Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill

Debate between Lord Blair of Boughton and Lord West of Spithead

Monday 2nd February 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blair of Boughton (CB)]

My Lords, I was brought up to believe that politics was the art of the possible. As a supporter of this amendment, it seems to me that we have reached a position whereby politics is the art of the preposterous. I exempt from that charge those noble Lords who object to this amendment on principle; they will mainly be Liberal Democrats and Cross-Benchers, but there will be other objections on principle. They and I disagree, but I suggest that both positions are perfectly respectable. It is not the same position as what I understand to have been happening in the case of the Conservative and Labour Front Benches.

Let us consider what we are all agreed on. I am not going to rehearse the arguments in detail. We are all agreed that jihadist terrorism is a real and present danger and that it is an increasing danger, indicated by a threat level of severe. We are all agreed that we have a degrading technological ability to monitor and intercept communications data, vital to the disruption of terrorist attacks. There is a gap, as the noble Lord, Lord King, has said.

What do I mean by preposterous? The provisions of this amendment, previously the stalled communications data Bill, go back in principle to the concerns of a Labour-controlled Home Office in 2007-08 about the degradation of our technological capability. So this had a Labour birth. The provisions were then adopted by a Conservative-led but not entirely controlled Home Office. In either 2010 or 2011, I was personally briefed in the most positive of terms about the communications data Bill by one of the Conservative noble Lords, who carried the Home Office ministerial brief in your Lordships’ House. I will not name him because he is not in his place. So it had a Labour birth and was a Conservative-supported Bill before the Paris attacks. Then, as we have heard, the current Conservative Home Secretary lamented the lack of progress on the Bill in a Statement to the House of Commons. And then in your Lordships’ House we discovered, in Committee, the existence of the Bill in the Home Office.

The noble Lord, Lord King, has made it clear to the House that we would table the amendment only once, and if it was sent to the other place we would not indulge in ping-pong. We just want the Commons to have the opportunity to consider this matter again. Despite this, the Conservative and Labour Parties are prepared to do precisely nothing at this stage about this gap. I do not understand fully the nature of the usual channels, but the next Government will be principally led by either the Labour Party or the Conservative Party —so they do not need to worry any more about letting each other down over a fast-track procedure. One of them will be responsible for doing that, and the other one would be agreed anyway. So why do we not put it forward?

In closing, I remind this House that elections and changes of Government are of great interest to jihadi terrorists. In 2004, they killed more than 190 people and injured a further 2,000 in bombs on trains in Madrid. They changed the course of the Spanish general election as a result. In 2007, they planted major car bombs in the Haymarket and bombed Glasgow airport to mark the day when Gordon Brown became Prime Minister. Had the London bombs exploded, hundreds of young people would have died in a night club. We face an election now and, who knows, we may have another one shortly afterwards; we may have a multi-party coalition assembling with a whole range of views on the subject of this amendment. I am acutely disappointed by the decisions of both Front Benches to refuse to accept this amendment or, better still, propose a better one, on a matter of such national interest. I urge both Front Benches tonight publicly to commit to bringing forward legislation about communication data monitoring as an urgent priority for the next Government and, particularly, I assume, their L Committee.

Lastly, I hope with all my heart that today’s decision does not result in some utterly preventable disaster somewhere on the streets or in the skies above Britain. I was not present to hear what the noble Lord, Lord Tebbit, said about the Brighton bombing, but what one has to remember about it was that afterwards a spokesman for the provisional IRA said,

“we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always”.

The Minister said that this is about real threats to real lives, and it really is.

[Lord West of Spithead]

My Lords, I support the amendment and make no apologies for reiterating some of the things that have been said. Why do I support the amendment? I do so because there is a clear and present danger to our people in this country. The threat level is severe, as has been said, and there is no doubt whatever that there will be more attempted plots and, I am afraid to say, there may well be a successful plot, so people will die. We have lost data. We knew that we would lose data and the ability to get intercepts on these people as far back as six or seven years ago. Intercept is absolutely crucial in these terrorist crimes. When I was a Minister, every single one of the plots that we unravelled was done initially through intercept information. I think I am correct in saying that has been the case with every major plot that we have unravelled.

As the noble Lord, Lord King, said, the Prime Minister, the Home Secretary, the head of GCHQ and the head of the Security Service have all said that this Bill is urgent, and I do not think that one should take what they say on security lightly. The traitor Snowden has made us all less safe. Terrorists are now much cuter about using data in ways which mean that our law enforcement people cannot get hold of them. As an aside, it is rather amusing or ironic that Snowden is living in a country which is such a paragon in terms of ensuring that its people are not snooped at and looked at, but that is a different issue.

The fact that the fast-track Bill is very important does not mean that we should miss this opportunity to tackle this issue. The noble Lord, Lord Carlile, put it very neatly when talking about the amendments drawn up for the Joint Committee. It is absolutely extraordinary that we have not been allowed to see those. We understand that there will be more amendments given that we had emergency legislation last summer. Why did we have that? It was because we did not have a communications data Bill. We have a fast-track Bill now which includes data provision. Why is that? It is because we do not have a communications data Bill. How much better the situation would be if we had had a proper communications data Bill.

There is a two-month period now. In two months we formed a task force, sailed to the Falklands, recaptured them and said that we had won. We have two months in which the other place is doing almost nothing at all. Perhaps it could stop working a two-day week, take this Bill seriously with all the amendments, do all the necessary amending, and give itself enough time to provide the necessary safeguards for our people—it is right that they should have privacy safeguards—but also make them safer. I doubt very much that there will be another two months in which to do this in the other place after the election, as has already been touched on by a number of speakers, as things will start to happen then and we have to have new legislation by December 2016. That sounds very far away but it is not; it is very close. Therefore, it is highly likely that there will be more fast-track and emergency legislation, as my noble friend Lord Harris said, because we are missing a trick in getting this done.

I hope that the Conservative Party and the Labour Party will put this issue in their manifestos and make it a manifesto commitment. If the Liberal Democrats did so I would be absolutely delighted, but I fear that at the moment they do not seem to know which way is up on this issue. Will the Minister give that commitment?

Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill

Debate between Lord Blair of Boughton and Lord West of Spithead

Monday 26th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blair of Boughton (CB)]

My Lords, I placed my name in support of Amendment 79 with those of the noble Lords, Lord King of Bridgwater, Lord Carlile of Berriew, and Lord West of Spithead. I echo what the noble Lord, Lord King, has said. I am not a party politician but this issue is far beyond politics. I put my name down in order to place in the records of the House the significance of communications data to the police and security services, which are now specifically mentioned in subsection (6) of the new clause proposed in Amendment 87. Those three agencies and the police are the agencies—the only ones—to which this communications data section will now apply.

Those agencies’ needs must be understood. They have been subject to a great deal of obfuscation, both witting and unwitting. The police and the security services are not asking for new powers. Rather, they are asking for the retention of what they already have but are now losing. They need the ability to determine, in specified circumstances, which telephone or other device has been used where, when, and to communicate with whom. This is an investigative tool of equal significance to DNA and fingerprinting, but changing technology is eroding that ability.

This is not the first time we have faced such a threat. I first met the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, in the early 1990s, and we were then discussing the fact that mobile telephones were appearing and were destroying the ability of the police and the security services to carry out lawful interception. Fortunately, that technology was overcome and new measures were brought in—and that is what people in these services are asking for now. The situation is that mobile telephones and the internet are merging. All the different apps for phones mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord King, along with all the other services, are increasingly being used across the internet via something I now know more about than I ever wanted to—a system known as VoIP, the Voice over Internet Protocol. This makes all those transmissions untraceable. I will not specify them, but they are being used in methodologies that Members of this House will be using most days. They are already changing things and we are losing our technological edge on terrorists and criminals.

We are not asking, as I heard a senior politician say on the radio recently, to listen to or to read every message, phone call and visit to an internet site by every person in Britain. A moment’s thought would show that that is completely and utterly impossible. We want to retain for one year data about where and when a particular device has been used, and to communicate with what. If suspicion emerges about a device or its user, that data can be interrogated.

I want to point out the reason for our insertion of the words “serious crime”, because this is not just a terrorist matter. Let me give two examples of capabilities that are now disappearing. A teenager goes missing in Sussex. She has had episodes of self-harm and she was last seen heading towards Beachy Head. All teenagers, whether or not they are capable of self-harm, are likely to have their phone with them. That phone will locate the child—but in a few years’ time, it will not. I cite the example of a dead body found in a field with signs of violence. One of the first things that the senior investigating officer will say is, “Get me the phone data”. What he or she wants to know is which phone has been carried across that field in the past few days. Which phone has been within a few hundred yards of the site of where the body was found? That information is what the police need in order to be able to identify the murderers by the technology that betrays them. At the moment, we can do it in most cases, but we are gradually losing that capability.

I turn to an actual case. Noble Lords will remember the terrorist attack on Glasgow airport. It had been preceded two days before by an attempted atrocity in central London, at the Tiger Tiger nightclub. The Metropolitan Police were 20 minutes behind the bomber when he reached Glasgow airport—and the way they did that was through tracing the phones.

The noble Lord, Lord West, recently mentioned the phrase “snoopers’ charter”, and referred to it as sanctimonious claptrap; I agree with him. In this amendment we have limited those who could exercise this kind of power to the security services and the police when investigating or preventing serious crime. They are not snoopers but lifesavers. Perhaps I may add to what the noble Lord, Lord King, said. I could usefully put before noble Lords how the Home Secretary finished her Statement to the House of Commons:

“It is too soon to say for certain, but it is highly probable that communications data were used in the Paris attacks to locate the suspects and establish the links between the two attacks”.

Given my professional background, I, along with my colleague and noble friend Lord Condon, can say, “Almost certainly”. The Home Secretary went on to say:

“Quite simply, if we want the police and the security services to protect the public and save lives, they need this capability”—[Official Report, Commons, 14/1/15; col. 871.]

I agree.

[Lord West of Spithead]

My Lords, my name is also on this amendment in support of the noble Lord, Lord King, along with those of the noble Lords, Lord Carlile and Lord Blair. I will mention some history as well, which is important because of the time lags and time. In 2009, when I was Minister for Security and Counter-Terrorism, I was made aware that changes to communications technology meant that a record of communications information would no longer be held by the communications service providers and that technology was changing the type of data that were available. This information was held purely as it was needed for the companies’ billing procedures—that is why they kept it—and, as such, was available for use by properly authorised state officials, in particular for prosecution of serious crimes and in terrorism cases. New technologies and methods of communication meant that firms were beginning to, and going to, charge differently.

Over time, communications material, which, as has already been said, was used to help to gain convictions in over 95% of serious criminal cases, was going to be lost—a very serious and irrevocable loss that would impact on the security and safety of our nation and our people. To try to ensure such information would be kept, and to access these new technologies, we started to draft a new communications data Bill. There was then an election, the coalition came into power, and the coalition drafted a new Communications Data Bill which was passed to Parliament for pre-scrutiny, as has been mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord King. It had many flaws and underwent considerable redrafting —the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, will, I am sure, talk about this later—to ensure that there were sufficient safeguards and so on. Indeed, the Home Office, as the noble Lord, Lord King, has mentioned, did a considerable amount of work to rectify all the faults with that Bill. Subsequently, for political reasons, it was kicked into touch. We find ourselves today, some six years—not two and a half years—after we started to try to draft legislation that would ensure no loss of what we already had, having done nothing but expend a great deal of hot air. Week by week we are losing the ability we once had; for example, to place a criminal close to the scene of a crime on a certain day, as has just been mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Blair.

The Prime Minister and the Home Secretary have both said in the past few weeks that this legislation is needed urgently—and they are right. So why is nothing happening? Well, yes, there are reviews going on, not least by the Government’s Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, Mr Anderson, and that is very sensible. But perhaps as a nation we should move more expeditiously on such a crucial matter.

One of the great strengths of this House is that it contains globally admired experts on almost every issue under the sun, and it can also act as a conscience for the elected Chamber in the other place. The noble Lords, Lord King, Lord Carlile and Lord Blair, are acknowledged experts in this field and clearly their advice has to be taken very seriously. They have identified this window of opportunity to rectify the growing shortfall in our ability to prosecute crime, whether criminal or terrorist. Do we really want murderers, people traffickers, serious organised crime and terrorists to be able to communicate and plot out of the reach of our law enforcement agencies? Do we want them to be able to avoid detection and prosecution in a way that they have not been able to in the past? The answer, surely, has to be no.

That does not mean that there do not have to be sufficient safeguards; for example, to ensure data that are properly looked after, as the communications providers have indeed always had to do, and to decide how long such data need to be held for. In addition, we need to investigate the costs because companies will be keeping data they no longer require for themselves so will want to charge us—they will probably want to overcharge us—for the privilege. The Government should be very hard-nosed on this point.

Much has been, and will be, said about individual privacy but, as the European human rights legislation points out, privacy is not an absolute right. There is much emotive claptrap using words such as “snooper”. It is, in that context, interesting to note that the judges at the tribunal looking into the allegation that GCHQ is involved in mass surveillance have just reported and were all absolutely clear in their judgment that there is no “mass” but rather only highly “targeted” surveillance properly authorised. Indeed, as the noble Lord, Lord King, mentioned, the data we are looking at here are not the contents of the letter, but what I would call the outside of the envelope. To be quite honest, the people we should be really worried about looking inside the envelope are various private companies, firms and ne’er-do-wells—not the Government.