Libyan Personnel: Bassingbourn Barracks

Debate between Daniel Zeichner and Madeleine Moon

Thursday 10th September 2015 Commons Chamber

[Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for allowing the House the opportunity to consider the extraordinary and unhappy events that occurred in the city of Cambridge as a consequence of the decision to train Libyan personnel at Bassingbourn barracks last year. Bassingbourn barracks is located some 10.5 miles to the south-west of Cambridge—the city I now represent—but the background to the events in question takes us back some years to events in Libya and announcements by the Prime Minister in 2013.

The decision to train up to 2,000 Libyan armed forces personnel at Bassingbourn was announced in a statement by the then Secretary of State for Defence on 11 June 2014. It indicated that in the first tranche, some 325 Libyan recruits were starting training and that the programme would continue for 24 weeks. He assured the House:

“These recruits have been carefully vetted by the Libyan Government and Home Office officials”.

—[Official Report, 11 June 2014; Vol. 582, c. 51WS.]

Cambridge is normally a safe city—as everywhere else, there are some incidents—but in late October 2014, the local newspaper started reporting a series of assaults that were highly unusual. The Cambridge News reported a Cambridgeshire police spokesman saying:

“We are investigating allegations of a serious sexual assault on Christ’s Pieces which is believed to have occurred between 2am and 5am this morning.”

The report continued:

“The force is hunting a group of three men, described as being of Middle Eastern appearance with dark black hair, in relation to the attack on the man in his 20s yesterday. Two men, both in their early 20s, are also being sought for the sexual attack on a woman on Mill Road. Cambridge residents are being warned to be vigilant and take safety precautions as well as sticking to groups at night.”

We now know that assaults took place on the weekend of 17 October, and more serious assaults occurred on 25 and 26 October.

What was going on? The police do not normally advise Cambridge residents on

“sticking to groups at night.”

What was going on was that these recruits, described by the Secretary of State as “carefully vetted”, were out of control on the streets of Cambridge. The local councillor for Bassingbourn tells me that he was assured, in respect of the recruits, that

“you will never see them and no-one will notice that they are there”,

and that the training was so intensive that they would not be let out of the barracks. That was clearly not the case —so out of control were they that, as we learned later when the cases were tried in May this year, two Libyan cadets were jailed for 12 years each for raping a man in Cambridge in a prolonged attack in Christ’s Pieces.

[Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way. We urgently needed to examine what happened in Cambridge and the trauma experienced by many families in the city. Does he agree that the Ministry of Defence should have been much more alert to the risk, given that sexual assaults, personnel breaking out of camps, the setting up of roadblocks and harassment of local communities had all happened where training had been offered to Libyans in Turkey, Libya and Jordan, and that the security vetting of these people was impossible?

[Daniel Zeichner]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. I was not aware that that experience should have been brought to bear; that will add to some of the points that I am about to detail. The point I am making is about just how serious the offences were. We found out more after the rape trial verdicts were returned, because it was revealed that three other Libyans cadets had already pleaded guilty to unrelated sex attacks which had taken place in Cambridge on the same night. They had been sentenced at Norwich Crown court on 13 May, but reporting restrictions had been in place until the rape case was concluded. What was happening was very serious, and today I want to find out how that was allowed to happen, why it has taken so long to get answers, and why the people of Cambridge, and, in particular, the victims of the assaults, have not had an apology from those who gave quite clear assurances in the first place that risks would be minimal.

Let me first pay tribute to those who have been seeking answers, particularly Councillor Lewis Herbert, the leader of Cambridge City Council. The horrible, avoidable attacks took place in his city, but the council had been given not a single piece of information at any stage by the Ministry of Defence or the Army about Libyan troop visits to Cambridge. He has doggedly refused to accept the frankly evasive and frequently obstructive responses from the MOD. I also pay tribute to his fellow councillors, from a range of authorities across Cambridgeshire, and council officers who have pressed for answers for months and months. They are, however, still being denied the full facts, so much so that Councillor Herbert’s most recent letter to the Secretary of State, in late May this year, concludes:

“An acknowledgement of regret and an apology to the victims is, in our view, still outstanding from the Ministry of Defence”.

I hope that that, at least, will be forthcoming from the Minister today. I would also like to thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon), the shadow Minister, for her tireless pursuit of the truth on these matters through questions and interventions. I am sure she, too, would like the full story to be revealed.

I shall move to the substance of what I hope the Minister will be able to tell us, but I will start by reminding the House of some of the key statements already made. On 4 November, soon after the weekends I have described, the Secretary of State made a brief statement saying only that the training programme was being curtailed and that the recruits will

“be returning to Libya in the coming days.”—[Official Report, 4 November 2014; Vol. 587, c. 44WS.]

There was no explanation and certainly no reassurance to the people of Cambridge. The following day the Prime Minister announced that he had requested a report into what had happened. It took until 9 January of this year for a further statement telling us that a copy of the report’s conclusions and recommendations only had been placed in the House of Commons Library. We still have not seen the full report; nor have we had the opportunity to see whether it really faces up to the issues or not.

Those producing the report had met local councillors and council officers, who presented a series of detailed questions and interrogated the terms of reference of the review that they had been given. Cambridge City Council also told the review team that it believed only an independent inquiry would restore public confidence. Later, in December, in response to Freedom of Information requests from the BBC, the original risk assessment was released, and it was confirmed that complaints about Libyan trainees leaving the camp and seeking out alcohol in pubs in local villages were reported as early as 8 August. Indeed, local Councillor Nigel Cathcart tells me:

“There were a number of incidents where Libyan trainees were observed, unsupervised, in the village of Bassingbourn. They were not causing any particular harm but residents were concerned to see them as it was understood that they should have been confined to the Barracks. As far as I am aware these incidents were reported at the time so the MOD should have been aware of what was happening. It was only later (probably 2 or 3 weeks) that the far more serious incidents took place in Cambridge. Had the MOD acted promptly on the original information and suspended the unsupervised incursions immediately then the Cambridge incidents could have been prevented. This was, therefore, a preventable event if the MOD had acted promptly with the information available to them.”

The councillor’s views are backed up by the risk assessment. The July 2013 assessment states that, subject to any subsequent review, the trainees were not to leave the camp off-duty unless—this is critical—they were in organised supervised groups. It states that

“the risk of bad behaviour of trainees outside Bassingbourn Camp is mitigated by the provisions of their visas, the supervisory measures in place for limited excursions and the security arrangements between the MOD, Police and Home Office.”

A second risk assessment reports that the initial plan to train 360 trainees for 14 weeks had been extended to 24 weeks, with tranches of 360 to 500. It is stated that by lengthening the course,

“to better meet Libyan intent and be more coherent with US plans”,

it would be necessary to allow supervised excursions, as rewards. These would require

“the appropriate measures in place to mitigate immigration and security risks”.

Detailed measures to reduce risks would include

“small, controlled batches of trainees”,

pre-advising of local police, and

“a robust communications plan in place for local communities and the media”.

There is also a detailed risk assessment for organised recreational visits. It says that

“under no circumstances will trainees be allowed to leave the group on an outward visit, and alcohol will be banned.”

Of course, as the local councillor has explained, none of that bears any resemblance to what actually happened.

[Mrs Moon]

Is my hon. Friend aware that the visits—which were apparently intended to encourage good behaviour among the Libyans, who were becoming increasingly out of control—included visits to the House of Commons, No. 10 Downing Street and Buckingham Palace?

[Daniel Zeichner]

We are grateful for the knowledge, as a consequence of some of the questions that have been tabled, that that series of visits took place. My point is that, even if those visits—extraordinary as some of them might seem—were supervised, the key question is what happened in the case of the unsupervised visits.

What actually happened was described by councillors, including the one whom I quoted earlier, when they met representatives of the MOD and the Army in February. In the minutes of that meeting, we had, for the first time, an apology from the Army, but none from the Ministry of Defence; and we finally had a recognition from the Army that the consultation with key local stakeholders had been inadequate. However, as the Army representatives admitted, we also learned that there had been a significant change in what is known as the “walk-out” policy in August 2014. Councillors were told that the decision to allow trainees to leave the camp unsupervised had been made by Ministers. I ask the Minister to confirm that that was the case, and to tell me why the safety of Cambridge residents was put at risk at that point.

I have to say that I find the account of what was happening in late October after the first spate of incidents quite alarming. Councillors were told that following the incidents of October 17, measures taken to

“add additional deterrent to leaving the camp included the addition of a platoon of Gurkha, two companies from the UK standby Battalion and Military Working Dogs.”

The following weekend, however, Cambridge suffered the most serious assaults of all. I also find it concerning that, in a written parliamentary answer on January 15 to the hon. Member for Bridgend, the then defence Minister said that the trainees

“were…escorted to shops in the local area, and Cambridge City Centre.”

In the light of what we now know, that hardly does justice to what was actually happening.

Of course, there was also a significant financial cost. We have learned from parliamentary answers that the costs of the training programme and reactivating the facilities were some £17 million, of which only £2.48 million has so far been recouped from the Libyan Government.

Let me end with a series of very clear questions to the Minister. Will the full report be made available? Who exactly authorised the end to the supervised walk-out policy in August 2014? Why was so little revealed about what actually happened, for so long, and why has it had to be dragged out by freedom of information requests and parliamentary questions? Will the Minister hold a genuinely independent inquiry, as requested by the local councils? What will be the financial cost of this entire exercise to the taxpayer? Finally, will there now be a full and unequivocal apology to the people of Cambridge and Cambridgeshire who were put at such risk, particularly the residents who, it may be argued, were as much victims of Ministry of Defence negligence as the Libyan trainees?