Why don’t police act?

Yesterday the House of Lords debated whether or not the rules of parliamentary privilege should be tightened – and, proving that they most certainly should not be, Lord Hain raised his decision last year to name Sir Philip Green as the man at the centre of harassment allegations investigated by this newspaper. Sir Philip gagged us with a court injunction.

Some in the legal establishment seemed to think that Sir Philip was defending a point of principle, namely that if someone signs a non-disclosure agreement (NDA), they should stick to it. However, NDAS were never intended to be used in this manner – to suppress allegations of sexual harassment and racist abuse.

Furthermore, the injunction was a perverse, outdated assault on free speech, and thank goodness Lord Hain defied it. Yesterday, he also answered a commonplace question: why did Sir Philip’s accusers sign an NDA at all?

According to one complainant quoted by Lord Hain, they went to an employment tribunal but “were told it would not get anywhere so settled”. Others were “worn down with spiralling legal costs”. Lord Hain quoted yet more disturbing stories, that Sir Philip: “was touching and repeatedly slapping women staff ’s bottoms, grabbing thighs and touching legs.”

The question is: will the police investigate such claims? They have been happy to act in the past on the basis of single, spurious allegations, so why this strange reluctance to act in the case of Sir Philip, where the allegations are both serious and numerous? Perhaps having been too fast to act in the past, the police are now being over-cautious. But these accusations cannot be justly ignored.