Investigatory Powers (Amendment)Bill [Lords]

Angela Eagle Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 25th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Dan Jarvis]

It is a privilege to open debate on Report of this important Bill. At the outset, it is worth reiterating that Labour supports the Bill, which updates aspects of the Investigatory Powers Act 2016. That is because it is imperative that legal frameworks are updated to ensure that our police and security services keep up with changes to communications technology. Doing so ensures that they are always one step ahead of criminals and malign forces who seek to harm us and undermine our national security.

I hope the Minister, and all Members who were present in Committee, agree with me that we had a constructive debate, testing the Bill’s proportionality and robustness. Some matters relating to third-party bulk personal datasets and the oversight process for the addition of new BPDs to existing category authorisations have been largely resolved to the satisfaction of Labour Members, but other important matters still need to be addressed. I will speak first about the new clauses and amendments that stand in my name, before dealing with some of those tabled by other Members.

New clause 1 seeks to ensure that the Secretary of State publishes an annual report on the engagement between the Prime Minister and the Intelligence and Security Committee regarding the investigatory powers regime. A very similar amendment was tabled in Committee, but was withdrawn after a lengthy debate on the ISC oversight arrangements did not make any meaningful progress despite helpful contributions from my right hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) and the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes). We tabled this new clause because the Government must recognise that the ISC has a vital role to play in the democratic oversight of some of the most powerful measures that the state has at its disposal to keep us safe, to intercept communications and to interfere with equipment.

The ISC is and should be the only Committee of Parliament that can appropriately hold a Prime Minister to account on investigatory powers. There must be accountability at the highest level, and the Prime Minister is no exception. However, many Members, not least members of the ISC, know that this important mechanism is not just broken but has stopped working altogether. Not since 2014 has a Prime Minister appeared before the Committee, but, when asked about successive Prime Ministers’ lack of appearance, the Minister said that such decisions were above his pay grade. That might well be true, at least for now, so if the Minister cannot commit himself to reinstating the convention of Prime Ministers’ appearing before the Committee, the new clause would, at the very minimum, ensure that this new convention of non-attendance is reviewed annually, and scrutinised by this House and the other place. I therefore give notice of our intention to push the new clause to a vote.

[Dame Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that it is not above the Minister’s pay grade to be able to confirm that the conventions and arrangements that give the ISC a particular constitutional place in the way our system works ought to operate, even if they have not done so for the last 10 years? Does he, like me, look forward to being able to hear the Minister—rather than dismissing this important concern about the dereliction of a constitutional duty—give us an assurance that this will be the case in the future?

[Dan Jarvis]

My hon. Friend has made an important point, and one with which I suspect the overwhelming majority of Members would agree.

--- Later in debate ---

Every time we have doubt and fear when facing the wicked people who seek to do us harm and who took the lives of our dear colleagues, we give them solace. Every time we stand firm, and do what is necessary to defend our nation and its people, we do what is right. The Minister has the great privilege of leading that effort tonight, and in doing so he should have the support of all men and women of good will across this House.

[Dame Angela Eagle]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes), and indeed all the fellow members of the ISC who have spoken on both sides of the House in our debate on seeking to improve this important piece of legislation. I must say that it is very rare, when one is called towards the end of a debate, for there to have been concessions on most of the areas at issue, leaving very little else to say. It makes me happy that I did not write my speech in advance, since I would have had to rip most of it up following the Security Minister’s very welcome concessions on a range of issues during our debate. They are on the record, and they are indeed extremely welcome.

However, there is one area of detail that I want to comment on, which is about the triple lock amendment—amendment 22—on the qualifications and experience of the Secretaries of State who, under the widening of the triple lock, could if the Prime Minister of the day is incapacitated for some reason, be drawn into making a warrant to intercept the communications of a Member of this Parliament, or indeed a Member of any of the devolved legislatures in the UK. The right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Sir David Davis) was very explicit about why that particular protection should be in existence, and I completely agree with his analysis. One of the ways we defend our democracy is by allowing Members of Parliament to do their unique jobs without interference unless it is for an exceptional and a very good reason, and has been authorised at the highest level.

There has been a lot of to-ing and fro-ing while the Bill has been going through its parliamentary stages about precisely how this widening of the power to make such a warrant away from the Prime Minister, if he or she is indisposed or unable to be near secure communications, should actually be defined. We have got down to the stage where everybody agrees that to make the system robust there should be an expansion, and we have even come up with a number of Secretaries of State—five—who should be authorised in such exceptional circumstances to make that warrant.

We are now down to the last piece of disagreement between the ISC and the Minister, which is about what the qualifications of those Secretaries of State should be. In seeking to try to draw out precisely what the Government mean, we have asked as a Committee that the relevant Secretaries of State who may be down to do this duty ought already to be responsible for warrantry, or have had previous responsibility for it. Thus far, however, the Government and the Minister have been unwilling to be that deliberate in the arrangements they have made.

As the right hon. and learned Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright) said in his contribution to the debate, the only qualification apart from being a Secretary of State that the Government appear to have admitted is that the person standing in for the Prime Minister ought to have had a 20-minute security briefing about warrantry.

[Mr Kevan Jones]

Does my hon. Friend agree with me that this is so important, because the Secretary of State will be acting as the Prime Minister at that time? Once that decision has been taken—even though we now have the commitment from the Minister that the Prime Minister will be told, not should be told—they will not be able to overturn or review it in any way, so that person is acting as the Prime Minister at that stage.

[Dame Angela Eagle]

Yes, and it is clearly important that there is a reassurance that the Secretary of State who is picked to do that job in these exceptional circumstances will either have previous experience of being responsible for warrantry and issuing warrants, or have current experience. I do not see why the Security Minister cannot concede that that is where we should be. I do not understand why, over all of the parliamentary time spent on this Bill, the Government have not been able to give us that assurance, which just shores up the important nature of the commitment to widening the triple lock.

Clearly, the Minister’s very welcome decision to make the concession on amendment 23, as my right hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) has just pointed out, strengthens the situation, because that means the Prime Minister will have to be notified of such a warrant. However, my right hon. Friend is also correct in pointing out that the warrant cannot be rescinded if it has already been granted. I therefore gently ask the Security Minister whether he will not take the opportunity, in responding to the debate, to give the ISC members and the public we all represent the reassurance that the Secretaries of State who may have this power delegated to them either will already be responsible for warranting, or will have previously had responsibility for warranting. I do not understand why he cannot just get up and give us that final assurance. If he does, I think we will have done extremely well on Report and in Committee. I am rather disappointed that the Minister is not leaping to his feet, since he has been leaping to his feet a lot while my colleagues have been making their speeches. I see no such flicker in him as I am making mine. I suspect and hope that that is because he is just thinking about how he will wind up the debate and give us that final assurance that we need.

[Mr Kevan Jones]

The measure is doable, because we are not asking for something in the Bill; it could be done in the guidance. The Minister has already agreed on changing the “should” to “will”, so this measure could be reflected in the guidance that goes alongside the Bill.

[Dame Angela Eagle]

I can see that the Minister is looking pensive, so I hope that means he is thinking of some way to reassure us on this final, important point with respect to the triple lock and the widening of those powers to other Ministers who are not the Prime Minister.

The whole debate around the Investigatory Powers (Amendment) Bill demonstrates that when threats evolve, the requirement to meet them also has to evolve. We know that this area is rapidly developing, and we know also that we will probably be back in the not-too-distant future to see how these powers can be changed again to defend our democracy and meet some of the threats of serious organised crime and terrorism, which our security forces help us deal with day in, day out. We also know that if our citizens are to give us effective permission and consent to take some of these powers, any increase in powers has to be accompanied by an increase in proper oversight, to reassure them that democracy is being defended, not undermined. That includes oversight by the ISC, which is why I am a big supporter of new clause 1 as tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley Central (Dan Jarvis). It is important that that can be an ongoing reassurance.

I do not want to repeat a lot of the arguments made by colleagues, and it is important now to listen to what the Minister has to say. I thank him for the concessions he has made, and I hope he can make just a slight move towards us on the warrantry issue in the instance of the triple lock, so that we can be even more content than we are now.

[Theresa Villiers (Chipping Barnet) (Con)]

I rise to speak to amendments 15, 20 and 22, and Government amendments 3 and 6. I highlight that the investments declared in my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests include a data company.

The intelligence services carry out vital work in keeping us safe in a dangerous world, as we have heard from many colleagues this evening. The secrecy that surrounds what the agencies do inevitably means that the majority of people who work for them will never receive public praise or recognition, so I take this opportunity to thank them for their brave and dedicated efforts on our behalf. This Bill provides important updates to the law to enable them to operate effectively and to adapt to fast-moving technological change and innovation. This kind of update to legislation will be essential again and again in years to come to enable our intelligence services to keep ahead of those who would seek to do us harm. For example—this is at the heart of what we are doing today—it makes no sense to require, as the current law does, that the intelligence services undertake the full range of actions designed for holding sensitive, confidential and private information when dealing with datasets that are readily available to the public or to commercial users and over which there is little or no expectation of privacy.