Part 2 — Report purpose and methodology
The Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance was copied into 2,690 long-form consultation responses that were submitted to the Home Office between 16 July 2026 and 20 September 2026. They contain the voices of civilians affected by the work of the Inquiry, including those directly impacted by the abuses under investigation as well as wider members of the public. This report provides an analytical summary of those consultation responses.
This report has been produced in advance of the Home Office's official report on the consultation in light of concerns that while an online survey is easily quantifiable, multiple long-form letters are not. This report aims to reflect the prevalence and force of the responses made by thousands of people who responded to the Home Office consultation without filling in the online questionnaire. The purpose of this report is to provide an empirical account of what consultees submitted by coding complex, open-text responses into recurring themes.
This report summarises what those respondents said. Where it assesses that a position is well supported by the corpus, it says so and explains why. It does not adjudicate the legal or factual merits of respondents' positions. Identified limits to the methodology are set out in Part 2.4 and within the details of the methodology found in Appendix 7.1.
2.1 The Responses
The dataset analyzed in this report comprises the complete set of written public consultation submissions forwarded to the Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance when sent to the Home Office between 16 July 2026 and 20 September 2026. An audit of the dataset established that 2,690 responses were made available in this way.
The corpus is structured into six distinct stakeholder tiers:
| # | Tier | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Standard Signatories | Core participants, affected individuals and members of the public used the online portal at ucpi.uk to formally endorse a unified position in the form of a standard letter (see Appendix 7.3). |
| 2 | Personalized Narrative Submissions | Individual personalised responses submitted using the same online tool which adapted the standard letter text to include personal accounts or additional information. |
| 3 | Bespoke Filings from Standalone Core Participants & Survivors | Standalone submissions filed by affected individuals including non-state Core Participants, civilian witnesses, as well as other affected members of the public. |
| 4 | Group Filings from Activist Cohorts & Networks | Collective submissions filed on behalf of targeted social movements: Camp for Climate Action, the Ratcliffe-on-Soar defendants, Earth First! Network, Genetic Engineering Network (GEN), WOMBLES, Social Centre Networks, Reclaim the Streets (RTS) and others. |
| 5 | Recognised Legal Representatives | The coordinating group of non-state, non-police Core Participants in the Inquiry sent joint responses, including submissions made through Doughty Street Chambers on behalf of all Non-Police Non-State Core Participants (NPSCPs), and the submissions of Pete Weatherby KC. |
| 6 | Filings from Monitoring or Campaigning groups | Such as Police Spies Out of Lives (PSOOL), the Network for Police Monitoring (Netpol), the Undercover Research Group (URG), the Centre for Women's Justice (CWJ), the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) Cymru, and the Hillsborough Justice Campaign (HJC). |
2.2 Unique-voice responses
To ensure methodological accuracy, the analysis distinguishes between mass template endorsements and unique-voice narrative submissions:
- The Standard Template Letters: The 2,554 signatories to the standard letter represent a mass endorsement of a single, unified position. This group would represent over 90% of total respondents but we've removed them from the prevalence analysis to focus only on unique voices. However we note that many of those who signed and sent the standard response will have done so in lieu of writing their own detailed personal response. Their views must be acknowledged and the position set out in the letter carries enormous weight. That letter is reproduced in full in Appendix 7.3.
- Unique-Voice Responses: 100 consultation responses submitted via ucpi.uk were found to deviate from the standard letter by more than 10% and of these we identified 27 substantively unique, personalized letters. Additionally we received 36 bespoke filings from CPs, legal teams, NGOs, and activist cohorts by email. Together, these provided a unique-voice corpus of 63 letters which were used for the qualitative analysis documents in Parts 3, 4, 5, and 6 of this report, and detailed in Appendix 7.2.
The methodology for segregating unique voices from the standard template corpus was automated using a python script which compared texts by calculating a similarity percentage. A second pass tokenised the text to compare individual words. Responses that showed a very small divergence were categorised as essentially template letters. Those with a divergence above a higher threshold had more changes or additions, usually comprising an explanation of standing or interest. These 'personalised' letters were then further divided using the same methodology but an ever higher threshold in order to retain only those with much more substantive additions or omissions to the positions being expressed.
2.3 The method in brief
Within the limits of the time and resources available, the qualitative and quantitative analysis of the corpus was conducted in accordance with published standard practice. The analytical workflow involved three stages, the first two performed with the assistance of AI.
- Document Ingestion & Entity Mapping: Full text extraction and attribution indexing across the available corpus.
- Thematic Coding & Prevalence Matrix: Inductive thematic coding identifying core shared arguments across submissions. Each theme was mapped across the unique-voice corpus to establish quantitative prevalence percentages (see 7.2).
- Verbatim Quote Verification: Block quotations selected to illustrate common themes were verified manually against the original sources to ensure attribution accuracy and contextual relevance, and consent was obtained from the quoted person or group. It should therefore be noted that the quoted voices are taken from a subset of the unique-voice respondents who actively consented to us using their words in this report.
2.4 Limitations in brief
The analytical findings of this report are subject to three identified limitations:
- Available data: If the Home Office received any responses directly through their online survey portal, or written responses from other stakeholders that were not copied to the Campaign, those were not available to us and do not form part of this report. We have submitted a Freedom of Information Application to the Home Office requesting information about the extent and nature of other responses they received, however we have not yet received a reply and those responses are therefore not considered here.
- Thematic Coding & Prevalence Matrix: While human checks confirm the majority prevalence of sentiment and common thematic positions across the corpus, no manual check has been made of the prevalence matrix provided in Appendix 7.2.
- Segregating Unique Voices: By necessity, arbitrary thresholds were used to measure divergence within the mass corpus from the template letter offered as a starting point on the ucpi.uk portal. This will inevitably have meant that some unique voice elements were inadvertently excluded or a few non-unique voices may have remained to skew the prevalence matrix calculations.