First published in The Times, August 5, 1989

Lord Justice Taylor delivered a damning indictment of the actions of senior officers of the South Yorkshire police when he published his report yesterday into the Hillsborough disaster in which 95 Liverpool football supporters died.

He made 43 separate recommendations to improve safety and prevent a similar tragedy, 28 of which should be carried out before the start of the next football season.

The incident on the Leppings Lane terraces on April 15 as Liverpool met Nottingham Forest in an FA Cup semi-final was Britain's worst sports ground disaster. The 71-page report left few of those involved chiefly in its organization unscathed.

Tragedy on the terraces

• 'Mayhem' after gate was opened

• 'We watched them die, innocent figures, lying prostrate and crushed on the green grass'

• Doctors attack 'total chaos' of rescue effort

Police in 'open gate' inquiry

• The man who opened the gate

• Force condemned for failing to avert turnstile disaster

• Senior officers were not willing to concede fault

Mother tells of losing husband and son as she witnessed crush on TV

• Names of the supporters who died are released

• Liverpool welcomes vindication of fans' behaviour

• Thatcher hears of heroic courage

Anfield Kop becomes silent focus of city's mourning

• Thousands at requiem mass as Liverpool mourns deaths

• Sombre lessons soccer failed to learn

Of the senior police officers, the judge said that neither their handling of the events of the day nor their account of it in evidence showed the qualities of leadership to be expected of their rank. They were, he said, ``defensive and evasive'' witnesses. Chief Supt David Duckenfield, the officer in charge of police operations at the match, was severely criticized. At the most crucial moment as the impending tragedy unfolded, his capacity to take decisions and give orders seemed to collapse, the judge said. He was also criticized for trying to blame the actions of supporters for the disaster.

The Sheffield Wednesday club was also responsible for a number of failures that contributed to the disaster. The performance of Sheffield City Council, which was responsible for issuing the safety certificate for the ground, was both ``inefficient and dilatory'', with a number of breaches in the Green Guide to the safety of sports grounds being permitted.

Lord Justice Taylor also sought to end, finally, allegations that large numbers of drunken and ill-behaved Liverpool supporters had been responsible for the deaths of friends and colleagues. That, he said, was the police case but not one witness had substantiated allegations that drunken supporters urinated on officers pulling out the dead and injured or urinated on the bodies of the dead and stole their belongings. ``However, the presence of an unruly minority who had drunk too much aggravated the problem.''

The allegations, and the way they were treated by certain sections of the media, caused widespread anger and resentment in Liverpool. The report will be welcomed on Merseyside as a vindication of their version of events. Lord Justice Taylor's interim report, distilled from 11/2 million words of evidence from 179 witnesses in 32 days of hearings at Sheffield Town Hall, will affect the way football is watched.

The second part of his inquiry, to be published by early next year, will deal with crowd control and safety at sports grounds. Among the main recommendations yesterday were calls for a 15 per cent reduction in the number of supporters allowed to stand on terraced areas, improved police planning and procedures, better monitoring of the filling of grounds, enhanced emergency communications and more medical facilities. The judge made no recommendation about removing perimeter fences but said that where they existed, all emergency exit gates to the pitch should be kept open while spectators were on the terraces.

The aim, he said, was to reduce numbers on the terraces, increase vigilance and to achieve a proper balance in crowd control between prevention of disorder and the maintenance of safety. In his findings, the judge said: ``The immediate cause of the gross overcrowding and hence the disaster was the failure, when gate C was opened, to cut off access to the central pens, which were already overfull. ``They were already overfull because no safe maximum capacities had been laid down, no attempt was made to control entry to individual pens numerically and there was no effective visual monitoring of crowd density.

``When the influx from gate C entered pen 3, the layout of the barriers there afforded less protection than it should and a barrier collapsed. Again, the lack of vigilant monitoring caused a sluggish reaction and response when the crush occurred. The small size and number of gates to the track retarded rescue efforts. So, in the initial stages, did lack of leadership. ``The need to open gate C was due to dangerous congestion at the turnstiles. That occurred because, as both club and police should have realized, the turnstile area could not easily cope with the large numbers demanded of it unless they arrived steadily over a lengthy period. ``The operational order and police tactics on the day failed to provide for controlling a concentrated arrival of large numbers should that occur in a short period. That it might so occur was foreseeable and it did.''