Craig Guildford collected a £57,000 (about $73,000) taxpayer-funded payout on his way out of West Midlands Police, months after two official investigations found his force built a football fan ban on fabricated intelligence and AI-generated fiction. The former chief constable, who earned £220,000 a year, kept his full pension too.
Two watchdog reports, a parliamentary committee and a Home Secretary who said in the House of Commons that she had no confidence in him could not touch his final paycheck. That is the part the outrage headlines skip past.
The Price Tag on a Quiet Exit
West Midlands Police recommended banning Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters from travelling to Villa Park for the club’s Europa League fixture against Aston Villa on 6 November 2025. Birmingham’s Safety Advisory Group (SAG) accepted that advice. Aston Villa won the match 2-0 in front of a stadium missing its entire away end.
A spokesman for the West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner has said Guildford “received no more than the bare minimum he was contractually entitled to.” The alternative, the spokesman said, was for Guildford to work out his three-month notice period until April 2026, drawing his chief constable’s salary the whole time while still making operational decisions.
Mr Guildford was legally entitled to 3 months’ pay in lieu of notice, plus any outstanding leave. He received no more than the bare minimum he was contractually entitled to.
That statement came from the office of the Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC), the elected official who holds the chief constable to account. The TaxPayers’ Alliance, a campaign group, put the same payment at £58,000 rather than £57,000, a small discrepancy that has followed the figure through its coverage. Either way, it landed on top of a pension nobody moved to touch, since forfeiting a police pension in England requires either a criminal conviction or a specific decision by the commissioner, and neither applied here.
An Amsterdam Narrative That Did Not Hold Up
The case for banning Maccabi Tel Aviv fans rested on intelligence about what happened a year earlier in Amsterdam, when Maccabi supporters travelled there for a Europa League tie against Ajax. West Midlands Police told Birmingham’s safety planners that as many as 600 Maccabi fans had deliberately attacked Muslim neighbourhoods that night.
Dutch police have since said “provocations came from both sides.” Five people were convicted over the Amsterdam disorder, and all five were found guilty of violence against Israelis, not by them.
His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services (HMICFRS), led by Sir Andy Cooke, examined the intelligence at the Home Office’s request and concluded the force showed what it called confirmation bias, finding WMP had “overstated the threat posed by the Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, while understating the risk that was posed to the Israeli fans.” The inspectorate found no evidence antisemitism drove the decision, but it did find an imbalance in the information the force chose to act on. The UK Football Policing Unit had already reached similar conclusions in its own peer review of the case, filed under the operation name Op Parkmill, which the Home Affairs Select Committee later published in full.
Other specific claims collapsed under scrutiny too.
| Claim in the Police Intelligence | What Was Actually Found |
|---|---|
| 600 Maccabi fans attacked Muslim neighbourhoods in Amsterdam | Dutch police said provocations came from both sides |
| Maccabi fans pushed members of the public into canals | Reporting on the parliamentary evidence found the only people pulled from Amsterdam’s canals that week were Israelis |
| 200 Maccabi supporters had links to the Israeli military | Dutch police said they had no evidence to support the claim |
| 2,000 Dutch officers were deployed around the Ajax fixture | Actual deployment was a few dozen officers |
| Maccabi Tel Aviv had a fixture against West Ham | No such match existed; the detail was invented by an AI tool |
Maccabi Tel Aviv, the Israeli club now controlled by the Recanati family after a $50 million takeover, had done nothing in Amsterdam to justify the picture West Midlands Police presented to Birmingham’s planners.
How Did a Chatbot End Up Deciding Who Could Watch Football?
Part of the answer sits inside the police intelligence report itself. It cited a fixture between Maccabi Tel Aviv and West Ham that never took place. West Midlands Police initially blamed a Google search. Guildford eventually admitted the fictitious match had been generated by Microsoft Copilot, an AI assistant, and that the error made it into a document used to justify shutting Israeli fans out of Villa Park.
Guildford first told MPs on the Home Affairs Select Committee that no AI had been used at all. Weeks earlier, an independent ethics panel advising the force had specifically questioned how officers would be trained to use Microsoft’s AI tools, minutes from a September 2025 session show. The force went ahead and used AI-assisted research in its intelligence report anyway, roughly a month later.
Guildford reversed himself before the committee’s chair, Dame Karen Bradley, in a letter offering what he called a profound apology. A Sunday Times journalist broke the admission on social media before it became public testimony. Guildford wrote that he had believed the fictitious match came from a Google search and that he had not intended to mislead the committee, an explanation MPs did not find satisfying enough to save his job.
The Jewish Community West Midlands Police Forgot to Call
The Board of Deputies of British Jews raised concerns with the government before the match was even played, warning that banning Maccabi supporters risked deepening distrust in Birmingham’s Jewish community. That warning proved accurate. Prime Minister Keir Starmer called the ban the wrong decision at the time. Israel’s Foreign Ministry described the force’s conduct as utterly disgraceful.
By January, the Board of Deputies had escalated its language considerably, saying alongside the Jewish Leadership Council that if Guildford would not resign, responsibility for acting would fall on central government. The Home Affairs Select Committee’s own report later found the force had done almost no engagement with Birmingham’s Jewish community before recommending the ban, and recommended that whoever becomes the next permanent chief constable treat rebuilding that trust as a named priority.
Guildford did resign, in effect, days after the Home Secretary’s statement. He framed it differently at the time, saying the political and media frenzy around his position had become detrimental to his officers’ work serving West Midlands communities.
Why No Rule Could Touch His Final Paycheck
Simon Foster, the Labour Police and Crime Commissioner for the West Midlands, was the only person with legal power to sack Guildford outright. He chose not to. Standing outside the force’s Birmingham headquarters, Foster said the retirement had prevented what might otherwise have been a complex procedure carrying significant distraction, impact and cost for West Midlands Police.
That is the mechanism worth sitting with. Sacking a chief constable for misconduct in England typically triggers a formal, lengthy process, one a commissioner can lawfully choose to avoid by accepting a resignation instead. Accepting a resignation, though, activates the ordinary contractual exit terms: notice pay, banked leave, an untouched pension. Nothing in the process HMICFRS, the Home Affairs Select Committee or the Home Secretary ran actually intersects with that separate, purely contractual track. Two watchdog reports and a public statement of no confidence changed Guildford’s job. None of them had any power over his exit payment.
A Watchdog That Keeps Investigating Anyway
One inquiry has refused to close the file. The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) opened a conduct investigation covering Guildford and other officers, including a voluntary referral from the force itself over its use of AI, and confirmed the probe would continue regardless of his retirement.
“Our interest in the actions of former chief constable Guildford, and other officers involved, does not end following his decision to step down,” said Rachel Watson, the IOPC’s director general.
Politically, the reaction has not been unanimous. Nick Timothy, now the shadow justice secretary and previously a journalist who helped expose the flawed intelligence report before entering frontline politics, called the payout a disgrace and accused the force of lying to justify banning Israeli fans under pressure from what he described as Islamists and antisemites. William Yarwood of the TaxPayers’ Alliance said the public should not be used as a cash machine for police chiefs leaving under a cloud. The Conservative Party has called the package a reward for failure.
- Conservatives and the TaxPayers’ Alliance say the payout rewards failure and should never have been authorised.
- The Police and Crime Commissioner’s office says Guildford took only the legal minimum and that forcing him through his notice period would have cost the force more in distraction and disruption.
- Ayoub Khan, the independent MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, argues the real damage is a chilling effect that teaches public officials to bend to political pressure or lose their livelihood.
West Midlands Police has been urged, including by critics of the payout, to publish the full justification behind the figure. As of now, that fuller breakdown has not been made public.
The Safety Advisory Group Rules Are Changing
Deputy Chief Constable Scott Green was appointed acting chief constable as the force tries to rebuild confidence across the West Midlands. The Home Affairs Select Committee’s report set out how it wants the next permanent appointment, and the wider system, to work differently.
- Remove elected politicians from Safety Advisory Groups deciding public order matters.
- Build an escalation mechanism for major policing decisions with international consequences.
- Require tougher due diligence and evidence verification before any force recommends a fan ban.
- Make the next permanent chief constable responsible for rebuilding trust with the Jewish community, named explicitly as a priority.
The pattern that started at Villa Park has not stopped there. Maccabi Tel Aviv has continued playing fixtures without any away support at all, including a domestic match decided inside an emptied home arena back in Israel.
The IOPC’s conduct investigation into Guildford and the officers around him remains open. His £57,000 has already been paid.
