Stockport Council’s Corporate Resource, Management & Governance Scrutiny (CRMG) Committee met last night.  Its job is to keep an eye on how the council operates internally – the “back office” side of things.

As a new item, we discussed the Council’s use of RIPA, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000.

RIPA provides a framework for a variety of public bodies – including councils, the police, the Benefits Agency and others – to use covert surveillance to gather evidence against members of the public suspected of breaking the law.

It’s been pretty controversial, with a typical Daily Mail comment against it being

When it was passed in 2000, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act attracted little public attention.

Those who did take an interest were informed that, far from being a cause for alarm, it would offer greater protection from Big Brother by regulating for the first time spying by the police and the security services.

Yet in only eight years, RIPA has become one of the most powerful tools of the surveillance state, used almost without restraint by councils determined to catch anybody daring to put their rubbish out on the wrong day.

It hasn’t been used for that in Stockport.

Stockport Council, we now know, used RIPA seven times in 2008 and seven times in 2009.  It wasn’t used to catch people putting out their bins on the wrong day, or to catch dog walkers.  It’s mainly been used to tackle anti-social behaviour and illegal selling of alcohol to children when other methods of gathering evidence have failed.

Councillors on the CRMG Scrutiny committee will be getting a quarterly report on how RIPA is being used by the Council so we can keep an eye on it.

Overall, I’ve long had concerns about the RIPA legislation – whether it’s too broadly drafted and gives too much power to the various public bodies that use it.  The Coalition government is considering changes and it may be that authorising RIPA requests moves from the Council to  Magistrates.

However, Stockport Council’s use of the legislation seems to me to be both appropriate and proportionate at present, and I look forward to monitoring it and ensuring it stays that way.

   1 Comment