Conduct of Undercover Policing and Surveillance Operatives Bill [HL]

Baroness Berridge Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 17th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to come late in the list, as most of the drafting problems in this Private Member’s Bill have been spoken to.

I recognise that the statutory guidance says that these relationships should not happen, or only in desperate circumstances, but a breach of criminal law gives victims better redress. It would then not only be in the annual IPCO report but would be investigated by the police, with fuller disclosure to the victims. Despite 11 years of a statutory inquiry, the number of victims is not reliably known—I think it is 68 adults and four children.

The added protection of criminal law is especially important for young people who, in desperate circumstances, may have entered into a relationship with a juvenile CHIS. I recognise there are very few juvenile CHISs, but victims could be young people, due to contexts outside the domestic context, such as that of youth violence, in which juvenile CHISs are deployed. I hope His Majesty’s Government will consider a role for the Children’s Commissioner and her view on this, and consider the long-term outcomes for juvenile CHISs. It seems that only current juvenile CHISs are within the remit of the IPCO’s report. Evidence on the long-term effects on a juvenile would aid the detailed risk assessments made by senior authorising officers on how to conduct or deploy a juvenile CHIS.

While today the media is seized of the case of agent X and lies told on three occasions by MI5 to our courts, I am grateful that this Private Member’s Bill allows me to put on public record my surprise at discovering, in my last-minute research, that it was only yesterday that a public consultation on the statutory inquiry was announced, along with that other significant news. I proposed and sat on the Select Committee on the Inquiries Act, and I cannot recall in evidence such a situation—if it exists, I suggest it is probably in Northern Ireland—where the commissioning department seeks to possibly end a statutory inquiry. Was that at the request of the victims? I suspect not, and I hope the Minister can confirm that they had advance notice of the consultation.

If I were a victim and knew that the inquiry had cost £138 million and that the Home Secretary, the decision-maker, had been asked to save over half a billion pounds from her budget by 2028-29, I would wonder how she is going to manage such a conflict of interests. Also, how does the Home Secretary by way of a consultation manage the allegations that there has been an inequality of arms? Core participants with deep pockets have apparently launched lengthy legal challenges, such as asking for blank anonymity orders, that have delayed matters significantly. Is the Home Secretary going to be supplied with how much money each of the 250 core participants has had for their legal fees? If the inquiry is ended, I spy a judicial review on the horizon.

These women were victims of violence—VAWG, which is a government priority—so I suggest that issuing publicly the consultation yesterday, and I have a printed copy here, was at best disrespectful to them. Yesterday’s findings by Sir John Goldring are of course taking the media presence and are disappointing. I want to believe that MI5 and MI6 are the stuff of Operation Mincemeat and James Bond, that rules are bent sometimes but only in a higher, noble cause. Agent X, this situation and the peculiar case of Gareth Williams in 2010, when I lived in Pimlico, undermine such trust. I hope that the Minister, in the enhanced oversight of MI5 that was promised yesterday by the Home Secretary, will thoroughly consider the role of the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament, and perhaps even whether the inquiry should continue, because they are parliamentary representatives of the victims and the undercover police.