6
IPCO Annual Report 2017
1. Introduction by the
Investigatory Powers
Commissioner
Lord Justice Fulford
1.1
One of my statutory obligations, which I am very pleased to discharge, is to report to
the Prime Minister annually about “the carrying out of the functions of the Judicial
Commissioners”. My Report must address a range of issues, including:
• statistics on the use of the relevant investigatory powers, such as the number of warrants
received, how they were used by the individual applicant authorities and the impact of
their use;
• the operation of the safeguards under the Act in relation to material covered by legal
professional privilege and confidential journalistic material and sources;
• the ways in which certain targeted warrants were handled;
• details of the operational purposes, as set out in the warrants;
• the number of errors reported to IPCO, and the number of individuals to whom
we provided relevant information as a consequence of the errors;
• details of the work of the Technology Advisory Panel (TAP);
• an explanation of our resources; and
• the public engagements undertaken by the Judicial Commissioners and members
of my staff.
1.2
On the surface for 2017 this appears to be a deceptively straightforward task. The reality
has been a positive refinement of complication because three quarters of the period (viz.
prior to 1 September 2017) relates to the work of our three precursor organisations, the
Office of Surveillance Commissioners (Lord Judge), the Intelligence Services Commissioner
(Sir John Goldring) and the Interception of Communications Commissioner (Sir Stanley
Burnton). In addition, many of the powers contained in the IPA did not come into effect until
2018, and thereby fall outside the ambit of this Report. Otherwise, we have been involved
in setting up my new organisation, putting in place the people, infrastructure and systems
that have enabled us to function; for instance, with the TAP, although work has been started
by that body in 2018, in 2017 we were recruiting its members and beginning the process of
applying for their security clearance.
1.3
One of the dominant features of 2017 (extending into 2018) has been the task of unifying
these three very different organisations into a single structure. There were marked
differences in how they carried out their work, to say nothing of the variety of powers
over which they each had oversight. A cursory glance at their annual reports reveals the
divergence in style and content as between my predecessor organisations. That is not meant
to sound any kind of critical note; to the contrary, the work of each of them was exemplary
but fusing their separate, and impressive, legacies into a single, coherent structure has been
a formidably challenging task.