Cameron: Anti-terrorist laws for snooping

The Tory leader used a speech to lambast councils and police for creating a "control state" with laws meant to protect the public from bombers.

He pledged to end alleged misuse of powers created under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. These included councils spying on dog fouling and whether a Poole family lived in the catchment area of their local school. The same law had been used by police to stop a woman walking on a cycle path.

"This was supposedly introduced to help fight terrorism," he said. "Last year, it was used over 120,000 times - one person stopped every four minutes."

A new "right to know" the unspun facts about how well public services perform was also pledged by the Tory leader. Voters will get unvarnished statistics covering local crime rates to salaries paid in their hospitals.

In a speech promising to give the public more power over the services they pay for, Mr Cameron announced that 20 sets of data would be published as a matter of routine within a year of a Tory election victory.

"Information is power because information gives people the tools to hold the powerful to account," he said at Imperial College in London.

The publications are likely to include information on school catchment areas, school performance, police force performance, road traffic statistics, crime data and quango salaries.

Tory officials said the final list was still being drawn up, but it would be regular and in a standardised format to enable comparisons between areas.