EUC Report: Internal Security Strategy

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Thursday 19th January 2012 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

That this House takes note of the report of the European Union Committee, The EU Internal Security Strategy (17th Report, HL Paper 149).

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

My Lords, the report of the European Union Committee on the European Union's internal security strategy was published on 24 May 2011. I am therefore glad now, after nearly eight months, to have the opportunity to bring it to your Lordships' House for debate as chairman of the Home Affairs Sub-Committee, which conducted the inquiry. However, in doing so, I cannot simply pass over that remarkable—and, in my view—lamentably long delay. If the House wishes to ensure the topicality and relevance of the debates it holds on subjects such as this and reports such as the one we are considering today, it must improve its record on the scheduling of debates.

Internal security is primarily a matter for member states themselves, but the treaty of Lisbon, although reflecting that, for the first time gave the European Union an explicit responsibility by setting up a committee whose prime aim is,

“to ensure that operational cooperation and internal security is promoted and strengthened within the Union”.

The committee is known as COSI—one of those dreadful acronyms—and I shall have more to say about it in a moment.

The new responsibility of the European Union, although limited, led to the five-year Stockholm programme, which invited both the Council and the Commission,

“to define a comprehensive Union internal security strategy”.

Both institutions took up the challenge. I hope that I am not being disobliging when I say that the Council strategy, which was agreed in March 2010, was an anodyne document of no great weight. However, in November 2010, the Commission published in response to the Council document what was intended to be an implementing communication called, The EU Internal Security Strategy in Action. That document formed the basis of our inquiry.

Security is a complex subject, and we were fortunate to have as our special adviser Stephen Hawker, whose experience and knowledge of counterterrorism and security issues is so wide that I am not permitted to divulge to the House more about his background. I can, however, say that the committee was extraordinarily grateful for his help.

In this Parliament, institutions of the European Union tend to come in for blame rather than praise, and that is particularly true of the Commission. I am glad, therefore, to be able to say that the Commission’s document was, in the view of the committee, pragmatic and realistic, focusing on five areas where the EU could and should have some real influence. These are: the disruption of international criminal networks; prevention of terrorism; security in cyberspace; improved border management; and increased resilience to crises and disasters—natural disasters, in particular. The document is a first rational attempt to articulate a comprehensive approach to the EU’s internal security, and I pay tribute to the impressive work of Commissioner Cecilia Malmström, the Home Affairs Commissioner.

Our inquiry was long and so, I fear, is our report. In this speech I shall concentrate on only a few aspects of it—primarily, not surprisingly, those where we regard the Government’s response to be unsatisfactory. However, the Government agreed with many of our recommendations, and I was very grateful, as was the committee, for that. In particular, I was struck by the fact that they firmly endorsed the committee’s view that Britain’s internal security neither begins nor ends at the water’s edge. That kind of conceptual approach is quite important because it rather gives the lie to the suggestion that we can just do this on our own and that will be fine.

The first of the areas where we are a little at odds with the Government in their response relates to cybercrime. No one nowadays doubts the scale of the damage that can be, and is being, done by cybercrime and by attacks on cybersecurity. Of course, much of the work of defending against them is a national responsibility or is being followed up in a military context in NATO. However, the cybercrime element is a bit different. The Commission recommended the setting up of a new cybercrime centre, through which the member states and institutions would be able to build operational and analytical capacity for investigations and for co-operation with international partners. Our witnesses, including the government witnesses, agreed almost without exception that this would be a worthwhile development, as did the committee. We recommended that it should not be a new free-standing institution, which we thought would be wasteful and duplicative, but that it should be located within Europol, which is increasingly becoming a central part of Europe’s efforts against various forms of crime and which possesses some of the infrastructure needed. The Government, I am glad to say, agreed on both those points. The disagreement between us comes over the funding.

Cybercrime is a huge cost to all our economies and it cannot be fought without resources, yet that is roughly what the Government would like to do. They are prepared—quite rightly, in my view—to allocate £650 million in new funds to the UK’s own national cybersecurity programme but they seem to think that Europol can fund a new EU cybercrime centre out of thin air from its existing budget. The EU’s budget framework for the years 2014 to 2020 is something that the Select Committee and its sub-committees are considering again at this moment, and I shall not stray into that wider territory. We are all realistic enough to appreciate that overall now is not the time for an increase in the EU budget. However, a reallocation of resources within the budget is another matter. The home affairs budget is actually less than 1 per cent of the total EU budget and will reach only about 1 per cent of the total EU budget if the Commission’s proposals for 2013 go through, which they may very possibly not do in the form in which they have been put forward.

I and my committee would argue that it is not really credible for the Government to suggest that the relatively modest cost of setting up the cybercrime centre within Europol cannot be found from other heads of the EU budget. The Government’s position is that it has to be found within the justice and home affairs budget, which is not really credible. I hope that the Minister will be able to undertake to look again at that aspect. I am not expecting him to concede the point here and now—I know where the true decisions on these matters are taken—but I hope that it will be looked at again because the suggestion that this can be found within the JHA budget is not very credible.

Mention of Europol brings me to the question of its parliamentary oversight. The treaty of Lisbon introduced the requirement that national parliaments should join with the European Parliament in overseeing the work of Europol. It had been suggested by the Commission, although not in the strategy document that we are debating today, that that should be done by a new and specially constituted body. My committee thought, and repeated in the report, that this could and should be done not by a new specially constituted body but by the joint interparliamentary meetings which already regularly take place between chairs of the home affairs sub-committees or committees of national parliaments and of the European Parliament.

I went to Brussels last October as chairman of the EU Home Affairs Sub-Committee for a meeting of those chairmen and it was hosted by the equivalent committee, the LIBE committee, of the European Parliament. At a session which I chaired, it was agreed that that oversight should be carried out by such existing annual joint interparliamentary committee meetings. The government response did not deal with the issue but I would like to hear from the Minister whether the Government agree that that is a satisfactory way in which to proceed and whether they will do all that they can to ensure that this approach, and not the more cumbersome approach which the commission proposed, is agreed at EU level.

I mentioned earlier the committee called COSI, which can broadly be rendered into normal English as the committee of senior interior ministry officials. Potentially, that is a high-powered body which could, and should, help to co-ordinate and, where appropriate, direct all the European Union's work on internal security. Currently, that work is distributed among a very large number of committees, working groups and working parties. We actually managed to unearth 14 of them which we listed in our report. I do not doubt that there are some lurking in the undergrowth that we may have missed. Much of their work overlaps. Setting up COSI was an opportunity for some, at least, of these bodies to be merged or abolished, but that opportunity was not taken. Most of them continue. The Government, who supposedly favour the abolition of otiose bodies, seem lukewarm about our recommendation, telling us only that they would be prepared to consider a case for COSI replacing or overseeing such bodies once it has established itself. That was six months ago. I hope that the Minister can now tell the House that he is prepared to press for COSI to have a more significant co-ordinating function and for some of this plethora of committees to be abolished.

The chairmanship of Council working parties usually rotates with the presidency on a biannual basis. Sometimes that does no harm but the committee felt that, in this sector, with a group of experts like COSI, there was a strong case for a more durable, longer-lasting chairmanship. The Government agreed that members of COSI should be senior, operationally focused officials with authority to commit their national operational resources but they could see the benefit of one of the best qualified of these officials chairing the group for, say, two or three years. That is by no means unknown in European Union practice; it was for many years the way in which the European Union’s monetary committee was run, in some years extremely effectively and professionally, by a member of Her Majesty's Treasury. That would be an improvement over the six-month rotation in the chairmanship of that committee. The Government conceded that six-monthly rotation,

“might have a detrimental impact on the Committee”,

but thought this might be mitigated by the adoption of the three-presidency approach, by which three successive presidencies work together. Frankly, mitigation is not quite enough. If a six-monthly rotating chairmanship is detrimental, the Government should seek the agreement of other member states to do away with it and have a more professional approach.

Data protection will shortly be in the news again, when the Commission brings forward its long-awaited proposal for a new directive. This is very relevant to internal security, so much of which depends on the painstaking collection and analysis of personal data. A balance has to be found between the interests of security and those of personal privacy, and this is never easy. It is particularly difficult in the case of the passenger name record data, or PNR: the data on passengers on flights entering or leaving the European Union. Flights from the EU to Australia are already the subject of an agreement which has, in our view, satisfactory data protection provisions. Flights from the EU to the US are the subject of an agreement—the fourth—which has been initialled but is not yet in force. All I can say about that one is that its data protection provisions are marginally better than those in the existing EU-US agreement, which is not saying an awful lot.

Data on flights into the EU are now to be the subject of a directive, not just flights from Australia or from the US. The Government, encouraged by a report which was endorsed by this House, have already opted into the proposal for this directive and I hope that the Minister will confirm that during the course of the negotiations, he will be paying due regard to the importance of the protection of passengers’ data—all the more so if, as the Government hope and the Committee hopes, too, that directive is extended to cover intra-EU flights, not only flights into the EU from outside.

I cannot conclude without mentioning yet again a question which the House has raised time and again in taking evidence from Ministers and officials in this House, and many times in correspondence with Ministers. I refer to the Government’s failure to sign or ratify the Council of Europe convention on money laundering, known as the Warsaw convention. The disruption of international criminal networks is, as I have said, one of the objects of the strategy we were examining and there is no doubt that the tracing and confiscation of the proceeds of crime is one of the most powerful weapons in the armoury of states.

The previous Government undertook to ratify the Warsaw convention early in 2010. For this Government the noble Lord, Lord Henley, who will be replying to this debate, assured the committee only last month that he was pretty sure that the United Kingdom was compliant with the convention, but that the Home Office did not currently have the resources to review this and therefore was not prepared to set a date for signature and ratification. I asked him when the Government would sign the convention, to which he replied,

“I would hope we would do so within the next year or so but I am not going to be any more precise than that”.

I hate to say so but he could not have been any less precise, even if he had tried.

A failure to sign one of the major international instruments for combating serious, organised crime does not give the impression of a Government who take the fight against such crime seriously. If we do not sign and ratify such a convention, how can we expect others to do likewise and how can we hope to play a leadership role in the Council of Europe, over whose intergovernmental activities we currently preside? I know that the Minister has already taken one broadside on this subject in the course of Questions in this House today. I am offering him here a somewhat less difficult matter, which does not raise the issue of extraterritoriality which he referred to earlier. It is frankly a little difficult to believe that the amount of resources needed to be quite sure that we are in conformity with a convention, as he is confident that we are, is such an enormous burden that it cannot be undertaken. It is a shame, frankly, that we are not signed up to and ratifying that convention.

This inquiry was one of great interest to the Committee and our report raised a number of serious questions for the Minister to answer. I look forward to hearing his replies. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who contributed to this very useful debate. I am particularly grateful to the three members of the sub-committee that I chair who participated in the debate in a singularly apt and helpful manner, but I am grateful also to all other noble Lords. I hope that I will be forgiven if I do not mention everyone, because brevity is the essence of the contribution that I am called on to make at the end of the debate.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, for what he said about cybercrime. He brought a lot of very pertinent evidence to bear and demonstrated that there is a huge cost to all our economies from the—alas—all too successful cybercrime that exists. Therefore, when we come to look at the resources we devote to combating this form of crime, we should bear in mind those massive sums and think about how, not in strictly budgetary terms, they could benefit not only this country but Europe collectively. I am also most grateful for what the noble Lord said about the follow-up to the Foreign Secretary's initiative last November, which the committee warmly welcomed. Perhaps I dare say that we envisaged such a conference before it was even a gleam in the eye of the Foreign Secretary. We had written a report on cybersecurity some time previously, in which we said that we hoped to see the Government taking an initiative to deal with the global issues that the noble Lord, Lord Judd, so wisely put his finger on.

I will make just two points about the reply of the noble Lord, Lord Henley. I am grateful to both noble Lords on the Front Benches for their offer of thanks and support to the committee; it is of great benefit to us. My first point is on the budgetary issue. I will not go any further because the response given today by the noble Lord, Lord Henley, was helpful. However, I must draw his attention to an Explanatory Memorandum that his department put its name to recently, which was less helpful than the response that he gave across the Floor of the House this afternoon. I think it was in paragraph 26 of the memorandum—I cite from memory—that the department stated that any increase in the resources needed for, let us say, cybercrime or anything in the justice and home affairs area must be found within that chapter of the budget. That is unbelievably restrictive and completely contrary to the policy that has been pursued by successive British Governments for I do not know how long, which is that we should look for transfers and shifts in the priorities of the budget, most obviously away from excessive expenditure on agriculture, and should focus the budget on higher priority areas.

The answer that the noble Lord gave just now was spot on. My committee is not saying that we should increase the overall resources allocated to the European Union; we are saying that we should reprioritise them. The Minister’s answer said precisely that: if savings can be found in other parts of the budget, it will be fine. However, it is not what the Explanatory Memorandum stated. I will not go on any longer because the EU Select Committee that is preparing a further report on the budgetary aspects of the multiannual financial framework will come back to this point in that context, and the Government will have an opportunity to give their considered response. I hope very much that the department for which the noble Lord is responsible will play its modest role in ensuring that it is properly understood that if we say that everything has to be found within individual chapters, it will be a recipe for stasis and for no change at all, and that no other member state will have any incentive to support reductions if resources cannot be moved to higher priority areas.

I turn finally to the noble Lord’s reply on the institutional point. I think that there was a slight misunderstanding. The approach that the EU Select Committee and my sub-committee supported was not to create any new institution. However, we are saddled with the fact that the Lisbon treaty instructs the institutions to provide oversight that brings together national Parliaments and the European Parliament. We are not proposing any shift because these meetings already take place on an annual basis between the chairs of the home affairs committees and the LIBE committee of the Parliament. We are merely suggesting that the Government throw their weight behind somewhat formalising that structure as the basis on which to keep an eye on Frontex, Europol, Eurojust and so on. It is totally cost-effective. It does not cost a penny, and it involves no new institutions. I mention that because I think that the Minister rather implied that we were thinking of something more ambitious. We are not.

I thank all those who participated and thank the Minister for his extremely thoughtful response. I am a little sad about the Warsaw convention, and I still hope that he can find some way to accelerate that. It is quite clearly less difficult than what he was dealing with earlier this afternoon. I previously dealt quite a lot with extraterritorial issues, and I understand that they bristle with difficulties. We are not really talking about that sort of thing in terms of the Warsaw convention, and I hope that he will find some way of moving to ratification of that pretty quickly because I do not think it does our reputation any credit and I do not think it is in the interests of this country that people pick and chose the things that they do or do not ratify.

Motion agreed.