Draft Investigatory Powers Bill

Lord West of Spithead Excerpts

Wednesday 4th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates]

My noble friend is absolutely right. We talk a lot about liberty and security but in order to enjoy our liberty we must first have security. That is what this is about. I mentioned in the Statement that six terrorist attacks have been thwarted by the outstanding work of our security and law enforcement services over the past year alone. The transparency report which I am publishing here today shows that some 299 people have been arrested in the past year on terrorism-related offences. It shows that the threat is real and the powers are necessary.

[Lord West of Spithead (Lab)]

My Lords, although I agree with the noble Lord, Lord King, that it is a delight to have the Minister in his post, I would have preferred to be in that post myself after the election—but that is a different issue.

This is not before time. It has taken a long time, but we should all celebrate today, as this is good news. We hopefully get rid of the old RIPA, which is discredited—not surprisingly, because it is so old—and of emergency legislation which we passed only because we got ourselves in such a muddle about this. Here is a real opportunity for us to set a gold standard in the ability to protect our people and ensure that we can track these ghastly people who wish to kill us and do us harm, but also to pay due regard to the privacy of the individual. With pre-legislative scrutiny of all the issues we have been discussing and a White Paper, and with sufficient time, there is no reason why we should not be able to do this. We have to realise that we must not delude ourselves: there are people out there who wish to kill us. We know they want to kill us, and there are a large number of them. This is a real threat. Not doing this would be madness.

I get annoyed, I am afraid, by some comments which seem to indicate that our own security forces and agencies are the bad guys and the ones who are threatening us. That is just not true. Some people use emotive language, such as “snoopers’ charter”. The emotive language I would use is that if we do not do something like this, those people are giving the people who wish to kill us a licence to kill—but let us not use emotive language and instead look at this in a balanced way. It has to be done and it is very important that it is done.

Have we really thought about some way of ensuring that there is better data protection, not just in this Bill, but more broadly? We are not as good at it as we should be, which is a real worry. We have to make sure we do it, because people are concerned when data are held anywhere. It is no reason not to do this, but we do need to have some way of making sure that is dealt with.

[Lord Bates]

The noble Lord is absolutely right. This is why it is important to work with communication service providers: this has to be a partnership between the industry, the law enforcement agencies and the Government to make sure that we get this right and that there is a way of doing it which is secure. He is right about the threat being real. I have heard some of the reports from meetings which the Home Secretary has had with families who have been victims of the online sexual exploitation of children. They feel exactly the same way as my noble friend Lord Tebbit feels in terms of the actions which could be taken to ensure that their children and their loved ones do not have to suffer the exploitation which they have suffered at the hands of these heinous criminals.