How Donald Trump’s tariffs are wreaking chaos in the British metal industry

Published

9 months ago

March 22, 2025

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As the clock ticked down towards 12.01am Eastern Standard Time on 12 March, Liam Bates kept refreshing his browser.

Over the preceding weeks, Marcegaglia, the stainless steel company whose long products division he headed up, had rushed to melt and ship as much metal as it could from its furnaces in Sheffield across to the east coast of America, ahead of the imposition of tariffs.

Stainless steel

UK and US industrially interlocked

Of all the varieties of steel, stainless steel – an alloy of iron and chrome, along with other elements like nickel, molybdenum and carbon – is among the most important. Unlike most other iron alloys, which can rust when they encounter oxygen, stainless steel has a passive film that protects it from corrosion and can even self-heal. That makes it essential not just for use in sinks and cutlery (where most people will encounter it on a daily basis) but, arguably even more essential, in surgical instruments, heavy machinery and the pipes and ducts out of sight but essential to keeping civilisation working.

The trick of how to make stainless steel in large quantities was discovered here in Sheffield by Harry Brearley, and while the laboratories he worked for shut down long ago, the furnace at Marcegaglia, in an industrial park just outside the city, can trace a continuous thread back to him. This furnace used to be owned by British Steel, the nationalised corporation responsible for most of Britain’s steel manufacture until the days of privatisation.

Ever since the invention of stainless steel, Britain has melted, cast and exported vast quantities of the stuff to America. For all that the US has a sizeable stainless steel sector, the two countries’ stainless sectors have nonetheless been industrially interlocked since the days of Henry Ford. You can see it in the way Marcegaglia functions.

It melts down scrap in its electric arc furnace in Sheffield – an enormous cauldron whose electrodes create a storm of lightning that consumes the same power as a sizeable northern city – and adds the relevant alloy ingredients to form a long, heavy metallic bar, a billet as it’s known. That billet is then shipped across the Atlantic to the company’s other site, where the billets are processed into bars that are then sold into the North American market. It is a single economic organism, split only by an ocean.

But today that ocean and that cross-country split have become an enormous problem. The last time Donald Trump imposed tariffs on steel imports, back in 2018, so-called “intermediate” products like the billet made by Marcegaglia and then processed in America were excluded from the duties. This time around, the initial tariff rules had no such exemptions. The upshot was that any steel arriving in American ports after 12.01am Eastern Standard Time on 12 March – including Marcegaglia’s half-finished stainless billets – would incur hefty 25% tariffs.

A race against time

All of which was why Liam Bates had raced to get as much steel as possible into the US before that deadline. But as he refreshed his browser in the run-up to that deadline, he noticed two straggling shipments, still stuck on the Atlantic. The two ships, the Eva Marie and the Atlantic Star, were, between them, carrying about $12m of steel and they had been due to dock in the US on 10 or 11 March. If so, they would have avoided having to pay those 25% tariffs. But now storms and squalls were spreading across the North Atlantic. Would they stray into the ships’ path, disrupting shipping?

If the cargo arrived late, it would obliterate any margin the company hoped to make on its steel. And since those bars were destined for Marcegaglia’s own plant, the company would have to pay all those costs itself (tariffs are technically paid by the importer). Somehow, Bates had found himself helplessly witnessing an unexpected collision of politics and weather – with profound commercial consequences.

Of all the metal items Britain exports to the US, stainless steel is by far and away the biggest category. And the vast majority of that steel comes from the melt shop at Marcegaglia. But the quandary facing Liam Bates, and those companies he sells to in the US, helps illustrate the difficulties of economic policy-by-tariff.

Americans will see cost of most things go up

The prevailing theory behind the White House measures is that by raising the price of all imported metals, it will encourage domestic producers to build new production. It will help the US to reindustrialise – or so says Donald Trump. And in the long run, that might well prove right. Already, metals producers are raising money, promising to restart old, mothballed smelters. After all, if your main overseas competitors have seen their prices rise by 25%, that’s quite a competitive opportunity.

The problem is: building industrial production takes time. Marcegaglia itself is planning to replace its old furnace with a newer model, but the planning process has already taken years; the construction itself will be measured in months if not years too. In other words, even if everything goes to plan, America is very unlikely to replace imported steel with domestic production within the period of Donald Trump’s term as president.

In the meantime, American consumers will see the cost of pretty much everything going up. After all, steel – ignored or dismissed as it sometimes is – is the single most important metallic substance in the world. If something isn’t made of steel it’s made in machines made of steel. And lifting some of those steel prices by 25% will travel like an economic tidal wave through US supply chains.

UK flooded with cheap imported steel

The tidal wave is already washing back elsewhere too. With so much steel now unable to get into the US at a decent price, exporters are redeploying shipments elsewhere. All of a sudden countries like the UK are seeing a flood of cheap imported steel – good news in the short run for consumers, but disastrous for what is left of Britain’s domestic industry.

As the deadline approached and Bates nervously refreshed his live vessel tracking map, disaster struck. The squalls across the Atlantic mounted and the Eva Marie and Atlantic Star slowed nearly to a halt. By the time midnight struck and the tariffs came into place, the two vessels were still many miles off the US coast. They had lost the race. The upshot was Marcegaglia would have to pay around $4m in tariffs – about £3m.

That a company was struck with a somewhat arbitrary fee simply to pass goods from one of its factories to another might be among the most egregious examples of the collateral economic damage wrought by trade barriers, but it is likely to be the first of many perverse episodes, with consequences all around the world. For steel is not the only metal to be hit with tariffs. If anything, the drama is even greater for another metal: aluminium.

Aluminium

The world’s biggest factory – hidden in Scotland

Here’s a riddle for you: what is the biggest factory in the world?

You’re probably thinking of vast, cavernous car production lines in Michigan, of shipyards in Korea or steelworks in China. But there’s a strong case to be made that the world’s biggest factory is instead to be found deep in the Highlands of Scotland.

Not that it looks anything like a factory. To the untrained eye, it looks, instead, like heather, forests and bubbling burns of water trickling into lochs. But the 114,000 acres of estates in Lochaber and Badenoch – the third biggest rural estate in Scotland – play a crucial role in helping produce one of the most important substances in the world.

The Fort William aluminium plant sits under the shadow of Ben Nevis, the tallest peak in the United Kingdom. Once upon a time, it was just one of a constellation of smelters dotted around Scotland, that made this country, all told, one of the world’s biggest aluminium producers.

For all that it is very prevalent in the earth’s crust, aluminium used to be one of the world’s most precious metals – so much so that no one had even laid eyes on it until the 19th century. When he wanted to impress his guests, Napoleon III served them dinner not on gold plates but on aluminium.

An extraordinary metal

Why? Because aluminium is very difficult – even harder than iron – to convert from the ores you find in the ground into its metallic form. Burn iron ore hot enough, in the right kind of furnace alongside the right kind of charcoal or coal, and you eventually smelt out a form of metal. But aluminium needs a different kind of force to be persuaded to loosen its bonds and form into a pure metal – the force of electricity.

So only when the Hall-Heroult process, which allows you to smelt aluminium via electrolysis of alumina (a processed version of the bauxite you get out of the ground), was invented in 1886 did aluminium become a widely available metal. Few people talk these days about the Hall-Heroult process, but it was a breakthrough of earth-shattering proportions. Aluminium is an extraordinary metal – strong but light. And those qualities make it essential in aeronautic deployments. No aluminium, no planes.

It is no coincidence that the Wright Brothers’ plane at Kitty Hawk had an engine made out of aluminium. Steel would have weighed the glider down too much. And it’s no coincidence that powered flight happened shortly after aluminium became widely available. Without the Hall-Heroult process, the world would have been a very different place.

While the process wasn’t dreamt up in the UK, British industrialists rapidly embraced it, building smelters all over the country. But the catch with aluminium is that you can’t smelt it without a big and (this is important) very reliable supply of power. Turn off the power to those enormous carbon electrodes inside an aluminium smelter and in a matter of hours the metal at its base will solidify, effectively destroying it. More than nearly any other industrial process, this is not something you can just switch off willy-nilly, which helps explain why smelters aren’t typically dependent on variable power sources like wind and solar.

It also explains why, throughout history, these plants have been seen as some of the most important industrial locations throughout the world. The Fort William plant provided most of the aluminium used in Spitfires during WWII. It was repeatedly targeted by the Luftwaffe – indeed there is an old German bomb kept as a memento just near the turbines that power the cells here.

Some of the world’s earliest smelters were powered by hydroelectricity – most notably the ones which drew their power from the Niagara Falls plants near Buffalo, New York. But the Fort William plant was subtly but importantly different. Those other hydro plants would typically piggyback off a big dam generating power from a big river – such as the ones you find in the US or Canada, or the fjords of Norway. But none of Britain’s rivers is quite powerful enough or with a reliable enough flow to provide that kind of uninterrupted power.

Radical design

So the designers of the Fort William plant did something radical. They bought up vast stretches of the countryside around Ben Nevis (including Ben Nevis itself). And within that estate, they built a series of dams to collect the rainwater trickling down from local watersheds. Those dams weren’t there to generate power for homes – they were there to collect the water and channel it through a series of tunnels, running 16 miles through the hills and through the flanks of Ben Nevis. Then the water, collected from those 114,000 acres, feeds five pipes running down the side of the mountain which run into an enormous hydroelectric power station.

There are many aluminium smelters around the world and many hydroelectric dams. But none are quite like this one. The point being that without the estate, without all those trickling streams and heather-covered watersheds, the plant here simply wouldn’t function. It is all part of a single ecosystem.

These days the plant is connected to the national grid, meaning it also serves another function: balancing. This comes back to one of the dysfunctions of the grid: it doesn’t have enough high-voltage lines connecting Scotland, with all its wind farms, and the south. So on windy days, when there’s too much power in Scotland, instead of curtailing those farms and wasting the electricity, the plant can suck in extra power from the Scottish section of the grid and leave its water where it is as a sort of battery.

Competition from China

The problem the plant has faced is that these days aluminium is a commodity metal. And it’s becoming harder and harder to compete with the cheap metal being exported from China. China dominates the global supply of the metal, in large part because its suppliers benefit from cheap energy and generous government subsidies – neither of which are available in the UK. As the years have gone by, the workers at Fort William have watched as, one by one, every other plant in Britain was shuttered. Rumours still abound that they may eventually be next.

And, much as for Marcegaglia down in Sheffield, the tariffs on aluminium will only make life tougher for Alvance, the unit of Liberty House – part of Indian-born Sanjeev Gupta’s business empire – that now owns the Fort William plant. Arguably, the impact could be even greater. The last time Donald Trump imposed tariffs on aluminium back in 2018, the rate he chose was 10%. The difference with the steel tariff level (which was 25% then and now) reflected the fact that the US imported far more aluminium than steel. Imposing severe extra costs on it would, the White House worried, cripple the American aerospace and car businesses dependent on the metal. No such concern this time around. The tariff is 25%.

Quite how that will affect the plant here in the Scottish Highlands remains to be seen. After all, Alvance itself doesn’t sell anything directly to the US, sending its large slabs of metal to other firms in England which process and roll them into sheets and specialised components, some of which end up in the US. Perhaps, as the defence industry ratchets up in the coming years, more of that aluminium will be used by domestic industry. But what’s to stop UK manufacturers doing what they’ve been doing for years, and simply opting for the cheapest metal available, which usually comes from China? Either way, life for the last remaining aluminium plant in the UK is about to get harder, not easier.

But while the main upshot of the trade war building across the Atlantic and the Pacific will be to make both sides worse off – that, at least, is the prediction from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development – that doesn’t mean there won’t be some beneficiaries in this country. For a small but important example, let’s travel from the far north of Britain to its far south.

Tungsten

UK has one of its biggest resources in world

Drive across Dartmoor, the windswept national park in the heart of Devon, and every so often you come across the remains of an old tin mine. At Fox Tor you find the remains of alluvial mining; there is Golden Dagger Mine, which ran all the way to the 1930s, as well as the hollow stone chimney of the pumping house at Wheal Betsy.

For much of the ancient era, tin – which when mixed with copper creates the alloy bronze – was what we would today call a “critical mineral”, essential for the production of the strong tools and weapons of the Bronze Age. And for centuries, the majority of Europe’s tin came from Cornwall and Devon.

That, of course, is long in the past. But just on the outskirts of Dartmoor is a site that could – just could – make this an important site for critical minerals once again. For here, beneath the soil of southwest England, is one of the world’s biggest resources of tungsten.

Tungsten among few substances on everyone’s list

Tungsten is among the 21st century’s most important critical minerals. Nearly every country has a list of these materials – the kinds of things they need to make their most important products – and the members of those lists vary by region. But tungsten is one of the few substances that feature in everyone’s list. The hardest metal in existence, with the highest melting point, it is essential in the production of hard steel tools, weapons, armour and as the electrodes inside semiconductor circuits. If you are making electronics you need tungsten. If you are going to war you need tungsten.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the main heyday for this mine, which contains plenty of tin as well as tungsten, was in the First and Second World Wars. Much as the Fort William plant provided aluminium for British Spitfires, Hemerdon provided the tungsten and tin needed for the weapons Britain used to fight the Nazis. But ever since then, its history has been chequered, to say the least.

It went into hibernation for decades, a sleep broken for only a single day during the Korean War. Then, a few years ago, investors tried to get it up and running again. They built a vast processing plant and began to mine the metal. But by 2019 the operation had run out of money and imploded. All that was left was an even bigger hole in the ground, a large tailings dam for waste and a hangar filled with processing equipment.

In part, the reason Hemerdon went belly-up that time was because the company made the mistake miners often make: they misjudged the type of ore they were expecting to grind through, meaning their processing plant was far less efficient than it could have been. But an even bigger challenge came back to something that will sound familiar: they were trying to compete with China.

China dominates world tungsten production – even more so than for aluminium and steel. It essentially controls the global market and, just as importantly, the tungsten price. Anyone trying to sell tungsten is contending with Chinese prices which can yo-yo for reasons no one can entirely explain. That makes it fiendishly difficult to compete.

But in recent years, new investors have begun to put fresh funds into the Hemerdon mine, hoping history will not repeat itself and this time around it can exploit that enormous ore resource. And there are at least a couple of reasons to believe (famous last words in finance) that “this time might be different”.

The first is that, in retaliation against Donald Trump’s latest metal tariffs, China has begun to put export limits on tungsten. How this will work in practice remains unclear (remember that like most markets China controls, the way tungsten sales function is almost completely opaque) but if it encourages domestic buyers to look for local suppliers, that could help the mine to find buyers. After all, in theory, it could produce a few thousand tonnes of the metal each year, which would instantly leapfrog Britain to become the world’s second or third-biggest producer (albeit a long way down from China).

Supplies matter more than ever

The second big shift comes back to defence. With the world remilitarising, all of a sudden tungsten supplies matter more than ever. And since defence suppliers pay outsized attention to where metals come from, again, that might allow a British tungsten mine to succeed where predecessors have failed.

Add to this the fact that the mine itself is nearly ready to be exploited and that the new owners reckon they’ve ironed out the problems that beset their predecessors, and it’s a compelling case. They think they could be getting metal out of the ground as soon as next year.

But those overarching challenges haven’t gone away. And nor has another, bigger problem facing the entire industry, not just in the UK but – perhaps even more so – in the US. How can you plan in a world where you just don’t know what’s coming out of the White House in the next few days, let alone the next few years?

Consider: imagine you’re a stainless steel producer or an aluminium smelter in the US. Those 25% tariffs mean all of a sudden in theory you have a competitive advantage over anyone shipping metal into the country. All of a sudden, there’s a strong case to build a smelter or a stainless steel melting shop. So you get to work looking for backers.

Uncertainty creates challenges

But building a plant like this takes time. You need to find a site, connect it to high-voltage power, and build the facilities and all the necessary infrastructure. Best case scenario: it might take a couple of years, but even that is ambitious. And as you contemplate this and map out your plans, those backers will ask you the same nagging question you’ve been asking yourself: sure, the economics of an aluminium smelter might add up today; but what if the president changes his mind tomorrow, or next year? What if those tariffs are pulled by the next president? Then, all of a sudden, the sums very much don’t add up.

All of which is to say, uncertainty around tariffs is a challenge not just for those companies hoping to ship products to America, but for American firms hoping to benefit from this trade war. And bear in mind metals are only the first chapter of what could be a long saga, which ends up engulfing all corners of American trade. These are unpredictable times, however you look at it.

UK

Sex offences against women not given same response as other high-priority crimes, inquiry after Sarah Everard murder finds

Published

51 mins ago

December 2, 2025

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Sex offences against women not given same response as other high-priority crimes, inquiry after Sarah Everard murder finds

Sexually motivated crimes against women in public are not afforded the same response as other high-priority crimes, an inquiry into the rape and murder of Sarah Everard by off-duty police officer Wayne Couzens has found.

The inquiry was launched after Ms Everard’s death to investigate how Couzens was able to carry out his crimes, and look at wider issues within policing and women’s safety.

Ms Everard’s mother told the inquiry of her unrelenting grief, saying she was going “through a turmoil of emotions – sadness, rage, panic, guilt and numbness”.

“After four years the shock of Sarah’s death has diminished but we are left with an overwhelming sense of loss and of what might have been,” Susan Everard said.

“All the happy ordinary things of life have been stolen from Sarah and from us – there will be no wedding, no grandchildren, no family celebrations with everyone there.

“Sarah will always be missing and I will always long for her.”

She added: “I am not yet at the point where happy memories of Sarah come to the fore. When I think of her, I can’t get past the horror of her last hours. I am still tormented by the thought of what she endured.”

Ms Everard, a 33-year-old marketing executive, was abducted by Couzens as she walked home from a friend’s house in south London in March 2021.

He had used his status as a police officer to trick Ms Everard into thinking he could arrest her for breaking lockdown rules.

‘No better time to act’

Publishing her findings on Tuesday, Lady Elish Angiolini, a former solicitor general for Scotland, said: “There is no better time to act than now. I want leaders to, quite simply, get a move on. There are lives at stake.”

The second part of the independent inquiry is split into two reports, with the first focusing on the prevention of sexually motivated crimes against women in public spaces.

Despite violence against women and girls being described as a “national threat” in the 2023 strategic policing requirement and it being mentioned as a high priority for the current government, Lady Elish found the “response overall lacks what is afforded to other high-priority crimes”.

She said her recommendation in the first part of the inquiry, that those with convictions and/or cautions for sexual offences should be barred from policing, has not yet been implemented.

Additionally, 26% of police forces have yet to implement basic policies for investigating sexual offences, including indecent exposure.

Lady Elish said: “Prevention in this space remains just words. Until this disparity is addressed, violence against women and girls cannot credibly be called a ‘national priority’.”

‘Women deserve to feel safer’

The inquiry chair said with a greater spotlight on the safety of women in public, women should feel safer – “but many do not”.

“Women change their travel plans, their routines, and their lives out of fears for their safety in public, while far too many perpetrators continue to roam freely,” Lady Elish said after her report was published.

“Women deserve to feel safer. They deserve to be safer.”

The report found that there was a lack of data on sexually motivated crimes against women in public spaces, with Lady Elish calling it a “critical failure” that data on these offences is “difficult to obtain, patchy and incomplete”.

In the inquiry’s public survey of 2,000 people, 76% of women aged 18 to 24 reported feeling unsafe in public because of the actions or behaviour of a man or men.

A similar study for UN Women UK in 2021 found that 71% of women in the UK had experienced some form of sexual harassment in public, with higher rates of 86% for younger women aged 18 to 24.

‘No silver bullet’

She said sexually motivated crimes against women in public spaces are a whole society issue that requires a whole society response, involving government, police and other agencies working together to fix an “unacceptable” and “deeply disappointing” level of inconsistency in responses.

Recognising sexually motivated crime against women as a public health matter as well as a criminal matter was crucial, as these crimes were “not inevitable”.

The inquiry considers that “there is not one silver bullet” in tackling these crimes, instead calling for a “long-term commitment, cross-party agreement and a steady course in preventing these crimes – through education, thorough investigations and swift arrests – always with an unswerving focus on the perpetrators”.

Lady Elish’s 13 recommendations include:

• Focus on better collection and sharing of data at a national level

• Better and more consistent targeted messaging around the issues, which is to be managed centrally

• An information and intervention programme for men and boys – to be coordinated between the departments of education and social care as well as the Home Office – to create a culture of positive masculinity

• Improving the investigation of sexually motivated crimes against women and girls – recommending that the home secretary mandates police forces to follow particular procedures

‘Justice cannot only respond after harm’

Zara Aleena, a 35-year-old law graduate, was killed as she walked home from a night out in east London.

Her killer, Jordan McSweeney, was freed from prison nine days before he attacked Ms Aleena as she walked home in Ilford on 26 June 2022.

Her aunt Farah Naz said after Lady Elish’s second report was published: “My niece, Zara Aleena, was walking home. That is all she was doing. Her death, like Sarah’s, was preventable.

“It occured because warnings were missed, risks were overlooked, and systems intended to safeguard the public did not function as they should. Zara’s case reflects the wider patterns identified so clearly in this report: systemic failure rather than isolated tragedy.”

She added: “Sarah’s death exposed a system compromised from within. Zara’s death shows that the gaps persisted – with fatal consequences.

“Sarah deserved safety. Zara deserved safety. Every woman deserves safety. Justice cannot only respond after harm – it must prevent harm.”

‘Women can’t trust a system failing to change’

End Violence Against Women director Andrea Simon: “It is deeply concerning that, nearly two years on, policing has still not implemented basic reforms such as a ban on officers with sexual offence histories.”

“Women cannot be expected to trust a system that resists naming misogyny and racism and continually fails to change,” she added.

Deputy Assistant Commissioner Helen Millichap, director of the National Centre for Violence Against Women and Girls and Public Protection (NCVPP), said that the centre was already working “proactively to recognise, intervene and interrupt predatory behaviour in public spaces”.

“We should not wait for a crime to be reported to act and we have seen some very effective joint operations with partners that target the right places and work together to make them safer,” she said.

“We want this to feel consistent across policing and we know that sometimes it doesn’t. This report rightly challenges us to create that consistency, implementing what works and the NCVPP will play a critical role in setting national standards.”

Responding to the latest Angiolini Inquiry report, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said the report made it clear that women do not feel safe going about their lives today.

“This is utterly unacceptable and must change. A new £13.1 million centre will strengthen the police response to these crimes and drive real change, but more needs to be done,” she said, adding that the government would “carefully” the inquiry’s recommendations.

Stop ‘another Couzens’

The first part of the inquiry, published in February 2024, investigated how Couzens was able to abduct, rape and murder Ms Everard.

The report found Couzens should never have been a police officer, stressing there needs to be a “radical overhaul” of police recruitment to stop “another Couzens operating in plain sight”.

It examined Couzens’ career and highlighted how major red flags about him were “repeatedly ignored” by police vetting and investigations.

After the publication of the second report, Ms Everard’s family said in a statement that the report “shows how much work there is to do in preventing sexually motivated crimes against women in public spaces”.

They added: “Sarah is always in our thoughts, of course, and we feel the inquiry continues to honour her memory.

“So too does it speak for all women who have been the victim of sexually motivated crimes in a public space and all those at risk.”

The second report of Part 2 of the inquiry will investigate police culture in regards to misogynistic and predatory attitudes and behaviours.

Following the sentencing of former Met Police officer David Carrick in February 2023, Part 3 of the inquiry was established to examine Carrick’s career and conduct.

Last month, Carrick was handed his 37th life sentence with a minimum term of 30 years to run concurrently after he was found guilty of molesting a 12-year-old girl and raping a former partner.

UK

Hillsborough report finds police guilty of ‘complacency, failure and concerted effort’ to blame fans

Published

3 hours ago

December 2, 2025

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Hillsborough report finds police guilty of 'complacency, failure and concerted effort' to blame fans

Police were guilty of “deep complacency”, “fundamental failure” and a “concerted effort” to blame fans during and after the Hillsborough disaster, according to a report from the police watchdog.

The Independent Office for Police Conduct has spent 13 years carrying out the largest ever independent investigation into alleged police misconduct and criminality.

Its report identified a dozen officers – including the then-chief constable of South Yorkshire Police – who would have had a case to answer for gross misconduct had they still been serving. A 13th officer would have potentially faced a misconduct case.

Hillsborough remains to this day the worst disaster in British sporting history.

A crush on the terraces during the FA Cup semi-final at the stadium in Sheffield resulted in the death of 97 Liverpool fans on April 15 1989.

The men, women and children were aged from 10 to 67.

What the victims’ families have endured ever since, said IOPC deputy director general Kathie Cashell, was “a source of national shame”.

Ms Cashell said: “The 97 people who were unlawfully killed, their families, survivors of the disaster and all those so deeply affected, have been repeatedly let down – before, during and after the horrific events of that day.

“First by the deep complacency of South Yorkshire Police in its preparation for the match, followed by its fundamental failure to grip the disaster as it unfolded, and then through the force’s concerted efforts to deflect the blame on to the Liverpool supporters, which caused enormous distress to bereaved families and survivors for nearly four decades.”

The IOPC report also found that South Yorkshire Police “fundamentally failed in its planning for the match, in its response as the disaster unfolded and in how it dealt with traumatised supporters and families searching for their loved ones”.

The force “attempted to deflect the blame” and “this included allegations about the behaviour of supporters, which have been repeatedly disproven”.

Police initially blamed Liverpool supporters, arriving late, drunk and without tickets, for causing the disaster but, after decades of campaigning by families, that narrative was debunked.

In April 2016, new inquests – held after the original verdicts of accidental death were quashed in 2012 – determined that those who died had been unlawfully killed.

The IOPC also examined the actions of West Midlands Police, which investigated the disaster and supported Lord Justice Taylor’s inquiry that followed. It found the force’s investigation was “wholly unsatisfactory and too narrow”.

The report names 12 officers who would have had a case to answer for gross misconduct.

They include the then-South Yorkshire chief constable Peter Wright “for his part in attempting to minimise culpability and deflect blame for the disaster away from SYP and towards Liverpool supporters”. Peter Wright died in 2011.

Also named is the match commander on the day, Chief Supt David Duckenfield.

He was cleared by a jury of gross negligence manslaughter at a retrial in November 2019, after the jury in his first trial was unable to reach a verdict.

Dozens of allegations of misconduct against officers have been upheld but none will face disciplinary proceedings because they have all left the police service.

Legislation in place at the time did not require the police to have a duty of candour.

But the report has received a lukewarm reception from some of the victims’ families.

Jenni Hicks, whose teenage daughters Sarah and Vicki died at Hillsborough, questioned why action had not been taken against those officers when police failings were first revealed by the Taylor inquiry just months after the disaster.

She said: “I can’t believe, having seen the 370-odd page report, how on earth it can have taken them 13 years to write. There’s very little in this report that I didn’t know already. It’s not, in my opinion, about telling the families anything.”

In September, the government introduced the so-called Hillsborough Law to the House of Commons. It will include a duty of candour, forcing public officials to act with honesty and integrity at all times or face criminal sanctions.

But Louise Brookes, whose brother Andrew Mark Brookes died at Hillsborough, dismissed both the IOPC report and the new law.

“Nothing will ever change. There will be another cover-up, there will be another disaster, and until things change at the very top, and I include MPs, chief constables, CEOs of organisations, until they’re the ones who stop protecting and covering up for themselves, nothing will ever change.”

Nicola Brook, a solicitor at Broudie Jackson Canter acting for several bereaved families, said it was a “bitter injustice” that no one would be held to account.

She said: “This outcome may vindicate the bereaved families and survivors who have fought for decades to expose the truth – but it delivers no justice. Instead, it exposes a system that has allowed officers to simply walk away, retiring without scrutiny, sanction or consequence for failing to meet the standards the public has every right to expect.

“Yes, the law has now changed so this loophole cannot be used in future. But for those affected by this case, that is no consolation.

“They are left with yet another bitter injustice: the truth finally acknowledged, but accountability denied.”

In her statement, published with the IOPC report, Kathie Cashell said: “As I have expressed to those closely affected, this process has taken too long – those who campaigned for so many years deserve better.

“If a legal duty of candour had existed in 1989, it could have helped ensure that all relevant evidence was shared fully and promptly. The families of those who were unlawfully killed would have experienced a far less traumatic fight for answers about what happened to their loved ones. Had that duty existed, our investigations may not have been necessary at all.”

What has the reaction been?

Charlotte Hennessy, whose father James was among the 97 killed in the tragedy, said Liverpool fans were “wrongfully blamed by the people who should have protected them” on the day of the disaster.

Steve Kelly, whose brother was killed at Hillsborough, said the Public Office (Accountability) Bill will ensure people will not go unpunished if a similar tragedy occurs.

Also known as the Hillsborough Law, the bill is intended to make sure authorities will face criminal sanctions if they attempt to cover up the facts behind disasters.

“No one should be beaten by the passage of time,” Mr Kelly said. “We should have truth, justice and accountability within at least in that person’s lifetime. It can’t happen again.”

Sue Roberts, secretary of the Hillsborough Family Support Group, lost her brother in the tragedy.

During a press conference on Tuesday afternoon, she was asked if she was upset that the police officers named in the report would not face any punishment for their roles in the disaster.

“It’s very frustrating,” she said. “But at least they’ve been named now, so their families can feel the shame of what went on.”

‘Deep regret and shame’

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has called the Hillsborough disaster a “stain on our nation’s history”.

She said today “serves as a stark reminder of one of the most significant failings in policing the country has ever seen”.

Following the publication of Tuesday’s report, South Yorkshire Police Chief Constable Lauren Poultney said its findings will “always be a point of deep regret and shame” for the force.

She said: “There is nothing I can say today which can take away the years of pain and hurt caused by the force I now lead.

“On behalf of South Yorkshire Police, I fully accept the IOPC report which highlights a litany of failures and am so deeply sorry for the pain and heartache caused.

“The report is clear in that people attended a football match in Sheffield and therefore, they were in our care. The force failed them and also failed their loved ones in the days, months and years after.

“This will always be a point of deep regret and shame for South Yorkshire Police. Those who lost their lives will always be in my thoughts.”

UK

Four years after Sarah Everard’s murder, women still feel unsafe on Britain’s streets

Published

7 hours ago

December 2, 2025

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Four years after Sarah Everard's murder, women still feel unsafe on Britain's streets

In the middle of Liverpool city centre, musician Ami Alex is showing me a TikTok she posted while busking on the street.

But instead of showcasing her singing, it shows a man approaching her repeatedly, coming closer and closer. He reaches out and touches her – wiping something wet on her arm.

“At first I thought it was coffee,” she says. “But when I watched the video back – you can hear him saying ‘that’s my pee’. My jaw dropped. I was horrified.”

It’s hard to believe what she’s showing me, but she says this kind of behaviour is “unfortunately standard for a woman doing this kind of work”.

She has many more videos – of men touching her without her consent, or demanding hugs or kisses for the money they’ve given.

“I’ve gotten a lot better at dealing with it,” she says. “When I was 21, 22, when I first started doing this, I would go home in tears.

“It’s just so degrading. It makes you feel objectified. Like – is that all you think of me?”

Sarah Everard’s murder in 2021 caused outrage across the country. There was an outpouring of anger as women shared their stories of feeling unsafe, threatened and sexualised on the streets.

At the time there were promises – assurances to women that things would have to change. But four years on, many women here in Merseyside say they have the same feelings they did then.

“Men are honestly shocked when we tell them ‘we don’t feel safe’,” says Kate Chadwick, from the Wirral charity Tomorrow’s Women. “Pretty much every woman has had some kind of experience.”

I meet her at a regular lunch club they host – at their building where men are not allowed inside. It’s intended as a safe space for their members, who they are helping through everything from domestic violence to sexual assault. There’s a medical clinic here, beauty treatment rooms, a computer lab – all staffed by women.

Kate shows me the pocket rape alarm they give out to the women who come here. She hopes they never have to use it, but “it makes them feel safer just having it”.

“As a woman, in the winter it’s a hard time just to exist,” Kate says. “Women don’t feel safe coming out of their homes. Routines will change. They don’t want to walk in certain places.

“One of our members gets two buses home because it’s safer than waiting at a dark bus stop to just get the one.”

They are about to launch a photography exhibition around stalking and harassment. For this, they gave their members a camera and asked them to submit photos that show their experience being a woman.

There are several photos of dimly lit streets, bus stops with no one else there. One photo is a fist holding a key through the knuckles – an image most women will recognise.

Another picture is of an outfit laid out on the floor – a T-shirt, denim skirt and tights. It’s titled What Were They Wearing?

“This can often be the first question in a sexual assault case,” Kate says. “It really doesn’t matter what the woman was wearing.”

“It’s definitely not getting better,” she says. “In 2024, violence against women and girls was declared a national emergency. The statistics you read every day are shocking.”

Later that evening, back in Liverpool, we meet Girls on the Go – a running club started with the express purpose of allowing women to exercise safely in the winter. It’s 5.15pm when we meet for the run, and already dark.

The women running here list a collection of similar experiences. They have been catcalled, yelled at from cars, even chased while out running alone.

Run leader Madeline Cole tells me that, as a women-only club, they have had to modify their warm-ups because “as soon as you bend over to touch your toes, or go into a squat, the shouting starts”.

Founder Steph Barney says she started the club because it is still “intimidating running alone as woman”.

“Far too many women experience harassment and catcalling – we wanted to create a group where women would feel safer doing it together” she says. “Even in the summer you get sexualised just for wearing shorts. You have to restrict what you do. None of my male friends have ever had to worry about that.”

I ask if anything would help them feel safer when out on their runs. “Better street lighting is a really obvious one,” she says. “And one of the issues is that it’s still not taken seriously by society. When you’re catcalled, it feels embarrassing to say ‘this is scary’.

“If it was taken more seriously – more women would speak out. And more could be done.”

The Angiolini Inquiry – which was established to investigate the circumstances surrounding Sarah Everard’s murder – is due to publish its latest report later today.

It is examining whether there a risk of it happening again, police culture, and broader concerns surrounding women’s safety in public spaces.