Watchdog says intelligence officers destroyed documents despite being told to keep them

A secretive Scotland Yard intelligence unit shredded a large number of documents after a public inquiry was set up into the undercover infiltration of political groups, a watchdog has found.

The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) announced on Wednesday that it had found that documents had been destroyed despite an instruction that they had to be preserved.

The watchdog found that an unnamed officer would have faced a disciplinary hearing on a charge of gross misconduct if they had not already retired from the Metropolitan police. Any officer found guilty of gross misconduct would be likely to be sacked.

The watchdog said it was “extremely unfortunate” that a number of former managers had refused to cooperate with its inquiry. It said the investigation had uncovered serious failings within the intelligence unit.

The findings heap further criticism on the police, who have been accused of obstructing a much-delayed inquiry into alleged misconduct by undercover officers.

The inquiry, which will scrutinise how undercover officers have spied on more than 1,000 political groups since 1968, has yet to hear any evidence in public.

It was set up in March 2014 by Theresa May as home secretary after a cascade of revelations about undercover officers. It was revealed that they had spied on the family of the murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence, deceived women into long-term sexual relationships and stolen the identities of dead children.

The IOPC found that the Met police intelligence unit destroyed documents in May 2014 after an instruction to retain files was circulated to staff in the force. The documents were shredded by the national domestic extremism and disorder intelligence unit (NDEDIU), a little-known squad that monitored political activists between May 2013 and November 2015.

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One officer said he saw a colleague standing next to a shredder with a “substantial quantity” of documents. The colleague told the IOPC that the documents related to undercover operations to infiltrate political groups dating from the 1990s and 2000s and more recently.

On Wednesday, Sarah Green, an IOPC regional director, said: “This investigation has uncovered serious failings in the national domestic extremism and disorder intelligence unit and how it handled materials relevant to the undercover policing inquiry.

“Managers of NDEDIU should have done more to be clear about what material should be retained and ensure they had an auditable process for destroying any material believed to be duplicates or not relevant to the inquiry.”

She added that the officer, who worked outside the unit, would have faced a disciplinary hearing for allegedly failing to take action when the shredding allegation was first reported.

The Met was alerted to the shredding allegations by a member of its staff in December 2014. However, the force did not draw the allegations to the attention of the watchdog until May 2016.

Jules Carey, a lawyer from the Bindmans law firm who represents victims of the surveillance, said the watchdog’s report underlined how the covert operations to infiltrate activists were out of control.

He said the public inquiry, led by the retired judge Sir John Mitting, needed to compel officers to explain why the documents had been destroyed.

The public inquiry had been due to start hearing evidence in public on 1 June. On Tuesday Mitting said the scheduled hearings had been postponed because of the coronavirus outbreak.

After the inquiry was set up, the police submitted a large number of legal applications to keep secret the identities of individual undercover officers. The inquiry had to decide whether each application was justified. This is a key reason why the inquiry has not started hearing evidence earlier. Victims of the surveillance have criticised the police and the inquiry for the delays.

The Met accepted that the former officer who would have faced a disciplinary hearing should have done more to investigate the shredding allegation. “Allegations of this nature undermine the Met’s commitment to transparency and accountability … We are not complacent in making sure staff and officers know what they should do with material which may be useful for an inquiry.”

The IOPC said it had not found evidence to support two other allegations concerning the intelligence unit.

In one, officers were alleged to have improperly destroyed files they had compiled on the Green party peer Jenny Jones. The IOPC found that the unit had recorded information about Jones’s political activities but decided that these were only passing references to her.

It said there was no deliberate intention to destroy the records held on her. A whistleblower had alleged that the unit got rid of the records to prevent her from discovering the extent of the police’s monitoring of her political work.

In the second, officers were alleged to have used hackers to illegally access the private emails of hundreds of political campaigners and journalists. The IOPC did not find evidence to support that claim.