Police face 13 hours of form-filling just to keep watch on a known burglar

The Tories revealed the astonishing figure as they announced plans to slash the red tape governing routine surveillance operations.

Other examples include a 17-page authorisation form to re-position a public CCTV camera to cover a row of shops where yobs have smashed windows.

Officers also face a maze of red tape for a task as simple as walking past the home of a suspected drug dealer to check for expensive cars.

Red tape alert: Metropolitan police have had to fill in up to ten forms before carrying out surveillance operations on known burglars

Shadow Home Secretary Dominic Grieve said: 'It is not right that we charge our police with combating crime and disorder and then tie their hands behind their backs in the name of Whitehall bureaucracy. '

The red tape stems from the controversial Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, introduced by Labour in 2000.

It was supposed to protect citizens from excessive snooping by public bodies, which have to seek permission for surveillance operations from a commissioner.

But it has inadvertently dragged in routine police work aimed at preventing serial crimes.

The Metropolitan force has told the Tories about the difficulty its officers encountered tracking a particular burglar with three previous convictions.

The man was known to break into houses after collecting his benefits from the local Jobcentre Plus.

On one occasion, the police knew he was going to commit a crime and decided to follow him.

But to comply with the Act, as this was classed as 'directed surveillance', an officer had to fill in ten forms which took 13-andahalf hours to complete.

The documents required included a Proactive Assessment and Tasking Form, which alone took ten hours of painstaking research. It asked for details of the number of burglaries in the area, the trend over the last three years and a list of all recent burglaries to which the suspect could be connected.

Leicestershire Police also told how a 17-page authorisation was needed to turn a public CCTV camera 'on to a parade of shops to watch a few ne'er do wells who were breaking the odd window'.

In 2007-08, there were 23,620 authorisations covered by the Act, equating to 550 per force.

The Tories said that, if the party was in power, authorisations would no longer be needed for surveillance using CCTV cameras or Automatic Number Plate Recognition systems.

Mr Grieve added that a police patrol, in uniform or plain clothes, was not covert surveillance and so did not interfere with personal privacy.

Other types of surveillance which would not require authorisation under the Tories include a walk past, drive past or fly past of a suspect's premises.

The party would also remove the need for approval for watching premises to identify or arrest a suspect, and visual surveillance of a public location, such as a high street or shopping centre.

The Tories added that it should also be possible, with consent, to carry out covert surveillance without authorisation in the home of a person believed to be a serial victim of doorstep conmen or distraction burglars.

'The police should be given both the resources and the freedom to use those resources to do their job,' said Mr Grieve. 

A Home Office spokesman said: 'Authorisations are only required where covert surveillance is likely to infringe an individual's right to privacy.

'It is right safeguards are in place, including consideration of necessity and proportionality.'