Families want swift justice as years take their toll

Members of the Hillsborough Family Support Group hope to meet with Home Secretary Theresa May this week to express concerns that separate inquiries by the Crown Prosecution Service, the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) and other agencies could ultimately lead to years of delay.

The families yesterday hailed one of the most significant steps forward yet in their long quest for justice when Attorney General Dominic Grieve announced he will ask the High Court to quash the original inquests into the deaths of those who died in the disaster 23 years ago during the FA Cup semi-final at Sheffield Wednesday’s ground.

But speaking before Parliament’s Home Affairs committee, Keighley businessman Trevor Hicks – who lost two teenage daughters in the tragedy – said: “What we want now is action. We’ve had lots of words, we’ve had lots of tea and sympathy, but we now need action.”

South Yorkshire Police Chief Constable David Crompton told the committee that over the next fortnight he will supply the IPCC with the names and details of up to 1,000 officers who were on duty at the stadium disaster in 1989. The IPCC has already said it will need extra resources to undertake what will be the biggest investigation into British policing ever conducted, admitting it has no idea how long the inquiry will take.

Meanwhile, the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer, has begun his own inquiry into whether criminal charges should be brought over the affair, and there are suggestions the Health and Safety Executive may also have a role to play.

With fresh inquests also now likely to take place, a myriad agencies could be involved in trying to bring those responsible to justice. The families’ lawyer, Lord Faulkner, said he would be asking Mrs May to agree to a single, co-ordinated investigation, led by Mr Starmer, “as a matter of urgency”.

He said: “These 23 years have taken a terrible toll. There are many people who are now dead who campaigned for justice. It is absolutely vital it is dealt with as quickly as possible now. It doesn’t need to take years. All the material has been collected in one place. It is simply a question of people drawing the conclusions from that material that should have been drawn a long time ago.”

Mr Hicks’s wife, Jenni, added: “We’ve already had 23 years of waiting. What we don’t need now is going round in circles with one agency and then another, and you end up with it being perhaps another three, four, five years down the line and we’re still waiting.”

Earlier at the hearing Mr Crompton, who was not part of South Yorkshire Police in 1989 and only became Chief Constable in April, said all the criticism of his force from Liverpool supporters over the past 23 years had proven “absolutely justified”.

Mr Crompton said he accepted the findings of the Hillsborough Independent Panel report “with no qualifications whatsoever”, admitting he was “shocked” by the scale of what happened. He did not dispute an assertion from MP David Winnick that senior officers who had tried to pin the blame for the disaster on the Liverpool fans acted with “sickness of the mind”. But he said he believed the way the police responded to the disaster had been a “one-off, unique event”, and that policing culture has now changed.

“I think the culture is different,” he said. “But I do think there is an issue about trust that comes out of Hillsborough that probably prompts us to look again at how we do our business, and not just necessarily accept that time, culture and so on have moved on. We should perhaps look to try and open the police service up a bit more to external influence and scrutiny.”