Hugh Orde: Belfast's new man from the Met doesn't expect to be popular

Monday interview: Chief Constable of Northern Ireland

New chief constables usually opt for an encouraging tone, trying to spread reassurance that the police will continue to do an excellent job. Hugh Orde, the new police chief in Belfast, has opted for a radically different approach.

Gesturing at his computer from the leather sofa of his new headquarters in east Belfast, he offers surprises rather than comfort. "We're in typewriter culture here," he says. "That's perhaps the best computer in the whole building, which is rather embarrassing. The technology here is Dark Ages stuff, most of it."

In London, he says, one of the first things officers coming on duty do is log on to the Metropolitan Police's intranet "to get all the updates on what's going on, to find where the hotspots are and what's happening". The Police Service of Northern Ireland has no such network, though one has just been ordered. Nor does the police headquarters in Belfast have a functioning major incident room.

So where have all the hundreds of millions of pounds poured into policing over the years gone? "It's gone on front-line policing, it's gone on overtime," he replies. "Some of the police stations probably break every health and safety rule in the book, because there's not been capital investment.

"How valued does an officer feel, working in a crumbling police station with out-of-date technology as a starting-point? I was surprised by what I found. You can't deliver modern policing without modern technology – can't do it."

All of this may cause many of those under Hugh Orde's command to blink: they are accustomed to criticism, but they are also accustomed to their Chief Constable sticking up for them and stoutly defending their record. But the new man has evidently made up his mind to go for frankness and bluntness rather than defensiveness, to signal from the start that he wants more resources, and not to court instant popularity in the ranks. "A huge number of people in this organisation are utterly committed to moving on. I have met a lot of impressive people doing a bloody good job," he says. "But if any bit of the organisation is stopping them from doing it, then it needs to be sorted. I don't expect to be popular."

Where his home-grown predecessor, Sir Ronnie Flanagan, tended to be smooth and emollient, the new man from the Met is business-like and fast-talking, striding quickly and confidently around his headquarters.

Aged 43 and married with a young family, Hugh Orde was with the Met for 26 years. His career has included high-profile activities such as the inquiry into the killing of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence and the hunt for the Brixton bomber.

His CV indicates that the Met tended to use him to tackle particularly knotty problems. His London experience has created a policeman who is clearly not afraid to point out shortcomings in his new service.

In the Met, he says, the system was to have "highly competent, highly professional teams of investigators who respond quickly to a murder." This meant bringing not only police support, but also scientific and psychological expertise to a murder scene, if needed.

This might seem a fairly obvious routine to follow, but not in Belfast. "We don't have that system here, and we need to think very carefully about it," he says. "If you look at our clear-up rate, it's very low compared to national figures."

Like other parts of the UK, Northern Ireland has a shortage of experienced detectives: many have left as the force has been downsized and re-modelled for a post-Troubles society. "This place has had the guts ripped out of it in terms of qualified investigators," he says regretfully. "I am desperately short of detectives."

So, with many other officers suffering from injuries suffered in riots, and a high level of absenteeism, is the force in crisis? "The next bit's going to be difficult, because you're looking at achieving major structural change when morale is low. Yes, there is a crisis to some extent, I guess."

That part of the Orde CV which interests most people in Northern Ireland is not his London experience but what he has been doing for the past two years. During that time he has been in day-to-day control of the Met's investigation into the murder in 1989 of the Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane.

The report is in draft form, though it will not be complete until Met detectives interview a former army intelligence colonel who helped handle loyalist agents in Belfast. In October or November, Mr Orde will, as Chief Constable, formally receive from the Met's Commissioner, Sir John Stevens, the report which he helped to put together.

It will cause yet another stir, he acknowledges. "It's historic, of course. I am confident Sir John will not pull any punches, and I am confident he will say what he has found.

"The Finucane case is, to a large extent, about intelligence-handling," he says. "Who knew what when? Could they have done it better? Was it resourced right? If it wasn't collusion, what was it? Is it gross incompetence or is it collusion, that is the key question."

In addition to the main report, "substantial pieces of work" will go to the director of public prosecutions for decisions on whether cases should be taken against any of the personnel involved.

What impact is all this likely to have? "My experience from the Stephen Lawrence case is that anything that criticises the service you care about has an impact. It's bound to. The question is what you do about it. Do you go defensive? Or do you engage with it? Do you learn from it and move forward from it? That's my plan."

The withholding of information by Special Branch is a major issue. "Senior officers complained they were not told about things that were known within the organisation," he says. "There may have been, on occasion, some good reasons. But when it gets to the stage of murder, the reasons have got to be bloody good – overwhelmingly good – not to tell an investigating officer that they've got some intelligence.

"Source protection is a big issue. I understand that. But the aim must be to disrupt, arrest, convict, put out of harm's way those committing the crimes, rather than to build an intelligence picture just for the sake of knowing what it looked like."

He is eager to move the emphasis away from pure intelligence collection to making practical use of the information by making arrests.

"The last three Catholics to have been shot were simply shot because they happened to be Catholic or suspected of being Catholic by a gang of murderers. That's what they are; a gang of serial killers.

"We need to target the people who we think are doing the killings. If we can't take them out for the killings, we'll take them out for something else. There are a number of major players who have no visible means of support, who seem to go on some very nice holidays and who seem to have a terrifying grip on some of their communities.

"To my knowledge – because I know some of them since I've been looking at them in the Finucane case – some have never been arrested for anything half-decent, which is interesting.

"Part of the way of dismantling the structure of terror within communities is to start removing those who are the most frightening people. If I can't get them for murder, and I can get them for trafficking or for importation or whatever, then I think that's worth doing."