MPs have described South Yorkshire police as “utterly inept” for allowing a search of Sir Cliff Richard’s home during a child abuse investigation to be broadcast live on television.
The Commons home affairs select committee said the singer, whose reputation has suffered “irreparable damage”, was now owed an apology.
An inquiry by the committee into the police raid on Richard’s home in Berkshire in August concluded that it was wrong of the South Yorkshire force to confirm his name as a suspect and then to “cut a deal” with the BBC to give them privileged media access.
“No British citizen should have to watch their home being raided by the police live on television. Sir Cliff Richard has suffered enormous and irreparable damage to his reputation and he is owed an apology over the way matters were handled. We are not surprised he wants to sell his home,” said Keith Vaz, the committee chairman.
Vaz said the South Yorkshire police’s handling of the situation had been “utterly inept”; the force had allowed itself to hand over sensitive information to a journalist and granted him privileged access to the execution of a search warrant.
“The email exchanges could easily be mistaken for a script from [the TV series]The Bill. The force should have refused to co-operate and explained to a senior BBC News executives why the premature broadcasting of a story, which they claimed the journalist threatened, would have prejudiced the investigation.”
But the report, published on Friday, was less critical of the BBC, saying the corporation was “well within its rights” to run the story.
That conclusion is disputed by Richard’s lawyers, who say the live news coverage of the search has “caused very serious harm” to the celebrity at a time when he had not been interviewed by the police, or arrested or charged.
Gideon Benaim, of the law firm Michael Simpkins, said that the BBC coverage had led to “immeasurable harm to our client and was both premature and disproportionate”.
The select committee report said that police sometimes decide to publicise the name of the subject of an investigation for operational reasons, which encouraging potential witnesses to come forward.
But they said the practice of naming suspects, or confirming names when put to them, was wrong when there was no operational need to do so.
The committee said that when a BBC reporter, Dan Johnson, threatened to break the story prematurely unless he got “inside access” to the raid, South Yorkshire police should not have cut a deal with him but instead approached BBC executives to explain the damage that such premature disclosure could do to the investigation.
The MPs heard evidence from the BBC director-general, Lord Hall, which said that the chief constable in this case had only to have picked up the phone and they would not have broadcast the story.
“In the absence of any such approach from South Yorkshire, the BBC were well within its rights to run the story, although as a result Sir Cliff himself suffered enormous, irreparable damage to his reputation,” the report said.
The home affairs committee said the episode also “clearly” pointed to a leak of information on the raid from Operation Yewtree, the Metropolitan police investigation into child sex abuse by Jimmy Savile and others. The MPs said David Crompton, the South Yorkshire chief constable, should have alerted the Met about the leak and invited them to investigate.
However the Met said that so far their investigation had found no evidence to substantiate the “damaging and, we believe, unfounded, allegation” that Operation Yewtree was the source of the leak to the BBC.
They added that they had established that there were “other people outside of policing” who knew about the planned search of Richard’s home.
A BBC spokesman said: “The committee chairman has already said that the BBC acted perfectly properly in handling this story, and we’re pleased that today’s report confirms this.
“Our reporter said very clearly that he did not reveal his sources to South Yorkshire police. We stand by his account.”
Vaz said the episode showed that police forces should consider carefully how they dealt with approaches from journalists on such matters in future.
He added: “Someone with sensitive information decided to leak details of the investigation to the media. We deplore this. South Yorkshire assert that the journalist stated it came from Operation Yewtree. The journalist denies this.
“South Yorkshire should have alerted the Metropolitan police immediately. Their reasons for failing to do so are unsustainable.”
