What is the difference between giving false information to the police and giving no information?

Those are not, however, the facts of this case. The appellant did not simply refuse to provide his identity to the police; he provided two false identities. The authorities recognize a distinction between the absence of a legal obligation to respond to police questioning and the existence of a legal obligation to refrain from providing the police with false information. As Parker C.J. explained in Rice v. Connolly, at 652: It seems to me quite clear that though every citizen has a moral duty or, if you like, a social duty to assist the police, there is no legal duty to that effect, and indeed the whole basis of the common law is that right of the individual to refuse to answer questions put to him by persons in authority, and a refusal to accompany those in authority to any particular place, short, of course, of arrest. Counsel for the respondent has pointed out that it is undoubtedly an obstruction, and has been so held, for a person questioned by the police to tell a "cock-and-bull" story, to put the police off by giving them false information, and I think he would say: well, what is the real distinction, it is very little away from giving false information to giving no information at all; if that does in fact make it more difficult for the police to carry out their duties then there is a wilful obstruction. In my judgment there is all the difference in the world between deliberately telling a false story, something which on no view a citizen has a right to do, and preserving silence or refusing to answer, something which he has every right to do. [emphasis added]