Baroness Nuala O'Loan:

I preface this remark by saying that when I was appointed police ombudsman, I made a decision that I would never exercise the power to refer back to the Police Service of Northern Ireland matters for investigation, so all investigations of all complaints were done within the office of the police ombudsman. That required a level of staffing and a level of resourcing which is far greater than that which GSOC has at present.

When I started there were 13,000 RUC officers and when I left, there were somewhere in the region of 7,000 to 7,500. I had somewhere of the order of approximately 150 staff. If one is to do the job, one must be resourced. My suspicion is that at the moment, there does not seem to be sufficient resources for GSOC to do the job it is charged with doing. However, I would have to qualify that by saying, I would have to go away and do a clear analysis before I could make a very much more definitive statement.