The Board’s June meeting was a virtual one, focussing on some big subjects, as we get ever closer to the launch of our new standards and operational oversight model later this year.
We started the meeting discussing the recent announcement of a general election. The pause in Government business for the pre-election period means that this administration will not have time to implement the 5% fee rise for enforcement work that it had announced in July 2023. It will also mean that the forthcoming review of the case for giving the ECB statutory powers will not proceed in the summer, as planned.
The Board reflected on the implications of this on the sector and the ECB’s mission. We agreed that the ECB will prioritise some targeted political engagement work to put the ECB and independent oversight of the enforcement industry firmly on the agenda of any new administration. With the right input, we are confident that a new administration will commit to legislation to provide the ECB with targeted statutory powers, subject to public consultation if necessary. This might also help it to determine how best to implement targeted powers.
The next item on the agenda was a paper on the development of the ECB’s operational oversight framework and enforcement powers. This was an opportunity for the Board to discuss the key policy positions before we start work on drafting an updated accreditation framework. We will be consulting on this in the summer, as part of our wider consultation on the ECB’s standards for enforcement work.
The Board was clear that building a risk-based approach to supervision, drawing intelligence from a wide range of sources, will be an integral part of the ECB’s approach to ensuring compliance with its standards and driving fair enforcement. More specifically, we discussed the importance of developing a culture of openness with enforcement firms that we are overseeing, as well as the importance of consistency and reliability in the assessments that the ECB will be making about the risk profiles of different firms.
We expect that in most cases where concerns about compliance are identified, the most effective means of ensuring that it is addressed and does not recur should be through supervision – with the firm concerned taking ownership of the issue and taking responsibility for developing a robust action plan to remedy it, with ECB monitoring in place to ensure that the plan is delivered. However, the Board is clear that we must also have a suite of enforcement tools available to deploy for the most serious or persistent non-compliance with our standards.
Where enforcement is pursued, we discussed the processes and procedures that we will put in place to ensure that good, reliable and consistent decisions are made, along with proportionate processes to review these decisions. We agreed that in
addition to the enforcement tools that are already in the framework (published note of concern, suspension and removal or accreditation), we should add the power to issue Directions, where we would specify certain actions that a firm would need to take in response to identified non-compliance.
We then moved on to development of the ECB’s standards, where we were able to review and discuss material that will be used for extensive targeted engagement on the project throughout June and early July.
We discussed some of the new requirements that we are proposing for the standards, including development of four overarching values that should underpin all enforcement work, a new definition of peaceful entry and proposal for a “no wrong route” policy during the compliance stage and for accepting complaints. We are looking forward to discussing the standards again in our July meeting, once the team has tested these areas (and others) with stakeholders prior to launching a full public consultation at the end of July.
Finally, we noted that the first fieldwork visit for our commissioned Body Worn Video research will start this week, which is a significant milestone. This research will gather valuable evidence on the current state of play with doorstep practices, which we will use to inform our future work. We are grateful to firms who have been randomly selected to participate in this research and those who have contributed to development of the methodology.
Catherine Brown, Chair