Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Bill

Baroness Manningham-Buller Excerpts

Committee: 4th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 14th November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

That does help me, and of course it is where the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, lives. The noble Lord makes a very good point in that instance. As for envoys trying to steal business, there is nothing wrong with healthy business competition, but undermining the economy, through critical infrastructure, is entirely different. He also asked about the IP Act and I will write to him on that. The answer just handed to me contains a quotation from the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, who wrote:

“If Schedule 7 is being skilfully used, therefore, one would expect its exercise to be ethnically ‘proportionate’ not to the UK population, nor even to the airport-using population, but rather to the terrorist population that travels through UK ports”.


That is a far more eloquent description of the proportionality. I will write to the noble Lord about the IP Act.

[Baroness Manningham-Buller (CB)]

It may help the Committee to focus on this as a counterespionage issue. In the years that I have been here we have had, as I said at Second Reading, endless debates and legislation on terrorism. We are now talking about something that was part of my career 30 years ago. The noble Lord, Lord Paddick, rightly suggests that the poisoning of the Skripals was attempted murder and a serious crime, but there is a range of hostile activity, much of which has been mentioned by the Minister, which is potentially seriously damaging to the UK. At one end, obviously, there is the Skripals and coercive repatriation, but before that there is the collection of information, the targeting of dissidents, collecting really important stuff which is sometimes difficult to detect. In answer to the noble Lord, Lord Rosser—which I should not do—I suspect that this will not be a very frequent occurrence, but as we heard from my successor but one in MI5, this is an increasing and serious problem. This is an attempt by the Government to address a counterespionage issue.

I have a commitment this evening which may mean that I cannot stay to the end of this important debate, but I want to say at this stage that there is also the problem that there is quite a lot of this activity which is not serious crime. Under the Official Secrets Act—which, a bit like me and possibly some of your Lordships, is old and creaky—that is not adequately covered. I was encouraged to see that the Prime Minister suggested in the House of Commons on 5 September that some espionage legislation was necessary to bring this subject up to date. I look forward to seeing whether that materialises, and it would be interesting to know whether it is regarded as a patch, temporary or long-term, to some of those other problems. I fear that the later amendments trying to make this all serious crime will not work, because Official Secrets Act offences get only two years’ maximum, whereas serious crime starts at three years. So there is a gap which we have to attempt to fill.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I thank the noble Baroness for her very experienced and helpful comments. She asked: is this a patch or have we thought further ahead? Obviously, in legislation that we introduce we try to look at future threats, but who is to know what threats may emerge in the future? Clearly, cybercrime is a hugely growing threat to us. But I thank her for those very helpful clarifications. On that note, I beg to move.