Security of Government Devices

Lord Foulkes of Cumnock Excerpts

Tuesday 21st March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

I do not have anything to say specifically on the review of the Ministerial Code; it is of course kept under review, and we now have a new ethics adviser. These sorts of matters are certainly being considered in the context of the new guidance on the use of non-corporate forms of communication, and I look forward to making a public statement on that in the not too distant future.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab Co-op)]

My Lords, the Minister said in reply to a question from my noble friend on the Front Bench that Ministers are given security advice. But that is useful only if they take notice of the advice they are given. How can we believe that they do that, when Boris Johnson, when he was Foreign Secretary, went to parties in Italy as a guest of Alexander Lebedev, and then later on promoted Alexander Lebedev’s son, Evgeny—the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev—to the House of Lords, against the advice of the security services? Surely that gives some evidence that he may well have been compromised.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

I always resist commenting on individual cases. Of course, that comment does not necessarily take account of the steps we have made on briefing Ministers, including new Ministers, on security matters. The evolution of social media has been beneficial in many ways; I am sure that noble Lords use it for non-security matters, and we believe that that is perfectly all right on people’s private phones as a complement to the use of government phones for government business. We are very clear that, where people use private phones for government business because they cannot do anything else, it is important that substantive government exchanges are passed on to the private office or elsewhere, so that they are added to the public record. You have to have a balance in this system; we have to have rules which make sense and respect security but are also workable.