§ Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Douglas Hogg.]
10·40 pm§ Mr. David Winnick (Walsall, North)A "bizarre chain of events" was how a leader in The Guardian described what occurred to Mrs. Madeline Haigh after she wrote a letter to a local newspaper in the west midlands about cruise missiles. Mrs. Haigh had also written letters to the Ministry of Defence.
The case has been discussed by the west midlands police committee, which agreed a motion stating that it was most undesirable for people to be subject to investigation on the basis of letters to the press. The chief constable has said that the decision to investigate Mrs. Haigh was mistaken. He did not seek at the police committee meeting at least to defend the decision and stated that he did not support what was done in this case. However, no action has been taken against those involved in the initial investigation.
I hope that the Minister will take the opportunity to say that the decision to investigate Mrs. Haigh was, indeed., mistaken. One of my reasons for holding the debate is to invite the Minister to give his views on that action and to agree with the chief constable and the police committee that the decision to investigate Mrs. Haigh was mistaken.
The events began with a letter from Mrs. Haigh about cruise in the local press in July 1981: It stated:
The electorate will be forced to resort to public demonstration and protest to air their views.Mrs. Haigh's name and address was included.
The Minister will, I hope, agree that public demonstrations and protests are part of the democratic rights which we hold very dear in this country and which separate a democracy such as ours from dictatorships,
Later followed a sequence of events which have caused much anxiety and personal distress to Mrs. Haigh and her husband. Two men called at her house when she and her husband were out. They told the babysitter that they were plain clothes policemen. The following day the two men returned. Mrs. Haigh was asked questions by one of thern who said that he was from the Birmingham CIL). His questions related, not to cruise or other defence matters, but to a mail order firm and possible fraud. Mrs. Haigh rang the firm mentioned by the caller the following day and it had no knowledge of the matter.
Understandably, Mrs. Haigh rang the local police station in Sutton Coldfield. A police officer called and took a statement from her. She told the officer that the two men could have been from the Special Branch. She made no secret of the fact that she had written to the Ministry of Defence and the newspapers about defence matters. Mrs. Haigh had nothing to hide. People who write to the press with their name and address cannot be trying to conceal their political views.
When nothing emerged, Mrs. Haigh got in touch with her Member of Parliament, the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr. Fowler), who is here to listen to the debate. The right hon. Gentleman received a reply from the chief constable dated 7 December 1982. The chief constable told him that the inquiries by his police force showed that Mrs. Haigh was not the subject of any police inquiries. It is interesting that the letter ended by saying 541 that his officers, in conducting inquiries, must properly disclose their identity. That should always be so, I would hope, not only for the west midlands police.
The matter might have ended there, as I am sure that the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield will agree, but Mrs. Haigh is, indeed, a determined person. She wrote again to her MP, stating that she was deeply concerned about the whole affair, as she had every right to be.
The right hon. Gentleman then wrote again to the chief constable. In May this year, the right hon. Gentleman wrote to Mrs. Haigh saying that he had just heard from the chief constable that this time they had been able to trace the two callers. They were in fact police officers, as Mrs. Haigh had believed all along. Later, the police explained to her that the investigation had been by Special Branch, following up what she had written to the newspaper. She was also told—and this will be of some interest to the Minister — that it was quite normal to follow up inquiries about people who write to the press on controversial topics. Without Mrs. Haigh's persistence and determination, the truth would never have emerged over this squalid business.
Was the investigation into Mrs. Haigh a one-off affair, or is it indeed the custom for the Special Branch to carry out investigations of those who write letters to the press expressing disagreement with official policy on controversial matters such as cruise?
Sometimes when one raises complaints regarding the police there is a tendency for Conservative Members—although I am not suggesting that the Minister will follow the same line—to say that the Opposition are engaging in police-baiting. I should therefore make my own view clear. It is a view that is, I am sure, shared by all my right hon and hon. Friends. I believe that the large majority of police officers carry out their duties in a proper and conscientious manner.
Why was Mrs. Haigh investigated, and why was she lied to? It may be argued that if the facts had been given in the first place and there had been no lie, the matter might have ended there. My view is that even if she had been told initially—as she should have been—that the men were from the Special Branch and were investigating her because of what she had written to the press, and perhaps in letters to the Ministry of Defence, there would still have been no justification for such an inquiry.
What is the policy of the Home Office and the police forces on such inquiries? I read the comments of the chief constable in one of the west midlands newspapers, the Express and Star. He said that on previous unconnected occasions he had turned down Home Office approaches to his force to pursue such inquiries. What is the official policy on such inquiries? Mrs. Haigh does not belong to any extremist organisation that wishes to replace parliamentary democracy with dictatorship, and she had not been alleged to do so. She holds strong views on defence matters. She has every right to hold such views and to communicate them. If she wishes to do so, living in a democracy, she can protest publicly and demonstrate with her fellow citizens. That is not a crime.
I am worried about what one might call Eastern European habits, such as following up those who write on matters such as cruise when they disagree with Government policy, making inquiries of citizens and about 542 citizens, and not telling the truth. One associates such things with Eastern Europe, although there it could not be a letter in the press which would set off such inquiries.
In my view, Mrs. Haigh's civil liberties have been seriously infringed. I hope that the Minister will agree. I hope that he will apologise for what has happened to her. Mrs. Haigh's civil liberties should be the concern of all hon. Members, not least to the Ministers at the Home Office.
§ The Minister of State, Home Office (Mr. Douglas Hurd)I am glad that the hon. Member for Walsall, North (Mr. Winnick) has raised this subject. He has done so in a temperate manner. As he said, there has been considerable public interest and anxiety in this case, and it is helpful to have the opportunity to put the facts on record. I shall try to do that in an unvarnished way.
The chief constable of the west midlands presented a report about the case of Mrs. Haigh to a meeting of his police authority on 16 November this year. It might be useful for me carefully but briefly to outline the facts of the case as set out in Sir Philip Knights' report. As far as I was able to follow the hon. Gentleman's narrative, those findings do not contradict the basis of what he said.
In August 1981 it came to the attention of West Midlands police that Mrs. Haigh had written to a newspaper in terms which were interpreted as indicating that she might be a person who was prepared to support, or get involved in, public protests which were likely to become violent. One of the responsibilities of Special Branch officers is to assist their uniformed colleagues to discharge their responsibilities for maintaining the Queen's peace, more particularly by analysing and assessing information of this type. A Special Branch officer was deputed to follow up the report about Mrs. Haigh.
On 20 October 1981, Mrs. Haigh telephoned Sutton Coldfield police station to say that, earlier that evening, two men who stated that they were police officers had called at her house and inquired of the babysitter whether they could see Mrs. Haigh. On being told that she was not at home, they said that would return during the daytime. She tried to establish whether it was known who the officers were and what the inquiry was about. She was informed the following morning that there was no trace of any officers from Sutton Coldfield having called on her and she was advised that, if the men returned, she should check their warrant cards.
The following afternoon, one of the men returned and inquired about a sum of money which was alleged to be owing to a catalogue firm. On being told by Mrs. Haigh that the debt was not hers, he left. Later that afternoon, Mrs. Haigh telephoned the firm concerned to be informed that it knew nothing of any such inquiry and that it did not work in that way. Mrs. Haigh so notified the police and the normal inquiries made in such cases were undertaken by a local uniformed officer. His conclusion, which was notified to Mrs. Haigh in December 1981, was that it had not been possible to identify the men who had called on her.
In October 1982, following receipt of a letter from my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Social Services as Mrs. Haigh's Member of Parliament expressing her continuing anxiety about the visit made to her, the chief constable asked for further inquiries to be made. The 543 detective sergeant who undertook the inquiry eventually reported that he had spoken to Mrs. Haigh and her babysitter at length and that she had accepted that the caller could quite likely have been a bogus police officer as police inquiries had failed to trace a genuine inquiry. However, as one of Mrs. Haigh's worries, as reported by her Member of Parliament. was a fear that there could be a link between the visit to her and the disappearance of two letters which she had sent to the Ministry of Defence, he suggested that the papers should be forwarded to the Special Branch. That was done and the papers were returned to CID Administration, endorsed to the effect that there was no record in Special Branch of such an inquiry having been undertaken. The chief constable's reply to my right hon. Friend was based on that information.
Mrs. Haigh was still worried about the affair and, in February 1983, on receipt of a further letter from her which was forwarded by my right hon. Friend, additional inquiries were undertaken by a detective superintendent. Arrangements were made for individual members of Special Branch to be interviewed, and it was then revealed that the two men who had called on Mrs. Haigh in October 1981 were from Special Branch. In the light of that information, the chief constable arranged for a senior officer to call on Mrs. Haigh to offer his apologies for the embarrassment and inconvenience that she had been caused by the police's failure to identify the two men earlier. He also asked an assistant chief constable to inquire into the reasons for this failure and to establish the justification for making the original inquiry of Mrs Haigh.
This inquiry established the background to the original inquiry which I have already mentioned. It also identified a number of weaknesses in the subsequent inquiries made in response to Mrs. Haigh's concern. I shall list those weaknesses as recorded in the chief constable's report. First, the original inquiry into Mrs. Haigh's report, conducted by Sutton Coldfield officers, was deficient in that the babysitter was not interviewed and no statement was taken from her. Secondly, a sergeant at Sutton Coldfield who was approached in the course of these initial inquiries suspected that the officers might have been from Special Branch but chose not to mention this to anyone. Thirdly, the detective chief inspector and detective inspector involved in the inquiry in the autumn of 1982 suspected that the callers might have been from Special Branch but did not follow up this suspicion as determinedly as they might have done. Fourthly, when senior officers in Special Branch were asked to check their records in 1982 they did so, but no information was there because of the policy in the west midlands police to destroy after six months records of inquiries which have revealed nothing of significant interest. Finally, there was insufficient evidence in the papers to justify the negative statement in the chief constable's reply to my right hon. Friend early in 1983 that Mrs. Haigh could be assured that
she had not been the subject of inquiry".On the basis of this report and the weaknesses that it identified and which I listed, the chief constable concluded that whilst the original inquiry in 1981 had been authorised by a senior officer in accordance with force orders the original information—I emphasise this point—did not warrant the attention that it had been given. The chief constable has now made arrangements to ensure that inquiries of this nature are authorised only by an officer of the rank of chief inspector or above. The chief constable further concluded that the manner in which the officer had 544 conducted his inquiries was unprofessional and not in accordance with the detailed instructions given to all such officers about the way in which they should carry out their duties and discharge their responsibilities. The officers involved were advised accordingly, but the chief constable did not consider that any formal disciplinary action was warranted. Finally, the chief constable concluded that there was no evidence to show that any deliberate action had been taken to hide the fact of Special Branch involvement or to mislead my right hon. Friend. Rather, it appeared that there had been an unreadiness on the part of divisional officers to face up to the possiblity that Special Branch had been involved. This being so, the chief constable decided that formal disciplinary proceedings against the officers concerned in this instance were not justified either, but that they should be given appropriate advice. This was done, and Mrs. Haigh was informed accordingly.
The full report by the chief constable, which I have summarised, was presented to the west midlands police authority. It demonstrates that there is no "conspiracy of silence" about this case. The chief constable has acknowledged that mistakes were made, and he has taken steps to ensure that they do not occur again. The matter was discussed, of course, by the police authority, and the meeting that it held on 16 November was able to conclude by reaffirming its confidence in the force as a whole and in the chief constable himself. We share that confidence. We believe that it would be wrong to allow a mistake of this kind to detract from the overall performance of the west midlands Special Branch or that of others.
§ Mr. WinnickPerhaps the Minister will take the opportunity to pay tribute to Mrs. Haigh, who would not have found out the facts had she not been so persistent. I hope that the Minister will praise her for that. However, leaving aside the circumstances of why Mrs. Haigh was lied to, why was she the subject of investigation in the first place? Is it normal to investigate those who write letters on controversial subjects, disagreeing with Government policy, where they do not try to conceal their identity? Is it true that this was not a one-off affair? Was the only difference in this case the fact that the police officers concealed their identity?
§ Mr. HurdI shall come to the hon. Gentleman's more general question in a moment. I certainly acknowledge the persistence which Mrs. Haigh understandably showed in this matter, supported by my right hon. Friend, which helped to bring the facts to light. I remind the hon. Gentleman of what I said a few moments ago—that one conclusion of the chief constable was that the original information did not warrant the attention that it was given. If he studies that sentence, he will see its implications for his question.
The fact that someone holds particular opinions cannot, by itself, justify action by the police. Special Branch inquiries are made within the framework of its specific responsibilities. They arise fundamentally from the chief officer's responsibility for the preservation of the Queen's peace. For that purpose, Special Branch officers may gather information about threats to public order, espionage, acts of terrorism, sabotage, and the action of subversive individuals and organisations. Special Branch officers may also provide armed personal protection for 545 people at risk, undertake functions at courts in connection with terrorists and other criminals, and undertake inquiries in relation to naturalisation and immigration.
The hon. Gentleman asked me specific questions about the operations of the Special Branch, which I cannot answer, because the nature of the work means that, unlike most other police work, it cannot be open to similar public scrutiny. Successive Governments, and chief officers of police throughout the country, have recognised that it would not be in the public interest to give public accounts of security matters. If they did, the effectiveness of the work of Special Branch officers would be jeopardised or damaged.
Each police force in England and Wales has its own Special Branch, but the Metropolitan Police Special Branch has responsibility for Irish Republican extremist activity throughout Great Britain. Each Special Branch is responsible only for what goes on in the area in which it operates. Members of Special Branches are police officers who are subject to the same terms and conditions of service, including the same discipline code and complaints procedure as any other police officer. They are responsible, through the head of their branch, and any intervening supervisory ranks in the force structure, to the chief officer, and the work of Special Branches is funded in exactly the same way as is the work of other parts of the police force, with an identical division between central Government and local government contributions. I wish to make that clear, not because the hon. Gentleman ventured on to this ground, but because some of the reports on the case revealed some misunderstanding.
I need not tell the House this week, of all weeks, how important is the work of the members of Special Branches. We live under the shadow of violence and every now and then, we realise with particular vividness the importance of accurate information.
546 As I have explained, Special Branch duties cover a much wider spread of responsibilities than the threat from terrorism. They involve the Special Branch in much routine, painstaking and time-consuming work.
§ Mr. WinnickI recognise the work of the Special Branch on terrorism and pay tribute to it. However, no allegations connected with terrorism were made about Mrs. Haigh and there is a danger of abuse. The Minister said that holding a particular view is not an offence. That is true, but suppose a person puts pen to paper, as Mrs. Haigh did, or takes part in a demonstration about cruise missiles. Is not there a danger that, unless much more control is exercised, there can be abuses that go far wider than the case that we are discussing?
§ Mr. HurdWhere powers exist, there is always a danger that they may be abused. That is why I have emphasised that members of the Special Branch are police officers and are subject to the same discipline and complaints procedure as other police officers.
I hope that the House will agree that ordinary citizens are entitled to expect the police to do all in their power to maintain law and order. The uniformed divisions cannot do that alone, and the support of Special Branches throughout the country is vital to that work. Mistakes were made in the case that we are discussing. They have been investigated, acknowledged and corrected—in a way that would be inconceivable in the countries with which the hon. Member drew a parallel.
I am satisfied that chief officers of police are fully aware of the need to ensure that the work of Special Branches is done under proper control, in accordance with their specific duties and responsibilities.
§ Question put and agreed to.
§ Adjourned accordingly at seven minutes past Eleven o' clock.