Part 6 — What Respondents Said Must Happen
Parts 3–5 record what respondents said was wrong with the consultation, why the Inquiry's remaining work matters, and why each of the Home Office's proposed alternatives is inadequate. This Part records what respondents said should happen instead. The 63 unique-voice submissions converged on a single core demand: complete the Terms of Reference as a statutory public inquiry under the Inquiries Act 2005 across Tranches 4, 5 and Module 3, and do so with the governance, candour, engagement and funding necessary to finish the job. 63/63 · 100%
Respondents submitted that only a statutory inquiry possesses the legal powers required to ensure documents are produced, compel witnesses to attend, and conduct meaningful cross-examination under oath. They further submitted that Tranche 4 (NPOIU deployments under RIPA 2000), Tranche 5 (regional undercover units) and Module 3 (future policy recommendations) form an integrated chain: truncating Tranche 4 or 5 would deprive Module 3 of the evidential foundation needed to construct meaningful recommendations.
"The NPSCPs maintain that the Inquiry must be fully resourced and maintained as a statutory inquiry so that its original Terms of Reference can be satisfied… The spycops scandal represents one of the most grave, systemic abuses of state power in modern British history. Public money was used to infiltrate lawful campaigns, subvert democratic accountability, mislead the courts, and sexually exploit women. The victims of this scandal have waited over a decade in good faith for answers."
— Kirsten Heaven, Doughty Street Chambers (on behalf of NPSCPs, 18 September 2026)
"The statutory nature of the UCPI has been fundamental in getting to the truth in the face of police desire to keep its laundry from being washed… The Inquiry must be fully and properly resourced and allowed to complete its work on the NPOIU, on Tranche 5 and Module 3. It must be a statutory inquiry with the necessary powers to take action."
— Dr Dónal O'Driscoll (Core Participant-in-Person, 17 September 2026)
6.1 How it must be done: four requirements
Requirement 1 — Appoint a successor Chair and an expert panel without delay 60/63 · 95.2%
The Home Secretary should exercise the appointment powers under ss.4 and 7 of the Inquiries Act 2005 to appoint a multi-disciplinary expert panel alongside a successor Chair before Sir John Mitting retires in 2027. Respondents submitted that relying on a single judge has created an unnecessary administrative bottleneck, and that an expert panel would have averted that. Delay in appointing a successor Chair risks further obstructing the Inquiry just as Tranches 4 and 5 are set to begin, creating more delays rather than solving that problem. Furthermore, an expert panel — comprising specialists in institutional misogyny, state racism, and democratic rights — is essential to properly contextualise political surveillance and abusive cultures in the police.
"I also urge the Home Secretary to move quickly to appoint a panel of experts to support the Undercover Policing Inquiry and to confirm a new Chair as a matter of urgency. Swift, transparent appointments – made in consultation with core participants rather than imposed on them – would demonstrate that the government is genuinely committed to the Inquiry completing its full Terms of Reference not managing its way towards an early conclusion."
— "Lindsey" (Category H Core Participant, 27 August 2026)
"… instead of a single judge, a panel would make more sense for this inquiry… such a panel could also provide Mitting with the kind of expertise he patently lacked (eg an understanding of issues such as institutional racism and sexism)."
— C Wilson (Core Participant in Person, September 2026)
Requirement 2 — Impose enforceable disclosure timetables 58/63 · 92.1%
Respondents call on the Home Office to incentivise efficiency and candour from state parties, rather than rewarding inefficiency, lack of candour and delays. The Inquiry Chair should impose strict, legally enforceable disclosure timetables on state core participants, with sanctions for non-compliance. The Home Office should use its sponsorship leverage to require full police cooperation within those timetables. Respondents submitted that the primary drivers of how long the Inquiry has taken have been state anonymity applications and satellite litigation, closed hearings, and a protracted redaction and disclosure process that suffers chronic delays. The remedy is to enforce cooperation, not to curtail scrutiny.
"The answer is and always has been to require state CPs to fully cooperate with the inquiry at the earliest possible point, proactively provide it with relevant information and materials within expedited timetables, and efficiently deal with legitimate public interest issues. Where that is done, the inquiry process is able to hone the issues which require further investigation and oral evidence, make timely disclosure and obtain the assistance of all CPs including those most affected, leading to an efficient and meaningful outcome."
— Pete Weatherby KC (20 July 2026)
Group and contextual disclosure. Some suggestions were also made about how to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of evidential disclosure, particularly the importance of adopting group and contextual disclosure models rather than relying on document-by-document disclosure to named individuals. They further submitted that individual-level disclosure atomises collective harms and omits the upper-level material that explains it, which risks obscuring systemic issues. 38/63 · 60.3%
"… the Home Office's consultation repeatedly frames 'disclosure' as a matter of releasing files to 'affected individuals'. This demonstrates a fundamental, fatal misunderstanding of how political policing actually operated… Any process focused strictly on individual-level disclosure inevitably misses the bigger picture, excluding upper level authorisations, decision logs, reports and briefings, without which it is impossible to understand the context and significance of an intelligence report mentioning your own name."
— Social Centre Networks Cohort (17 September 2026)
Requirement 3 — Replace administrative consultation with trauma-informed direct engagement 52/63 · 82.5%
Respondents insist that Home Office and the Inquiry must adopt explicit trauma-informed engagement for all future contact with affected survivors, replacing hostile administrative consultations and protocols with direct, respectful dialogue with Core Participants and affected people, conducted before policy decisions are taken rather than after. Respondents condemned the timing and execution of the July 2026 consultation as a re-traumatising exercise. They submitted that direct engagement should have preceded the consultation, not followed it.
"For women in our group, there is an urgent need for an improved process of disclosure and a genuine trauma-informed approach. Many women affected in earlier tranches were retraumatised by the ongoing delays, which are the result of repeated applications for anonymity, secrecy and extensive redactions by the state."
— Police Spies Out of Lives (September 2026)
"I formally request a direct, trauma-informed online or in-person engagement meeting between the Consultation Team, Category H survivors, and our legal representatives (something that clearly should have occurred before this consultation was launched)."
— "Tina" (Category H / Tranche 4 Core Participant, September 2026)
Requirement 4 — Fund the Inquiry to completion 57/63 · 90.5%
Respondents stress that the Home Office should commit to ensuring the Inquiry is properly resourced to complete Tranches 4, 5 and Module 3. Dr Dónal O'Driscoll emphasised that not only must the inquiry be properly resourced, it is the responsibility of the Home Office to ensure that there is the political will to enforce cooperation and candor from the agencies it oversees:
"The Inquiry must be fully and properly resourced and allowed to complete its work on the NPOIU, on Tranche 5 and Module 3. It must be a statutory inquiry with the necessary powers to take action. If there are issues, it rests with the Home Office, who oversees all the state agencies with a vested interest, to ensure that they are cooperating fully and with candour…"
— Dr Dónal O'Driscoll (Non-State Core Participant in Person)
Respondents submitted that abandoning the Inquiry on the threshold of its most critical tranches would squander the investment already made. Ben Leamy set out the logic of ensuring genuine value for money:
"The Government has already spent many years and a very substantial amount of public money establishing and conducting this Inquiry. The best way to protect that investment and deliver genuine public value is not to abandon the work when it becomes more challenging than anticipated. It is to ensure that the Inquiry is properly resourced, made more efficient, protected from unnecessary interference, and allowed to finish the job it was established to do."
— Ben Leamy (Tranche 3 & 4 Core Participant, 7 September 2026)
6.2 The essential outcomes
Question 5 of the consultation questionnaire asked respondents to rate seven outcomes on a 1–5 scale, explicitly juxtaposing statutory functions against "delivering public value for money by prioritising concluding the Inquiry" and "delivery of timely conclusions by prioritising concluding the Inquiry" (see Appendix 7.6). This structure appears to present the Inquiry's statutory functions as competing commodities from which a shorter list of priorities might be selected.
Respondents rejected that premise outright. Nevertheless, the refusal to rank these outcomes against each other should not be interpreted simply as a failure to value them. On the contrary many respondents highlighted the importance of the listed outcomes, while stressing that they form a sequence of interdependent stages and that seeking to dispense or curtail any of them would sever the chain. The demand is therefore not for any single outcome to be prioritised above the others, but rather that the chain of essential outcomes be kept intact.
Outcome 1 — Disclosure of relevant documentation to victims
Meaningful victim participation requires enabling survivors to examine the evidence and process the state intrusion into their lives.
"Full Disclosure to Survivors: The police and Home Office must end their systematic obstruction of disclosure. Survivors have a right to see their full police files and learn the true extent of state interference in their personal and political lives."
— Eleanor Fairbraida (Category H, Tranche 4 Core Participant, September 2026)
Disclosure of contemporary documents to those with direct knowledge of the events in question is also essential to enable the Inquiry to understand the context for those documents and to challenge and contrast unreliable police accounts. This process has formed an important part of revealing concealed wrongdoing examined at Part 4.1 above.
"Time and again in this Inquiry we have seen that it is only through disclosure of the relevant documents to the non-state core participants that the full extent of the wrongdoing and corruption among officers and within the units has been revealed."
— Ben Leamy (Tranche 3 & 4 Core Participant, September 2026)
Disclosure is the first step both for healing and for getting to the truth.
"We, the affected women, need disclosure and live hearings in order to heal. The Inquiry needs these things, because, without the assistance of civilian witnesses it will be difficult, or impossible for them to meaningfully and accurately interpret what they read and are told by those responsible, who of course want to hide and minimise their abuses."
— Police Spies Out of Lives (September 2026)
Outcome 2 — Opportunities for those impacted to share experiences
Survivors need to see the documentary evidence, but they must also be given the opportunity to recount their own experiences and set the record straight.
"One of our key demands for decades has been for the state to release our files. However, releasing the files is not enough on its own. It is only through the content of these files being interrogated through our own archives and live evidence that we have any chance of getting to the truth and correcting the lies told about us – let alone even starting to think about what justice would look like for the abuses we've faced. The examples that I'm highlighting below show why it is this dual approach, disclosure and live evidence, that is essential, and therefore why the inquiry must continue in its present form."
— Emily Apple (Core Participant, September 2026)
Survivors bring irreplaceable perspectives to the Inquiry's understanding of covert policing that decision-makers must listen to and embed into operational reforms.
"Survivors of the undercover policing scandal — both those actively engaged as Core Participants, and the many who were also spied on but who are not Core Participants — bring direct, lived experience to the Inquiry, and deserve more, not less from the process… It is vital that you listen to the demands of the survivors of abuse, misconduct and unlawful deployments of undercover police."
— Chris Mitchell (Consultation Respondent, August 2026)
"Truncating would mean this evidence would never be heard and recommendations for future action based on the full evidence, including testimony from those victims, would not be made — which are essential in these increasingly repressive times."
— Duncan Law (Consultation Respondent & Activist, August 2026)
Outcome 3 — Public accountability for those responsible for bad practice
Public accountability starts with undercover officers, operational managers and senior managers being compelled to give evidence. They must publicly account for what happened.
"I want the truth, to be told properly, by the people who still owe it – including the officers and their managers who have not yet given evidence, and whoever in the Home Office is currently deciding how much of this Inquiry the public gets to see completed."
— "Alison" (Category H Core Participant, August 2026)
"Both the Police and the Home Office are and have been ultimately responsible for the undercover policing being scrutinised, and hence the shocking and scandalous systemic wrong-doing committed since 1968 by the political undercover units. They have a vested interest in undermining and curtailing this hugely embarrassing Inquiry. But conversely, they also have a duty to be held publicly accountable, to learn from the mistakes… and to take heed of the recommendations due once the Inquiry is concluded."
— Dave Morris (Core Participant / McLibel Defendant, September 2026)
It is important for the process of understanding and reconciling what happened and ensuring that it never happens again:
"Kennedy and Jacobs deceived multiple women into long-term relationships during their deployments with the National Public Order Intelligence Unit. Their conduct, and the conduct of the managers who ran them, and the justification for the deployments, has never been examined by the Inquiry… We submit that it is vital that women affected and the wider public see these officers and their managers being formally questioned, required to explain their actions and account for their wrongdoing in order to prevent this happening again."
— Police Spies Out of Lives & Category H Core Participants (September 2026)
Survivor participation is not a courtesy but a condition of accountability: victims cannot process what was done to them, and the Inquiry cannot test the evidence, unless those affected are able to engage not only with the documentary material but also with the people who produced it.
"It is therefore very important that the Inquiry is able to take an integral approach to the evidence. Survivors must be able to tell their stories and the perpetrators must be called to answer publicly for their actions, in an arena where those affected can witness and provide support to each other."
— Police Spies Out of Lives (September 2026)
"Justice means being able to process what's been done to me. I can't properly process the impact of these undercover operations until I've both seen full disclosure and had the opportunity to question the people who perpetrated it… I've engaged with the inquiry for the past 11 years, and have dedicated substantial parts of my free time over the last two years to the evidential process, including searching through archives, reading through hundreds of documents, writing hundreds of pages, and giving and watching live evidence."
— Emily Apple (Core Participant, September 2026)
These first three outcomes — disclosure of documents, hearing from victims and questioning perpetrators — are therefore all vital elements for survivors, because they enable understanding and processing what happened. However they are equally vital for the Inquiry itself, because they create the body of evidence that enables the Inquiry to carry out its key duties of establishing complete factual findings, identifying institutional failures, and recommending future reforms:
"Those three central tenets are inseparable. It is not possible to properly identify failure and thereby accountability without establishing the full facts. It is not possible to learn lessons and make recommendations for the future without a definitive official determination of the facts and where responsibility for failures lies."
— Pete Weatherby KC (Recognised Legal Representative, July 2026)
Outcome 4 — Establishing findings of fact
Establishing the facts — ascertaining what happened, based on the best possible evidence — is the precondition for everything else the Inquiry must do:
"It is impossible to learn lessons and make recommendations for the future (Module 3) without a definitive official determination of the facts and without establishing where responsibility for failures lie in other cases of undercover policing spying. Examining and understanding what went wrong is therefore critical to recommendations for the future of undercover policing."
— Kirsten Heaven, Doughty Street Chambers (on behalf of NPSCPs, September 2026)
Again, respondents stressed the importance of the Inquiry considering the bigger picture. While victims may wish to see individual accountability, the Inquiry must seek to expose and understand the institutional culture and failings that will be central to any meaningful recommendations for change. "Lisa", a Category H Core Participant, explained why institutional fact-finding — rather than individual prosecution — is the point:
"It has always been incredibly important to me to find out at an institutional level what went wrong. I haven't sought to simply prosecute one 'rogue officer', because I have never bought into the narrative that this process was about routing out individual wrongdoings, but rather that it's about uncovering the institutional attitudes and culture… For me, it's about finding out what happened, why and how it was allowed to happen, who knew what, and what patterns have been established over many years of similar behaviour…"
— "Lisa" (Category H Core Participant, via Centre for Women's Justice Submission, September 2026)
Outcome 5 — Delivering recommendations for the future
This is, by necessity, the last step in the process, as it can only be meaningfully done once all the evidence has been considered and the facts established. However, last is by no means least:
"I have referred so far to individual instances of miscarriages of justice. This focus should not detract from the wider point — that the very purpose of the Inquiry is to identify systemic problems and causes and make recommendations for the future."
— Mike Schwarz (Solicitor & Recognised Legal Representative, Hodge Jones & Allen, September 2026)
"There is a need for a root and branch consideration not just of the law, but of the regulatory framework and the now dated Codes of Conduct and National Intelligence Model. The UCPI is very well positioned to do this and make the necessary recommendations in a way that is transparent to the public, and which the public and core participants can feed in on. To not facilitate this would be to squander a valuable opportunity and all the resources that have been poured into the Inquiry to date."
— Network for Police Monitoring (Netpol)
One key point made by respondents about recommendations is that if the Inquiry fails to provide recommendations that really would represent a waste of time and money. They reframe the concept of "value for money" as something to be assessed on what the Inquiry delivers — disclosure, participation, accountability, findings of fact, reforms and ensuring that these things never happen again — not on the speed with which it is brought to an end.
"A great deal of public money has already been spent and will have been wasted if no action is taken to ensure that nothing like this can ever happen again. There is already a good deal of mistrust of the police and of public inquiries. Limiting or closing the existing inquiry would only make this worse."
— Hilary Tilbury (Individual Consultation Respondent, 8 August 2026)
"Considering the amount that's already been spent on all the groundwork, the systems for gathering/ sorting/ storing evidence, the hearings that have already taken place, the staffing costs, the legal expenses, it would be a travesty, and a complete waste of public money, to just pull the plug now, before the inquiry's work is completed, leaving no recommendations for the future at all – which was supposed to be the entire point of this exercise."
— C Wilson (Core Participant in Person, September 2026)
The fight is not over.
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