Inside story of the secret deal with Warwickshire Hunt

It has come to something when a police officer describes the Warwickshire Hunt as “an organised crime group by definition”, but that’s where we’ve come to.

Now for the first time, police officers in Warwickshire have broken silence over the long-running sore, which was caused when Warwickshire Police reached a secret deal with the Warwickshire Hunt to avoid going to court.

So what had begun a few years ago as a minor local issue of public order policing of the Hunt has now become a national issue about open and accountable policing, which an MP says is now lacking in Warwickshire Police.

All this comes about because our months of investigation have to some degree penetrated the wall of silence which descended around Warwickshire Police after they reached the secret deal with the Hunt.

As said, it all began when the Hunt was accused of antisocial behaviour, not the illegal chasing of foxes, but disrupting traffic on main roads and so forth.

Archive footage clearly shows the hunt apparently impeding the progress of an ambulance attending an emergency with blue flashing lights. The police Rural Crime Team took action, issuing a Community Protection Notice (CPN). But after the Hunt appealed, the whole matter was heading to court.

And then something extraordinary, perhaps unprecedented, happened. The CPN was gone, in its place a secret deal. The court action simply evaporated, and from that day until this, nobody has been allowed to know what was in the secret deal, or quite why it seemed a good idea.

The police officers who spoke to us on condition of anonymity are bitter and angry. They plainly believe that the interests surrounding a trail hunt – formerly a fox hunt – have arrived at a situation where the organisation is seen as being treated differently to others, as if it is outside the law.

They accuse senior officers of deciding which laws to enforce and which ones not to. These are strong allegations, of course, vehemently refuted by the force, who say they police communities fairly and impartially and are committed to transparency around their policing of trail hunting in order to build confidence with the public.

But some of their comments are hard to fathom. They insist there was no secret deal on the one hand, but agree on the other hand, the contents of the deal struck with the hunt are legally confidential and cannot be disclosed to anybody. They also say the decision to maintain the confidentiality of the document has been maintained by the Information Commissioner’s Office, an independent body.

Local MP Matt Western has been investigating this matter and demanding that the details of the secret deal, which has now been superseded, are disclosed. He says he will go to court to get the matter settled and disclosed to the public once and for all.

Over the same time period, he has coincidentally had a nail inserted in the tyre of his car and graffiti daubed on his house. He doesn’t know who is responsible or why, but it is clear that somebody is targeting the MP.

As for the Warwickshire Hunt, it strongly refutes the suggestion that it is an organised crime group and insists it works closely with the police who regularly attend their meets. Hunt Master Elizabeth Sinden told us that they operate within the law and are accountable to the police. She’s also previously told us that “it’s not a private deal, it’s a settlement out of court” and that she doesn’t think the public need to know the details of the deal.

Unfortunately, minutes after filming her interview, a hunt supporter drove his white van at our cameraman, striking him with the wing mirror. We reported the incident to the police, although the cameraman was thankfully unharmed.

Part of the wall of silence involves key players at the time when this happened. It was on the watch of the Police Commissioner Philip Seccombe, and also the then chief constable Debbie Tedds, that it all took place.

Neither has ever faced any real public scrutiny, and both repeatedly declined interviews, which left us with little choice but to doorstep Mr Seccombe,and we caught up with him as he left his house one morning.

He is a member of the pro-hunting Countryside Alliance, but says that’s irrelevant. He says he was not party to the deal, that he does not have a copy of it and that he is therefore not able to disclose it. Equally, he says he has nothing to apologise for to the public, when we put it to him that the secret deal besmirched the reputation of the police. He simply said, ‘Well, that is your opinion.’

As for Debbie Tedds, the former chief constable, she again declined to give an interview and sent us a text saying, ‘Please don’t chase me.’

However, after months of investigation, the police officers coming forward, and to some extent the doorstep interview with Mr Seccombe, have penetrated the veil of secrecy which surrounds this affair, and it is clear that Mr Seccombe himself is not entirely happy about what happened.

He’s commissioned an inquiry to look into it, to learn lessons and to help with public confidence. Critics say that’s marking your own homework, and that it should be carried out through a recognised independent body. Well, that argument will run and run, as likely will the whole issue, until what was in that deal and how it was arrived at are openly disclosed.