Draft Criminal Justice (Electronic Commerce) (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2021

Alex Cunningham Excerpts

Tuesday 29th June 2021 General Committees

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

Let me just say that it is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship for the first time, Mrs Miller. This is the first time since Thursday that I have been in this particular Committee Room; we were dealing then with the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. Then, I was working with two Ministers, and today I am pleased to welcome this Minister, who is almost ready to go, so I will sit down.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Cunningham]

I am sorry to disappoint you, Mrs Miller, by not allowing you to oversee your first Division in Committee. I thank the Minister for outlining the proposal so comprehensively.

As he explained, the e-commerce directive no longer applies in the UK following the end of the transition period on 31 December 2020. As a result the country of origin principle whereby an EEA-established ISS is liable for relevant offences only to the laws of the state in which it is established, rather than being subject to the individual laws of each state in which it operates, no longer functions as it used to.

There are also a couple of adverse possible consequences of not removing provision of the country of origin principle, which the Minister outlined. There would be a dual legislative burden for UK-established ISSs while operating in the EEA, and it would leave a gap with liability for EEA-established ISSs when operating in the UK. Of course, I recognise the volume of legislative change that was needed to extricate the UK from the EU, and that within the bulk of work, some parts would need to be prioritised over others. However, it would have been far preferable for the Government to finalise the necessary changes before the transition period ended. That would have been entirely possible had it not been for the Government’s insistence on seeking arbitrary deadlines throughout the Brexit process that they consistently failed to meet.

I would also welcome some reassurance from the Minister on a point raised by the European Statutory Instruments Committee, which said:

“The Committee is concerned that the effect of this instrument could be to dilute regulation of the international effect of publication of certain kinds of material (particularly online material with global reach) as it is not clear whether equivalent offences exist across the EEA.”

I am glad the Government have responded positively to the Committee’s recommendation of using the affirmative resolution procedure, but they have chosen not to carry out the review of equivalent provision across the EEA, as requested by the Committee.

I can understand that a full and comprehensive review would have taken a good amount of time and resources and I recognise the Government’s point that the impact of the changes will be minimal, because, as far as they are aware, there have been no prosecutions of information society services for these offences, or even any use of the country of origin principle jurisdictional rules that the instrument will remove. Yet, I am still surprised to see a Government who have had much publicity on how seriously they take the dangers of online harms shrug off the Committee’s response so quickly.

The Minister was in the Chamber earlier today to hear one of his own Members raise this very matter during Justice questions. It would therefore be useful to hear from the Minister whether any other sort of less comprehensive and therefore less resource-intensive research was considered by his Department before it chose the option of doing nothing at all.

That said, as I explained earlier, the Opposition understand the aim of this change and are sympathetic to it. We recognise that some Brexit-related deficiencies still need to be addressed and so we will not oppose this instrument today.