Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Bill

Debate between Baroness Fookes and Lord Cormack

Committee stage & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 24th November 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, this is another fascinating debate. A number of your Lordships are seeking to put forward solutions to what I think is a gaping hole in the Bill. I was glad to add my name to the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Hain. We have had some powerful speeches not only from the noble Lord, Lord Hain, who speaks with truly unique personal experience as well as experience as a very accomplished Secretary of State, which I saw at first hand in Northern Ireland, but we have other suggestions put forward, most notably by the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, and the very powerful quartet of the noble Lords, Lord Anderson, Lord Butler of Brockwell and Lord Carlile, and the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, and we heard a powerful speech a moment or two ago from the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford.

Fundamentally, what it comes down to is this: what we are doing in the Bill is giving authority for people to commit crimes. We all accept the basic necessity when it is a matter of national security. I am not convinced, and I will need a lot of convincing, that we have to give similar powers to the Environment Agency, the Competition and Markets Authority, the Financial Conduct Authority, the Food Standards Agency and the Gambling Commission. There are others on this list, such as the Serious Fraud Office, the National Crime Agency and the intelligence services, that one would approve, but wherever one is approving, one is giving potentially a vast range of people the authority to authorise crimes and to launch these agents into a world where they can do great damage to individual innocent people. We touched on this earlier when we talked about compensation.

I believe it is absolutely crucial that these permissions are not granted without the authority of a senior judicial figure or a Secretary of State. The argument in favour of a Secretary of State, made very pointedly by the noble Lord, Lord Hain, is that there is a degree of public accountability to Parliament for decisions that, one would hope, have been taken in good faith, but which may go wrong in a bad way. What we need is for my noble friend the Minister, and, doubtless, some of her ministerial colleagues, to sit down with those who have proposed these various amendments and try to come to agreement on an amendment for Report stage that the Government can back.

This Bill as it stands just will not do. It could be called the “carte blanche Bill”; in this field, that is not acceptable. I urge my noble friend when she replies to share some reflection on that idea. The noble Lords, Lord Anderson, Lord Butler of Brockwell, Lord Hain—all these people and others—have experience that they can draw upon and advice that they can proffer. We cannot have this Bill giving so many bodies authority to authorise the commission of crimes. I keep coming back to that, because that is what we are talking about. This has to be handled with firmness, sensitivity and, above all, the knowledge that the last thing we want to become is a state in which the police have virtually unbridled powers.

Police are public servants. We all honour them; we believe we are extremely fortunate in the quality of our police forces even though there have been some terrible recent examples, some of them talked about in this broad context by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, a little while ago. At the moment—I have half-joked about this in the House recently—we are living in a benign police state where we can be prevented and fined for seeking to sit down with members of our family. It is all very serious, and underlines the seriousness of what this Bill is about.

I beg my noble friend to listen to those who have spoken with great experience and authority, putting forward ideas that are practical and workable; some doubtless better than others, but we must have a system where a person of real seniority, answerable for his or her decisions, can give the authorisation before the crime is committed.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Fookes) (Con)]

My Lords, I understand that the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, has withdrawn, so I call the noble Lord, Lord Butler of Brockwell.