A public inquiry set up almost two years ago by Theresa May to investigate scandals in undercover policing has spent more than £3 million but is yet to hear any evidence.
The Pitchford Inquiry was established by Mrs May in March 2015 after revelations that a secretive police unit had spied on the justice campaign run by the family of the murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence.
There are concerns that it is experiencing some of the same issues of delay and lack of transparency that have dogged the public inquiry into child abuse also ordered by Mrs May when she was home secretary.
The policing inquiry, chaired by the senior judge Sir Christopher Pitchford, has not scheduled any public evidence sessions and has admitted that it will not meet its target of reporting by 2018.
Its expenditure of £3.15 million includes more than £1 million shared between ten in-house barristers and £700,000 spent on other staff.
Advertisement
Legal costs for more than 200 “core participants” — mainly activists and the police officers who kept them under surveillance — have reached almost £600,000.
The inquiry has received a flood of documents, including 320,000 files from the Metropolitan police, but does not have a secure IT system on which sensitive documents can be analysed.
The Pitchford Inquiry was set up after a series of revelations, beginning in 2010 with Mark Stone, an environmental activist, being exposed as the police officer Mark Kennedy.
Sir Christopher is to examine how units such as the special demonstration squad and the national public order intelligence unit spied on political groups, justice campaigns and trade unionists and whether undercover police committed crimes and incited others to break the law.
He will also investigate how undercover police took the identities of dead children and entered into long-term relationships with women on whom they were spying, sometimes marrying and having children with them.
Advertisement
A major obstacle appears to be the volume of applications for anonymity from former undercover officers on which the inquiry has to rule. In one case a psychiatrist assessing the health of former officers has also asked to be anonymous.
Sukhdev Reel, who was spied on by police when she campaigned for an investigation into the death of her son, Ricky, 20, in 1997, said that her faith in the inquiry was receding.
“At first we thought we’ve got a public inquiry, it will be transparent, we can participate, but it’s not happening that way,” Mrs Reel, 67, said.
“We’ve had two decades of a lack of transparency and honesty from the police and we don’t want the inquiry process to be hampered in the same way.”
A spokesman for the inquiry said that its timetable had slipped but its work was “too important to artificially squeeze into a three-year time frame”. It had “a very large volume of information to process” and admitted that there had been delays obtaining a secure IT system.
Advertisement
In his opening remarks in July 2015 Sir Christopher said that the inquiry was the first time undercover police operations had been “exposed to the rigour of public examination”.
