The CCRC “fit for purpose” – is it really?

Dame Vera Baird, Chair, CCRC 

It was announced recently by Anthony Rogers, HM Chief Inspector of His Majesty’s Crown Prosecution Service Inspectorate (HMCPSI), that the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) is “fit for purpose” following a review of the organisation. The aim of the review was to assess the effectiveness of structures that support casework decision-making and assurance processes.

Although the overall assessment of the CCRC was positive, i.e. fit for purpose, it is difficult to see how that conclusion was reached. For example:

2.14. A key factor in the delays we saw was the time taken to obtain material, but the processes for allocating cases within the teams at month’s end can also introduce delays, particularly for applications received at the beginning of each month.

2.15. We saw limited use of escalation to expedite the receipt of material required to progress cases. In some cases we examined, this led to lengthy delays of several months, with relatively little activity. The assurance around the quality of casework was limited and did not provide adequate ‘grip’ of live cases.

Nobody knows which specific cases were examined. However, taking the example of Jeremy Bamber, a very long running case with the most recent submission having taken over 5 years to adjudicate on just four out of over ten submissions, we can clearly see the effects of paragraphs 2.14 and 2.15 above. Not mentioned at all by the HMCPSI review is what happens when ‘game changing’ evidence is presented to the CCRC.

Over a year ago, Empowering the Innocent (ETI) provided Dame Vera Baird with two documents that indicate that a referral to the Court of Appeal (CoA) was warranted without further delay. One document related to evidence that Sheila Caffell, supposedly dead, made a telephone call via the 999 service at 06:09 on 7^th August 1985, while Jeremy Bamber was outside the farmhouse surrounded by police officers, i.e. someone that Jeremy Bamber supposedly murdered was making a phone call several hours after he allegedly killed her! The document given to Dame Vera highlighted the need for urgent further investigation with the Metropolitan Police, but nothing happened and a crucial witness died before the CCRC could take any meaningful action.

The prosecution of Jeremy Bamber relied on the supposition that when he arrived at White House Farm around 4 am on the morning of 7 August 1985, five members of his family were already dead, killed by him. In July 2024, it emerged that a police officer, Nicholas Milbank, discussed with a journalist that at 06:09 on 7 August he had received a 999 call from someone supposedly dead for at least 4 hours. In an audio recording the police officer is clearly not distressed by the discussion, indeed he seems quite cheerful and helpful in admitting that someone was alive inside a farmhouse where all occupants had apparently been murdered. It is as if he was blissfully unaware of how stunning his revelation was! The 999 call was acknowledged by retired Essex Police officer, Nick Milbank. The circumstances are detailed here.

The existence of the ‘game changing’ evidence exposed by Nick Milbank was immediately referred to the Chair of the CCRC and the Case Review Manager. They did nothing to secure evidence from Milbank. Instead, the CCRC, reverted to the ‘bad old days’ practices so beloved by former CEO Karen Kneller – by ignoring the reported evidence and asking Essex Police to ‘discuss’ the issue with the retired policeman rather than do the job themselves. Lo and behold, to nobody’s surprise, the police officer was swayed to change his story and alleged that he didn’t know that he was talking to a journalist and he hadn’t given permission to be quoted. Consequently, on this flimsy excuse, the CCRC declined to consider Milbank’s evidence. The CCRC naïvely accepted the word of Essex Police even though there is irrefutable evidence that Essex Police have not told the truth about this issue, because the journalist, Heidi Blake, has text messages from her to Milbank stating clearly that she is a journalist employed by The New Yorker magazine and intended to quote her discussion with him in a podcast. To which Milbank replied with two ‘thumbs up’ emojis! Hardly the reaction of someone being conned by a journalist, as Essex Police would have us believe. (see here).

There are two conclusions that can be drawn from this episode:

• (A) The CCRC blundered again and failed to understand the significance of the Milbank interview; or,

• (B) The CCRC fully understood the implications of what Milbank disclosed and deliberately sabotaged the evidence that could, and should, have resulted in Bamber’s case being referred without delay to the Court of Appeal.

The evidence seems more likely to support conclusion B.

The second document sent to Dame Vera and colleagues at the CCRC is a 50 page outline of around 70 wounds suffered by the three adult victims that the pathologist, Dr Peter Vanezis, denied existed, thus denying jurors of evidence clearly indicating that Sheila Caffell killed her family before killing herself. (See here).

Furthermore, the CCRC has never in its 30 years of existence requested to see documents held secret under Public Interest Immunity (PII) in the White House Farm murder case.

There are things that our rulers, in their wisdom, feel that the public shouldn’t know, presumably because the knowledge might be disturbing or embarrassing to authority.

PII —previously known as Crown privilege—is a long-standing exclusionary rule of evidence. When operated, it excludes certain evidence (normally documents) from production in court. So, PII might be used to protect matters of national security if a trial involved exposing information that a State enemy would find useful, such as how to build an atomic bomb. All well and good if protecting us from adversaries that mean us harm.

However, in theory PII has no application in the evidence accumulated in a straightforward criminal investigation and murder trial, which is what the case against Jeremy Bamber amounts to. Jeremy Bamber was accused of killing five members of his family at White House Farm (WHF) following a police investigation with no involvement of the state security services (as far as we know). That documentation has been hidden using PII powers suggests that deeply embarrassing events may have taken place in the White House Farm murder investigations – so embarrassing that these documents are locked up for 70 years.

In thirty years of allegedly considering submissions submitted by Jeremy Bamber, the CCRC has failed to investigate:

• (a) documentation compiled by the original murder enquiry overseen by DCI Taff Jones, causing him to believe that Sheila Caffell was responsible for the deaths;

• (b) documentation from an enquiry by DCI James Keneally, causing him also to believe that Sheila Caffell was responsible for the deaths;

• (c) documentation compiled by DCI James Dickinson that confirms that Jeremy Bamber telephoned the police at 03:36 and not 03:26, a crucial piece of evidence in supporting Bamber’s account of the morning;

• (d) documentation from Operation Stokenchurch, conducted by the Metropolitan Police, including the outcome of enquiries into a 999 call made from inside White House farm at 06:09.

In short, the conduct of the CCRC over the past 30 years has been to fail to pursue any leads that suggest that Jeremy Bamber is innocent. We now know why this is the case; Essex police officers have been allowed by the CCRC to manage the submission process since the year 2004!

A highly significant and sinister aspect of the CCRC operation not addressed by the HMCPSI is the employment of numbers of retired police officers by the CCRC, who claim to not even know how many of their employees are ex-police officers. The culture and ethos of the CCRC staff is something that nobody ever takes into account. ETI reported in 2022 that the culture of the CCRC begins with the assumption that everyone who approaches them is guilty: “Your application to the Commission begins with a presumption of guilt, not innocence.”

The above quotation is from a letter from Catherine Dilks, Customer Service Manager CCRC to applicant Mark Alexander on the 26 March 2015.

This single declaration sums up succinctly the entire approach of the CCRC to its clientele. By implication, the CCRC presumes that applicants to its deskbound case auditing ‘service’ are likely wasting the CCRC’s time by dishonestly trying to fool the Court of Appeal into overturning a valid conviction.

It is staggering to think that the organisation that is the last and only hope for the innocent assumes that everyone who approaches it is guilty. If for no other reason than the people, like Andrew Malkinson, who were entirely innocent and wrongly convicted and who had to fight CCRC indifference every inch of the way to justice.

The CCRC’s stance is that retired police officers bring invaluable investigative skills to the organisation. But can anyone actually recall an instance when the CCRC undertook any meaningful investigations? They are more likely to offer up excuses why something won’t be investigated. The supposed investigation skills of retired police officers employed by the CCRC seem more likely to be used in steering the CCRC staff away from potentially valuable areas of investigation.

In any event, it is simply appalling that retired police officers are employed in powerful positions by the CCRC; can anyone believe that upon being hired by the CCRC they become freshly dedicated to finding fault with fellow police officers and securing the release of prisoners?

It is known that Jeremy Bamber’s submissions have been overseen by retired police officers for a very long time.

In 2004, Jeremy Bamber reapplied to the CCRC with fresh evidence, and many fresh lines of enquiry, that he hoped would be investigated by them. That same year, he was allocated a new Case Review Manager, and he absolutely refused to accept Bamber’s argument that virtually every aspect of the case against him was wrong, and that the evidence set out by the prosecution at trial was either misrepresented or fabricated.

Years into the second review, the Commission informed Bamber that working on his case was a former Essex Police officer (the alleged murders occurred in Essex). They did not give Bamber his name, but assured him that he had no connection with the original investigation in 1985/6. However, that was only true in the narrowest sense, and highly misleading. 

It is now known that the former police officer, an ex-Detective Chief Superintendent (DCS), had been in charge of Essex police Case 253 (88), in which four key prosecution witnesses against Bamber at trial were allowed to avoid prosecution for fraud related to White House Farm. Essex Police failed to aid prosecution against them despite the strong evidence against them. Some think it was so that their convictions could not be used by Bamber as a ground of appeal.

Why didn’t the CCRC prevent this ex-Essex DCS from working on Bamber’s submissions from 2004 to 2012? Why did they mislead Bamber and his lawyers about the fact that he oversaw a fraud investigation, begun in 1988, to drag on for many years, and for it then to be discontinued due to the length of time taken to investigate it? This is despite the clear evidence of wrongdoing by the prosecution witnesses. 

Bamber’s current Senior Manager at the CCRC is an ex-policeman, who mislead Bamber and his solicitor about what his Case Review Manager had stated to Jeremy in various phone conversations.  Months later, he admitted that Bamber’s calls to the Commission were all recorded and conceded that the Case Review Manager had said what Bamber alleged he’d said all along. This behaviour, we submit, represents the real CCRC and the way that they conduct themselves; anything to obstruct justice.

Reviews such as those recently concluded by HMCPSI never get anywhere near to uncovering the real truth about how the CCRC operates because they fail to ask questions that would expose the failings inherent in an organisation that can appear in some reviews to be essentially run by the police for the benefit of the police.

The Westminster Commission on Miscarriages of Justice made 60 recommendations for improving the way that the CCRC operates[1]. The Henley Report[2] made 9 detailed recommendations following the CCRC’s failure to assist Andrew Malkinson, which had resulted in 17 years of unnecessary imprisonment. None of the 34 recommendations set out in the 2026 HMCPSI report would address the shoddy, unprofessional behaviour outlined above in the Milbank revelations. It seems as if after every scandal that engulfs the CCRC a thorough report is made but it has no impact at an operational level. A plethora of recommendations has failed to cause the CCRC to undertake the basic function of conducting investigations themselves into alleged police malpractices.

The final words on this subject are spoken by Jeremy Bamber:

“The Commission has been given powers to obtain anything they require to investigate potential miscarriages of justice. Even when this evidence is obtained and it is put right in front of them, as I have done repeatedly, they simply refuse to investigate and then create straw man arguments to justify their erroneous conclusions.

The CCRC is NOT fit for purpose, and I believe that ex-police officers deliberately sabotage investigations to protect their former colleagues, and that corruption of this kind is endemic in this organisation, carried out behind closed doors with no one holding them to account.

Why does this continue? Because it conceals all the failings in the Criminal Justice System that would embarrass the police, the CPS and Prosecuting Counsel who obtain convictions on evidence they know to be false, as they did, and continue to do, in my case”.

By Bill Robertson

Bill Robertson has researched alleged miscarriages of justice for around 20 years and advised on several cases, including the most recent application to the CCRC by Jeremy Bamber.

Please let us know if you think that there is a mistake in this article, explaining what you think is wrong and why. We will correct any errors as soon as possible.

References

[1]Westminster-commission-on-miscarriages-of-justice-in-the-interests-of-justice.pdf

[2] Independent review by Chris Henley KC, of the CCRC’s handling of the Andrew

Malkinson case Report & CCRC Response 2024.