The cost of running Britain’s state-run databases over the next ten years has soared to £34 billion, according to estimates from a new campaign against what it called the surveillance society.

Supporters of the Convention on Modern Liberty claim that spending on computer systems ranging from the NHS Spine to the ID card register is rising at an alarming rate. The convention will hold its first meeting in London at the end of this month, with prominent supporters including Philip Pullman, the author, David Starkey, the historian, and Brian Eno, the musician, as well as politicians, lawyers and civil liberties campaigners. The event has been timed to coincide with the publication by the Home Office of a consultation paper on the future of communications surveillance.

A Home Office working party has drawn up three options for surveillance of telephone calls, e-mails and text messages, including a huge government database. Opponents describe this as a Big Brother project that could cost £12 billion over the next ten years. But the police say that access to data about the time and duration of calls and texts, and the location of callers and senders, is essential. They emphasise that they are not seeking access to the content of calls and e-mails, but believe communications data must be retained in some format.

Mobile phone companies retain call logs for billing purposes, which can be obtained by detectives. The problem facing the police is that internet telephony networks such as Skype do not need the data and so do not collate it. One senior police source said: “We face a potentially disastrous loss of our investigative capability.”

Dame Stella Rimington, the former head of MI5, argued in a Spanish newspaper interview against the growth of surveillance powers. She said: “It would be better that the Government recognised that there are risks, rather than frightening people in order to be able to pass laws which restrict civil liberties, precisely one of the objects of terrorism: that we live in fear under a police state.”

Lord Bingham of Cornhill, the former Lord Chief Justice and a supporter of the Convention on Modern Liberty, said that citizens should use the Human Rights Act to challenge the spread of the surveillance society.

“Perhaps the British are content to be the most spied-upon people in the democratic world,” he wrote in The Guardian. “But this would be surprising given their traditional belief that the state should mind its own business. The right to respect for private and family life embodied in the European Convention on Human Rights is not an ideal weapon to counter the growth of a surveillance society, but failing adequate regulatory oversight, it may be the best weapon there is.”

The Convention on Modern Liberty said: “How long can we continue to finance the huge rise in surveillance and data collection, which the House of Lords constitutional committee stated ‘risks undermining the traditions of privacy and freedom which are vital for a democracy’?”

— Pubs, clubs, restaurants and offlicences are being told by police to instal CCTV cameras or their licence applications will not be supported, it was claimed last night. It is understood that a blanket policy has already been introduced in the London boroughs of Islington and Richmond. Essex police are said to ask every licensed premises in the county open after 11pm to instal cameras.

Times Recommends

• Oh no, Mr Darling: you have failed
• BBC survives dogfight over Kennel Club expose
• Where the Rosetta belongs can’t be set in stone