I’ve already written a couple of commentaries on the arrest of Shadow Immigration Minister, Damian Green, over at Lib Con but for my third, and most controversial, article on this story I decided to bring the action back home to the Ministry, so…

Let’s begin at the beginning with a quick recap.

Green was arrested last week on suspicion of committing two common law offences of ‘conspiring to commit misconduct in a public office” and ‘aiding and abetting, counselling or procuring misconduct in a public office”, setting off a political shit storm of epic proportions.

Over the weekend, Green’s claim that he was just an innocent MP who was doing his job in accepting leaked information from a civil service whistle-blower started to unravel as it emerged that Green’s source, Christopher Galley, was a former Conservative local election candidate who’d also applied, unsuccessfully, for a job working for Green.

In a press statement given by his lawyer, Neil O’May, on Monday, Galley admitted to having first met Green in the House of Commons in 2006 before going on to claim that:

“[He] gave Mr Green information that was important for the public to know in an open and democratic system.”

And that

“[Mr Green] received the information in the same spirit and used it in the course of his parliamentary duties”.

And so begins the time-line of events which may show both those assertions to be false.

Also on Monday, The Times, in reporting Jack Straw’s apparent surprise at Green’s arrest, incorporated this new piece of information into its article:

Other Home Office leaks being investigated are: the complete version of Sir Ronnie Flanagan’s report on the future of policing in February; the information that a disc containing details of 4,000 Dutch offenders that had been sent to Britain had been lost for a year; and news of the loss of data on thousands of prolific offenders.

The inclusion of the Flanagan report in the list of leaks being investigated seems rather at odds with the other items. It is, after all, an official review of the police service that was commissioned by Tony Blair in April 2007 in line with a recommendation in a government policy review published only a month earlier and neither Flanagan’s interim report (12th September 2007) or his final report (7th February 2008) contains anything that might be considered ‘embarrassing’ to the government although it does question a number of what were, at the time, existing policies and practices, which is only what you’d expect from a review of this kind.

So why would the police be interested in the possibility that full copy of the final report might have been leaked to Damian Green, particularly when, but for the usual pre-release press articles based on government briefings, there was nothing in the press at the time to indicate that the contents of the report had been leaked?

To answer that question we need to look at what the Conservative Party were doing in the week immediately prior to the release of the final report, a week during which two extremely senior Tories, David Cameron and the then-Shadow Home Secretary, David Davis, made separate policing-related policy ‘announcements’ via exclusive articles in the national press, ‘announcements’ which contained six different ‘new’ policies in total all of which mirror recommendations made within the Flanagan report.

On January 30th 2008, David Cameron gave an exclusive interview to The Sun newspaper in which he announced two policies, a proposal to discontinue the use of ‘stop forms’:

The stop form has to go. It’s ridiculous you have a situation where community support officers and traffic wardens and even parkies can ask people what they are doing, but police officers can’t.

And changes to the regulations governing the use of stop and search powers:

My stop and search proposals are more far-reaching. Today in order to stop and search where there isn’t suspicion you need to have the say-so of an inspector or above.

That means there isn’t as much stop and search as there should be. We need to see a culture where it is unacceptable to carry a gun or a knife.

We will scrap the rules of stop and search. We need more newer rules.

We need to work out whether it needs completely scrapping, or whether we need to replace the say-so of an inspector with that of a sergeant or lower. But those current laws, be in no doubt, have got to go.

You’ll find both these proposals in the final Flanagan report but that should come as no great surprise. Not only was Cameron not announcing anything new – both policies had featured in a Conservative ‘mini-manifesto’ on crime and disorder published at the end of August 2007, a full two weeks before the publication of Flanagan’s interim report but the policies are a couple of no-brainers that anyone could have come up with on the strength of a five minute conversation with any serving beat officer in Britain.

So, neither of these policies seems likely to be relevant to this case.

Of much more interest here is an article by David Davis which appeared in the Sunday Telegraph on 3rd February 2008, four days before the release of the full and final version of the Flanagan report, in which Davis makes three further policy announcements after, first, opening the article with a rather pointed dig at the government for delaying the release of the Flanagan report, which David claimed was solely to allow the government to steal the Conservative’s latest policy ideas:

The Government has, yet again, delayed publication of Sir Ronnie Flanagan’s report on police bureaucracy, as it scurries to incorporate the latest Conservative proposals. At the risk of another delay, here are a few more.

After several paragraphs of ‘by the numbers’ flannel about bureaucracy and red tape, Davis, unsurprisingly, made cutting the number of government policing targets his first definitive policy statement:

First, a Conservative government would aim for dramatic reductions in the current 29 central government targets for the police. In their place, we would introduce directly-elected police commissioners, to make police forces directly accountable to their local communities.

Nothing new here again, merely a portmanteau announcement of two items that were presented as separate and unrelated policies in the August 2007 mini-manifesto in which the sole innovation is Davis’s suggestion that elected police commissioners would be a replacement for national targets.

As for the Flanagan report, that contains several references to revising and scaling back government policing targets, which is entirely unsurprising as part of the brief given to Flanagan was that of finding ways to reduce bureaucracy, and a chapter on involving local people in policing which include a short appraisal of a range of different options including directly elected commissioners, local police boards and police authorities – again, there’s nothing her that seems the slightest bit out of the ordinary.

Skipping Davis’s second announcement (temporarily and for reasons that will shortly become clear) we come to we come to one of two obvious examples of blatant plagiarism:

Third, we will allow defendants at police stations to appear before magistrates by video for a range of hearings, cutting the time wasted on travel to and from court and waiting for a case to be heard.

The introduction of Virtual Courts is a major recommendation in Flanagan’s full report but one which was obviously going to feature given the obvious enthusiasm for the idea evident in the interim version of the report:

1.35 Pilots are currently underway to assess the benefits of using Virtual Courts as a way to reduce costs and improve efficiency in the custody process. By creating a virtual link between the custody suite and Magistrates’ Court significant savings can be made in reducing prisoner transport costs and making better use of Magistrates’ time. It can make the difference between a hearing on Friday evening and a weekend holding, with a hearing on Monday. The scheme also offers the opportunity for Magistrates’ Courts to operate more flexible hours which are closely matched to demand, and in turn, reduce pressure on custody suites. (It can of course only operate with the consent of the prisoner involved).

1.36 While the current pilot has yet to be fully evaluated, I have again discussed this process with the Director. We are both enthusiastic about the potential this has to offer to streamline processes and save valuable time.

Recommendation 12:

Following completion of the pilot evaluation, urgent consideration should be given to rolling out virtual courts, both geographically and in terms of the categories of cases they can cover.

Davis’s second bout of plagiarism is referenced earlier this article but actually made its first appearance, two days earlier (1st February 2008) in an article in the Daily Mail:

The Association of Chief Police Officers has described RIPA as a “huge unnecessary bureaucracy”.

Mr Davis said the Tories would introduce “common sense” to the rules and would stop police being deterred from investigating minor crimes by mountains of paperwork.

He added: “The idea that some of this requires a 40-page form is just ludicrous.”

He said that his party’s plans were “a straightforward way of taking a burden off the backs of the people doing the job”.

And again, a review of the bureaucracy arising from the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) is a recommendation made by Flanagan in both his final and interim reports:

The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2000) (RIPA)

1.27 I have referred earlier to a perception within the police service that the operation of RIPA and the activity of the Office of Surveillance Commissioners (OSC) brings about an unduly heavy administrative burden upon police. As I further indicate earlier, I have no doubt that at least part of this burden is brought about by instances of police going further than either the legislation or indeed the OSC require. I have initiated dialogue with the Chief Commissioner in this regard and intend to build upon this as the Review progresses. I am also familiar with current work initiated by AC PO and NPIA in this regard and will be maintaining close liaison with them to ensure that any guidance developed for the service in this area is appropriate.

So, two of Davis’s ‘new’ policies, Virtual Courts and the RIPA review, appear to been have plagiarised from Flanagan’s interim report and then passed off as the Tory’s own work, which is dishonest but far from an unusual occurrance in modern politics -

- but then we come to the policy announcement we skipped over earlier and things get much more interesting:

Second, we will restore government’s trust in the professional police officer. As part of wider reform, a Conservative government will abolish “statutory charging” in straightforward magistrates court cases, restoring discretion to the custody sergeant and eliminating the reams of paperwork that police prepare for the Crown Prosecution Service. This will free up to a million police hours per year, allowing officers to re-focus on fighting crime.

Meanwhile, in the final version of the Flanagan report, we find this:

5.53 As a first step, the police service needs to make full use of the charging powers they currently have. This is not happening in all forces due to the complexity and lack of clarity around existing guidance. Improving this guidance and the quality of supervision could substantially reduce the time officers currently spend waiting for charging decisions from the Crown Prosecution Service, allowing them to return to their primary function of patrolling and investigating at an earlier stage.

5.54 Further efficiencies could be made by extending police charging powers to include all summary offences, regardless of plea, and to additional offences subject to trial at either magistrates or crown court. This could enable the CPS to concentrate on more serious and difficult cases. Making this change would require a valid charging decision making process and appropriate supervisory structures. Consideration should also be given to expanding the role of the courts to include community justice, which would enable them to support Neighbourhood Policing priorities through focused community sentences.

Flanagan stops short of identifying custody sergeants as the hub of his ‘valid charging decision making process’ but its the same basic policy as that pitched by David Davis four days previously, give or take that Flanagan is keen to add some of the ‘either/or’ offences, which could be tried either by a magistrate or crown court, into the mix to free up a bit more CPS time and speed up the charging process.

So this is another policy that the Tories have lifted from the interim report, right?

No – this proposal of Flanagan’s is not included or referred to in his interim report in which Flanagan notes only that:

It is essential that the police make proper records of their actions if they are going to secure sound convictions in the courts and justify themselves against complaint. Yet it is in this area that the risk averse culture is most strongly entrenched and about which front line officers have the greatest concerns. The process leading to charge and time taken in compiling files for court is significant and warrants further scrutiny.

So far as what’s in the public domain is concerned, this new policy on discretionary charging, which Davis announced a mere four days before the publication of the Flanagan report, seems to have appeared from nowhere. It wasn’t in the Tory’s mini-manifesto, published only six months before and I can find nothing on record to indicate that this idea, or anything similar, was being kicked around, floated or otherwise developed in even a rudimentary form prior to it turning up in Davis’s article.

The only other place this particular policy appears is in the final version of the Flanagan report, a report that has now been identified as being amongst the items of confidential Home Office information where there is, apparently, some suspicion that it may have been leaked to Damian Green by Christopher Galley -

- and at the time the Flanagan report was published, Davis was the Shadow Home Secretary and Damian Green’s immediate political superior.

The possibility that information relating to upcoming Home Office policy announcements may not only have been leaked but have actually found its way into Tory policy announcements that have pre-empted the government’s own proposals by a matter of a few days has been one of the underlying subtexts of this case, indeed its believed to be one of reasons why the police were called in to investigate in the first place – and here we have an example of a policy where, in the absence of any evidence of an underlying policy development process that might reasonably have led Davis and his shadow team to the same conclusions as Flanagan.

There is, at the very least, a legitimate interest in asking the Conservative Party to clarify just exactly where and this policy came from and to seek clarification as to whether the Flanagan report was one of the documents that Galley passed on to Green and, if so, when did this leak actually occur, even if it is, perhaps, far too much to expect a full confession if the Galley/Green connection was, indeed the source of this policy idea, which David Davis not only claimed as his own but used as means of taunting the government over delays in the publication of Sir Ronnie Flanagan’s report on the future of policing.

Irrespective of the view one takes of the legitimacy, or otherwise, of those leaks that have already been confirmed as having taken place, there is no reasonable sense in which the unauthorised appropriation of government policy ideas and proposals and their incorporation in Conservative policy announcements could reasonable consider to be be either a matter of holding the government to account or to be a normal part of the job of an MP -

- and with, at the very least, some clear circumstantial evidence pointing to the possibility that the source of the Tory’s ‘discretionary charging’ policy might well have been a leaked copy of the Flanagan report, the Conservative Party has a few awkwards questions that it really should be endeavouring to answer.