Nick Adderley’s CV is being looked at closely by the police complaints watchdog
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Northamptonshire’s under investigation police chief will receive full pay while the probe into his career history takes place.
Adderley was suspended this week by the police, fire and crime commissioner Stephen Mold who said he did so after ‘careful consideration’ of the situation and following legal advice. The commissioner’s office has confirmed Adderley will continue to be paid his £165,000 salary.
A complaint to the Independent Office for Police Conduct in July, instigated by Adderley’s wearing of war service medals that were not his own, has prompted a look into his background and the claims he made on his CV while applying for the chief constable job.
CV fraud is a crime under the Fraud Act 2006 and can be punished with a jail sentence.
In 2014 superintendent Martin Price who served with forces in Merseyside and the Metropolitan Police was jailed for 18 months for CV fraud. He had fabricated his qualifications and beefed up his work achievements in order to gain promotions.
It has long been reported that Adderley served in the Falklands war. In July this year the northants police press office was making the claim in a media release, however this has now been deleted from the force’s website. Since the medal scandal broke, Adderley has not publicly stated whether he did or did not serve in the conflict with Argentina.
The Sun newspaper has reported that Adderley was only in the navy for two years in the early 1980s before going back to civilian life. The suspended chief constable has himself stated he served for ten years in the military. We have asked the force whether this is true and they said they would not comment on The Sun’s claims.
NN Journal has seen the CV and personal statement that were put before the panel that interviewed Adderley in July 2018 as part of his appointment process. He claims to have risen to the rank of commander - which has responsibility for commanding a ship. He would have only been 26 at the time.
The personal statement viewed by the panel.
The CV states that he trained at the Britannia Royal Naval College in Dartmouth and also studied at the University of Portsmouth.
Adderley’s CV says he studied in Portsmouth (pictured) at the city’s university
In a strongly worded statement this week the IOPC said it is ‘criminally investigating’ Adderley, who has been Northants chief constable since 2018. Read more in our earlier story.
Asylum seekers staying at hotel in Northampton were moved at very short notice earlier this week after a year of living in the town.
Many have been upset by the way the people who have been accommodated by the home office at Westone Manor Hotel were moved on.
NN Journal has heard reports that people were handed a suitcase and told to pack their things, unsure of where they were being moved on to. Around 180 people were staying at the hotel. Many children were involved in the move.
Lorraine Bewley-Tippler who was involved with helping the migrants said:
“As a representative of the local church, where many of the residents have become regular members (many fled their homes because of religious persecution) and a member of Welcome Churches Northampton, what I saw was shocking and heartbreaking. Children came home from school to see their family’s belongings being bundled into taxis. Through the afternoon, families were shipped off to locations unknown to them or us and, as their friends and neighbours, we are distressed that we had no time to offer them the support or goodbyes that they deserved.
Northampton Cllr Danielle Stone says she has heard that people have been moved to places such as Liverpool, Manchester and Telford and many had again been put in hotels. There were asylum seekers from across the world staying at the Northampton hotel including from Afghanistan, Ethiopia and Somalia.
She said:
“What I can’t come to terms with is the fact these people are being moved about like pieces on a chessboard. It is inhumane.
“For the children they had already gone through the trauma of leaving their own country and the trauma of the journey and then that of settling into the hotel. Many had started at local schools and it was not until they came home from school on Monday that they knew they were being moved on.”
Cllr Danielle Stone
A large number of local organisations has become involved with the asylum seekers. Some had taken an English language course and were hoping to move on to studying at a local college. Others had been volunteering and had forged new friendships.
Cllr Stone said:
“One of the questions is, why has this happened and why now?
“There are suspicions they (the conservative government) are getting ready for a general election and want to say they are clearing out hotels.”
The cost of putting up asylum seekers in hotels has been an issue for the Conservative government and has been hugely criticised by the right wing of the party.
Claims for processing asylum claims have been very slow, with a huge backlog having built up since the tories came into power.
The Home Office - which centrally ran the hotel through a contract with Serco - has said it does not comment on hotel moves.
Brackley Town Council has given its backing to a campaign to save a school from closure.
At a special meeting last Friday the council voted on a motion recommending a pause on the closure of Southfield Primary School until all information is provided by West Northamptonshire Council (WNC), the Department of Education (DfE) and school trustees. The town council, however has no powers to halt the closure which will come down to the DfE.
As of September this year, the school had 129 pupils enrolled but had the capacity for up to 428.
The children will be relocated at the end of the academic year to other primary schools in the area. The unitary council has said that admissions teams are committed to keeping children in sibling and friendship groups where possible.
The chair of trustees for Southfield, Christopher Watt, said the reason for the closure was issues with debt that began years ago. He said:
“The bottom line is since January 2022 the DfE has put in an immense amount of additional funding just to keep the school open. In an ideal world, we would redevelop the site, but actually, it’s financially unviable.”
Councillor Fiona Baker, representative of Brackley West and cabinet member for children and education at WNC, said that they have looked at a number of different ways over the years to “save the school”, including increasing the SEND department, but that none had been taken up by the DfE.
Brackley town councillors echoed concerns that, like the parents, they had been given no new information previous to the closure statement, despite MP for South Northamptonshire, Andrea Leadsom, suggesting that the DfE were talking about shutting the school as early as 2019.
She said the DfE kept the school open for “considerably longer than it intended to”, at her and West Northants councillors’ request.
Report by Nadia Lincoln, Local Democracy Reporter
Kettering library has been closed this week due to water damage. The library, which needs a new roof, has been the only area of the town’s cultural quarter to remain open after a multi million pound upgrade has gone over budget and is now at a standstill. Read an earlier report here.
Westminster Watch
Wellingborough MP Peter Bone has been making the news in Westminster this week after being found by an investigating committee to have bullied, hit and indecently exposed himself to a young male staffer.
The MP has been suspended by the Conservative Party, of which he is a very long standing member, and is now sitting as an independent MP. Parliament will decide shortly whether Bone will receive a six week suspension - which is likely to trigger a by-election.
Alternatively Bone, who has represented the area since 2005, could resign as his fellow MP Chris Pincher did when found by parliament to have groped two men at a private members’ club.
Rank and seniority of Royal Navy officers are matters of public record. For the period when Adderley is claiming to have been in service, the Navy Lists, which are HMSO publications containing the appropriate information, have been digitised and are available online. I have checked the quality of the digital information by looking at the records of a number of Navy officers known to me (including my father, as it happens), and the information appears to be correct and complete. In the period in question, there were no officers - none at all - listed with the surname Adderley (or any credible misspellings). Accordingly, it seems quite unlikely that Adderley ever served as a Royal Navy officer.
Other than the important issues raised in the main article above, what absolutely appalls me is that no-one connected to the process of appointing Adderley, including the Commissioner, his staff and the Panel and its monitoring officer, seems to have bothered to make the necessary, simple and quick, basic checks of the information that Adderley provided in his application. Everybody worth his salt as a recruiter goes through a candidate's CV with care, checks for inconsistencies and anomalies and raises points with the candidate if anything "peculiar" is found - it's a basic part of the job. For example, making it to Commander rank at age 26 would be more-or-less a peacetime record, and then resigning immediately afterwards is very surprising indeed. I think that if ever there was an exhibition of culpable, unprofessional negligence, then the recruitment of Nick Adderley as Chief Constable may very well turn out to be it. If I was Mold (how often we find him at the middle of a bungle these days!), I would either be praying for a miracle or penning my resignation letter.
Rank and seniority of Royal Navy officers are matters of public record. For the period when Adderley is claiming to have been in service, the Navy Lists, which are HMSO publications containing the appropriate information, have been digitised and are available online. I have checked the quality of the digital information by looking at the records of a number of Navy officers known to me (including my father, as it happens), and the information appears to be correct and complete. In the period in question, there were no officers - none at all - listed with the surname Adderley (or any credible misspellings). Accordingly, it seems quite unlikely that Adderley ever served as a Royal Navy officer.
Other than the important issues raised in the main article above, what absolutely appalls me is that no-one connected to the process of appointing Adderley, including the Commissioner, his staff and the Panel and its monitoring officer, seems to have bothered to make the necessary, simple and quick, basic checks of the information that Adderley provided in his application. Everybody worth his salt as a recruiter goes through a candidate's CV with care, checks for inconsistencies and anomalies and raises points with the candidate if anything "peculiar" is found - it's a basic part of the job. For example, making it to Commander rank at age 26 would be more-or-less a peacetime record, and then resigning immediately afterwards is very surprising indeed. I think that if ever there was an exhibition of culpable, unprofessional negligence, then the recruitment of Nick Adderley as Chief Constable may very well turn out to be it. If I was Mold (how often we find him at the middle of a bungle these days!), I would either be praying for a miracle or penning my resignation letter.
You can judge a society by how it treats it's weakest and most vulnerable members. The way these poor refugees are being treated is shameful.