Police chiefs have made public sections of a private letter that was sent to Doreen Lawrence, the mother of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence.
In the letter, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, the Scotland Yard commissioner, wrote that : "Records exist which indicate that undercover officers were deployed into supporters and campaigns connected with Stephen's family."
The release of the letter was prompted by an interview on Channel Four News last night by Peter Francis, the former undercover spy who has become a whistleblower.
That interview can be seen here, and a Daily Telegraph report on the contents of the letter is here.
The admission was made to Mrs Lawrence after claims, made public in June by The Guardian and Channel Four's Dispatches programme, by Francis.
What the letter does is to confirm one of the central claims made by Francis.
He had said that he and other spies from his former unit, the Special Demonstration Squad, were tasked with infiltrating groups that were supporting the Lawrence family's campaign for a proper police investigation into Stephen's murder. He describes this in our book Undercover.
The question that is now contentious is what is the proper way to investigate the activities of the undercover officers, particularly another of Francis's claims - that he was asked to find information that could be used to discredit the campaign by Stephen Lawrence's family.
Police chiefs insist that the best method of investigating remains the internal police inquiry that is being led by Derbyshire's Chief Constable, Mick Creedon.
However Doreen and Neville Lawrence, Stephen's parents, say that they have no confidence in the internal inquiry.
Doreen's lawyer, Imran Khan, told Channel Four News last night :"What we are concerned about, and certainly what Doreen Lawrence is concerned about, is if he (Francis) goes to the police behind closed doors, and gives information which is relevant to what she wants to know and what the public wants to know, we don't know how that information is going to be treated and how he is going to be treated."
"Now what we all know over the last twenty years is that the Lawrence family have been given assurances and reassurances that the police, the Met police in particular, are dealing with their case properly, and time and time again, that particular statement has been borne out to be completely untrue."
"What we want him (Francis) to do is to give his evidence in open so that everyone knows what he is saying and everyone knows how he is treated."
He added that the police's admission on the deployment of undercover officers into the family's supporters confirmed "that what Peter Francis was saying is accurate".
Mrs Lawrence is backing Francis's call for a public inquiry where he and others can give evidence under oath.
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