A former senior Scotland Yard officer has spoken of his regret at taking part in “Fawlty Towers-like ” consultations for a report into race disparity commissioned by No 10, as others continued to distance themselves from it. Dal Babu told of “shambolic” discussions and said it was clear that other participants were “generally from the right of politics” and came at it almost as if they had a pre-prepared answer for an exam question. He spoke out as the Race Council Cymru and the National BAME Youth Forum Wales said they were “appalled” to have been referenced in the report by the government’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities. Babu, who was a Metropolitan police chief superintendent and one of the UK’s most senior British Asian officers until leaving the force when he was rejected for promotion, said he regretted taking part in an evidence-gathering Zoom session for the commission’s report. “It was a Fawlty Towers-like experience. We were told it was going to be ex-BAME police officers. I turned up and it was youth workers … a whole hotchpotch of individuals,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “We raised concerns that we ex-police officers talked about and then they stopped the meeting [and] got rid of some people who were not supposed to be on there.” Once the conversation got going, Babu said those taking part “expressed a level of cynicism” about what was going to be said in the report, which he said had been vindicated. “The commissioners lacked diversity of thought. They are all of one ilk and I think we have seen that in the report, so we basically said: ‘Look, we have had a lot of these reports.’ And in between they are punctuated with recommendations which never actually see the light of day.” He said two commissioners present started having a disagreement about whether a 2017 report by the Labour MP David Lammy into racial bias in the justice system had been delivered or not. He added that one of them said: “Well, it’s a matter of interpretation,” though Babu himself felt it had not been delivered on. “So what we have is a continuous system of more and more reports. Every time there is a crisis we have a report, an inquiry.” Referring to others taking part in the session, which took place in February, he added: “I think they were generally from the right of politics. They are not the kind of people I would normally come across as being key individuals in this whole debate about race … about equality. “I think they almost had an exam question with the answer already written on it. I feel really personally disappointed that I took part because it gives some kind of credibility to it.” Babu said he was struggling to understand what the commission had been able to deliver. There had been some positives around its focus on issues such as education and the performance of particular groups, but it had failed to address what happened when young people went to try to find jobs. “We have seen the under-representation of BAME communities in every aspect of British life. I think the commission missed an opportunity. They had a political view and I think that is what they have done here.” Many of its recommendations simply echoed those that had been made decades ago in the Scarman report, which was commissioned by theThatcher government after the 1981 Brixton riots, he said.