The UK government published evidence on Wednesday it had submitted in now-collapsed legal proceedings against two men accused of spying for China, as Prime Minister Keir Starmer seeks to contain controversy over the failed case.
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Starmer’s government has faced accusations of killing the case to protect relations with China, and his Labour administration and the independent prosecutors have been rowing over why it failed to proceed to trial.
The Crown Prosecution Service said the case collapsed because the government’s evidence did not show that China represented a threat to national security at the time of the alleged offences.
Starmer, a former chief state prosecutor himself, has said the government was only able to submit evidence from the time of the alleged offences, which occurred between 2021 and 2023, when the Conservative party was in power.
Earlier on Wednesday, he told parliament he would publish “in full” the three statements prepared by deputy national security adviser Matthew Collins for prosecutors. The government published the witness statements online Wednesday evening.
In the most recent statement, from August 2025, Collins told investigators the Chinese intelligence services are “highly capable”, and said they “conduct large-scale espionage operations against the UK to advance the Chinese state’s interests and harm the interests and security of the UK”.