A Crown Prosecution Service solicitor is facing disciplinary proceedings over failings in the treatment of evidence from an undercover police officer in trials of environmental activists.

An inquiry by retired Court of Appeal judge Sir Christopher Rose into the CPS’s handling of cases against campaigners at Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station, Nottinghamshire, found that CPS reviewing lawyer Ian Cunningham had failed to establish the extent of the undercover officer’s involvement in a plot to shut down the site.

Rose said that Cunningham had relied too heavily on information from the police, without questioning what material existed in relation to the officer’s activities.

He found other individual failings by the CPS and police, but said they were ‘not systemic’ and that at no stage was there ‘deliberate, still less dishonest, withholding of information’ from the defence.

The director of public prosecutions, Keir Starmer QC, said he took ‘very seriously’ the findings of individual failings on the part of the CPS and had begun disciplinary proceedings in relation to Cunningham.