Speeches by Jones.

“The process of the SAG is that, ultimately, you must have a safety certificate for the match to go ahead, so that is what we were working towards: how do we manage to get that safety certificate? I did not mention before, and should have done, that the Cabinet Office is doing work looking at the terms of reference of t…”

“There are a number of things there. First, we were not sure when the SAG was meeting, who was on it, or on what basis it was making its decision. We are just not in that conversation. Should we have seen the political implication earlier? Quite possibly. We have already looked at our processes for raising issues within…”

“Again, I will bring in Richard in a minute on the timings of what happened when, but I think the fundamental point was that the Home Office position was to be a receiver of information. We were asking for information—DCMS was the same—and were part of the flow of information across Government. We did not have a role, s…”

“Do you want to talk through the detail, Richard, and then I can come back?”

“I do not think that we were complacent at all. The reality of our role is one that is now being looked at through HMICFRS. It is looking at the role of police in this system. We are also looking at what the role of the Home Office is in policing decisions. The whole police reform agenda is an interesting one. As we kno…”

“Information flows within the civil service, within the Department and within the private offices. We were acting in our role, which was to ask for and receive information. It was being passed around to DCMS and others. I do not think that publicly we could have had a role at that point, because the decision had not bee…”

“There was also a point at the start of October. There had been a question that UEFA might vote to exclude, which I think people were waiting for. On 2 October, it became apparent that that was not going to be the case, so that was also a date of significance.”

“I do not think I can comment on that, because I do not know. I have not seen any evidence to suggest that there was prejudice, but nor have I seen all the information. That is why we are asking HMICFRS to look at the intelligence. There were lots of different views as to what happened in that Amsterdam match and differ…”

“One of the struggles that we had with this process was that we did not actually have the information on why decisions had been made within the SAG. With the previous panel the Committee talked about what the SAG does and how it operates. We were not in the SAG process; we did not hear what the reasons were. We did not …”

“Because, as I said, the decision sent a message that the Prime Minister could not accept, which was that Jewish people would not be welcome to come to this match. He was very clear that we needed to look again at that. The police and crime commissioner, on that decision, then also wrote to the SAG to ask that it meet a…”

“The wider context in this is very important. There are some contested facts and figures that we don’t have answers to at the moment. More widely, policing football matches is really hard, and policing protest is really hard, and the police pretty much do a really good job in difficult circumstances. I was involved in c…”

“Do you mean that in terms of whether it was the hooligan element?”

“To put it in context, the SAG has its terms of reference and does what it does. Part of its role is not that it needs to alert central Government when a problem is coming. Equally, we knew in the Home Office that this was happening and there were several options being looked at, one of which was not allowing fans to co…”

“As I said, the Prime Minister was expressing a view. Rightly or wrongly, people thought that Jewish people were not being welcomed into our country to watch a football match. Of course, the decision—and this speaks to the challenge that we have in looking at these issues—was not made in a vacuum. The police chiefs know…”

“Richard was the one having the contact over the weekend. I should be clear that we heard the decision when Aston Villa tweeted about it first, because it was their decision. They tweeted at about quarter-past 5, and that is when we first knew about it. There was an initial taking in of that information, and then this w…”

“He met with my predecessor as Policing Minister. We were not there, but the action from that was that the UKFPU was to work with Lord Mann, as we understand it. Lord Mann will know whether that happened or not.”

“If I can come in here, when police forces want mutual aid—support for matches—the request does not normally come via us; it would come into the wider policing system, so we would not necessarily be part of that process. As Richard says, I asked for information on the 15th. We got information back that said that there w…”

“There is a big difference between commenting after a decision has been made and before. No comment was made in the run-up to the decision. It would not have been right, nor did we try or even think about trying, to influence what the police may have to say about the safety of a match. Once the decision had been made, t…”

“This inspection is specifically on the input that police forces make into the safety advisory groups. It is looking at their risk appetite in terms of advice and assessment; the degree to which they look at community impacts as part of these decisions, beyond a narrow community safety element; whether the balance is co…”

“At that time, I did not have Lord Mann’s report, I did not have access to any intelligence, and I did not know what the SAG was making its decision based on, other than that its terms of reference mean that it looks at several things. I did not have access to that information. Whether I should have done, within the con…”