An email written by a Lancashire Constabulary police inspector and later exhibited in the High Court has raised serious conduct questions. An offered right of reply via the force press office, was met with silence. A requested statement from the Head of Professional Standards also went unacknowledged.
Silence is not a viable option
That silence shifts the focus from individual conduct to institutional accountability: if the force will not explain the words of its own inspector, the public is entitled to ask why. Press officers were supplied with links to two recent Neil Wilby Media articles, headlined When is a ‘task force’ not a task force? and A police email, a High Court intervention and questions of Professional Standards, together with an redacted copy of the subject email (read here, here and here).
Public confidence in the police continues to seep away as social media – and the legacy media when they catch up – is packed tight with misdemeanours. Stonewalling a journalist, backed with hard evidence, is not a viable option either for Lancs or Inspector Daniel Clough, the officer at the heart of the controversy.
More of the same
Correspondence emerging since the first of those two articles was published on 24th August 2025 now paints an increasingly troubling picture of complainants dismissed by the same officer, whilst a multiple-bailed suspect was further reassured.
Miss C’s complaints dismissed
One of the emails at the heart of this controversy shows the inspector writing directly to a suspect to say that he would not be progressing a complaint made against him by a woman identified here only as Miss C. She is both a rape complainant and a family court litigant, and, at the material time, had protective measures in place.
Rather than assess her complaint impartially, the inspector reassured the suspect that the matter was closed unless the Information Commissioner’s Office forced him to reopen it. The tone was one of comfort and support — a written message that could only have encouraged the recipient.
In later correspondence with Miss C herself, dated 26th February 2025, Inspector Clough went further — denying that he was corrupt, or a threat to vulnerable women, or that he leaked private data to third parties. The tone of both exchanges was defensive, self-serving and personalised, a far cry from the objectivity expected of a serving officer. Taken together, they show a troubling pattern: complaints from a vulnerable woman were not only dismissed, but rebuffed in language more concerned with the officer’s own reputation than with her protection.
The “worst five days of my life” for Miss G
The backdrop was the suspect’s arrest on 30th January 2025 and release on conditional bail the following day. Four stakeholders, all protected by those bail conditions, were left in the dark about his custody status.
The officer who had managed the case until then, Inspector 3762 Iain Carr, told one of them, on 29th January, that an arrest was imminent, and that charges and a remand application would follow. He was on annual leave at the time, leaving Inspector Clough to manage the arrest, charging decision, and safeguarding. The operation had been weeks in the planning, since early December 2024, and postponed several times because Lancs response officers couldn’t locate the suspect when they attended to arrest him.
It went badly wrong. The suspect was released on bail without charge, and stakeholders were not informed for five days and waited a further four days to be informed of bail conditions.
One of them, Miss G, later described this as “the worst five days of her life.” In an email to Clough, she explained her fear that the suspect, enraged by his second arrest, would come looking for her or her family. She detailed repeated unanswered calls (over twenty in total), being passed from police force to police force, officer to officer and the absence of any safeguarding contact. It was not only a cry for reassurance, but a warning of imminent risk. Her words echoed a phrase that Lancashire officers had repeatedly heard from other sources: “Someone is going to die.”
Even when Inspector Clough returned to duty, he did not update the four stakeholders. That silence was not accidental. He knew the decision to release the suspect without charge, contrary to what had been briefed two days before, would trigger uproar. Concealment, rather than candour, became the default response.
Opacity and missing records
When Inspector Carr returned from annual leave, the picture was no clearer. There was no custody record available, nothing recorded on the Police National Computer, and Carr claimed he had not spoken with Clough and knew nothing about what had happened following the arrest. That was uncharacteristic in the experience of those who had dealt with him over many months.
It was not until 11th February – twelve days after the arrest – that Carr eventually provided the bail conditions. By then, the damage was done: for almost a fortnight stakeholders had been left in the dark about the safeguards supposedly protecting them. The opacity and missing records only fuelled their suspicion that something very dark was being concealed.
Inspector Carr had no explanation for what had gone so badly wrong and was not prepared to say which senior officer – from a list of just two suspects: Supt Gary Crowe or Force Solicitor, Sharon Cottam – had ordered or sanctioned the change of plan.
A covering note – and a dismissive reply
A covering note to Clough, sent to him by the author of this article, Neil Wilby, made the points plain. It accused him of grotesque failings, urged him to self-refer to Professional Standards, and asked him to step aside from further involvement.
Clough’s reply was defensive, at best. He objected to the “tone” of the message, refused outright to self-refer, and closed with a sarcastic dismissal: “Please feel free to make whatever complaints you wish and I am sure you will do so.”
The contrast is stark. Victims describing fear and risk were met with defensiveness, self-preservation and sarcasm. A journalist raising safeguarding failures was brushed off for his “tone.”
The key inference from Clough’s email is also easy to draw: Make a complaint against me because I’m comfortable that PSD will cover up for me.
A troubling juxtaposition
Yet in other correspondence, the same inspector struck a wholly different note with the suspect. His messages were reassuring, almost customer-service in style. He offered comfort, suggested further complaints against that suspect were not being taken forward on Clough’s say so and gave written assurances that could be used to aid the suspect’s claims in the High Court.
The juxtaposition is seriously troubling: Anguished victims were met with silence or dismissal, while the bailed suspect received reassurance and support.
The Code of Ethics backdrop
The College of Policing’s Code of Ethics sets clear expectations: safeguarding updates must be timely, complaints must be recorded and assessed, and officers must act with fairness, integrity, and accountability. None of those obligations were met here. Instead, complainants were left uninformed, a rape complainant was briefed against, and safeguarding concerns were met with defensiveness about “tone.”
Suspicion of tipping off
Stakeholders say it is hard to believe the tenor of private conversations would have been any different. If the inspector was this reassuring in writing, why would he be sterner in speech?
That inference feeds directly into their suspicion that, when arrest attempts by Lancs officers repeatedly failed in late 2024 and early 2025, this inspector was the likeliest officer to have tipped the suspect off. The pool of officers with both access and contact was very small. Clough’s repeated correspondence, coupled with his dismissive treatment of victims, placed him at the centre of suspicion then and that remains the position now.
They emphasise this remains suspicion, not proven fact — but it is rooted in lived experience of failed arrests and reinforced by the inspector’s own correspondence. Against that backdrop, their belief that tipping-off occurred — and that Clough was the likeliest suspect — is at the very least plausible.
Institutional silence
The force press office has declined to acknowledge any of this; Inspector Clough, so noisy elsewhere, declines to rebut or apologise – and the Head of Professional Standards has provided no statement.
That silence is now central to this story.
It is not simply a question of one inspector’s judgment. It is about whether Lancashire Constabulary is willing to confront behaviour that undermines impartiality, professional integrity and public confidence in policing. All the evidence, at present, suggests not.
Conclusion
One email that ends up in evidence in the High Court, another to a suspect closing down a complaint, and another dismissing safeguarding concerns. The pattern is undeniable. Policing depends almost entirely on trust and consent. When officers’ words repeatedly raise more questions than they answer, and when the institution refuses to account for them, that trust inevitably corrodes still further.
This article, the third in a continuing series, demonstrates how institutional silence only deepens mistrust. The next instalment will widen the lens further onto Lancashire Constabulary’s Professional Standards Department and Legal Services, and the growing perception of a force unable, or unwilling, to hold its own officers to account.
Neil Wilby concludes: “I have been holding the police service and its statutory regulators to account across three decades – notably the three Yorkshire forces plus Durham, Cleveland and GMP – but Lancashire Constabulary continues to shock on an almost daily basis.
“Beneath the veneer of what they describe on their own website as ‘5,500 fantastic officers keeping people safe’ is a level of laziness, ineptitude and institutional dishonesty that is very seriously concerning. To be a victim of crime in this county – and I know from very personal and lengthy experience – is a living hell.
“That is the true measure of Lancashire Constabulary’s failures. Inspectors Daniel Clough and Iain Carr are just the tip of a very deep iceberg”
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Neil Wilby is a journalist, court reporter and transparency campaigner who has reported on police misconduct, regulatory failures, and criminal and civil justice since 2009. He is the founder and editor of Neil Wilby Media, launched in 2015.
Page last updated: Thursday 28th August 2025 at 11h25
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