Q59 Mr. Dave Anderson: Sir Hugh, good to see you again. We have had a message from Sinn Fein that says that PSNI cannot deal in the past and what there needs to be is the establishment of a credible, independent mechanism which treats all citizens equally. I would not expect you to agree with the fact that you could not do this, but is there a case to say that some form of independent body (I do not know what that would be) could have done this job, could possibly have done it either better than yourselves or, at least, as well as yourselves, and that would then have meant that you would not be facing the financial burdens that you are now?

Sir Hugh Orde: It is a very interesting question. I am not against, if it was the will of Parliament or Stormont, or something, putting all this together in a different way. I am not precious about the Historic Enquiries Team at all; I am very proud of what they have achieved, and I think it would be recognised where the idea came from, but I have no difficulty with that, if that fitted a broader remit, as in Bradley (?) and all the other ideas around how you deal with the past - no difficulty with that. However, the reality is that none of that would be seen as Article 2 compliant, if a family did not want to go down that route. So there would, perhaps, be some challenges to it. The other problem is, of course, we have the material; we are the gatekeepers of the material. So wherever you put it, there will be huge pressure on my organisation to service it. Peter Sheridan mentioned to me (my ACC, Crime) the other week that in one month something like 600 requests for information from outside bodies came into this hub - be it inquiries, ombudsman investigations, HET. That would not go away, but you could certainly run it in a different way. There are all sorts of ideas, but, yes, you could run it in a different way.

Q60 Mr. Dave Anderson: The other thing I want to raise with you is something from the British Irish Rights Watch. They said one of the reasons why it has taken so long for the HET to work is that, effectively, a lot of the work you are doing is equivalent to the work that was done around something like Soham, but you are not resourced to the extent that Soham was. Would that be a fair comment to make?

Sir Hugh Orde: I think Soham was a fundamentally different issue; it was around the capacity of the Force to deal with a critical incident that was way outside its ability. Many chiefs sent - indeed I sent - people to help with that particular inquiry. So I think that is slightly different. The reality is we were given a pot of money to do something very different. As David has said, I do not think we could have done it any more quickly, frankly. There is a limit to the number of people prepared to do this sort of work (the turnover speaks for itself), and what we have got is something that has got a fairly clear timescale and, interestingly, is now delivering outcomes. If one was to look at other attempts at dealing with the past I am not sure I have seen one that has delivered an outcome. We await, for example, the Saville Inquiry report, which I am told should be, perhaps, this year. Other public inquiries are now up and running. On the Finucane Inquiry, the jury is out on whether it is going to take place at all. As long as that is in the margins I still have to make sure we have available to that inquiry, should it ever exist, a fully resourced capacity to deliver all the material for that, which is huge.

This is an uncorrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee. Neither witnesses nor Members have had the opportunity to correct the record. The transcript is not yet an approved formal record of these proceedings.

The full transcript may be read here.

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