Non-state core participants (NSCPs) have been critical of the Inquiry on a number of issues:
Concerns re anonymity and disclosure leading to delays:
- The amount of anonymity given to former undercovers and their managers.
- The overwhelming majority of officers have had their real names withheld. This not only means not only are they avoiding accountability, but the public don’t know if they are in inappropriate positions today (eg HN2 Andy Coles 'Andy Davey',
whose identity was exposed by activists, and within hours he resigned from his post as Deputy Police & Crime Commissioner for Cambridgeshire; as a city councillor he’d participated in a campaign to protect older teenagers from sexual abuse, despite having done it himself as a spycop).
- This issue led to a walk-out of NSCPs and their legal representatives at the March 2018 hearing in protest, calling on the Inquiry Chair, Sir John Mitting, to step down.
- The delays incurred by the Inquiry in processing the material, not least due to the amount of time prioritising anonymity of police officers and having to handle demands by the police that much of the Inquiry’s work should be done in secret.
- The lack of disclosure to NSCPs, and the often last-minute release of material to them. Disclosure often can run to thousands of pages, frequently supplied in random order, with only a few weeks for the recipient to read, analyse and be ready for hearings. Many NSCPs with family and work commitments find this to be an impossible task.
- Their perception that the Inquiry does not value what NSCPs have to offer in terms of analysis of issues and material. Police reports are often wildly inaccurate, the people who were actually in groups and campaigns are best placed to explain what they were like and what went on.
Additionally, many NSCPs have done extensive research on spycops and have significant knowledge and insight, often concerning details that the guilty officers would prefer not to admit. NSCPs have expressed exasperation at the centring of the preferences of police, with the Inquiry apparently seeing itself as a form of arbitration between police and activists rather than an investigation into a perpetrator-victim situation.
A lack of grasp of police efforts to delay the processes by relying on excessive security concerns. Claims that officers must have anonymity lest they be attacked by members of campaigns they spied on decades ago are not based in fact. A number of officers have been fully exposed by activists and have had nothing untoward happen to them. Often, the officers’ own reports describe the people they spied on as posing no significant threat to anyone. Many NSCPs have reached the conclusion that such claims are being made to demonise them and so justify the spying, and to justify anonymity for guilty officers so they can delay the Inquiry with the debate and avoid accountability thereafter.
- Concerns over the length of time and cost of the Inquiry were raised in a House of Lords debate held on 21 April 2021.
Need for a Panel
It is common practice for a public inquiry Chair to have an advisory panel of people whose experience helps the Chair understand the issues, though it is not required by law. However, NSCPs from various backgrounds have advocated this for the Undercover Policing Inquiry since the start.
The point was made emphatically in 2020 by NSCP Baroness Doreen Lawrence, mother of the murdered Black teenager Stephen Lawrence in her opening statement.
She noted that Mitting, a white, male, public-school barrister, was not positioned to understand the breadth and experience of sexism and racism that are in the very foundation of the scandal.
Baroness Lawrence’s lawyer, Imran Khan KC, in his oral statement on her behalf, argued:
The simple fact is, sir, that discrimination on the basis of a person's skin colour is not a single act of prejudice, it is about power, it is deeply impactful, and affects every aspect of the individual's life. It is an existential issue which cannot be compartmentalised and viewed in isolation. And, sir, it is certainly not a case of being colour-blind but of being colour conscious.
And, sir, with respect, if either this makes no sense to you or you do not consider it relevant to this Inquiry, the point that Baroness Lawrence makes is proven. [emphasis added]
You need a panel of advisers and you need it now. The conduct of the SDS, from the individual officer who carried out the surveillance all the way up to those who gave the orders to do so, must be subject to scrutiny of racism by those who sufficiently understand and have expertise in identifying it. A panel of advisers who have such knowledge must be immediately appointed.
It is well understood that the Macpherson Inquiry into the police investigation of the murder of Stephen Lawrence and its finding of institutional racism within the Metropolitan police was achieved in part because its Chair had the help of a diverse advisory panel.
Mitting rebuffed it all, saying that children in his family have classmates of various ethnicities and that the decision itself is not his to make, it would require a change in the Inquiry’s terms of reference, and so rests with the Home Secretary. However, successive Home Secretaries have ignored or rebuffed representations from NSCPs (see letters on the documents page), including a group who took legal action on the issue in 2018 to no avail.
- For more see under Panel.
Recruitment of UCOs
In defending anonymity for officers, Kent’s Chief Constable Alan Pughsley submitted a statement claiming that there had been a decline in the number of applications for undercover roles due to the spycops scandal, which thus placed the public at risk because of greater crime. The Inquiry asked the College of Policing to confirm it, but they said there was no real evidence to support it. At a procedural hearing on 21 November 2017, Mitting concluded that even if it were true:
‘I have to get at the truth. If the truth is uncomfortable and deters people from volunteering to be undercover officers, so be it’.
Deaths of core participants
The long delays have meant that many key people who should be giving testimony are too frail, or deceased. Five NSCPs have died since the Inquiry was announced, as well as at least four SDS managers and officers and some of those at the very top of spycops operations. The latter includes two Home Secretaries, and three Met Commissioners whose tenures cover the entirety of 1977-1993.
Hearing of 5 February 2018
The procedural hearing of 5 February 2018 contained the following notable exchange with the Inquiry Chair, Sir John Mitting:
MS KAUFMANN: It is, we submit, impossible to rule out wrongdoing on the basis of an individual's personal or family circumstances.
SIR JOHN MITTING: Of course it is impossible to rule it out, but you can make a judgment about whether or not it is more or less likely. We have had examples of undercover male officers who have gone through more than one long-term permanent relationship, sometimes simultaneously. There are also officers who have reached a ripe old age who are still married to the same woman that they were married to as a very young man. The experience of life tells one that the latter person is less likely to have engaged in extramarital affairs than the former.
Later at the same hearing, when challenged on this by Helen Steel, one of the litigants-in-person, the Chair responded:
SIR JOHN MITTING: All right. I may stand accused of being somewhat naive and a little old-fashioned. In which case I own up to both of those things and will take into account what everybody says about it, and I will revisit my own views.
Membership of the Garrick Club
The NSCPs have emphasised that the institutional sexism of the Met and abuse of women is central to the whole spycops scandal. Mitting is a member of the Garrick Club, an elite London institution that did not permit women to be members until May 2024. Prior to this, NSCPs said that the membership in itself was reason to question Mitting's suitability. In 2017, thirteen women deceived into relationships by spycops wrote to the Home Secretary raising this and other concerns. They were ignored.
Lack of coverage of Scotland, Northern Ireland and undercover activities abroad. The Inquiry’s terms of reference limit it to examining undercover policing in England and Wales. Yet, from the start, officers were working outside those boundaries. Some did so without telling the local police at their destination, some did it with their approval, and others did it at the invitation, even the contracted payment, of the host location’s constabulary.
By the time the Inquiry was established in 2015, it was known that the list stretched to at least 16 countries.
Particularly, a significant percentage of spycops were active in Scotland, as detailed in a report by the Undercover Research Group.
The imbalance, with the citizens abused in England and Wales receiving the fullest possible inquiry while those subjected to the same deeds by the same officers in Scotland and beyond getting ignored, has been repeatedly condemned as indefensible by NSCPs and others.
The German government formally requested inclusion, echoing representations from parliamentarians from Ireland, Scotland and Iceland. In 2018, Amnesty International called for expansion to cover Northern Ireland.
They have all been ignored.
- See also under Jurisdiction (Terms of Reference).