Investigatory Powers (Amendment) Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Murphy of Torfaen and Lord Hogan-Howe

Committee stage
Wednesday 13th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

My Lords, I apologise that I did not speak at Second Reading, but I was here. Perhaps for the same reasons, I strongly support what the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, has just said. It is secret that telephone interception is in place. If someone is aware, directly or indirectly, that the only way the Security Service or the police will discover a certain piece of information is by a telephone call, then it could be revealed, so it would require the law to be changed.

I have four worries about this amendment. First, at the point at which an interception is stopped, it is very difficult to predict whether the investigation will continue and/or be resumed. If the suspect is advised of the existence of the investigation, it gives them the potential to destroy evidence, which may frustrate the investigation in the long run, so I do not think it is wise to advise any suspect that they have been under investigation.

Secondly, there are two types of investigation: overt ones, where the person knows they are under investigation, and covert ones, where they do not. There is a general convention whereby if an investigation concludes without a charge, we have never told the person that they were under investigation. I am not sure why we would breach that principle merely because intrusive surveillance was in place.

Thirdly, as the noble Baroness mentioned, why would we do that only for Members of the legislature? It could be put in place, but there have to be some strong reasons. I do not think Members of a legislature can just say, “We deserve extra protection”. There has to be a stronger reason, because, otherwise, the rest of the public could rightly say, “Well, why can’t we have that protection?” For that reason alone, you would have to think very seriously about it.

Finally, sometimes Members of the legislature might be under investigation for things in their private capacity and sometimes for a mixture of the two; it might overlap into their legislative acts. Before anything like this was considered, I would take an awful lot of persuasion and I do not think the argument was made for why this needed to happen only for Members of the legislature.

[Lord Murphy of Torfaen (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the points the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, made about Amendment 50 regarding the revelation of whether someone who is in a legislature has been tapped. I do not think that is possible. I think it has all sorts of practical difficulties which she rightly outlined, and that situation is something that I could not in any way support.

I want to come back to the issue of “unable” or “unavailable” with regard to the Prime Minister. I think that it is right that it should be “unable”, because of the gravity of the business of tapping the phone of a Member of Parliament or a devolved legislature. I suspect that such a possibility is hugely remote; it might not happen for years and years. However, when it does happen, it is exceptionally serious, because you are not only depriving that Member of Parliament of liberty—you are in many ways saying that the person who has been elected by his or her constituents as a Member of Parliament or of the Senedd, or whatever it may be, is now in some doubt as a public representative. That is hugely serious, so the triple lock is important, but the word “unable” is more serious a word than “unavailable”, and I support changing the word in the Bill.

I also very much agree with the noble Lords, Lord West and Lord Coaker, about the nature of the Secretaries of State who should be the substitute for the Prime Minister if the Prime Minister was unable to perform his or her duty with regard to tapping the phone of a parliamentarian. I tapped phones for three or four years almost every day, except at weekends—occasionally at the weekend, but mainly on weekdays—and I took it very seriously. I knew that I was depriving someone of their liberty and privacy; generally speaking, they deserved to be deprived of their liberty because of the horrible things that they might do. Sometimes, although very rarely, I would not sign them, because I was not convinced of the argument put to me.

Someone who has the experience over the years of dealing with warrants has an idea of the nature of the act of signing the warrant and how important it is. It is not simply about reading it and putting your name at the bottom—you have to think about it very seriously. Your experience develops as time goes by. In fact, when I was unable or, more likely, unavailable to sign warrants as Northern Ireland Secretary—if I was on the beach somewhere in the Vendée, as I occasionally was—somebody else would sign the warrants that I would normally have signed. It was generally the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, who was then the Home Secretary—and when he went on holiday somewhere, I signed his. The point about that was that, technically, almost every member of the Cabinet—because by then nearly every member was a Secretary of State—could have signed. But I knew, when the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, signed mine, that he knew what he was doing—and vice versa, I hope. Therefore, there should be some way in which we designate Secretaries of State who are used to signing warrants to be a substitute for the Prime Minister.

The other issue, on which I shall conclude, is that the debate so far is evidence of why it is so important that the Intelligence and Security Committee puts its views to this House, through the noble Lord, Lord West, and that the committee should look carefully at these matters.