Charlotte Church

Charlotte Church: 'A phenomenal amount of information' was collected about the singer

Credit: Still from Leveson inquiry stream

National newspapers spent more than £1.2 million obtaining confidential information from a private investigator over the course of eight years, a new investigation by ITV News has concluded.

The broadcaster's analysis of invoices and notes from Steve Whittamore shows the extent to which newspapers used the investigator was much greater than reported from a 2003 information commissioner's inquiry, Operation Motorman.

Whittamore's home was raided by police in 2003 and he was later convicted of conspiring to commit misconduct in public office. ITV News said it had gained access to Whittamore's invoices from 1995 to 2003 and to four books in which he logged transactions with the main newspaper groups.

The Daily Mail was the top spender, with 1,728 transactions totalling £143,150 - almost double the 982 transactions discovered by the information commissionner. The next biggest spender, the Daily Mirror, made 984 requests for information from Whittamore, spending an estimated £92,000.

The requests are for personal information including ex-directory phone numbers, requests for friends and family details, obtaining a name and address from a phone number, criminal record checks, driver vehicle licensing information and other data from the police national computer. Not all of the transactions referred to in the documents are illegal.

Whittamore's invoices from 1995-2003, analysed by ITV News, suggest the main newspaper groups spent the following:

News International: £490,739
Trinity Mirror: £376,918
Associated Newspapers: £268,311
Express Newspapers: £95,340
Guardian News and Media: £28,860

ITV said Whittamore's log books included 17,000 entries about at least 4,000 people including Kate Middleton, the family of murder victim Holly Wells, members of the England football team and singer Charlotte Church.

Church told ITV News: "It was about literally everybody I had ever known. Anybody I had ever come into contact with. That's what took us by surprise about it. Lots of my parents friends ... some of my Mum’s old work colleagues ... a phenomenal amount of information.”

"I find it really bizarre, I really couldn’t get my head around the fact that somebody would be that interested to do that much research and get that deeply into our lives for stories."

She said that if the details from the Motorman files had been made public earlier, a lot of the bad practice in the newspaper industry would have been stopped.

"I think probably most of the names in those files were of totally ordinary people whose details were in there and they have absolutely no way of controlling that or stopping that.

"It definitely would have stopped a lot of the phone hacking I should imagine because if they were under such scrutiny they definitely would have behaved a little more properly."

The Hacked Off campaign group, which represents some of the alleged victims of newspaper phone-hacking, has called on Lord Justice Leveson to publish the full data from Operation Motorman. The files were used as the basis for a extensive public report by the information commissioner six years ago, What Price Privacy?

The report at the time found that 305 journalists, from 31 publications around the UK, had requested information from private investigator Steve Whittamore, whose home was raided by police in 2003 and who was later convicted of conspiring to commit misconduct in public office.

The information commissioner's office said in a statement: "We have provided the Leveson Inquiry with extensive oral and written evidence relating to Operation Motorman. We now await the inquiry's outcome, and will respond appropriately to any relevant recommendations.

"While we had reason to believe that some of the material could only have been obtained via unlawful means, the press are able to claim a public interest defence. This could explain an apparent discrepancy in figures."

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