Final Report of the Morris Inquiry: The Case for Change

LESSONS FOR THE FUTURE
88. [Redacted] informed me that he had been overseeing the investigation.Why were the
Gold Group overseeing the investigation and not DPS? What is the policy?”
(Submission from Chief Inspector Pendry.)
10.114 The MPS has told us that it accepts that holding the first meeting of the
Gold Group at Southall Police Station was a mistake. We agree that it is
inappropriate for such a Gold Group to be held at the station where the officer
concerned is working and for officers involved in making the complaint in any way
to be included on such a group. The way in which this Gold Group was established
and conducted itself suggests that insufficient regard was paid to the welfare of the
officer under investigation. It also raises questions about the objectivity of the
management of the investigation process.
10.115 The MPS has sought to persuade us that in this case “the Gold Group
provided for a measured and scrupulously fair process where the interests of all parties
were represented.” Chief Inspector Pendry was not represented on the Gold Group.
In any event we would query whether a Gold Group should have representatives
of either complainants or other interested parties, given its role in managing a
‘critical incident’.
10.116 These failings seem to have been compounded by an apparent failure to
communicate with the officer even after she raised concerns at the time:
“So every time I asked and said,‘Please, I feel I really have concerns about the make-up of the
Gold group and the bias of the Gold group and people are sitting in judgment of me, some
of them with their own agendas’, that I wanted somebody sitting there considering my needs
and also fairness. So we asked and we were just ignored.” (Evidence of Chief Inspector Pendry.)
10.117 In addition, as we noted earlier in this report when we dealt with the
Fairness at Work procedure, when Chief Inspector Pendry raised various concerns
under the FAW procedure, the MPS was reluctant to deal with the matter and it
took three months and 12 days to have her ‘Form 1’ accepted, as it was initially
said that the issues she wanted to raise related to disciplinary matters. That is over
three times as long as the entire FAW process is intended to take and hardly the
best way to deal with a senior officer who already feels that the organisation is
being unfair to her.
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