Use of RIPA by Birmingham City Council

Birmingham City Council did not have the information requested.

Dear Sir or Madam,

In light of recent reports on the use of RIPA by councils in
England and Wales, I am writing to enquire on the use of the RIPA
law by the Council. Specifically:

1) How many Council employees have the power to authorise the use
of RIPA, and what is their designated grade?

2) How many times has RIPA powers been used in the last 5 years? On
what dates were the requests made and by whom?

3) For what purposes was RIPA used, what type of investigation was
being undertaken? What was the motivation for using RIPA? What were
the outcomes of the RIPA requests? Please provide details for the
past 5 years.

4) Over the past 5 years, by each year, how many people have been
prosecuted as a result of evidence gathered through the use of RIPA
sanctioned investigations, and how many of these prosecutions have
led to convictions?

For all of the above where possible please provide the ethnicity
and gender of the people concerned who were under the RIPA
sanctioned investigations.

Yours faithfully,

Paul Bradshaw

Birmingham City Council

Dear Mr Bradshaw

Freedom of Information Act 2000 - Request for Information

Thank you for your recent enquiry for information held by the Council under
the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act 2000. We acknowledge
receipt of your request dated 25 July 2009 and we will be touch with you
again in due course.

In some circumstances a fee may be payable and if that is the case, we will
let you know. A fees notice will be issued to you and you will be required
to pay before we will proceed to deal with your request.

If you require any further information or are not happy with our response
please do not hesitate to contact a member of our team on 0121 303 4876.

Yours sincerely

Corporate Information Governance Team

Data Protection Act 1998
The information you have provided within your Freedom of Information
request will be held on our database and may also be held within manual
records for a period of 2 years from the date Birmingham City Council
received your request. Any personal data that you provide to Birmingham
City Council will be held in line with the requirements set out within the
Data Protection Act 1998.
Re Use of Public Sector Information
Where Birmingham City Council is the copyright holder of any information
that may be released, re-use for personal, educational or non-commercial
purposes is permitted without further reference to the City Council. Where
the re-use is for other purposes, such as commercial re-use, the applicant
should notify the City Council in writing to seek approval or agree terms
for re-use.

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Birmingham City Council

1 Attachment

Dear Mr Bradshaw

Further to your request for information regarding:

1) How many Council employees have the power to authorise the use
of RIPA, and what is their designated grade?

Answer: 22 senior officers are responsible for the general authorisation of
surveillance under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. These senior
officers have all received training in respect of this responsibility from
the Corporate Director of Governance and receive periodic refresher
training. Certain surveillance operations can only be authorised by the
Chief Executive, after obtaining advice from the Corporate Director of
Governance.

2) How many times has RIPA powers been used in the last 5 years? On
what dates were the requests made and by whom?

3) For what purposes was RIPA used, what type of investigation was
being undertaken? What was the motivation for using RIPA? What were
the outcomes of the RIPA requests? Please provide details for the
past 5 years.

Answer: Below I have attached a spreadsheet which is from 2004 it includes
the amount of RIPA applications each year and by directorate.

4) Over the past 5 years, by each year, how many people have been
prosecuted as a result of evidence gathered through the use of RIPA
sanctioned investigations, and how many of these prosecutions have
led to convictions?

For all of the above where possible please provide the ethnicity
and gender of the people concerned who were under the RIPA
sanctioned investigations.

Answer: 4. This information is not centrally held and could only be
located by conducting a physical search of legal services files opened and/
or closed after April 2004.

Due to the obligations of security imposed under various legislation,
including the Data Protection Act and RIPA, and in light of the
Surveillance Commissioner’s guidance following their routine
inspections. Birmingham City Council keeps details of surveillance
secure, to avoid any leakage of information which could prejudice any
surveillance or endanger the individuals conducting any
surveillance. Accordingly, any information relating to impending or
ongoing surveillance is kept secure, as information relating to any
surveillance or interception of communications authorised under RIPA
is held only in a restricted and secure lotus notes database.

Often Legal Services are involved in the outset of investigations,
and accordingly, Legal Services operate under the same obligations of
security. As such, it does not keep a central record of files to
which RIPA evidence was or is being obtained or used, other than on
the actual case file itself.

There is no direct 1:1 correlation between RIPA authorisations and
actual surveillance, as there may be situations that where, in the
intervening period between authorisation been granted and any
surveillance actually taking place, unforeseen events may arisen
which means that the surveillance is no longer required or possible,
e.g. where the target for the surveillance has been arrested by the
police for a different offence, or has gone on holiday during the
period the authorisation has been issued for. In those
circumstances, the authorisation would then be cancelled, but still
be logged as a RIPA authorisation.

Neither is there a direct 1:1 relationship between RIPA
authorisations and prosecutions, as there may be situations where the
surveillance does not produce sufficient evidence to support a
prosecution.

In addition, there may be a number of prosecutions arising from a
specific RIPA surveillance operation.

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. As stated above, due to the fact
that RIPA information may be used in more than one prosecution, we
can not directly refer to the corporate RIPA database and then cross
reference the same against Legal Services files.

I am advised that 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
criminal litigation files alone to determine whether or not RIPA
surveillance was used in respect of any prosecution.

If you are not satisfied with the response you may ask for an internal
review. If subsequently you are not satisfied with the Council’s decision
you may apply to the Information Commissioner for a decision. Generally,
the ICO cannot make a decision unless you have exhausted the complaints
procedure provided by the Council. The Information Commissioner can be
contacted at the following address:

The Information Commissioner
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF

Telephone: 01625 545745

Web Address: www.ico.gov.uk

Yours sincerely

Corporate Information Governance Team

Re use of Public Sector Information

The information provided is subject to Birmingham City Council copyright,
however, it may be re-used for personal, educational or non-commercial
purposes without further reference to the City Council. If the re-use is
for other purposes, such as commercial re-use, you should notify the City
Council in writing to seek approval or agree terms for re-use. Where
Birmingham City Council does not hold the copyright, it has indicated the
copyright holder. Permission for re-use should be sought from them directly
.

(See attached file: Bradshaw.FOI3205.RIPA Stats 2004-2009..xls)

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Paul Bradshaw left an annotation ()

If you are reporting on this for a news organisation please attribute the submitter of the request - in this case Paul Bradshaw from Help Me Investigate.com

Dear Sir or Madam,

Could you please explain why the Sheet1/2 tables are classified/titled with such date ranges? Especially as Sheet 3 shows the numbers based on your Fiscal Year breakdown – this suggests you have numbers by fiscal years too?

Yours faithfully,

Paul Bradshaw

Birmingham City Council

Dear Mr Bradshaw

Further to your query regarding our attached spreadsheet. The information
contained in sheet 1/2 was taken from a large data gathering exercise for a
previous request. In which we had to go through paper RIPA forms from
2004/6 and the electronic database for 2006/9.

In your request you asked for how many times RIPA powers had been used in
the last 5 years. On what dates were the requests made and by whom? This
information was not captured previously.

Birmingham City Council has estimated that it will cost more than the
appropriate limit to consider your request. The appropriate limit specified
in the regulations is £450.00. This represents the estimated cost of one
person spending 18 hours in determining whether the department holds the
information, and locating, retrieving and extracting the information.
Consequently, the Council is not obliged by the Freedom of Information Act
2000 to respond to your request see section 12(1).

regards

Corporate Information Governance Team


Paul Bradshaw
<request-15158-fb
ea4730@whatdothey To
know.com> [email address]
cc
07/08/2009 12:59
Subject
Re: Freedom of Information request
- Use of RIPA by Birmingham City
Council





Dear Sir or Madam,

Could you please explain why the Sheet1/2 tables are
classified/titled with such date ranges? Especially as Sheet 3
shows the numbers based on your Fiscal Year breakdown – this
suggests you have numbers by fiscal years too?

Yours faithfully,

Paul Bradshaw

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Francis Irving left an annotation ()

Blog post about this request: http://www.jamesrb.co.uk/?p=256

HelpMeInvestigate investigation that this is part of: http://helpmeinvestigate.com/investigati...