2011 Annual Report of the Interception of Communications Commissioner
“Approximately 70% of the 2,130 requests were managed by the NAFN SPoC
Service.... Overall NAFN is achieving a good level of compliance with the Act and
Code of Practice”
During the reporting year 39 inspections were also conducted at local authorities who were not
making use of NAFN and for 11 of these local authorities it was their first inspection. Only 18 of
the local authorities who reported using their powers in 2011 (but not through NAFN) were not
inspected by my team in the said year, but I can report that 6 of these 18 are due to be inspected
within the first half of 2012.
A number of local authorities previously signed up to use the SPoC service provided by a
company called SinglePoint. Although quite a number of local authorities signed up, the overall
usage of the service was very low. In previous years, my inspectors conducted inspections at a
number of the local authorities who reported using SinglePoint to examine the procedures in
place. SinglePoint themselves were not inspected as they are not a public authority, however the
work they conducted on behalf of the local authorities was fully examined during the individual
local authority inspections. Serious failings and weaknesses were identified in the systems and
procedures for acquiring communications data at these local authorities and recommendations
were made for the issues to be rectified immediately. I was informed in January 2011 that
SinglePoint were to cease providing a SPoC service to local authorities.
Figure 11 illustrates that 96% of the local authorities inspected in 2011 achieved a good or
satisfactory level of compliance with the Act and Code of Practice and this represents a 7%
increase on last year. Only 4% of the local authorities inspected were achieving a poor level of
compliance, however if the NAFN results are removed from the overall total, the percentage of
poor performing local authorities increases to 10%. These percentages should be treated with
caution as the public authorities being inspected are not the same every year.
“96% of the local authorities inspected in 2011 achieved a good or satisfactory
level of compliance with the Act and Code of Practice”
Overall four of the local authorities did not emerge well from their inspections and serious failings
and weaknesses were found in their systems and processes, some of which will be discussed later
in this section. I am pleased to report that these four local authorities are now all using the
NAFN SPoC to manage their communications data requests and this should help to resolve the
compliance issues.
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