UK plans for Iraqi police under fire

Douglas Brand, who was the first British chief police adviser in Baghdad, claimed there was an assumption that an efficient Iraqi police force would simply "rise like a phoenix" within months.

But he told the Iraq war inquiry, which resumed public hearings yesterday after a break for the General Election, that British and American efforts to rebuild the country's police were underfunded and unrealistic. Mr Brand, a former Deputy Chief Constable of South Yorkshire, highlighted the lack of support he had received, including the Foreign Office's failure to give him bodyguards for his first three weeks in Iraq.

Paul Kernaghan, the Association of Chief Police Officers lead on international affairs from 2000 to 2008, admitted he did not believe there was ever a "clear, comprehensive, realistic strategic plan" for Iraqi policing.

Mr Brand arrived in Baghdad as Britain's chief police adviser to the Ministry of Interior in July 2003 having been briefed on a policing plan he described as "high on aspiration but low on substance". He told the inquiry it was "quite breathtaking" to compare the huge resources available for training the Iraqi army with limited help for the police.

"There was nothing for the police. There seemed to be this expectation that the police would just rise like a phoenix and just get on with things like they always do...

"In fact sometimes it felt quite lonely because there was nobody else recognising the fact that you don't have this quantity of trained police to do the policing job that everybody wants them to do.

"And in order to get more it's going to take an awful lot longer than the time frames that were then starting to be talked about."

Mr Brand recalled that targets of recruiting 30,000 Iraqi police in just 30 days were openly discussed in the military headquarters in Baghdad by August 2003.

He said: "I do find it rather strange that otherwise well-informed professional thinkers could imagine that you could just create a police, thinking about their own countries, thinking about the United Kingdom. It takes a long time to develop that skill. Yet here we were facing people just being gathered together, being called police and then pushed out, saying 'OK, you get on with it'."

Mr Brand was sent to Iraq with no support staff, although he was loaned a British Army captain to help him, and was not given a protection team until three weeks after he had arrived.

Mr Brand noted that the provision of British police officers to help train their Iraqi counterparts was "slow and fragmented", and he said South Yorkshire Police offered only "limited" support to his family while he was in Baghdad.

Mr Kernaghan, the former chief constable of Hampshire, also claimed some British police forces refused to supply officers, particularly for service on the ground in Iraq.

Former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix and ex-MI5 director general Baroness Manningham-Buller are among witnesses who will appear before the inquiry over the next month, along with ex-deputy prime minister and former Hull East MP Lord Prescott.

The inquiry was adjourned until 10am today.