Ellison Review

Jack Straw Excerpts

Thursday 6th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

I thank my right hon. Friend. In fact, “wholly inappropriate” is precisely the wording that Mark Ellison uses in relation to the use of an undercover officer during the Macpherson inquiry. I think that many people will be absolutely shocked by the fact that there was an individual who was, in Mark Ellison’s words—I used the quote as did the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper)—

“an MPS spy in the Lawrence family camp”

at a time when the family were in opposition to the MPS in judicial proceedings. I am sure that everybody recognises that that was wholly inappropriate and that this is not the behaviour that we expect from the police.

On the question on whistleblowing, my right hon. Friend makes a very valid and important point. It is crucial. The issue of whistleblowing in various aspects of the public sector has been raised in recent times. It is very important that police officers feel that they are able to raise matters of concern and that those matters of concern will be properly considered and properly dealt with. I have not quite finalised my proposals in this area, so I ask my right hon. Friend to have some patience. I will inform the House in due course of how we intend to improve the ability of police officers to be whistleblowers and to feel that they are able to do that and what they feel is absolutely right and of benefit to the vast majority of offers, who operate with integrity.

[Mr Jack Straw (Blackburn) (Lab)]

May I first welcome the resolute determination the Home Secretary has shown in pursuing this issue and thank her for establishing the Ellison inquiry and for making this statement, which I have to say is one of the most shocking and serious statements I have heard by any Minister from any party over the whole of the 35 years I have been in this House?

As the Home Secretary and the police authority for London who established the Macpherson inquiry, I was struck, in the three months it took me to establish that inquiry and agree its terms of reference, by the reluctance of the Metropolitan Police Service to have any inquiry that focused forensically on the facts, as it had successfully resisted such calls for four years. I attributed that defensiveness to a bureaucratic unwillingness to accept scrutiny, but it is now clear that there was venality, probably at the highest level of the Metropolitan police, by which, against all rules, they refused to offer evidence, as they were required to do, to the full judicial inquiry of Sir William Macpherson. I have to say, given what the Home Secretary has now said, that had that evidence been offered, I think it is at least possible that Sir William Macpherson and his colleagues would have concluded not only, as they did, that there had been institutional racism, but that there had been institutional corruption as well.

I had a personal interest in the issue of the SDS and that organisation’s activities to go after subversives, because in 1974 the Security Service informed me of, and showed me, records that had been kept on my family and me from 1960 until 1971, when I finished as a student activist. When I went to the Home Office, I said that I did not want to see my file, but that I did want to know whether they were carrying on wasting money looking at subversives like myself, my family and successors. I was assured that that kind of activity was not going on, so I hope very much that this inquiry will get to the bottom of it.

May I also say—this is my last point—that I am very pleased that the permanent secretary is going to scrutinise what happened under the previous Government? I will give every possible co-operation to that inquiry, because, to my certain knowledge, I knew nothing whatever of these continuing activities, and had I done so, I would have stopped them immediately.

[Mrs May]

On the right hon. Gentleman’s last point, one of the things that comes through clearly in the Ellison review is that part of the ethos of the SDS was precisely that of secrecy, to the extent that very few people—this is one of the difficulties in establishing exactly who knew—within the Metropolitan police, let alone outside it, knew. This was kept very tight and close in terms of those who were even aware that the SDS was in existence, let alone of what it was doing.

The right hon. Gentleman referred to the specific issue of corruption. Everybody will be appalled that there was an allegation of corruption by an individual police officer that was brought to the attention of superior officers in the Metropolitan police, yet it was not referred to the Macpherson inquiry.

One has to ask what the thinking was of somebody who thought that it was right not to refer the allegation to the Macpherson inquiry. I find it absolutely incredible that that further reference did not take place. As Mark Ellison says, it was a significant failure by the Metropolitan police.

I just want to comment on the issue of culture, which is part of this matter, and also goes back to the question about whistleblowing asked by my right hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith). The culture of looking inward and protecting each other was rife at the time. One of the issues that can be looked at in the public inquiry is the whole question of Peter Francis’s allegations against that background and against what was actually going on in the SDS at the time.