MPs discover files on 1984 clash between police and striking miners and ask for urgent review to be set up

Unreleased files about the Battle of Orgreave from five police forces, including a contemporaneous report by a chief constable on the policing of the miner’s strike, have been uncovered by the Commons home affairs committee.

The new files follow the recent identification of nearly 800 unreleased South Yorkshire police files that were not considered when the home secretary, Amber Rudd, ruled out an independent public inquiry.

Yvette Cooper, the chair of the Commons home affairs committee, has written to Rudd asking that an urgent independent “review and publish” process is set up for the newly discovered files to determine which should be made public. She says it should not be left to the individual police forces to decide.

The scandal of Orgreave Read more

The latest material includes files from the Merseyside, Metropolitan, Norfolk, Northumbria and West Yorkshire police forces, including reports from senior “liaison” officers for units deployed at Orgreave. They also include injury reports from officers, informal photos, a “response to a national debrief” and plaques, miners’ lamps and tallies. At least two Met police files have been identified as containing information relating to Orgreave.

“This information is in addition to the information held by South Yorkshire police who have completed the cataloguing of 782 files in 84 archive boxes related to Orgreave, with a further 10 boxes since located, and the 20 files held at the Hull History Centre on behalf of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, formerly the Association of Chief Police Officers,” Cooper said in her latest letter to Rudd.

“The committee is seeking further information from other forces. Given the potential importance of the information contained in these latest files discovered by the home affairs select committee, I urge you to ensure that an independent ‘review and publish’ process is established.”

Cooper says the latest files were not reviewed by the home secretary when she ruled out a public inquiry nor by the independent police complaints commission when they carried out a scoping exercise.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Protesters gathered outside the Home Office in March last year to call for an inquiry into police conduct at Orgreave. Photograph: Rob Pinney/LNP/Rex/Shutterstock

The call for an independent review of the files is understood to be supported by South Yorkshire police and by the South Yorkshire police and crime commissioner, Dr Alan Billings.

He has told the MPs that he wants to see as much information published as possible so that people can see what happened over 30 years ago. He is believed to have suggested that the files be transferred to the National Archives but remain in Sheffield so local people can access them when they become available.



The disclosure is the latest development in the campaign to get to the truth about what happened when South Yorkshire police officers clashed with striking miners on a picket line at the Orgreave coking plant in June 1984.

Approximately 8,000 pickets faced 5,000 officers in what many regard as the most violent confrontation in the year-long strike.

The so-called Battle of Orgreave led to 95 people being charged with riot and violent disorders but their cases were dropped amid questions about the reliability of police evidence.

Campaigners say some of the thousands of officers drafted in to police the picketing used excessive violence – and that this was followed by the fabrication of accounts during the subsequent investigation.

They have been demanding a public inquiry to determine exactly what happened, but there was disappointment when Rudd ruled this out in 2016 saying “ultimately there were no deaths or wrongful convictions” resulting from the events of 1984.