UK prosecution of alleged Chinese spies was ‘shambolic’ says Parliamentary committee

The UK’s failed attempt to bring a prosecution against two alleged Chinese spies was “shambolic”, “beset by confusion” and suffered from “systemic failures”, a cross-party group of MPs and peers has concluded.

The high-profile espionage case against Christopher Cash and Christopher Berry collapsed in 2024, when the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) decided there was not sufficient evidence to show that China was a threat to UK national security at the time of the alleged offences.

The CPS abandoned the case despite witness statements from the UK government deputy national security adviser (DNSA), who described China as “the biggest state-based threat to the UK’s economic security” and pointed to state-linked cyber attacks against government and commercial targets, according to the MPs’ report.

The chief prosecution witness in the case, DNSA Matthew Collins, wrote in witness statements that “China’s espionage operations threaten the UK’s economic prosperity and resilience, and the integrity of democratic institutions”, and that China was behind “malicious cyber activity … targeting democratic institutions and Parliamentarians as part of large-scale espionage campaigns”.

The two accused – Cash, a former Parliamentary researcher, and Berry, a teacher – were charged in April 2020 for spying offences under the Official Secrets Act 1911. They were accused of passing information about UK politics, MPs and UK government policy to a Chinese intelligence agent, before subsequently being acquitted after the government dropped the case.

According to a report published today by the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy (JCNSS), it was “not immediately obvious” that the director of public prosecutions lacked the evidence to show that China was a threat to national security at the time of the alleged offences, given the strength of Collins’ witness statements.

According to the report, prosecutors raised questions about the case against Cash and Berry following a court ruling after the conviction in May 2025 of a Bulgarian spy ring working for the Russian state, led by . The ruling addressed the meaning of the word “enemy” under the Official Secrets Act 1911.

The Court of Appeal found that there was “no reason why the term ‘an enemy’ should not include a country which represents a current threat to the UK”. It went on to say that a jury would be well placed to assess the evidence and facts.

The director of public prosecutions, Stephen Parkinson, told the committee, however, that the Roussev judgment meant prosecutors needed to demonstrate that the “totality of threats posed by China” when the alleged offences took place “made China a threat to national security”.  

Parkinson went on to tell Parliamentarians that prosecutors had been unable to secure evidence that China posed “an active” and “current” threat to UK national security at the time of the alleged offences.

The committee said that events in the case “raised eyebrows”, particularly following a decision to drop the prosecution two days after a meeting between the UK’s national security adviser (NSA), Jonathan Powell, and other officials to “discuss the management of the UK’s bilateral relationship with China”.

The committee said it did not find evidence of a coordinated high-level effort to collapse the prosecution or any deliberate efforts to obstruct it. But it did find evidence of a process “beset by confusion and misaligned expectations”.

Constitutional safeguards designed to protect the independence of criminal proceedings instead “catalysed a crisis of public confidence and fuelled allegations of conspiracy at the highest level of government”, the Parliamentarians found.

Matt Western MP, chair of the joint committee, which has made recommendations to improve the handling of future cases, said he hoped the committee’s investigation would draw a line under the case.

“As the global security environment worsens, sensitive national security cases will arise more frequently. The government must show the public that it is confident in standing up to adversaries when required. Failing to do so will corrode public trust in our institutions,” he added.