More sex abuse failings uncovered in ‘House of Secrets’

Two weeks ago, the first of a series of five articles was published on this website that will shed more light on the unethical, unprofessional – and in some cases unlawful – conduct of Police and Crime Commissioner, Julia Mulligan, and her growing team of extravagantly rewarded senior officers, headquartered in what has previously been dubbed ‘The House of Secrets‘.

This second article re-opens the running sore of extracting disclosure from the PCC’s office and, in doing so, also re-visits two other long held concerns: Failing to hold the chief constable to account and Mrs Mulligan’s apparent distaste in addressing alleged senior police officer failings over child sexual exploitation.

A more recent concern, since he was appointed in 2017, is the ineffectiveness, duplicity and sleight of hand of her deputy, Will Naylor. That was explored in some detail in the first article in this series (read here).

On 24th January, 2019 a simple enquiry was sent by email to Naylor. It concerned matters already well ventilated in the public domain. The catalyst for the request was Mrs Mulligan’s extraordinary, and belated, claim that she had been raped as a 15 year old, together with inside information passed to me about her former chief constable. To the effect that he had, allegedly, not co-operated with the Greater Manchester Mayor’s inquiry into police failings around the Rochdale and Manchester ‘Curry Mile’ child sex abuse scandal.

That, of course, is his inalienable right. It was not a judicial, or even a Departmental inquiry, to which witnesses could be summonsed. Except that the State is funding his gold-plated pension, worth around £70,000 per annum. The reasonable expectation is, therefore, that he should have given evidence. Cleared the air. The corollary being that adverse inference may be drawn if he has not.

The request for information from the Deputy PCC was expressed in the following terms:

“You may recall that, at the last PCP meeting I attended, at Selby Civic Centre in January 2018, it was brought into public knowledge, by Cllr Peter Dew, that a complaint had been raised against the then chief constable [Dave Jones]. At the time, and my notebook records this, Julia told the Panel that there would be a robust, thorough investigation. The PCP minutes (see attached) do not reflect that, but I am sure that the tape recording of the meeting will.

“I am told, by a policing source, that there was a disapplication and no investigation by the PCC took place into Mr Jones’ alleged knowledge of child sex abuse and the shutting down of police investigation(s) by senior officers within GMP. No further mention of the matter is recorded in subsequent PCP minutes. Cllr Dew, of course, left the Panel last year over Julia’s unpleasant behaviour towards him, which further obscures the issue.

“In summary, and please forgive the convoluted route, can you please tell me [1] on what date a recording decision was made regarding the complaint raised by Cllr Dew in the PCP meeting against Mr Jones, and [2] the outcome?

“It is not possible to distil such knowledge from the scant information provided on NYPCC website.

https://www.northyorkshire-pfcc.gov.uk/how-can-we-help/complaints/complain-chief-constable/ “

The reply from Naylor, after the standard delaying tactics, was short and to the point:

“In response to your questions about the response to a Chief Constable complaint (sic), I am unable to share that information with you. We publish the overall number of complaints against the Chief Constable (current and past), and actions taken thereafter. We do not, and do not intend to, go into the detail of each of those with about (sic) individuals who were not part of that complaint.”

This email was sent by way of reply:

As of 22nd February, 2019 that email had been ignored by all the recipients. Not even the courtesy of an acknowledgement. A polite reminder, sent to Jane Wintermeyer, on 15th February, 2019 urging her to deal with the matter, at her earliest convenience has also remained unanswered.

In the meantime, other enquiries had revealed a troubling chain of events. It was discovered that the complaint against ex-chief constable, Dave Jones, had been made on 8th December, 2017 by Anthony Nixon, a retired solicitor and North Yorkshire resident. It followed the refusal by Jones to respond to a letter sent to him, by Mr Nixon, following the airing of the seminal BBC documentary series, Three Girls. 

Mr Nixon holds the view, shared by a number of others, including some very high profile Greater Manchester Police whistleblowers, that Jones, Head of the Criminal Investigation Division of GMP at the material time, may know more about the shutting down of complaints of child rape, within his operational area, than he is prepared to admit. Put shortly, the allegation is that either Jones (and others) was complicit, or he was incompetent and negligent in his duties with the most awful consequences for hundreds of victims in Rochdale and on the Manchester ‘Curry Mile’.

On 29th March, 2018, Dave Jones, less than three months after the complaint against him was aired at the Police and Crime Panel meeting by Cllr Dew, did what is described in Yorkshire as a ‘moonlight flit’. He was not seen again on duty after that date. He had booked annual leave until 9th April, 2018, then gave notice of his retirement on that day. In the same moment, he went on sick leave until the end of his notice period, 9th July, 2018. He collected over £40,000 from the taxpayer during that short time. Not a word has been heard of him since.

PCC Mulligan has never explained why she, at first, gave two misleading accounts over her chief constable’s shock exit and has not, since, pursued Jones over breach of the service contract he signed, that should have kept him in post at NYP HQ until 2020. A freedom of information request I made to her office confirms that no legal action was taken against him.

The reason she has given for Jones’ disappearance is that ‘he wants to spend more time with his family’. Giving up at least £350,000 in salary and benefits to do so. The reader is invited to draw their own conclusion as to the plausibility of that arrangement.

An underperforming chief constable, who failed miserably in the running of almost every single operational area of his police force, in the five years he was in post; had little regard for the law or other regulatory strictures; overspent his budget by over £1,000,000 in each of his last three years in post; scarcely faced a single word of criticism from the elected official, whose primary functions include setting the budget for the police force and holding the chief constable to account: PCC Julia Mulligan.

Conversely, and perversely, she made excuse after excuse after excuse, each more implausible than the last, to explain away a lengthy series of catastrophic failings. The only recorded criticism that can be traced is over the rating of North Yorkshire Police as ‘inadequate’ over the recording of crime. This finding was made by Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary in March, 2018. 

Whether the complaint against Jones, by Mr Nixon, was a factor in the unexpected departure of Jones is still a matter of speculation, but the likelihood of that is diminished by the discovery that, on 26th January, 2018, a letter from the PCC’s office was received by Mr Nixon. It was signed off by Fraser Sampson, the chief executive, and set out the reason why the complaint against Jones would not proceed: Essentially, claims Mr Sampson, the complaint was a repeat of another made in 2015, over much the same matters. It ignores completely the issues raised by the complainant that could only have come to light since 2015.

There is another troubling feature, insofar as the four year investigation, relied on by Sampson (Operation Span), to dismiss the second of Mr Nixon’s complaints, did not cover either the relevant period, or the GMP senior management, of which Jones was, of course, a key player. An even more concerning aspect is that Span was a joint enterprise between the disgraced Independent Police Complaints Commission and GMP’s notorious Professional Standards Branch, the latter charged with investigating their own officers. Unsurprisingly, in spite of 1,000’s of preventable criminal and very serious offences of child rape, trafficking and exploitation, not one single GMP officer faced misconduct proceedings.

It has transpired that Mr Nixon was completely unaware, until I told him very recently, that his complaint had been raised in the PCP meeting by Cllr Dew, a retired North Yorkshire Police officer who served for 30 years, from 1971 onwards. Mrs Mulligan, Fraser Sampson and Will Naylor were all present in that meeting, but neglected to keep Mr Nixon informed. Indeed, there was no communication at all between him and the PCC’s office betwen his complaint being made on 8th December, 2018 and the Sampson decision letter seven weeks later. A recording decision should have been provided to Mr Nixon within 10 working days to comply with the applicable statutory framework.

In fact, on 15th January, 2019, as he was perfectly entitled to do, Mr Nixon made a complaint against Mrs Mulligan over her failure to respond to his complaint against Jones. He did, however, make that complaint to the IPCC, who by then had attempted to disguise their dreadful reputation with a name change to Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC), rather than to the Police and Crime Panel, who are the ‘Appropriate Authority’, in terms of the legislation, for dealing with such matters.

Nevertheless, the IOPC forwarded the complaint to the PCP for them to deal with. The fate of that complaint, and the troubling manner in which it was dealt with, is the subject of a further article, yet to be published. Put shortly, the PCP did not even record the complaint against Mrs Mulligan, even though she has been criticised by Panel members, on a number of occasions, over her office’s handling of correspondence and dealing with complaints.

Mr Nixon maintains, and it is a strong argument, that without them being made aware, by the IOPC and then, in turn, the PCP, of the consequent complaint against Mrs Mulligan, his issues concerning Dave Jones would have been ignored altogether by both the PCC and Mr Sampson.  With, or without, the intervention of Peter Dew.

The Nixon hypothesis is supported strongly by the fact that no report to the PCP, over the fate of the complaint against Jones, was made at the meeting in February, 2018. Or, at any subsequent meeting. Cllr Dew has, helpfully, confirmed that he was not informed, either. He was aware that a matter raised by Mr Nixon had been referred to the IPCC (IOPC) at the time, but was, quite understandably, not clear as to either the substance, or its outcome. Particularly, as he resigned from the PCP in July 2018 before Mr Nixon’s IPCC/IOPC/PCP matter was settled.

It is fair to say that the failure to record Mr Nixon’s complaint, which taken at its face, and after filtering out the hyperbole, appears to have merit, was brushed under the carpet by PCC Mulligan. She plainly hoped that the matter would be forgotten about. As it very nearly was.

The allegations, in any event, decayed when Jones left North Yorkshire Police. The sex abuse victims in Rochdale and Manchester, and the police whistleblower who first brought the matter to light, Maggie Oliver, incensed at the outcome of Operation Span, were undoubtedly let down once again. This time by a police commissioner who portrays herself, quite wrongly in my own personal, and professional experience, as a victims’ champion.

This was not the first time child sex abuse victims were let down by senior officers within North Yorkshire Police and Julia Mulligan. The antics of both, as a large number victims of such abuse at the hands of former BBC celebrity, Jimmy Savile and ‘Mr Scarborough’, Peter Jaconelli, was painstakingly uncovered by two citizen journalists, Nigel Ward and Tim Hicks, contributing to the North Yorkshire Enquirer website, simply beggared belief.

The two journalists were subject to a £1 million pursuit by the police, enthusiastically funded by Mrs Mulligan, in order to silence the Enquirer’s stinging criticism of the force and the PCC whom, between them, had found not a single Jaconelli or Savile victim. The police, and its commissioner, went to extraordinary lengths to deflect rebuke, despite the fact that the two infamous perverts had offended, unchecked, for decades in North Yorkshire. There appears to be little, or no, trace of support for those victims and a reluctant, mealy-mouthed apology was eventually squeezed out of the now retired assistant chief constable, Paul Kennedy.

Dave Jones, chief constable at the time, remained silent on the topic, apart from leading the disgraceful criminal, then civil, action against the journalists (read more here). Others notably involved as claimants in that private civil action, fully paid from the public purse, were Jones’ deputy, Tim Madgwick, who is now, incredibly, Chair of York Safeguarding Board and, even more incredibly, the present NYP chief constable, Lisa Winward.

The Jaconelli and Savile ‘cover-up’, by the force and its beleagured PCC, repeatedly alleged by the Enquirer, is serious enough of itself. Many thousands of words have been written about the scandal by Messrs Hicks, Ward and other media outlets. Viewed in the light of what now may also be a second alleged ‘cover-up’ involving child sex abuse and North Yorkshire Police, or, at least its most recent ex-chief, and the PCC, and the well-publicised and catastrophic failings of the force’s Protecting Vulnerable Persons Unit (PVPU), also glossed over by Mrs Mulligan at the time (read more here), a deeply troubling pattern emerges.

On any view, it does not sit well with her own positioning as a victims’ champion. Nor does it chime with her recent ‘stage-managed’ claim to have been raped, as a 15 year old, and relating it to the desperate fate of the child sex abuse victims in Rotherham and the ‘Me Too‘ campaign. Absurd, given that all those victims have, very bravely, named their attackers and supported prosecutions, where appropriate.

A story, according to a very reliable source, that was published by the Yorkshire Post as a quid pro quo for that newspaper burying reports over Julia Mulligan’s association with convicted kidnapper, Mujeeb ur Rehman Bhutto. She is alleged to have asked a member of her PCC staff to trawl through her personal Facebook account and delete all references to Bhutto. A Conservative campaigner, and donor, that Mrs Mulligan now claims was just one of three hundred people working on her campaign to become an MP in 2010.

This Bhutto/Mulligan exclusive was published by the Northern Echo (read full story here), two days before the Post’s public relations exercise, and produced what is described by an insider as a ‘nuclear reaction‘ from the short-fused police chief. She had previously told a select group of journalists (which, of course, excluded myself) that she had been sexually assaulted in her earlier life, but asked them not to publish any details.

The police commissioner’s rape claim – and her insistence that it is not investigated and the alleged rapist not brought to book – is the subject of another searching article that will be published on this website in the very near future.

Julia Mulligan, Fraser Sampson, Jane Wintermeyer and Will Naylor have all been offered right of reply. As has the Police and Crime Panel.

Only Mrs Wintermeyer has responded: “No comment, thanks”

Page last updated on Wednesday 27th February, 2019 at 1030hrs

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