IPCO 2017 Annual Report Published 31 January 2019
The Prime Minister has today laid our 2017 Annual Report in Parliament.
The Investigatory Powers Commissioner, Sir Adrian Fulford, made the following statement:
“My first annual report is a comprehensive account of the oversight work carried out by my new office and our predecessor organisations of the use of investigatory powers during 2017. I am pleased to have unequivocally concluded that, across the full range of organisations for which we have oversight responsibility, my Judicial Commissioners and Inspectors, past and current, have continued successfully to challenge the necessity and proportionality of how these powers are used, in order to protect the public and to ensure that any intrusion into privacy or other rights is justified.
This report is being published later than I would have liked, in the main because of our inevitable focus on dealing with the challenge of unifying our three predecessor bodies and establishing a new office and operating model during 2017 and 2018, in order to meet the challenges of the Investigatory Powers Act. In this first report, I have adopted the approach of providing a consistent and comprehensive overview of the various investigatory powers that fall within my oversight, as well as a summary of the key findings in each area. I hope that in the result both Parliament and the public find the report informative and useful.”
The report covers each investigatory power in an individual chapter, providing an introduction to the legal basis for that power, how and how much it is used and how it is overseen. Each chapter also includes a summary of the findings from both the prior approval (of some) of these powers and IPCO’s retrospective oversight by inspection of all of these powers. It must be noted that many of the powers contained in the Investigatory Powers Act did not come into effect until 2018 and thereby fall outside the ambit of this report. The report also gives further information about the work to establish IPCO, errors that have occurred in the use of these powers and the office budget. The report can be accessed online here.