Undercover police are still being given "free rein" to have sex with their targets, according to eight women who fell victim to the shocking practice.

The group, who are suing Scotland Yard, made submissions to a consultation on codes of practice for surveillance and say the government is failing to prevent officers from starting sexual relationships with the people they're spying on.

They said the failure "to introduce measures to prevent further abuse amounts to institutional sexism."

The women started legal action after discovering they had been engaged in relationships of up to six years with undercover police officers including Mark Kennedy, Bob Lambert, Mark Jenner and John Dines.

Most of the officers were working in the Met Police's Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), which operated from 1968 to 2008.

Mr Lambert, now a lecturer at the University of St Andrews, even fathered a child with a duped activist before abandoning both of them when he finished his deployment.

The women were responding to a Home Office consultation on updating the code of conduct for undercover officers.

In the contribution, they said: "Having had our privacy intruded upon to a huge and damaging degree we feel that these guidelines fail to address the issues raised by our claims and fail to offer any increased protection to the public."

"The changes proposed to the codes of practice are not sufficient to prevent the kinds of abuses that have been perpetrated by undercover officers.

"It is irrational and represents a dereliction of duty for new guidelines to ignore this behaviour.

"In the light of inconsistent statements by senior police and ministers on the subject of sexual relationships, a duty is owed by the government to the public (and to officers) to ensure the regulations are clear."

A criminal and misconduct investigation into the SDS recently found that a "tradecraft" manual had advised officers to make any sexual relationships "fleeting and disastrous," although there was no official endorsement of the practice.

The women said steps must be taken to explicitly ban such behaviour.

They said: "The situation as it stands currently gives free rein to officers and their handlers, and in view of the fact that women have been disproportionately affected by these relationships, a failure to introduce measures to prevent further abuse amounts to institutional sexism."