A row has broken out over the level of legal costs incurred by Chief Constable David Crompton during the re-opened inquests into the deaths of the Hillsborough victims. The lawyers charged over £2 million – and the costs were paid by South Yorkshire police. Chief Constable David Crompton was suspended from duty after the inquests and he now faces disciplinary procedures which could lead to his dismissal from the police force.
Dr Alan Billings, South Yorkshire’s Police and Crime Commissioner, looked into the costs and initially blamed the length of the inquests, which ran for nearly two years, for the high cost. However, several families of the victims, who also attended the inquests, had already made complaints about Chief Constable Crompton during the inquests. They claimed that his lawyers were spending too much time trying to find ways of blaming the Liverpool fans for their own deaths, which had prolonged the inquests and increased the costs.
The figure came to light after painstaking work by BBC journalists, who went through public records of South Yorkshire Police’s spending and pieced together what the total costs on legal representatives was. Spending data for the period covering the last stages of the inquest has not been published yet, so the final costs of the legal representatives are likely to be much higher than the costs unearthed so far.
The procedures which led to the costs being incurred and then paid are not yet completely clear. Chief Constable Crompton was declared a “concerned person” by the Coroner who presided over the inquests, which entitled him to public funding for his legal representative. The funding was agreed by the then Police and Crime Commissioner Shaun Write, who resigned as Commissioner shortly after the inquests began (over issues which came to light in the investigation of the sexual abuse of children in Rotherham). Dr Billings continued the funding and he told the BBC that he had not changed the arrangements because there was concern that any change might be legally challenged – and any such challenge would have cost the police force as much as any cut would have been likely to save, or even more.
The search for justice goes on.
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