Antisemitism in the UK

Antony Higginbotham Excerpts

Monday 19th February 2024 Commons Chamber

[Chris Philp]

What happened to my right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) at his house was completely unacceptable. It was intimidation; it was an attempt, I would suggest, to coerce a Member of Parliament and inhibit him from doing his democratically elected duty. I am sure everyone in the House would unreservedly condemn the behaviour of that mob outside my right hon. Friend’s house.

Various legal powers are relevant, including section 42 of the Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001, which gives the police the power to direct people outside a person’s house to move if they are behaving in a way that causes harassment, alarm or distress. That would clearly have applied in this case. My right hon. Friend the Minister for Security, who is in his place, and I wrote to chief constables on precisely that point on 16 February, just a few days ago, raising concerns and calling for robust action. I believe we are having a discussion on that topic in just a few days’ time. Members of Parliament at their home addresses, constituency offices and surgeries need to be protected because they are doing their democratic duty. Where people seek to intimidate them, the police need to take extremely strong action, because aggression against Members of Parliament is an act of aggression against democracy itself and in my view that makes it particularly serious.

[Antony Higginbotham (Burnley) (Con)]

I welcome everything my right hon. Friend has set out today and that the Government are trying to tighten the law where necessary, but evidence suggests it is not yet working. Every week we see protests and people marching through London with placards with antisemitic, conspiratorial tropes—the same things we saw in October, November, December and January. We know that antisemitism is still running rife on university campuses, in schools and in our communities. I urge my right hon. Friend to look not just at how we deal with prosecutions and crime, but at how we tackle the root causes and how we get into our schools, educate people and try to rid society of this evil scourge once and for all.

[Chris Philp]

My hon. Friend is right. Where the law is broken, whether that is inciting racial hatred, intimidation or harassment, the police must act and make arrests, and they have arrested 600 people already. That is necessary as a law enforcement response, but he is right that we need to tackle the ideology at source. We need to make sure that schools are teaching young people the right thing and explaining what British values of tolerance actually mean. The Department for Education is doing work in that area, as is my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, who is in the Chamber. We need to make clear to every member of our society that antisemitism and anti-Jewish racist hatred have no place in these islands of ours. We must eradicate it wherever we find it.

Oral Answers to Questions

Antony Higginbotham Excerpts

Monday 27th November 2023 Commons Chamber

[Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con)]

11. What steps he is taking to help reduce levels of organised crime.

[Antony Higginbotham (Burnley) (Con)]

15. What steps he is taking to help reduce levels of organised crime.

[The Secretary of State for the Home Department (James Cleverly)]

We will continue to break the business model of organised crime gangs to keep the people of this country safe. We are disrupting their activities both domestically in the UK and internationally, including disrupting the work of the gangs behind the illegal small-boat crossings, and it is why the Criminal Justice Bill creates new powers to target organised criminal gangs. We will also publish a new serious and organised crime strategy soon.

--- Later in debate ---

[James Cleverly]

I thank my hon. Friend for the work he has done in this area, including with his private Members’ Bill. He is absolutely right that the rural communities of this country need to be supported, and they will be. Driving down rural crime is an important area of work and we have provided £200,000 of funding to help set up the NRCU. My hon. Friend and I, and others in this House, understand the terrible impact this has, and we will continue to work with the rural police forces to drive down rural crime.

[Antony Higginbotham]

In Burnley and right across Lancashire county lines continues to be a problem, with organised groups peddling drugs and exploiting young people with no regard for the harm they are doing, not just to the communities but to the young people they are exploiting. Lancashire police are making very good inroads with an enhanced rural policing unit and neighbourhood taskforces, but what more can Lancashire Constabulary do to tackle the county lines issue and bring order back to our streets?

[James Cleverly]

I thank my hon. Friend for highlighting this vile type of criminality, which targets the young and the most vulnerable. As part of our fight against county lines we are investing up to £145 million in our county lines programme, and since it was launched in 2019 police activity has resulted in over 4,700 county lines being closed, over 14,800 arrests and over 7,200 safeguard referrals. We will keep our focus on this evil criminality.

Oral Answers to Questions

Antony Higginbotham Excerpts

Monday 3rd July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Chris Philp]

As I mentioned in earlier answers, across England and Wales we now have record police numbers of 149,572. The previous peak was 146,030 in 2010, so we have 3,500 more officers than we have ever had before across England and Wales. In Northumbria, the number has gone up by 512 since 2015. Of course, many of the powers sit with the PCC, including powers over the precept. It is entirely open to police and crime commissioners to use those powers.

[Antony Higginbotham (Burnley) (Con)]

T4.   Today, Operation Centurion has started across Lancashire, utilising £2 million from the Government to put more police officers on our streets tackling antisocial behaviour. In my constituency, that means almost 2,500 extra hours of police patrols in Padiham. It will have a major impact, but we can do more. Can I ask the Home Secretary whether the safer streets fund will have another round so that we can make physical changes, as well as getting more officers on the streets?

[Suella Braverman]

I am delighted with the progress being made to tackle antisocial behaviour in Burnley and Padiham. As my hon. Friend will know, we have allocated almost £1 million to roll out pilots of ASB hotspot response in 2023-24. A new round of safer streets will be announced soon. I take this opportunity to thank Lancashire police, which has launched an ASB problem-solving unit. It ran Operation Propulsion, which involved more officers patrolling locations dealing with motor nuisance and boy racers, and it has had a real good crackdown on residential burglary thanks to Operation Defender. Neighbourhood crime has fallen by 26% in Lancashire. Tribute must be paid to Chief Constable Chris Rowley and the police and crime commissioner, Andrew Snowden.

Doctor Training

Antony Higginbotham Excerpts

Tuesday 17th January 2023 Westminster Hall

[Anthony Browne]

I agree fully with my hon. Friend that training more doctors is just one part of the solution. There is no point training them if they suddenly leave. We need to ensure that they are not incentivised to retire early, and that they stay working in the NHS.

According to a study by the health consultancy Candesic, only one in four pharmacists are currently allowed to prescribe; 6,000 pharmacists a year could be trained to prescribe, at a cost of £12 million a year. Those are all things that we should be doing anyway, but they will clearly not solve the problem on their own.

The NHS has historically attempted to make up the shortfall of doctors by hiring them from overseas. That decades-old Government policy means that the majority of new NHS doctors are now trained overseas. Only 45% of doctors joining the General Medical Council register last year were trained in the UK—less than half. A similar percentage were international medical graduates from outside Europe, and the remaining 10% came from the European economic area.

Those overseas medical workers keep the NHS going; they provide expertise and care and are part of the exchange of ideas and experience that drives medicine forward. They are very welcome, but relying on other countries to train our doctors for us is not a long-term, sustainable solution. First, it leads to a global doctor shortage, which harms the world’s most vulnerable countries the most. We are far from being the only rich country to try to save money by getting other countries to train doctors for us. In fact, when it comes to training doctors, we are in the middle of the pack. We train 13.1 medical graduates per 100,000 inhabitants. That is more than the US, at 8.5, and Germany, at 12 per 100,000, but we are behind countries such as Italy, at 18.7 medical trainees per 100,000 people, and the world leaders, Ireland, at 25.4.

The World Health Organisation estimates that the refusal by rich countries to train enough doctors has led to a global shortfall of 6.4 million doctors. It is the poorest countries, which can least afford to retain their doctors, that are most harmed. The NHS tends to recruit predominantly from south Asia and Africa. According to the GMC register, the UK is now home to 30,000 doctors from India, 18,000 doctors from Pakistan, 10,000 doctors from Egypt, 4,000 doctors from Sudan and 3,000 doctors from Iraq. Nearly all those doctors were trained in the medical schools of their home country and left to join the NHS.

Many of those countries need their doctors even more than we do. Sudan has a doctor-patient ratio of 0.3 doctors per 1,000 people, a tenth of our doctor-patient ratio. Infant mortality at birth in Sudan is ten times higher than our own. It is ridiculous that our international aid budget is paying for health projects to try to improve health outcomes in those countries, while we strip them of their doctors. If we had supplied 4,000 doctors to Sudan, we would rightly be proud of the help we had given, but instead we recruited 4,000 doctors from Sudan. Countries such as Sudan need our support, rather than our laying out the red carpet for their medical professionals.

The WHO responded to this by setting up a red list of 47 countries that are deemed to have a low doctor-patient ratio, from which other countries should not recruit. That is a step in the right direction. The NHS no longer actively recruits from those countries, but passive recruitment continues apace. The GMC still offers professional and linguistic assessment board tests in countries such as Sudan, Ghana, Pakistan and Bangladesh. In just the past year, another 500 doctors joined the NHS from Sudan, even though the Government are supposedly not recruiting from there.

The global doctor shortage is likely to get worse, as countries age and economies grow, and demand for healthcare increases. It would be foolish to think that we can always rely on importing doctors whenever we want them. We face increasingly stiff competition from the global market. From a workforce planning perspective, it is significant that the retention of UK-trained medical graduates is higher than those trained elsewhere. Nine in 10 UK graduates who obtained their medical licence in 2015 still had it in 2021, but that was the case for only two thirds of international medical graduates, and less than half of European economic area graduates. We need to minimise leakage from the NHS workforce if we are going to stop the vicious spiral of staff shortages.

The only long-term, sustainable solution, and the purpose of this debate, is to train more medical workers, particularly doctors. This really is a long-term solution, as it takes 10 to 12 years to train a GP and even longer for a specialist, but that is all the more reason to start now. We need to ensure that the supply of doctors is sufficient for our national needs, and that we retain them for the span of their whole career. It is a conclusion that the Government have arrived at before: it was once championed by the current Chancellor when he was the Health Secretary and as Chair of the Health and Social Care Committee. The Government announced an ambitious plan to increase medical training places in 2016, creating 1,500 more places—a 25% increase on the existing number. That was then the largest single uplift in our history, and it was very welcome. It was no mean feat and required the building of five new medical schools across the country, but it is still not enough.

We need to be bolder if we are to aim for self-sufficiency. It is an ambition that has widespread support: the Royal College of Surgeons, the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal College of General Practitioners are all calling for it. The British Medical Association and the Medical Schools Council support it. As I understand we will hear today, it has cross-party support. Last year, just short of 16,000 doctors joined the register. To meet our national needs, we need to double our number of training places by adding at least a further 7,500 to the existing 7,500, making a total of around 15,000 training places.

[Antony Higginbotham (Burnley) (Con)]

My hon. Friend makes a compelling point. Does he agree that we do not have to do a massive expansion of medical schools to expand the number of medics we are training? In Burnley we have the University of Central Lancashire, which already trains medics, but the number it trains for the UK is relatively small; it does a far bigger international programme. The university is more than willing to switch that over and train far more here for the UK. We do not need a massive number of new facilities, so the capital cost is relatively small. It is just about saying to the medical schools, “You can train more UK students.”

[Anthony Browne]

My hon. Friend makes a really interesting point, which I was going to touch on later. I was going to call on the Government to do a feasibility study of how we get all those extra training places, using the existing resources that we have. I was going to mention one: we now have the first medical school in the UK that does not train any UK graduates; it only trains international graduates. The facilities are absolutely there, and we need to make the most of those to start with.

I should say that training enough of our own doctors does not mean an end to international movement of doctors, and nor should we aim for that. A steady exchange of internationally trained doctors around the global health system is a force for good. It provides opportunities for doctors to experience best practice in other countries and encourages knowledge sharing, and long may that continue.

Now that the policy has cross-party support and backing from the medical profession, why are we not already training enough doctors for our needs? Well, I am afraid to say the main stumbling block has been the Treasury. The perceived wisdom in the Treasury is that it is cheaper to recruit doctors from overseas than to train them ourselves, which might be true in the short term. Medical school places are highly subsidised. Estimates vary, but it costs around £200,000, if not more, for the Government to send a student through medical school. The additional 7,500 places would equate to an additional £1.2 billion a year.

However, on closer inspection, the financial argument does not really add up, certainly not in the medium or long term. First, a considerable proportion of a trainee’s time is spent providing clinical care to patients, so training more doctors will mean that hospitals can spend less money on recruiting locums to provide the care that trainees could provide. Secondly, training more doctors will reduce the £6 billion cost of locums overall. Investing in the training of doctors will save the Treasury money in the medium term as we reduce our dependence on agency staff. Thirdly, the financial argument neglects the income tax receipts earned by the Exchequer over the lifetime of a doctor. An excellent paper just published by the think-tank Policy Exchange calculated that there is a net additional positive lifetime return to the Exchequer of £183,000 for women and £398,000 for men—why is there a difference, one might ask—compared with the most positive plausible alternative degree. In layman’s terms, the Government make a greater return if they train someone to be a doctor than if that person pursues a degree in chemistry or pharmacology.

Concerns have also been raised that taxpayers will pay for the training of doctors, who will then simply leave for countries such as Australia and New Zealand in search of better pay, working conditions and, indeed, weather—who can resist the Australian sunshine?—but that is easily sortable. The Army provides medical bursaries worth £75,000 for Army medics, in return for which they must commit to working for the Army for four years. The Government should adopt a similar policy. Trained doctors should have to commit to working for the NHS for a set period, such as four or five years; otherwise, they would have to repay a portion of their training costs.

If, as I hope the Government will do, we decide to train an extra 7,500 doctors a year, how do we make that happen? My hon. Friend the Member for Burnley (Antony Higginbotham) made this point earlier. Implementation of training places is difficult, but it is doable. We have done it before. Training a doctor is complex. There are interdependencies between different bodies that require collaborative thinking and co-ordination. To achieve 7,500 more places, we will need to not only increase the capacity of the existing medical schools and switch places over from international training, but also build an estimated 15 new medical schools.

Each new school will need access to hospitals with clinical training facilities. There would need to be enough clinical academics to conduct the training. Newly qualified doctors will need access to postgraduate courses, including foundation and specialist training.

Despite those hurdles, we managed to increase places by 25% following the announcement in 2016. We can do that again, on a greater scale. I am looking for a commitment from the Minister that the NHS workforce plan that is due out this year—it may be independent, but I am sure the Government have their view—will not only outline an ambition for the UK to do enough medical training for its own requirements but will also include a realistic plan of how that ambition could be implemented. Will the Government launch a feasibility study into how medical school places can be doubled to 15,000 by 2029?

In the meantime, on the path to that ambition, will the Government commit to reinstating the funding provided for additional medical school places during covid for the next academic year? That is a straightforward way to boost capacity in the short term.

Finally, there is a real problem with the transparency of the workforce in the NHS, because of the lack of data. Will the Government commit to providing third-party access to electronic staff records to encourage greater understanding of medical career lifestyles in the NHS?

There are other benefits that flow from increasing training places for doctors. At present, we have many hard-working, straight-A students who are perfectly capable of being excellent doctors but are denied places at medical school. Last year, the rejection rate at medical schools was a staggering 90%. To cling on to their dream, young people are being forced to turn to foreign medical schools for their studies, in places such as Bulgaria, but most of those who are rejected move into other scientific disciplines and are lost to the medical profession forever. If they have the hunger and the ability, we should be giving these students the opportunity to realise their dream of becoming a doctor.

There are clear economic advantages to training more doctors. Life sciences are set to be a major economic growth area in coming decades. To maintain our world-leading position, we need more medically trained people who can conduct the research and run the clinical trials.

Another benefit of training more doctors is for levelling up. The current distribution of medical schools around the country is poor. London has 22% of student places, but just 13% of doctors. That contributes to the increased difficulties for staffing in rural and coastal areas. We need new medical schools in places that are under-doctored—where the places are matters, as around 25% of students remain within 10 miles of their medical schools after graduating. The 2018 expansion capitalised on that knowledge and the new medical school in Sunderland is a fantastic case study. It recruits people from lower socioeconomic groups who are under-represented in medicine. Its graduates will help reduce the shortage of doctors in the north-east, a place where overseas recruitment has been ineffective, due to poor retention. A bonus is that a medical school contributes an estimated £20 million to the local economy.

The arguments are clear. We need to ensure that, as a country, the UK trains enough doctors for our own needs. Increasing training places will be good for the NHS and its patients, good for developing countries, good for the economy, good for the taxpayer, at least in the medium and long term, and good for our bright, young people who will be able to fulfil their dreams of a medical career. In short, it is the right thing to do.

We cannot waste any more time prevaricating on this issue. The medical students who started in 2018 will not be fully qualified GPs until 2028. For too long, we have kicked this issue down the road. Short-termism has been winning the day as we blindly increase our reliance on overseas recruitment. Far too often, we take the easy route and do not make the investments we need for the future. The UK must train enough doctors and other medical workers for our national needs. That is the only sustainable, long-term solution for the NHS.

Oral Answers to Questions

Antony Higginbotham Excerpts

Monday 19th December 2022 Commons Chamber

[Dean Russell (Watford) (Con)]

12. What progress her Department has made on tackling county lines drugs gangs.

[Antony Higginbotham (Burnley) (Con)]

15. What progress her Department has made on tackling county lines drugs gangs.

[The Minister for Crime, Policing and Fire (Chris Philp)]

The Government are determined to crack down on county lines gangs who are exploiting our children and devastating communities. That is why we have invested £145 million in our county lines programme over three years. That is delivering results. Since 2019, the programme has resulted in over 2,900 drug dealing lines being closed down, including over 8,000 arrests. That is important work and it is continuing.

[Chris Philp]

I thank my hon. Friend for his question and for taking part in the dawn raid, which I hope was a resounding success. I share his concerns about the mental health of police officers, who are often exposed to dangerous conditions and situations. The police covenant board, which I chair, met just a few weeks ago, and many of the work streams are designed to help police officers deal with mental health pressures. We have instituted a new chief medical officer position to look after serving and retired police officers, which is extremely important, and I am working closely with the Police Federation to ensure that the right support is in place.

[Antony Higginbotham]

In Burnley, our neighbourhood policing taskforce has been doing great work breaking down doors, disrupting gangs and arresting those responsible for dealing drugs. A key driver of that is the Government’s combating drugs strategy, but most of the new funding under the strategy is geared towards treatment and prevention, which, while important, will not be effective without the deterrent of tough enforcement. Will my right hon. Friend agree to meet me and the Lancashire police and crime commissioner to talk about what more we might be able to do to make the strategy even better?

[Chris Philp]

I am always happy to meet my hon. Friend and his colleagues from Lancashire. He is quite right that there are three elements to the combating drugs strategy. One is treatment. It is important to treat drug addiction, which is the underlying cause of a great deal of offending behaviour. In addition to ensuring that we are treating people, we need to enforce, too. That is one reason why we are recruiting more police officers. I think his local Lancashire force already has an extra 362 officers, which is well on the way to the extra 509 officers it is due to have by March next year. We are also increasing resources in Border Force to stop drugs getting into the country. There are now, I think, over 10,000 Border Force officers, up from about 7,500 in 2016. So, lots of extra resources are going into enforcement and policing, as well as treatment, but both are important.

National Security Bill

Antony Higginbotham Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 16th November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant]

I, too, support the Bill, but I think part 3 is a complete mess. I do not think it will survive long in the House of Lords—I hope they do a proper job of scrutinising it, because we are certainly not able to do a proper job of scrutiny this afternoon. The Minister is a lovely chap, but if he were on the Back Benches, he would be saying exactly what I am saying now. We know that Ministers do that, because only days ago, the right hon. Member for Camborne and Redruth (George Eustice), the former Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, told the whole House that the one thing he had been proclaiming to the world—that the UK deals with Australia and New Zealand were wonderful—was not what he really believed.

Of course, we need to tackle political interference by hostile states in the United Kingdom. Some of us have been arguing that point for a very long time, which is one of the reasons why I would like to see the tier 1 visa report published—I see the Minister nodding, so let us hope that he will have produced it by the end of the week. Secondly, I would like us to have the full Russia report, so that we know exactly what the Government knew about interference in British politics.

Some interference is overt, but much of it is covert, as the hon. Member for Milton Keynes North (Ben Everitt) has just referred to. Some of it comes not from embassies, but from all sorts of different people who approach MPs and Ministers and seek to influence the British political system. Some of it is online targeting through bots and trolls, which may be done from St Petersburg, Tehran or wherever, but some of it happens on our own streets. Sometimes, it happens in Parliament through all-party parliamentary groups that receive support, whether secretariat or financial, that comes directly or indirectly from a foreign power. We need to be careful about that. We on the Standards Committee have had direct advice from Parliament’s director of security that this is the Achilles heel of the British political system at the moment.

MPs and peers, of course, do not have the resources to be able to personally check whether the person who is coming through the door has legitimate bona fides; we simply do not have that intelligence resource. That is why one of the amendments I have tabled seeks to establish that, once somebody has registered that they are working for a foreign power, they should declare that when they come to see a Member of Parliament or Government Minister. In Parliament, we do not just register: we declare. That is a simple thing and I am bewildered that the Government are not prepared to accept it.

My new clause 2 would, very simply, make it a new criminal offence for an MP or peer to work for a foreign power that has been specified by the Government to be a danger to the country. Why would anybody vote against such a measure? I have no understanding of why the Government would oppose it. Without my new clause, the Government might decide that, for instance, Iran or Belarus was to be one of the countries on the list and introduce that by regulation, but an MP or Member of the House of Lords would be free to work for that foreign power—all they would have to do is register the fact that they are doing so. I am sorry, but I think that should be a criminal offence. People have talked too easily of treachery and traitors in the political domain over the last few years, but this is an open door to treachery and treason, and I think we should close it.

[Antony Higginbotham (Burnley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this debate and to follow the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant). I agree with everything that my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes North (Ben Everitt) has said. I am incredibly supportive of the Bill overall, but I do have questions that it would be helpful to get clarity on in this debate, or—what I think is more likely—when the Bill goes to the other place. I say that because the questions and issues we want clarity on are so substantial that we cannot do them justice in the limited time we have today.

For me, those issues revolve around the foreign influence registration scheme and the exemptions to that scheme. I am mindful that the scheme was introduced into the legislation after we had taken evidence in Committee, so we did not get the chance to question some of the experts on what it would look like. I will address my remarks to clause 68 and Government new schedule 2, and to amendments 15 and 16, which stand in the name of my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith). I am particularly concerned about the legal services exemption. I do not understand why such a broad exemption is required. As my right hon. Friend said, it might be that we are just copying the US legislation, but we need a level of explanation. Removing the legal exemption is not about restricting access to legal services—we still fundamentally believe in natural justice and the rule of law—but we need transparency to prevent exactly the kind of lobbying that we have spoken about. I know that we are unlikely to vote on the amendments today, but we need that kind of transparency.

If we are trying to copy or mirror some of what the US has done, I would question the lack of any kind of exemption for academia, which the right hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) spoke about. I have spoken to Universities UK, which is concerned about the enhanced tier proposed in FIRS and the impact it could have on UK R&D and on our competitiveness. The US registration scheme clearly has an exemption for

“religious, scholastic, academic, or scientific pursuits”

provided that no political activities are included.

I am saying not that there should be an exemption for academic services but that we in this House need to debate properly what exemptions, if any, should apply to the scheme. Should there be an exemption for legal services? Should there be an exemption for academic work? I do not think we have the opportunity to consider that properly today, but I look forward to following the debate in the other place. I ask the Minister to think about some of those exemptions and, if we are to proceed with them, to give a proper explanation to the House about why they might be necessary.

[Stewart Hosie]

The Minister said in relation to the foreign influence registration scheme that other countries have had similar provisions for some years, and of course, that is absolutely true. It is also true that the ISC is very much in favour of introducing a foreign influence registration scheme. We are concerned, however, that the scheme as proposed is more complex than the ones in the US and Australia but that it simultaneously does not go far enough, which is a problem.

Unlike the US and Australian schemes, the proposal is for the one here to be two-tiered. I welcome Government amendments 63 to 94 to restructure clauses 61 and 64, which at least makes some of this a little more comprehensible. However, that still leaves us with a primary tier that will capture all arrangements and activity undertaken on behalf of any foreign power for the purpose of influencing a political event or decision—that is welcome at face value—and a secondary tier designed to capture all other activity beyond political influence, including, for example, acting as a foreign intelligence officer. For arrangements or activity to require registration, however, they have to be undertaken on behalf of a country set out in secondary legislation, so the provision does not necessarily apply automatically to every country.

As I said earlier, it is difficult to understand why acting covertly as an intelligence officer outwith the political influencing sphere, for example, applies only where the foreign power is set out in secondary legislation. It is perfectly possible that intelligence operations will be undertaken by countries that are not named in the regulations and so will not require registration. That is self-evidently an omission and a weakness. Requiring all countries to register such activity would be a stronger deterrent.

As the scheme does not yet name a particular country that may be registered under the second tier, it is not clear which countries the Government intend to name when the Bill becomes law. It is also not clear what criteria will be used when deciding which countries to add to the list. Furthermore, as has been pointed out, these things can take some time. I do not know how swiftly the Government might react to add a new country threat, and I am certainly not at all convinced that when that threat is lifted, the Government will act swiftly to remove a country from the list in the secondary tier.

This is a bit of a dog’s dinner. The real risk is that the secondary tier, which could be valuable tool and which I want to see work, might end up not being used. As the Security Minister recognised in Committee, use of the enhanced registration requirement will be “limited”. We do not want this to be limited; we want it to be comprehensive, to be able to capture the majority of the risks. It would surely be far more effective to have one tier which applies to all countries and a broad range of covert activity.

National Security Bill (Fourth sitting)

Antony Higginbotham Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 12th July 2022 Public Bill Committees

Again, nothing in clause 11 explicitly allows a constable to seize a device that has been used to photograph, film or record details of the cordoned-off area. That, too, would require scrutiny and consideration, and a proportionate balance would need to be found, but that seems to be an omission that I cannot see addressed elsewhere in the Bill. Could a person be instructed to leave an area, but potentially take footage or photos away with them? Will the Minister confirm whether that is the case? We are minded to consider the matter further. For the avoidance of any doubt, we are comfortable with clause 10 and the designation of a cordon.

[Antony Higginbotham (Burnley) (Con)]

I wish to speak briefly to the clauses. In Lancashire, we are home to BAE Systems Air, in Samlesbury and Warton. That is a significant manufacturing and assembly location for the fourth generation Typhoon aircraft, the fifth generation F-35 and, looking ahead, potentially the sixth generation of the future combat air system. Manufacturing and assembling those aircraft brings a requirement to test them and put them in the air. With any new aircraft, we run the risk of some kind of emergency landing, so the clause is entirely necessary and proportionate to allow the police to put a cordon in place, should that be required. We have to remember the highly sensitive nature of some of the aircraft, recognising in particular that many contain not just UK technology but technology from our friends and allies around the world.

Not that long ago, as we may all remember, one of the F-35s fell off the deck of the Queen Elizabeth carrier as it was meant to be taking off. On the news, we all saw that other allied warships had to go towards the area to ensure that unfriendly or hostile states could not go to find that aircraft on the seabed and try to take some of its technology. The clause seems to do something similar: it will ensure that in the event of an emergency, we have the ability to protect a site so that we can clean it up and investigate it in a controlled way. That control is important, because hostile states are always looking at ways to take advantage of unforeseen circumstances.

Will the Minister confirm that the area where the cordon is put in place will be as tightly defined as possible? We must recognise that in Lancashire, for example, where such events might happen, there is a significant amount of farmland and land used for other things, so we must try to find a balance. It is about proportionality and recognising that although a site is controlled—not just in terms of where it is but recognising that parts might be spread over a significant area—the land might have another use. Will the Minister confirm that the Government expect there to be a balance and that an area will not be so widely defined that it becomes unusable for a significant number of people?

I was pleased to see that there is a 14-day limit for the cordon zone in clause 10, with the potential to expand it to 28 days if needed. That properly tries to balance the different access requirements that the police will have during the clean-up. We all recognise that these will sometimes be complex sites to try to clean up. I very much welcome the clause. For an area such as Lancashire, which has aircraft test flights all the time because of BAE, it will put lots of residents’ minds at ease that if the worst happens, there is a controlled, legislative way to make sure that the site is managed.

[Stephen McPartland]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his helpful contribution. The maximum time period is 14 days because we are trying to put in place a limit. The idea is to restrict the areas as tightly as possible to protect the sensitive material without having an impact on other issues. A cordon around the military area will cover a much tighter area. There are already other cordoning factors, which is why the provision is not wider in scope.

The clauses have been drafted because of the experiences in Lincolnshire with the crashed F-15 aircraft in 2015, and the gaps during that period. My understanding is that the pilot lost control of the aircraft, successfully ejected and crashed into farmland adjacent to a village. Once the fire was extinguished, because there were no fatalities Lincolnshire police left it to the relevant military teams to run the area. As result, potentially sensitive debris was left vulnerable to harmful hostile actors over quite a wide range of areas. The purpose of the clauses is to address the direct experience of what happened during that unfortunate aircraft accident.

The hon. Member for Halifax asked a range of questions, including one on civilian light fixed-wing aircraft. The answer is that the provision currently applies only to military aircraft and does apply to foreign aircraft. The powers in the Bill enhance the powers in common law to try to compensate for what happened with that F-15 aircraft. Although the hon. Lady made an incredibly good point about search and seizure powers, as it stands they are not included in the clauses. I will go away and think about that point and ask my officials to look into it in more detail.

Question put and agreed to.

Clause 9 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clauses 10 and 11 ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 12

Sabotage

Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.

National Security Bill (Third sitting)

Antony Higginbotham Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 12th July 2022 Public Bill Committees

[Stephen McPartland]

Both the right hon. Member for North Durham and the hon. Member for Halifax made a very good point. We will take that away and look at it. If they want to strengthen the Bill, we are happy to work with them to do that.

[Antony Higginbotham (Burnley) (Con)]

Would my hon. Friend agree that there is a difference between providing force protection for a site and providing constabulary and law enforcement duties?

[Stephen McPartland]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. We must also bear in mind that it is not our intention to introduce search-and-seize powers under these police powers. This is part of the tiered approach we referred to earlier, with the police being able to warn people to go away before they fall foul of the law. There is the opportunity to give them that warning before any arrest.

National Security Bill (Second sitting)

Antony Higginbotham Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 7th July 2022 Public Bill Committees

[Holly Lynch]

Q Given some of the conversations we have had with the prior witness panels, are there other examples of best practice from around the world in respect of the influence of foreign states, particularly online? Have other countries—other legislatures—got some of the answers that we perhaps do not have in this legislation?

Professor Ciaran Martin: A lot of countries have struggled with it, and it goes beyond just legislation, if I am honest. In terms of things like disinformation, quite interesting were some of the things that the French did in 2017, when there was the Russian attempt to do something and they deliberately sort of cast doubt on the integrity of it. They knew the information was being, in effect, data dumped, but they are believed to have done some alterations so as to cast doubt on the authenticity of the whole thing.

In terms of civic society and discourse, in advance of the 2020 election the Washington Post editorial board did something really interesting. Although it did not come to pass in the way that it did in 2016, they issued a proactive statement to say that if they received very sensitive political information but from a suspect source that was likely to be a foreign intelligence service, they would treat it differently from, say, a leak from within the United States—they might sort of print it differently. There is a discussion about how we handle the outcomes of disinformation, on the assumption that it might happen. That is one idea.

On the other hand, on the duties to protect within Government, for example, we are not always very good at gradations of harm. When I started in the civil service at the end of the last century there was still this approach that any leak of any data was potentially quite serious. These days, there is far too much information to take that approach—things are going to leak all the time. We need to focus on an understanding of harm caused and the duty to protect the most sensitive information.

[Antony Higginbotham (Burnley) (Con)]

Q Thank you for your time, Professor. We talked with a previous panel of witnesses about the so-called Confucius institutes, and there was discussion of the fact that the British state may be inadvertently employing agents of foreign powers. Given your work in academia, what are your views on those institutes? Do you think the Bill should seek to restrict or criminalise them?

Professor Ciaran Martin: It is for your detailed scrutiny to work out whether you think that activity that is clearly on behalf of a hostile state is adequately deterrable and punishable by this Bill. It is quite clear, from both my previous job and discussions and concerns in academia, that it is a target sector—of course it is—for hostile foreign powers, particularly China.

I have to say that even before I went to work for a university I thought it was a very, very hard thing to leave to universities to police. I am not a legal expert, so I do not know how this is going to work on the ground, but the question is: does this Bill provide a sufficient legislative framework to deter some of the actions? There is plenty in the Bill that says that damaging foreign intelligence activity in this country is unlawful, and that would obviously include the academic sector. Whether that sufficiently captures activity is an interesting question.

I think it does help, but it is probably quite tricky to specify, if you like, academic institutions as distinct from general malevolent activity in whatever the sector may be. It is a question worth asking, though, because the sector that I work in now is clearly of significant interest to hostile intelligence services in all sorts of different ways, including in respect of people and individual areas of research. That is one of the key threats that legislation like this is designed to counter.

[Antony Higginbotham]

Q Given your role in academia now, do you think the sector would welcome the Bill providing more clarity on the legal position?

Professor Ciaran Martin: I do not mean to be flippant, but obviously there could be as many different opinions as there are academics. I think that Government providing clear frameworks, laws and guidance to universities without infringing on academic freedom is where I would want to be. I do not think that it is fair to rely on universities to police this activity. It is extremely difficult in open and collaborative research environments like universities to be able to identify what is malevolent activity. If they do, it is extremely difficult to know where to go, what the relevant laws are, and so forth. The combination of a clear legal framework and clear guidance to universities is something that I personally would welcome. I imagine quite a few people, particularly in sensitive areas like technological research, would absolutely welcome that.

[Sally-Ann Hart]

Q You said earlier, looking at the increasing concerns about China and cyber-espionage, that the Bill will be useful against the threat from China, but do you think that the Bill will make the UK safer from the cyber-espionage threat from China, or will we require enhanced offensive capabilities?

Professor Ciaran Martin: They are not mutually exclusive. The thing about offensive capabilities is that they are sometimes seen as almost symmetrical—cyber is a sort of enclosed boxing ring, where you have offence versus defence—but offensive cyber can be used for anything. Our own British Government’s one declared offensive cyber-operation was against so-called Islamic State, not against the cyber-capabilities of another state.

I need to be reasonably careful about what I say here, but if you think that the US’s offensive cyber-capabilities are largely in the Cyber Command and the UK’s in the National Cyber Force, the GCHQ-MI6-Ministry of Defence partnership, one would expect that the operational security of those capabilities to be pretty good and therefore make quite hard targets for other actors. Similarly, some of China and Russia’s offensive cyber-capabilities against us will have quite good operational security, which will make them hard targets. We cannot rely on offensive cyber-capabilities to stop other people, particularly at the top end of the spectrum, at the elite nation- state level.

There is no magic panacea in the Bill, because no magic panacea is available. Even in the areas we were talking about, such as completely remote activity, one of the things that we saw anecdotally—there is some emerging research to support this—was that when the US in particular had a legal framework, where it can prosecute and indict people in absentia, in China and to some extent Iran, that did have some impact for some time. It did not solve everything, but it did affect the behaviour of some actors—they could not travel to the west, most practically, because they were under indictment by the US and therefore all the US’s allies. It meant that the associates of these people, because digital infrastructure is global, could get arrested.

Some people working with Russian groups have been arrested in eastern European countries with which we can co-operate in law enforcement terms. Strengthening that sort of legal framework gives you something. It is probably more incremental than transformative, but it is still something.

National Security Bill (First sitting)

Antony Higginbotham Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 7th July 2022 Public Bill Committees

[Sally-Ann Hart]

Q We heard from the previous witnesses about the challenges of online harm—sabotage and dis, mis and malinformation—and the Bill seeks to modernise the espionage regime to meet the challenge of the digital age. Do you think it will achieve that aim and where are the gaps, if any?

Paddy McGuinness: I would expect it to be a dynamic process. I think you will be looking at further legislation; let us hope you have a long life as an MP, but in your time as an MP I would expect you to have to look at this again.

To Sir David’s point, I do not think we should delay for a moment fixing the things that the Bill fixes because of the fact that technologies develop dynamically. There is a lag. I can remember—I think I was actually working at GCHQ at the time—us thinking about what was happening with Facebook as it emerged as a widely used platform. Here we are with the Online Safety Bill, about 13 years later. There is a natural and quite proper lag between rapid technology innovation and slow and considered regulation and legislation, and we are going to have to live with that. I think this is good. It provides a basis, and I think the extraterritoriality is particularly important, as is the way in which sabotage is broadly defined to allow you to deal with the kind of range of things that I have been talking about, given that the opponent will move through those spaces.

[Antony Higginbotham (Burnley) (Con)]

Q The other day the director-general of MI5 and the director of the FBI said that most of what is at risk by quantity is not what the state does, but the technology, research and development and commercial advantage developed by our businesses and academic institutions. Does the Bill do enough—I am thinking mainly about the offences part of it—to protect against that risk?

Paddy McGuinness: I think it does a very significant thing in the way in which it criminalises specifically the trade secrets aspect, which covers a very broad range. Again, we may have to return to this. This kind of legislation and the type of work that Sir Alex and his successors in MI5, MI6 and GCHQ are doing has Darwinian effect, so I have no doubt that as companies have got better at certain kinds of protection advised by the interaction with the CPNI and the National Cyber Security Centre, so the opponents have got better at it. And we will have to go on doing it.

It does not feel as though we have quite the same volume of opencast mining of our intellectual property and economic value that we had, as was described previously by General Keith Alexander, the head of the National Security Agency in the US. He described the enormous volume—trillions of value—taken out of our economies. There still is a very high level, though, so there is more work to do on this, and it is a significant challenge to the corporate sector to do the right thing in this space, because of the difficulty that it represents. The Bill provides a really solid basis for that discussion, because of the criminalisation of the trades secrets aspect.

[Antony Higginbotham]

Q That is really helpful. They also said in the same speech that our opponents have a whole-of-state approach to further their aims—you touched on this. Does the Bill do enough to join us up and ensure that we have got that whole-of-state view on how we defend against espionage, sabotage and so forth? Or is that not realistic because of the evolving threat?

Paddy McGuinness: One must constantly avoid complacency, but one of the strengths of the British state is the way in which institutions and agencies work together pragmatically and practically—within the bounds of law, obviously. That is how we have managed to get this far, with a lack of powers, without something going catastrophically wrong. It has felt really nerve-wracking doing it. As the person who had to represent it to Prime Ministers and the National Security Council, my word I was nervous about this. I was much more confident in other areas of my responsibilities, because there was a real shortfall. The Bill closes out quite a lot of that.

I would note something that I think reads across several of the points that have been made by the previous witnesses that I have heard today that it is important for the Committee to understand and for me to represent. When you are dealing with state threats, and in particular against really capable actors, that is a different task from dealing with terrorism or serious and organised crime, because we must work on the assumption that some of our communications, some of our computers and some of our people are under their control.

When I look at, for instance, the STPIM powers, I reflect that it is much more difficult still to bring prosecutions in this area than it is for terrorism and for serious and organised crime, where sometimes people have been suborned by the crime group. This is all together more serious, and it would be naive to think that no one spies for a foreign country, no communications are intercepted and no one is in any of our computers. That just raises the level of difficulty that we have got in this space.

[The Chair]

Thank you very much. That brings us to the end of the morning sitting and the time allocated. On behalf of the Committee, I thank Mr McGuinness for giving evidence today.

Ordered, That further consideration be now adjourned. —(Scott Mann.)