SNOOPERS

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Local councils are snooping on our telephones, accessing our email systems, using covert surveillance and maintaining databases on everything from our sexual orientation to whether we were once rude on the phone to a council officer. They are routinely sending out ‘diversity monitoring’ forms asking us our ethnic group, our sexual orientation and whether we have a long-term illness. It is a requirement, they claim, under the Equality Act 2010, Labour politician Harriet Harman’s hobby horse, passed in the dying days of the last Labour government.

Yet far from fighting discrimination, this intrusive questioning provides information which makes it easier for council officials to discriminate against us if they feel so minded. Staff in a council’s waste collection service, for example, wouldn’t have a clue as to the sexual orientation of individual taxpayers were it not for these forms. Obsessive data-collection is just one element of councils’ fixation with surveillance. Another is outright spying.

If James Bond creator Ian Fleming were still alive and getting a bit tired of the supervillain Blofeld, he might well be tempted to recast his MI6 operative as a council employee hiding in the bushes with a long-lens camera to check that citizens are correctly using the poop-a-scoop facilities. An investigation by pressure group Big Brother Watch last year revealed 8,575 cases where councils had employed surveillance against their taxpayers.

Some of them were for offences such as serial benefit fraud, vandalism and arson but many more were for incredibly petty transgressions. Twelve councils had employed surveillance to catch people out for dog-fouling, and five had used it for enforcing the smoking ban. Gloucestershire Council tried to catch out a farmer illegally moving his sheep, while Bromley Council employed cameras to catch people leaving donations of clothes on the pavement outside a charity shop, or ‘fly-tipping’ as the council described it.

Cambridgeshire council used surveillance equipment to trap a newsagent suspected of employing newspaper boys without a valid permit. Others have admitted going through our bins in search of evidence of the wrong sort of recycling. According to an analysis of government credit cards, Basildon Council spent £1,757 in a shop called Spycatcher in Knightsbridge, buying zoom binoculars, night-vision goggles and a GPS tracking device. Sevenoaks Council bought four motion-sensitive infra-red cameras.

And councils are spying on our telephones and computers, too. According to Sir Paul Kennedy, a retired High Court judge and the current Interception of Communications Commissioner (ICC), councils last year made 1,756 requests for data relating to their taxpayers’ phone and email usage. The requests were for details of the telephone numbers citizens had rung and the email addresses with which they had exchanged messages. Councils are supposed to be there to empty our bins and sweep the streets, not to operate as miniature outposts of the Secret Service.

Jane Clift, formerly of Slough, discovered the extent to which councils will go in 2005, when she received a letter from her local authority telling her that she had been placed on a list of ‘potentially violent people’ which had been circulated to council staff as well as doctors, dentists, libraries and schools. She had got on the list by being ‘very difficult’ when she rang a council official to follow up a complaint she had made about a drunk she had seen trampling flowers in a local park. As a result of being added to the list, she lost her chance to be a foster parent.

Council officials were advised not to see her on a one-to-one basis. Mrs Clift sued and won £12,000 in libel damages from Slough council, but many thousands of other citizens who have been placed on council blacklists for daring to complain about something may not even be aware of it, until they find themselves banned from council premises. The government has pledged to crack down on the use of surveillance by councils.

Home Secretary Theresa May has promised that in future local authorities will be allowed to use surveillance techniques only when investigating serious offences punishable by a prison sentence of at least six months. That is a reasonable compromise, but the problem of over-zealousness on the part of councils will not go away until there is a change of culture in local government. Officials need to realise that they are there to serve their taxpayers, not to cajole and threaten us into following their own petty bylaws. (Source: Daily Mail, Jul/11)

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