A NEW surveillance policy will help the council crackdown on fly-tippers, a top council official has claimed.
The council’s updated covert powers strategy, which was rubber-stamped earlier this week alongside a new CCTV strategy, allows Bracknell Forest to breach an individual’s right to privacy if it helps prevent or detect a crime.
This means from time-to-time, additional temporary CCTV may be deployed in the borough as part of a response to anti-social issues.
READ MORE: Flurry of fly-tipping reports as issue blights borough
And councillor John Harrison, Bracknell Forest Council’s public protection chief, suggested the Investigatory Powers Commissioner’s Office (IPCO) policy will help council bosses tackle one of the borough’s most pressing problems.
He said: “Members of the public and members of the council will often come to me and say ‘we’ve got a problem with fly-tipping in our area. Can you put some cameras up, find out who’s doing it, and prosecute them?’
“The answer is yes we can, but there are regulations the government and the council uses.
“Things such as CCTV, monitoring social media to find out what’s going on.
“We need to be compliant with those, and therefore we need policies that set out exactly how such uses are authorised, how we’re going to do it and what records we are going to keep.
“That’s what this policy does.”
READ MORE: Bracknell Forest fly-tipping hotspots revealed
Fly-tipping is an issue many local authorities like Bracknell Forest has to deal with.
The News has reported on several incidents of the act over the past year.
In October 2020, a pair from Maidenhead were fined £400 each for dumping waste at Malt Hill in Warfield.
Other issues the policy allows the council’s public protection partners to deal with includes investigations into car deals, sales of counterfeit goods online and the offering of un-licensed waste services.
The policy was updated after a review into the council’s strategy by IPCO in 2019.
READ MORE: Maidenhead pair fined for dumping waste in Bracknell Forest
Sean Murphy, head of Berkshire’s Public Protection Partnership, said IPCO’s inspection of Bracknell Forest’s policy was ‘positive’ and only a few minor recommendations were made following the visit.
Speaking of the policy, he said: “This is surveillance in the form of covert surveillance.
“Effectively, where surveillance is carried out, the person under surveillance is not aware of the fact surveillance is being carried out.
“There is a protective right under the Human Rights Act which is the right to privacy. That is now in law as a qualified right and for certain, very specific reasons that right can be breached within a framework set out in the regulation of investigatory powers act.
“The local authority, Bracknell Forest, is able, subject to very tight constraints, to occasionally breach that right if the necessity of proportionality tests that are laid down in law are met.
“In the case of local authorities, the necessity test can only be met in relation to the prevention or detection of serious crime.
“The last time this matter was before the executive was back in 2014 when the council had its policy reviewed.
“Things have changed since then. Back in 2019, the authority was subject to an inspection by the investigatory powers commissioner’s office and effectively they reviewed the policy we put before them at that time.
“A number of recommendations were made, very minor recommendations, but they have been incorporated in this policy.”
The council’s IPCO policy was approved alongside a new CCTV policy by Bracknell Forest Council’s top team at a meeting on Tuesday, January 26.
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