Report of the Interception of Communications Commissioner - March 2015
7.50 Overall the inspectors were satisfied that the large majority of DPs had discharged
their statutory duties responsibly. There is evidence that the DPs are questioning the
necessity and proportionality of the proposed conduct. 5% of applications were rejected
or returned for redevelopment by the DPs.
7.51 The inspectors concluded that the vast majority of DPs were completing their
written considerations to a good or satisfactory standard. Where satisfactory, the
inspectors highlighted to DPs, as a matter of good practice, how they could further
improve their considerations e.g. by avoiding the use of generic phrases within their
written considerations and ensuring that comments are tailored to the individual
applications being considered.
7.52 The inspectors raised concerns with regard to the level of independence of the
DPs in a number of public authorities and made recommendations to ensure that DPs
who are directly involved in investigations do not consider applications.
7.53 In comparison to the previous year the proportional breakdown of recommendations
in 2014 is very similar. The number of recommendations in the record keeping and errors
categories has increased. The recommendations in relation to record keeping were varied
due to the different systems and recording practices utilised in public authorities. A
number related to ensuring that the contemporaneous records are sufficiently completed
when making use of the urgent oral process and, a number concerned the updating of
workflow systems and processes to provide more reliable statistics or to better facilitate
inspections by IOCCO. With regard to the Errors category the greater proportion can be
explained by my office recommending that steps needed to be taken to reduce human
transposition errors by, for example, enabling communications addresses to be ‘copied
and pasted’ from the source documentation to the application and acquisition system. I
will say more about this latter point in the Errors part of this section.
7.54 At the end of each inspection, the individual public authority is given an overall
rating (good, satisfactory, poor). This rating is reached by considering the total number
of recommendations made, the severity of those recommendations, and whether those
recommendations had to be carried forward because they were not achieved from
the previous inspection. The proportion of inspections given an overall rating of good
dropped to 80% from 87% in 2013 (Figure 11). As previously stated it is difficult to
compare previous years because the public authorities inspected each year change.
7.55 A more reliable way to gauge whether compliance is improving is to compare a
public authorities rating in 2014 to the rating from its previous inspection. In 2014 79 of
the 90 public authorities inspected had been subject to an inspection in preceding years.
62 of the 79 public authorities maintained their level of compliance at either satisfactory
or good; 6 improved and emerged with a good level of compliance when they had
previously only achieved a satisfactory rating; and the remaining 11 public authorities
worsened moving from good to satisfactory or, in two instances moving from a good to
a poor level of compliance.
7.56
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76 of the 90 public authorities inspected in 2014 had received recommendations
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