The publication of the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) and Operation Resolve report in December 2025 represents a watershed moment in the modern history of British policing and state accountability. 

Concluding the largest independent investigation into police misconduct ever undertaken in the United Kingdom, this report serves as the final official chapter in the thirty-six-year struggle for truth regarding the Hillsborough disaster of April 15, 1989.

The investigation, spanning over thirteen years and costing the public purse in excess of £150 million, was tasked with a forensic examination of the actions of South Yorkshire Police (SYP) and, crucially, the West Midlands Police (WMP) in the aftermath of the tragedy that claimed 97 lives.

 The findings are devastating in their clarity: the report identifies twelve police officers, including the most senior commanders of the day, who would have faced gross misconduct proceedings had they not retired or passed away.

It confirms the existence of an industrial-scale cover-up involving the alteration of witness statements, the propagation of lies to the media, and a systemic bias within the force appointed to investigate the disaster.

.While this report delivers an unassailable declaratory justice, officially and permanently vindicating the families and survivors, it highlights the failure of retributive justice.

Due to the passage of time, legal technicalities regarding the status of public inquiries, and the retirement of officers prior to legislative changes, no individual will face disciplinary sanction or criminal punishment for these established failures.

To understand the gravity of the IOPC findings, one must first recall the policing culture of the late 1980s. It was an era characterised by a paramilitary approach to crowd control, where football supporters were frequently viewed not as citizens to be protected, but as a public order threat to be contained. This “hostile environment” mindset is essential to understanding why the immediate police response to a lethal crush was to deploy riot control tactics rather than emergency rescue protocols.

The disaster unfolded during the FA Cup Semi-Final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest. As thousands of supporters arrived at the Leppings Lane end of the stadium, a bottleneck formed at the turnstiles. The failure to manage this crowd accumulation, a fundamental duty of the police operation, created a life-threatening crush outside the gates.

The critical juncture occurred when Match Commander Chief Superintendent David Duckenfield ordered the opening of Exit Gate C to relieve the crush outside.

 This decision, made without closing off the tunnel leading to the already overcrowded central pens (Pens 3 and 4), funneled thousands of fans directly into the crush zone. The result was the death of 97 men, women, and children.

The cover-up began almost instantly.

 At 3:15 PM, with bodies still on the pitch and terraces, Duckenfield falsely informed Graham Kelly of the Football Association (FA) that Liverpool fans had “forced the gate”. 

This lie, which Duckenfield would admit to decades later, created the police narrative: that the disaster was caused by hooliganism and drunkenness, rather than police negligence. 

The 36 years from 1989 to 2025 have been defined by the state’s resistance to the truth. 

The 1990 Taylor Inquiry correctly identified “failure of police control” as the main cause, yet the subsequent 1991 Inquests returned a verdict of “Accidental Death,” effectively exonerating the police and cementing the narrative of fan culpability for over twenty years.

It was not until the formation of the Hillsborough Independent Panel (HIP), chaired by Bishop James Jones, and its report in 2012, that the “Accidental Death” verdicts were quashed. 

This led to the fresh inquests of 2014-2016, which returned the historic verdict of “Unlawful Killing” and categorically exonerated the fans.

 The IOPC and Operation Resolve investigations were launched in the wake of the HIP report to criminally and disciplinarily investigate the conduct that the Panel had exposed.

The 2025 IOPC Report 

The IOPC investigation, finalised in December 2025,  focused on offenses including perverting the course of justice, misconduct in public office, and manslaughter by gross negligence.

The report is structured into 21 chapters, covering everything from the planning of the match to the treatment of bereaved families.

 Its conclusions align with and reinforce the findings of the HIP and the 2016 Inquests, but with a crucial distinction: the IOPC report is a misconduct report. Its purpose was to determine if specific officers breached professional standards to a degree that warranted dismissal.

The report concludes that twelve officers would have had a case to answer for gross misconduct. This finding is significant because “gross misconduct” is the highest tier of police disciplinary infraction, defined as a breach of the Standards of Professional Behaviour so serious that dismissal would be justified.

Chief Superintendent David Duckenfield

The report is scathing in its assessment of the Match Commander. It finds that Duckenfield “froze in the crisis” and failed to take command of the situation as the disaster unfolded. 

Specifically, he would have faced misconduct proceedings for ten separate allegations, the most damning of which was his fabrication regarding the forcing of Gate C.

 The report confirms that this was not a momentary lapse under pressure but a calculated deceit that fundamentally distorted the media coverage and the subsequent investigations.

Chief Constable Peter Wright

For the first time in such explicit terms, the actions of the Chief Constable of South Yorkshire Police, Peter Wright, have been categorised as gross misconduct. 

The report lists six allegations against him, primarily centering on his orchestration of the force’s defensive strategy. Wright is identified as the architect of the narrative that sought to “minimise SYP’s culpability” and “deflect blame towards Liverpool supporters”.

This finding pierces the veil of operational failure and places the responsibility for the cover-up at the very top of the police hierarchy.

Other Senior Officers

The report also implicates Chief Superintendent Donald Denton and Detective Chief Inspector Alan Foster. 

These officers were central to the amendment of police statements. The investigation confirmed that they pressured junior officers to alter their accounts to remove criticism of senior management, thereby sanitising the evidence presented to the Taylor Inquiry. 

Superintendent Roger Greenwood was also found to have a case to answer for failing to organise life-saving efforts at the pens.

A critical section of the 2025 report analyses the Wain Report. Previously presented by SYP as an objective summary of facts, the IOPC found clear evidence that it was, in reality, a draft proof of evidence that was edited substantially by the legal team before submission. 

The investigation revealed that references to SYP’s role in monitoring pen safety and previous tunnel closure tactics were removed from this document. This proves that the omission of vital safety information was not accidental but a deliberate legal strategy to present a best case for the police, rather than a candid account for the inquiry.

West Midlands Police 

One of the most revelatory and damaging aspects of the 2025 report is its condemnation of West Midlands Police (WMP). 

Following the disaster, WMP was appointed to conduct an independent investigation into SYP and to gather evidence for the Taylor Inquiry. For decades, survivors alleged that WMP officers were aggressive, dismissive, and seemingly working to exonerate their South Yorkshire colleagues. The IOPC report validates these allegations in full.

The report describes the WMP investigation as wholly unsatisfactory and inexplicably narrow. It concludes that the force failed to act with the independence required of it, instead functioning as a shield for SYP.

The IOPC identified two senior WMP officers, Assistant Chief Constable Mervyn Jones and Detective Chief Superintendent Michael Foster, who would have faced gross misconduct proceedings for bias.

The investigation found evidence that these officers:

1. Possessed a “Fixed View”: They approached the investigation with a predetermined narrative that favored the police and blamed the fans.
2. Biased Interrogation: They directed their officers to focus excessively on the alcohol consumption of survivors (“the drinking narrative”) while failing to rigorously question SYP officers about their command failures.
3. Intimidation: The report upholds complaints that WMP officers were intimidating towards survivors during statement-taking, exacerbating the trauma of the bereaved.

This finding is crucial because it demonstrates that the injustice of Hillsborough was not the result of a rotten apple force in South Yorkshire alone. It was a systemic failure of the British policing institution, where silence and solidarity extended across force borders to protect the reputation of the police service at the expense of the truth.

The role of the media, particularly The Sun newspaper’s “The Truth” headline, has long been central to the Hillsborough story. The IOPC report investigated the origins of these stories to determine if they originated from police sources. The findings confirm that the smear campaign was a police-led operation.

The report identifies Chief Inspector David Sumner as the likely source of quotes blaming “excessive drinking” for the disaster. Furthermore, it confirms that the lurid allegations published by The Sun, accusing fans of urinating on cops and stealing from the dead, were based on material that originated from news agencies in South Yorkshire, fed by police sources.

The report highlights that police officers felt empowered to spread these falsehoods because there was no duty of candour at the time. The police were legally entitled to present their best case in civil and public inquiry settings, which they interpreted as a license to mislead the press and the public to protect their corporate reputation.

 The IOPC report notes that while Duckenfield later apologised for his lies, the “damage his comments caused was immense and enduring”.

The  injustice felt by the families stems from the chasm between the IOPC’s findings of gross misconduct and the outcome of the criminal trials. 

To understand this, one must analyse the legal technicalities that allowed the perpetrators to escape conviction.

The Acquittal of David Duckenfield (2019)

David Duckenfield was charged with gross negligence manslaughter. Despite the Inquest jury’s verdict of unlawful killing, the criminal court required a higher standard of proof and a unanimous verdict on specific elements of negligence. 

In 2019, a jury acquitted him. The defense successfully argued that the operational failures, while severe, did not meet the high threshold for criminal manslaughter, particularly given the passage of time and the chaotic nature of the day.

 R v Denton, Foster, and Metcalf (2021)

The trial of Donald Denton, Alan Foster, and solicitor Peter Metcalf for perverting the course of justice is the most significant legal failure regarding the cover-up. They were charged with amending witness statements to mislead the Taylor Inquiry.

The trial collapsed when the judge, Mr. Justice William Davis ruled there was no case to answer. His reasoning was based on a strict interpretation of the law:

• The offense charged was perverting the course of public justice.
• Public justice refers to the course of justice in a court of law.
• The Taylor Inquiry was an administrative inquiry appointed by the Home Secretary, not a statutory inquiry with the powers of a court.
• Therefore, altering statements for the Taylor Inquiry, even if done to deceive, did not technically constitute perverting the course of justice under the law as it stood in 1989.

This ruling effectively meant that lying to a public inquiry was not a crime. It revealed a huge loophole in the accountability framework of the UK, allowing the architects of the cover-up to walk free on a technicality.

The IOPC report of 2025 states that the officers would have faced gross misconduct if they were still serving. 

For decades, police officers could retire or resign to avoid disciplinary proceedings. While legislation was introduced in 2017 to allow proceedings against former officers, the specific timing and circumstances of the Hillsborough officers’ retirements (mostly in the 1990s and early 2000s) meant they fell outside the reach of these new powers.

 This creates a situation where the state formally acknowledges the guilt of these men but lacks the jurisdiction to punish them.

The IOPC report must be read in conjunction with the 2017 report by Bishop James Jones, titled The Patronising Disposition of Unaccountable Power. Bishop Jones analysed the experiences of the Hillsborough families and identified a cultural pathology within public bodies: “Institutional Defensiveness”.

This defensiveness manifests as:

• Denial: Refusing to accept responsibility even in the face of evidence.
• Delay: Using legal proceduralism to drag out investigations, hoping victims will give up or die.
• Defense: Using public funds to aggressively fight victims in court.

The IOPC report provides the evidentiary basis for Bishop Jones’ theory. It proves that SYP and WMP engaged in a coordinated strategy to deny, delay, and defend for over three decades.

The impact of this strategy on the families is described as “secondary trauma.” The primary trauma was the loss of their loved ones; the secondary trauma was the torture of being blamed for those deaths.

• Charlotte Hennessy, who lost her father James, noted that her mother died before the truth was established. She describes the report as confirmation that “David Duckenfield is a liar,” a fact the families knew but were gaslit about for years.
• Steve Kelly, who lost his brother Michael, articulated the pain of the delay: “We were beaten by the passage of time”.

The psychological toll of fighting the state for 36 years cannot be overstated. 

Families were subjected to surveillance (though the IOPC found no official records of this, families remain skeptical), vilification in the press, and the agony of repeated legal false dawns.

The Hillsborough Law (2025)

The Public Office (Accountability) Bill

In direct response to the failures detailed in the IOPC report and the legal loopholes exposed by the collapsed trials, the government introduced the Public Office (Accountability) Bill, commonly known as the “Hillsborough Law,” in September 2025.

The Duty of Candour

The centerpiece of this legislation is the “Duty of Candour.” Currently, public officials have a duty not to lie, but they do not have a positive legal duty to volunteer the truth if it is damaging to them. 

The Hillsborough Law changes this by:

• Imposing a legal duty on all public servants to act with “candour, transparency and frankness”.
• Requiring officials to proactively assist inquiries and disclose relevant information without waiting to be asked.
• Creating criminal sanctions for misleading the public or failing to cooperate with investigations.

This law is designed to prevent the administrative inquiry loophole that saved Denton and Foster. 

Under this new law, the alteration of statements for any inquiry would be a criminal offense.

Parity

The Bill also addresses the inequality of legal resources. During the original inquests, the police were represented by King’s Counsels funded by the taxpayer, while families had to fundraise for basic representation. 

The Hillsborough Law mandates “parity of representation,” ensuring that bereaved families at inquests involving the state receive publicly funded legal aid equivalent to that of the public bodies.

Has Justice Been Done?

If justice is defined as the establishment of the truth, then the Hillsborough families have achieved a victory almost without parallel. 

They have overturned an accidental death verdict, secured an unlawful killing verdict, and now possess an official state report (IOPC 2025) that documents the police corruption in minute detail. The narrative of “drunken fans” has been obliterated. The names of the victims have been cleared.

If justice is defined as the punishment of the guilty, then justice has completely failed. The “Accountability Gap” is absolute.

• Deaths: 97 unlawfully killed.
• Convictions: zero.
• Disciplinary Actions: zero (due to retirements).

The IOPC report’s finding that officers would have faced gross misconduct is a hypothetical punishment. It carries no weight in the real world other than reputational damage. 

The perpetrators retain their pensions and their freedom. This is the bitter injustice referenced by solicitor Nicola Brook: “The truth finally acknowledged but accountability denied”.

If justice is defined as ensuring “never again,” the picture is mixed but hopeful. 

The introduction of the Hillsborough Law in 2025 suggests that the state is finally willing to legislate against its own defensiveness. This law transforms the relationship between the citizen and the state, making the specific tactics used by SYP illegal. 

However, laws are only as effective as the culture that implements them. The IOPC’s finding of WMP bias suggests that police culture is resistant to external scrutiny, a resistance that legislation alone may not cure.

Conclusion

The IOPC report on Hillsborough is a testament to the power of persistence against the state. It is a document that vindicates the dead and condemns the living who failed them. But it is also a monument to the failures of the British justice system.

The report confirms that the system was designed to protect itself, not the public. The police investigated the police and found no fault. 

The courts applied technical definitions of justice that allowed liars to walk free. The disciplinary systems allowed the guilty to retire into comfortable obscurity.

Has justice been done?

• For the 97: The truth of their innocence is established, but their killers remain unpunished.
• For the Survivors: They have been vindicated, but the cost was 36 years of their lives.
• For the Future: The Hillsborough Law offers a promise of better justice, but it is a promise bought with the suffering of the Hillsborough families.

The legacy of the 2025 IOPC report is that it serves as the final, irrefutable proof that in the case of the Hillsborough disaster, the law failed before the truth prevailed.

Key Officers and IOPC Findings (2025 Report)

The following table summarises the specific findings against the key individuals named in the report.

The Timeline of Accountability and Failure

Analysis of Legal Concepts