Thank you.

Thank you.

I hope so.

I think the practical advice -- and with all this, my -- what I hope was little bits of practical help were not making an assumption that many police officers didn't know these things. Of course they do. But I was trying to provide them with what they asked for, particularly ...

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes, I think you're right.

Off duty.

That's right.

I couldn't agree with you more.

Yes.

I assume that some people, who -- I, by this time, knew that there was some evidence that some people had accepted excessive hospitality, for example -- did not regard that as improper, and I made the assumption that that must also be true of some people who accepted money, because what ...

Yes, I think mainly, but it may have been wider than that.

Of course, and that was said to me by numbers of journalists.

Well, I can only develop it by saying that the person who was the senior person in that department was said by a considerable number of people who spoke to me to have set that tone and that style within that department, and that -- made it clear that certain newspapers ...

So I'm saying there should be clarity about who is providing what, but the assumption should be that a lot more people will be providing information, and I hope that will go some way to do what so many people within the Met wished, that the public was better ...

Well, I'm seeking to convey that there will be some information -- and the Met must make it absolutely clear what that is -- that everybody who works for the Met can and should pass on to members of the public, to local media outlets and to anybody else who talks ...

And deal with those properly and proportionately.

Well, it's a real fear, and certainly journalists have expressed it very forcefully to me. So they're anxious about it. I think if all the things that I'm saying are adopted by the Met, particularly the openness and more contact with the media, this should not happen ...

No, I hope that's clear.

Mm-hm.

Mm.

Yes, and I understand that a new protocol between them has now been agreed.

Yes, I think you're right.

Yes, and then the other bit, which is going to work for security firms, which I think sometimes leads to, again, people coming back to their colleagues for information and --

Absolutely.

Of course.

Yes. There are two bits to it. There's the bit of former employees very quickly taking up jobs in the media, but perhaps even more concerning than that is former employees who become investigators and who either have favours to call in from colleagues that they used to have ...

I was in one other organisation when a person who had a relationship, a proper relationship, towards policing gave information to a journalist, so I saw that happening, and I was in another organisation where a person said they had given information in the past and had described themselves as ...

Absolutely.

Yes.

I hope I'm giving due regard to the very difficult and complex job that the Metropolitan Police have to provide, and the way in which they are often the eye of a media frenzy, which I think does make all the things that it's easy for somebody like ...

Yes, I think you're absolutely right, and: "We'd like some information, please, and it's your duty to protect this organisation through giving us that information."

So I think there's a number of those sorts of approaches which would help somewhat, but I share your view that ...

I'm sure you're right, I have no doubt, and I have no doubt that this it difficult, but I think there are other things the Met could do. For example, they're very loath to tell their staff that they're carrying out some of these enquiries and ...

Yes.

No, of course not.

No, but I think that there are -- of course you're right, and of course, any of these methods to deal more quickly with leaking has those problems and may not lead to anything sensible, but I think that it's possible that ordinary discipline arrangements that would operate in ...

Yes, and I don't belittle the difficulty of doing those leak investigations, but I think there are some things that the Met could do more speedily on though things. If, for example, you know that the information was only held by three people, you haul the three people in ...

Well, it was a big enough scale for a lot of people with -- inside the Met to be worried about it, but in terms of numbers, no, I couldn't say anything solid about that, I don't think, other than almost everybody I spoke to felt it did the ...

It's always somewhere else.

I agree with you, it's difficult, and that -- as I've said earlier, it seems to me that it is about creating a culture within the organisation and within small parts of the organisation that this is not what we do here.

Absolutely. But there's lots of information that the Metropolitan Police collects which would be of great interest to the public which isn't confidential and which is statistical, which is information about their neighbourhoods and so forth, which I think the Metropolitan Police ought to do more to disseminate.

Absolutely.

Well, they're the sorts of principles that I have tried to set out as being core, that people should be very careful in their dealings with the media, that they should think about what they are going to say before they say it, that they should record briefly what ...

None of them did when I began my work. Some of these have been improved since then.

I don't wish to -- and I know efforts have been made recently to improve things considerably in the DPA.

But certainly what had happened, it appeared, in the past was, as you suggest, that instead of seeing themselves as a public information, public affairs operation, which collected and provided ...

Certainly -- and I do underline that, of course, my interviews and my report is very much looking back on how things were.

Well, often this -- the trading that I was referring to earlier, which is: "I'll give you this story if you'll keep this story out." That seemed to be the main consideration, but there were quite a number of people who said to me that they thought that it ...

Yes, it was a very constant refrain from a lot of people at very different levels within the organisation that they were concerned about some of the relationships -- and I underline "some" of the relationships -- within the DPA and the media, and that the DPA favoured some journalists and indeed ...