Spycops cover-up: Conflicts of interest and a rigged consultation

When the Home Office launched its summer ambush against the future of the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI), their ‘consultation’  was quickly recognised as rigged. After 10 years of controversial and devastatingly embarrassing revelations about abuses committed by undercover police, the Inquiry is finally getting to the modern era, and the government is seeking to shut it down.

At the centre of this process sits Lord Hanson of Flint, the Home Office Minister responsible for the consultation. In June 2009, David Hanson became the Labour government’s Minister of State for Policing, Crime and Security, with direct oversight of counter-terrorism and covert intelligence units. That period falls squarely within the next tranche of the Inquiry, which investigates the National Public Order Intelligence Unit. He took office two months after the fateful Ratcliff-on-Soar conspiracy arrests in 2009, and presided over the initial aftermath alongside then-Director of Public Prosecutions Keir Starmer. Perversely this guy, and the Home Office which is itself subject to the Inquiry investigations, are now empowered to decide whether the Inquiry continues.

The consultation’s design has been widely condemned for steering respondents towards a predetermined outcome of limiting the Inquiry or shutting it down. The online questionnaire offered no option to support completing the Inquiry as conceived. Instead respondents were asked to prioritise between: establishing facts and uncovering miscarriages of justice; hearing from victims; accountability from those responsible; and recommendations for the future – all pitted against administrative “value for money”.

As a result, the official questionnaire was boycotted, with responses sent as written representations instead. When people tried to hand-deliver their responses by prior agreement, the police were called, told the building was “under attack”, and the entire building remained in lockdown until the Home Office finally took delivery.

Ahead of the Home Office’s own consultation findings, an Interim Report analysing 2,687 submissions has been produced by Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance (COPS), not only setting out the case advanced by survivors, legal representatives, and campaign groups, but also detailing the deep distrust of the process. 

The Home Office agreed to meet non-state Core Participants, with four round-table meetings held in October 2026, attended by around 45 people.  At the first two of those meetings, a pre-recorded video message from Lord Hanson was played. Attendees found his message arrogant and insulting, but most significantly the minister referred to the still-ongoing Inquiry as “the original inquiry”, as if it were already a thing of the past, its fate settled. The video was not shown at later meetings, apparently written off as “unhelpful”. A predetermined outcome is contrary to a lawful consultation.

A Freedom of Information request revealed that in October 2023, then-Home Secretary Suella Braverman wrote privately to Inquiry Chair, Sir John Mitting, proposing he ignore the requirement to examine “impact” on individuals, take a “sampling” approach to the evidence, and end the Inquiry by late 2026. She added, as if an afterthought, “subject to the necessary consultation”. The Home Office have since disowned this interference, claiming that was “a previous administration”, as though it were mere coincidence that a consultation to end the Inquiry is happening now, in late 2026.

John Mitting, is retiring next year but the Home Office has admitted it is currently making no effort to find another chair to enable the inquiry to continue. 

There has been widespread criticism of the consultation’s proposal to replace the statutory inquiry with a non-statutory alternative, hypocritically invoking the Public Office (Accountability) Bill, better known as the Hillsborough Law. Before entering Downing Street, Andy Burnham said the Hillsborough Law would “end the cover-up culture” that had failed ordinary people. Yet today his government appears to be weaponising that very law as cover to wind down the UCPI. Ken Derbyshire, Chair of the Hillsborough Justice Campaign, told the Home Office: “Survivors haven’t fought for all these years so a law (not yet enacted) can be used to deny other victims truth and accountability.”

If Burnham’s administration shuts down statutory scrutiny now, his commitment to institutional openness will be exposed as cynical political theatre. The delays and costs cited as the reason for the consultation are, after all, the product of relentless police secrecy applications. Rewarding that obstruction, and burying the investigation into modern political policing, would complete the cover-up the law was meant to end.

Closed hearings continue and closing statements covering the SDS operations are being prepared now. The Inquiry is not over, and any attempt to curtail it must be seen for the cover-up it is.

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