Home affairsLetter from Commander Neil Basu, Metropolitan Police, to the Chair of the Committee, 30 August 2013

HOME AFFAIRS SELECT COMMITTEE INQUIRY INTO PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS

I write in response to your letters of 15 and 19 August 2013, which together raise seven questions, and further to your letter of 19 July to the Commissioner. The answers to the seven questions are provided in Appendices 1–7 to this letter.1 You will see that each Appendix contains a direct answer to the question, and then a table setting out further detailed information. It will also be noted that reference is made to a series of closed and live investigations that have taken place within the time parameters you specified, namely 1998 to August 2013.

Question 1

In relation to Question 1, I note that in your letter of 19 July 2013 you originally asked:

“How many people the Metropolitan Police have intelligence to suggest may have commissioned illegal activity when they asked for information from a private investigator?”

Whereas the question that you now ask is:

“How many companies or individuals the Metropolitan Police Service have intelligence to suggest commissioned private investigators who have broken the law to obtain information between 1998 and August 2013?”

As has been explained to the Committee by both the MPS and SOCA, it may be the case that a client engaging the services of a private investigator may remain unaware of any crime then committed by the private investigator, or anyone that they subcontract the work to, in order to fulfil the terms of the engagement. Such clients nonetheless fall to be included in answer to Question 1. Accordingly, the answer to Question 1 set out in Appendix 1 includes such clients. You will note that, for this reason, I have included a column (column 4), that identifies where there was insufficient evidence to justify an investigation (in 59 of the 118 cases).

Question 2

In relation to Question 2, I note that in your letter of 19 July 2013 the question asked was again different and contained limitations—it was:

“Please supply us with a list of names of people or companies which the Metropolitan Police has intelligence to suggest may have commissioned illegal activity when they asked for information from a private investigator. We understand that data can only be given where cases are closed and where the Metropolitan Police were the lead investigators.”

Whereas the question now asked is:

“If you would supply us with a list of names of people or companies which the Metropolitan Police Service has intelligence to suggest commissioned private investigators who were involved in illegal activity between 1998 and August 2013.”

I note in particular that the limitation that data was requested only in relation to closed cases is not included in your latest request. In order to assist the Committee, I have included all investigations (including live investigations), but have redacted the names of the clients themselves to avoid compromising active investigations that are underway. Instead, and again to assist the Committee, I have identified the relevant industry within which they worked.

The information in Appendix 2 is provided to the Committee pursuant to the Committee’s written agreement that (i) it has the status of and is formally accepted as written evidence given by a witness to the Committee in response to a formal request and that its formulation and submission accordingly enjoys the protection afforded to proceedings in Parliament, and (ii) it is provided on a strictly confidential basis for sight by and in order to assist members of the Committee.

In relation to the publication of the information in Appendix 2:

(1)The names of clients who have been charged are included as they are a matter of public record but, of course, in all these cases the matters are in any event sub judice.

(2)The names of clients who have been convicted of criminal offences are also included and again are a matter of public record, but are therefore not subject to the same conditions of confidentiality set out above.

(3)You will note that Column 4 of Appendix 2 identifies a number of cases in which there is not a live investigation. This may be because there was insufficient evidence to justify an investigation by the MPS (because, for example, there was no evidence linking them to the criminality of the private investigator). It may also be that they fall within those cases to be referred to the Information Commissioner’s Office for consideration as to whether any breach of the Data Protection Act 1998 has been committed. Column 4 also contains examples of where clients have been investigated but no further action was taken against them because there was insufficient evidence to do so. In these circumstances, I would respectfully draw your attention to the detailed reasons given by Mr Pearce and Sir Ian Andrews (see their letters of 12 July 2013, 22 July 2013, and 30 July 2013) as to why similar information that SOCA provided to the Committee ought not to be published by the Committee.

Questions 3 and 4

Appendices 3 and 4 provide the answers to these Questions.

Questions 5–7

Appendices 5, 6 and 7 provide the answers to these Questions. It will be noted that, of the 7,161 people that the MPS has identified as victims, by far the majority of them (5,500) arise from Operation Weeting. As the Committee knows, this class has been sub-divided into “likely victims” and “potential victims” (the latter category consisting of cases where there was not sufficient information to determine one way or the other whether the relevant person had their privacy compromised). Notwithstanding this feature, the MPS decided that efforts should be made to inform people within this category. It will be noted from Appendix 6 that the MPS has managed to inform 3,500 of these 5,500 victims—a truly extraordinary undertaking involving the deployment of very significant resources and thousands and thousands of hours of work by police officers and police staff. Notwithstanding this, it has not been possible to identify or make contact with 2,000 individuals. This is for a wide range of reasons, but principally because the information in the possession of the MPS means that it is not possible to identify the likely or possible victim. Thus, for example, the material seized in the course of the investigations may only reveal a single forename on a piece of paper, or a surname with no other identifying information, or a partial and incomplete telephone number, or an incorrect telephone number, or a dead telephone number. In relation to Operation Pinetree, where the MPS is engaged in the task of seeking to identify and contact some 1,250 people, the Committee will be aware that the investigation itself is presently at a formative stage.

Limitations of Data Provided

The information provided by this letter and its Appendices has been obtained by conducting searches for operations within those MPS Directorates where it is known that the activities of private investigators and their clients have featured prominently.

Additionally, however, I have commissioned a search of MPS electronic data bases to ascertain the extent to which private investigators feature within them. This type of key-word search is the start of any trawl of the large amount of data that the MPS holds. The returns on such searches would probably include some cases additional to those that are mentioned in this letter and its Appendices. But the returns also include cases where the private investigator was a victim of crime, a witness to crime, or those words were simply mentioned as an incidental part of the narrative of the text. Searches were accordingly carried out across the following databases, with the following results:

Police National Database (PND)	3,584 records (Cris, Custody and Crimint+)
Crimint +	1,926 records
IIP (Integrated Intelligence Platform)	3,681 records (Cris, Command & Control Crimint +, Custody and Merlin)
Confidential Unit	8 records
Directorate of Professional Standards (DPS)	658 records and 477 documents

The searches thus resulted in a total of 9,857 records and 477 documents which have some reference to private investigators within them. A number of duplicate records will be contained in this return and would need weeding out prior to any research taking place. It is judged that this de-duplication would take up to 1 week to complete. In addition the documents held within the DPS would need to be reviewed to ascertain how long the scanning of these would take. After these exercises had been undertaken, the records themselves would need to be reviewed to determine whether the mention of “private investigator” within the electronic record brought the cases within any of the categories covered by your seven questions. It is estimated that one person could scan on average 48 records a day (6 per hour), namely 240 records per week. Even if 50% of the 9,857 records were duplicates it would take 102 working days or approximately three months to complete the initial research. After that was done, then the records would need searching again (probably by reference to the primary materials involved—original case papers; and in some cases by reference to the investigating officers) in order to provide answers to each of the questions that you have asked in relation to that case. It is not possible to predict how long this would take, save to say that the task of compiling the information set out in this letter and its Appendices has been very considerable. I trust that you will agree that the time of police officers and police staff ought not to be further diverted from their primary task of preventing and detecting crime.

One final point I would raise at this time is that I note at present your questions are directed solely at the MPS and SOCA, and do not appear to lake into account the fact that such offences are likely to be occurring around the country. I would suggest that the full scale and extent of the issue can only be properly assessed in the national context.