Hillsborough inquiry is a huge challenge, says IPCC chair

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2013/jan/02/hillsborough-disaster-inquiry-challenge-police

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The criminal inquiry into the cover-up over the Hillsborough stadium disaster is the greatest challenge ever faced by the Independent Police Complaints Commission, its chairwoman has said.

Dame Anne Owers made it clear that the IPCC's task was bigger and more testing than any of its other controversial inquiries, including those into the fatal shootings by police of Jean Charles de Menezes after the 2005 London bombings and of Mark Duggan before the 2011 riots.

She revealed the scale of the investigation in an interview with the Guardian in which she also accused police involved in Duggan's shooting of delaying the IPCC inquiry by refusing to be interviewed in person. Instead, the officers had to be questioned through multiple exchanges of letters over more than six months. "It was like putting a message in a bottle and sending it down the Thames," she said.

The Hillsborough investigation comes at a time when the IPCC faces criticism from groups including families of victims of police brutality, politicians and lawyers, and after the shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, called for it to be replaced by a new body with tougher powers.

Owers said the task ahead, while huge, would also provide the IPCC with a chance to display its strengths in the face of such criticism. It has been given new powers to compel police and others to testify as witnesses.

"Clearly it is a test and a challenge," she said. "But it is also an opportunity for us to show what we can do if we are properly resourced to do a big job. The scale of it is very big but I think the way we are working with a team that includes investigators, lawyers and family liaison teams is critical and will be a model for the future, provided that we get the resources we need."

Owers said she was in discussions with the Home Office over extra funding to cover the investigation. She is also demanding more resources for the watchdog's present and future work as it struggles to cope with a 20% – £5m – cut in its budget over four years, a reduction she said was putting considerable pressure on frontline staff.

She revealed the IPCC is embarking on a huge recruitment drive to employ 100 investigators. Forty will be recruited from next month in the first tranche – both former police officers and others from non-police backgrounds – as the Hillsborough investigation gets under way.

A major incident room has been set up in the IPCC office in Sale, Greater Manchester, as a temporary base for the inquiry team while the organisation secures an office block in Warrington which will be the team's permanent home. The building will be equipped with special security systems to secure the evidence before the IPCC takes possession of all the documents and begins interviewing. In the months ahead the team will:

• Try to retrieve more than 450,000 documents from the authorities that own them.

• Input them into the Holmes major incident system.

• Prepare to interview up to 2,400 police officers who were on duty on the day.

Owers admitted retrieving and inputting the documentation could take months. But she said the investigation would not be put on hold while this was done. Investigators would pursue possible lines of inquiry from the documents and could potentially start interviewing police officers.

The IPCC inquiry will work alongside a criminal inquiry into the disaster by the former chief constable of Durham, Jon Stoddart. The Hillsborough Independent Panel's report in September exposed the scale of the cover-up by South Yorkshire police and other authorities in the aftermath of the disaster in 1989, which left 96 people dead. The panel found that officers altered 116 of their 164 statements to remove or amend comments that were unfavourable to South Yorkshire police as they tried to blame the victims – the Liverpool fans – for the disaster.

Stoddart's inquiry will focus specifically on any criminal culpability for the deaths at the FA cup semi-final in Sheffield, while the IPCC is focusing on the cover-up and what has been described in parliament as a black propaganda campaign by the police.

Owers – who was appointed by the home secretary, Theresa May, as part-time chair last April – has increased her commitment to four days a week to take charge of the Hillsborough inquiry.

She admitted that the challenge to the IPCC came at a time when questions about its competence had been raised by a number of different people. The family of Sean Rigg, a 40-year-old who died at Brixton police station in south London in 2008, have attacked the IPCC for its "inadequate and obstructive" investigation into his death after an inquest jury found officers had used unsuitable force on him during an unnecessarily long restraint. Owers has since asked for an independent review of the IPCC's work on the case.

"Yes there are cases where people haven't been satisfied with our investigations," Owers said. "We have got to be concerned about the cases that families feel have gone wrong, we have got to respond to that.

"We are doing a review of the way that we deal with cases of death in custody. We are going out and talking to families about their experiences and about what they think could have been done differently. We are talking to lawyers who have made criticisms and to external groups like Inquest. We are looking at to what extent it is about the powers and resources we have got and to what extent it is about the fact that we need to look at things differently in some cases."

Owers defended the time it has taken the IPCC to conclude its inquiry into the shooting of Duggan, which sparked the riots in summer 2011. She vowed that the full report would be published and in part blamed police obstructiveness for the delay. "The investigation is nearly finished," she said.

"It is a very complex case. One of the problems for us was that the officers would not come in to be interviewed. We asked them to do so in December of last year and it was July before we got the final response from them to our questions. We had to write the questions to them and they wrote back their answers. That prompted more questions so we had to write to them again and they wrote back through solicitors.

"It was like putting a message in a bottle and sending it down the Thames."