Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Bill

Debate between Baroness Massey of Darwen and Lord Hain

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

[Baroness Massey of Darwen (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I, too, remind colleagues that I am a member of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, as is my noble friend Lord Dubs. I will be brief in supporting my noble friend’s excellent contribution on Amendments 11 and 59 concerning the requirement for prior judicial approval of criminal conduct authorisations, also mentioned by my noble friend Lady Kennedy of The Shaws and the noble Lord, Lord Anderson of Ipswich.

The amendments are based on the JCHR’s examination of the Bill and refer to chapter 7 of its report. Paragraph 94 refers to lack of prior independent scrutiny or approval of CCAs, and paragraph 95 gives examples where the Bill is in contrast to other investigative procedures, highlighted by my noble friend.

Retention of data is also an issue. Privacy is a vital right protected under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, but the authorisation of criminal conduct risks more damaging human rights violations, including physical violence. Paragraph 97 of the report states that

“the Bill as it stands imposes no requirement that the belief of the individual making the CCA that it is necessary must be a reasonable belief”.

The report concludes that:

“Bringing CCAs within the review function of the IPC provides some reassurance of independent scrutiny of their use after the event. However, this is insufficient protection for human rights”,


and the Bill must be amended accordingly.

[Lord Hain (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I shall speak to my Amendment 15, and I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, and the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, for having added their names. I am also grateful to my noble friend Lord Blunkett, a former Home Secretary, who would also have added his name had not the list been full.

This amendment is very straightforward. It ensures that:

“The granting of criminal conduct authorisations under subsection (1) may not take place until a warrant has been issued by the Secretary of State.”


My noble friend Lord Blunkett and I both signed hundreds of warrants for surveillance operations under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000—RIPA—which was updated by the Investigatory Powers Act 2016. When I was Secretary of State for Northern Ireland in 2005-07, I regularly signed warrants to place under surveillance dissident IRA splinter groups planning to kill, bomb and fundraise through drug and other crimes, and I signed warrants for surveillance on loyalist paramilitaries and hardcore criminals. If the Home Secretary was not available, I also signed warrants that he would normally have signed, sometimes with very short notice, in real time—on one occasion, to prevent Islamist terrorists in a south London house unleashing a bomb in London.

The point that I wish to underline is that these were absolutely essential security and policing operations, yet they required ministerial authorisation at a high level. Why was that so? Because ultimately that brings ministerial responsibility and therefore direct accountability. The operational decision was for the police or intelligence services, but the accountability was ultimately governmental and political. The time has come to bring that principle into the sphere of undercover policing, because it has involved far too many abuses for decades and, if there is not the same kind of accountability as for surveillance, there will inevitably be even more abuse.

I met undercover officers doing brave work trying to prevent dissident IRA splinter groups and loyalist groups killing and bombing. I was also briefed about vital undercover work around Islamist terrorist cells to prevent terrorist bombing and killing. In other words, I have direct experience of how undercover officers can perform vital functions to save lives and prevent crimes or terrorist attacks. But I am also due to give evidence early next year in what is described as a non-police, non-state core participant role to the official inquiry on undercover officers established by Prime Minister Theresa May and chaired by Sir John Mitting, a former High Court judge. It was established because undercover policing has got out of control and needs to be made accountable. That is important.

From 1969-70, undercover officers spied on me at anti-apartheid and anti-racist meetings, including when I was an MP in the early 1990s. As confirmed by evidence given to the Mitting inquiry, a British police or security service officer was in almost every political meeting that I attended, private or public, innocuous and routine, or serious and strategic, like stopping all white apartheid sports tours and combating pro-Nazi activity. Why were they not targeting the criminal actions of the apartheid state responsible for, among other things, fire-bombing the London office of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress in March 1982 and, in 1970, murdering South African journalist Keith Wallace, who had threatened to expose apartheid security service operations in the UK? Why did they show no interest whatever in discovering who in South Africa’s Bureau of State Security sent me a letter bomb in June 1972? It was so powerful that it could have blown up me, my family and our south-west London home were it not for a technical fault in the trigger mechanism. Scotland Yard’s bomb squad, then chasing down the IRA, took it away and made it safe, but I heard nothing more.

Another victim was ecological activist Kate Wilson, whom I mentioned at Second Reading. Agree or disagree with her views and actions, she is not a criminal. Kate was at primary school with my two sons in the 1980s, and our families remain friends. Undercover officer Mark Kennedy formed an intimate and what she described afterwards as an abusive relationship with her for over seven years, even reporting back to his superiors on contacts with my family when I was a Cabinet Minister. I would like to think that a Home Secretary presented with a warrant to assign Kennedy to target Kate Wilson would at least have asked, “Why are our police wasting their time targeting her, an environmental activist, instead of drug barons, human traffickers, criminals and terrorists?” A warrant procedure would force police chiefs to stop and ask that question too, instead of morphing policing from the overtly criminal into the covertly political sphere.

Another widely reported example was referred to by my noble friend Lord Dubs. Doreen Lawrence, now my noble friend Lady Lawrence, is a law-abiding citizen, yet her family’s campaign to discover the truth about her son Stephen’s brutal racist murder was infiltrated by undercover officers. Why were they not targeting the racist criminals responsible for Stephen’s murder? A warrant procedure would have forced police chiefs to stop and ask that question, too, instead of morphing policing from the overtly criminal into the covertly political sphere.

Why did an undercover officer going under the name of Sandra infiltrate the north London branch of the Women’s Liberation Front between 1971 and 1973? She conceded to the Mitting inquiry that she failed to discover any useful intelligence whatever. Some of the meetings were attended by just two activists, she reported. She told the inquiry on Wednesday 18 November, last week:

“I could have been doing much more worthwhile things with my time.”


She worked for the Met’s special demonstration squad. She went on:

“Women’s liberation was viewed as a worrying trend … There was a very different view towards the women’s movement then as compared to today.”


Sandra told the inquiry that she did not think that her work

“really yielded any good intelligence”.

That is nice to know now, over 40 years later, but why was there no proper accountability for her deployment? I like to think that a Secretary of State might have asked a few questions if a request came to authorise her infiltration of a women’s rights group. Knowing that the Home Secretary would take a look, maybe police chiefs would never have deployed Sandra on this scandalous and wasteful mission.

In each of these cases, the police were on the wrong side of justice, the law and history: harassing anti-apartheid activists campaigning for Nelson Mandela’s freedom, instead of pursuing crimes by the apartheid state in our country; infiltrating the family of a climate change activist, instead of combating climate change; covering up for a racist murder, instead of catching the murderers; and targeting women’s rights campaigners, instead of promoting gender equality, including within the police of that time. Why were undercover police officers trying to disrupt all of us, diverting precious police resources away from catching real criminals, such as drug traffickers, human traffickers, terrorists and criminal gangs?

When I give evidence next year to the undercover inquiry, I will also show that there was a systematic pattern of malevolence, deceit and exaggeration by undercover officers. One, named as Mike Ferguson, claimed to be my right-hand man when I chaired the campaign to stop sports apartheid tours by all-white rugby and cricket teams. It was a straight lie; I had no right-hand man. If he is the person I vaguely recollect, he was on the periphery of the central core around me. Mike Ferguson claimed our campaign intended to attack the police at Twickenham when England played the Springboks—a lie. We did not. He also claimed that we planned to sprinkle tin tacks on the pitch—another lie. We did not, and indeed were at pains to avoid personal injury to players, as we ran on to pitches in acts of nonviolent direct action, sometimes being beaten up by rugby stewards or the police. Mike Ferguson reported that we planned to put oil on Lord’s cricket pitch and dig it up—again a lie. We never did. Giving evidence only the other week, another undercover officer who had infiltrated our campaign admitted that this allegation about oil and digging up pitches was false. Undercover officers also played agent provocateur on occasion, daring militant but non-violent protesters into criminal activity.

A warrant procedure would have forced police chiefs to stop and ask serious questions about all this before seeking authorisation from the Home Secretary over Mike Ferguson’s role, instead of morphing policing from the overtly criminal into the covertly political sphere.

This is not ancient history; it has happened over recent decades and could well be happening still. There needs to be a structure of proper accountability to ensure that undercover policing or covert surveillance through embedded agents is performing a legitimate function, not an illegitimate one, as in the examples I have mentioned, including those involving me. Otherwise, how do we stop legitimate undercover police or intelligence work sliding over into the illegitimate and the blatantly political? Even in our era of modern legislatively accountable policing and intelligence work, things are still going badly wrong, such as when counterterrorism police recently put non-violent Extinction Rebellion on their list of terrorist groups, doubtless for undercover operations, which are presumably continuing now, as well.

This covert human intelligence sources Bill does not address any of the key questions that I have asked, which is why I believe that the amendment, which would ensure that a warrant was signed by a Secretary of State before undercover policing was authorised, is vital and why I hope that it will be put to a vote on Report.