October’s Board meeting was back in person and we started with a session with the President and CEO of CIVEA. We discussed CIVEA’s views on market sustainability, regulatory changes and the CIVEA President’s priorities for her term, and how these all interplay with the ECB’s work. It was a productive meeting and the themes we discussed were a good framing for the rest of our Board meeting. We look forward to more engagement like this in the future.
The first item on the Board’s main agenda was a discussion of next steps for the ECB, following the Government announcement in August that it will make it a statutory requirement that Enforcement Agents can only work for, or with, ECB accredited firms. We talked about the steps that the ECB needs to take to be operationally ready for this measure coming into force. These include:
• ensuring that we have standards that are appropriate for every kind of organisation or individual who is contracted directly to do TCOG work
• agreeing a Memorandum of Understanding with the Ministry of Justice setting the parameters of our accountability
• Preparing to process applications for new firms that will need to come under our oversight.
As positive as the forthcoming changes are, they will not address our concerns about the inadequacy of the current system when it comes to preventing individual bad Enforcement Agents from practising. Having lodged our own EAC2 complaint at the start of the summer, following some very serious misconduct that we came across, we now have first-hand experience of how slow the court-based certification and complaints process is.
This really matters – it is crucial for public protection that Enforcement Agents who prove themselves unfit to do the job, are swiftly stopped from doing this sensitive work. It is also important for public trust and the reputation of the industry, which can be significantly harmed by a small number of bad agents. So we agreed that we will seek to develop options for how we might be able to improve the situation, accepting that the primary role of granting and removing certification will remain with the courts for now. The team will be developing their thinking on this area over the coming months and will welcome ideas on how we might work with others to tackle this issue.
Next on the agenda were proposed changes to our complaints scheme from our Process and Efficiency Review, following a huge amount of engagement over the summer with industry and other second tier complaints handlers. I have always been clear that we need a service that balances quality with timeliness. A service that is efficient and can handle the scale we need it to at a proportionate cost. It was therefore very encouraging to see a suite of changes put forward that should contribute to meaningful reductions in the length of time it takes us to investigate individual cases, as well as increasing the overall caseload that we can handle within existing resources. Some of these have already started to be trialled but full implementation will be achieved by early 2027.
The Board reflected on the fact that the latest complaints data in the CEO Report is already showing significant inroads being made into our case backlog from last year, even before most of the changes are to be implemented.
From complaints, we went on to consider the top level findings from the latest Data Return process. There are some encouraging trends emerging, such as increasing proportions of cases settled at the compliance stage, increases in settlements by staged payments and reductions in the proportion of missing Body Worn Video. There are also areas on ongoing concern, including low uphold rates for first tier complaints handling and the high rates of violence and abuse suffered by Enforcement Agents.
Our discussion focussed on plans to improve our analytical capability to make further use of the data in future iterations. We reflected on the value that the data returns are already having in identifying outliers and bringing out issues that needs to be picked up with specific firms through our oversight. In the new year we will be updating the data requests, in consultation with accredited firms, to reflect the new vulnerability standards and also to ensure we are getting the most useful data in a streamlined way.
This led onto a paper on the mid-year budget reforecast, which showed very limited variation from the original budget. The main substantive change was that we agreed that the budget that was set aside for a new Complaints Investigator from January 2027 should instead be used to bring in a new member of the Risk and Compliance team, to assist with preparation for bringing in and then overseeing a relatively large number of small enforcement firms, once the Ministry of Justice’s measure has been implemented.
Alongside the items on the agenda, the team updated the Board on the fact that the ECB has now issued its first sanction, against the Partners of Whyte and Co, following breaches of our standards. This relates to money that was collected from members of the public but was not remitted to the Local Authority creditor. The impact has been on the creditor rather than the individuals who paid their debts to the enforcement firm. The sanction, which the Partners consented to, is published on our website.
Our next meeting is near the end of November, where we’ll be scoping our business plan and budget for 2027/28.