Police lose battle to keep secret information about the theft of dead children's identitiesPolice chiefs have been ordered to disclose more details of one of its most controversial undercover techniques.
The order, made by an official watchdog, centres on the theft of dead children's identities. It is a practice that has attracted
a lot of criticismfrom the public,
including MPs who called it "ghoulish and heartless".In what police accept
was "common practice", undercover officers stole the identities of dead children when they
assumed fake identities to infiltrate political groups. The parents of the children were never consulted or informed.
These articles
here,
hereand
here describe how the undercover officers trawled through birth and death certificates to find a suitable candidate.
The furore compelled
Bernard Hogan-Howe, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, to issue a
general apology for "the shock and offence the use of this tactic has caused" among the public.
However police chiefs made it very clear that they refused to tell any specific families if the identities of their children were stolen, as it could lead to the exposure of the undercover officers.
They have argued that the safety of their undercover officers is more important than the need to tell the families.
However it seems that at least one person has not let it lie. This person - who has not been named - used the freedom of information act to request the ages of the dead children whose identities were stolen by the undercover officers.
Now the Information Commissioner, Christopher Graham, has decided against the Metropolitan Police and ordered them to disclose the ages.
He dismissed the Met's arguments in his decision which can be found here.
The person who requested the ages argued that the information could help the families who lost children by a process of elimination.
The requester argued (see paragraph 68) that by confirming which ages were used by the undercover officers, the Met would also be confirming which ages were not used.
As the Information Commissioner points out (paragraph 22), "what disclosure may allow is for an affected family to be satisfied that their child was not one of those identities used as they died, for example, at the age of 2 and no officer used the details of a child of this age."
The Information Commissioner found this argument to be "particularly compelling" (paragraph 69) as it may give some form of relief to surviving relatives.
The Met must hand over the list of ages unless it lodges an appeal by September 14. However one person who is already happy to step forward and assist the families is Peter Francis, the former undercover officer who has blown the whistle on his former unit, the Special Demonstration Squad.
He says that the age of the boy whose identity he stole was five. The boy died of brain cancer.
Since Francis started speaking out, he has made a series of disclosures about the SDS. In 2013, he described how he felt as if he was
"stomping on the grave" of the boy whose identity he stole. He said he always felt guilty "celebrating" his fake birthday knowing that somewhere the parents of the boy would be "thinking about their son and missing him". (He spoke in
this videounder his now-discarded pseudonym of 'Peter Black').
The ages of two other children whose identities were stolen are also already known. Bob Lambert, who worked undercover in the 1980s,
used the identity of a boy who died of a congenital heart defect at the age of seven.
One of his colleagues, John Dines,
adopted the identity of an eight-year-old boy who died of leukaemia when he pretended to be a social justice campaigner with the name of
John Barker.
Hat tip to Jon Baines at the Information Rights and Wrongs blog for
by the Information Commissioner. 
Topic: Police steal dead children's identities