response to this unprecedented situation.

However, my Lady, it bears repeating that at all stages of the pandemic the work of the NPCC and of Operation Talla encompassed far more than the enforcement of the Covid-19 restrictions, in terms of the co-ordination of that national policing effort.

Moreover, the NPCC itself played no direct role in the enforcement of the regulations, the policing issue on which the Inquiry has chosen to focus during this module.

As you know, and so far as enforcement by the police was concerned, this remained at all times the responsibility of individual officers and forces.

However, a vital aspect of the NPCC’s work was the production, the dissemination of clear and accurate briefings and formal guidance for forces in conjunction, of course, with the College of Policing.

The key guidance, as you will recall, was issued by the NPCC and the college in March 2020, and it was the four Es approach: engage, explain, encourage, enforce. That approach, I would suggest, was inherently flexible and the message was simple: enforcement was the last resort after the first three Es had been undertaken.

As Martin Hewitt explained to you, compliance, not enforcement, was the object of the exercise and, I would suggest, the proper metric of success.

Any attempt to assess the police response to the pandemic solely by reference to the number of FPNs issued involves focusing disproportionately on the final stage of the four Es process. The overwhelming majority of police contact with the public and the police’s achievement in securing compliance with the regulations came as a result of the first three Es.

The four Es guidance of course reflected another fundamental point highlighted both by Mr Hewitt and by Dame Priti Patel in their evidence to you, which is that in this country we have policing by consent. The task faced by the police in the pandemic was to encourage the public to comply with regulations which were judged by government to be both in everyone’s best interests, whilst at the same time retaining their trust, and I said to you in my opening that that was a formidable assignment.

Dame Priti Patel in her evidence said that the police had been asked to almost do the impossible. Their task was as always to enforce the law, and I stress again that it was no part of their remit to enforce government policy, still less to enforce government guidance.

However, as you’ve now heard from a number of witnesses, that task was made the more difficult by the frequent changes to the regulations, by the speed of those changes, by the lack of consultation and little or no notice given to the police before changes were enacted, and of course by the frequent discrepancies between the terms of the legislation on the one hand and government guidance or ministerial statements concerning it on the other.

You heard, I would suggest, compelling evidence from Martin Hewitt about the difficulties which this caused the service in the largely unchartered territory of public health policing, despite what he also emphasised to you was a very strong working relationship with the Home Office. So it was significant that the then Home Secretary herself accepted in her evidence to you that the process of enacting regulatory changes was “suboptimal at every single level”.

It’s no exaggeration to say, my Lady, that UK policing and its leaders had to draw very heavily on their reserves of flexibility and resilience as they adapted to the novel responsibilities conferred on the service and sought to keep the public safe.

My Lady, the issue of the enforcement of Covid regulations has played a very minor part in these hearings, which have of course been largely devoted to high level government decision-making. Indeed, it’s been a striking feature of the many, many hours of submissions you’ve heard so far today that none has made any reference to, still less any criticism of, the enforcement by the police of the regulations: a fair indication, I would suggest, of the very modest role the question has played in these hearings. It features, you’ll remember, as a single sub-issue in your lengthy list of issues, and only one day of evidence was directed to it. On that day, you heard, as I’ve said, from Mr Hewitt on behalf of the NPCC, and my submission to you is that his evidence was considered, balanced, reliable and authoritative.

My Lady, we’ll put in detailed written submissions, of course, drawing on that evidence and on the other material the Inquiry’s gathered in in relation to policing, but of course if we can assist you in any other way, we’re ready to do so.

Lady Hallett: Thank you very much indeed, Mr Phillips.

I understand that those who are still to speak were given a listing of tomorrow and would prefer to stick to tomorrow. So unless there’s anybody who is particularly anxious to speak tonight, we shall pause now and return for 10 o’clock tomorrow; and I’m extremely grateful to everyone who has spoken today for admirably, almost to a man and woman, sticking to their time limits.

Thank you very much. 10 o’clock tomorrow.

(3.55 pm)

(The hearing adjourned until 10 am on Thursday, 14 December 2023)