§ Mr. Fletcher-Cookeasked the Secretary of State for the Home Department whether he will make a statement about police investigations affecting the Railway Gazette.
§ Mr. R. CarrThe Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis informs me that a report on investigations into the disappearance of a document about railway plans has now been sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions, at whose request the investigations were made. The conduct of the investigations was a matter for the Commissioner, who has assured me that there is no foundation for the suggestion that his officers made threats in the course of their inquiries.
I think it right to add, in view of concern which has been expressed about 495W the interception of telephone calls, that the procedures for authorising interception which were described in the report of the Birkett Committee in 1957 are scrupulously followed. This means that police requests for interception would be authorised only by me, or exceptionally, in my absence, by another Secretary of State, and that they would be considered only in connection with serious crime, which continues to be defined and interpreted on the strict and limited terms set out by the Committee.
It would, as the Committee said, be against the Public interest either to publish statistics about the extent of interception or to say whether interception has been used in any particular investigation; but I can say that the present Government are in no way departing from the practice of successive Administrations.