The millions still to be spent investigating hacking allegations

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It was hardly the box office stuff of recent weeks, but back in March London Deputy Mayor Kit Malthouse appeared in front of the Leveson Inquiry.

You might remember the coverage of the session centred on the revelation that more was being spent on investigating claims of hacking (Approx £40 million) than the Met spends in one year on child abuse work (Approx £36 million, apparently)

Predictably this prompted 'More spent on hacking than child abuse' type headlines (more on those later), but curious about the £40 million figure I decided to take a closer look.

After a Freedom of Information request, the Met has now disclosed how much it spent on hacking in the last two financial years, and how much it estimates it will spend on the investigations in the years ahead.

Here are the figures broken down by financial year for spending on Operations Weeting, Elveden, Tuleta and Appleton.*

What this shows is that the investigations won't be slowing down any time soon, with costs in 20/13/14 exceeding those of 2010/11 and 2011/12 combined.

But also worth noting here is the misleading impression created by the reporting of Kit Malthouse's figures.

If we accept the £36 million figure (sorry no FOI on that one folks) then it is obvious that even in the most expensive year of investigations the spend was still less than half as much as Mr Malthouse claimed went on child abuse work.

This is of course not to say that this makes the hacking investigation any more crucial/efficient/justifiable/etc. After all, judging the necessity of the spend of a police investigation in terms of its cost relative to child abuse work does not seem the soundest basis for policing decisions.

What it does show is once again, how easily newspapers can either get the wrong of the stick, or offer it to their readers, sometimes on purpose.

At least now there is more evidence, a correction will no doubt be forthcoming.

*Operation Weeting - police investigation into allegations of phone hacking by the News of the

World.

Operation Elveden - police investigation, supervised by the IPCC, into e-mails received from

News International that allegedly show payments being made to police by the News of the World.

Operation Tuleta - a police investigation into hacking in general terms and so far involved

consideration of hard drives, and other documentation seized in historic operations.

Operation Appleton - The MPS response to the Leveson Inquiry.

(Summaries cribbed from here)

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Met reply, unmet deadline, met with frustration...

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Last month I expressed doubts about the presentation of some figures given to the Leveson Inquiry about the cost of the police investigation into phone hacking.

London Deputy Mayor Kit Malthouse told the inquiry that at an expected total cost of £40 million the cost of police work and hacking and related investigations was costing more than the annual budget to tackle child abuse.

The comparison was a flawed one, contrasting as it did the total cost of a multi-year police investigation with a single year budget for another type of crime fighting.

But nevertheless the predictable thing happened and newspapers seized on the outrage-ready 'more spent on hacking than protecting children' headline.

Before I rattled off a complaint to the dear old Press Complaints Commission I thought I would at least try and get a bit more information from the Met on where this £40 million figure came from.

I asked, by way of a Freedom of Information request, for a year-by-year breakdown of previously incurred costs and projected costs for the forthcoming year(s). That way the cost could be compared against the annual figure for child protection to see in what year, if any the comparison was valid.

Sadly the Met seem out to spoil such investigation, or at least slow it down. The response to my request stated they are seeing whether the info is exempt from FoI request.

So a year by year breakdown of a total amount that is already a matter of public record is potentially exempt from the FoI?

Tis but a little bit of extra detail behind Mr Malthouse's figure, so why do they even need to consider it - and use up another month in the process?

Hmmm. I say again: Hmmm.

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Leveson gets political (and unattributed)

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The Leveson Inquiry will apparently not expand its remit to consider Jeremy Hunt's handling of the NewsCorp/BSkyB affair in relation to the ministerial code.

A sensible move, given the inquiry was not set up with this in mind. After all it is an inquiry into the Culture Practices and Ethics of the Press, not of the cabinet. No doubt such an inquiry would prove just as intriguing, but for better or worse we don't have one of those.

So instead we are left wondering how the Government will respond, since Strategy A has apparently failed.  But what to make of Leveson's move to stop the Hunt issue going into the long grass?

Yes he has done what seems perfectly sensible, namely stopping his Inquiry being used to save a ministerial career.

But the way it has come out seems a little odd. The Daily Mirror for example are simply quoting an Inquiry Source rather than Lord Justice Leveson.

Could be that this is simply a way of making the official inquiry spokesman sound a bit more like a juicy confidential source. But it if this really is the view of the Leveson Inquiry why can't whoever it is just go on the record with their name, or better still have it come straight from Leveson himself?

Hopefully there isn't anything in it, but why give unattributed quotes to the Daily Mirror, the most anti-Coalition paper, and risk looking like the Inquiry is on their side?

The Hunt affair has risked turning the inquiry into something of a political play thing, with opposition MPs pressing the Inquiry not to become a get out clause for JH, and the Government pushing the other way. Whatever the Inquiry does it will unavoidably have party political implications.

Given the important and wide ranging issues the Inquiry is dealing with, Leveson needs to make sure his eventual report gets a fair hearing from both press and Government when ti finally reports. 

There is a delicate balancing act to be done between corners of the press which view the inquiry as a wheeze dreamt up by politicians to stop them scrutinising their behaviour too much, and embarrassing the Government to the point of antipathy to Leveson.

Perhaps you can't do one without the other, but it has to be hoped that Leveson maintains the Independence he has scrupulously shown so far, and doesn't leave his Inquiry open to any charges of having an agenda.

Other than better standards for the press, of course.

Update: The mystery continues over where that quote came from. Try Googling it. All I could find was PoliticsHome's reuse of the above tweet. It doesn't appear to have made it into the Mirror's coverage, nor any other papers' for that matter.

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