According to the FT,the UK’s police forces pay telecoms groups millions of pounds each year for information such as call records and the personal details and movements of customers.
The government, which is seeking to extend its surveillance powers, has paid telecoms companies including BT, Vodafone, EE and Virgin Media more than £37m for data on customers and their activities in the past five years.
The data were collected from police forces and local authorities by the FT using the Freedom of Information Act.
Fees paid to the telecoms industry have increased every year since 2008, which shows police forces are increasingly relying on technology to help them catch criminals, who may not be aware how closely they can be monitored when using their smartphones.
The 34 police forces and authorities that responded to the FT’s requests paid more than £6.7m in 2014, although the overall cost is likely to be much higher, given that 10 forces and various government agencies declined to provide the data on cost or security grounds.
The payments are made annually from a central pot for access to information on communications such as where and when they occurred, the identity of the person called and how long the conversation lasted. These types of requests can be made by senior member of a police force or authority.
The data does not include the content of the calls or messaging. Such eavesdropping requires warrants signed off by the home secretary.
Companies’ expenses for surveillance are set to increase significantly under the proposed Investigatory Powers Bill, which would raise the amount of data that needs to be collected and stored.
The potential costs of what has been dubbed the “Snoopers’ Charter” have been met with concern by executives , who argue the plans go too far in collecting encrypted communications and risk interfering with network equipment.
Internet and telecoms providers would need to keep “permanent capabilities” to intercept and collect personal data without the need for judicial authorisation. The proposals would require companies to record web browsing histories for 12 months.
The bill has also raised privacy concerns. Daniel Nesbitt, director of Big Brother Watch, the campaign group, said: “Without detail about the use of this capability how can we understand whether it represents value for money. With plans outlined in the draft Investigatory Powers Bill to include our internet activity as a resource the police can seek access to, it is likely that the costs to the police and indeed the taxpayers pocket are only going to increase dramatically over coming years unless these plans are revised.”
The data collected by the FT show a wide range of costs accumulated by each police force. The highest cost included in the data was incurred by South Wales police, although forces who declined to reveal their expenditure for cost reasons may pay more.
The Metropolitan Police makes the highest number of requests but declined to provide cost details, citing the “disproportionate amount of work to obtain”. The lowest cost was in Cambridgeshire.
A number of government departments also use communications data. The Environment Agency used its powers to access the phone records of just four people in one year, but HM Revenue & Customs regularly spends more than £200,000 each year.
The Environment Agency said it typically used powers in the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 to investigate serious cases of waste dumping.
According to the data from authorities that responded, each request made by an agency costs about £50 on average.
There were 517,236 such requests in 2014 made by a range of government organisations, including the telecoms regulator Ofcom — meaning the payments could total nearly £26m every year. Almost 90 per cent were made by police forces and law enforcement agencies, with the remainder mostly from intelligence agencies.
The activity is costly for telecoms companies, who need to maintain dedicated teams able to handle requests in secure offices, as well as databases able to hold the information for up to two years.
The Home Office runs a centralised cost-recovery scheme that reimburses providers and then invoices the police forces quarterly.
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