Big Brother Watch has released a research paper outlining the progress the Coalition Government has made on civil liberties issues during its first year in office.

The paper concludes that, while real progress has been made, many of the Coalition’s promises to roll back the power of the state remain unfulfilled.

Click here to download the report

The Coalition has some real achievements to speak off. 

Ministers should be congratulated for taking steps to scrap ID cards and remove the profiles of the one million innocent people held on the national DNA database.   They should also be praised for doing away with the ContactPoint database of children’s details and reforming the criminal record check regime.

They do, however, have more work to do. 

Police stop and search powers remain in place, Control Orders remain virtually unreformed and there has been no opt-out from the European Arrest Warrant.  When it comes to E-Borders, the Summary Care Record and Intercept Modernisation Programme, they have continued to implement the previous government’s policies – warts and all.

Big Brother Watch has released a report exposing the shocking extent to which councils use debt recovery agents such as bailiffs to recover unpaid council tax and parking fine debts.

Across the 320 local councils who responded to a Freedom of Information request from Big Brother Watch, almost six million (5,939,003) cases have been passed to bailiffs for the late payment of council taxes and parking fines.

The full report, including a breakdown of the number of cases passed to bailiffs by local authority by a) overall number, b) non-payment of council tax  c) parking infringements, can be found here (from page 8 onwards).

Between 1997 and 2010, the last government quadrupled pre-charge detention, enacted over 3,000 new criminal offences and introduced identity cards. Random police stop and search expanded exponentially. Free speech has been undermined, whilst control orders introduced house arrest for individuals who have not been convicted of any crime. These authoritarian measures have not eliminated or substantially reduced the threat to Britain – in September 2010, the head of MI5 warned that the terrorist threat remained ‘persistent and dangerous’, presenting a ‘serious risk of lethal attack’.

The election in May 2010 of a new government offers a unique opportunity to review UK counter-terrorism strategy. The coalition programme for government pledges to ‘be strong in the defence of freedom’, and the Home Secretary has initiated a review of counter-terrorism powers. In ‘Fight Terror, Defend Freedom‘, Dominic Raab makes the case for restoring the core freedoms of the British citizen, whilst using the justice system – including intercept evidence‘– to adopt a more robust approach to prosecuting those seeking to perpetrate terror in Britain. 

Click here to download the full publication.

New research reveals that 54 CCTV Smart Cars operated in 31 local councils in Britain, caught and fined at least 188,000 motorists between April 2009 and March 2010

Drive-by Spies is the is the first piece of research into the recent innovation of the CCTV Smart car; detailing the number of councils that have bought and are using the cars, the cost of the various schemes in the past year and how many people have been caught, fined and the amount these councils have accrued in fines over the past twelve months. Our research reveals that of the 25 councils that provided data, almost 188,000 people have been caught by a CCTV Smart car, generating over £8 million in revenue for local councils.

To read the full report, Drive-by Spies – including a detailed breakdown of which councils are using CCTV Smart cars and the amount they have made in fines – please click here.