6
IPCO Annual Report 2018
1. Introduction by the
Investigatory Powers
Commissioner
Lord Justice Fulford
I am very pleased to be able to discharge my responsibilities as Investigatory Powers Commissioner in
presenting the 2018 report on the ‘carrying out of the functions of the Judicial Commissioners’. This is
my second IPCO Annual Report to the Prime Minister and, in the event, it is my last.
Under the terms of the Investigatory Powers Act 2016, the Report must include information on the
following:
• 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 the Investigatory Powers Commissioner’s Office (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 (JCs) and members of my
staff.
Structure of the report
Last year, the report was organised into chapters which reflected each of the powers we oversee and
it contained a significant level of detail as to how each of these powers were used. That provided a
highly useful explanation of the work of IPCO but it would be unnecessarily repetitive if this approach is
adopted each year. As a result we have used a markedly different structure in the present report, with
chapters on each of the types of organisations we inspect and focusing on the key findings from our
inspections. This gives a clearer sense of the range of issues we address in each of the different bodies
we oversee, without readers needing to move between the various chapters to comprehend the full
picture. IPCO continues to develop a new inspection regime for the multiple organisations for which
we have responsibility, and I have no doubt that my successor will have his own views on how best to
present the information we gather each year.
There undoubtedly remains an imbalance in the amount of information we provide, in the sense that
there is more detail of our inspections of the intelligence agencies in comparison with the inspections
of other public authorities. This is unavoidable, given the number and the depth of the inspections