Thank you.

Yeah, and you'll have similar arrangements in some forces, but not all of them.

Sure, we would hope so, supported by these things that we've talked about, you know: national guidelines, training, leadership, all those types of things.

Perhaps the other thing to say about building in and bolting on is the level of development of corporate coms is very different across forces ...

Okay. My interest in police communications has always been around enhancing the legitimacy of policing, and I think it's much better if communications is embedded into all policing activities, rather than just being seen to be bolted in at important times, for example when there's a serious event ...

True. That would be my guess, yes.

I think you have to look at the current arrangements to see if they're transferable to see what's happening. Police forces are supporting LPAs in some areas, but if you look at the PCCs that are coming in, they're overtly political in a way that LPAs aren ...

I'd be surprised if it did.

That's right, yes.

No, I don't think there should be a cooling-off period because they come with all their expertise fresh and it's been one of the consistent avenues of recruitment for police press offices. We referred to earlier the growth of professionalisation, and that's where the professionalisation comes from ...

I would agree with the HMIC report, that they ought to look into cooling-off periods.

So in terms of keeping the distance, it's things like structured contact with the SIOs and controlling the locations that the media have access to. That type of thing.

Sure, but that's the clash of objectives that I mentioned earlier.

I think so. That was the title of a paper by David Wilson and his colleagues where they interviewed a number of SIOs and analysed their common experiences. They all recognised the need to deal with the media and work with the media, but they felt there was a need ...

That's right, yeah.

Sure. I was provided with plenty of that kind of evidence.

Yes.

Well, in talking to local police forces and local crime reporters, they had common interests and there would be tensions but they would rub along together pretty well, and then if an incident occurred which brought in the national media, then the national media were seen as here today, gone ...

Sure. I mean, A good example this morning was the discussion about the different needs of a Sunday newspaper from a daily newspaper. Different deadlines.

I think it should be a combination of both. I think there should be high level principles, such as those which the ACPO guidelines embody, and those could be, as other people have said, extended to include matters of integrity and managing contacts, and then, at local level -- at regional ...

I'm not sure if it was evaluated.

Yeah. Obviously I've been following the proceedings and the guidelines which have been produced by ACPO, the 2010 guidelines -- it's interesting, in that, as the previous speaker was saying, they had low visibility, and the guidance that is there is all very sensible but it does make you ...

It's a good point. The impression I got from my research was it tended to -- the people that were prepared to speak off the record were the more experienced officers who knew what was and what wasn't permissible. The people that were more suspicious about talking to the ...

Yes, I think so.

There was when I did the research, yes. It was the bread and butter work of the local crime reporter to do that.

Yes. That quote that you mentioned, that was from the 1930s, Lord Trenchard. Yes, those off-the-record -- or backstage briefing, really. I've watched and heard the debate over the terminology of "off the record". In terms of when I spoke to reporters about it, it was really about picking up ...

No.

No. No, the research I did was carried out before news of that was emerging, so it was something that I couldn't look at retrospectively. I thought it about it retrospectively and wondered whether there may be some connection to the decline of specialists, whether there's now a ...

No. At the time of doing the research, it just wasn't on the radar. It just wasn't a topic of conversation.

There is an increased use of that, yeah.

I suppose it's -- rather than more meetings between the crime reporters and the detectives, the press offices will prepare packages which reporters can use from their offices without going out and doing the information-gathering.

Yeah, that's one of the things I was interested to chart with this apparent rise in police corporate communications: what the balance was on the other side, in terms of media, and with consolidation of ownership in the media, industries and declining sales of newspapers and budget cuts, I ...

Complementing at the moment. I think it would be interesting to see how things develop. A number of the managers of corporate coms that I spoke to talked about a law of diminishing returns in dealing with the traditional media, in terms of: there's only so much you can ...

No, I'm sorry.

From the research I did, those informal channels, I wouldn't think leaks arise from those. They tend to provide the background information, the additional information to stories that reporters are interested in. It doesn't tend to be leaks that create a story on its own.

Yeah. A number of reporters said to me that they'd rather lose a story than lose the trust of a valuable source. So in that sense, if there was a story which they thought wasn't appropriate to run, they would perhaps not tell their editor about it and ...

My understanding of that would be it's the trust that's built up between the individuals involved.

That's right, yeah. Yeah, it's the competitive advantage.

Yes.

That's what crime reporters were trying to maintain, yes.

No. I think they're a necessary but not sufficient element of media relations, in that crime reporters may use the press offices as a first stop but they need to use other sources to build the stories, the specialist crime reporters, to give them something extra, to give them ...

I'm not sure. It's to facilitate the flow of information, I think, as much as control it, because by appointing other people who are not communication specialists -- neighbourhood inspectors, for example, it's -- if you're giving the responsibility to more people, you're not really controlling it ...

What it means is in terms of the rise of corporate communications, although a lot of resource has been put into it, it's just keeping up, really. They're running to stand still. And in terms of -- do you want me to talk about the relationship between crime reporters --

That's right. That is something else which I was interested to try and get a feeling for, and with the proliferation of media in recent years, I was interested to find out whether forces were dealing with more media organisations or just more information from the same number, and ...

That's right. This is -- it was breaking the model, really, of just having a headquarters press office and no press offices elsewhere. It's something that I described as the permeation of communications throughout the force. This might comprise satellite press offices in some areas, some larger cities, perhaps ...

Even at a time -- doing my last survey I was getting the impression that cutbacks were happening. The few forces that didn't participate in the survey -- I know that two of them were restructuring at the time and so chose not to take part -- and there was some research ...

That's right, yeah.

Yeah.

Yes, definitely. It's now force policy -- or on the last survey, about 90 per cent of forces were recruiting professionals and the survey found that about 400 professional communicators were employed across forces. That compares with 121 in 1996/1997, so quite some growth.

Yes.

Yes, that's true. It's something of a misnomer, really, press office, these days. In the three surveys that I've carried out, the first 1996/1997 and the last 2006/2007, we see a definite pattern of movement from press offices sort of moving back and corporate communications ...