In addition to the witness appeal, the IOPC also had a second major source of new evidence: the policy books of ACC Jones, who led WMP’s work around the disaster.
This was a series of 14 physical notebooks into which were attached detailed, chronological records of ACC Jones’s correspondence, telephone calls and meeting notes throughout the investigations. They also included some policy decisions, often flagged as such, among more detailed entries. Each entry was numbered, and they appeared to form a continuous record of how WMP conducted its work, the decisions made by senior officers and its dealings with other parties, including SYP, the Taylor Inquiry team and Dr Popper.
The policy books therefore were of considerable importance to the IOPC’s investigation into WMP’s work.
The books were provided to the IOPC by ACC Jones in 2013. He had retained them in his personal possession when he left WMP and had not previously made them available to any other party, investigation or review of evidence relating to the Hillsborough disaster.
Though he had not been specifically contacted by the Stuart-Smith Scrutiny, there is evidence that he was aware of its work and aims. In 2011, the HIP contacted ACC Jones and asked if he had any relevant material for its work. He did not provide the policy books and advised the HIP that “all of the product of my involvement in the investigation” had been retained by WMP.
He later told the IOPC that when the HIP contacted him, he had forgotten he had them. He further said that the policy books were “my copies of material forwarded to the official Holmes Policy File”, adding: “the contents you have probably found are already known to you from the official file.” In short, he suggested that the policy books were only duplicates and that the material in them would all have been available elsewhere.
While the HIP did have access to copies of many of the documents in the policy books, it did not have all of them. Further, when the IOPC restored and examined the HOLMES databases used by WMP for its work around the Hillsborough disaster, it became apparent that ACC Jones had requested that some of the electronic policy files related to WMP’s investigation should be deleted from the system. Before doing so, he requested that printed copies were made.
An officer retaining potentially sensitive material relating to police work in their personal possession, and deleting material from the HOLMES system, are both unusual steps.
Further, given the allegations of a failure in the direction and control of WMP’s investigations noted in WMP’s referral to the IOPC, the deletion appeared particularly significant. It was therefore one of the issues raised in the Notice of alleged breach of the Standards of Professional Behaviour the IOPC sent to ACC Jones in January 2015.
ACC Jones responded to the allegation in a prepared statement to the IOPC. He stated that the deletion of the policy files had been agreed as they contained potentially sensitive and confidential material. However, he provided no further details, such as who this had been agreed with. He also said he did not have the printed copies of the policy entries.
Given the potential value of the policy files, and the strong indication that they were not the same as the policy books, the IOPC carried out or requested a number of further searches in an attempt to find them, in either digital or hard copy format. This included searches of police premises and obtaining a warrant to search ACC Jones’s home. The files were not recovered.
Though ACC Jones’s decision to delete the files was documented and included an instruction to retain hard copies, it was nonetheless highly unusual and leaves a gap in the IOPC investigation. It remains unclear what happened to the hard copies of the policy files.
The IOPC recorded a conduct matter around ACC Jones’s actions and completed an investigation into it. Having reviewed the investigation report, the IOPC was of the view that, if he had still been serving, ACC Jones would have had a case to answer for gross misconduct for discreditable conduct in relation to the deletion of the files, falsehood or prevarication regarding the retention of the policy books and neglect of duty, because he did not advise the Stuart-Smith Scrutiny of the books’ existence in 1997.
