Five years after a blacklist was found that singled out construction site workers for being union activists, the full extent of undercover police surveillance and collusion is still not known, and myriad questions remain

One Monday morning in February 2009, four investigators from the Information Commissioner’s office knocked on a door in an alley in Droitwich, West Midlands. It was opened by 66-year-old Ian Kerr. David Clancy, head of investigations at the ICO, had spent months hunting for the Consulting Association, which had no nameplate above its green door and didn’t appear on official records. But this was the epicentre of a 30-year covert operation involving the country’s top construction firms and security services. Eventually the repercussions from this raid would be felt in boardrooms and parliaments around the world.

For 16 years the Consulting Association compiled a secret database on thousands of construction workers. The files in this shabby two-room office had names, addresses and National Insurance numbers, comments by managers, newspaper clippings. The organisation acted as a covert vetting service funded by the industry. When people applied for work on building sites, senior employees at Carillion, Balfour Beatty, Skanska, Kier, Costain, McAlpine and more than 30 other companies would fax their names to the Consulting Association, where Kerr would check his files to see if they matched.

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The effect was devastating. The worker had no idea their details were being checked and no way of seeing if the information was accurate. Blacklisting was a secret tool used by companies to keep out people they didn’t like. Those with files were often union members who had raised health-and-safety concerns. There had always been rumours about blacklisting but the files provided evidence.

The official position was that blacklisting didn’t happen. Working on a story for this newspaper in 2008, journalist Phil Chamberlain followed a trail that led him to Manchester, where three electricians sacked from the Royal Infirmary building project successfully argued at an employment tribunal that they had been wrongly dismissed.

There, a former manager gave evidence that blacklisting of union members had occurred. A few days after the Guardian article was published, a member of Clancy’s staff dropped a copy on his desk and the investigation began.

A month after the raid on Consulting Association, the ICO issued enforcement notices against 14 companies, and announced it had seized the covert database of construction industry workers. The files included phrases such as “will cause trouble, strong TU [trade union]”, “ex-shop steward, definite problems” and “Irish ex-army, bad egg”. Some bordered on the ridiculous: “talks like a young Alf Garnett”; “wears anti-Nazi League badges and insignia”. While it was claimed the system was meant to identify people who might steal or had poor workmanship, the files suggested union membership was the overwhelming criterion for inclusion.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Unite union members protest against blacklisting in 2012 Photograph: Hot Shots/Alamy

But there was also information in the files that could only have come from the security services. Two that raised suspicions were on Frank Smith and his girlfriend, Lisa Teuscher. Frank, a bricklayer, was a political activist who had been involved in a number of actions calling for better wages and conditions. When in 2012 the Consulting Association’s Kerr appeared before a select committee of MPs that was investigating the practice, he said he had no links with the police, and when Pamela Nash challenged him about a line referring to an individual’s “security clearance”, he asked if he could answer in private. But this wasn’t followed up – and then, two weeks later, Kerr died, reportedly from heart failure.

However, in a posthumously published newspaper interview, Kerr recalled a meeting in 2008 at which construction industry directors were addressed by an officer from the National Extremism Tactical Co-ordination Unit (Netcu). Kerr said a two-way information exchange began, and disclosed that codes were used to indicate those who were of interest to Special Branch and that “Irish ex-army, bad egg” was an example of this. The information commissioner seized evidence of this meeting and showed it to MPs but has refused Freedom of Information requests.

The involvement of the security services was the most closely guarded secret of the blacklisting scandal. Mark Jenner went by the name Mark Cassidy as an undercover spy for the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), which was set up in 1968 to infiltrate protest groups. He turned up at the Colin Roach Centre in north London in 1994 posing as a joiner. The centre was home to trade-union campaigns and Jenner ferried workers to demonstrations.

Jenner also spied on anti-racism campaigners and some of this information appears to have made its way on to blacklist files. Frank Smith came into contact with the police at an anti-BNP event in 1999 but was not arrested. Yet the incident is recorded in his Consulting Association file, which also describes him as “Under constant watch (officially) and seen as politically dangerous”.

Police spy Peter Francis, who subsequently blew the whistle on SDS activities, which included spying on the family of murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence, was asked to monitor Smith because of his anti-fascist activities. Yet Smith’s blacklist file describes him as a “leading light” in a group known as the Away Team, which sought to protect anti-fascist activists from attacks. How a manager on a building site would know this is difficult to explain, and Smith and others believe information on their anti-racist activities originated from undercover police.

Smith’s girlfriend, Teuscher, who is an American citizen, had her own file. Teuscher fought a seven-year battle with the British government against deportation. Now back in the US, she has received a copy of her blacklist file from the ICO and says: “I was shocked when I first read my file. It made me feel physically sick. It’s absurd. I don’t see any reason why my name should be linked with the building industry. I had no professional involvement whatsoever. The only reason I am on the list is because of Frank. And that is not a legitimate reason for the police following me or anybody else making notes on me.”

Who could have known private information about Teuscher, who never worked in construction, other than a police source? Scottish politicians Tommy Sheridan and Colin Fox also had blacklist files despite not working in construction. Kerr told MPs that he held around 200 files on environmental activists that the ICO never seized because they did not open the filing cabinet. Kerr later burned them.

The SDS is notorious for having spied on environmentalists but it was not unusual for its officers to be on picket lines. While its existence was a secret even within Special Branch, its files could have been available to other desks, such as the industrial section, whose sole purpose was to spy on trade unions.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest When people applied for work on building sites, employees at Carillion, Balfour Beatty, Skanska, Kier, Costain, McAlpine and more than 30 other companies would fax their names to the Consulting Association, where Kerr would check his files to see if they matched. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty

Another on the Consulting Association’s “green list” was John Stewart, who chairs the pressure group Heathrow Association for the Control of Aircraft Noise. Stewart was told by his union, the GMB, that he was blacklisted. He fears this may explain why, when he landed in the US in 2011 for a speaking tour, he was escorted off the plane by armed guards and sent back to the UK. He says: “It’s worrying that somebody like me, without convictions, can find myself on a blacklist like this.”

On 18 June 1999 a huge demonstration called Carnival Against Capital, inspired by the 1980s Stop the City protests, took place, and several blacklist files mention sightings of their subjects there. It seems unlikely, to say the least, that a site manager happened to be passing through, saw a construction worker they knew, and passed the details to the Consulting Association. Dave Smith’s file says “Re: J18 (stop the City of London) At Finsbury Square site, then to Bank of England demo returning to site with 4 Eco warriors – attempted entry, but unsuccessful.”

Helen Steel is another activist who found herself on the Consulting Association blacklist. Steel was one of the defendants in the “McLibel” trial and is suing the police for sexual and emotional abuse after she had a long-term relationship with police spy John Dines. Her McLibel co-defendant Dave Morris is also on the database, and Steel is convinced that if intelligence gathered by police was routinely given to McDonald’s in the 1990s, as McDonald’s head of security Sid Nicholson claimed in the witness box, then police were giving it to construction companies too.

The police unit Netcu, which gave the presentation to the Consulting Association in 2008, was dissolved and responsibility for monitoring extremism was handed to the National Domestic Extremism and Disorder Intelligence Unit in December 2011. In 2013 it was revealed that the NDEDIU was monitoring some 9,000 people considered domestic subversives. All monitoring of domestic extremism is now under the auspices of the Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Command SO15 unit, which means that state spying on trade unionists is now categorised as counter-terrorism.

The ways in which legal protests are viewed has affected those on the blacklist. Steve Acheson, an electrician, started a picket outside the Fiddlers Ferry power station in Cheshire after he was dismissed from the site. Owners Scottish and Southern Energy tried to bring an injunction against him under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, claiming the picket was a threat to national security. In 2009 Acheson won an appeal with the judge describing SSE’s argument as “fanciful bordering on paranoia”.

The authors of this article requested any files on the campaigners in the Blacklist Support Group from several police forces, which all said they would “neither confirm nor deny” that they held such information. The group believes it is the target of ongoing police surveillance. A request by Dave Smith under the Data Protection Act for information held on him by the police was refused because it might jeopardise ongoing criminal investigations.

In 2012 a solicitor complained on behalf of the Blacklist Support Group about collusion between the police and Consulting Association. This was passed to the Independent Police Complaints Authority, which said “it was likely that all Special Branches were involved in providing information about potential employees”. Operation Herne, which was set up to look into the activities of undercover officers, and which is being boycotted by the Blacklist Support Group and other affected groups, says there is no such evidence.

We don’t suggest that any undercover police officer directly passed information to the Consulting Association. Undercover police officers spied on union activists, and their intelligence was added to Special Branch files. The industrial section of Special Branch passed on some of this information to construction industry managers, including Dudley Barrett. Peter Francis says: “I would like somebody independent of the police to forensically examine all the blacklisting files, to be cross-referenced with Special Branch records to look at the areas of collusion.”

In March 2014, home secretary Theresa May announced a public inquiry into undercover policing. Campaigners say victims should assist with drawing up the remit to ensure it encompasses all aspects, including collusion with blacklisting of trade unionists.

Five years after the ICO raid, nearly half the 3,213 people with Consulting Association files have still to be traced. While some aspects of the blacklisting have been investigated, there are many loose ends. What happened to all the minutes of Consulting Association meetings? Not one scrap of paper has so far been disclosed by any of the firms.

Group litigation is likely to go to full trial this year. Employment tribunals are ongoing and claims to the European Court of Human Rights are waiting to be heard. Balfour Beatty is the only firm to have defended its use of the Consulting Association. CEO Andrew McNaughton expressed regret but claimed it was the consequence of “an extremely difficult industrial-relations climate that had an adverse effect not only our company, but on our industry, our customers and the country as a whole”.

To this day, no blacklisting firm has made a public apology to the workers whose lives they ruined.

This is an edited extract. Blacklisted: The Secret War between Big Business and Union Activists is published by New Internationalist on 22 March for £9.99. Buy it for £7.99 from bookshop.theguardian.com

On the list: victims and players in an industrial scandal

Steve Acheson, a 61-year-old electrician from Denton, south Manchester, believes the blacklist was the reason he got only 36 weeks’ employment over a nine-year period. After the blacklist was shut down in 2009, he said: “I’ve been angry for so long. It affects your character and demeanour – it’s the fact it’s so blatantly unjust … I’ve been at snapping point a few times. You’ve got a job, then you haven’t got a job. You get to the stage where you think: should I bother?”

Helen Steel is a longstanding environmental and social justice campaigner, and became known as one of the two “McLibel” defendants sued by burger giants McDonald’s in the 1990s. It was the longest civil trial in English history, and cost the fast-food chain millions in legal fees. She is currently suing the police after she discovered that her one-time boyfriend was an undercover policeman, John Dines. Steel found herself on the blacklist and believes information on it originated from the police.

David Clancy led the investigation that closed down the secret blacklist in 2009. A former police officer and social worker, he was the head of investigations at the watchdog body, the Information Commissioner, when a colleague drew his attention to a Guardian article that revealed evidence of a blacklist. He has told an employment tribunal that “there is information on the Consulting Association files that I believe could only be supplied by the police or the security services”. He said the information “was so specific and it contained in effect operational information that wouldn’t have formed -anything other than a police record”.

Ian Kerr spent more than 30 years compiling blacklisting files on workers considered by managers to be politically troublesome. His career in blacklisting started in 1969 with another covert body, known as the Economic League, which was wound up in the 1990s. One of his bosses said he infiltrated “a lot” of trade union meetings and was “a key guy. He was one of our most effective research people.” From the early 1990s, he ran the covert blacklist that operated under the anodyne name of the Consulting Association, until it was closed down in 2009. He died in 2012. Rob Evans