Serious Crime Bill [HL]

Lord Wasserman Excerpts

Monday 16th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wasserman (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome this Bill. It is the latest instalment of an ambitious programme of work which my right honourable friend the Home Secretary set herself in the summer of 2010, shortly after taking office. Her goal was clear and unequivocal—to make this country a safer place in which to work, bring up children, grow old, study and visit. Much of that programme has already been delivered. Local policing is no longer the responsibility of the so-called tripartite cabal of ACPO, the Home Office and the Association of Police Authorities. In its place there are now directly elected local police and crime commissioners, who oversee the local police force as part of their wider responsibilities for community safety. The College of Policing has brought together the Police Federation, the Police Superintendents’ Association and ACPO into a single body, under an independent chairman of integrity, to professionalise policing across the whole of England and Wales. The inspectorate has been strengthened and modernised, so that its work is seen to be serving the public rather than Home Office Ministers and officials.

The Bill is largely the product of another of my right honourable friend’s innovations, the National Crime Agency. The significance of the NCA as a crime-fighting organisation, headed by a professional crime fighter and reporting directly to the Home Secretary, is not often appreciated by the general public. Indeed, most home affairs commentators in the media do not appreciate the fact that before this Government the police department of the Home Office, in which I am proud to have served for many years, devoted most of its efforts to dealing with local crime and anti-social behaviour, although we did not use that term in those days. Serious and organised crime was something that Home Office Ministers were happy to leave to individual chief constables to tackle, working independently or through ACPO. For a short period between April 2006 and October last year, the Serious and Organised Crime Agency also played an important role in this field, but it reported to a board that was largely independent of government and headed by the chairman without any professional policing experience. As my right honourable friend said recently in an important speech delivered to the Royal United Services Institute,

“when I became Home Secretary four years ago the lack of a response”,

to the threat of serious and organised crime,

“both in policy terms and operational terms—was glaring. While the centre was bossy, clumsy and interfering when it came to local policing, it was weak, timid and sometimes entirely absent when it came to serious and organised crime”.

How different things are now. A few weeks ago, on 28 May, I attended a reception at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office at which the heads of the national law enforcement agencies of the UK, the USA, New Zealand, Canada and Australia—known collectively as the “Five Eyes” law enforcement group—were guests of the NCA. Keith Bristow, the NCA director, chairs this group of top crime fighters. I used the opportunity to chat to the director of the FBI and the commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Both these top law enforcement officials were fulsome in their praise for the work that the NCA was doing internationally, particularly the way that it was bringing law enforcement partners together to help to pursue serious and organised criminals and frustrate their activities around the globe.

The Bill gives the NCA and other UK law enforcement agencies some of the tools that they need to meet their objectives of keeping us safe. Most of its provisions, as many noble Lords have already mentioned, are entirely uncontroversial, and I very much hope that your Lordships will welcome them, as I do. Many provisions are years overdue, some by decades. For example, take the provisions concerning the misuse of computers. The Act that we are being asked to amend in Part 2 of the Bill received Royal Assent in 1990, which is equivalent in IT years to the Dark Ages. The owners of many of the largest and most profitable IT businesses in the world were still in nappies in the 1990s; a fair proportion had probably not yet been conceived. Similarly overdue are the provisions to update the definition of a gang, to deal with the cutting agents that are used to increase the profitability of the illicit drug trade, or to amend the Children and Young Persons Act 1933 to recognise that child abuse may be psychological as well as physical. All these provisions should have been on our statute book years ago, and I very much hope that your Lordships will ensure that they get there urgently.

While I warmly welcome those provisions that are in the Bill, I want to mention two matters that are not included but have already been mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey. The first relates to the data retention directive of the European Union. On 8 April this year, a few months ago, at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg there was a decision that will have very damaging consequences for our fight against serious and organised crime. The court struck down the data retention directive of the European Union.

As your Lordships will know, the UK’s domestic data retention regulations are based on the EU directive and are the legal basis for the obligations we place on communications service providers to retain communications data for 12 months. Without these regulations, providers have no reason to retain the data and, given the current concern post-Snowden, do not very much want to retain it unless they are compelled to do so. I am aware that the Government are trying hard to find a way forward on this issue but I urge them to act boldly and courageously in tackling it. Communications data are now used in more than 90% of serious and organised crime investigations and are vital in bringing serious criminals to justice and protecting the most vulnerable among us.

There is one other matter relating to serious and organised crime that does not need legislation but which I hope will be tackled as a result of our interest in this subject. It is the question of the responsibility for counterterrorism. In that speech by the Home Secretary to which I referred earlier, she said,

“in 2010, I made sure serious and organised crime was included in the National Security Strategy … I am aware that it is a relatively new way of thinking to consider organised crime a national security threat, and I know that some people … may argue that individually none of these crimes represents a national security threat. But when you consider their collective effect, when you add up the total cost to society, when you realise the huge numbers of victims who suffer from organised crime, there is no doubt in my mind that it is a very real threat to our national security”.

It is obvious from many of the provisions in this Bill, particularly in Part 2 dealing with computer misuse, that when we talk about the threat of serious and organised crime we are talking about a threat that extends to serious damage to critical national infrastructure and therefore to our national security.

Given that the Home Secretary herself recognises that serious and organised crime encompasses terrorism and national security, is it not time to bring together in one organisation responsibility for both counterterrorism and serious and organised crime? In particular, responsibility for counterterrorism should be brought more directly under the Home Secretary rather than leaving it as it is today under the Metropolitan Police, which is accountable to the Mayor of London, and ACPO, which is accountable to itself. Given that the NCA has made a great start in the few months in which it has been fully operational and the respect it is accorded by the FBI, the RCMP and other leading law enforcement agencies around the world, I urge the Government to act on this matter and to transfer responsibility from the Mayor of London to the NCA—in effect to the Home Secretary—before the end of this Parliament so that the new arrangements are in place before the next mayoral elections in May 2016. It seems to me that the last thing we want is for the security of this nation to become a party-political issue in a local election. With this plea I commend this Bill to the House.