The Bichard Inquiry - Report - Digital Education Resource Archive ...

eceived) to 24 December 2001 (the day after the file was closed on the
CPD), to the relevant units of Humberside and Lincolnshire police to which
any request for information would have been made.
1.351 A fax was sent from Cambridgeshire CRB at 13:15 on 23 December 2001
(a Sunday) to Humberside CRB. The content is unknown, but it must have
been relatively few pages as the transmission time was only 44 seconds. This
was the only fax sent by Cambridgeshire to Humberside during that period.
1.352 As far as Lincolnshire is concerned, one fax was sent from Cambridgeshire
CRB, at 16:54 on 8 December 2001, to a fax number shared by the then
Disclosure Clerk and the Criminal Justice Information Unit of Lincolnshire
Police. Another fax was sent at 16:31 on 11 December. There is no record
of any fax being sent on 23 December, the only day (during the relevant
period) on which a fax was sent to Humberside.
1.353 The fax to Humberside was sent two days after Mrs Giddings’ PNC check
against the name of ‘Nixon’. She, and a number of other Cambridgeshire
police witnesses, stated that the member of staff who noticed the need for,
and raised, a fax query would usually send it themselves. Occasionally, if they
were very busy or interrupted, they might pass the query on to somebody on
the next shift, but it would certainly not be any later than that. If Mrs Giddings
had noticed the need to send a fax to Humberside, it should have been sent,
at the latest, by 06: 00 on 22 December. No fax to Humberside was sent until
23 December at 13:15 – five shifts after Mrs Giddings’ shift.
1.354 The shift operator at 13:15 on 23 December 2001 was Mr Causer. Unsurprisingly,
he does not remember sending this particular fax and has no memory of its
content. Unlike his newer colleagues, including Mrs Giddings, who operated
the ‘tray’ system, Mr Causer’s usual practice was to perform all tasks on one
enquiry at the same time.
1.355 Cambridgeshire CRB’s Child Access Database indicates that the disclosure
request was closed by Pamela Nicholson as ‘no trace’ at 21:35 on
23 December. It is not known why this was done. Ms Nicholson has no
recollection of closing this file and assumes that it was a form that she
removed from the ‘booking out’ tray and actioned. Her evidence was
that if she had picked up a form from the ‘booking out’ tray with the PNC
endorsement on it, but nothing to indicate that a foreign force fax had been
sent, she would almost certainly close it on the Child Access Database.
1.356 It is clear that, even if a fax request about Huntley was sent earlier on
23 December 2001, no reply from Humberside had been received by this
time. Cambridgeshire telephone records establish that a fax was sent from
Humberside CRB to Cambridgeshire at 09:12 on Monday, 24 December
2001. Again, it is not known what the content of the fax was, but the
transmission was just 37 seconds.
1.357 Although the automated faxing system at Cambridge CRB was not working
at the time, the actual fax form itself would still be generated because the
Child Access Database would automatically fill in its relevant fields, so any
fax form sent about Huntley would have included both the name ‘Nixon’
and the alias ‘Huntley’.
72 The Bichard Inquiry – Contacts, recruitment and vetting – the facts