Lord Patten
Main Page: Lord Patten (Conservative - Life peer)Terrorist Asset-Freezing etc. Bill [HL]
Lord Patten Excerpts
Lord Patten
My Lords, there is an ever shifting frontier between the activity of terrorists and that of serious and organised criminals, as the example of Northern Ireland has shown us over the decades. To believe otherwise is to engage in delusional thinking on stilts. That said, it is impossible to be comprehensive all the time about every threat related to terrorism and serious crime. It is important from time to time to be highly targeted, as this welcome Bill introduced by my noble friend the Commercial Secretary seeks to be in concentrating on meeting our international obligations to freeze terrorist funds ever more effectively.
Doing this will always be a challenge, however good the legislation, as the sad experience of the Serious Organised Crime Agency has shown us so starkly, with its £0.5 billion annual budget up to 2010 managing to deny access to only approximately £140 million of criminal funds. The Home Secretary, who had a hard-driving tutor when she was at Oxford, is therefore quite right, following her radical, root-and-branch review, to bring this expensive organisation to an end with the setting-up, as she proposes, of the national crime agency. I hope that it will rapidly learn the lessons of the Serious Organised Crime Agency, just as much as they will be pondered by others responsible under this legislation, whether in the Treasury or elsewhere, as they deal with the challenging practical problems of the efficient asset freezing of terrorist funds. It is vital that any strategy includes targeted intelligence gathering, law enforcement action at home, much smarter global regulatory scrutiny, capacity building for other Governments, the protection of charities from terrorist abuse and much more besides.
There is an array of actions to be taken. They include, for example, the breaking of pipelines through which parties move money and manage to operate in mainstream financial sectors, or the exposing of terrorist-financing money trails that lead to hitherto unknown terrorist cells or terrorist financiers before any freezing can be contemplated. Success in these two strands may force terrorists to use more costly and much more dangerous informal means of terrorist financing such as illicit, trade-based commodity systems, ranging from the obvious, such as diamonds, precious metals, narcotics and cigarettes, through to the less obvious, such as trade in honey or even in rare plants.
Fast coming down the track to join these are various forms of cyberterrorism, whose mirror image is cyberfundraising through recruiting of financial supporters. Just as cyberweapons are so much easier to procure—they are more like chemical weapons by comparison to other more general military hardware, let alone nuclear materials—so cyberfundraising is often much easier to achieve and harder to track than the smuggling of the goods and commodities to which I referred.
When in opposition, Members on this side of the House again and again pressed noble Lords such as the noble Lord, Lord West of Spithead, who is not in his place today, to tackle issues such as the performance of the Serious Organised Crime Agency and the threat of cyberterrorism. It was all, alas, to scant avail, as we have seen. By comparison, I greatly applaud the work and effectiveness of the 31-nation Financial Action Task Force, an organisation to which I think my noble friend has made a considerable contribution in the past, together with other organisations whose names we do not often hear aired in your Lordships’ Chamber, such as the Egmont Group, representing about 70 financial intelligence units in the different countries that are members. Only a part of its activity may involve work to disturb channels along which terrorist funds may travel or to aid the seizure of assets, but it is vital among the rest of its work in respect of money-laundering generally.
All that said, I have theoretical sympathy—if one can have theoretical sympathy; looking around the Chamber, I do not see any philosophical tendency on the part of your Lordships to help me with whether I can have theoretical sympathy—with the view of the Select Committee on the Constitution that we should always strive to ensure legal certainty, which is a pretty soundly based principle. The Constitution Committee favours all terrorist asset-freezing measures being in one statute because, if this Bill becomes law, as I hope it will, we shall have a dual regime between the new Act on the one hand and the al-Qaeda and Taliban asset-freezing regulations on the other. This aim to consolidate would be desirable in the longer term, exactly as the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, said in his speech a few moments ago, but we need to get on with tackling the issue as soon as possible through the Bill, as my noble friend Lord Sassoon pointed out.
I end with three more detailed points that verge on questions, which I table now and on which I seek reassurances from my noble friend if he has time at the end of his winding-up speech. First, I assume that Part 1 of the Bill will be extended to the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man by Orders in Council at the earliest possible opportunity, for all the obvious reasons. If that is not the intention, I think that it should be and I wish to know why it is not.
Secondly, Clause 20 lays a duty on the Treasury to co-operate with any investigation into these matters in the United Kingdom—with, I guess at the moment, organisations such as the Serious Organised Crime Agency or its successors—and internationally. However, I seek reassurance that the Treasury has the staffing capacity to co-operate effectively with the other agencies in asset freezing and, in so doing, to put living enforcement and investigatory flesh on the well drafted bones of this Bill.
Thirdly and lastly, Part 2 of the Bill is intended, as I understand it, to deal with financial restrictions on persons connected with countries of concern, specifically in connection with the development or production of the nuclear, radiological, biological or chemical weapons specified in Schedule 7 to the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008. That Act, when it was just a little Bill and was being drafted, did not take any formal notice of cyberwarfare, cyberterrorism, cyberfundraising or whatever you want to call them—threats that, back in 2006 and 2007, were just gathering the momentum that they are now reaching. Perhaps that is why paragraph 1(4)(a) in Part 1 of Schedule 7 to the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008 specifies all the weapons that I have just listed but does not specify cyberweapons of any sort. It should have done so and I hope that this legislative opportunity will be taken, whether under the “etc.” cover or some other cover, to improve the legislation to embrace the cyberthreat specifically.
There are a number of other questions that I would like to ask, but I sense around me a gathering wish and anticipation rather to hear the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes of Stretford, which I share.
Lord Myners
My Lords, my contribution today will be brief, and much the most important part of it will be to congratulate the my noble friend Lord Davies of Stamford on a fine maiden speech, rich in content and insight. The noble Lord earned a very good reputation in the other place for his dedicated representation of the interests of his constituents, first in Stamford and Spalding and later in Grantham and Stamford.
It should not go without notice that on more than one occasion my noble friend was awarded prizes for being the Back-Bench Member of the year and the independent Back-Bench Member of the year in the other place. This speaks powerfully to his intellect and independence of mind. Not only was my noble friend an outstanding constituency representative in the other place but he went on to hold high ministerial office, which required undoubted integrity, given the extraordinarily important and sensitive issues for which he was responsible.
We welcome my noble friend to this House and to these Benches. He is a true progressive, in the sense of his journey to join us on these Benches. His academic record is very good; he took a first at Cambridge, won awards at Harvard and went on to carve out a highly successful career in finance and economics. Indeed, I recollect in the 1990s sitting at the back of a room at the clearing bank where I worked when we occasionally had a visitation from the then Mr Quentin Davies, who briefed us on his views on the economic and financial situation.
I should also seize this opportunity to congratulate my noble friend Lady Hughes of Stretford on her equally fine maiden speech, which showed the expertise that she will bring to the House’s deliberations. As I sat listening to these two fine maiden speeches, I turned my mind back to my own, which, if I bother to look it up, I imagine I will find a great disappointment—it certainly did not reach the soaring heights that we heard today.
I turn briefly to the Bill. As noble Lords will be aware, I was responsible for taking the temporary provisions Bill through this House in February. The Government acted in good faith in their implementation of the powers which they believed they were able to take under the United Nations Act 1946. However, the Supreme Court advised that, in its judgment, we were relying too much on the facilitating powers of that Act, hence our need to bring a temporary provisions Bill through this House. I thank noble Lords who participated in that debate for their very useful contributions to an expeditious conclusion which ensured that we had appropriate legislative protection in place and a clear commitment that we would bring a fuller Bill back to the House as soon as possible. I congratulate the Minister on bringing the Bill back in this Session and giving us the opportunity for this Second Reading debate.
Measures to prevent terrorist financing are at the heart of international efforts against terrorism. If you read yesterday’s and today’s Guardian you need no reminding of the continuing great threat that our country faces from terrorism. However, our responses must be proportionate and fair and, at the same time, robust and effective. This is a difficult balancing act—to strike a balance between public interest on the one hand and the rights and liberties of individuals on the other. I am most grateful to the Minister for depositing in the Library a schedule indicating the changes to the temporary Bill contained in this Bill. That is a very constructive step by the Minister; it shows that he approaches the Bill with an open and accommodating stance. I know the House will appreciate that.
I welcome several of the improvements that the new Government have made to the Bill, compared with the temporary Bill which I took through the House in February. Spousal and partner exclusion is a particularly good addition. I am also pleased to see the proposals for review and reporting, although I am sure that in Committee the House will test the Minister on the extent of the review and reporting procedures. Perhaps in winding up the Minister could give us a little more of a feel for the identity of the likely reviewer. How do we strike the right balance between a reviewer who is experienced and one who is independent? Is it the Treasury’s current proposal that an existing reviewer should perform that function, or that this presents an opportunity for the Government to bring a fresh view to this task?
The key issue in looking at the Bill has to do with the term “reasonable suspicion”. The noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, talked about that both in February and today, as did the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, from the Cross Benches. I have reflected long and hard on our discussion of the temporary Bill on this point. I was much taken by the words of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, which were recited by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, both in the debate on the temporary Bill and today. They are so powerful that I will repeat them as well:
“To suspect something to be so is by no means to believe it to be so. It is to believe only that it may be so”.
As I think more about this, I find myself asking whether there is a better form of words that we should be using here, notwithstanding that I was party to a Government who persuaded the House to support the use of the term “reasonable suspicion” in the temporary Bill. The powers granted to HMT officials are very broad, very pervasive and have enormous consequences. I am not sure that reasonable suspicion is a sufficient test. The Minister will need to satisfy the House—perhaps today, definitely in Committee—that it is not better to use the word “believe”. The Government and the Minister will have to persuade the House that we would wish to grant these powers if the Government could not say that they believed that there was terrorist activity at hand or in prospect.
I am also persuaded that we need to look carefully at the limitations of judicial review in providing protection for those who find themselves in receipt of an order in respect of this Bill. I welcome the Home Office review of counterterrorism powers but I share with others, including the noble Lord, Lord Patten, a view that perhaps the time has come to merge and consolidate. Indeed, in the only political comment in the Minister’s opening remarks, he referred to a lack of coherence and co-ordination in the previous Government’s approach to terrorism. The defence there must be that the situation with terrorism has evolved so radically over the past 10 years that we constantly found ourselves—
Lord Patten
I am extremely grateful to the noble Lord for giving way, but he used my name. When the record is published tomorrow, I think we will see that I said the time was not right for consolidation, and that we should press ahead. I remember that my noble friend Lord Sassoon indicated assent from the Front Bench. Rather than seeking to consolidate now, at a later date it may be entirely suitable to have that certainty to which the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, referred. However, for the avoidance of doubt, I definitely did not say, “This is the Bill, now is the time, get on with it”.
Lord Myners
I am very grateful to the noble Lord for correcting me. He is, of course, absolutely correct. However, the sentiment that there is a patchwork of regulation and legislation is an entirely reasonable one to express. There is considerable merit in pulling all this together in a single piece of legislation at some point. However, if I take myself back to where I was before I accepted the intervention of the noble Lord, Lord Patten, I still argue that this situation will continue to evolve. We may never reach a steady state where we can put in place a single piece of comprehensive legislation which will cope with all possible contingencies and developments, including cyber crime, as the noble Lord, Lord Patten, mentioned, or piracy, as my noble friend mentioned.
I hope that we will not see any reduction in the availability of legal aid to those who find themselves having to defend an action taken under either the temporary Act or the new Bill. I would welcome an assurance from the noble Lord, Lord Sassoon, that there is no intention to reduce the legal aid available to those entitled to it in securing advice and pursuing their right to challenge actions taken under the temporary Act or this Bill.
I am sure that the general sentiment and thrust of the Bill will receive the warm support of the House. However, as they say, the devil is in the detail and, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Davidson of Glen Clova, said, the House will no doubt wish to pursue a number of issues in Committee.