§ Mr. Austin Mitchellasked the Secretary of State for the Home Department whether he will publish in the Official Report for each of the years 1979 to 1984 the number of telephones which were tapped on grounds other than (a) terrorism directed from Ireland and the middle east and (b) murder, theft and similar criminal activities without any evidence of political motive.
§ Mr. BrittanNo. Successive Governments have accepted the conclusion of the 1957 Committee of Privy Councillors under the chairmanship of Lord Birkett that there are powerful arguments against disclosing statistics of authorised interception. Exceptions to this policy have been made only in the Birkett report itself (Cmnd. 283) and in the 1980 and 1985 White Papers on the "Interception of Communications" (Cmnd. 7873 of April 1980 and Cmnd. 9438 of February 1985). To give statistics which distinguished certain authorisations on national security grounds from other authorised interception would be particularly harmful since (in the words of paragraph 121 of the Birkett report)
it would greatly aid the operation of agencies hostile to the state if they were able to estimate even approximately the extent of the interceptions of communications for security purposes.