Police Officer Safety

Maria Eagle Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Ms Abbott]

My hon. Friend must be clairvoyant, because the next thing I was going to say was that fire crews in the UK have come under attack 1,000 times in the past two years, and attacks on ambulance workers are also on the rise. Although the main purpose of this debate is to discuss violence against the police, I could not let it pass without referring to other blue-light services with similar issues. All assaults on the police are unacceptable, and we will discuss how to address them. The sad thing is that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen (Nick Thomas-Symonds) said, there is no clear, reliable evidence of the number of assaults on the police, because the data are still recorded in a haphazard and irregular fashion.

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

On Merseyside, the most recent figures equate to almost 16% of the entire force being subjected to an attack in one year. Not all those attacks would have resulted in injury, but very many of them did. Does my hon. Friend think that it is an urgent matter for the Government to collect proper statistics on such assaults?

[Ms Abbott]

It is indeed urgent that the Government collect proper statistics. We need reliable, uniform data so that we are clear about the extent of the problem, the trends over time and the differences between forces. To address a problem, it is first necessary to identify it correctly.

There is a further point in relation to the collection of data. Even without data that are as robust as we would like on assaults, there are things that we could do now to address violence against the police to the benefit of the police force and for the reassurance of the public. One of those things is the adoption of body-worn cameras by all police officers who come into contact with the public. I will return to that subject later.

Orgreave

Maria Eagle Excerpts

Tuesday 1st November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Brandon Lewis]

I understand my hon. Friend’s point, but the reasoning behind the Home Secretary’s decision comes from looking at the wider public interest. There were no wrongful convictions and no deaths and, importantly, the changes in policing over the last three decades mean policing has moved on, and we need to continue those reforms.

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

Does the Minister accept that there were no wrongful convictions because the case the police fabricated against those 95 miners collapsed because of the fabricated evidence? Does he not accept that there was then no accountability for the senior officers in South Yorkshire police, including the chief constable at the time, who led that arrangement to fit people up wrongly? Five years later, that same cadre of senior officers was responsible for fabricating evidence against fans after the Hillsborough disaster. Yes, that did lead to 96 deaths, but the denial of justice over so many years for the Hillsborough families and those affected by the events at Hillsborough might never have happened if the chief constable and his senior cadre of officers had been held to account for what happened at Orgreave, but they were not.

[Brandon Lewis]

The hon. Lady has in effect outlined why it has been so important to have those reforms in how policing works and that local accountability over the last three decades. Her point about Hillsborough is right, and criminal proceedings may well come out of that with the IPCC, but that is because the reforms and changes through the IPCC and further reforms in the Policing and Crime Bill and the PCCs have changed the landscape of policing. It has changed dramatically in the last 30 years, and that forms a part of the Home Secretary’s right decision that it is not in the public interest to have a public inquiry.

Hillsborough

Maria Eagle Excerpts

Wednesday 27th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

I think everybody will be disappointed and, indeed, concerned by some of the remarks that have been made by South Yorkshire police today. There was a very clear verdict yesterday in relation to the decisions that were taken by police officers and the action of police officers on 15 April 1989, and I urge South Yorkshire police force to recognise the verdict of the jury. Yes, it must get on with the day-to-day job of policing in its force area, but it needs to look at what happened—at what the verdicts have shown—recognise the truth and be willing to accept that.

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

I thank the Home Secretary for her statement and, in particular, for her decision when she came into office in 2010 to allow the work of the Hillsborough Independent Panel to continue. That has been absolutely crucial to this outcome. When I was first elected in 1997, my constituents Phil Hammond, Doreen Jones and Jenni Hicks were some of the first people to come to see me. They were then part of the executive of the Hillsborough Family Support Group, and between them, they lost five family members. They came to see me about the disaster, and I have campaigned with them ever since to have the truth acknowledged and to have justice done.

We all knew the truth; it just seems to be the legal system in this country—I speak as a lawyer—that has been unable to get to the truth and accept the truth. For 27 years, it failed the victims at every turn. Almost everything that could go wrong in a legal case went wrong in those 27 years. Yesterday, the legal system finally did its job, but it has more to do to hold to account those who we now know for absolute certain are responsible. The Home Secretary has more to do to deal with the appalling culture and behaviour of South Yorkshire police, which persists to this day.

This disaster was filmed live and shown on television, and within months the interim report of the Taylor inquiry put the blame squarely where it actually lay—it did not get everything right, but it was substantially correct—yet for 27 years the families of those who died have had to defend every day the reputations of their lost loved ones and of their friends and other people living in Liverpool who have been blamed for what happened.

It was only the panel taking this out of the legal system that has led to the truth being acknowledged more widely than it was, and to its then being fed back into the legal system. There is a deep issue about our legal system, so will the Home Secretary now commit to supporting Lord Michael Wills’s Public Advocate Bill to ensure that the victims of public disasters—there will be more in future—are never again forced to spend decades of their lives fighting smears, lies, official denials, indifference and cover-ups from public authorities? We have to make sure this can never ever happen again.

[Mrs May]

The hon. Lady is right that we need to stand back and ask what it is about our system that actually enabled this to happen and enabled people to suffer in this way over those 27 years. One of the reasons why I have asked Bishop James Jones to work with the families, to hear from them their experiences, is obviously to try to learn from that and to see what steps we need to take in response.

One of the things that has come of this is that the panel model is one that can be used elsewhere. I have indeed used that model, with fewer members, in relation to the necessity of looking into the killing of Daniel Morgan, where again the legal system, through a number of cases, has failed to get to the truth. I think it is a method that we could use on other occasions.

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.

Hillsborough Disaster

Maria Eagle Excerpts

Monday 17th October 2011 Commons Chamber

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

I begin by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Steve Rotheram) on his superb effort in securing this debate and on his incredibly powerful opening speech. I also wish to thank the 140,000 people who signed the e-petition, which so strengthened my hon. Friend’s hand when he attended the Backbench Business Committee to argue for time to have this debate on the Floor of the House.

This subject is of massive importance to my constituents, to Liverpool football fans, to football fans generally, to the city of Liverpool and to Merseyside as a whole, as shown by the fact that all the Merseyside MPs supported my hon. Friend’s proposal that time be found, on a votable motion on the Floor of the House, to consider the full disclosure to Hillsborough families, unredacted and uncensored, of all Government-related documents, including Cabinet minutes. The release is a matter of enormous importance to the bereaved families of the 96 people whose deaths were caused on that day and to the survivors of the disaster.

I was one of two Ministers who called for full disclosure and publication of all existing documentation relating to the Hillsborough disaster on the 20th anniversary of the tragedy in 2009, along with my right hon. Friend the Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham). The incredible show of solidarity and dignity at the Anfield memorial, which I also attended that year, as well as the chants for justice that interrupted my right hon. Friend’s speech on that occasion, led to the establishment of the Hillsborough independent panel. To achieve that, my right hon. Friend and I were able to push behind the scenes in government to overcome some obstacles in Whitehall, although in my view the terms of reference leave a little to be desired. I hope the process, ably led by the Bishop of Liverpool, who knows what a dark shadow the tragedy still casts across the city, will finally bring everything that can now be known and every document that now exists, 22 years after the event, into the public domain, unredacted by officialdom.

I thank the Home Secretary for her positive and clear commitment to full disclosure this evening. The Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister have agreed to the release of all documents and it is of enormous importance that Parliament should vote to call for unredacted and uncensored release and publication of all Government papers, including Cabinet minutes and papers.

I believe that the Hillsborough disaster and the circumstances surrounding it are a unique case that justifies unique action. Let me briefly set out why. The Hillsborough disaster was not an accident. It could and should have been avoided. It was caused by a failure of police control: that was the finding of Lord Justice Taylor in his interim report just four months after the disaster. Why, then, do so many people still talk of hooliganism?

South Yorkshire police failed spectacularly in their duty on 15 April 1989, but rather than admit it they spent years trying to blame the Liverpool fans who attended the match and the victims for what had happened. That was an orchestrated, sustained and deliberate campaign to blacken the names of the victims and of Liverpool supporters who attended on that day to enable South Yorkshire police to evade their responsibility. As a consequence, the Hillsborough families have had to endure one of the most disgraceful campaigns of official skulduggery, hostility and lies of any victims’ families whom I know. It began on the day of the tragedy and continued for years and even now it has left families feeling understandably distrustful and suspicious of officialdom.

South Yorkshire police’s failure to accept responsibility and their ongoing efforts to deflect blame, which lasted for years after Taylor’s verdict, mean that there are huge amounts of misinformation, which the families keep having to correct. Twenty-two years after the event, the families should not still be having to defend their relatives who died from the lies and innuendo that appear every time the disaster is discussed in the public arena. It is as well to remember that one of the first things that senior officers in charge on that day did was lie about why the gates at Leppings Lane were opened, in order to cover up their culpability.

Inexcusable police behaviour continued on that day. Police refused to allow ambulances that might have saved lives into the ground because they were treating it like a riot, not a disaster. They treated families who arrived on the scene to look for missing relatives as if they were criminals. They blood-tested the dead for alcohol—even children—but there was worse to come. South Yorkshire police briefed The Sun that the victims had caused the crush and that fans who merely sought to assist the injured and dying were stealing from them and urinating on them—vile and untrue smears that heaped appalling distress on top of unbearable sudden bereavement. It is about time we knew who gave those stories to The Sun and I join the families today in calling on News International to tell us.

As if that were not enough, South Yorkshire police quickly established what I referred to in a debate in this House in 1998 as a “black propaganda” unit, which systematically set about altering police statements in an attempt to influence Lord Justice Taylor’s inquiry into the causes of the disaster. My right hon. Friend the Member for Leigh read from one of them; I have read them all. This was no less than a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. One cannot read all the statements, amended, unamended and annotated by police lawyers and police, and come to any other conclusion. It failed mainly—and really only—because they did not have time to complete the job and unamended statements were sent to Taylor. Taylor then gave his finding, but instead of taking notice of Lord Justice Taylor’s clear finding and his equally clear rebuke, South Yorkshire police kept the black propaganda unit in place and simply set about persuading the South Yorkshire coroner of their story, preferring to try to engineer historical revisionism rather than to face up to the fact that they were at fault and found to be at fault by the Taylor inquiry.

Despite all that disgraceful behaviour, the chief constable did not resign. The two senior officers in charge on that day were retired on medical grounds and with large pensions to avoid their having to face disciplinary action. No one responsible has ever had to account for the loss of control on that day or for the extended quite despicable behaviour that followed for years thereafter. Indeed, one member of that black propaganda unit, responsible for the smears, is a serving chief constable to this day: Sir Norman Bettison. No wonder the families are suspicious of officialdom, no wonder they do not ever quite believe that what they are told will happen will happen and no wonder they want Parliament to support them by voting for them to see all documents unredacted and uncensored. I believe that a vote in this House for full publication will strengthen the hand of the Hillsborough independent panel in any discussions that it might need to hold with the Government about ultimate publication of all the material produced to it.

Although prompted by the Government’s reaction to the Information Commissioner’s ruling that Cabinet minutes should be produced, this important debate will allow Parliament to make its views clear, on a votable motion, about what it expects to be disclosed. Parliamentarians should take the chance to say clearly: we are with the families, who must see everything, and there must be no more suspicions of sinister official manoeuvring to prevent the full truth of the disaster from coming out, as there has been too much of that. That is all the families want and we must help them to get it by voting in favour of this motion.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr George Howarth (Knowsley) (Lab)]

Every weekend, hundreds of thousands of people attend public events, including many sporting events. They leave their homes in the not-unreasonable expectation that those who are responsible for the management and safety of those events will do their jobs professionally, thoroughly and properly, and that all the experience available will be brought to bear in those situations. What they do not expect is that if something does go wrong, as things do occasionally at events, any victims will be turned into villains. At the heart of the continuing problem that the families, I and many Members have about what happened at Hillsborough is that that is exactly what happened—there was an attempt to turn the people who were victims, in the ways described by my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Steve Rotheram), into villains.

My hon. Friend spoke movingly and eloquently, and I think that he spoke for the whole House. His speech was thorough and covered all the events, problems and things that have gone wrong since, but what he did by reading out the names of the victims was to bring things back to the human scale. I want to do that now by mentioning two people who were constituents of mine at the time—they have since moved—Mr and Mrs Joynes. They lost a son, Nicholas, who has been named by my hon. Friend, and I had a lot to do with them in the early years after the tragedy occurred. They would not want to be seen as being any different from any of the other families concerned, but I single them out because they typify the dignity with which people have responded to the loss of loved ones.

I mention Mr and Mrs Joynes because it was at their request that I attended a day of the inquest hearings, at which I was appalled. It was clear from the way those mini inquests were handled that the whole event seemed to be geared up to proving how much or little alcohol was in the blood of those who had been killed in that tragic and awful disaster. I note that there is a whole debate to be had about mini inquests, but it might be best to have that debate on another occasion. Is it any surprise that those people who had lost loved members of their families at Hillsborough were offended when, on top of the attempts to turn the victims into villains, they found that the inquest, which was supposed to be about establishing cause of death—nothing more than that—seemed to be a perpetuation of that calumny?

[Maria Eagle]

It was.

[Mr Howarth]

Indeed—it was.

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham) and my hon. Friend the Member for Garston and Halewood (Maria Eagle) on the role they have played in bringing about the release of all these documents, and I welcome, I think, the statement that the Home Secretary made today. As I understand it, she has said that all documents, including Cabinet minutes, will be made available and that nothing will be withheld from the glare of public scrutiny. If that is what she was saying, I very much welcome that. I followed her comments carefully and that appears to be what she said.

I want to make a slight qualification about the process of redaction. The Home Secretary will be aware that, wearing another hat, I sit on the Intelligence and Security Committee. When we produce annual reports or any other kind of report we use the process of redaction, which is necessary because issues of national security are sometimes involved. However, I am aware that redaction causes suspicion. What is left out gives the media vent to speculate about what might have been in there. In this particular case, the families who want to know everything, and rightly so, might feel that something has been excluded. The point I want to make to the Home Secretary is that more thought needs to be given to how that process is to be conducted, who is to be involved in it and who will have the final veto. The default position should be to have no use of redaction unless there are issues of personal medical evidence or of data protection to consider. Data protection should not be used to protect those who may have been culpable of failing in their duties, but other issues of data protection, including in relation to the families themselves, might be relevant. There should be redaction only in those circumstances, and even then each decision should be open to question by the families and the independent panel.