In 2004, Richard Thomas, Britain's privacy watchdog, warned that we were "sleepwalking into a surveillance society". Four years on, it has been left to Sir Simon Milton, the excellent chairman of the Local Government Association, to take action, calling on local councils to scale back the overzealous use of local surveillance powers.

Everyone wants the police and local authorities to clamp down on crime and antisocial behaviour. But neighbourhood snoops increasingly peer into every aspect of our daily lives. Public bodies have amassed 266 separate powers to forcibly enter the home. There are now 1,000 bugging operations (and other forms of interception of email and post) in Britain every day. Bugging is no longer the preserve of MI5 – hundreds of councils are entitled to exercise these powers. And it is not just bugging. Local councils increasingly hire neighbourhood spies to investigate petty misdemeanours, including dog-fouling, rubbish regulation and parking entitlements. In one case, snoopers spied for weeks on parents taking their children to school to check they really did live in the catchment area – leaving one young girl with sleepless nights.

CCTV provides another illustration. The current approach is the worst of all worlds – intrusive, ineffective and expensive. This government spent half a billion pounds on CCTV – one camera for every 14 citizens. Yet police say 80% of CCTV footage is unusable in court. Of course, there are cases where CCTV has helped, but many where it has failed. After the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in July 2005, there was no usable footage from any of the CCTV cameras – on the bus, tube or at Stockwell station. And CCTV is prone to abuse. In one case, a camera was pointed at a young woman undressing and displayed by operators on a plasma screen at the control centre. We need a more intelligent deployment of CCTV, one which is both more effective and provides better checks on abuse. That way we can catch more criminals and preserve the privacy of the innocent.

The abuse of local powers has followed the example of central government. The government's fixation with ever-longer periods of pre-charge detention, its obsession with intrusive ID cards and its accumulation of the largest DNA database in the world, has undermined our liberty and privacy, but failed to make us any safer.

Gordon Brown has gagged his ministers from participating in any public debate on these issues during the byelection, which I am fighting against the relentless assault on British liberty. Today I issued a challenge to every cabinet minister, inviting each one to come and debate with me these vital national issues. I won't hold my breath. This is not a government with the courage of its convictions.

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