Dear National Police Chiefs Council,

ANPR is a powerful crime fighting tool The system gathers very large amounts of data daily about people's movements and stores it for a number of years. In the five year strategy, “Policing the Roads in Partnership 2015 – 2020” National Lead for Policing the Roads
Chief Constable Suzette Davenport set out some basic principles, one of which was :

'Accountability – we are answerable for our decisions, actions and omissions'.

Issues arising from a system on the scale of ANPR such as privacy can be mitigated by good system design and effective governance. I should be grateful for information you hold in your records about the governance of the ANPR system, particularly at a national level such as (but not exclusively):

structure of governance - committees, their membership
papers and minutes produced or consumed by or within the governance structure - such as board papers, minutes of meetings, records of decisions taken
correspondence with the Information Commissioner's office about the system

I am interested in the period 2013-2015 but would welcome relevant information you may hold prior to that time.

ANPR is almost unique globally in its scale and, as it holds billions of records of people's movements there is a very strong public interest in publishing the information I request.

I would invite you also to add such information to your publication scheme on an ongoing basis. If you do publish this already then please point me to it - I can't find a reserve of documents about ANPRs operation and governance on your websites.

I prefer to receive information electronically through this service. If you can answer only part of this request then please do so rather than rejecting the whole thing. Should you require any clarification in order to answer this request then please contact me through this service.

Yours faithfully,

william perrin

Dear National Police Chiefs Council,

Thank you for this - i had thought i had sent a clarification upon receipt of your request but the web service seems to have lost it.

Anyway - thank you for that the information as you have set it out will suffice for this request with one clarification, i seek only recorded communication with the ICO office in respect of ANPR, not across the whole sweep of your organisations activities.

The opacity of the governance arrangements for ANPR makes it hard to get this request right first time.

Yours faithfully,

william perrin

Dear National Police Chiefs Council,

Thank you for this Sherry

In conducting a public interest test I should be interested to know how you weigh up the positive aspects of releasing the information and who you talk to to weigh up the positive side of a public interest balance. I have a correspondence with the Surveillance Camera Commissioner Tony Porter and he said that he would welcome increased transparency about ANPR governance.

In the public interest i should ask you to note that:

The UK ANPR system is one of the world's largest systems for recording the movements of private individuals.

The ANPR system contains over 1 billion records

At this scale, how this data governed and matters arising from that governance are of very significant public interest indeed.

I should remind you that I have sought three types of information and asked that if you cannot meet all of them then please do what you can rather than reject all of it.

I find it hard to conceive that disclosing information about the structure of governance, what happens within that governance and issues that needed to be raised with the ICO can actually harm the public interest at a scale that would be less than the good caused given the scale and nature of data involved.

Yours faithfully,

william perrin