Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Bill

Andrew Miller Excerpts

Tuesday 15th July 2014 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Miller (Ellesmere Port and Neston) (Lab)]

I understand where my hon. Friend the Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan) is coming from, but I disagree with him that it is not possible to create vehicles to build trust with the public. We need to look at examples of work that happens in other sectors. My Select Committee, the Science and Technology Committee, has recently been taking evidence on the way data analytics are managed within social media networks, and it is interesting to consider how the banking card systems create a vehicle of trust between customer and bank, with the customer sharing an enormous amount of information with those organisations.

My hon. Friend is absolutely right that the body that is trusted least is Government, and it is our job as Parliament to find ways, in this very serious area, to rebuild that trust in the system. Our next period of work on this subject must be the hugely important job of creating confidence in the independence of the oversight process of the Government and the security forces.

The David Anderson review gives us an opportunity to do something important. Clearly, David Anderson’s work goes substantially beyond counter-terrorism. Mention has been made of many other types of crime, and on my last visit to my constituency police headquarters I looked at how forensic computing is being developed in that police force. I was horrified at the proportion of work they are doing on child abuse images. With that in mind, we need to ensure that the David Anderson review takes into account expert advice from people involved in all those areas.

I encourage the Minister, when thinking about the privacy and civil liberties oversight board, to think broadly. The Minister should not think of a board and structure that fits the technology of today alone. We need to think of a structure that is technology-neutral, which both deals with the philosophical points that have rightly been raised from both sides of the debate in the House today and is structured in such a way that it can continue its work and evolve with the technologies. Twitter is here today, but it will be gone tomorrow, and something else will take its place that will be bigger, faster and better, enabling greater analysis of data for all sorts of commercial, or criminal investigation, purposes.

The other point I would like to make concerns warrants. I have discussed this with my wife, who as a magistrate has had to sign many warrants. It has always seemed to me that the missing link in public confidence has been the ability to be sure that when a warrant is signed, the person responsible for signing it—in this case the Home Secretary—is continually pressing the investigating officer, to show that the warrant was issued with just cause, so that there is some confidence building in the process of warrant granting. There would seem to be a place for almost an online equivalent of magistrates taking some of the Home Secretary’s role in this complicated area, because one would need to be logging the intrusions into personal data in a way that we have the technology to achieve, as we have demonstrated in other Departments. There is still a lot to be done in confidence building.

With those observations, I fully support the aims and objectives of the Bill, but urge that oversight is considered carefully.