Hillsborough

Maria Eagle Excerpts

Monday 22nd October 2012 Commons Chamber

[Maria Eagle (Garston and Halewood) (Lab)]

I was, with my right hon. Friend the Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham), one of the two Ministers in the previous Government whose initiative led to the establishment of the Hillsborough independent panel. I believed then that after years of campaigning and the seeming exhaustion of all legal avenues, only transparency and full publication of all documents could reveal the truth to the world. The people of Merseyside always knew the truth of Hillsborough.

Hillsborough is something that I have campaigned on since I was first elected in 1997. As a lawyer by trade, I am dismayed to see the utter failure of the legal system to right the wrongs and the smears of Hillsborough. Only Taylor’s interim report partially succeeded. All the other legal proceedings—from the inquests to the civil actions, the contribution proceedings, the judicial reviews, the criminal investigations, the disciplinary investigations, the Stuart-Smith scrutiny, and the private prosecutions—failed. The Hillsborough independent panel has succeeded. It has enabled the incontrovertible truth of what happened on the day and subsequently to be spread beyond Merseyside.

It took a wholly novel and non-legalistic process to break down the failings of past legal attempts to get the truth on record. I commend the great work of Bishop James Jones and the panel members. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Leigh, as well as Lord Michael Wills, whose role has been unremarked on but was crucial, our current Home Secretary, who enabled the panel’s work to be finished when it could have been halted by the new Government, and the Prime Minister, who quickly grasped the import of the panel’s findings and has said that justice must follow on from truth.

Accountability, especially for the black propaganda campaign, matters very much to this House. Those who ordered and orchestrated that campaign have had many years of impunity to enjoy their burgeoning careers. One of the people I named in this House in 1998 as being involved in orchestrating it is Sir Norman Bettison, currently chief constable of West Yorkshire police but at the time a chief inspector, then superintendent, in South Yorkshire police. I should make it clear that he has always denied any involvement in the “dirty tricks campaign”, as Trevor Hicks has somewhat mildly dubbed it—the black propaganda campaign, I call it—in public statements.

I have here a letter from which I would like to read an extract. It was written in 1998 to Ann Adlington, then a solicitor working for the Hillsborough family support group. It is from Mr John Barry, who says that he was at Hillsborough and saw the disaster unfold. He sent it to me with a covering letter in 2009, and has recently given me permission to make it public. It says: “At the time”, in 1989,

“I was doing a part-time MBA at Sheffield Business School. One of my fellow students was a middle ranking police officer with South Yorkshire Police…Some weeks after the game and after I had been interviewed by West Midlands Police, we were in a pub after our weekly evening class. He told me that he had been asked by his senior officers to put together the South Yorkshire Police evidence for the forthcoming inquiry. He said that ‘we are trying to concoct a story that all the Liverpool fans were drunk and we were afraid that they were going to break down the gates, so we decided to open them’. I was quite astounded that he had shared this information with me, knowing that I had been very close to the scene of the disaster and had been greatly affected by it. We didn’t discuss it further.”

Mr Barry confirmed to me in the covering letter in 2009 that the middle-ranking police officer to whom he refers is Norman Bettison. He has agreed to swear a statement to that effect and I have put him in touch with the families’ solicitors. Here we have an account of a contemporaneous conversation in which Norman Bettison boasts that he is engaged in a South Yorkshire police plot to fit up the Liverpool fans and deflect blame from the force. That is indeed what happened subsequently, so what Sir Norman denies in public he boasts about in private conversations.

Sir Norman Bettison has given inconsistent accounts publicly over the years about what his role was. In late 1998, when he was appointed chief constable of Merseyside, he accepted that he was a member of what the Hillsborough independent panel report calls the Wain unit. In a written statement, he said:

“The unit was tasked with looking at what had happened on the day of the disaster…The unit also liaised with and passed information to WM police who were undertaking the formal and independent investigation into the disaster…After the immediate work of the unit was complete, I was given a specific role to monitor the public inquiry and the inquest and brief the Chief Constable on progress.”

On 13 September 2012, the day after the panel’s report was published, Norman Bettison immediately put out a statement exonerating himself and restating two of the Hillsborough smears that were part of the black propaganda campaign I referred to in 1998, namely that fan behaviour made the police’s job more difficult and that Liverpool fans arrived late at the ground and caused a surge at the Leppings Lane end. In the 2012 statement, he said about his role:

“Shortly after the conclusion of the Taylor Inquiry, I was posted to other duties. I had nothing further to do with the subsequent Coroners Inquests and proceedings.”

That is completely different from what he said in 1998 about having a special task reporting to the chief constable until after the inquests.

It is my belief that Norman Bettison has always known more than he has admitted to publicly. I met him one to one in my parliamentary office in late 1998 at the request of Sir David Henshaw, the then clerk to the Merseyside police authority, following the understandable furore that erupted when Norman Bettison was appointed chief constable of Merseyside. At that meeting, he let slip the liability split agreed in the contribution proceedings —in other words, the percentage of the blame that South Yorkshire police would accept for the disaster when paying out damages. That was very sensitive information from South Yorkshire police’s point of view and it was never made public; it was a requirement of the settlements that it be kept secret.

I knew what percentage of the blame each defendant had agreed to accept, because as a trainee solicitor at Brian Thompson and Partners I had had legally privileged access to some of my principal’s Hillsborough files. My principal was on the Hillsborough steering committee of lawyers, dealing with civil litigation on behalf of some families. Only someone who was at the heart of dealing with Hillsborough from the South Yorkshire police side would have known what percentage of the blame they accepted, and Norman Bettison knew that information.

The Hillsborough independent panel report itself suggests that Norman Bettison had a much wider role than he has admitted. He was present and took notes at the five-hour meeting between senior officers and the South Yorkshire police legal team on 26 April 1989, at which it was decided that officers would write their own statements instead of having them taken. That would not have been usual practice.

Norman Bettison compiled and introduced a video for South Yorkshire police, which was shown on 3 October 1989 to Michael Shersby MP, who represented the interests of the Police Federation in Parliament, and which tried to emphasise aspects of the disaster that deflected blame from the police. He also brought it to Westminster and showed it to more MPs, in an attempt to undermine Taylor’s findings that South Yorkshire police were to blame for the disaster.

Norman Bettison was involved in what looks like a crude attempt to smear and discredit Lord Justice Taylor, as reported by The Independent on Sunday on 16 September 2012, which led to the then chief constable of South Yorkshire police, Peter Wright, travelling to see the Director of Public Prosecutions to suggest that Taylor should be charged with perverting the course of justice. He also received daily reports of how well the smears were being received by the coroner at the inquests—the means by which police sought to undermine Taylor’s report and achieve historical revisionism. I very much welcome the Independent Police Complaints Commission investigation into his role.

I want to raise one other issue. This House and the country were shocked by the extent to which police statements were interfered with and changed by South Yorkshire police. I believe that there may have been a similar issue regarding West Midlands police pressurising survivors who were witnesses into changing statements to support the South Yorkshire police account of events. The hon. Member for City of Chester (Stephen Mosley) has referred to West Midlands police pressurising police officers about their statements. I have seen one such example. I have heard from survivors who gave statements that they were never told whether they were passed to the Taylor inquiry or the coroner and that they have been denied copies when they have sought them. I am pleased that the IPCC has decided to investigate the role of West Midlands police in that regard.

The families want swift criminal investigations that do not overlap and are not sequential. I know that the Home Secretary understands that and wants to do her best in that respect. The families deserve to be properly resourced after 23 years of having to raise their own money, and I know that she is also thinking about that. The families want a point of contact in order to be able to be kept informed about how things are going. The Bishop of Liverpool may be a good person to fulfil that role, given that he continues to advise the right hon. Lady and is well trusted by the families.

Twenty-three years is far too long for anybody to wait for justice. I hope that, through the efforts that we can all make and the House’s unity on the need for something to be done to get to the bottom of this, and soon, we can make sure that justice does not take as long as it has taken to establish the truth.