Football: Abuse and Violence

Lord West of Spithead Excerpts

Monday 12th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

Yes—verbal abuse and some of the chants that we hear need to be addressed. The FA’s “Enough is Enough” campaign is, as I say, making it clear that anybody who undertakes unacceptable behaviour will have action taken against them.

[Lord West of Spithead (Lab)]

My Lords, I qualified as a football referee at Dartmouth in 1966, and I gave up after a few years because I was conscious of making wrong decisions. Within the service environment there was not this threatening behaviour, but there is no doubt that, when one has made certain decisions—and the referees do work very hard—such threats are really damaging and dangerous. Something has to be done to stop this happening.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, 1966 was clearly a very good year for football in this country. The noble Lord makes an important point: there are fantastic role models in the Navy and across the Armed Forces, who demonstrate very high-quality behaviour. That is what we want to see at football matches, so that everybody can enjoy the game.

Gambling Act 2005

Lord West of Spithead Excerpts

Wednesday 9th February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grade of Yarmouth (Con)]

I have never been so popular.

[Lord West of Spithead (Lab)]

It could all change.

[Lord Grade of Yarmouth (Con)]

More ships!

I thank my noble friend the Minister for that response. One of the lessons of the implications of the outdated nature of the 2005 Gambling Act, which the Government are addressing, is that there was a serious lack of accountability on the Gambling Commission. It had many powers to stop many of the abuses that have led to such tragedies as we have heard and as we read about in the newspapers almost every day. We are very interested to know what the Government can do to increase the accountability of the regulator in this sector.

Telecommunications (Security) Bill

Lord West of Spithead Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 29th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord West of Spithead (Lab)]

My Lords, those of you who participated in this House’s consideration of the National Security and Investment Act may, I am afraid, detect a few similarities in the nature of my contributions to this legislation. That is an unfortunate consequence of the Government’s failure to listen to the strength of feeling in the House on the subject of oversight during those debates.

Like that Act of Parliament, the Bill seeks to address concerns first raised by the Intelligence and Security Committee some seven years ago in its report, Foreign involvement in the Critical National Infrastructure, namely that there were serious failings in the way in which successive Governments managed the entry of foreign telecommunications companies into the UK market. Clearly, the Government have been listening to what the ISC, with its unparalleled access to highly classified material, has been able to discover on behalf of Parliament, leading to both pieces of legislation.

The ISC therefore welcomes this Bill. We strongly support the principle behind it and the new safeguards it introduces. However, as with the National Security and Investment Act, we are concerned that the Bill does not provide for sufficient parliamentary oversight of these important new powers. As noble Lords are aware, the Bill provides significant powers for the Secretary of State to designate certain vendors as high-risk and to direct telecommunications providers to abide by certain requirements about the use of equipment from designated vendors. When the Secretary of State issues, varies or revokes a designation notice or a designated vendor direction, he will lay it before Parliament, except when this is contrary to national security.

This is a perfectly reasonable provision. I, for one, would not wish the Government to publish information that would damage national security. However, as things stand, this results in a significant gap in Parliament’s ability to scrutinise the Government’s decision-making and use of these powers. I am sure noble Lords agree that this is not what Parliament expects.

There is a simple and elegant solution to this problem: any designation notices or designated vendor directions that cannot be laid before Parliament for reasons of national security should be provided instead to the ISC for scrutiny. Parliament established the ISC for this purpose. Indeed, it is the only committee of Parliament that has regular access to the most sensitive protectively marked information. ISC colleagues have made these points repeatedly in the other place but they, again, have fallen on deaf ears. The Government’s resistance to this idea, coming so swiftly after their resistance on the NSI Act, gives the unfortunate impression that they are seeking to avoid scrutiny—an impression I am sure Ministers will wish to correct.

The Government have been clear that they do not think the ISC’s scrutiny role should be included in the Bill. This is regrettable. We should not knowingly be passing legislation that has holes in it. However, once again, there is a ready solution to that problem. As noble Lords are aware, the Justice and Security Act 2013 requires the ISC’s specific remit to be set out in a memorandum of understanding between the committee and Prime Minister. The Government told Parliament that the MoU would provide the ISC with oversight of substantially all the Government’s intelligence and security activities. However, with the passage of the NSI Act and now this Bill, the MoU is self-evidently out of date. It is a very simple matter to update it to provide the ISC with oversight of these powers in the specific and limited way I described a few moments ago.

The committee has formally raised this issue with the Government and asked them to take forward updating the MoU to ensure that it meets the commitments the Government made to Parliament during the passage of the Justice and Security Act. For that reason alone, I do not intend to table an amendment that would put the ISC’s essential oversight role on these powers in the Bill. However, the Government should be in no doubt that they must address this issue; the current situation is not tenable. If the Government do not wish to amend the Bill to fill this oversight gap, they must give a commitment to update the ISC’s memorandum of understanding and provide the oversight that Parliament requires in that way.

A large body of opinion from all corners of the House feels strongly about this and, should another Peer table an amendment on it, I would support it. The Minister will recall the strength of feeling in the House when the Government failed to provide for ISC oversight of the powers introduced by the National Security and Investment Act. I urge the Government to work constructively with the ISC on this issue.

BBC and Public Service Broadcasting

Lord West of Spithead Excerpts

Thursday 5th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord West of Spithead (Lab)]

My Lords, I too thank my noble friend Lord Young of Norwood Green for tabling this very timely debate. To start, I ask the Minister to confirm that, in 2019-2020, the licence fee was £12.54 per month, whereas Netflix—cited as a comparator by those who would like to see the licence fee abolished—was £11.99 per month, or 55p less; and that £5.29 of that BBC monthly fee went towards the World Service, BBC Monitoring, 40 local radio stations, orchestras, choirs, BBC News online and a host of other services that Netflix does not and would never provide.

I intend to focus on the World Service and BBC Monitoring, as both impact on the security and strategic posture of our nation. The global soft power index for 2020 puts the UK at third place in the overall rankings, after the United States and Germany, and states that arguably one of Britain’s greatest soft power tools is the BBC, which reaches a colossal 426 million viewers and listeners abroad every week.

The BBC is, without a doubt, the world’s most trusted international news broadcaster, with correspondents on location in more countries than any other broadcaster. It is available in 42 languages and is globally recognised as being committed to accurate, impartial and independent news. Independent surveys show that there is an exceptionally high association between awareness of the BBC globally and thinking positively about the United Kingdom.

As the Government set in train the biggest review of our foreign, defence, security and development policy since the end of the Cold War—let us call it the “Johnson review”—we should not be risking our greatest soft power tool. BBC Monitoring scrutinises the world’s media, from state broadcasters to streetwise social media. Its expert journalists and linguists provide vital information from all corners of the globe to our Government, charities, NGOs, think tanks, security groups, businesses, the OECD, the UN and universities. I found it extremely important when I was Chief of Defence Intelligence and as a chief of staff. It remains as relevant today as it was at the height of the Cold War.

As the UK faces uncertainty following Brexit, as tensions between Russia, China and the West increase, and as the Middle East and the Gulf are a powder keg, the work of BBC Monitoring is more important than ever. BBC Monitoring works in close partnership with the equivalent American organisation, the Open Source Enterprise, but if we continue to run down our service, as we have over the last years, we cannot be certain that the USA would want to continue to share information. The current agreement with the Government is that BBC Monitoring should be global, sufficient, adaptable and flexible. This should not be put at risk.

Constant exposure to Netflix might drive our enemies into a catatonic state of lethargy but hardly matches the significant importance of the World Service and BBC Monitoring to our nation’s security. We really should not put them at risk.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Barran]

I can reiterate with confidence what the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State have said, but I am sure that the noble Lord will understand that I cannot respond confidently about leaks to the newspapers; I can deal only with the facts before me. My noble friend has whispered in my ear that I have a minute or two more, and I would be grateful if I could go through the important points that other noble Lords have raised.

On soft power, the royal charter is clear that the BBC must spend at least £254 million a year on the World Service until 2022, and in 2017-18 that figure was £268 million.

[Lord West of Spithead]

BBC Monitoring is crucial if we are to understand these countries that are a real danger to us. Will that be covered as well?

[Baroness Barran]

I will write to the noble Lord to clarify any other points that remain unclear.

I want to take the last minute and a half to talk about the creative industries. My noble friend Lord Gilbert asked if the BBC and the public service broadcasters are considered as part of the Government’s industrial strategy, and that was also touched on by the noble Lord, Lord Foster. The Government continue to support the wider broadcasting landscape by having developed the creative industries sector deal, which came from the industrial strategy, and in 2018 the Government and industry agreed a landmark £150 million deal to promote the creative industries. The deal set out a number of measures, including rebalancing growth between London and the rest of the country. The noble Lord, Lord Foster, asked about the apprenticeship levy and we recognise that some employers in the creative industries experience challenges in using the apprenticeship levy to support their business, and we are working very closely with the sector to try to address this.

We have had some very passionate speeches and I want to try to close on a slightly more positive note and pick up what the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, said in talking about change as an opportunity for improvement. Change is not a choice in a landscape that is moving very rapidly, but we want to see it as an opportunity to build on and enhance the strengths of both the BBC and the creative industries. Both are success stories of the British economy and, as noble Lords have highlighted today, public service broadcasters have contributed to the success of the creative industries but have also benefited from that success. I have no doubt that in the next seven years there will be a very important debate continuing about how public service broadcasters should evolve in a rapidly changing broadcasting landscape, and that debate should and will ensure that both our public service broadcasters and our creative industries remain world-class.

BBC: TV Licence Evasion

Lord West of Spithead Excerpts

Wednesday 5th February 2020 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord West of Spithead]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their estimate of the cost to the taxpayer of decriminalising TV licence evasion and, should decriminalisation take place, how they propose to continue to fund the BBC World Service and BBC Monitoring.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (Baroness Barran) (Con)]

My Lords, the Government have launched this morning an eight-week consultation on the potential to decriminalise TV licence evasion. The Government are asking for evidence of the impact on taxpayers and the BBC. We will explore in further detail and consult on options around how to do this and assess the cost to the taxpayer if required. The BBC is responsible for funding the BBC World Service and BBC Monitoring, as set out in the charter. The Government currently provide some grant in aid funding for additional World Service languages as part of the World 2020 programme through the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

[Lord West of Spithead (Lab)]

I thank the Minister for her reply, as it stands. She is no doubt amazed that I am not mentioning frigates and our nation’s shortage of them. However, I am going to talk about the World Service, which is a crucial part of our soft power and something we really need to support. I am afraid the way that we are moving with the TV licence does not seem to take into account how we will ensure that it is properly costed. It is about not just money, but the perception around the world, which must be that our Government do not see the World Service and the BBC to be as important as they used to. The timing of this is extraordinary, just after the election campaign, Brexit and everything. Even if it is not true, the perception will be that this is having a go at it. The fact that Ministers do not go to key current affairs programmes on the BBC again will lead to the perception that the Government do not care. Do the Government see the BBC as a national treasure, which I believe it is, or something that, in time, they wish to dismantle?

[Baroness Barran]

I shall quote my right honourable friend the Prime Minister in describing the BBC as a cherished national institution, which I guess is not far from a national treasure. The World Service is obviously an absolutely key part of that. The royal charter states that the BBC must spend at least £254 million a year on the World Service up to 2022. In the last year for which we have accounts it spent £289 million, but I absolutely agree with the noble Lord’s sentiment that that reach of over 400 million people a week is invaluable to us as a nation.

UK Telecommunications

Lord West of Spithead Excerpts

Tuesday 28th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morgan of Cotes]

That is because the evidence of the oversight board—it is extremely vital to our relationship with Huawei, a world-leading structure to have over it, and it provided the evidence that our services provided to the National Security Council—was not the only evidence that the National Security Council received that gave us the reassurances to make this decision today. Some of it cannot be discussed in public. The board will absolutely continue to operate and to work with Huawei to improve standards.

[Lord West of Spithead (Lab)]

My Lords, in an ideal world we would not want the Chinese to provide us with telecoms equipment, build our nuclear power stations, own all our CCTV structures, buy British Steel or invest so much in the City, but we are not in an ideal world. The Americans make a lot of complaints about risks to intelligence. I was in the intelligence world for six years. I do not believe that there will be a risk to intelligence unless they say that they will not give information. This is extraordinary, bearing in mind that they released several hundred thousand of our very sensitive signals using SIPRNet, WikiLeaks and Snowden. We have to be a bit careful about shouting the odds about intelligence.

Does the Minister not think it inconceivable that the director of GCHQ and the head of the NCSC, who know more about this issue than probably anybody else in the UK, would ever give advice that put our intelligence at risk, bearing in mind that intelligence has been their bread and butter all their lives?

[Baroness Morgan of Cotes]

It is a delight to agree with the noble Lord. I and my colleagues have been thoroughly impressed with the careful, systematic way in which GCHQ, the NCSC and other services have advised the National Security Council on this matter. He is right: if they felt that different advice should have been given, it would have been given. I put on record my thanks to them for all the work that they have done on this.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Morgan of Cotes]

As I said earlier, if the noble Lord looks at the documents, he will see that the process sets out clearly how a high-risk vendor is defined, which was one of the points raised by his Front Bench. The requirements that a company does not meet—there is a list of them—determine how it will be considered a high-risk vendor. Once it is considered a high-risk vendor, and if a provider wanted to include it in the networks, that would trigger involvement by the NCSC in working out how its involvement could be mitigated. So, there are a number of steps that I would expect, based on today’s announcement and where we are with the providers and rollout of 5G. I have made it clear that we want to reach a stage where there is no need for any high-risk vendors in our system. However, we are some way off that, which is why the NSC has taken the decision it has taken today.

[Lord West of Spithead]

My Lords, the issue of governance boards, rightly raised by the noble Lord without a tie, is a valid one. It was first flagged up that we had problems with Huawei, after a number of years, when it stated that it could no longer guarantee security. Huawei was told to put in place a lot of investment—£2 billion, I think. Has that investment been put in to harden up the systems and to correct those problems?

[Baroness Morgan of Cotes]

The oversight board’s conclusions are, I believe, public documents. As we heard earlier, there are question marks about things that Huawei has been asked to do which it has not done. I would need to check the specifics on whether it has spent that money and where we are in the latest process—the oversight board publishes its report annually—and I am happy to write to the noble Lord with further details.

Lotteries Regulation

Lord West of Spithead Excerpts

Tuesday 16th July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

I think I said that we need an evidence base to change legislation for the National Lottery, as it has been such a conspicuous success. The noble Lord implies that it is not the right thing to do. Technological changes to the way that people can play the lottery now are a concern, but in going out to consultation we are not presupposing the rights and wrongs. We are saying that if we are going to change what has been a very successful institution, we need evidence, and we want to ask people what they think about it.

[Lord West of Spithead (Lab)]

Talking of evidence, do we have any evidence about what strata of society, in terms of income, tend to buy most lottery tickets? Is it the less affluent or the more affluent, and is there any evidence as to how that is split?

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

I should have said to the previous noble Lord that I do not have the figures for the percentage of lottery sales made to 16 to 18-year olds, but I will write to him. Speaking very generally, there is evidence that the less affluent sections of society spend disproportionately more on the National Lottery.

Internet Encryption

Lord West of Spithead Excerpts

Tuesday 14th May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

It is not possible to do so very briefly. It means that, when you send a request to a server and you have to work out which server you are going to by finding out the IP address, the message is encrypted so that the intervening servers are not able to look at what is in the message. It encrypts the message that is sent to the servers. What that means is that, whereas previously every server along the route could see what was in the message, now only the browser will have the ability to look at it, and that will put more power in the hands of the browsers.

[Lord West of Spithead (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords—

[The Lord Privy Seal (Baroness Evans of Bowes Park) (Con)]

My Lords, if we are very quick and we actually ask questions, we might get two in. We will start with the Labour Benches.

[Lord West of Spithead]

My Lords, I thought I understood this subject until the Minister explained it a minute ago. This is a very serious issue. I was unclear from his answer: is this going to be addressed in the White Paper? Will the new officer who is being appointed have the ability to look at this issue when the White Paper comes out?

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

It is not something that the White Paper per se can look at, because it is not within the purview of the Government. The protocol is designed by the IETF, which is not a government body; it is a standards body, so to that extent it is not possible. Obviously, however, when it comes to regulating and the powers that the regulator can use, the White Paper is consulting precisely on those matters, which include DNS blocking, so it can be considered in the consultation.

Huawei

Lord West of Spithead Excerpts

Thursday 25th April 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord West of Spithead (Lab)]

My Lords, does the Minister not agree that—

[Noble Lords]

Front Bench!

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

I assure the House that I do not feel certain about many things. But seriously, my noble friend has a point. However, one should not be led into a false sense of reassurance by saying we should ban one particular company. There are really only about three main suppliers of this 5G equipment: Nokia, Ericsson and Huawei. Both Nokia and Ericsson either have their components assembled in or buy components from China. We must be very careful about trying to give a false sense of reassurance by banning just one company or another.

[Lord West of Spithead]

My Lords, I apologise for leaping in earlier; it is not like Radio 4. It is an absolute disgrace that things discussed at the National Security Council are leaked. I hope the Minister can tell us exactly what is to be done about this and how it will be looked into. It is really disgraceful.

On the work that is going on, does the Minister not agree that it is really important to complete that full survey? This is such a complex subject. Many of the firms referred to have exactly the same sort of problems as Huawei does. We have used Huawei since 2009. We know there are risks. We must never forget that China is a very real risk—let us face it: it has, on an industrial scale, stolen IP from us—but that does not mean that we cannot use its equipment in certain ways, as long as our experts are able to modify that risk.

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

My Lords, I completely agree with the noble Lord that any leak from the National Security Council is a disgrace. Obviously it should not happen. On what is happening about that, I am not able to comment—and he would not expect me to—on any particular inquiry or investigation, but I can say that the Prime Minister takes leaks from the Government very seriously, particularly when they are to do with security. I will leave it at that.

As far as Huawei in particular is concerned, I absolutely agree with the noble Lord. We must mitigate the risks where we can. We have an extensive oversight programme for Huawei—more extensive than for any other company. We have to face up to the fact that the risks come from not just the hardware but the software, and 5G in particular will mean that upgrades to software will be going through the networks the whole time. That is one of the areas we have to concentrate on and it does not come from a particular supplier of hardware.

Online Harms

Lord West of Spithead Excerpts

Monday 8th April 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

I agree with the noble Baroness that the television regulator and other media regulators have done a good job and that they are a good example. However, I will not be watching that programme, because I have an enormous amount of work today. If she promises not to ask any questions about the statutory instrument tomorrow, I might have a bit more time. But seriously, that shows that the decisions we are asking regulators to make are not easy. We are not trying to censor the internet. We want a vibrant internet which allows discussion, debate and different points of view but which does not allow some of the worst harms, which are indescribably bad. We need to deal with those, and we want to make the areas which are regulated offline also regulated online, in a reasonable and proportionate way.

[Lord West of Spithead (Lab)]

My Lords, we must not delude ourselves; despite everything the major internet giants and the social media platforms say about how they are trying to advance the cause of humankind and make things better for us, they are there to make profit—to make money. In the same way as when you are dealing with a chap and you grab him by a certain part of his anatomy, his mind follows, if you grab their money, their minds will follow. Anything we do about punishing must focus on the money side, because that will grab their attention.

When we talked about the international side of things some years ago, we were concerned about countries such as China and Russia, which immediately said, “Oh yes, this sort of control is a wonderful thing”, and we had to be careful to get ourselves unwound from that. Have we had any international discussions at all yet about what we are proposing in this White Paper?

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

I agree with the noble Lord about money, although it is not only about money; individual liability is also important. If senior executives of companies are held personally responsible, that has a significant effect, as do criminal charges against companies. However, those things are part of the consultation.

On Russia and China, and countries that do not share our views about the open internet, obviously we have to take that into account, which is why, for example, there is a lot of discussion about disinformation and how companies will be expected to look out for that and deal with it by using technology and in many other ways.

Lastly, I am not aware of the detail of the international discussions, but no other country has taken this approach. For example, we have talked about individual measures that different countries have taken: Australia has set up a new safety commissioner, who is like an ombudsman, but again, that is reactive rather than proactive, and Germany has set up a law which insists that companies must take down material, but again, that is reactive. We have talked to countries about individual bits of legislation, but no one anywhere has taken a holistic and proactive approach to internet regulation. We certainly expect that if this goes through, is a success and works well, other countries will be interested, and we will certainly be prepared to talk to them about it.