The Home Affairs committee is today calling for the Home
Secretary and NPCC to review whether key files on Orgreave can
now be made public, as it publishes responses from police forces
across the country about Orgreave files.
The committee is publishing correspondence following its request
for information on any and all records held in relation to the
policing of the violent confrontation between police and
picketing miners at Orgreave on 18 June 1984. A tranche of some
of the documents were recently placed in the National Archive.
The Committee has received responses it requested from the 18
forces that contributed to the policing of Orgreave.
The Metropolitan Police were particularly asked if they held the
operational policing plan for the day on which the confrontation
took place. They have said that they don't and that operations on
the day were led by South Yorkshire Police.
All 18 other forces have indicated that they do not hold
information about Orgreave which is not already in the public
domain.
However, the NPCC, which took over from the ACPO, identifies a
series of documents whose headings indicate they may
contain information related to Orgreave. Some of these files are
categorised as containing “personal sensitive information” and
are therefore closed until 2066 under the provisions of the Data
Protection Act.
The Chair of the Committee Yvette copper has written to the Home
Secretary asking that, given the importance of the information
contained in these file to the public understanding of the events
at Orgreave, the Home Office initiate a process to review these
files to see whether they can after all be made publicly
available or, alternatively, whether a redacted version of the
papers in these files could be placed in the National Archive and
made publicly available there.
The response from the Metropolitan Police reveals the
operational arrangements around its officers’ deployment to
Orgeave, indicating that they “were deployed under the immediate
direction & control of the hosting force receiving
assistance. As the MPS had no coal mining facilities or coke
processing plants within its boundaries, the MPS took no
Operational Command, Control or Coordination in the policing of
Orgreave.”
Chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee, MP said:
"People want to know the truth about what happened at Orgreave -
especially in the coalfields. Little by little, our questions are
uncovering what files and information are still held. Some of the
intelligence files we have identified are being withheld until
2066. We have asked the Home Secretary to get those files
independently reviewed to see if they can be released
instead.
"This correspondence also confirms that most of the Orgreave
files are still with South Yorkshire Police. That means the most
important thing is for those files to be properly reviewed and
made public too.
"People in coalfield communities need to know what happened at
Orgreave and deserve access to the truth. There must be no more
secrets or cover ups. That is why we keep pushing to get to the
bottom of this."
