Investigatory Powers (Amendment) Bill [HL]

Lord Murphy of Torfaen Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 20th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Murphy of Torfaen (Lab)]

That was an interesting speech by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans, because he put his finger on the dilemma of any legislation like this: the balance between liberty as a subject on the one hand and the security of our citizens on the other. That has become increasingly complicated as the years have gone by.

As the noble Lord, Lord Anderson of Ipswich, has mentioned, I was asked by the then Home Secretary, Theresa May, to chair a Joint Committee of both Houses of Parliament to deal with the original Investigatory Powers Bill exactly eight years ago this week. She asked me because I had been chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee. We met for about three months and made 86 recommendations, nearly all of which were accepted by the Government. Those recommendations were nearly all about the balance between liberty and security, which the right reverend Prelate referred to. The committee had 57 witnesses, including the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, and 148 written submissions. The process that took place all those years ago was vital for this sort of Bill. For various reasons we have not had that, and perhaps we will come to that in Committee.

That balance is also reflected in the work of government. For example, when I was Northern Ireland Secretary I had to sign warrant after warrant to deprive our own citizens of their liberty. They did not know it, of course, but that is what we were doing. If we had not done so, the chances are that many hundreds if not thousands of people would have perished in Northern Ireland, and indeed in Britain, because of the way in which the intelligence services were able to infiltrate the IRA and the loyalist paramilitaries.

Of course, a major recommendation of that committee was to have a review of the legislation five years after the legislation had been finished in Parliament. We have been very fortunate that the noble Lord, Lord Anderson of Ipswich, has actually conducted that review. I read it on the weekend. It is a lot to read on a weekend—138 pages—but it is, although on a very difficult subject, a relatively easy read for lay people such as myself. It is thorough; it is full of common sense, and it is practical. In the absence of a pre-legislative committee of both Houses, the review has, in a way, replaced that. Without the noble Lord’s review, we might not have the same Bill in front of us as we do now.

I agree with every single one of the noble Lord’s recommendations and, indeed, in Committee, there may well be more recommendations that this House can put before the Government. I hope that we do not get into a situation where we have to vote on those, but that we can have proper discussions between Members of this House and the Government on what those might be. They could cover internet communications records, bulk personal datasets, the issue of telecommunications companies and their notification of changes in the way they operate—all these things are significant. I just want to touch on one, which is of interest to all of us in here, and that is how we deal with parliamentarians.

The Wilson doctrine is as old as Harold Wilson, of course: it was a long time ago that that happened. I understand that, because we now need three people, including the Prime Minister, to consider these matters, but if the Prime Minister is incapacitated—as Boris Johnson was when he had Covid at that time—what do you do? Presumably, you go to the Secretary of State to be able to deal with that issue. I think that is sensible, but I take my noble friend Lord Coaker’s point that it should not be just any Secretary of State. It should be confined to either the Foreign Secretary, the Home Secretary, the Defence Secretary or the Northern Ireland Secretary; in other words, Secretaries of State who have experience of dealing with warrants, because these are such hugely important matters.

I also want to take up the point that my noble friend made about the Intelligence and Security Committee itself. The Minister will answer whether the committee has been consulted on these proposals: if it has not, it should have been and if it has, it would be useful for us as parliamentarians to know what it said. That is of vital importance to us.

Clearly, we need to update how we deal with the evil and unpleasant people who threaten our security and our lives. The technological innovation in the past eight years has been absolutely dramatic and will get even more dramatic as the years go by. My noble friend mentioned China, the war in Ukraine and Russia, and all those other authoritarian countries that exist on our planet. That is going to get worse. He also mentioned how much more sophisticated criminals now are, so we have to keep up with all this. What struck me in the last six or seven weeks, in the horrific and terrible war that we now see in the Middle East, was that the intelligence services of Israel, which were notably good, obviously failed. It could have been that if they had worked, we might not have had the horror that we now see in the Holy Land. I support this Bill, but I also support it on the basis that it has had immense scrutiny from the noble Lord, Lord Anderson; but there is still work to be done and I look forward to debating it in Committee.