Important note: This is an archive of the website that was formerly at www.morrisinquiry.gov.uk. It is being hosted on the MPA website for archival purposes only and may contain out-of-date information.

This resource is from the Transcripts section. This section contains a transcript of the private session with CC, on 19 April 2004.

Sections available here:

• Transcript of private session: Mr CC
  • Questions by Miss Weekes

This transcript is also available with original line and page numbering.

Transcript of private session: Mr CC

The name of this witness has been changed, and his submission redacted, to avoid the identification of the individuals and any third parties.

Monday, 19 April 2004
12.20 pm

Sir William Morris: Mr C, good morning to you. Please make yourself comfortable, have some water if you so wish, and, when you are ready and all set, we will begin.

How do you like to be called: Mr C, C?

Mr C: C is fine, thanks.

Sir William Morris: That is good. C, first of all, can I formally thank you for accepting our invitation to attend the Inquiry to give evidence and for letting us have your written submission, which we have found extremely helpful?

I do appreciate that any process to some of our witnesses might be somewhat daunting, so I thought it would be helpful if I set out very briefly how we propose to conduct the hearing this morning. But first, let me introduce myself and the other members of my panel: I am Sir Bill Morris, recently retired General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union. As you can see, there are three of us; on my right is Sir Anthony Burden, who recently retired as Chief Constable of the South Wales Constabulary, after a very long and distinguished career in the police service, and on my left is Miss Anesta Weekes QC. Anesta is an eminent barrister, she is also a recorder and a part-time chairperson of employment tribunals. She was also counsel to the Lawrence Inquiry.

As you know, C, we have been asked by the Metropolitan Police Authority to conduct an independent inquiry into professional standards and employment matters in the Metropolitan Police Service. Quite deliberately, we have taken as our focus the MPS as an organisation and not the individuals that make up the MPS.

Nevertheless, we need to hear from individuals in order to understand how they are affected by the policies, practices and procedures that govern how the MPS works.

Although we are a public inquiry, we have decided to conduct this hearing and some others, where we hear from individuals, in private; the reason for this is we are very keen to hear from individuals like your good self, who have had problems with the way that the MPS operates, but we also understand that some of our witnesses might be reluctant to answer questions if they feel that the Met is a fly on the wall, listening in.

I hope you find these arrangements helpful, and that you feel sufficiently confident to speak freely to us this morning.

Although we are meeting in private today, as I have said, we are a public inquiry, and that means that it may be necessary for us to seek further clarification from others about what you say to us and what you say in writing today. If we decide to seek any further clarification, we will do so without any identification of your good selves whatsoever.

Also let me assure you that we will try to cause you the least possible inconvenience if we have to seek further clarification, and we will only do so after seeking your permission.

The Inquiry we are conducting is just that, an inquiry; it is not inquisitorial, and there are no adversaries here, so it is not adversarial in nature or character.

We are very keen to enquire into the issues raised by our terms of reference, so that we can make appropriate recommendations for further good practice within the Met, rather than concentrating on making criticisms.

We have no wish to go back over the details of what has happened to you, because we have read your written submission carefully, and have a clear idea of the events.

What we now want to do is to ask some questions which enable you to share with us your experience that we want to draw on in order to facilitate and add value to our work. At the end of these introductory remarks, one of my colleagues, in this instance it is Miss Weekes, will lead the questions on behalf of all of us, and then the remainder of the panel, myself and Sir Anthony, may have one or two supplementary questions to put to you.

When we have finished our questions, before you depart, I will offer you the opportunity for a brief closing comment if you so wish.

It is right that I should just draw your attention to the fact that a transcript is being taken, so that we have a proper record of what our witnesses say to us by way of evidence.

We are also hoping to publish this transcript, together with your written submission, on our website in the next few days, but we will only do that after we have taken out any reference to your name or, indeed, other personal details, in order to ensure that it contains no information which identifies you or any other individuals.

But before I ask Miss Weekes to begin the formal questions, for the benefit of the transcript, can I invite you, please, to just formally introduce yourself to the Inquiry?

Mr C: Certainly, my name is CC, I am a detective constable with the Metropolitan Police, currently working in [Redacted]. I joined the police in [Redacted], worked for about eight or nine years on [Redacted], serving as both uniform and CID roles, left the service in [Redacted] following a discipline hearing, and returned in [Redacted].

Sir William Morris: Thank you very much indeed. I will ask Miss Weekes to lead on the questions.

Questions by Miss Weekes

Miss Weekes: Thank you.

C, thank you very much for your submission, which I have read. If I can just very, very briefly summarise it. Then I want to turn to the issues which you have highlighted, and to set them against our terms of reference for your comments; if you can help us with what is the better way forward for dealing with situations like yours.

Way back in [Redacted], you had been on duty quite properly with a colleague of yours, you had been following a car which you might have suspected may have been a car that you were interested in, but decided that it was not, after a fairly short length of time. It happened to contain three female Afro-Caribbean women.

But to summarise the story shortly, one of the women essentially got out and had a discussion with you about why you had been following them, and you gave your reasons as a police officer as to why, but made it absolutely clear there was no difficulty, you were not going to arrest her, but effectively, you tried to deal with it constructively at the time.

Out of that came an allegation by her, she is a member of the public, that you had used racially-abusive language towards her, but most important to your case, she said at the time a single word was being used.

Out of all of that came a disciplinary allegation against you. Now, first of all, I think you would agree that, because it was a member of the public raising that, it was going to have to be investigated.

Mr C: Yes.

Miss Weekes: And you accept that?

Mr C: Absolutely, yes.

Miss Weekes: That is not the nature of your complaint at all. But what was going on at the time was the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, and the Met being, as far as you were concerned, quite sensitive about race issues, and you feel that that rather overspilt into the way your disciplinary was being handled; have I summarised that correctly?

Mr C: Correct, yes.

Miss Weekes: All right. Now can I, first of all, deal with the two to three main issues that you raise? The first is the integrity of the investigation officers, the integrity of the process generally; how they took statements, your right to disclosure, things like that.

Mr C: Yes.

Miss Weekes: Press coverage, you have raised, and then finally, I think I would like to ask you about welfare generally and how you were introduced back into the force, having been exonerated by the Home Office report.

First of all, can I deal with the integrity of the investigating officers themselves? You raise that in your submissions, and essentially, you have remained very concerned about the integrity of those officers; whether they can be trusted, whether they were fair.

If someone else was in your situation, whether it was race or not, because it could be any particular issue that an officer is complained about, how do you say one can ensure the unbiased fair approach of an investigating officer? Because the rules say there should be impartial investigation.

Mr C: There should. Part of the problem I have found is the officers investigating complaints do not follow the same guidelines that everybody else in the Metropolitan Police follows, in terms of criminal investigations.

As a detective myself, I am involved in criminal investigations now, and all of the inquiries that we do we have to put on to a computer-based system, detailing every contact we have with the witness, what we do during that contact with the witness, and making sure that everything is there, disclosable and retrievable.

Complaints branch officers do not investigate in this way, they make written records, and there is no test to ensure that what they are writing is correct as to what they are actually doing on a day-to-day basis, which is a problem that I encountered, insofar as some of the witnesses were interviewed and there was not any note at all made that the officers had even spoken to them.

In my particular case, the main witness was spoken to two days after the original complaint; no record was made anywhere, the first note being made some two months later, which compromised my position, and would not be acceptable in any other criminal inquiry.

Miss Weekes: Now let us just deal with that. That essentially boils down to, procedurally, how an investigation should be conducted, in the same way that you are governed by PACE as to how you investigate an allegation of assault, murder or whatever it is.

What does exist at the moment that should draw investigations into line, and should ensure that there is a set standard as to how investigators from DPS deal with investigating disciplinary complaints? I mean, is there a guideline, is there a statute, is there a procedure, or do they make it up as they go along?

Mr C: My personal view is they do make it up as they go along, they are given greater scope, if you like, to do what they want to get the result that they need.

Miss Weekes: Is there something in place? If I were to ask professional standards to send us the current guideline procedure or document that governs precisely how they should approach the different types of complaints, would I get one?

Mr C: I am certainly not aware of one. It is something that earlier on in my case, I wanted to find out what their parameters are, and we never really got anything.

Miss Weekes: Did you ask at the time?

Mr C: I did not ask directly, we made discussions amongst and my own barrister, and I think the view was that they have to act within PACE and they have to act within the police discipline code and, apart from that, there is no set procedure as to how they should investigate.

Miss Weekes: Would you prefer one to be in place?

Mr C: I think there should be one in place.

Miss Weekes: Let us suppose we have got that in place, does it guarantee that the officer will behave – using fairly simple, straightforward language – because you can have a written document, but if he takes a view that he is not going to follow the written document, what is the sanction? What is going to make sure that your suggestion is adhered to?

Mr C: I think full disclosure. I think that, in normal investigations, the fact that an officer knows that everything he does is disclosable, can be tested, can be analysed by other people, means that they exercise their powers with much greater caution.

With a complaints investigation, they do not disclose what they do, they withhold lots of information, they actually – in my case, they withheld information that was very important to my defence.

Miss Weekes: One of the things you mentioned was the background to the complainant, and why she might be unreliable.

Mr C: Yes, that, and the fact that there were, as I say, interviews that I was not told of. The case that was presented to me was a very basic simple one, basically three statements, which I had to accept, but in the background, there was an awful lot more going on which they refused to disclose. Most importantly, of course, the closing officer's report in my case, which said that there was serious concern about whether these people should be believed.

Miss Weekes: What happened at the time in relation to your lawyer's ability to ask for disclosure of any item? Could the lawyer have asked, and did they ask?

Mr C: We repeatedly asked. We repeatedly asked for disclosure on the complaints history of the person that made the complaint against me, and we were lied to and told that she had not made a complaint, when the fact of the matter is that she had. Ultimately, we were not given the details of that complaint. We repeatedly asked, over a period of years, for disclosure of the previous case that this woman had been involved in.

We managed to glean that she was subject to a surveillance operation by a national squad, and had made complaints about the integrity of those officers. We wanted to know the details of that case, in order – because, in our view, we thought the origin, the reason for the complaint was that she thought I was part of a surveillance team.

So we asked for disclosure of the case papers, and we were blankly refused that throughout; we also asked for disclosure of practical operations that were conducted against me, and again, that was refused on numerous occasions, and indeed has never been fully addressed.

Miss Weekes: And who did you make these requests to? Was that to DPS, or was it to the disciplinary board themselves?

Mr C: It was to DPS. It was to the case officer, the inspector and chief inspector that was dealing with my case. The requests also went to the chief inspector that presented the case against me, and also went to [Redacted] [Redacted].

Miss Weekes: How would you suggest that that could be improved? You and I know, because I sit part-time in a Crown Court and you are a police officer, that matters of disclosure and fairness of what an accused person is told is usually dealt with by a ruling by the judge; the parties come to court and you make your application. But that is in a Crown Court.

Now how might the system be improved in relation to your right to know information that could discredit a complaint against you?

Mr C: I think that there should be a great deal more openness. I really do not see why the closing officer's report in a investigation remains a secret document. That is a final assessment of the investigating officer. I see absolutely no reason why that should not be disclosed. In my particular case, that was very important, because it undermined the case, and yet that was ignored.

Not only was it not disclosed to me, I understand it was not disclosed to the Police Complaints Authority either. In terms of other disclosure issues – and, of course, I understand that there are sometimes going to be issues of public interest immunity, and I do not have a problem with that, but I do have a problem whereby the requests are just ignored, and when you are lied to – and basically a smokescreen goes up in order to prevent you getting to the information, which, in my particular case, they knew existed, and they knew was going to go in my favour.

Ultimately, we did keep pushing, and it took until [Redacted], before we could really push the issues of – specifically the criminality of the complainant concerned, and a large number of reports went towards the Home Office panel, and they decided that a public interest immunity did apply. And that is absolutely is fine, I am happy, in that instance, that it went before them, they were able to see it and make their judgement as to whether I could see it, and I am happy with that judgment.

Miss Weekes: Well, who would be the best person or what kind of set-up do we need, in terms of the disciplinary process, to ensure that, at some stage, you or your representative can ask for all the items of disclosure, and a proper ruling is made upon it? Where does that fit in, and who should be doing that?

Mr C: That is a difficult one for me to answer, but I do think that in terms of investigations, I think it would be better if there were a better legal team within CIB, as opposed to it just being investigators who may make gut reaction decisions. They could do with some properly legally trained people in there, as we have now in police stations. I work in a police station where we have a CPS lawyer working as part of the CID.

Miss Weekes: That is the new charging, is it not?

Mr C: It is, and it is a system that works. CIB is just another investigative wing of the police station, they should have lawyers within that who can advise them of the legality of what they are doing.

Miss Weekes: You will probably be aware that independent persons may soon, after some more investigation and organisation, sit on the board for disciplinary hearings, along with two police officers. Is that going to be an improvement, if, for example, you came before such a composed panel, and asked for disclosure?

Mr C: I cannot see it being a disadvantage. I certainly was not very happy sitting before three police officers and later sitting before one police officer, in the two internal hearings I had. I did not think that they approached it impartially. I think they had an agenda. That was my view at the first hearing. At the second hearing, my grounds of appeal were not even read by the officer that heard the case, which he grandly declared at the opening.

Miss Weekes: But your point, the department of professional standards should have legally qualified persons within it, perhaps goes much more to your insecurities that, when legal issues arise, and matters which would involve weighing up fairness and impartiality, you are not sure you want to entrust that to a police officer investigating.

Mr C: Again, it is a very difficult one, because I know the views held within the organisation and outside the organisation. Outside, I know that the public are not necessarily happy that the police investigates itself all of the time, and rightly or wrongly, people question whether that is a proper system, probably quite rightly.

Again, internally, I think that whilst there should be police officers involved in some of the investigations, particularly the criminal ones, there needs to be a balance with the rights of the employee, which is what we are, which I think is often very much forgotten, that you can – you are working for an organisation, for a large period of time, a number of years, and you are trusted and well-regarded, and all of a sudden, you become the suspect by that organisation, and the balance seems to go between you being a suspect, and, at the same time, still being an employee.

Miss Weekes: Just dealing, finally, again with the process itself, we dealt briefly with the integrity of the officers themselves and your suggestions for a recognised code or procedural requirements for investigating cases, can I ask about the disciplinary process itself? Is there anything about the day or the days that you have spent within the disciplinary process, you and your lawyers in front of a panel, that you can comment upon, any particular issue that has left its mark on you that could be improved?

Mr C: Well, it is a very uncomfortable day, going up to Tintagel House where they hear the meetings. You are not made welcome, you are not made to feel comfortable whilst you are up there. None of the witnesses you bring are made to feel comfortable. I can certainly say that nobody who came up to support me was given any tour of the facilities or the buildings, they were not given proper waiting space, they were not offered any refreshments at all.

So in terms of the day, stressful anyway, but not made any better by the treatment that any of us received whilst we were up there.

Miss Weekes: The history of the incident began in [Redacted]–

Mr C: Could I just mention something else with regards to disclosure and CIB? One of the things I also had a problem with, in terms of disclosure, was the disclosure of practical operations against me, which never happened, I never received disclosure of that.

My concern is that, at the time, I believe that there were certain types of inquiry, whereby CIB were initiating proactive investigations and surveillance and integrity testing against officers whereby had it been a normal criminal inquiry, the guidelines in place would have actually prevented them from doing it.

Starkly, if you are integrity tested and you fail it, they will use it against you, but if you pass it, they then suppress it.

Miss Weekes: You say, obviously for your reasons, that is wrong.

Mr C: That is absolutely wrong, because if you have been tested and passed the test, as part of a disciplinary investigation, then you should know about it. But there is also the problem with whether these tests should actually be going on at all.

Certainly, at the moment, I know that these tests do continue, and they do not necessarily comply with RIPA, and, despite the advice within the organisation from the departments that were meant to ensure that everybody in the organisation complies with RIPA, there are warnings going to CIB telling them that they should not really be doing this, and yet they continue with these and, presumably, continue to suppress the existence of them.

Miss Weekes: Just two things coming out of that, because it is an important point, you have now mentioned it: I take it you would agree that there is an important aspect of the Met maintaining the integrity of their police officers; that is, they say, not negotiable.

Mr C: I agree, yes.

Miss Weekes: And maintaining professional standards, so the message goes out to the members of the public, "We take steps to ensure, on a regular basis, that the integrity is not negotiable", you agree with that?

Mr C: Yes.

Miss Weekes: So the principle of being able to test that your officers are behaving themselves and maintaining integrity is also something you would not disagree with?

Mr C: No, I would not disagree with that.

Miss Weekes: It is the method.

Mr C: The method, yes.

Miss Weekes: How do you say that should be improved?

Mr C: It needs to be within the scope of the law, and if we have RIPA, then it has to be within RIPA, and it has to be clearly legal and proportionate to what you are actually investigating.

I do not know exactly the integrity tests that I was subjected to, although I am reasonably well informed to what they were, and they were two methods of practical investigation against me which had nothing to do with racism, whilst I was being investigated for making racial comments, proactive – and I do not know this for a fact. I say I am well informed, but the practical operation against me was to see how well I dealt with registered informants. That had nothing to do with what I was being investigated about.

Miss Weekes: Who is going to double-check on this? You raise again an important point I was going to come to: proportionality, and are you being tested according to acceptable guidelines? Because it would not be right for officers to go on a fishing expedition to try and find out extra things, and that is something we have in mind on some of our high profile cases. But who is going to double-check the officer who conducts what I might call – in inverted commas – the covert investigation of you?

Mr C: Potentially, the checks are already there, because there is an RIPA office at New Scotland Yard, there are publications about how to properly conduct covert operations. I actually noted very recently that in the covert journal, which is a monthly journal which talks about proper conduct of covert operations, they specifically talk about integrity testing in discipline matters, and warn against it.

So the test is there; the department that has the specialist knowledge is there, but is it actually being listened to, or is it being ignored? I think at the moment it is largely being ignored.

Miss Weekes: But in relation to what is before us today, you would like an ability, when officers are disciplined, to be able to call up any integrity testing that has been conducted, and, if it is in favour of the officer, that it should be disclosed. That is your basic point.

Mr C: Yes.

Miss Weekes: Can I just go back to two issues really? One is the approach that the Met take to race issues generally. I think I am right in saying that your submission raises the oversensitivity of the Met to race issues; am I right?

Mr C: Yes.

Miss Weekes: And do you think, currently, that this is still the case, that they are oversensitive and sometimes overreact whenever it is a race issue?

Mr C: Yes, I think they do.

Miss Weekes: But they do not do that in other situations necessarily?

Mr C: Not necessarily, no. I think they are very – cautious is not the word, they are very overzealous sometimes around these issues. They never seem to get it quite right, they either overreact or do not do anything at all.

Miss Weekes: We have heard evidence in relation to line management, that line managers suddenly become rigid and fearful and they will not line manage ethnic minority officers because they are worried about allegations made against them, that they have got it wrong, or that they are racist. So that is one extreme, and you say yours is the other.

Mr C: Mm.

Miss Weekes: A member of the public makes an allegation, and you say there was an overreaction.

Mr C: Yes. I mean, it is fair to say that there is a lot of fear within the Metropolitan Police around the issues of racism and being labelled racist, and exactly how you deal with racist issues. That was certainly the case before I left. You know, at the time of The MacPherson Inquiry, everybody was acutely aware of the criticisms that were being made, and most people in the organisation knew that most of the criticisms were fair comment, but everyone was very concerned about how this was actually going to affect the organisation, how it was actually going to affect individuals within it.

Whilst a lot of the points were fair, the fall-out probably was not, and I think there is that same fear within the organisation now, that certainly, when it comes to issues of race, you certainly, as an officer, do not want to be on the receiving end of any kind of complaint regarding race, whether it be inside or outside the organisation.

Miss Weekes: What is the way forward on this? Because it clearly is not helpful that this is the current culture within the Met on what is their flagship policy of diversity. What do you suggest should be some of the approaches that might help to improve things?

Mr C: I think that the – I mean, diversity is fine, as a policy, it is fine and proper and correct that it should be there, but I do not necessarily think that everybody is allowed full free speech around diversity. It is very much – all the diversity training that I have been involved in has been very much front-loading training, whereby you are being told what you are allowed to do, what you are allowed to think and what you are allowed to say, and that does not necessarily go down well with many people at all, whether you are a police officer or not. You want to be able to explore all of these issues without receiving criticism.

I think that is probably a big area that could be changed, greater freedom.

Miss Weekes: Just one final point on this, because it is an important topic: it is clear that in your case, where a member of the public does raise the issue of an alleged racist attitude of an officer, it is going to have to be investigated; you are not going to get away from that.

Mr C: Oh no, it has to be investigated.

Miss Weekes: But your overall criticism here is how it was investigated. You are not challenging that you clearly had to be investigated.

Mr C: No, you have to be investigated, but, as I say, with regard to the investigation that I was subjected to, apart from the other points we have already made, the crucial point is that at the end of the investigation, the investigating officer did not think there was suitable evidence to actually go to a discipline hearing, and ultimately, three and a half years down the line, the decision of the Home Office panel is that I should probably not have had a discipline board in the first place. So absolutely everything that happened in between that was avoidable, totally unnecessary, and I suffered greatly in that period, and I cannot see any benefits in that at all, what I went through.

Miss Weekes: Has anybody had a discussion with you about, constructively, how this investigation and its ultimate outcome could have been better dealt with?

Mr C: The simple answer to that is: no. Since returning to the service, I am trying to have the issues that I have brought to your attention also brought to the attention by the organisation, and I have just met with a brick wall, basically. I have had meetings with the Commissioner's staff officer, who originally gave a clear assurance that he would look into all of these matters, and that simply did not happen.

Miss Weekes: When did you make an approach to the staff officer?

Mr C: That was in [Redacted].

Miss Weekes: Nothing has happened to date?

Mr C: Nothing has happened to date. What has happened is, I have been continually asking for when I will get feedback on the issues that I have raised, and I have raised them in quite a detailed manner, in the same way as I have raised them with yourselves. Towards the latter part of last year, I was trying to get some of these answers to the questions that I posed, and on two separate occasions, I was called in to see a supervisor and told that I was to stop asking these questions and stop making contact, and, as a result of that, I initiated the Fairness at Work Procedure, and I am about halfway through that at the moment.

Miss Weekes: So that is going ahead?

Mr C: I am now at the appeal stage of that, and, again, it is not a very satisfactory system, as far as I can see it.

Miss Weekes: There was a press release, was there not, in relation to your case? That was [Redacted], the police issued a press release, and that is when you were removed from operational duties, and asked to withdraw your application to any specialist teams.

Mr C: Yes.

Miss Weekes: Were you told about the press release before it happened, or did you discover it after it had been sent out?

Mr C: I was told after it had gone out.

Miss Weekes: Do you know why it had been put out?

Mr C: No, I have no idea.

Miss Weekes: Did you think that was fair?

Mr C: No, it was unfair. I actually first saw it on BBC News. I was sitting in the canteen at the police station, and saw my case on the news, before I had even been informed that there was going to be a press release.

Miss Weekes: That is not a leak, that is actually issued by the police?

Mr C: It was from the press office, yes.

Miss Weekes: How do you know that?

Mr C: I have a copy of it.

Miss Weekes: Have you ever made any enquiries about who made the decision and why it was felt that a press release should have been sent out?

Mr C: That was one of the questions I asked the Commissioner's staff officer, and his response was, he thought the press office was responding to questions raised by the community, which, in my view, was fudging of the issue, because it was not at all.

Miss Weekes: Final question, which really relates to the actual appeal process itself: ultimately, you have been exonerated by the Home Office report, but you had to get all the way to the Home Office level in order for that to be done. Do you say that could have been done earlier?

Mr C: Definitely, yes.

Miss Weekes: And at what stage could you have been exonerated, before you had to wait for the Home Office report? Because that is the final appeal tribunal, is it not?

Mr C: It is, yes. It could have been done at any stage within the organisation, all it needed was someone to actually properly review the evidence that had been obtained, which clearly they had not done, all the way to the director of CIB, and he stated – that being [Redacted]. He stated that, in his view, it warranted a disciplinary action.

I should also say, he also wrote and said it was the opinion of the CPS and the PCA, that there should be disciplinary action, and I have since found out that the case was never referred to the CPS and the PCA never gave that advice either, so there was a couple of lies told within that.

But as I say, a proper review could have been done at any stage, whereby somebody really impartially sits down and looks at the evidence. I think it is really quite clear that it was never sufficient.

Miss Weekes: You will be aware that the Taylor Review is wholeheartedly adopted by certainly every single senior officer that has appeared before us, and it may not necessarily have been in place during the time that you were being disciplined. It is now, and we understand it will be. Do you think that goes sufficiently far enough to deal with the very point you just made, that cases, whatever they are, should be reviewed, to deal with proportionality, fairness and disclosure?

Mr C: I do not actually know about the Taylor Report, but I agree with the sentiment you just said there.

Miss Weekes: Okay. Thank you.

Sir William Morris: Right, C, I am just going to see whether Sir Anthony has any questions he wants to put to you? SIR ANTHONY BURDEN: No, I had one point but it has been covered. Thank you very much indeed.

Sir William Morris: Right, well, I think that exhausts the list of questions that we wanted to put to you today, but you will recall during my introduction, I said that before you leave us, I would provide you with the opportunity to make a brief closing comment or statement; if you do wish, then this is your time to do that.

Mr C: I would only conclude really by saying that since returning to the organisation, I have not been treated very well at all, despite having been put through the mill already. Before I left, I was awaiting a specialist post, obviously that did not happen. Upon my return to the organisation, I was told I was going to be returned to uniform foot patrol.

I challenged that, and it took some two months before they finally agreed that I should return to CID duties. So they did not exactly go very far to make me feel welcome back into the organisation.

With regards to – I know that Fairness at Work is something that you have been looking at as well, and, as I mentioned to you, I am part way through a Fairness at Work procedure, with regards to having my issues addressed.

One of the problems I have identified with the Fairness at Work procedure is that it is actually very basic, it is a very basic procedure for an organisation as complex as the Met. It seems to be geared towards dealing with one issue that one officer might have with one supervisor, a very small incident which can then be looked at and dealt with very quickly.

Apart from that, there does not seem to be anything in place for people who have suffered a whole series of events, at the hands of a whole series of different people, who want to raise issues with the organisation.

The Fairness at Work procedure seems to focus on naming an individual, and that is not always necessarily what an officer, who wants to make a complaint, wants to do. They might want to highlight issues or a series of issues, and they might not want to name somebody – because that obviously leads to further conflict later on in your career.

Sir William Morris: Okay, well, thank you very much indeed for that additional enlightening point. But, before you leave us, can I just, on behalf of my colleagues and myself, say thank you for your written submission, thank you equally for attending this morning, and responding to the questions, your oral responses, and thank you indeed for the overall contribution that you are making to our work. We are very grateful to you.

Mr C: Thank you very much. 

1.05 pm

On this website:

• Evidence: CC
  Evidence provided by and documents referred to by CC, in his appearance at the Inquiry.