Children: Online Privacy

Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall Excerpts

Thursday 16th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates]

My noble friend makes an important point. From this September, e-safety guidance must be taught in our schools at all key stages. It is vital that children are made aware of this. We shall need to look very carefully at the issue of storing images online given that the Snapchat application is attractive to young people because images can be uploaded and then disappear, allegedly after a period of up to 10 seconds.

[Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall (Lab)]

Will the Minister expand a little on the underlying points in the contributions of the previous two noble Lords who have spoken, because fundamental to this issue is that children are educated to understand what privacy is and what it is to have boundaries about what you are prepared to share with other people and what you really should not? Can he say with confidence that the way that the current PSHE syllabus is set up is robust enough to take that into account?

[Lord Bates]

The noble Baroness is absolutely right that we need to keep this matter constantly under review. We cannot be at all complacent about it and the relevant advice will need to be strengthened as the technology advances. The Government have set up a website through the National Crime Agency called Thinkuknow, which is aimed specifically at young people—indeed, children as young as five—and has specific information on this issue. In the context of this Question, new guidance is available there to young people who feel that they may have been a victim of this particular hacking incident.

Immigration Bill

Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall Excerpts

Monday 3rd March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Judd]

My Lords—

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall) (Lab)]

I believe it is time for the amendment to be agreed.

Licensing Act 2003

Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall Excerpts

Wednesday 9th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

Yes, I would certainly vouch for that. There has been a lot of co-operation from the retail trade. I met representatives of the Association of Convenience Stores at the Conservative party conference, where they had a meeting. They are very supportive of retail initiatives of this sort. This morning I met Richard Antcliff, the chief anti-social behaviour officer in Nottinghamshire, and I went to Nottingham to see the work being done in that city to reduce alcohol abuse. Communities can do an awful lot on this issue and the Home Office would encourage any such initiatives.

[Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall (Lab)]

My Lords, following on from the last question, does the noble Lord not agree that although there are obviously deficiencies in the way that the 2003 Act has operated, which give rise to some of these difficulties, one of the main problems is the enormously wide availability of alcohol at very low prices? Do the Government have any plans at the moment to address that?

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

Licensing of alcohol in retail outlets is, of course, in the hands of licensing authorities, but the pricing has been challenged—and, indeed, I have been challenged by noble Lords in this House on this issue. The Government have announced the policy on this; there will be a policy whereby drink cannot be sold at cost plus duty plus VAT, which in effect puts a floor on cheap sales of alcohol. I think that that should be encouraged.

Intelligence and Security Committee: Annual Report 2011-12

Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall Excerpts

Monday 21st January 2013 Grand Committee

[The Marquess of Lothian]

That the Grand Committee takes note of the Intelligence and Security Committee Annual Report 2011–12.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall)]

My Lords, we are hoping that the annunciator will be changed shortly so that we are not distracted by proceedings in the Chamber. I remind noble Lords that in the event of a Division in the Chamber, the Committee will adjourn for 10 minutes from the sound of the Division Bell.

[The Marquess of Lothian]

My Lords, the core work of the committee upon which the noble Lord, Lord Butler of Brockwell, and I have the honour to represent your Lordships’ House covers an important area of national interest, not least because of the amount of public money that the agencies consume each year, something over £2 billion. The nature of the work they do, and what they spend the money on, must, of course, for the large part, remain secret. However, the Intelligence and Security Committee ensures that there is parliamentary oversight of this work, and it is right that we have, as we have today, the opportunity to debate our findings.

The committee has had another busy year under the firm leadership of our chairman, Sir Malcolm Rifkind MP, to whom I readily pay tribute, as I do to the immensely hard-working staff of the committee, without whom our detailed and often complex scrutiny would not be possible. I would also like, at this early stage, to record my continuing admiration, gratitude and respect for the almost always unsung dedication and professionalism of those who serve our country in our intelligence and security agencies—SIS, MI5 and GCHQ. We owe them much as a country, and I am glad to pay tribute to them.

This annual report covers a wide range of issues, and we have made a number of recommendations. I shall, in the time available, concentrate on a few of those. First, resourcing—the agencies received a relatively generous settlement in the last spending review of 2010, with what is known as a flat cash budget, which nevertheless represented a significant real-terms cut over the four-year period. With a combination of pay freezes and concerted efforts to control other costs, the agencies are currently coping with this while apparently preserving front-line capabilities. All the same, the settlement commits the agencies, both individually and collectively, to achieve significant savings before 2015. The committee agrees that the efficiency savings need to be made, wherever possible, in administration and related areas. However, we are not convinced, as we say in our report, that sufficient progress is being made towards making them, and the Government have yet to convince us that the agencies will meet the targets that they have been set. If they do not, the agencies could be forced to cut front-line capabilities, and that, as I am sure your Lordships agree, would be extremely worrying. I hope that the Minister can assure us that the axe will not end up falling on the front-line capabilities that are so badly needed to protect our national interests.

The second area, also related to resources, is the ability of the agencies to respond to unexpected events. We have seen—here I include Defence Intelligence, whose role was, and continues to be, crucial—how the agencies had to divert resources to the events of the Arab uprising, which is a subject to which I will shortly and briefly return.

The committee is concerned that, inevitably, these resources will have to be switched from other areas. In these straitened times, particularly for Defence Intelligence which has suffered round after round of cuts, our ability to maintain sufficient coverage of all the areas of the globe—the importance of which has been graphically and painfully illustrated in Algeria over these past few days—is becoming increasingly fragile. Yet our agencies need to be able to respond to events anywhere and at any time. We may be able in the short term to plug the gap but only by robbing Peter to pay Paul. If we do not examine this more closely, sooner or later we will be caught out—if that has not already happened.

More generally, we welcome the fact the central intelligence structures are now aligned beneath the National Security Council. However, from past experience, we are concerned to ensure that analytical judgments and policy recommendations remain separate when advice is presented to Ministers. As we have seen in the past, it has been easy for this distinction to become blurred and it is crucial that it does not do so in the future.

Earlier I referred to the agencies’ swift and commendable response to the Arab spring—or, as I prefer to call it, the Arab awakening. That presented a real challenge to the intelligence community which had to reprioritise quickly and redirect its resources towards the region. Of course, it is often impossible to predict such events. However, the question remains as to whether, once events began to unfold, the agencies should have anticipated the possibility that the unrest would quickly spread across the region and should have recognised the Islamist nature of much of it and the crucial distinction between national and universal Islamism, which is of such importance to our security. We are seeing this clearly in what is happening in the Maghreb and the Sahel and potentially even more dangerously, in Syria.

Although the capability of al-Qaeda and its affiliates has been weakened in Afghanistan, in the tribal regions of Pakistan and increasingly in the Arabian Peninsula and Somalia, it has demonstrated that it is still resilient, capable of regrouping and recruiting elsewhere, of mounting an attack on western interests and of posing a serious terrorist threat to the United Kingdom and its citizens. This danger needs to be further and urgently pursued. Above all, this demonstrates the risks inherent in drawing down effort on lower priority areas, and of the importance of the agencies, working with allies where necessary, maintaining global intelligence coverage.

In Northern Ireland we welcome the intention of the Security Service to maintain its resources at current levels. From my own experience, this is a ball we can never afford to take our eye completely off.

Finally, there is cybersecurity which remains the most rapidly growing threat that we face. Every day citizens and businesses in this country face attacks on their computers and networks from criminals, hacktivist groups—that is spelt with an “h”—and state actors, ranging from actions which cause mere irritation to the compromise of financial details and, at the most extreme end, the theft of intellectual property and sensitive national security material. This is a threat to the security and prosperity of the United Kingdom and, in its report, the committee has welcomed the seriousness with which the Government have addressed this. The additional resource—£650 million over four years—is a significant sum in these straitened financial times.

While the committee’s interest has been primarily in the 20% of more sophisticated attacks where national security has been affected, the wider issues remain the same. We have noted the work of the Communications-Electronics Security Groups and the Centre for the Protection of the National Infrastructure, which are increasing their efforts to educate government and business about the vulnerabilities and weaknesses of their systems and how improving behaviour will strengthen defences and benefit the entire country at the least cost. However, it is more than two years since the Government announced increased funding for work against cybercrime. While there has been some progress in developing new capabilities, this does not appear to have been as swift as might have been expected. In a fast paced field, where new technologies are emerging all the time, we cannot afford delays in our national response. The committee will keep this issue under close review.

There are many other important matters mentioned in our annual report, including counterterrorism work, staffing and diversity in the agencies, and access to communications data—to name but a few—which other noble Lords may wish to raise. I will now turn to broader issues. When we held this debate last year, the Government had just published a Green Paper covering reform of the Intelligence and Security Committee and increased protection for intelligence material involved in civil cases. Since then, this House has debated the Justice and Security Bill, which is currently being considered in another place. I will not repeat the arguments that were deployed in Committee and on Report in your Lordships’ House, but there are one or two areas that I wish to raise briefly.

As noble Lords will be aware, Part 1 of the Bill concerns reforms to the Intelligence and Security Committee itself. It is intended to formalise many of its practices, which have evolved beyond the limitations of the statute under which the committee was originally established in 1994, and gives the committee greater powers to access information held by the agencies. It will also make clear the committee’s responsibilities to Parliament as well as to the Prime Minister, which have not always been clear in the past, and underline that it is an independent committee, which has also not always been clear in the past to outside observers. These are important changes that originated from within the committee and we are pleased that the Government and others, both in your Lordships’ House and, I understand, in another place as well, have in principle accepted them as being necessary.

However, there is more work to be done to bridge the final remaining gaps between the committee and the Government and I hope the Minister can reassure me that agreement on these issues is near. I think we are all agreed on the need to strengthen the committee’s link to Parliament but there are implications from formalising this relationship. While I understand the Government’s nervousness around such issues as parliamentary privilege, can the Minister confirm today that the work of the committee will be adequately protected in future?

Secondly, for the first time the committee is being given explicit powers to investigate operational matters, subject to certain clear provisions. These are that the matters are agreed between the Prime Minister and the committee as being retrospective—that is, not part of any ongoing operation—and of significant national interest. These principles are not controversial and the committee has no intention of becoming involved in the day-to-day operations of the agencies.

However, we must ensure that the legislation does not inadvertently tie the committee’s hands. After all, the committee often investigates matters relating to operations, sometimes even at the Prime Minister’s request; its report into the 7/7 bombings is a case in point. It would be a significant step backwards if the legislation did not allow for such inquiries in future.

My final point relates to the resources available to the committee. Our admirable staff provide all our research, analysis, briefing and drafting in-house. If the committee is to be able to continue its work, let alone take on the increased role that the Bill envisages, the Government must ensure that we have adequate support to do so. Our resources are meagre compared to those of our overseas counterparts, as noble Lords who have been on the committee and have visited other countries will readily agree, I am sure. They are also meagre in comparison with inquiries such as that on the detainees or the Iraq inquiry, the report of which we still await, or indeed of the Committee on Climate Change, to name just a few. If the Government are serious about supporting the measures in the Bill, this committee must be funded correctly and adequately so as to be able to carry out its responsibilities properly in the future.

My very last point on the Justice and Security Bill is about the necessity of introducing closed proceedings in civil cases where the protection of national security material is involved. This was debated at length in your Lordships’ House and I am pleased that the core of the Government’s proposals has survived that consideration. The reputational damage to our agencies of legally unjustified financial settlement with those questionably claiming mistreatment cannot be allowed to continue. The public perception is that the agencies have something to hide and we should not allow the situation to continue where a judge is unable to rule on such allegations. In addition, our relations with allies will suffer if we are unable to guarantee that we can protect their secrets, especially as we expect the same when we share our intelligence with partners overseas.

It is been an extremely busy year for the intelligence agencies, primarily due to the burdens placed on them by the Olympic and Paralympic Games. That these events not only passed off without incident but were such a widely acknowledged success was in no small measure due to the enormous behind-the-scenes efforts of the agencies to ensure that terrorists did not take advantage of the situation. This took a significant effort on the part of the Security Service in particular, and we have noted the disruption that staff had to endure with long or unsocial working hours and bans on leave—and this was all in addition to the range of their other work that continued as normal.

The agencies do not often get the public recognition they deserve, so it is important to put this on the record when the opportunity arises. They are a credit to this country and we owe them all a debt of gratitude. I commend the report to the Committee and I beg to move.

Immigration: Controls at Airports

Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall Excerpts

Wednesday 16th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, we are not using denial of visas to adjust these numbers, but obviously we want to deal with passport control as we can at the point of exit, where it is possible. That is one of the things that we do, and it is good to make things easier for visa control later on.

[Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall]

My Lords, the Minister referred in his Answer to people with skills and experience and referred in his subsequent answer to the right people in the right places. Will he explain to the House what skills and experience are required for somebody to become a member of the UK Border Agency, how they acquire those skills and where the UK Border Agency is recruiting from?

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, at the Dispatch Box, in answer to a question, I am not going to go through in detail the recruiting processes of UKBA and the border force. Obviously, they have to make sure that they get the right people who get the right training, and that they deal with things in the proper ways. At the same time, we also want to make sure that we use technology as best we can, as in the past we did with IRIS and in the future we will do that with e-gates. As a result, we hope that we will be able to improve the service for all those people and improve the security that we can offer to the country in dealing with these matters.

Queen’s Speech

Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall Excerpts

Tuesday 15th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall]

My Lords, isn’t it nice not to be talking about ourselves? I remind the House that my interests include involvement with a number of performing arts organisations, including the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Roundhouse Trust. I mention that because despite the portmanteau title of today's section of the debate, the gracious Speech in fact has nothing explicitly to say about culture, and certainly not about the arts. When the noble Lord, Lord McNally, introduced the debate, he omitted to mention that culture was even part of today’s debate. Go figure. This is no surprise because I cannot recall when a gracious Speech ever did say anything explicitly about culture.

It is not surprising but it is revealing. In this country we have tended to have an ambivalent attitude to our cultural life and heritage, sometimes congratulating ourselves heartily on the success of our artists, our tourist attractions, our theatre, our historic buildings and our vibrant museums and galleries and, at other times, we appear to view art, artists and cultural endeavour as variously marginal, frequently ridiculous, an unjustified drain on the public purse and not a proper job. Having worked my whole life in the performing arts, I know well how dispiriting indifference can feel to those for whom making a career in what we now call the cultural industries means years of demanding training followed by mostly under-remunerated employment in a fiercely competitive market, in order, not only to provide pleasure and entertainment for other people but often also to contribute valuable work in education, health, prisons, as mentioned earlier, and elsewhere. Glamorous it mostly ain't.

I want to salute our artists, everyone from Oscar and Turner prize winners through to those about to graduate from our colleges and conservatoires. We need them and they do us proud. Just because the gracious Speech says nothing about culture, it certainly does not mean that there is nothing to say; in fact, just now there is rather a lot to say, but the speakers’ list is long, and we are all aiming to be brief, so, hedgehog-like, I have just one big point.

From the moment when the coalition Government took office in 2010, it was clear that the public sector was in for a rough ride. To be fair, things would probably have been pretty tough if my party had been re-elected, but not because the UK economy had been uniquely mismanaged, as we are repeatedly told from the Benches opposite, but because the world economy had suffered a traumatic shock from which, as we can see all too clearly today, it is still struggling to recover. In these circumstances, no sector in receipt of public funds could expect to escape unscathed. The cultural sector certainly had no such expectations, and in the wake of a challenging spending round in 2010, Arts Council England undertook, very scrupulously, the painful task of reorganising its portfolio of support, along the way reducing or withdrawing funds to many successful organisations. Local authorities followed suit, faced with their own budget restrictions, and the net result, now that the impact of these decisions is kicking in, is serious damage to the provision of arts and culture right across the country. I could list all the losses suffered but I will not. I hope that the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, may do some of that for me. However, I will say this: it is easy to take things apart but much more difficult to build them up again. To quote the song:

“Don't it always seem to go,

That you don't know what you've got

‘Til it's gone”.

At the time of the election, this Government, in the person of the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Mr Jeremy Hunt, told the arts sector that, despite the inevitability of reduced government funding, help was at hand. He had a plan and it was called philanthropy. The then bright-eyed and bushy tailed Mr Hunt—tail a bit straggly now and eye a bit dull—was convinced that, given a little encouragement, huge new resources could be released from the private sector to fill the gap. Does that sound familiar? Some of us, veterans of many years spent developing the delicately balanced mixed economy which keeps our cultural sector lively, were a little sceptical, but nobody wanted to rain on his parade, except, as it turns out, his right honourable colleague the Chancellor of the Exchequer. In this year's rather accident-prone Budget, Mr Osborne chose to introduce a cap on charitable donations so that there is now an active disincentive on major donors to give. Many cultural institutions already rely heavily on such donors, including perhaps some of those who do the good work mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott. Worse, the Chancellor, supported, to my great surprise and dismay, by Polly Toynbee but by few others, carelessly implied, in his attempts to justify this curious bit of double-think, that giving generously to charity is just a form of tax avoidance. That was at best inept. I could put it more pungently as, in fact, the director of the National Theatre, Nicholas Hytner, put it when he referred to major donors in a recent article in the Guardian. He wrote:

“It is frankly slanderous to suggest that any of them are involved in tax avoidance. It is also ridiculous. To qualify for tax relief of £2,500, a higher-rate (40%) taxpayer … would be down £7,500. Call me a financial illiterate, but I can't see what's been avoided here—and many wealthy philanthropists give millions away each year”.

He went on to say:

“Unsurprisingly, a number of donors are having to reconsider what they hoped to be able to give”.

I am reliably informed that this damaging effect of the Chancellor's extraordinary decision is spreading.

Those who give generously to charities, including the arts, doubtless do so for a variety of reasons, but of all the many motives that may be in play I am quite sure that securing a tax benefit is rarely, if ever, the main one because, as Nick Hytner points out, there is little such benefit to these individuals who have, over the years, helped to make possible the creation of some of our finest buildings and our most innovative creative programmes. It is preposterous, and demeaning, to brand as tax avoiders people such as Dame Vivien Duffield or the Sainsbury family, or the one I know best, Sir Torquil Norman, who not only persuaded many generous people to contribute to his brilliant reinvention of the Roundhouse in North London as a creative centre for young people but also put millions of his own money into the project. He and others like him have done nothing at all to deserve the slur that has been cast upon them. Who could blame them if they chose to take their bats and balls home, although I suspect that they will try to find another way forward being, in the main, resilient and thoughtful people.

The Government are entitled to look at every option for maximising tax revenue, and should do so, but on this occasion they appear to have scored a notable own goal, discouraging the very people whose support they can least afford to lose. Like Hamlet, they have shot an arrow over the house and hurt their brothers. When the Minister replies perhaps he can say what the Government intend to do to right this wrong.

UK Border Security: 30 November

Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall Excerpts

Monday 28th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Henley]

I am very grateful for the support of my noble friend. I wish I could get similar support from noble Lords opposite.

[Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall]

My Lords, given that the Minister is so fixated on the possibility of getting the kind of statement that he would like to hear from these Benches, does he imagine that the people out there who are contemplating going on strike are mostly or even to a small extent members of the party I support? I submit that not only are they not, they are members of all parties and none, and what is preoccupying them is not the question of whether the Labour Party supports them but their concern for their future pension rights.

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, the noble Baroness accuses me of being fixated on this issue and perhaps I am somewhat naive to be so fixated on this issue. I do not know in which way the members of the unions involved happen to vote. I happen to know that those unions support the party opposite. That is why we are still waiting for that condemnation from the party opposite.