National Security and Investment Bill

Lord Lansley Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 4th February 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I am glad to have the opportunity to contribute to what is already an interesting debate. I am grateful to my noble friend the Minister for his introduction because it has helped us to see the Bill’s shape very well. I also welcome the noble Lord, Lord Woodley, and look forward to his contributions to our debates on this Bill and in the future.

I was a member of the Standing Committee on what became the Enterprise Act 2002. I do not think that we lacked an understanding at that time, in the wake of the terrorist attack in 2001, of the nature of the emerging risks of asymmetric and unconventional threats to this country. The point is that the Enterprise Act is limited since it relates to qualifying mergers, and of course to some extent it is a post hoc regime when what we need is something that gives people clear notice of and predictability about the nature of any intervention. The scope and the need for these interventions under this legislation is warranted and I support the Bill.

My noble friend the Minister said that there are, as it were, complementary or parallel regimes in other countries. Actually, they are different, and what is being proposed here by the Government for this country is better. For example, the EU regulation relates essentially to the screening of investments across a wide range, but of course, that is not limited to national security. It includes, for example, the media sector because that concerns national security and public security, and it drifts into public order. The fact that we are focused on national security is important. Indeed, one can see from the way the scheme is implemented in France, where it is focused on foreign ownership, that it also drifts into strategic autonomy, which is the new phrase of the moment in the European Union.

We might want to be more autonomous in terms of our supply chains, but this is not the mechanism for doing that. This Bill is about national security and it is rightly focused on that—“project defence”, as my noble friend on the Front Bench referred to it. If we want resilient supply chains, we must have mechanisms which focus on that, but let us not confuse them with the proposition that these necessarily represent a threat to our national security; let us focus on these things separately. For example, promoting foreign direct investment remains an objective that we all support, and the Office for Investment within the Department for International Trade is a welcome step in that direction.

We have a series of distinct purposes with distinct regimes. I will not go on at length because many noble Lords have already helpfully illustrated where we need to look in Committee, particularly at how the regime is going to work. I shall mention some points that I think will be important.

The first is that we have to think about how this regime interacts with all the others. How does it interact with the public interest regime, for example? My noble friend talked about the financial services sector, and of course there is a public interest intervention regime under the Enterprise Act as well, and there is the question of how the competition regime is to work. We want to secure ourselves against risks, but we do not want so to diminish competition as to harm consumers.

We need to look at other regulatory regimes. For example, we need to look carefully at the question of critical infrastructure in the water industry and the utility regulators.

A number of noble Lords have referred to SMEs. If indeed literally 1,000 or more SMEs a year are having to make notifications, we have to think very hard about how we look after their interests and help them through the process.

A number of noble Lords have mentioned the higher education and university sector. The relationship between the kind of technologies that we are dealing with here and higher education and research and development is an important interaction that we need to understand.

That brings me to the point that a number of noble Lords have talked about: defining national security. In this respect I think I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Truscott. We cannot define national security directly but it is already the case in the Bill that, if one looks at the consultation on the specified descriptions, the 17 sectors and how they are described—I have to say, a document that exceeds any other in including terminology that I do not understand—and asks whether there would be a risk if control of all these assets, technologies, activities and infrastructure were to pass into the hands of hostile actors, then by definition you have defined national security. You do not need another definition because it is already there in the Bill.

My final point is that I entirely agree with the noble Lord, Lord West of Spithead. What he proposes in respect of parliamentary oversight on the security aspects of this is absolutely right, and I hope the Government will listen positively to what he had to say.