HC Deb 15 May 1964 vol 695 cc837-53

1.53 p.m.

Mr. Stephen Swingler (Newcastle-under-Lyme)

I rise to call attention to the Skelhorn Report and the tragic circumstances surrounding the death of the artist, "Hal" Woolf. I do not wish to discuss the contents, merits or demerits of Mr. Skelhorn's Report. It was presented to Parliament in March of this year, and I trust that when we resume after the Recess we shall have an opportunity to debate the conclusions and the body of the Report.

Mine is a preliminary plea, and I make it so that we may be put into a better position to assess the value of the Report and to judge the criticisms and structures contained therein. I am asking the Home Secretary whether he will agree to publish the evidence—at any rate, the police evidence—given at the Skelhorn inquiry, so that Members of Parliament and the public may be able to draw their own conclusions.

I begin by reciting briefly the facts that led up to this investigation. I shall be as objective and succinct as I can. Why was there an inquiry into the Woolf case? Mr. Herman Woolf was knocked down by a car in Central London in November, 1962. He was taken to hospital and X-rayed there. A short time afterwards he was considered fit for discharge, and he was promptly arrested by the police on the allegation that he was in possession of a dangerous drug. Within 24 hours he was returned to that very same hospital, gravely ill and injured, in a comatose condition. Shortly after that he was transferred to another hospital, and 12 days later he was dead.

During this whole time—from 10th to 23rd November, 1962—the late Mr. Woolf was under police surveillance, and most of the time under police arrest. In spite of the fact that some days after this unfortunate incident and his transfer to a hospital in the suburbs more than one of his friends reported him missing at a London police station, his former wife—who was his next-of-kin—and his friends were not notified by the police of his whereabouts until after he had died.

Those who heard the recital of these facts, which I have given so barely—Mrs. Woolf, his former wife, friends of "Hal" Woolf and Members of Parliament who were subsequently informed—found in them things which generated in them a number of suspicions. Let me put them quite bluntly. There was a suspicion that Mr. Woolf had been beaten up by the police, and that that accounted for the grave injuries that eventually led to his death. There was a suspicion that he had been framed on the charge of drug peddling. There was the suspicion, thirdly, that the police had deliberately withheld knowledge of his whereabouts, despite the fact that he was under their surveillance, until after his death, because we know that on 15th and 16th December he was registered and reported as a missing person, but that not until he died in the Atkinson Morley Hospital were his wife and friends notified of his whereabouts.

One of the troubles about the whole of this tragedy in 1963 was that those equipped with authority to deal with this matter in any way did not show themselves to be over-anxious to investigate the circumstances of the case. At the inquest Mrs. Woolf objected to the haste with which it was being held, and asked to be represented, but her objection was brushed aside. Later, her legal advisers had great difficulty in getting a transcript of the evidence—such as it was—which had been given at the inquest.

Last summer when, as a result of an article in the magazine Private Eye, the national Press took up the Woolf case, and suspicions and anxieties were aroused among many people about it, an investigation was held by Scotland Yard, under Detective Superintendent Axon. It took a very short time. I know none of the details. There was a report to the Commissioner, and comfortable and complacent conclusions were issued to the Press. But the report has never been published. Neither the public nor Members of Parliament know any of its details.

Subsequently, the case went to the Divisional Court, on the demand for a new inquest. Surprisingly, to those who read the evidence, that court rejected the demand for a new inquest, which was most unfortunate, because it would have provided an opportunity for a public cross-examination of those people who were concerned with the case, particularly members of the police force. About 12 months after these events the Home Secretary was good enough, at the instance of the National Council for Civil Liberties, to receive an all-party deputation of Members and to consider the case. He was sufficiently impressed by the expression of their anxieties and misgivings, and the facts that they put before him, to agree that the case necessitated an investigation into police conduct. So it was that in December of last year, more than 12 months after the tragic death of Mr. Woolf, the Skelhorn inquiry was set up.

The inquiry was established by the Home Secretary quite explicitly to allay public anxiety about the circumstances surrounding the death of Mr. Woolf—anxiety that had been expressed to him by Members of Parliament of all parties and which had been made widespread by the publicity in the case, quite apart from the long-drawn-out anxiety suffered by Mrs. Woolf and Mr. Woolf's friends.

Although the Home Secretary decided that the inquiry should be in private, he had the power to oblige the London police, for whom he is responsible, to give evidence at that inquiry. Their evidence was the most important evidence, because the anxiety was about the police conduct of the case, and there seems, therefore, no reason at all why the Home Secretary should not decide immediately to publish the police evidence and the report of the cross-examination of the police witnesses, with which we are most concerned. In the case of the other witnesses, who are fairly numerous, for whom presumably he made the inquiry private in case they would not otherwise be prepared to come forward to give their evidence, I am suggesting that the Minister should seek the consent of those other witnesses to the publication of their evidence and that publication should be dependent upon their agreement.

It is important, as we all know, that justice should not only be done but should be seen to be done, and it is also important, in view of the criticisms, implied and explicit, in the body and conclusions of Mr. Skelhorn's Report, that those who have been concerned with the case should be able to assess and judge the validity of his recommendations.

We have only the conclusions of a single man, albeit a distinguished citizen, but if the Home Office really wishes to achieve the objective of allaying public anxiety about a case of this kind which received considerable publicity as a result of proceedings in court and in the Press, it seems to me that there is a real responsibility upon him to make the facts known. During this Session of Parliament a good deal of concern has been expressed about safeguards against arbitrary police action. There has been widespread concern amongst people about particular cases that I do not propose to mention this afternoon.

Because of that, because of the importance of this fact and because of the importance of legislation that has recently been through this House, it seems to me to be a necessary part of the duty of the Home Secretary in a case of this kind to tell the public the whole of the facts, to give them the whole truth about the cross-examination that occurred at the inquiry.

There is also another side to this matter, and that is the aspect of fairness to the police themselves. In Mr. Skelhorn's Report some police officers are exonerated and others are censured—some of them quite severely—for their conduct during the course of this case. One has to reflect upon the fact that if there had not been an agitation and if the Skelhorn inquiry had not been held, these things would never have come to light. In fairness to those members of the police force, it seems to me that the Home Secretary ought to publish the Report so that the censures upon them may be judged by the public and so that what they said in cross-examination at the inquiry can be weighed up by citizens in relation to the conclusions to which Mr. Skelhorn came.

I hope, therefore, that, on reflection, the Joint Under-Secretary of State will show willingness today, in the first place, to agree to the publication of the police evidence, which is the basis of the Skelhorn Report, so that we may be more fully informed of the facts that were adduced as well as the conclusions to which Mr. Skelhorn came; and, secondly, that he will be willing to ask the other witnesses, over whom he has no control and for whom he has no responsibility, if they will consent to the publication of their evidence so that this matter may be seen to have been fully probed before it was debated in the House of Commons.

2.6 p.m.

Mr. Sydney Silverman (Nelson and Colne)

I wish to speak in support of my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Mr. Swingler). I do so with some diffidence because, as I think everyone knows—certainly the Joint Under-Secretary of State knows—I was myself professionally engaged in the inquiry and conducted the case from Mrs. Woolf's point of view, cross-examining all the witnesses and addressing the learned Commissioner at the end of the day. It would be quite wrong of me—and I have no intention of committing such a solecism—to take advantage of the knowledge which I have about the evidence that was given in order to plead a case to an assembly that has not the same advantage. The inquiry was held in secret, rightly or wrongly, and, having taken part in it in that way, I recognise that, whatever I think of the merits of the matter, I must not do anything in breach of the secrecy which I accepted.

Before saying anything further, I should like to ask the hon. Gentleman whether he has read the evidence in this case. I would be obliged if he would tell me now.

The Joint Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mr. C. M. Woodhouse)

The answer is, "Yes".

Mr. Silverman

One may take it, therefore, that the Home Secretary has likewise read it?

Mr. Woodhouse indicated assent.

Mr. Silverman

Therefore, the Home Secretary and the Joint Under-Secretary will be able to appreciate the point that I am about to make, even though I can only refer to the evidence allusively and not specifically.

The difficulty in this case was obvious. Dr. Toone at the hospital—he gave this evidence at the inquiry, so this is no breach of secrecy—thought that Mr. Woolf, after two and a half hours detention, was suffering from no more than trivial injuries. The Commissioner specifically accepts that this is what Dr. Toone honestly believed. The dilemma is that, if Dr. Toone was right, obviously something must have happened to Mr. Woolf in the 17 or 20 hours that elapsed between his discharge into police custody from St. George's Hospital, suffering only from trivial injuries, and his return to St. George's Hospital less than 24 hours later in a collapsed, comatose, completely unconscious condition from which he never recovered.

Certainly when he came back to St. George's Hospital his injuries were not trivial. If, therefore, when he was first discharged from St. George's Hospital his injuries were trivial, something must have happened in the meantime. Whatever happened in the meantime could only be a happening for which the police custodians were responsible, because it is not contended that he was ever not in their custody. Indeed, Mr. Skelhorn specifically finds that for virtually the whole of the period after the first hour or two in the police station he was virtually unconscious until 2 o'clock the next day when he was returned to the hospital in the condition which everybody now knows.

So, quite obviously, the first question that the Commissioner had to decide was whether in fact anything had happened to him in the police station. If hon. Members will turn to paragraph 33 of the Report, with the cross heading, Was Mr. Woolf subjected to violence or maltreatment by the Police? they will see the first sentence: As to the first of these questions"— the question I have just recited— I am quite satisfied on the evidence I received both from the police officers who had custody of Mr. Woolf and from the medical evidence as to the injuries which he received, that he was not subjected to violence or deliberately maltreated by the police. Lower down on the page it says: I was satisfied that their denials"— that is, the denials of the police officers concerned— that he was in any way subjected to violence, were true. He goes on at the end of that paragraph to say that he comes to this finding because he accepts the evidence of Mr. Bush and Inspector Keene. He goes on to say that he was fortified in it, although he does not base his findings on it, because the medical evidence shows that at any rate his injuries were consistent with having been inflicted not in the police station.

I cannot go further into detail about this. My recollection—I do not go into any details or make any specific reference to any witness or fact, but my recollection—of the evidence is that it was neutral. There may have been a bias in favour of thinking that the injuries were not caused in the police station. The doctors were quite sure that they could have been. We are left with Mr. Skelhorn's acceptance of the evidence of the two police officers themselves.

It is not complained that a judge in a case forms a different assessment of the credibility of the evidence of particular witnesses from what other people form, or may have formed, or would form, if they had the evidence in front of them. That is certainly no matter of complaint. It was for Mr. Skelhorn to decide, and he decided. I say with some diffidence, but I think it has to be said and the Under-Secretary will know what I mean if he has read the evidence, that one might derive—if one had not read the evidence—the feeling that Mr. Skelhorn accepted the whole of the evidence given by Mr. Bruce and Inspector Keene. I think reference to the evidence would show that this cannot be SO.

On one very important matter, Inspector Keene and Detective Sergeant Bruce gave evidence as to what they found when they illegally searched Mr. Woolf's flat. In this they were contradicted by every other witness in the case. If one were to disregard the evidence on this point of all the lay witnesses, all the civilian witnesses, and pay attention only to the evidence of police officers, it is clear that Inspector Keene and Detective Sergeant Bruce in their description of what they found were contradicted as clearly and absolutely as they could be contradicted by other officers who at relevant and material times examined the same premises.

Of course, a good judge has an open mind at the beginning of a case, but if his mind is still open at the conclusion of the case he is to that extent a less good judge. It is his business to decide which side he believes; he could not believe both sides. Either the other officers were not telling the truth, or Inspector Keene and Detective Sergeant Bruce were not telling the truth.

The curious thing, I suggest the regrettable thing, is that Mr. Skelhorn has seen fit not to refer to this very important matter.

Mr. Woodhouse

The hon. Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Mr. Swingler) is seeking to draw the attention of the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. S. Silverman) to the fact that he has used the wrong name.

Mr. Swingler

My hon. Friend is referring to Detective Sergeant Bell.

Mr. S. Silverman

I am much obliged to my hon. Friend.

I find it a little surprising, and I think regrettable, that when he wrote the paragraph which says he accepts the evidence of the police officers concerned on the material point of whether they inflicted any injuries on Mr. Woolf or not, he says nothing to indicate that their evidence on another material point was challenged, and perhaps successfully challenged. Of course, that does not mean that a judge cannot say, "I accept this part of the evidence but not that part of the evidence", but at least he ought to indicate, if he is doing that, that he is doing that.

I should have thought it very wrong that the Home Secretary should conceal from the public what was the evidence which apparently Mr. Skelhorn accepted without qualification. It was about the condition of the flat. In the Report Mr. Skelhorn goes out of his way—very fairly, and everyone is very grateful to him for doing it—to pay tribute to the kind of man Mr. Woolf was, and to the cleanliness and orderliness and even methodical nature of his way of life. This is an indication that the evidence on this point given by Bell and Keene, which could not have been a mistake, if it was not true must have been invented. I think the Home Secretary on consideration might feel that the public ought to be told what this evidence was and enabled to judge.

I have taken longer over this than I intended to take, but I want to make one or two short points. There was the question of the diary. In the hospital there was found a diary which contained a specific request that in case of anything happening information was to be given to Mrs. Woolf, whose address and telephone number were contained on the first page of the diary. There is no doubt that this was in police custody from the day Mr. Woolf was discharged from the hospital until April of this year, when it was handed to me with other property by the police. There is no doubt that it was kept with his other property in the station. What is said about it is that Mr. Bell, the detective sergeant in charge of the case, never saw it. There the Commissioner leaves it. He leaves the question quite open. "He never saw it. It was there but he never saw it. It contains the precise information that he was looking for, but he never saw it." If Mr. Skelhorn feels unable to come to a conclusion as to whether Mr. Bell is telling the truth on this point or is not telling the truth on this point, it is perhaps reasonable that the House and the public should see what the information is, for perhaps they might be able to make up their minds—and it is only right that they should have the opportunity to do so.

There is also the question to which my hon. Friend referred about whether earlier medical advice should have been sought. Mr. Skelhorn fixes the blame solely on one police officer who was supposed or claimed to have served, but obviously did not serve, a meal early the following morning. There was a lot of evidence about this. There was some negative evidence whether the police ought not to have discovered it very much earlier. I feel sure that not everybody would agree with Mr. Skelhorn that the blame for not seeking medical advice earlier was solely that of Mr. Thornley and that everybody else could be completely exonerated. I may be wrong. All I am saying is that if one police officer, and this a casual jailer, is to be singled out for sole and exclusive responsibility for not discovering what ought to have been obvious to everybody; if this is to go down and to be accepted as a final conclusion in the matter, then at least everybody is entitled to know on what evidence it was based. Unfair to the others? It is unfair, first, to Thornley.

There is the question of the delayed charge: brought in at 8 o'clock, charged when obviously completely insensible at 11 o'clock or 12 o'clock—I have forgotten the exact time—in circumstances about which there is considerable contradiction of evidence and in which there is even one document which says that he was not charged at all. These are matters which the public are entitled to know about in an inquiry the object of which was to relieve public anxiety. We cannot relieve public anxiety by leaving questions open or reaching equivocal decisions and not allowing anyone to know on what evidence they were based.

Obviously I cannot take longer, although there is a great deal more which could be said and which I shall have to reserve for another occasion. I ask the Joint Under-Secretary to imagine for one moment this situation: let us suppose that in the course of trying to find out from Woolf his source of supply, a matter of obvious interest and duty to a police officer investigating such a charge, and not believing that he was seriously injured in any way and incapable of anything, something happened. Suppose he passed out. This could be the explanation of everything else that followed; the pretence that one never saw the diary, the failure to communicate with the Criminal Record Office, the failure to communicate with the widow until after death, the resulting fact that nobody ever saw him who knew him until after he had died. All this would be readily explainable if something untoward had happened at the police station at the beginning of the story.

I am not saying that this is so. Not at all. I do not know whether it is so. I would draw certain inferences from certain evidence, but that is of no interest to the House, and I do not seek to detain the House about it or to commit the obvious breach of confidence which would be involved. What I say is that if we are to find, by accepting the evidence of two police officers, which evidence is not disclosed, that the evidence concludes the principal matter on which there was public anxiety, then in all fairness and in all justice we must disclose, and enable others to judge after disclosing, the evidence which was investigated. There were 78 witnesses; all of them are alive.

I do not expect the Joint Under-Secretary to say, "I will publish all this tomorrow." Of course he will not, and of course he cannot. But I ask him to believe that those who are pressing these matters upon him do it with the utmost sincerity and in all good faith. As I said to Skelhorn about the business of the Report, to quote Othello: …nothing extenuate, Nor set down aught in malice. There is no malice behind this. There is only a passionate desire to know what is to be known about what transpired during that tragic night. Nobody can feel on the Report, without the evidence, that there are not at least as many questions raised by the Report as are answered by it.

2.26 p.m.

The Joint Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mr. C. M. Woodhouse)

I am grateful to both the hon. Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Mr. Swingler) and the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. S. Silverman) for the moderation and unquestionable sincerity with which they have put their case, and I am grateful, particularly, to the hon. Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme for giving notice to my right hon. Friend of some of the points which he intended to raise and which I shall briefly deal with during my remarks, although I must apologise to the House in the present circumstances for the inevitability that we shall somewhat overrun the provisionally allotted time.

The hon. Member said that he hoped that there would be an opportunity to debate the Report on a later occasion. This, of course, is not a matter for me but a matter for negotiation through the usual channels, and that is my reason for not dealing, in detail, with any points of substance on the Report raised by the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne. Perhaps I might briefly comment on two points on which he touched. The first was the reliance of Mr. Skelhorn, as he put it, on the police evidence alone in paragraph 33. If the hon. Member reads later paragraphs which appear under the same cross-heading, particularly the latter part of paragraph 43, he will see that reliance is not placed solely on the police but that the medical evidence is corroborative of it.

Mr. S. Silverman

The hon. Member understands that the stress which I was laying on it was that for just that reason the evidence ought to be made available both about paragraph 43 and about paragraph 33.

Mr. Woodhouse

I understand the hon. Member's point. I thought that he did not completely cover the ground in touching on paragraph 33.

In respect of the diary, it is fair to remind the House of what Mr. Skelhorn said in paragraph 99: It is probable, however, that, even if the diary had been examined earlier, no action would have been taken on the information it contained about Mrs. Woolf in view of Mr. Woolf's request that nobody should be informed. I am not proposing that we should debate this Report in detail now, but merely mentioning that there are other points which need to be put before the House in considering the points which the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne raised.

The facts about this very unhappy case are as they were put, temperately, by the hon. Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme. We are all familiar with the general sequence of events which culminated in Mr. Woolf's tragic death and I do not need to repeat them, but I think that it would be useful, in looking at the recital of facts given by the hon. Member which led up to the inquiry, if I examined and explained the considerations which my right hon. Friend had to take into account in deciding the form of the inquiry. The circumstances of Mr. Woolf's death had already been examined three times, in greater or lesser degree of detail, before Mr. Skelhorr was appointed.

They had been examined by the coroner at the inquest on 28th November and 5th December, 1962, when a verdict of accidental death was returned. They had been examined by Detective Superintendent Axon, on the instructions of the Commissioner of Police, and a very full report was submitted by him to my right hon. Friend in August, 1963. Thirdly, they were explored before the Lord Chief Justice on 12th and 13th November, when he refused an application to the Divisional Court for a fresh inquest. In giving judgment on that occasion, the Lord Chief Justice said: There is not a shred of evidence that there was any incident in the police station which would account for any additional injury. Those are facts, but my right hon. Friend was, naturally, anxious that no possible point of doubt about the case should remain unresolved. After meeting an all-party deputation, to which the hon. Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme referred, my right hon. Friend agreed to set up an independent administrative inquiry. He was anxious not only to allay public anxiety about the case, but also to give the Metropolitan Police the opportunity to refute the allegations of brutality which had been made against them in certain quarters following the widespread Press and television publicity which had been given to the case.

I come now to the factors which influenced my right hon. Friend's decision that the inquiry should not be in public. As my right hon. Friend told the House in his statement on 19th December last year, he had no power to compel the attendance of witnesses, and the terms of reference given to Mr. Skelhorn were necessarily limited to the actions of the Metropolitan Police in the case because these were the only matters which had been subject to public criticism. But the success of the inquiry was bound to depend on the evidence not only of the police officers in the case, whose attendance was assured, as the hon. Gentleman pointed out, but also of such witnesses as the medical staff of the two hospitals who had dealt with Mr. Woolf and who would have been within their rights in declining to attend the inquiry.

My right hon. Friend therefore consulted his right hon. Friend the Minister of Health and came to the conclusion that the desired end could best be achieved and a full and frank examination of all the evidence be obtained by ordering the inquiry to be held in private. In fact, all the essential medical witnesses who were available and all the private persons involved in the case did come forward to give evidence, and we join the hon. Gentleman in his tribute to their public spirit. But, in the nature of things—I am sure that both hon. Gentlemen will acknowledge this—we can never know whether those witnesses would have been willing to attend if the inquiry had been held in public. It is certain that they would have been entitled to refuse to attend.

My right hon. Friend is, therefore, satisfied that the decision to hold the inquiry in private was, in these circumstances, the right one and to seek their consent to publish their evidence now would be tantamount to inviting them to agree that he should go back on his word.

The hon. Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme posed the question whether the evidence given before Mr. Skelhorn was confidential in, I take it, the sense that there was anything in the evidence itself such that it would be wrong to disclose it. The answer to that can only be that the witnesses who attended the inquiry would be entitled to insist that the answer to the question is affirmative. Once they were invited to give their evidence in private, they were entitled to accept that their testimony would not be published. This applies to all of them. If the evidence were published, this would, surety, make nonsense of the decision to hold the inquiry in private, and, as I say, it would be a betrayal of the implicit understanding on which the evidence was freely offered.

I am not altogether clear from the criticisms which have been made in the debate whether the suggestion is that Mr. Skelhorn ignored some of the evidence. I should certainly assert the contrary. I am not suggesting that the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne had this in mind, but such an interpretation could, perhaps, be read into some of the observations made. Anyone who reads with an open mind this detailed Report, which runs to 34 closely printed pages, will be bound to feel that it has fairly set out all the facts as they emerge.

Mr. S. Silverman

I should like to make clear what I am saying and what I am not saying. I am saying quite definitely that a considerable part of the time of the inquiry and a large number of the pages of the transcript were devoted to some evidence given by Bell and Keene and evidence on the same matters by other policemen in contradiction of it, to which no reference whatever appears in the Report. I draw no inference from that, but I think that the fact is clear and I would not like it to be in any way overlaid.

Mr. Woodhouse

I take the hon. Gentleman's point, and the last thing I want to do is to misrepresent him; but, of course, this does not bear on the question whether or not the evidence should be published, since my reason for opposing the suggestion of publication lies in the undertaking given by the Home Secretary before the inquiry began.

Mr. S. Silverman

The suggestion being made is that the undertaking applies only to witnesses who were not compellable. When he announced the inquiry, the Home Secretary said that he would take personal responsibility for seeing that the police officers came. Therefore, no question as to the confidential nature of their evidence can possibly arise.

Mr. Woodhouse

I am sorry, but I cannot accept that. The undertaking that the inquiry would be in private was general and comprehensive. It was not limited to some witnesses to the exclusion of others.

Mr. Swingler

Obviously, the Home Secretary has responsibility for the Metropolitan Police and he has power over them. As I understand, he made it a private inquiry to ensure that the medical and lay witnesses would attend. He could have obliged the police witnesses to give evidence in any case, could he not?

Mr. Woodhouse

It is true that he could have obliged the police witnesses to give evidence. It is true, also, that, from the beginning, he gave a general unqualified undertaking that the inquiry would be in private. I must ask the House to allow me to come to a conclusion because we have already over-run our time. That which I have just asserted is a fact which, I think, cannot be put in dispute. The hon. Member for Nelson and Colne, in the proceedings on the Police Bill, himself paid a tribute to the thoroughness of the inquiry, and I think that he has, in spirit, repeated it today.

Mr. S. Silverman

I repeat it now.

Mr. Woodhouse

I am very grateful. As we know, Mr. Skelhorn acquitted the police completely of any suggestion that they used violence towards Mr. Woolf or deliberately maltreated him. That is in general accord with the conclusion reached in the course of the other investigations. In view of the tone of some of the comments made in public during the last year or so, I think this should be emphasised again.

As regards the other matters dealt with in the Report, which were alluded to again by the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne today, the reasons for the failure in the missing persons procedure, already admitted by the Commissioner, are not in dispute. Steps are being taken, as the hon. Gentleman knows, to rectify he defects. The detailed criticisms of certain other aspects of police procedure have either been accepted by the Commissioner or are under further examination.

I wish to say something about the suggestion that some of those named in the Report may feel that they have been explicitly or implicitly censured on unpublished evidence. I must emphasise here, as regards the two police officers, that it has not been felt that there was any warrant for taking disciplinary action against either of them, or against any of the others. For the rest, I have not heard it suggested that the Report was unfair to anyone mentioned. What the Commissioner did in the case of the two police officers mentioned was to see that they were interviewed—one of them was interviewed actually by himself—and given helpful advice on their future action in similar circumstances. It did not seem justifiable to initiate any disciplinary action against them.

Whatever view was taken by particular individuals, however, I do not think that we should be justified in departing from the understanding on which the inquiry was conducted from the first, namely, that, while the Report was to be full and frank—my right hon. Friend said from the beginning that, whatever it contained, he would publish it—the inquiry itself and, therefore, the record of its proceedings was to be private.

I appreciate that there was a widespread call at the time for a full inquiry into the case. There have now been three separate investigations. We are sometimes told that the police feel that they are unfairly harried by those who are determined to believe the worst of them. If it is suggested that in this case further steps are required to satisfy the public, I can only say that this is not my impression.

I do not believe that there is any strong public concern that the facts have not been brought out or that anything further is needed to establish the facts. I have no doubt that hon. Members would not wish to quesion the impartiality and care with which Mr. Skelhorn assessed the evidence he heard. I hope that the three suspicions to which the hon. Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme referred may be regarded as having been removed by the very fair and thorough examination of all the evidence by Mr. Skelhorn.

My right hon. Friend is convinced—and I hope that the House will take this assurance in a co-operative spirit—that no useful purpose would be served in publishing the proceedings of this inquiry and that it would, in terms of the undertaking he gave in the beginning, be quite wrong to do so.