Question to the Northern Ireland Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, how many interception warrants were (a) issued, (b) declined and (c) cancelled by her Department under (i) section 8(1) and (ii) section 8(4) of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 in the last six months for which figures are available.

The Interception of Communications Commissioner, Sir Anthony May, publishes statistics on the total number of interception warrants authorised annually. His 2013 Annual Report states that 2760 interception warrants were authorised in 2013 (under both sections 8(1) and 8(4) of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000), a reduction of 19% on the same figure for 2012, and that 1669 such warrants were extant on 31st December 2013. As a matter of longstanding practice we do not provide more detailed breakdowns of statistics relating to interception warrants.