Daniel Morgan Independent Panel Report — House of Lords, 2021-06-22
Topic: Law and Crime
Brian Paddick (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, I commend the noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan, on her report and her patience. I apologise to the Morgan family for the way an organisation I was part of for over 30 years has conducted itself. The only points I wish to make are that this report chimes exactly with my professional and personal experience, that this report needs to be taken seriously, and that urgent action needs to be taken as a result. The Metropolitan Police puts its own reputation before openness, honesty and the pursuit of justice, and those who are telling the truth are ostracised and forced out Let me give noble Lords another example. In 2005, as a police officer holding the fourth highest rank in the Metropolitan Police, I gave evidence to the Independent Police Complaints Commission inquiry into whether the Metropolitan Police has misled the family of Jean Charles de Menezes after he was mistakenly shot and killed by the police following the London bombings. The then commissioner had told the media that both he and all those advising him believed for 24 hours after the shooting that Jean Charles de Menezes was a suicide bomber, when, in fact, five hours after the shooting, his closest advisers had told me that Jean Charles de Menezes was innocent. Noble Lords will recall the trial of the Metropolitan Police for health and safety breaches, where the Met digitally altered the image of the suspect it was pursuing to make it look more like de Menezes and claimed mistaken identity. After an uneasy truce of about 18 months, I was side- lined from being in day-to-day charge of 20,000 officers to overseeing a project with 20 officers because the commissioner had lost confidence in me. He had done so because I told the truth. As a police inspector, I was told that I was too honest to be a senior police officer, and 20 years later I found out that that was true. That was the culture of the Metropolitan Police then, and this report tells us that it is the culture of the Metropolitan Police now. It highlights various types of corruption, including what it describes as "incontrovertibly corrupt behaviour", such as selling stories to press contacts and planting false evidence Research that I saw when I was a serving police officer showed that when there were surges in recruitment, as there was 30 years after the end of the Second World War and again 30 years later, there were significant increases in misconduct in those cohorts of recruits, increasing in seriousness as they secured important investigative positions within the organisation. The usual peak for misconduct was between 10 to 15 years’ service. In the early 2000s the peak was between nought and two years’ service. The report is right to highlight vetting systems, but this is nothing new. Why have the Government not taken action to address this recurring problem in the police service The report also highlights what it describes as a form of institutional corruption, failings in police investigations, unjustified reassurances rather than candour and a culture of obfuscation. The panel describes hurdles placed in its path, such as a refusal to recognise the necessity to have access to the HOLMES computer database, limiting access to the most sensitive information and even failing to provide a copy of the London homicide manual. It set out how murder investigations should have been conducted at the time of Daniel Morgan’s murder, and its existence was not even revealed to the panel until December 2020 The Metropolitan Police were able to claim repeatedly that the initial Daniel Morgan murder investigation was in accordance with the standards of investigation at the time by concealing the manual that proved that it was not investigated in accordance with the standards of investigation at that time. This is how the Metropolitan Police acts now, under its current leadership. This is not just about a few corrupt police officers who thwarted a murder investigation in 1987 or even the further corruption identified after a subsequent investigation; this is about a culture that enables corruption to thrive. The kind of institutional corruption identified in this report is not some kind of academic construct, an isolated incident of a few corrupt officers. It is the tip of an iceberg that threatens to undermine policing by consent in this country. That is a matter for the Government and the Home Secretary, and it must be urgently addressed.