I will talk through the presentation which is about the structure and objectives of the Historical Enquiries Team. This team is a bespoke unit that purely concentrates on examining cases from the period of the Troubles. It is ring-fenced funding from the Northern Ireland Office. It is not abstracted in any way by other investigations. We purely look at the cases from that time.
When we set the team up we set three objectives for ourselves. We very deliberately set at the top, and as our over-arching objective, that we wanted to assist in bringing a measure of resolution to families of victims affected by deaths attributable to the Troubles. The period on which we concentrate is from 1968 to 1998. Those questions can be on any subject. We do not limit those questions to traditional police investigations.
As an example of that I would cite one particular family we met in regard to a death that occurred quite early in the Troubles in the early 1970s. The son who came to see us had never understood why his father's body had been left lying where it was for so long before being recovered by the police. We were able to find quite quickly through contact with the original officer at the time that there had been a suspicion that the body had been booby-trapped and many security measures had to be in place before the body could be recovered. That is an example of answering a family's question. It does not relate to the investigation but it was something that had really worried the family for all that time. We set a wide parameter and we say to families when we meet them that they can ask us any questions about any facet of the death of their loved one and we will try to find answers.
The second objective is that we will do our work to modern, current, professional police standards, as would be expected. We will be thorough, fair and objective in our work. Third, we will try to do this in a way that entertains the confidence of all sections of the community. The Chief Constable has touched briefly on the background reasoning. It was always envisaged as part of a wider process. To be fair, we work quite closely with groups such as the WAVE foundation which is a cross-community charity that supports victims. We also work closely with trauma advisory panels and other bodies that look after the interests of victims, in addition to the interim victims commissioner in the North.
In terms of doing work, somebody had to take the lead and, as far as we know, our work remains the only concrete work being undertaken anywhere for victims. As the Chief Constable said, we have potential to answer questions for some families but we may not be able to help everybody. The extent of the task relates to the 3,268 deaths that were related to the security situation. A total of 505 other murders took place during that period in Northern Ireland but they were attributable to crimes like bank robberies, domestic disputes etc. They will be reviewed if they remain unsolved but the serious crime review team would undertake that work. Our work is limited to the 3,268 victims to which I referred. Those deaths occurred in 2,516 incidents. The original funding for the project was aimed at the Historical Enquiries Team and the Forensic Science Service of Northern Ireland. The promise was made that this ring-fenced funding would be invested in us alone. However, times have changed slightly and it has become a slightly wider project as other interests have emerged, such as a role for the police ombudsman. The timescale over which this money will be released is six years.
With regard to the structure of the Historical Enquiries Team, the slide before the committee shows there is a purple team and a red team. The other boxes on the slide relate to support units for the teams. Of the investigative and review teams — the purple and red teams — the purple team is composed of serving and retired officers, some of whom were members of the RUC and PSNI and some of whom were members of other police forces. The red team is composed entirely of serving and retired police officers who have never worked in Northern Ireland and have had no connection with the RUC or PSNI.
The rationale for this structure is to try to meet the criteria of independence, if a family requests it. For example, if a family states it has no confidence in a case being examined by a person with any connection with the RUC, we can offer a service by using the red team.
The other boxes on the slide refer to civilian staff as well as serving and retired officers. There is a mixture of external and internal staff. If, as in one of the high profile cases we are examining, the family states it has no objection to former RUC officers being involved in the investigation but that it wants external, independent eyes to look at the role of special branch, we can deliver this because we have officers within our intelligence structure with sufficient vetting qualifications to consider all the intelligence but who have never been members of the RUC or PSNI.
The issue of independence is one on which we are often challenged. It concerns Article 2 which deals with compliance as set out by the European Court, whereby an investigation would have to be independent, effective, transparent and prompt. With regard to independence, as far as we can be, we are independent. No staff who were involved in the incidents under investigation are in any way involved in a review. Even those officers on the purple team must sign a declaration that they have had no previous dealings with a case that comes up for review. The members of the red team would never have had contact with such cases in any event.
With regard to the requirement to be effective, the staff of the team are mainly retired police officers, most of whom have over 30 years experience in police investigations, particularly homicide investigations. Using those staff, we have built up a good matrix of experience with which to consider cases. We would be as effective in terms of experience as any other unit I have ever dealt with.
With regard to the requirement to be transparent, we work directly with families and we are committed and determined that families will be the prime movers in this process, which centres on trying to answer their questions. We work closely with them and, if they have representatives — many families come to us accompanied by members of local authorities, Members of Parliament or members of non-governmental organisations — we also work closely with those representatives as well. Our intention is that at the conclusion of this process we will provide the family with a copy of what we call our review summary report, which will detail the work we have undertaken on the family's behalf, what we have found and the answers to the particular questions the family has raised. This accords with the principle of maximum disclosure to which the Chief Constable referred and to which I will return. An independent monitor, who has observed our processes, has been involved throughout the project.
It is with regard to the issue of promptness that we struggle, given that we are the Historical Enquiries Team and, therefore, cannot be very prompt. The European Court recognised in the context of the Finucane case that it is very difficult to carry out historical investigations that would meet this standard. However, our commitment is that we will deliver an objective, fair and thorough review. Our protocols set demands that we do this in a timely fashion and that we keep the families involved promptly informed of everything we are doing throughout the process.
Are we accountable? We hold ourselves primarily accountable to the families. We are operating on their behalf and we seek feedback from them to see how we are getting on.
Operationally, we are an independent unit. I report directly to the Chief Constable and not to any other line of command in the PSNI. That is exactly the same process when I was working on an external inquiry, the Stevens inquiry, before I came to the Historical Enquiries Team. As the Chief Constable is the statutory authority for the investigation of crime in Northern Ireland, all external investigations must report to him in any event. We are no different in that way. That does not mean the Chief Constable has time on his hands to make operational decisions. It means I report to him in terms of accountability.
Through the Chief Constable I report to the Northern Ireland Policing Board. It has been very supportive and interested in our role. It has visited our offices on three occasions and we have given two presentations to its meetings. I am also accountable to the Northern Ireland Office. It wants to know what I am doing with its money. On a two-monthly basis I attend a meeting of the financial monitoring group. There is the inspectorate function of Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary which can inspect any area of policing and publish reports.
A task of this size must be approached in a structured fashion. We thought long and hard about how we would deal with these cases and in what order. Should we start with the most recent, where cases are still fresh, where perhaps there is access to information on computers, and work back, or should we start at the beginning? We decided we would start at the beginning because it is fairest to those people who have waited longest. It allows us to see the developing tragedy in Northern Ireland and understand the nuances of what happened, including tit-for-tat murders, the development of very professional paramilitaries and murder machines. We also pick up the linked series of crimes that follow from those developments.
It seems to be a rule that there have to be exceptions to the rule and we have four. We are as strict as we can be in keeping a chronological list but we do allow exceptions. If the PSNI was already looking at a case, it would be unfair to say to the family that the HET will shut it down until it comes up in the chronological list. The PSNI is continuing with some of its investigations but gradually handing them over to us. In some sad cases, surviving relatives are ill or frail and possibly cannot wait for us to get to them as part of a chronological process. We take a generous view on those applications and will always expedite such cases.
In issues involving serious public interest, only the Chief Constable will direct us to take those cases. To date we have limited those to cases where the European Court has sent them back to the PSNI with instructions that work on them is to take place. With linked series of murders, it makes sense to examine them contemporaneously so that any crossovers, such as a ballistic links, are taken up.
We must have a process to move the cases through in the time we have been given. It is an ambitious process. We try and complete a review in 16 weeks. That allows four weeks for the four phases of inquiry. On top of that there is a collection process which I will speak about in a moment.
We accept some cases will not fit the process. The sheer complexity of some cases will take longer to investigate. We will at least start them and keep families up to date as to why they cannot be completed and where the review stands.
An antecedent to the process is the collection phase. When we began this work, there was no central store in the PSNI. That is no different to anywhere else in policing. In the 1970s and 1980s, very few police forces had any central stores or registries. Most material was stored at local police stations. We had to gather together all the material we could find. We established a team of 33 staff who are still working on this 18 months later. We have physically checked every room in every building within the PSNI for materials relating to cases from this time. This underpins the process in which we are engaged. We have to tell families that we have looked everywhere. It would be a disaster for us if we told a family that we had reviewed everything possible, then gave a professional opinion on what we could or could not do and later said we had found another file. We need to have everything to hand before we start the process.
This also supports other public inquiries for which we have found much material. It is not a cheap option; it costs the best part of £500,000 in time and staff costs. There are some missing files and papers and this has been publicised in the North. Several police stations were blown up several times and the forensic science laboratory was attacked and completely blown up twice, so exhibits and files were lost.
We do not give up when this arises; we go to other sources, and that is our open source requirement, which has become a major part of our business. We seek information from other agencies such as the Court Services, the Public Records Office, inquest files, the BBC and UTV libraries and the Linenhall Library where all the newspapers from the era are stored. We also approach families some of whom have kept material. Their legal representatives often have submissions from families and have made these available to us. Our latest finding is that in 90% of cases we have police material and in virtually every case we have something with which we can work.
The type of material we want to find includes case papers, witness statements, officers' messages and all the material one would expect to be connected to a police investigation such as exhibits. The forensic science services have worked with us on this and we have recovered some 7,000 exhibits from that era which we will be able to examine. The forensic laboratory and the fingerprint bureau also work with us. The Ministry of Defence keeps very good records, as one would expect from the army. Everything is filed in triplicate and it is a good source of information if army personnel were involved in the incident. The security service has been supportive. We have a memorandum of understanding with it to the effect that it will make material available if it is relevant and assists in the investigation of a serious crime. That is within its charter. It is not a major issue for us because the security service is concerned more with issues of state-level intelligence than with individual incidents but it has undertaken to support us if required to do so.
This material has been collected and used with another PSNI objective, setting up a central store. The store is unparalleled; it is huge, secure, and climate and computer controlled. It is hermetically sealed and it is almost impossible to get in to examine material, let alone remove anything.
To underpin the integrity of our process we reviewed the PSNI fingerprint database. There is a computer examination device for automatic fingerprint recognition which checks marks that have been recovered. As that did not exist in the early days we wanted 100,000 marks re-entered on to the new system to be searched using modern technology. This is not cheap because an American company had to come to increase the memory capacity of the machine. There are potential identifications.
I will briefly explain our historical analytical database, the head analysis. It is vitally important in terms of public perception and the confidence of the families concerned that we go back and ensure all these actions are taken.
The computer database I mentioned is where all our material is entered, and it underpins all our work. It struck us that as well as entering the data, we could use this database to undertake analytical work. By utilising the expertise of our staff, most of whom have 13 years' or more experience of detective work, we devised a form to be completed in every case we examine. This form has developed into a 60-page booklet and is used to record all the details we believe may be of use to an investigator in a particular review, such as ballistic linking, descriptions, vehicles used and so on.
We envisage that this database will ultimately have the capability, for example, to list all incidents where a 9 mm pistol was used or where the gunman was described as having red hair. This will be an important development with the capacity to provide a massive amount of information about the Troubles. All the open source material from the time of a particular incident will be appended to its database entry so that a user who opens that case for review will have access to the relevant newspaper coverage and television footage as well as all the analytical offshoots.
Members will see on the screen how information is gleaned from the database in regard to a particular incident. The incident is represented in the centre of the screen, the ballistic links show the other incidents in which the weapons were used and there is further linking, based on intelligence and other sources, in respect of the persons involved. The user can continue to follow the links until, in this example, the last screen allows one to check fingerprints against the crime scene. This process can be followed for any incident. It is a visualisation process that enables reviewers to ascertain what links they should follow and where those links may take them.
The next phases in every review are key and we adhere to what we call minimum standards in this regard. Our assessment of every case we examine begins with the removal of the exhibits and case papers to a site in Sprucefield where they are catalogued and indexed. Initial inquiries are made to our partner agencies such as the Ministry of Defence, special branch or the intelligence service, to discover whether they have any relevant information about the particular case. The open source desk, meanwhile, examines television and newspaper coverage of the time for any information we may further explore. In addition, some 3,000 books have been written about the North, many of which are detailed, and we must go through them and extract any relevant information before approaching the families of the victims.
After the file desk has put together a file on the case, the next steps in the process are particularly important. When we began this work we did not anticipate the need for a team of staff to track the families victims. Some 30 years on, however, some of the people concerned have moved to various parts of the world. Our tracing and first contact desk has become sophisticated in its work and we have a 90% success rate in tracing families. We have built up a memorandum of understanding with other agencies such as social services and Inland Revenue in our efforts to contact people.
When we discover the location of family members, the first contact is difficult but very important. It is undertaken in consultation with our partners in those agencies which look after the interests of victims. It is a case of gently initiating contact with people who may have moved on and put the incident in question behind them. It is also, however, about asking them what questions they have about the case at this stage. It is an important element of our work. The analytical aspect at this stage relates to the establishment of links between this case and others and a decision as to whether it should be assigned to the red team or the purple team.
We allow four weeks for the completion of this phase after which we move to the review phase. Again, we work to minimum standards. There must be a common denominator so that families can be confident we are doing everything we can in every case. We try to find the original case officers if they are still alive and ask if they will talk through their memories of the investigation and, in some cases, the reason for some decisions they made. We have had a pretty good uptake on that from retired officers. In some cases they will not engage because it is too traumatic for them or for other reasons, but in most cases we get at least a letter and in many cases we get a personal contact. They are keen to assist the families. In some cases we have had offers from them to meet families. It is around setting the context of the day. I gave the example earlier about the gentleman whose father's body was left lying there. We can answer questions for families quite early in the process.
The family concerns review — have we answered the questions that the family gave us? This is key work; it is a key principle. The intelligence review boils down to three questions that we ask of our other agencies or our own C3 special branch. Was there intelligence at the time that could have prevented what happened? Was there intelligence at the time that meant it should have been detected, and has any intelligence come in since that now enables us to move on? Those are the three key questions to which we try to get answers.
On the fingerprint and forensic review, everybody is familiar with advances in DNA and laser technology in the area of fingerprinting. This is fine and it is great but we have to be honest with families and we are honest with them. It underpins our approach. We sit down with families at the beginning and say this will work if we have the exhibit and it has been stored properly and we can prove it to a court's standards. There is no point in raising a family's expectation by saying, "do not worry, we will get DNA". If we cannot prove the exhibit, where it has been stored and that it has been properly maintained then any forensic examination of it would be of minimal value. The analytical review is about the use of our database, putting all the material on it and checking if there are links that point us towards examining several cases at once.
The open source review is what have we found in the library. Quite often families in the terrible trauma of the day did not see much of the coverage. Many families have asked if we can find for them copies of press material from the time and we are happy to oblige. The original case papers is a thorough read-through of the investigation papers and statements to see if any opportunities jump out that were missed at the time or could not have been taken at the time. Linking that with a talk to the original case officers one may say there are not many statements on a particular file, and ask if there have been any inquiries in the area. They will say "No, because it took 200 soldiers to get us into the area and they gave us 15 minutes at the scene and then we had to get out, so nobody went to see any of these witnesses". Even after this time, mostly through the help of families, we can identify witnesses and go and see them.
At the end of this we do a review report and that takes us into our next stage, where we find things we can do, a focused reinvestigation stage. We are not resourced and capable of doing full investigations. I cannot start a whole inquiry again, as the Stevens team did on the Finucane investigation. That one case took some six years and several million pounds and a team of 30. It is not practical to do that in every case. We follow the focused lines of investigation that the review has thrown up. We put our money on our best horse, so to speak. We look at what the review has thrown up that we feel may take this investigation forward. There may be many lines and we carry out risk assessments and quality checks. Perhaps five lines of investigation have been thrown up, the first being forensic. If we do the first and it comes back negative it may make the other four of very little value. We constantly try to quality assure the process so that we get the best value out of the money available to us. We keep families updated on what we are doing. We will pursue as many of those lines of inquiry as are viable. That is the reason the arrows point both ways in that book. We can go back to our review panel as many times as necessary when we are sent out to do further investigations.
If investigations bring sufficient evidence we will submit cases to the Public Prosecution Service. We are a police operation and we will put cases for examination by the Director of Public Prosecutions. If there are no evidential opportunities at all or our focused inquiries come to nothing, we move to the resolution process, which we feel is our key business. It is about working with families. We may get some cases to court, although I doubt if the number will be very large. However, in every case we will be able to sit down with families and tell them what we have done. This is a great deal of work for us, and very traumatic. These cases are as real today for the families as they were at the time, and it is very much a challenge. We will presently show a short film culled from recent documentaries and television programmes; members may recognise some of the families involved. They are very moving and extremely touching, demonstrating how things are for our family liaison staff and how we must work through very difficult issues with the families.
If I followed standard policing guidelines, I would have to have 3,268 family liaison officers, but I cannot do that. I have therefore had to develop an alternative structure. We have a small unit of 12 officers who meet the families. We have a pamphlet, some copies of which I believe I have distributed. It is available to families who desire information about us. The individual case officers come from our teams, and we try to build up a rapport with the families. As I said, at the end of the process, we will give the families a copy of our investigation report.
The film does not seem to be working, so I will talk members through the resolution process. We may be able to return to the film shortly. Meetings with families and their representatives are a key area for us. Over four weeks, we work through what we have found with the families. In many cases representative groups accompany them. They have strongly supported the families and have been very fair with us. They have not always accepted that we were the ideal solution, but they have taken the view that the families whom they represent will at least get some service from us, and have steered them our way. It revolves around whether we have answered the families' questions and whether there are any others. We evolved the resolution strategy with partners such as the trauma advisory panel. If there are further issues that require to be addressed in a more professional manner than the support that we can offer a family, we can pass them on to such groups.
The principle of the maximum disclosure of information is key, and we can answer most questions in most cases. It is a matter of being honest with families and, where there are constraints, making the common-law presumption of innocence. We cannot ethically name those who we feel might have been involved; we must have evidence. Concerns for agents' identities, the right to life, and the Security Service Act 1989, which limits the use of material for the investigation of crime, are some of the constraints. However, they will be an issue only if we are worried that we might have uncovered the role of an agent. In most cases, that will not arise. If we find one, that does not stop us looking. We still look, and if we find criminal behaviour by an agent, none of the Acts offers any protection to him or her. The person would be investigated like any other, and if convicted, names and details would be a matter of public record in any event.
In terms of the headlines, we have managed to set this team up and have it operational within 12 months. We are working on 320 cases out of which we have managed to find 284 families. The families' interests are of great political interest in terms of the peace process as it is seen at the moment. However, we have also catalogued the types of questions. We have received some 750 types of question. I believe the Chairman touched on the matter in his opening remarks. There are many more queries than just who is the person responsible. That is now always the question we get. It is not often the question asked. The questions revolve around the minutiae and whether it was a good investigation and worries that the families have. That is what we try to address.
As regards other issues, we have moved on the fingerprints in the search. The funding issue is a major matter for us. I am sure it is known that, in terms of a project of this scale, there is not a vast sum of money available. However, I have enough money at present and we are not constrained from starting our work. We are pressing on and we keep the issue at the forefront of what we are doing.
I apologise for the fact that we did not manage to see the video. However, the conclusion I would offer is that this is a unique enterprise in world policing. We have not found anything similar anywhere else from which we can either take ideas or learn. It is an imaginative attempt to try to do something in the context of achieving resolution for some families. It demonstrates the commitment of the Government and the PSNI to move on in this area. It has been a catalyst for engagement with some groups and it may perhaps be expanded to form part of the wider process. Our motto is to be different and to make a difference for all the worthy families that waited for so long for somebody to try to help them.
