Border Force Budget 2016-17

Lord Jopling Excerpts

Wednesday 20th April 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jopling (Con)]

My Lords, will the Minister explain why at some airports passports of people leaving this country are examined and recorded, whereas at others no check whatever is made? Is this because of a shortage of resources?

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon]

As my noble friend will know, it was this Government who reintroduced exit checks last year. He is right to point out that we introduced these checks in particular in larger ports. If there are specific airports he is concerned about I will be happy to discuss them with him afterwards and write to him accordingly.

North of England: Transport

Lord Jopling Excerpts

Wednesday 17th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jopling (Con)]

My Lords, perhaps I may begin by teasing my old friend, the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, under whose admirable chairmanship I served only a few years ago. I suggest to him that the next time he travels from the south-west to Newcastle via Leeds and Doncaster to Darlington, he would be better to go along one side of the triangle and go direct to York and then on to the north-east. I know him well enough to tease him in that way.

I certainly welcome this debate. I particularly welcome the Minister’s opening speech expressing the Government’s determination to do something about the problems of transport connectivity and infrastructure in the north of England. We must face it: it is a mixed picture of some blessings and quite a number of horrors. I shall begin by talking about the train service. At the moment, the north-south train connection between London and Yorkshire and the north-east is good. In fact, one can go from King’s Cross to York in less than two hours, and those quick trains move on. It is good news that the east coast main line is going to have further improvements; that is very welcome. What has been a big bonus on the east coast main line in recent years has been the arrival of the Grand Central railway company which, after a very shaky start, has very much improved access and kept the fares down on that line. That is welcome and demonstrates the advantage of competition.

However, while the north-south rail connections are good on the whole, the east-west service is absolutely lamentable. That is the main horror of the northern rail transport service. I will not quote examples; if noble Lords look at the most helpful briefing that the Library of the House produced, they will find ample examples of the ridiculous problems that travellers have in moving east to west, including within the industrial areas of the north. I very much welcome what the noble Lord, Lord Prescott, said: “Get on with it”. He made a big thing of saying that. It is one thing to have plans, documents and intentions, but the thing is to get on with it, and I very much welcomed his saying that that is what needs to be done.

There is one particular horror which I find in the northern railway network, which is the existence of what is ridiculously called the TransPennine Express, which is a connection between the north-east and Manchester Airport. I have always thought, on the fortunately infrequent occasions when I have had to resort to this service on the way to Manchester Airport, that it is a strange combination of Cobbett’s Rural Rides and what John Betjeman described in his poems as his rural rail jaunts from halt to stop at rural stations.

I will say just one word about HS2, which very much follows what the noble Lord, Lord Prescott, said. As it is planned at the moment, HS2 will be very helpful indeed as far as the West Riding of Yorkshire is concerned, but, as he said, when you think about York, Hull and the north-east, it will not be much of a bonus to travellers who want to go into those areas, and I cannot see them using it very much.

On the road situation, I think of connectivity, which is part of the subject of the debate, and in particular of the connectivity of the road network to the north of England. Of course, the main motorway to the north is the M1. I was horrified to hear in a recent Question in your Lordships’ House that at that time on the M1 between London and Yorkshire, 25% of the road was under speed restrictions. I myself was on parts of the M1 only last weekend, and it seemed that the speed restrictions were going on and on and that in general there was no need whatever for them. I hope that the Government will shake up Highways England to lift those speed restrictions where it can, because there seemed to be mile upon mile where no work was apparently being done—certainly nobody was there performing it.

I travel from North Yorkshire to London each week on the roads and I have stopped using the M1, which I always used to use, and have started using the A1. However, I am very glad to read in the Government’s road document, which was produced at the end of last year by the coalition Government, that it is intended to improve the southern part of the A1 south of Peterborough to move it towards what is described as “full motorway standard”. I would hope that that would eliminate those dreadful five roundabouts between Huntingdon and London, which at various times do so much to hold up the traffic and deter connectivity between the south and the north of England.

I also ask the Government to consider the planning of roadworks and the management of all the work that will be going on. During the last couple of weeks, I asked a Question about one particular road improvement near Gamston Airport, on the A1 south of Doncaster, which seems to have been going on for endless months and years. I was told that the cost of putting a new bridge over the A1 has risen from an estimated £7 million to £13 million. I then tabled another Question, the answer to which I have been handed since I have been sitting here. I asked what problems were being encountered by Highways England and their contractors. Perhaps I may briefly tell your Lordships that they were: first, previously unidentified old contaminated landfill sites; secondly, the excavation of old concrete and tarmac; thirdly, the need for an additional infiltration pond; and, fourthly, a change in the central pier design. Every one of those things ought to have been seen, noted and sorted out before the work ever began, and I am very critical of what can only be described as the sometimes cack-handed way in which the highways authority goes about awarding these contracts.

Finally, there is another issue, to which the noble Lord referred in his opening speech, which is that a study has been commissioned to decide whether it is best to dual the A66 between Penrith and Scotch Corner or the A69 between Carlisle and Newcastle. To be quite honest, while both are important, I think that by far the more important is the A66. I used to use it when my constituency was in the Lake District but I very rarely use it now. I can only think that setting up a study group to look at those two options is tantamount to kicking for touch and hoping to find the long grass. The A66 is the key route from the industrial area of Scotland down the west side and then across to serve the east coast ports and the east of England and to go towards London. I do not think that we ought to be messing about with a study group, as I would have thought that the solution was obvious.

Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill

Lord Jopling Excerpts

Tuesday 13th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jopling (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome the Bill. Many of us agree that the tragic events in Paris over the last few days only underline the relevance of this Bill at this time.

I have been looking at the Explanatory Notes for the Bill. I understand, as we all do, that the Explanatory Notes are not part of the Bill, but explain the background thinking of the Government in this. Paragraph 5 says:

“The UK has a strategy for countering terrorism”.

It goes on to say that it is based around four main areas of work and that the provisions in this legislation work in particular to the first three: Pursue, Prevent and Protect. I want to talk about the fourth part of the strategy, Prepare, which is explained as,

“working to minimise the impact of an attack and to recover from it as quickly as possible”.

I hope that it may be possible to strengthen the Bill by finding ways to improve our preparedness for a terrorist attack and to deal with it after it has happened. Terrorist attacks, as we know, can come in many forms. The Paris outrages are strong in our memories at this time but we should understand that individual zealots intent on killing by the use of either the gun or a suicide bomb could be seen as comparatively limited outrages compared with what we could be faced with in the future—events that could even exceed the twin towers tragedy in New York.

My principal concern today is the potentially much more serious attacks that could cause far wider, long-term devastation. I am concerned about our preparations for CBRN attacks, which are not impossible. We must be better prepared for the use of chemical, biological, radioactive or nuclear devices and aware that attacks could happen. In most of these possibilities it is essential that the authorities are aware at the earliest possible moment after the attack of its nature and of what we are confronted with. In the case of a radioactive attack using a dirty bomb, it is essential that we know as soon as possible whether the terrorist bomb that has gone off has radioactive material attached to it, so that at the earliest moment the public can be warned what to do if there is radioactive contamination. I only hope that we are fully prepared countrywide to be able to identify the effects of a dirty bomb when it might happen.

[Lord Judd (Lab)]

The noble Lord is making an extremely powerful point, which all of us must take very seriously, but does he agree that is not only radioactive threats with which we should be concerned? We need to be equally concerned about bacteriological and other forms of life-threatening content.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Jopling]

My noble friend Lord Judd must be a little patient because I am moving on to exactly those points—which cause me even greater concern—in a few moments, if he would be good enough to bear with me.

I welcome the provisions in the Bill that take further steps to strengthen border controls over the various transportation routes. Devices which are known and available can in many cases identify radioactive substances that might be hidden in lorries, trains or ships and could be used for a dirty bomb. I can only hope, and ask Ministers to ensure, that devices that can identify radioactive material are fully used wherever possible.

Now I turn to the point the noble Lord, Lord Judd, has just raised—biological attacks and the way in which a major attack on a city could be implemented by the use of aerosols. This is an area where I think there is the greatest and most urgent need for early warning systems so that we know the nature of the attacks at the first possible moment. As we know, these attacks could come in the form of various diseases, of which smallpox, anthrax or botulism are only examples. It is no good waiting days and maybe even a week or two after an attack of this sort for clinical symptoms to appear in people who are infected. By that time it is too late—a classic case of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted.

In many parts of the world—particularly, as I know, in parts of the United States and indeed in the United Kingdom—it has been the, to my mind, ludicrous and bewildering strategy to monitor sales of aspirin in chemists’ shops as an indication of whether a major biological attack has taken place. I am serious about that. Devices are now available to monitor the atmosphere on a daily basis. They can indicate very soon after a biological attack that there are, in the atmosphere, biological organisms which could have caused widespread diseases. When I last inquired about this in New York some months ago, I was told by the police department that it had 20 of these devices around the city. I can say to the Minister only that it is absolutely vital that we employ those automatic devices throughout our major cities, so that we know that a biological attack has happened within hours rather than maybe a week after it when people become ill.

There is another issue on preparedness which concerns me and I have asked a number of questions about it in your Lordships’ House over the years. The issue is how many front-line doctors and nurses are vaccinated for smallpox and other potential vehicles for biological attacks. In the past, the numbers have been seriously low. I have talked to Ministers about this, stressing how crucial it is to increase the number of front-line medical staff who are vaccinated so that they can deal with an outbreak.

I now come to one other point which I would like the Minister to look into. Again, it is an issue that I have raised before and which continues to cause me concern. It relates to a substance whose name will be familiar to most Members of your Lordships’ House. I refer to Botox, a well known cosmetic treatment for women. While Botox itself is not a danger, the substance from which it is created is absolutely lethal. Botox is created by sterilising botulinum toxins, which cause the dreadful, horrible and deadly infection of botulism. I was told some time ago by researchers in the United States that they had evidence that botulinum toxins had been made available on the internet in certain countries in Asia. One can see the immediate danger of terrorists getting hold of those toxins. I hope that Ministers are aware of this situation and that they are doing everything they can to close down possible sources of botulinum toxins for potential terrorist activities.

I am trying to draw attention to possible shortcomings in our preparedness for devastating terrorist attacks. I hope that Ministers will take notice and apply themselves to addressing them. It is said—and I understand why—to be sometimes in the interests of national security that there is a reluctance to describe fully the structure and details of our preparedness. If the Minister is unable, for those reasons, to reply to the points I have tried to make, could he write to me and express the Government’s views on these anxieties? However, if we were to suffer a devastating attack of the kind that I have been describing, and it afterwards became clear that the warnings such as the ones I have been trying to put over today had not been heeded, I warn Ministers that their lives, in those circumstances, would be barely tolerable, to say nothing of their consciences.

Calais: Illegal Immigrants

Lord Jopling Excerpts

Thursday 27th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates]

If they are stopped at the French border, that is an issue for the French. If they arrive in the UK, they have the opportunity to apply for asylum. The asylum regime is there and advice is available to them. I must say that in a lot of these cases—this backs up the claim made by the noble Lord—they actually want to be put back in France so that they can try again, because they want to get into this country to work illegally.

[Lord Jopling (Con)]

My Lords, the Minister will know that at the port of Calais there is very sophisticated X-ray equipment that can see whether there are people hiding inside containers. Can he tell us what proportion of lorries are monitored with that equipment, or is it just a random selection, with only a small proportion being vetted in that way?

[Lord Bates]

All vehicles have to go through that level of vetting, which is carried out by the Border Force using the latest technology for sensing whether there are people in the vehicle. That is a strong safeguard.

EU Police and Criminal Justice Measures: EUC Reports

Lord Jopling Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jopling (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, kindly referred to the fact that I was some years ago his predecessor as chairman of the sub-committee of the European committee that deals with matters of home affairs and that general area. I am bound to say that I have spent almost all the 16 years that I have been a Member of your Lordships’ House as a member of one or other of the sub-committees of the European committee, as well as a member over a number of years of the main committee.

The noble Lord, Lord Hannay, spoke of speaking harshly, and I shall speak no less harshly, but not quite on the same issues as those that he talked about. I am not a member of either of the select committees that have produced these reports. I am now a member of Sub-Committee C, which deals with foreign affairs and defence. Years ago, I was chairman of that committee. Over the years, I have had a continued disquiet over the Government’s attitude to the House of Lords and its work. The noble Lord, Lord Hannay, referred to a good many of the reservations that the members of the committees have had about how the Government have responded—and I am talking about Governments of both parties. I shall come to that a little later. I do not believe that the departments involved treat your Lordships’ House as they should.

If I were making a sermon, I would take as my text the Government’s response to House of Commons Paper 683, titled, The UK’s Block Opt-out of pre-Lisbon Criminal Law and Policing Measures, in which the Government say that they,

“thought it necessary to reply to one of the principal criticisms running through your report: a perceived lack of engagement by the Government with Parliament on this issue”.

That would be my text, but then one comes to the two reports that we are discussing. Paper 159, published on 23 April last year, in paragraph 280 says:

“We regret that the Government have not complied with their own undertakings to engage effectively with Parliament regarding the opt-out decision”.

In the second report, to which the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, also referred, which is Paper 69 published on 31 October last year—I am sorry to have to keep quoting these things, but it puts things into proper perspective—the committee states:

“We restate our disappointment that important information about the measures covered by the opt-out was not provided in a timely manner to Parliament and was only made available a few days before both Houses were asked to take decision on the Government’s proposed course of action”.

In the same report, in Chapter 2 and paragraph 106, the committee says:

“We regret that the grounds on which the Government made their selection of measures to seek to rejoin were not set out persuasively in the EMs”—

that is, the explanatory memoranda.

Those are just some examples of when the committee has had anxieties. Those anxieties are also spread among other European Union sub-committees, and we have seen much more blatant examples of incompetence by departments and Ministers in the past. When I was chairman of the committee of which the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, is now chairman, we had a case under the previous Government involving Mr Liam Byrne, who took over a year to reply to one of our letters. The then Leader of the House, the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton, actually named him, with a rebuke on the Floor of your Lordships’ House. I have been a Member of one House or another in this Building for just coming up to 50 years, and I can never remember a senior member of the Government publicly criticising a junior Minister, as she did, before.

We have had yet another case in Sub-Committee C, which I raised with the previous Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Green. We wrote him a letter in November 2012. He did not reply. We sent reminders at staff level the following March, May and August. We then wrote again last October, to find out what was going on. We found almost immediately afterwards that the Government had agreed the text, but we still had not had a reply to our letter of a year earlier. When the noble Lord came to give evidence to the committee, on 21 November last year, it seemed to the committee—I cannot swear that this is true, but there was every indication that it was—that the first the noble Lord had heard of this incompetence was as he was in the passage upstairs coming into the committee, when one of our officials told him and his officials that the matter was likely to be raised.

Those are two examples of Ministers in different Governments taking over a year to reply to our requests and correspondence. Frankly, it just will not do. One cannot help feeling that, just because your Lordships’ House is not so politically confrontational as the House along the corridor, they seem to think that they can treat it in that dilatory way. I resent that very much indeed. I am no Eurosceptic—philosophically, I tend very much in the opposite direction—so I am not using this argument to push a Eurosceptic line. That is the last thing I would do.

We get far too many overrides. Departments seem to have an unacceptable lack of urgency. Above all, Ministers do not insist. They do not see to it that they enforce proper attitudes towards your Lordships’ House in their departments. When, a few weeks ago, we confronted the noble Lord, Lord Green, with that delay—I got the impression that the poor man was hearing all this for the first time—I asked him, with regard to ministerial control over departments, “Have you ever heard of Sir Thomas Dugdale?” He said that he had. Your Lordships will remember that Sir Thomas was the Minister of Agriculture in the other House who resigned over the Crichel Down affair, which started in the 1940s, because he reckoned that he was in charge of the department, and dilatoriness and sloppiness in departments—which is what we see now—was the ultimate responsibility of Ministers. Your Lordships’ House should not be fobbed off by lack of ministerial control and sloppy departments.

Police: Officer Numbers

Lord Jopling Excerpts

Tuesday 13th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Henley]

I am very grateful to my noble friend for raising the question of bureaucracy. That is what my right honourable friend the Home Secretary has done in announcing a package of policies that will cut police red tape, saving some 3.3 million police hours per year. That is the equivalent of some 1,500 police posts.

[Lord Jopling]

My Lords, will the noble Lord answer yes to my question as to whether he will look at the pathetically low number of not only police officers but all emergency service workers who have been vaccinated against things such as smallpox and anthrax when the Olympic Games next year will clearly give us a dangerous situation so far as potential biological attacks are concerned?

[Lord Henley]

I hope I will be able to answer yes to my noble friend in due course. I will have to look at those figures, but I am unsighted on them at the moment. If my noble friend is prepared to accept it, I will write to him in due course.

Cyberattacks: EU Committee Report

Lord Jopling Excerpts

Thursday 14th October 2010 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Jopling]

That this House takes note of the Report of the European Union Committee on Protecting Europe against large-scale cyber-attacks (5th Report, Session 2009-10, HL Paper 68).

[Lord Jopling]

My Lords, this report on protecting Europe against large-scale cyberattacks followed an inquiry by the Home Affairs Sub-Committee of the European Union Select Committee. The chairmanship of the sub-committee is now in the safe and capable hands of the noble Lord, Lord Hannay of Chiswick. However, I was the chairman during the course of that fascinating inquiry and it therefore falls to me to open this debate.

We published the report on 18 May, seven months ago, the inquiry having begun in November last year. It is a long time, with a very fast-moving subject, since we published the report, and it is unfortunate, for such a fast-moving topic, that we have been prevented—mainly, of course, by the dissolution of Parliament—from having this debate earlier. I know that this is a continuing problem for Select Committees, which spend a lot of time and put a lot of work into their reports and then have to wait for a long time before the discussion comes to the Floor of your Lordships’ House.

I called this a fascinating inquiry. Certainly for me, it opened entirely new vistas. I believe that that was true of many other members of the committee. The process of educating us fell to Doctor Richard Clayton, our specialist adviser, and I pay particular tribute to his expert knowledge and helpful facility for explaining things to those less expert than him. I especially want to thank our clerk, Michael Collon, whose expertise, both in the past and in a continuing way, is of huge value to the Select Committee. The debate today brings with it two maiden speeches to which I, for one, am eagerly looking forward. They are from very distinguished experts in this field, both former Defence Secretaries, and I look forward enormously to their comments in the context of this report.

Anyone who doubts the havoc that successful cyberattacks can cause, and so the importance of protection against these attacks, needs to look no further than the opening pages of our report to see how in May 2007 Estonia virtually ground to a halt as a result not of, as it thought, activities by the Russian state, but perhaps more probably—no one is entirely sure—of activities by a number of disgruntled Russian students. More recently, noble Lords may have read about Stuxnet, a highly sophisticated virus designed to attack specific industrial infrastructure. It is so refined that many think that it could have been created only by a state. Computer systems in Iran have been particularly affected, and there is speculation that it could have been directed at one of the Iranian nuclear facilities—the Bushehr nuclear power plant or the Natanz uranium enrichment facility. There is no doubt that an appropriate virus of that sort could cause catastrophic failure at such a facility. That is a genuine example of cyberwar.

Colleagues will be aware of a speech made this week by Iain Lobban, the head of GCHQ at Cheltenham, which was reported in the Daily Telegraph yesterday. He said that cyberattacks pose a threat that,

“goes to the heart of our economic well-being and national interest”.

He went on to warn of,

“the threat from terrorists, criminals and hostile states using the internet”.

He said that:

“Government systems are being hit by email-borne attacks 1,000 times a month”.

Finally, he spoke of GCHQ,

“detecting more than 20,000 malicious emails on government networks each month”.

Those are examples of the possibilities with regard to cyberattacks.

I mention them for two reasons: first, as an illustration of the importance of protection against cyberattacks, although I am sure that noble Lords were never in any particular doubt about that; and, secondly, to make clear what our report means by cyberattack, since it is often confused with cybercrime. Cyberattacks are aimed at destroying or disabling major computer networks, such as power networks, communications or financial operations. They are obviously criminal acts. What is more accurately described as cybercrime is interference with personal internet security. By its nature, it relies on internet systems being up and running.

The trigger for our inquiry was a communication published by the European Commission in April 2009, entitled, Protecting Europe from Large Scale Cyber-attacks and Disruptions: Enhancing Preparedness, Security and Resilience. The disruptions to which the title refers are those caused by major natural disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina in 2005, or major accidental damage, such as the explosion at the Buncefield oil refinery in December 2005, which destroyed the offices of a company running a payroll system for employers of one in three Britons. In that case, the disruption was potentially severe, but the effects were not. That is an illustration of a point that witnesses made to us repeatedly; namely, that the internet is remarkably resilient. One of our witnesses said that it was designed to withstand a nuclear war. Noble Lords may find that comforting. Certainly I do. But at the same time it still means constant vigilance and absolutely no complacency.

The internet is global. Attacks are potentially global in scope and protection mechanisms must be prepared to meet global attacks. Our inquiry examined what role the European Union could play in defending the member states against attacks which would as easily come from outside the European Union as inside. Our conclusion was that much could be done only at local or at global level, but that there were also many areas where intervention at EU level could be helpful. However, the communication says little about the role of the European Union in a global context. That is unfortunate because there is no way in which any effective action can be taken at EU level without consideration of its effects at global level and the effects on it of global developments.

Network security is largely in the hands of organisations called computer emergency response teams, or CERTs. These organisations study network security to provide incident response services to victims of attacks and to publish alerts against attacks. In the UK, many large companies have their own CERT, as do organisations which have a common interest. JANET is a CERT for the academic world which protects up to 16 million people who are probably mostly unaware of its existence. The Government have their own CERT to protect the public sector, but there is no UK national CERT—nor does the committee believe that there is any need for one. The current system seems to work extremely well.

We were concerned that the Commission proposed that all member states should have national CERTs. We were hoping to read in the Government’s response that they had no intention of setting one up in the UK. In fact, we read in their response:

“The Government understands the argument that a national CERT would be of no added value to the UK, and that the current CERT network provides more effective protection. At this stage, we need to keep an open mind as to the best structures to support cyber defence and response in future”.

I am all for the Government keeping an open mind, but I hope that the Minister can assure us that they will not be setting up a national CERT just to satisfy the Commission’s yearning for tidiness. This is a classic example of, “If it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it”.

But that is not always the case elsewhere. While some member states have the same model as the UK and others have national CERTs that work well, other states have little or no CERT capacity and what they have is distinctly broke. In the case of these states, what the Commission proposes could be valuable. It will benefit the United Kingdom if other states have effective internet protection because we could suffer problems within the global network through ineffective protection in other member states. We suggested that in the member states where there are too few or inadequate CERTs, the Government should support this proposal. Their response did not address this and I should be most grateful if the Minister would give us that response today.

Those who in the past have listened to debates on the European Union Committee’s reports on home affairs will have heard me, on a number of occasions, deploring the lack of co-operation and co-ordination between the European Union and NATO. Protection against cyberattacks is a form of civil protection and one that is increasing exponentially in importance. After the attacks on Estonia in 2007, NATO became alarmed and stepped up its work in this field. So did the EU, but not in a co-ordinated way between them. We recommended, as we have before, that the two institutions should co-operate and co-ordinate rather than proceeding on their separate, parallel ways, and we urged the Government to intervene to make this happen. In their response the Government said that greater co-operation between the EU and NATO was a priority. I should be glad to know what developments have taken place in the mean time, and how successful they have been in pushing what they describe as “their own priority”.

In evidence to us, the then Minister for security, the noble Lord, Lord West of Spithead, was doubtful whether NATO had any part to play in protecting the internet, saying that he did not regard it as the appropriate body unless the security of an individual member was threatened. As his successor as Minister, does my noble friend Lady Neville-Jones share that view in the light of what I have just said?

Lastly, I turn to the European Network and Information Security Agency. The Council decided that the agency should be sited in Greece, and the Greeks decided that it should be sited in Crete at Heraklion. They do not seem to have given any consideration to the problem of recruiting and retaining specialist staff in a remote place which has no international school, nor to the fact that it can mean up to two extra days of travelling time for those attending meetings, especially in winter when flights are very limited. We recorded the criticism and frustration that this has aroused, but we accept that nothing can be done at this stage to reverse the situation. However, we welcomed the decision of the Greek Government to make office space available in Athens for meetings, eliminating the need to go to Crete. I am glad to read in the Government’s response that this arrangement is working well.

At this stage I should like to suggest that in the future, when the European Union is sharing functions around the member states, the allocation should not just define the state concerned but also where that state intends to locate it. The Government say that the location does not seem to have resulted in an inability to recruit and retain staff, but in the next breath in the response they add that,

“it is clear that the location is a major factor when professional staff consider applying for posts”.

This seems to imply that the persons best qualified may not be applying for jobs. I hope the Minister will say whether or not this is so. I am far from suggesting that only second-rate persons apply for these posts, but it would be unfortunate if the best are inhibited from applying. This would be particularly the case for applicants from the United Kingdom, which is about as far from Heraklion as it is possible to get within the European Union.

ENISA was originally set up with a five-year mandate. This was extended by a further three years, expiring in March 2012. We expressed the hope that agreement could be reached well before then to extend the remit of ENISA to cover matters such as police and judicial co-operation over criminal use of the internet. Within the past two weeks, the Commission has issued two proposals. The first would simply extend the mandate by a further 18 months, expiring in September 2013. The express purpose of this is to give time for consideration of a second proposal; namely, a revision of the regulation setting up ENISA.

In its Explanatory Memorandum to the regulation, the Commission said that it had considered three options. It agreed to some expansion in the tasks of ENISA, adding law enforcement and privacy protection authorities as fully-fledged stakeholders, but it decided against adding either fighting cyberattacks or the response to cyberincidents, or supporting law enforcement and judicial authorities in fighting cybercrime. This is a rather timid move and is not in accordance with the rather bolder suggestion in our report. We expect in due course to receive from the Government their own Explanatory Memorandum of their views on this, but I should be grateful if the Minister could today give the House some indication of their thinking about an extension of ENISA’s role. What I would hope to hear is that they share our view and intend to press for further expansion of ENISA’s remit in the course of the negotiations on this proposal.

I have come to the end of what I want to say on this fast-moving topic. The United Kingdom, the EU and, indeed, the whole civilised world must keep a step ahead of potential attackers. The previous Government seem to have recognised the importance of this and to have taken decisive steps to counter the threat. I hope the Minister can confirm that the coalition Government will continue on this path and, particularly, encourage the European institutions to play a useful part. I commend the report to the House. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Jopling]

My Lords, as we come to the end of the week’s business, I shall delay the House for only a very short time. First, let me say how grateful I am, as I am sure the committee will be, for the kind and generous remarks made to me and about the committee’s report. I think that I have heard no criticism at all of the report; indeed, there has been generous approval of it. There is no doubt in my mind that this topic—cyberwar or cybercrime, whatever it be—will recur fairly regularly in our discussions in this House. I was particularly glad to hear the Minister saying that we need to talk about it and I hope that we shall.

The contributions today demonstrate that there is a good deal of expertise on this issue lurking within the House. That brings me particularly to the two maiden speakers, the noble Lords, Lord Reid of Cardowan and Lord Browne of Ladyton. I spoke earlier about our anticipation of their speeches. They have given us an example both of the broad view of this problem and of their great expertise, having been Defence Secretaries in the past. We are most grateful to them and we look forward to hearing them both regularly on this and other issues in future.

I thank the Minister for her comprehensive summing up. I was particularly pleased to hear, in the latter part of her speech, what she said about ENISA and NATO. I have probably said enough at the end of this debate, except to say that I beg to move.

Motion agreed.