Ex-warden fails to overturn murder conviction

A FORMER church warden jailed for murdering a vulnerable university lecturer after a campaign of physical and mental torture has failed to persuade Court of Appeal judges that his conviction is unsafe.

Benjamin Field was found guilty of killing Peter Farquhar, 69, in order to inherit his house and money after driving him to think he was losing his mind following a period of gaslighting.

He asked three appeal judges to overturn his conviction earlier this year, at a Court of Appeal hearing in London.

But Lord Justice Fulford, Mrs Justice Whipple and Mr Justice Fordham yesterday ruled against him.

Field, 30, of Olney, Buckinghamshire, was given a mandatory life sentence and ordered to spend at least 36 years in jail in October 2019 after being convicted of Mr Farquhar’s murder following a trial at Oxford Crown Court.

At the appeal hearing in January, a barrister for Field argued trial judge Mr Justice Sweeney had misdirected the jury and said the murder conviction was “unsafe” as a result.

David Jeremy QC also said directions given to jurors before they started deliberations left the defence with “nothing to say”, when in fact there was “much that could be said on Field’s behalf on the issue of causation”.

But the three appeal judges ruled Mr Justice Sweeney’s approach was correct.

In a written ruling, Lord Justice Fulford said that between 2012 and mid-2017, Field had pretended to be in a genuine and caring relationship first with Mr Farquhar, who lived in Maids Moreton, Buckinghamshire, and subsequently with his elderly neighbour Ann Moore-Martin.

Field had admitted several frauds against them, along with burglaries.

THREE LABOUR MPs, a council leader and a candidate for West Yorkshire Mayor have joined forces to campaign for a Northern Powerhouse rail stop in Bradford.

Bradford’s Labour MPs – Judith Cummins, inset, Imran Hussain, Naz Shah – plus Bradford Council leader Susan Hinchcliffe and Batley & Spen MP Tracy Brabin, the mayoral candidate, met in Bradford to press for the city to have a rail stop in the plan.

It comes as local political leaders are concerned that the Government has cooled on its commitment to NPR after the process was again delayed.

They are concerned Bradford could lose out entirely or not realise the full potential the scheme could bring for the people of the city and district if funding is cut.

The Government will not set out its eagerly awaited vision for major highspeed rail projects like HS2 and Northern Powerhouse Rail until after May’s local elections.

Rail Minister Chris Heaton-Harris revealed that the Department for Transport had run out of time to complete the Integrated Rail Plan (IRP) before the “purdah” period starts when major announcements are heavily restricted.

It means the publication, originally expected late last year before being pushed back to March, will now not happen until after the local elections have taken place on May 6. Northern leaders had been expecting to find out in the IRP how the Eastern leg of the controversial HS2 high-speed route through Yorkshire would fit in with schemes like Northern Powerhouse Rail, which connects the major cities of the North.

A LACK of highly qualified social workers is the “elephant in the room” for Bradford’s beleaguered Children’s Services department, a councillor has claimed.

At a meeting of Bradford Council’s Children’s Services Scrutiny Committee, members heard that around one in four Level 3 children’s social worker roles in Bradford were being carried out by agency staff.

The committee was given an update on the Children’s Services Improvement Programme – implemented after a critical Ofsted report into the department in 2018.

Ofsted carried out another visit last year, and in a letter to the council said while improvements had been made, there were still issues with the service, and the pace of improvement was too slow.

Marc Douglas, head of Children’s Services, said: “What I can say is we’ve spent a lot of the last 18 months getting in place the right structure, and the right quality in place.”

Explaining why improvement seemed slow, he told members that when he was brought in to Bradford Council in summer 2019, he said it would take a minimum of three years for the service to move from inadequate to good.

He added: “It couldn’t be fixed quickly due to the scale and complexity and the level of inadequacy they had identified. We’re only halfway through that time frame I set. Secondly, none of us at that stage knew we were going to have a pandemic.”

He said the council’s ability to recruit and retain Level 3 social workers – with at least two years’ experience – remained a “strategic challenge.”

He added: “Around one in four of our established staff are agency workers.”