Police chief defiant over Soham report

A BELEAGUERED was last night involved in a stand-off with the British Home Secretary who had ordered his suspension over the Soham debacle.

David Blunkett demanded Humberside chief constable David Westwood's removal from active duty after the inquiry in to how Ian Huntley slipped through the net revealed "very serious failings" in his force.

Sir Michael Bichard's devastating report concluded Mr Westwood should take "personal responsibility" for errors that meant Huntley's murky past never emerged.

The report also revealed a "deeply shocking" catalogue of errors across all organisations that had contact with Huntley before he murdered schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in August 2002.

Mr Blunkett said it was "difficult to disagree" with the conclusion on Mr Westwood and ordered Humberside Police Authority to suspend him.

However, in his first public words on the scathing report, Mr Westwood insisted he would stay until his police authority acted, saying: "Until they decide what their position will be, I remain chief constable."

The Home Secretary's demands could ultimately lead to Mr Westwood's retirement or resignation.

The chief constable of Cambridgeshire Police, which was also criticised in the report, suggested he might act differently if his force had been criticised so heavily.

Tom Lloyd said: "If he had said they (the errors) were systematic and corporate, it would have made me consider my position very seriously."

The report stopped short of calling for Mr Westwood's resignation and said: "It is not for me to draw conclusions about Mr Westwood's future."

Although the report cast its criticism very wide, the most severe attacks were reserved for Humberside Police. It only emerged after his conviction that Huntley was at the centre of four alleged rapes and indecent assault and four alleged incidents of underage sex during the 1990s.

The Humberside force either deleted or failed to retain records of them, which meant his past was not spotted during the vetting of him to work as a caretaker at Soham Village College.

It was from there that he murdered 10-year-olds Holly and Jessica.

Humberside's failures were "not isolated or the result of simple human errors" and its intelligence system was "fundamentally flawed", the report said.

The force was "haemorrhaging" intelligence and the problems were not just "systemic and corporate" but "endemic."

The only intelligence report written on Huntley, which warned he was a "serial sex attacker", was deleted from Humberside's files a year after it was submitted.

The report also said that, taken together, it was impossible to guarantee that other sexual deviants had not escaped police attention because intelligence systems were so shambolic.