Investigatory Powers Bill

Baroness Hamwee Excerpts

Tuesday 19th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Beith]

My Lords, I am very glad the noble Baroness has tabled this amendment because it enables us to clarify the extension of the things we were discussing on telephone interception into this area, which the Government are now seeking to ensure is covered in other respects and that the same principles should apply. Having said that, I am inclined to agree with the noble Lord, Lord Murphy, that what is now in the Bill is probably about the best set of safeguards that we could reasonably construct from the very important principle—I agree with the noble Baroness on this—that we should protect the ability of constituents and whistleblowers to contact elected Members to raise matters of concern. They may be matters which affect the very organisations, whether it is the intelligence services or the police, that might seek the power to initiate interception.

The noble Baroness mentioned the Wilson doctrine, which came up earlier. That adds no clarity whatever to the situation but simply obscures it. It is even further complicated now by the fact that the last Prime Minister to make a Statement on the subject is no longer the Prime Minister. It is not even clear that his successor will consider herself bound in any way by what Mr Cameron said on the subject. As I think we teased out in the previous discussion, the Wilson doctrine does not really mean anything now. There is now a statutory basis for considering how to deal with a situation where there are reasonable grounds to believe that a Member of a legislature is involved in very serious crime or associated with terrorism. That is the procedure set out in the clause that the amendment addresses.

That there should be a bizarre principle now that the Government generally have a policy of not using these sorts of powers but will come along to Parliament some day and say, “We’ve changed our minds and now we want to use these powers very widely indeed” just does not make any sense at all. Since no Prime Minister has ever come to the House to satisfy the requirements of the Wilson doctrine—that if government policy changes, you should make such a Statement—the whole thing has become absurd. We should give it a decent burial and satisfy ourselves that the provisions we put in place for governing interceptions of any kind of the communications of a legislator are satisfactory. I am of the view that the clause we have now, following the various interventions that the noble Lord, Lord Murphy, described, is a good basis for doing so.

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, I do not know whether the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, feels that she got an adequate response to her equivalent amendment the other day. I had a look at the Official Report this morning and I thought that it was quite telegraphic—quite brief. So it is understandable that she would raise the matter again in this context. I see that she has expanded subsection (3)(d) with regard to the public interest. On the noble Baroness’s previous amendment on interception, my noble friend Lord Paddick made the point that if ever there was a need for political accountability regarding the target of a warrant, it is when that target is a parliamentarian. He acknowledged the tensions and dilemmas in all this.

I am a member of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, which, when it considered these issues before the Bill had its Report stage in the Commons, expressed concern about the separation of powers, which is what underlies this, at any rate as regards parliamentarians—the need to be able to communicate freely with constituents and others because of the distinction between the Executive and the legislature.

Perhaps I might say a word about government Amendment 173—although not to argue with it. It is about modifications and the Committee knows our concerns about those, but I accept the need to define “designated senior official”. But I wonder about the wording that this is for,

“the purposes of this section”.

Presumably it is also for the purposes of the modification and is case by case. I am not really sure about that but I can see the need for an audit trail. I think that the phrase “designated senior official” is used elsewhere, not only in this clause—I found it in Clause 112(7)—and not only as a senior official designated by a public authority. So I wonder whether there is a need to look at the definition throughout. Of course, the Bill is not really long enough as it is, so maybe we should have additional definitions collated in Clause 236. My principal point is whether there might be some confusion about using the phrase only for the one section.