Surveillance Watchdog's Verdict on our Reforms to Council's 'Snooping' Powers

I wrote on here some months ago about reforms we've introduced to restrict the Council's ability to spy on local residents, and to ensure that it is accountable publicly for each and every use of the powers it has to conduct surveillance. The main features of the reforms were the restriction of the abilitiy to authorise the use of the powers to only the most senior officers (shortening the list of authorising officers considerably), and the introduction of a new requirement that every use of the powers by the Council must be reported to the public meetings of the Council's Executive four times a year. For the first time this has ensured public oversight of the Council's use of these powers, which have been dubbed a 'snooper's charter' for Councils after several instances of their excessive and unjustified use elsewhere. These have included the case of a council spying on parents incorrectly suspected of using a false address to get their child into a preferred school and numerous cases of councils spying on their own staff. Since then, the Council's use of the powers it has under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIPA) Act 2000 have been inspected by the Office of the Surveillance Commissioner, and its findings have now been published.

I am pleased to say that those findings, which were reported at the last meeting of the Council's Executive, are extremely positive about the new policies we have in place and how they are working in practice. The last inspection in 2008 was, to be frank, scathing about the Council's use of surveillance powers. The Office of the Surveillance Commissioner issued a string of recommendations for the Council to tighten up its RIPA regime, relating to a range of areas including the recording of uses of the powers and ongoing internal monitoring. In the case of each of the seven recommendations issued in 2008, the Commissioner concluded that the recommendation "can be considered to be discharged." The report was also highly complimentary about the new, tighter more open and transparent regime we have brought in. The report states that the Council's use of the powers since 2008 fall into two distinct camps: those before the new regime came into force, and those after, with the authorisations issued since our new policy came into force noted for their thoroughness and deemed to be "the standard that should be aspired to for all future authorisatinos." Indeed, seven recommendations following the last inspection have been reduced to just one this time around:

"The current standard of applications and authorisations should be maintained and the previous failings listed at ... not allowed to recur. Authorising officers and those with responsibility for corporate oversight must be robust in this regard."

Rightly, the report notes that the new regime is in its relatively early days, and sounds a note of caution that standards must be maintained. I can assure the Commissioner and, even more importantly, local people that we will continue to do all we can to ensure these powers cannot be misused against residents in Bedford Borough.