Councils are to have their powers to snoop on the public curbed under government plans aimed at addressing alarm at the expansion of the surveillance state.

Local authorities have used legislation intended to tackle terrorism and serious crime to deal with minor offences such as dog fouling.

Under the plans, published today, relatively junior council officials will lose their power to authorise surveillance operations on behalf of local authorities. Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary, will say that only council chief executives and officials at director level will have the right to order investigations involving techniques such as eavesdropping, tracking vehicles and secret filming.

Codes of practice will outline the offences for which surveillance can be used and make it clear that local councils should not deploy it for minor or trivial cases.

Mr Johnson indicated this week that the Government’s reforms to the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) should stop local authorities using them for “trivial” reasons.

Mr Johnson said: “If agencies use Ripa powers for trivial offences, the case for using them to track down serious offenders who put public safety at risk rapidly diminishes in the eyes of the public.”

Ripa was introduced in 2000 to define when covert techniques, such as secret filming, could be used by police, local councils and benefit fraud teams.

The powers have been used almost 50,000 times by public authorities such as local councils and the health service since 2002.

Today’s plans to restrict use of the powers comes after mounting concern that they were being abused. In one case a family was spied on for two weeks by Poole Borough Council in Dorset. The council wrongly suspected them of cheating over school catchment rules.

Councils including Derby, Bolton, Gateshead and Hartlepool also used the laws to investigate dog-fouling. Conway council used the act to spy on a worker who claimed to be sick, and Kensington & Chelsea council used Ripa to monitor the misuse of a disabled parking badge.

But the proposals stop short of meeting demands from the Local Government Association for greater involvement by councillors and the public in authorising and overseeing Ripa powers.

The association called for local people to be co-opted on to a committee overseeing surveillance and also for senior local councillors to be responsible for authorising surveillance.

Les Lawrence, chairman of the association’s Safer Communities Board, said: “It is only by giving the elected representatives of local people more power that we will rebuild trust in the use of techniques that councils need to crack down on serious criminals.”

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