Operation Midland: Henriques Report

Lord Benyon Excerpts

Tuesday 13th December 2016 Westminster Hall

[Richard Benyon (Newbury) (Con)]

We all bring prejudices into this place. The greatest prejudice that perhaps we all share is one of revulsion at the idea of child sexual exploitation, but when it affects an individual we know or revere, our prejudice is to immediately assume they are innocent. That was the case, in my circumstances, with Field Marshal Lord Bramall. He is an individual who, in my regiment, is revered, with a semi-godlike status. The whole family of the regiment were horrified that he should have been accused in such a way, and we rejoice that all the effects of the accusation have been removed from his character. However, we remain demanding of answers in this case.

Of course the great and the powerful should be investigated when allegations are made, just as allegations against anyone should be investigated, but it is how we investigate that matters. The Henriques report has outlined an appalling catalogue of errors in all the cases that hon. Members have mentioned in this debate. In the case of Lord Bramall, the report says that it was wrong to raid his home based on the testimony of a single complainant since dismissed, as hon. Members have said, as a fantasist. I entirely agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex (Sir Nicholas Soames) about the number of officers, where they parked and the other factors involved in the case. The Henriques report says that it was entirely wrong to wait 10 months for the investigation to be dropped. In addition, Henriques questions the police tactics in obtaining search warrants for Lord Brittan’s and Harvey Proctor’s homes.

We have to ask who in the team conducting the search on Lord Bramall’s home questioned the ethics of entering the house of someone in their 90s in the way that they did. This was someone nursing his terminally ill wife. The police spent 10 hours in that house, many of them dressed in forensic suits, causing great distress to the ailing Lady Bramall. They took personal items out of the house and did not return them for a very long time. What kind of appalling groupthink existed in that team? I understand the medical term for it is cognitive dissonance. We have seen this in hospitals that have declined to see terrible figures on mortality. We have seen it in other organisations. I suggest it was prevalent in the Operation Midland team. Was there—is there—an adequate whistleblowing system that would have allowed someone properly to raise this?

I warmly congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Aldershot (Sir Gerald Howarth), who secured this debate. He made an excellent speech. In many of our public services, including our most secret intelligence services, there is a system for people to raise concerns, but the system clearly failed in the case of Operation Midland.

The hon. Member for Rochdale (Simon Danczuk) rightly talked about the pendulum swinging. The police were appalled at the attacks that had been made on them for their failure in the Savile case and they swung the other way. But did anyone lose their job over the treatment of people like Lord Bramall, Lord Brittan and Harvey Proctor? Such high-profile people who are still alive are articulate and able to make a powerful case on their own behalf, whatever the privations they have suffered as a result.

[Sir Nicholas Soames]

On that point, I thank my hon. Friend for his excellent speech. Someone was in charge of this. Someone was providing the leadership for the teams and exerting the judgment, issuing instructions and orders, and yet no one has been held accountable for the dreadful way in which it was being done.

[Richard Benyon]

As my right hon. Friend’s grandfather might have said, who was in charge of the clattering train? But it is not just about famous and well-known people. What about the teacher, the carer, the social worker, the fireman who are treated in this way? Blame lies not just with the misguided officers behind so many of the failures in Operation Midland. The climate was perpetrated by—I will name him—the hon. Member for West Bromwich East (Mr Watson) and others, who fostered a conspiracy theory culture around many of the investigations into the individuals.

The hon. Member for Rochdale was right to mention the loathsome people behind Exaro, the news website that put innocent people’s names in the public domain. It is hard to credit that the initial failures of the search and the delay in announcing that the inquiry had been dropped were compounded by the official letter Lord Bramall received, which was very churlish in its conclusions. It just said there was insufficient evidence to merit continuing the inquiry, and that further investigation could take place if more information came out. That was sent to a 90-year-old war veteran, with his dying wife in the house. What kind of mindset prevailed in the organisation?

I want never again to be ashamed of any action taken by the police force in any part of the country. I revere the police and firmly agree that they have a most difficult job; but the way things were done in the case I have outlined is deeply worrying to all of us who believe that fairness before the law is this country’s greatest virtue. I hope that the Minister will understand the strength of feeling that means he needs to hold the police force to account.

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[Brandon Lewis]

My hon. Friend may be aware that there have been changes in the leadership at South Yorkshire police, and work is being done there to look at how they act. One of the other things we are doing to ensure that action is taken more widely nationally is to look at some issues that the Home Secretary has raised. I will come to that in just a few moments.

Today I have spoken to the national policing lead, Simon Bailey, who will be coming to see me before Christmas to discuss the recommendations of the review and the work that the police are doing more generally in response to these serious issues. There is also the issue of compensation for those who feel that they have been poorly treated and who have seen their reputations tarnished by the Metropolitan police force. As Members have said, that is important.

Of course, as we have taken power from the centre and moved it into police forces, it is for the Metropolitan police to address any claims for compensation that arise from the report’s findings and the general issues around such cases, particularly the Harvey Proctor case. I am sure that the House will agree that money cannot give someone back their previously unsullied reputation; nor can it give back the months, if not years, of anguish and turmoil they will have suffered. It does however at least provide some recognition of failure and responsibility, and recompense for the cost that people have suffered. That is something on which the police must focus. I am seeing Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe next week, when I will raise that issue and what the Metropolitan police are doing in that case. I assure the House that I will treat these matters with the utmost seriousness in raising them with him, and indeed in the conversations that I will have with the national police lead.

[Richard Benyon]

The Minister has rightly talked about maintaining the right balance, and he is making a powerful speech. However, if a member of a team going to search an individual’s house knows that what they are being asked to do is intrinsically wrong, what mechanisms exist in the police? I am mindful that the police have to maintain good order and discipline and cannot have people questioning them and going to the press, but there must be a hierarchical system in which an individual can say, “This is wrong. Something has to change.”

[Brandon Lewis]

I will come in a second to how the police should be dealing with those issues and going about their investigations, but, in terms of something happening whereby a member of the force sees something is wrong, in the first instance we should have a police service in which any member within it has the ability and confidence to come forward to the hierarchy of that service with a complaint and an outline of where things are going wrong. However, going beyond that and realising that we live in the real world and that in some hierarchical organisations, no matter how much we want it to be different, people feel that they cannot do that, in the Policing and Crime Bill that is going through Parliament we are giving more power to the Independent Police Complaints Commission so that it can take things up directly to give better protection to whistleblowers.

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[Brandon Lewis]

I am sure that the members of the Government Whips Office will be delighted to hear that my hon. Friend feels rightly confident in having that conversation with them. He is right; that is exactly what should happen. However, through the Policing and Crime Bill we are trying to recognise that from time to time, as much as I wish it were not the case, there may be an officer who feels for whatever reason that they cannot go down that route and effectively act as a whistleblower. I will come on to how that should be handled going forward in more detail in just a few moments.

I will turn to some of the specific issues raised during the debate, but hon. Members will be aware that I cannot comment in detail on some of the specifics of Operation Midland, or indeed on individual cases associated with it. It is inappropriate for the Government to comment on operational matters such as those. Additionally, I am sure hon. Members are aware that action is being taken by the Independent Police Complaints Commission, which I will outline, as a result of some of the failings identified in the review.

Five Metropolitan Police Service officers, ranging from a detective sergeant through to a deputy assistant commissioner, have been referred to the IPCC. Indeed, the individual who originally made the allegations that Operation Midland focused on is also being investigated by an outside force for attempting to pervert the course of justice. To that end, I hope the House appreciates that I am constrained by various ongoing proceedings, but I am happy to continue and to outline some further wide-ranging points.

On the publication of the report, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Aldershot referred in his opening remarks, I believe that there should be a presumption in favour of transparency in a situation like this. It is to the commissioner’s credit that he commissioned this report, and I will discuss his plans for publishing it when I see him next week. There is a balance to be found between considering any legal implications of sensitive and confidential material in the report and publishing that material, which is an issue I know the commissioner has to look at. I will discuss that with him next week. In the first instance, we and the Metropolitan police should look to be as transparent as possible.

I understand the views of Sir Richard Henriques and Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe on whether the police should “believe” all victims. I cannot be clearer on the matter than by reiterating the words of my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, who was then the Home Secretary. She said that the police should focus on the credibility of the allegation, rather than on the credibility of the witness or victim. That has to be right, but as was said earlier, it works both ways in terms of how the police deal with these issues.

The position of the National Police Chiefs Council—I spoke to Simon Bailey about this earlier today—is that officers and staff must approach any investigation without fear or favour, and must go where the evidence takes them. I understand that Simon Bailey clearly made the point to Sir Richard Henriques, as he was putting together his report that outlined how many claimants’ allegations tend to be baseless, that once the victim has come forward, that case and its investigation must be undertaken without fear or favour to get to the bottom of whether that allegation is correct. If it is, it should quite rightly be followed through to its finality, which the police are required to do by the code of practice of the Criminal Procedure and Investigations Act 1996.

The evidence of the victim is just one part of an investigation; “believing” victims, or even referring to them as such at the point of disclosure when recording the crime, as opposed to complainants, should not and must not interfere with that. However, we need a system under which people who believe they are a victim feel confident and free enough to come forward in the first place. I am sure we all wish to see that continue. As with the rest of Sir Richard’s recommendations, I know that the Metropolitan police, the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, the College of Policing and the National Police Chiefs Council are looking closely and carefully at that, as they must, in order to respond fully.

[Richard Benyon]

Lord Dear made an important interjection on this issue in the other place. He said that the loss of the Police Staff College has had an impact on decision making and leadership. Does the Minister agree, and are there plans to put something like it in its place?

[Brandon Lewis]

I understand why Lord Dear made that point; I met him recently and he outlined his thoughts. However, we now have the College of Policing, which is working to make sure that we have the standards and the sharing of best practice in place. That is exactly what the college is there for.

The Home Secretary recently announced the development of a licence to practise for child sexual abuse investigators, as hon. Members outlined earlier. That will ensure that only qualified officers are carrying out those complex investigations and in the correct and appropriate way, and are hopefully dealing with some of the issues raised earlier. As a Government, we have done more than any other to lift the lid on what are heinous crimes. We have acknowledged the painful treatment endured by victims and by those wrongly accused. We have to make sure that we get that balance right. Similarly, we have to acknowledge the pain endured by those who have suffered sexual abuse and whose voices went unheard for such a long time. We saw that with the revelations relating to Jimmy Savile several years ago, and we are sadly seeing it again now with the appalling scale of allegations of abuse within football, as was noted earlier.

Child sexual abuse is a despicable crime. We have to do everything in our power not only to prevent it from happening but, where it happens, to root it out, deal with it and bring people to justice. We have been consistently clear that, where abuse has taken place, victims must be encouraged to come forward and have their allegations reviewed thoroughly and properly investigated so that people can be brought to justice. Again, that has to work both ways. To have confidence in the system, both the victims and the accused must have confidence that they will be treated with respect and will be brought to justice where appropriate.

In the case of Operation Midland, the Metropolitan police is clearly guilty of serious errors, as we heard earlier. Those failures must not be allowed to undo so much of the good work that we and they have done in recent years in giving that confidence to victims, survivors and the wider public to ensure that the police take these crimes seriously. Victims should—and increasingly do, as we have seen with the football scandal—feel able to come forward, to report abuse and to get the support that they need. In ensuring that that continues, we must not turn a blind eye to when the police get it wrong. In this instance they got it wrong, and they must stand up to that.

I again thank my hon. Friend the Member for Aldershot for raising these important issues in such a powerful way, along with other right hon. and hon. Members. I hope that I have been able to assure hon. Members on the Government’s position; I will update them further following my meetings over the next week.