Sophie: What types of surveillance do you do?           

Pete: Right, we do a number of aspects of surveillance depending on the type of client. So for corporate clients we may do employee absenteeism or where an employee is potentially moonlighting for another employer. We also carry out matrimonial surveillance for partners who believe their partner is committing infidelity and we also do personal injury surveillance where someone has been involved in an accident and says they can’t work, can’t walk, can’t play football, can’t do this, can’t do that and normally what happens in a personal injury case - the injured party is normally sent for a medical to assess their injuries and during that medical the consultant will make a series of notes about what questions that he asks and the examination he carries out, and he will then compile a report which says “I examined Mr F or Mr B or whatever and I don’t think that his injuries are that severe” or there’s a question mark about what his ability or her ability may be. And if that sends up a red flag then the solicitors or the insurance company may say, “right, we don’t think these injuries are as serious as they’re making out” and they will instruct us to carry out surveillance to see exactly what the individual can or can’t do on a daily basis.

Sophie: What cases might require or involve surveillance?

Pete: Okay, so re-iterating part of the first question really. So depending on who is instructing us, if it is a corporate client who has got an employee off sick, long-term sick normally where they keep submitting new sick notes and saying they can’t come to work for whatever reason, but they have seen on social media normally (laughter) that’s where people let themselves down, that last weekend they were sky-diving and they’re going to walk the Brecon Beacons on Sunday, and they’re like “oh, hang on” and then they will instruct us and put them under surveillance. Similarly the personal injury stuff, it’s all a question of if there is a red flag, normally, that highlights that that person who’s potentially unable, says they’re unable to work, but there are suspicions that they are able to work. That’s when we will get instructed.

Sophie: What equipment is involved?

Pete: Okay, so as against criminal types of surveillance, like in the police force for example if you are carrying out criminal surveillance on a potential criminal, or a gang member or something quite serious, drug dealing that sort of thing, then you have a team of 6 or 8 guys in separate vehicles, motorbikes, people on foot etc-etc. It’s a little bit different in the civil world. So the civil world is, we haven’t got those resources and they can’t afford those resources, so, if a solicitor was to instruct me to carry out, let’s say a personal injury claim surveillance, we normally use two agents in separate vehicles, if we know or potentially know the subject is going to go out in a vehicle, we will try and follow them from their home address or wherever it is we’re going to take him away. If the address that we’re going to to take the target away is difficult like a cul-de-sac or something, then we may put what is called a target van in, so it’s a trigger van. So it’s a little unmarked van, someone is hidden in the back with spy holes, they will then monitor the address and the other two agents are sat back from the address around the corner somewhere and then he will give us the trigger that the subject is on its way. Then as it comes out the cul-de-sac, we then take up the surveillance. Then we have obviously car-to-car radio, and then if we then get out on foot, lets say he goes to high-street, just starts walking up and down the high-street, we have to get out on foot and follow, we have again devices to communicate individually and/or mobile phones.

Sophie: What are the common misconceptions of surveillance?

Pete: I think the biggest one is people don’t realise how difficult it is. People think, they’ve seen it on the tele, one guy in his car following the subject. Now, if it is somebody who is potentially aware that surveillance may be carried out like an active criminal, he will be what we call ‘surveillance conscious’. So he will be constantly looking in his rear view mirror, he may go round and round roundabouts twice to see if you’re following him, but generally with civil surveillance the subjects aren’t surveillance conscious so they’re not likely to think they’re going to be followed. However, some of the personal injury ones and all the matrimonial ones, if certain things have happened, they may well have been warned that potentially they could be put under surveillance. So they may well be looking for us. So if you’ve only got two vehicles and you follow someone to a set of traffic lights, they go through the lights and it turns red, we can’t start jumping traffic lights. So we’re done. He’s gone. And it’s trying to find him again and pick up the surveillance again, but that’s the most misconception is that people think it’s very simple to follow someone, it’s not. If you follow someone onto a motorway, which I’ve done before, and they do 50mph on the motorway, you’ve suddenly got to sit behind them doing 50. They’re going to look in their rear view mirror “why is that big expensive car sat doing 50mph behind me?” Everybody else is doing 70, so you’ve got to then overtake it and get ahead of it and then maybe come off at the next junction, spin round the roundabout and go back on again and come back behind him. Because if you sit there he’s going to know that you’re there. We do–we get a little bit of paranoia as surveillance operatives because if you are following somebody and what we try and do is get what we call one for cover or two for cover, so we try and get–if we’re following that vehicle, we try and get another car totally unconnected between us and him so he’s not looking at us in his rear view mirror. Sometimes you can do that, sometimes you’re going down a country lane and it’s just you and him and then it is very, very difficult. So you’ve got to play all the games to try and maintain your surveillance without being seen, without being found out. Yeah, so it’s not easy [Laughing].

Sophie: What’s been your most interesting surveillance case?

Pete: There’s been loads. Over the years we’ve done obviously loads and loads of surveillance, but some of the most interesting is where we’ve put somebody under surveillance many times but never got a result. So either they’ve never come out of the house or they’ve come out the house, walked down to the shop, gone back home and we just sit there for the day doing nothing. We had a really good case a few years ago where this guy–he was only a young-ish guy but he was claiming that he could never work again, couldn’t walk the dog, couldn’t do anything and they were adamant from his medicals that there was nothing wrong with him. So they said “right, we’re going to do one more day”. We done about 10 days which is–we never do more than 2 or 3 days anyway, but we did the 10th day, we just sat there, out he came, we thought he was going down to the shop as usual but he didn’t, he got in the car, we followed him and he went to a sailing club. He drove in the sailing club, we couldn’t get in so we parked up, got out on foot, looked around, eventually the gates opened and the tide was out, so he pulled this huge trailer with a boat on it on his own and wheeled it all the way down to the water, got in, and then rode all the way to his launch and we just stood there and videod everything. And off he sailed to the Isle of Wight. And so we waited for about 4 hours, back he came. Now the tides come in so he’s got to row even further to get back to shore in his rowing boat, we just stood there and videod him. And then he got out and lifted this trailer and he hauled it all the way back and of course we sent the video off to the solicitors and the insurance company. They were looking at paying half a million pounds for this claim and the whole thing got shot down. So they were absolutely delighted. [Laughing]

Another one we do, more prevalence surveillance we do, because the personal injury stuff has gone away a lot. There’s not much personal injury surveillance now because of the way that the cases are conducted in under CPR rules, a lot of these cases now are settled very quickly. But most of the surveillance today is employee, whether they’re off sick or working for somebody else and again it’s rumours through the company, somebody in the office has spoken to somebody, or seen something on social media and again if you’ve got a company, especially a medium to small-sized company, who have got an employee that’s long-term sick, they’re having to pay another employee to come and cover that work and they’re paying the sick pay etc-etc. So it starts to get very costly for them. So their solution to try and finalise and bring something to a conclusion is to put somebody under surveillance. Now, there are lots of rules and regulations around surveillance, Human Rights Act, the new GDPR rules, lots of rules that we are restricted by, on who we can put under surveillance, how we can put them under surveillance and when. So for example if I am instructed to follow Fred Smith and he’s walking down the road with Joe Brown, we’re not allowed to put, or try not to capture Joe Brown in any of the surveillance footage because that’s what’s called collateral intrusion. Collateral intrusion is inadmissible in court. So our surveillance has to be directed on the subject. If it’s a government body, then it’s all governed by what we call RIPA which is the Regulatory Investigatory Power’s Act which allows certain government bodies to instruct us to put someone under surveillance but again the rules and regulations are very, very strict and collateral intrusion is the biggest one we’re not allowed to do–well try and avoid, and if, let’s say they’re suspected of working somewhere else, if in the first hour we take him to–he’s a painter and decorator and we take him somewhere and he starts painting and decorating for ten minutes, and we’ve got that on video, we have to stop. We can’t sit there all day watching and video-ing him because we’ve got the essence of the complaint already captured, we must seize the surveillance. So there’s lots of rules and regs that you have to be careful of. And a RIPA authority has to be signed off by a solicitor or Head of Legal department and normally HR or some solicitor–Head of HR in a big firm and it’s about a ten page document they have to complete in order to allow the surveillance to actually take place in the first place.

Touching on the matrimonial one. So matrimonial, obviously, in all the years that I’ve been doing this, if somebody comes to me, male or female, and says “I think my partner is having an affair, I want you to put them under surveillance”, I can guarantee 99.9% it is true. Because by the time they have plucked up all the courage and done everything else, by the time they’ve got to me, they know it’s true, they just want some kind of bullet-proof-proof that it’s definitely happened, so we’re always fairly confident when we start that job that it’s going to be a positive conclusion and we’ve had some great stories over the years, but one was a little classic where a guy rang me really late on a Friday, “I want my wife followed, she’s definitely seeing somebody else” “Okay, where are you?”. So at quarter past six we took up surveillance, she came out of the house at half past six, we followed her to an address about 5 miles away. She got out of the car, her car, went into this house and about ten minutes later she came out of the house with another guy, got in his car and then drove away. So I rang the client and said, “good news and bad news. Good news is we’ve caught her. Bad news is she’s gone off in the guy’s car”. “So right, where are ya?” So I told him. “Right, stay there”. So he arrived about 20 minutes later with the spare keys to her car and said “right follow me”. And he drove her car to an industrial estate about 5 miles away, parked it in the corner and I took him back to his car and he went home. And he waited for the call. So about 11 o’clock at night she rings, she obviously got back to the house and went “where’s my car?” So she rang him and said, “my cars been stolen”, “really? Where from?”, “Errrr–outside my friend’s house”, “oh yeah, which friend is that?” She went, “ohh you know”, “really? Yeah”. Told him what to do and he put the phone down. And apparently, I spoke to him about a week later and he didn’t tell her where the car was for 5 days. [Laughing] So that was brilliant!

Sophie: [Laughing] Payback.

Pete: [Laughing] I love that one. And as I say, you’re going to give somebody bad news but they generally know. Whilst you’ve got to ring them up and say “mm you know, I just caught them kissing and cuddling in the corner at the pub” or whatever it might be, they’re pretty [inaudible] that’s what they’re gonna do.

Sophie: How often would you say a surveillance case comes up?

Pete: If we get–we probably get instructed at least once a week or–you know–any variety of surveillance work but generally at the moment, most of our surveillance this year for example has been employee absenteeism and that’s what we really want to focus on, to take to the clients and say “that’s what we’re experts at” and all being well we will get you a result one way or the other. Sometimes it’s absolutely genuine, the guy is off sick and it’s just been a rumour around the office that “oh you know he’s pulling wool over your eyes”, actually some of these people are genuine.

[Laughing] We followed this guy to–he was–been off sick for ages and ages, bad accident and they sent him to Harley Street to see one of these consultants, one of these medical–and they said “I want you to follow him, see what he’s like all the way up there and after he comes out”. So we followed him and he was with I think his dad [inaudible] only a guy in his twenties. And he came out the house on crutches, limped all the way, well they got a cab, followed the cab to the train station, we got on the train, followed him up to London, followed him to Harley Street, on his crutches, he could hardly walk, went into the medical, we waited outside. About two hours later they came out, walked out the door, walked down the road, got round the corner and went–put the crutches over in someone’s garden and they skittled off to the pub.

Sophie: [Gasp]

Pete: Nothing wrong with him at all. [laughing] And about 4 hours later they came back, retrieved the crutches and went home.

So to summarise, we carry out surveillance for all corporate bodies, government bodies, local authorities, private clients, anybody who’s got a suspicion about somebody who’s off sick or unable to work or on the matrimonial side, infidelity and we have trained personnel who have been doing this for many, many years, all the right equipment, all the right people and we can help.