NEW laws granting security services additional snooping powers suffered a heavy setback yesterday when a government terrorism watchdog said they must be scrapped and rewritten from scratch.

Independent government terrorism legislation reviewer David Anderson QC called for a total overhaul of the approach to intrusive powers used by the authorities to combat terrorism and serious crime.

“The current law is fragmented, obscure, under constant challenge and variable in the protections that it affords the innocent,” he said.

“It is time for a clean slate.”

In his report A Question of Trust, Mr Anderson concluded that the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, introduced 15 years ago to govern surveillance techniques, had been “patched up so many times as to make it incomprehensible to all but a tiny band of initiates.”

He added: “A multitude of alternative powers, some of them with statutory safeguards, confuse the picture further.

“This state of affairs is undemocratic, unnecessary and — in the long run — intolerable.”

Following its publication yesterday, Mr Anderson said that each intrusive power must be shown to be necessary and clearly spelled out in law.

They must also be limited by international human rights standards and subject to “demanding and visible” safeguards, he said.

Mr Anderson also stated that no operational case had yet been made for the Tories’ Draft Communications Bill — dubbed the Snoopers’ Charter — which would force communications providers to keep records of all internet browsing, email, phone calls and text messages.

He questioned the lawfulness, intrusiveness and cost of the proposals.

However the report argued that “bulk collection” of external communications — those sent from and into Britain — should continue subject to “additional safeguards” and recommended maintaining existing compulsory communications data retention capabilities under the Data Retention and Investigatory Power Act.

Amnesty UK legal programme director Rachel Logan welcomed the report.

“It’s recently taken legal challenges from Amnesty and others to expose how government spooks are operating outside of the law and now David Anderson is rightly calling for much-needed reform,” she said.