West Midlands Police (Hansard, 3 May 1990)

§ 7. Mr. Livingstone
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department when he received the special branch document ref. No. 10368/74; and what action he has taken.

§ Mr. Waddington
As I said on 30 March in reply to a question from my hon. Friend the Member for Newark (Mr. Alexander), a copy of this document was passed to me by the West Midlands police on 23 January 1990. I examined the document carefully and concluded that it did not constitute new evidence which might cast doubt on the safety of the convictions of the Birmingham Six.

§ Mr. Livingstone
As the document is a special branch record of the confession of a confirmed member of the IRA, who was then convicted for his crimes, is not the Home Secretary disturbed that on page 3 the individual names a member of the IRA, Mr. Michael Hayes, whom he met in December 1974 and who told him that he had planted one of the two Birmingham pub bombs? As the confession has been in the hands of the police and of special branch for over a decade, how can it be that it did not lead to doubts in the Home Secretary's mind and to a full investigation? Surely this calls into doubt the soundness of the conviction. Surely now is the time for a full public inquiry.

§ Mr. Waddington
One thing the police report certainly was not was a confession—it was a report on information provided by a person arrested for terrorist offences in the 1970s. The Home Office made inquiries about the document after a Granada television programme last November which referred to its existence, but the hon. Gentleman has got it entirely wrong. The men referred to in the document had been included in the original police investigation, but not sufficient evidence was found against them. Therefore the production of the document by Granada was a non-event and I was able to recognise it as such.

§ Mr. Barry Field
Will my right hon. and learned Friend ask special branch to investigate why it is that if those men are wrongly convicted they always face the wall whenever they appear in front of a prison governor because they claim that they are political prisoners and not prisoners of British justice?

§ Mr. Waddington
I do not think that I am capable of commenting on that. I have made my position absolutely clear: if material is put before me which it is suggested is new evidence that may cast doubt on the safety of the convictions, I am prepared to look at those matters. Here is a clear case where a great deal of fuss has been made about a document which includes the names of certain people who it is quite clear were investigated by the police way back in 1974, before the trial, when no sufficient evidence was found against them.