Police Spies Out of Lives has serious concerns about both the timing and the substance of today’s Home Office announcement.
The Inquiry is currently in the middle of hearing evidence from SDS managers — precisely the evidence that goes to how this abuse was authorised and covered up. Core participants are focused on preparing for and following these hearings, not on weighing up the future shape of the Inquiry. A consultation of this significance deserves proper attention from those it affects most, not a response squeezed in around live evidential sessions.
The announcement also lands the week before schools break up for summer, when many of those directly affected — and the small support networks they rely on — are least able to engage. Whether intentional or not, this is a bad time to be asking survivors to make decisions about an Inquiry that has already taken over a decade of their lives.
We are concerned this move looks like the groundwork for winding the Inquiry down before it has finished the job. Key figures central to some of the most serious allegations — including Mark Kennedy, Lynn Watson, Rod Richardson and Marco Jacobs — have still not given evidence. Any conversation about the Inquiry’s future that doesn’t guarantee their evidence will be heard is not a conversation about improving the Inquiry. It’s a conversation about shutting it down early.
We don’t dispute that the Inquiry has cost a fortune and taken far too long — we have said so ourselves, repeatedly, for years. But the answer to that failure is not to cut the process short before crucial evidence is heard, and it is not to strip the Inquiry of its statutory status. Those are not efficiency measures. They are ways of ensuring the full truth is never established.
We will be responding to the consultation in full, and we expect the government to give core participants the time and space to do so properly.
In the meantime, we are advising those affected not to submit their own response to the consultation yet. The options on offer have real implications for how — and whether — the truth gets established, and core participants need the chance to discuss them properly before anyone answers on the record.
ENDS
Media contact: media@policespiesoutoflives.org.uk
