UK: Police Delayed Review of Tactics for Controlling Fracking Protest as Conflict Escalated, Leaked Emails Show

by Mat Hope / DeSmog Blog

Police have been criticised for repeatedly delaying a review of official guidance for policing fracking protests after a cache of leaked correspondence highlighted ongoing problems with the consultation process. More than two years after the review was first promised, DeSmog and the Guardian can exclusively reveal it has now been delayed for a fifth time.

Dozens of leaked emails between the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) Lead on Shale Gas and Oil Exploration — Lancashire Assistant Chief Constable Terry Woods — and Green MEP Keith Taylor show how the process has been repeatedly delayed, with the review’s remit changing without any prior warning.

Police monitoring group, Netpol, described the ongoing delays as “a classic example of the police deliberately dragging their feet”.

The leaked correspondence shows:

• The deadline for completing the new guidance has been delayed five times;
• The remit of the review changed without the police warning stakeholders;
• Fracking business groups being included in early consultations, with anti-fracking protestors excluded from the initial review process;
• Police having to restart the review process after a botched first attempt at wider consultation in March 2018;
• The police officer in charge of the review admitting he had not realised the scale of the job, 15 months after being appointed;
• The police promising to complete a six-week public consultation by “Easter 2019”, which has failed to materialise. The College of Policing confirmed it is now not expected to be completed until after “summer 2019 at the earliest”, more than two and a half years after a review was first promised.

As the review into tactics for policing the protests has been delayed, conflict between the police and campaigners at fracking sites across the UK has escalated.

In November 2017, Green party co-leader Jonathan Bartley was dragged from a fracking site in North Yorkshire. There have also been multiple reports of rough policing at Cuadrilla’s Preston New Road site, including a disabled 85-year-old woman being dragged across a highway. In August 2017, police promised to review a video in which officers are seen joking about the arrest tactics for anti-fracking protestors.

Keith Taylor, Green MEP for South East England, who has been communicating with Woods about the review since 2016 told DeSmog:

“We started this process quite some considerable time ago and there has been a series of missed opportunities and broken pledges about when the consultation would start, and who would be involved in it.”

“Prevarication is one thing the police have been shown to be very good at.”

Woods told DeSmog that “work to complete the review of the guidance was comprehensive and ongoing”.

“While there have been delays in publication due to a widening of the focus of the guidance as well as capacity and competing demands on subject matter experts, substantial work has taken place and the guidance is now undergoing final check,” he said.

“Following consideration by the College of Policing Professional Committee, the guidance will undergo public consultation and dates will be announced to allow interested parties to engage and shape the final guidance.”

Alan Whitehead, Labour’s Shadow Minister for Energy and Climate Change told DeSmog that the review was urgently needed. He said:

“Neither the law nor fracking protest procedures are clear at the moment and it’s in no one’s interest that this continues.”

“The review of procedures should be concluded urgently and transparently so that proper and peaceful protest can be carried out without fear of arbitrary action or time wasting prosecutions.”

Geraint Davies, Labour MP for Swansea West, and a member of the House of Commons’ Environmental Audit Committee, told DeSmog the police must operate more transparently on an issue that is so publicly sensitive, and that has significant implications for climate change:

“The police are public servants and must be open, transparent and inclusive in ensuring their behaviour helps to protect the public, including from environmental harm, and not to be complicit in fracking. They need to sympathetically ensure demonstrations support our democracy safely and not do anything that thwarts the people they are here to serve.”

“Fracking is a critical threat to climate change and the public know unless the Government don’t change direction we will not fulfil our Paris emissions obligations and send a message to the world that other countries don’t need to take global warming seriously.”

Late in the process, Woods turned to the College of Policing for guidance on how to conduct a full public consultation. The College was set up in 2012 to “provide those working in policing with the skills and knowledge necessary to prevent crime, protect the public, and secure public trust”.

Responding to DeSmog’s questions about the ongoing delays to the review process, its role in the process was “to set the standards for key areas of policing which help forces provide consistency and a better service to the public.”

“In setting any national standard there is a rigorous quality assurance process. This process can only commence once the content has been developed; in this case the focus has widened which has involved more development work than originally planned.”

Delays

Police first promised a review of its 2015 guidance on policing onshore oil and gas activities in January 2017, the leaked correspondence reveals.

The police have moved the date by which the review would be completed five times, with the approach to conducting a wider consultation evolving in an ad-hoc manner over the past two years.

In total, the police have now set five deadlines for the review process or public consultation to be completed:

• January 2018: Woods said the review would be complete by January 2018, shortly after he was appointed as the NPCC’s Shale Gas Lead.
• April 2018: After pressure from Taylor and Netpol, Woods agreed there should be wider consultation on the updated guidance, with an initial informal consultation to be completed by April 2018. This was derailed after North Yorkshire police conducted a botched attempt to engage the campaign community;
• October 2018: Woods then took advice on the method for conducting a full public consultation from the College of Policing. A six-week consultation period was promised on new draft guidance that Woods said would be complete by the end of October 2018;
• ‘Easter 2019’: Woods’ latest timetable, shared with Taylor and Netpol in December 2018, then claimed a public consultation would not be complete until ‘Easter 2019’. Woods said he had set the October deadline with the College of Policing but that they “had been unable to achieve this”. “This isn’t what I wanted but I am strongly pushing for this to get to me asap. I’m insisting it has to be before Christmas as it’s setting my timescales back a number of weeks now,” he said.
• ‘Summer 2019’: This deadline has now been pushed back to “Summer 2019 at the earliest”, the College of Policing confirmed to DeSmog. It said this was due to it now taking a wider focus for the updated guidance, which will no longer be only on policing onshore oil and gas activity but “long-term protest generally”.

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