Big Brother on criminals' trail; LAW: Council uses phone taps and bugging to spy on offenders.

Byline: Paul Dale

BUGGING devices, telephone tapping, hacking into emails and other surveillance tactics to detect criminals have been used by Birmingham City Council on 575 occasions during the past five years.

The council took advantage of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act to probe a wide range of illegal activities, including benefit fraud, counterfeiting, anti-social behaviour, money laundering and fly-tipping.

Details have emerged in a Freedom of Information Act reply to the Birmingham-based website helpmeinvestigate.com The council has admitted that 22 senior officials have the power to authorise the use of RIPA, but declined to say how many people have been successfully prosecuted as a result of surveillance.

Help Me Investigate branded the council "trigger happy" and accused it of resorting to Big Brother-type covert surveillance operations too often.

The council said the workload involved in examining every RIPA request and analysing the result would be too great.

In its reply to the FoI request, the council said: "To provide you with the information you have requested, Legal Services would have to retrieve every criminal litigation file and Anti Social Behaviour Order file closed after April 2004, in order to determine whether any evidence was obtained under RIPA.

"It has been estimated that it takes at least 20 to 25 minutes to locate a specific closed file, arrange for the file to be retrieved from archive, and then reviewed to determine whether or not RIPA was used for that specific prosecution.

"Since April 2004, there are over 2,500 files held in respect of criminal litigation alone. Accordingly, it would take at least 800 hours to go through these files alone to determine whether or not RIPA surveillance was used in respect of any prosecution."

Help Me Investigate spokesman Paul Bradshaw said the figures reflected concerns nationally that councils were using surveillance legislation designed to catch terrorists for more trivial matters such as catching fly-tippers.

Mr Bradshaw said analysis of the figures suggested Birmingham City Council was far more likely to use RIPA than most other local authorities.

When the city's population was taken into account, Birmingham was putting under surveillance six times as many of its citizens as the typical council, he said.

A council spokeswoman said: "Birmingham City Council, like other local authorities, is using these powers to respond to residents' complaints about issues such as fly-tippers, benefit fraudsters and rip-off merchants, which is precisely what the act is intended for.

"We are recognised as an exemplar of national best practice in this area, using it only when necessary and proportionate."

CAPTION(S):

Surveillance: Birmingham City Council more likely to use these tactics.