Local councils' increasing regulation of public leafleting is heavy-handed and an affront to our historic liberties

Josie Appleton is director of civil liberties group the Manifesto Club, and author of the report Leafleting: A Liberty Lost?, which is being published today.

Over the past five years it has become increasingly difficult for local groups to hand out leaflets in town and city centres. In our Manifesto Club survey of local authorities, we found that 27% of councils have brought through leafleting licence systems, enacting ‘free literature distribution’ powers contained in the Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act 2005.

Many local authorities are now charging residents vast sums (£50 an hour in Basildon) for the privilege of standing on a street corner and pitching their theatre or music night to fellow residents. You can’t just grab some friends and head out because it’s a nice day. Instead, leafleteers have to apply two weeks in advance, give national insurance numbers and addresses for all ‘distributors’, say what they will be handing out and where they will be standing, and ensure their ‘authorised leaflet distributor’ badge is ‘highly visible at all times’.

Leafleting licence costs are simply unaffordable for circuses, car boot sales, music nights and the host of other small-scale events that promote themselves hand-to-hand. A mere glance at a lengthy ‘free distribution licence application form’ is enough to deaden the will and put anybody off. The result is that smaller organisations – key to local economies as well as ‘big society’-type activities - get squeezed out of public space.

Council snooping powers curbed

The Daily Mail reports restrictions on the power of Town Halls to carry out surveillance under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. There will be a double check of approval from a magistrate and the power being limited to cases where the offence under investigation carries a custodial sentence.

The only exception will be undercover operations for underage sales of alcohol and tobacco. Is that offence, often inadvertent, necessarily worse than persistent dog fouling?

Offences such as using a false address to pretend you are in the catchment area for a good school will cease to be covered by the anti terrorism legislation.

The report says:

In reality, it will restrict councils to going after more serious criminals, such as benefit cheats, con-artists and industrial fly tippers.

Councils spending more than £100m per year on CCTV

Tim Montgomerie

Via FOI requests to local councils, the BigBrotherWatch campaigning organisation has discovered that a total of £314,835,170.39 was spent on installing and operating CCTV cameras during the 2007 to 2010 period.

It compiled a table of the biggest ten spenders with LibCon Birmingham in the number one spot:

Alex Deane of BBW commented:

“This is a shocking figure.  Public money is being wasted on snooping surveillance that does next to nothing to prevent or solve crime.  We are being watched more than ever before, and we’re being ripped off into the bargain.  British taxpayers will be scandalised to see their money being thrown away like this in the current economic climate.”

Download a PDF of the Big Brother Watch Report.

Last year Gavin Barwell (now a Conservative MP) posted a defence of local councils' spending on CCTV.

"Council race spies rummage through your bin"

By Jonathan Isaby

Today's Daily Mail splashes on a story that relates to an unnerving intrusion into our lives licensed by the last Labour Government:

"Councils are secretly rifling through thousands of dustbins to find out about families' race and wealth. Waste audits allow officials and private contractors to check supermarket labels, types of unwanted food  -  and even examine the contents of discarded mail.

"The local authorities are using social profiling techniques to match different types of rubbish to different ethnic groups or wealthy and poor households, as part of a recycling drive initiated by the last Government. Householders can then be placed into social categories, which in some areas range from 'wealthy achievers' to the 'hard-pressed' - and subsequently targeted for future leafleting campaigns."

At least 90 councils have reportedly been found to have been doing this - claiming it was in line with guidance from the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

I hope that new Defra Secretary Caroline Spelman will revoke such guidance.

Read the full Daily Mail piece here.

Caroline Spelman MP repeats Tory promise to abolish council tax inspectors’ right to enter private homes

Mrs Spelman's intervention was made in response to a report from The TaxPayers' Alliance's Big Brother Watch that found that up to 20,000 council officers are permitted to enter private property without needing either a warrant or an accompanying police officer. The Shadow Secretary of State for Local Government and Communities commented:

"Thanks to Labour, there are now over 1,000 powers of entry that allow state officials to barge inside your home. Gordon Brown pledged to curtail them, but yet again, he has failed to deliver on his empty rhetoric. The police need powers to tackle crime, but there is a far weaker case for town halls to have these powers, especially given the abuse of surveillance powers by local authorities. Conservatives will cut back these unnecessary powers of the municipal officials to enter homes, starting off with abolishing council tax inspectors’ rights of entry and reigning back in the over-zealous town hall bin police.”

Alex Deane of BBW commented:

“Once, a man’s home was his castle. Today the Big Brother state wants to inspect, regulate and standardise the inside of our homes. Councils are dishing out powers of entry to officers within their council for their own ease, without giving due thought to the public’s right to privacy and the potential for abuse. There needs to be a much closer eye kept on the number of officers granted the right to barge into private premises without a warrant.”

Go to the Big Brother Watch website for more.

Tim Montgomerie

Keep Big Brother out of the Town Hall

Mark Wallace of the Taxpayers Alliance says councils should avoid spending money on surveillance

It is a truth self evident that we live in an increasingly Big Brother society. With a Government seemingly obsessed with gathering as much data as possible on individuals, we are beset by ID cards, DNA databases, health snoopers and CCTV cameras. Whilst the warnings – most recently from former MI5 Chief Stella Rimington – tend to caution us against a “police state”, it is almost unnoticed that in practice much of these measures are in fact wielded by bureaucrats rather than the police.

Giving the police unprecedented powers to snoop on the public is worrying enough, but if anything it is even more concerning that it is local government who are the people behind the spy cameras.

There was a widespread sense of anger when it emerged the Poole Council had been using so-called “RIPA” powers, introduced on a wave of Government rhetoric about fighting terrorism, to covertly film a family whom they suspected to be lying about being in a school catchment zone.

Eric Pickles answers more of your questions

We have already published the first installment of answers to the questions you recently posed about local government reorganisation to shadow communities and local government secretary, Eric Pickles. Here is his second set of answers, covering how Conservative councils can be Conservative, local councils' use of anti-terrorism powers to spy one people, the Conservative revival in the north of England and the regularity of rubbish collections.

His final responses will be published tomorrow morning.

Questions from David Cooper and Deborah: What are your recommendations for strengthening the resolve of Conservative councillors, especially those in authorities that have recently changed hands, to deal with executive officers who either drag their feet over plans for efficiencies and savings or condone/encourage unacceptable treatment of council taxpayers in the name of the council? And how should the Conservative Party deal with those councillors who wore blue rosettes to get elected but who do not follow Conservative principles?

Eric Pickles: I believe in democracy, and as such I think elected representatives should make decisions in the interest of their communities, not unelected and unaccountable officials. The first question I always ask our council leaders is 'how would your electorate know you are a Conservative council?' It is surprising how many don't have an answer. It was the case that some of our Councils were delivering a version of Labour lite – delivering the government's agenda in an efficient and effective way that you would expect from a Tory council. But the time has come to break the consensus. I recently called on out councillors to "just say no" to the government if a Whitehall proposal wasn't in the best interests of their electorate. I am delighted that many of my local government colleagues have accepted that challenge. The clear illustration of this is the number of councils who have signed up to our council tax freeze policy. Those Councils make me extremely proud.

People who live alone face surveillance from council tax inspectors

The 7.5 million people who receive a 25% discount from their council tax bill because they live alone are more likely to have to prove it in the months ahead.

One council, Thurrock in Essex, asks people to sign a declaration that permits the council to enter their home to prove that they are single occupants.

A spokesman for the Local Government Association told The Telegraph that the crackdown was necessary because of fraud:

"Millions of pounds are being ripped off from the taxpayer by a minority of people who deliberately cheat the system by claiming discounts. Councils are clamping down hard on fraudsters who pretend to live alone when there are actually more people living in a house and try cheating the tax payer.  Pretending to live alone to defraud the taxpayer is not a victimless offence. This is money that could be spent on the genuinely vulnerable or keeping council tax down."

Eric Pickles MP, Tory spokesman on local government, is concerned, however, at local authorities' use of surveillance powers to check on single occupancy:

"Day by the day under Labour, the rights and liberties of law-abiding citizens are being undermined, with more and more state officials trying to enter and spy on people's homes. It may be appropriate for local authorities to check that council tax discounts are not wrongly claimed. But it is wholly disproportionate to threaten higher council tax bills if residents do not allow state officials into their bedrooms.  This is another worrying sign of function creep. State duties originally intended to tackle fraud are now being over-used by bureaucrats in a heavy-handed, intrusive manner."

Councils are using surveillance powers to stop misuse of disabled parking badges and against littering

The Conservative leader of the Local Government Association, Sir Simon Milton, has warned councils against over zealous use of surveillance powers that they were given to fight terrorism and criminal offences.

Sir Simon fears that councils may be using these powers too freely and will undermine public confidence in councils having them at all.

Reports in this morning's media note how a family in Dorset was watched for three weeks in order to establish whether or not they were actually in the correct school catchment area.  It was found that they were.  The Telegraph reports that local authorities are launching more than 1,000 covert surveillance operations every month.  The newspaper highlights that Newcastle has used its powers 24 times to investigate parking fines and by Conservatives in Kensington and Chelsea to investigate the misuse of disabled parking badges.

Sir Simon appeared to imply that the surveillance powers were appropriate in dealing with fly tippers, rogue traders and those defrauding the council tax or housing benefit system.  Action against littering was not, he has written, a "necessary and proportionate" use of local authority's surveillance powers.

Dominic Grieve, the new Shadow Home Secretary, welcomed Sir Simon's intervention:

"The public will be alarmed that such strong powers introduced under the guise of counterterrorism are being used by councils. They must be as tightly controlled as if they were being used by the police or security services."

Sir Simon said that the media also had a responsibility to use language more carefully. Talk of snoopers patrolling council parks to check that people were allowing their dogs to foul green spaces would, he implied on this morning's Today programme, produce a different response to news that a park-keeper was empowered to stop fouling of places where children play.