Crime and Policing Bill
Baroness Harding of Winscombe Excerpts(5 days, 21 hours ago)
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Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)
My Lords, given the hour, I shall be brief. I support my noble friend Lady Stowell in the two amendments that she has so ably introduced, and I have been delighted to add my name to both of them.
I have worked all my life in consumer services: for 20-odd years in retailing, but then in telecoms and in the National Health Service, and, today, in hospitality—in horse racing. I should declare my interest as the chair or senior steward of the Jockey Club, given that we have the Cheltenham Festival next week, where we will have thousands of people in front-line, consumer-facing service roles at the racecourse.
I have not engaged in the Bill until this stage, so I apologise for that, but I am speaking to and have put my name to these amendments because I am bemused by the Government’s failure to support public-facing workers in all these other industries. I grew up in retailing and I love retailing, but if you have ever sat in a GP surgery with a receptionist, as I have, and watched them do their job, you will know that it is no different from being at the customer service desk at Tesco, which I have also done, dealing with the ups and downs of everyday life with the customers, the consumers, the citizens you are serving. We should be protecting them and treating them in exactly the same way. As the noble Lord, Lord Hendy, has said, that is true for transport, finance, telecoms, energy and water. We should not exclude the hundreds of thousands, millions, of people who provide us with these essential services. We learned during Covid how important these essential front-line, customer service-facing roles are, and it breaks my heart, five years after the pandemic, to see a Government who say they support working people not supporting many front-line working people.
It is not just front-line working people who want us to protect them; their bosses do too. The CEOs of businesses in all the sectors I have just mentioned know that it is good business to protect them. Some 42% of front-line workers, according to the Institute of Customer Service, have experienced abuse in the last six months, as my noble friend Lady Stowell has said; 37% say they have considered leaving their role because of that hostility; and more than 25% have taken sick leave as a result. That costs productivity in our public services and it costs economic growth in our private sector. The chief executives of all these organisations know that, and they want us to make sure that we treat all those workers with the same respect that the Bill, at the moment, treats retail workers only, which is why I support these amendments.
Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)
My Lords, I have added my name to this amendment because it is trying to achieve consistency in law. At the moment, the law protects a retail worker more, when in fact those who provide services are doing exactly the same thing. Broadly, they deal with the public and they are trying to get rules enforced. They are just trying to make sure that things work well.
My reading of the present advice on providing protection to retail workers is that they are protected if they provide goods, but not if they provide services. The consequence of that is that people who, for example, work in betting shops, theatres and cinemas do not receive the same protection that they would receive if they were providing that same retail worker service and also providing goods, and that seems inconsistent. Then there is the further group of workers that the noble Lord, Lord Hendy, referred to: people who work in transport, such as taxi drivers. All of them face people who are often affected by drink or drugs, for example, and have to challenge bad behaviour, but they do not receive this protection. That seems odd. I find it odd that the Government do not want to protect that group of workers in the same way. For reasons of consistency, and because the workers I have described—those who work in betting offices, for example, where you get some pretty bad behaviour at times—deserve that protection, they ought to be included.
My final point is that although the present legislation excludes wholesale workers—should I name the companies? Perhaps not—you only get access to some of these wholesale or, I would say, retail sites by joining a club; you do not pay any money. I think we all know the ones I am talking about, where you get access to better prices merely by joining the club. Apparently, that is not retail. I think it is pretty much like retail. They still get bad behaviour on these sites. For all those reasons, I think this amendment regarding public-facing workers is a good idea and I encourage the Government to support it for the sake of consistency for those who provide services to us.
Computer-generated Child Sexual Abuse Material
Baroness Harding of Winscombe Excerpts(2 months ago)
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Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
The noble Lord makes a very valid point and obviously I will discuss these matters with my noble friend Lady Smith. That goes to the heart of education and confidence-building, particularly for young boys, to ensure that they do not stray into the type of activity that leads to adult misbehaviour as well. It is really important that we focus on that. I will take the noble Lord’s point and discuss it with my noble friend.
Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)
My Lords, I welcome the Minister’s strength in his answers. He says that if Ofcom does not act to hold X to account for Grok’s illegal activities, the Government will. Can he expand on how the Government will act, if they need to?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
Both parties’ Governments —the previous Government and this Government—have passed legislation in the Online Safety Act to make it illegal to provide child sexual abuse material online. In the Crime and Policing Bill, which is before this House, there are four or five additional measures to strengthen that purpose and ensure that we remove child sexual abuse material online. There are significant penalty points in the current legislation. The purpose of the consultation is simply to ensure that it has been discussed. There are views on how we implement it but when we receive that report in April, the Government will take action on what is already strong legislation.
Investigatory Powers Bill
Baroness Harding of Winscombe Excerpts(9 years, 8 months ago)
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Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)
My Lords, it is humbling to follow so many noble Lords this evening who, if it is not too back-handed a compliment to say it these days, are such experts in this subject. Let me declare my more prosaic interest as the chief executive of TalkTalk, the communications service provider.
Debating the balance between liberty and security is not new. What has changed is the methods people use to threaten our security and to express their freedom. It will not come as a surprise to hear that I think that the internet is a wonderful tool, but just as it can accentuate what is good about the world, it can also accentuate the bad. There is a growing body of psychological evidence that the internet amplifies human behaviour. People shout online in a way they would never do to someone’s face, and the internet can connect criminals globally in a way that would be inconceivable in the physical world. The internet did not invent child abuse, terrorism or organised crime, but left unchecked it does allow those crimes to be committed on a much grander scale. Any child abuse is clearly horrific, but the internet takes those crimes to a global audience and allows those criminals to monetise it globally.
We know that ungoverned spaces in the physical world become havens for criminality. The same is true online. I am passionate about the opportunity the digital world can bring for this country—even more so after the events of the last week or so. I see the opportunity for Britain to be a brilliant digital nation, but we need a civilised digital world where the rule of law is clearly established by Parliament, where our law enforcement agencies have clearly articulated powers to act in the digital space, and where there is robust and transparent monitoring of those agencies by the judiciary and Parliament. That is why I am pleased to support the Bill and to play a part in what is clearly a very important debate.
As my noble friend the Minister said, the vast majority of the Bill covers powers that already exist under various disparate Bills. As DRIPA expires, the Government are right to take the opportunity to consolidate those powers into a single Bill, creating simplicity and the very transparency that is one of the ways to ensure that we maintain the right balance between freedom and security.
As a number of noble Lords have said, the Bill also needs to keep pace with technological changes, and I would like to focus my remarks on the most significant new power in it: the use of internet connection records. Whereas once, criminals communicated by phone, like everyone else they are increasingly moving online. For criminals—in fact, for all of us—the boundaries between the digital and the physical world are very porous, but our current legal framework still treats them very differently. Knowing what website someone visits is just the modern equivalent of knowing who they called. Knowing what IP address they are using, I would argue, is very similar to knowing which phone line they are calling from. Yet at present, we create a false legal distinction that artificially handicaps law enforcement agencies by denying them digital powers equivalent to those they have in the voice telephony world.
From my experience, it is right that police can access communications data. In just the first six months of 2016, nearly three-quarters—72%—of National Crime Agency comms data applications to TalkTalk related to child sexual exploitation. But child abusers definitely do not just use their phones to make calls. The next biggest category, 16%, concerned threats to life. How many of these cases would be resolved, how many lives saved, by extending access to internet connection records as opposed to voice calls only? That is why I welcome the inclusion of internet connection records, and why I believe that access to them is proportionate in a digital world. That does not mean, however, that we should just wave this legislation through. The digital world amplifies all behaviour, good and bad, so it is undoubtedly important that we scrutinise very carefully how these new powers can be used and their use monitored.
I will not even attempt to opine on the legal checks and balances proposed in this legislation. I am not a lawyer—I run a business—and I bow to the considerable legal expertise in this House and the other place on how best to ensure sufficient oversight, so that the various agencies that could access this data do so only when appropriate, and to ensure that individual freedom to roam the internet legally is well protected. But as the great legal minds in this Chamber begin that debate, I would like to add a little practical context on both the feasibility and the associated costs of storing and using internet connection records.
In principle, it is feasible for communication service providers to store internet connection records. It is, however, a non-trivial task, and the Government will have to work closely with them for some time to ensure it is achieved in a proportionate, practical and cost-effective way. Different businesses’ networks are configured in different ways, so the flexibility the Bill allows for different approaches is a practical and pragmatic way forward. The combination of obligations on the Home Office to consider the practical implications and costs on businesses before issuing a data retention notice, including the new privacy clause that places an obligation to consider the security of data storage systems, sets out clear safeguards that prevent this legislation being implemented in a way that is unreasonable for businesses, or that places unachievable obligations on industry.
A number of domestic communication service providers, including my own, have questioned the Home Office’s cost estimates. While I think it is fair to say that concerns remain about these estimates, I was reassured by the clear commitment from the Home Office that its figures are an estimate based on its expected implementation and do not in any way represent a cap or a budget. The Home Secretary was explicit in the other place that government would cover the costs incurred in the industry, and colleagues of mine across the sector will hope that my noble friend the Minister can reiterate that today.
Let me be clear: there is more work to do. The Government need to work closely with all providers likely to be affected by the legislation in order to understand what these obligations may look like for each provider and how much they will cost. But this is to be expected with new obligations, and the Bill as drafted provides the industry with the right safeguards that businesses need.
This is a hugely important debate. The moral, legal and social scaffolding for the digital world does not yet fully exist. I am a firm believer that the UK is better placed than any nation in the world to take advantage of the digital revolution and, just as we did with the Industrial Revolution, we need to ensure that the digital world is a civilised world where there is the rule of law; where Parliament has set out how we as a society balance individual freedom with security; where we do not tolerate unpoliced no-go areas; and where British liberal democracy flourishes.
I believe that this is an important Bill that helps us in that journey, a Bill that gives the UK the legal framework needed to protect our citizens without infringing on the innovation and creativity that we love about the online world. I am pleased to support it.