Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Bill

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Thursday 17th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Paddick]

My Lords, I want to say just two things. The majority view of this House yesterday at Second Reading was dissatisfaction with the lack of time for public consultation and parliamentary scrutiny of this legislation, not dissatisfaction with the sunset clause. The last thing we need to do is to recreate that problem by not allowing enough time for public consultation and parliamentary scrutiny of the whole area of RIPA and the associated legislation.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the amendment to have the timetable brought forward because two and a half years is a very long time. While I want to put to one side ideas of conspiracy theories, I do think that there is a hope that somehow the current high level of interest in this will dissipate and that the usual British torpor about what happens with the security services will settle itself back on to our society and we will become unquestioning again. This is about kicking it into the long grass; this is really about postponing it for as long as possible because by that time people will have forgotten the disclosures that we recently had through Snowden and others. We should be concerned to ensure that we act while people are interested and concerned about these issues because they are pressing and very important to a vital and vibrant democracy.

It is important that we have proper scrutiny of the activities that are done in our name at whatever level in our society, and we have to have proper controls. What I am concerned about is when I hear about the setting up of Joint Committees and so on because we always know that the people who are put on to such Joint Committees are hand-picked. There was a period in my life where I remember this happening with the vetting of juries. They are hand-picked to be people who are already very much on the side of protecting the security services.

The security services are vital to the interests of our nation but they need to be questioned. They need to be questioned with some scepticism at times and I am not sure that we get that when people become comfortable in the security committees, as we have seen, and scrutiny is not of the level that it should be. So if we are going to set up these committees and so on, I hope we will see on them the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, and some of the people who have been niggling at these issues and asking the questions that were not asked about rendition and so on. There was a complacency in this House and elsewhere about some of the things that happened, which we should have been much more scrupulous about. I hope that when we come to set up committees we will see a greater variety of presences than the ones we have seen until now.

I do not think that two and a half years is the right period of time; 18 months would be perfectly satisfactory and I urge that we look to a shorter period because it concentrates minds while minds are concentrated on this issue.