Mobile Communications (Interception)

Baroness Primarolo Excerpts

Thursday 10th March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

I believe that, in accordance with Parliament-speak, this Adjournment debate has been entitled something like “The Interception of Mobile Telephony”, but in case anybody is in any doubt, it is about phone hacking. [Interruption.] That term covers a multitude of sins: tapping a telephone call or line; hacking into a phone’s operating system to access e-mails, text messages, contact details or— [Interruption.]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. I am very sorry to interrupt the hon. Gentleman. The Adjournment debate is now taking place. If Members wish to have private conversations, they can do so in the Lobby. I would be very grateful if they would not do so in the Chamber.

[Chris Bryant]

You are very naughty boys.

As I was saying, the term phone hacking includes hacking into a phone’s operating system to access e-mails, text messages, contact details or a record of mobile internet searches, and the interception of mobile phone messages either before or after the person for whom they were intended has accessed them. These are not just sins, of course; they are offences under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, the Data Protection Act 1998 and the Computer Misuse Act 1990.

There are other dark arts: ringing an office and pretending to have to deliver a parcel to someone’s home address and thereby fraudulently getting the home address; ringing a phone call centre and pretending to be a client so as to get a personal identification number to be able later to listen to, or change, somebody’s messages; and blagging a doctor’s receptionist into giving highly personal information about an appointment or medication or other treatment. Interestingly, one expert concluded only two days ago that roughly 60% of doctors’ surgeries in England are completely incapable of protecting patients’ privacy in this kind of situation.

All those dark arts were part of the systematic modus operandi of the News of the World for a sustained period. Evidence already in the public domain shows that that period extended at least from 2003 to 2006, when Andy Coulson was the editor of the newspaper. Recent evidence also suggests that it continued long after Coulson had left, and that between June 2009 and March 2010 a News of the World journalist called Dan Evans was accessing or attempting to access the phone messages of Kelly Hoppen. I believe that the practice started earlier than 2003; I believe it started in 2002, under the editorship of the then Rebekah Wade, now Rebekah Brooks, and I believe that evidence will very soon prove that to be the case. I find it absolutely extraordinary that Rebekah Brooks has, thus far, refused point blank to appear before the Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport. I very much hope that in future deliberations that Committee will insist, if necessary by a motion of this House, that she be forced to appear before it.

This activity was not confined to the News of the World alone. I understand that there is now clear evidence that at least one journalist at The Sunday Times was also involved. For a long time, though, News International tried to maintain that just one rogue reporter at the News of the World was involved: Clive Goodman, the royal correspondent. News International could not explain why a royal correspondent would have been interested in the messages of the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes) or Sienna Miller, as they are not notable members of the royal family, but it was assisted in its argument by the Metropolitan police. Assistant Commissioner Andy Hayman, who was formerly in charge of the investigation, said that there were “perhaps a handful” of hacking victims, and his successor, John Yates, maintained time and again that there were very few victims. Indeed, as late as late last year several possible victims were told directly by the Metropolitan police that there was “little or no” evidence of hacking in their case.

Of course we now know that to be completely and utterly untrue. Indeed, the head of the new investigation, appointed this January, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers, has said explicitly that

“this has now proved to be false, and represents an important and immediate new line of inquiry.”

The allegation that there were only “perhaps a handful” of hacking victims is countered by the fact that I could name—I am not going to do so today—at least eight Members of the House of Commons who have been informed directly by the Metropolitan police that not only were they a person of interest to Mr Mulcaire, but there may have been interception of their messages.

There are very serious issues here. On the face of it, at least, the relationship between the Metropolitan police and the News of the World is remarkably and, I would argue, dangerously close. The former editor of The Sun and the News of the World, Rebekah Brooks, has openly confessed that she has paid police officers for information—in other words, bribed the police—and there has been no investigation whatever. Andy Hayman, who once led the News of the World investigation at the Metropolitan police, has ended up on the News International payroll. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner and other senior Met officers dined with senior executives at the News of the World both while the investigation was ongoing and when there were calls that the investigation be reopened. Indeed, Sir Paul Stephenson met Neil Wallis of the News of the World in September 2006, only a month after counter-terrorism officers arrested Mulcaire and Goodman. There were 12 other private dinners and social engagements, including an invitation for Sir Paul to attend the News Corporation summer party. And in 2009, Deputy Commissioner John Yates had dinner with the editor of the News of the World, Colin Myler, just when he was refusing calls for the investigation to be reopened. That was at best ill-advised; at worst, fairly or unfairly, it smacks of collusion.

One day there will have to be a full investigation into why the Met’s original investigation was so cursory. Was it laziness that meant people simply could not be bothered to wade through the material gathered from Glenn Mulcaire in 2006? Was it because of the closeness of senior officers to the newspaper? Was it just too ready an acceptance of News International’s word, or did the News of the World have something on some of the people involved in the investigation? Or was it a mistaken understanding of the law, deliberate or accidental?

That takes me to the evidence that John Yates gave to the Select Committee on Home Affairs in September 2010, in which he said that

“hacking is defined in a very prescriptive way by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and it’s very, very prescriptive and it’s very difficult to prove…There are very few offences that we are able to actually prove that have been hacked. That is, intercepting the voicemail prior to the owner of that voicemail intercepting it him or herself.”

That point at the end is very important:

“intercepting the voicemail prior to the owner of that voicemail intercepting it him or herself.”

On that basis—and only on that basis—Yates asserted that there were really only eight to 12 victims.

It has now emerged, however, that never at any stage during the prosecution of Goodman and Mulcaire did anybody from the Crown Prosecution Service advise the Metropolitan police that the law should be interpreted in such a way, and never at any stage in the prosecution was that interpretation relied on. Indeed, the Director of Public Prosecutions said in his evidence:

“First, the prosecution did not in its charges or presentation of the facts attach any legal significance to the distinction between messages which had been listened to and messages which had not. Secondly, the prosecution not having made the distinction, the defence did not raise any legal arguments in respect of the issue, and pleaded guilty.”

Furthermore, I understand that on 1 October last year a team from the CPS held a meeting with a team from the Metropolitan police and formally warned them it was wrong to claim such an interpretation. Scotland Yard, therefore, has known for more than five months that the evidence given by Yates to the two Select Committees was misleading—not on a minor point, but on the most substantial point of all, as it is directly linked to the question of how many victims there are in the affair and whether there should or should not be a further investigation or a reopening of the investigation. Indeed, that was the very reason—and the only reason—why the Metropolitan police refused point blank to reopen the case until January of this year.

Let me be clear. I am delighted that the Met has reopened the investigation. I am glad that additional information has now been gathered from other sources, but what still astounds and infuriates me is that in many cases the Met already had all the information it needed—reams and reams of notes taken by Mr Mulcaire with 91 personal identification numbers, copious invoices, pages devoted to individual targets with thousands of linked phone numbers, many of them garnered illicitly, and quite often the name of a commissioning journalist or executive. Indeed, some of us have been shown the material that was gathered from Mr Mulcaire in 2006, which has been sitting in the Metropolitan police’s vaults ever since, that relates directly to us.

In other words, the Met had many of the dots—it just failed or refused to join them up. Let us take one example. On 2 September 2009, Mike Hall, former MP for Weaver Vale, directly asked Mr Yates,

“was John Prescott’s phone actually tapped or not?”

Yates answered:

“No. As I said on the day, there is no evidence it was.’

Yates also told the Home Affairs Committee on 7 September 2010—just a few months ago—that Lord Prescott

“has never been hacked to my knowledge and there is no evidence that he has.”

Yet now Lord Prescott has been told that that evidence exists and always has existed. We now know that the evidence given to the Committee was completely disingenuous.

Yates misled the Committee, whether deliberately or inadvertently. He used an argument that had never been relied on by the CPS or by his own officers so as to suggest that the number of victims was minuscule, whereas in fact we know and he knew that the number of potential victims is and was substantial. What was lacking was not possible avenues of investigation, but the will to pursue them.

What is depressing is how closely all that accords with the line spun by News International. When the Chairman of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport Committee asked Les Hinton:

“You carried out a full, rigorous internal inquiry, and you are absolutely convinced that Clive Goodman was the only person who knew what was going on?”,

Les Hinton replied:

“Yes, we have and I believe he was the only person”.

There simply has not been a full or rigorous investigation. I do not know why, although I could speculate, but I hope that one day we shall all know.

There is also the matter of the mobile phone companies, each of which has operated a slightly different system regarding mobile phone messages. There is clear evidence that in some cases rogue staff members sold information to investigators and reporters. In other cases, companies spotted that a client’s phone had been compromised but failed to notify the client. Indeed, one Select Committee report noted that Vodafone sometimes notified people, O2 mostly notified people but Orange never did. When I asked Orange yesterday whether it would notify a client if their phone was hacked into now, it said it did not know. However, I understand that today it believes that in certain circumstances it might notify a client. I believe that in every such circumstance the client should be notified when there has been a problem. All that suggests a rather slapdash approach towards the security of mobile telephony.

This has been a many layered scandal, but at the heart of the issue is the rationale behind the whole modus operandi at the News of the World and other newspapers. As one police officer put it to me, the newspapers involved deliberately sought to harass, intimidate and bully people for their own commercial interests. In the pursuit of their victims they were reckless about the innocent bystanders whose personal messages were intercepted, transcribed and relayed to others.

Almost as bad as the original illegal activity—only the tip of which we have yet seen—has been the cover-up. Other Members and former Members of the House have said they were warned off pushing the issue in the House and in Select Committees. When I raised the question of parliamentary privilege in the House last September, my friends were told by a senior figure allied to Rupert Murdoch and a former executive of News International to warn me that it would not be forgotten. What is truly shameful is the fact that the full extent of all this is coming to light now only because individuals have taken private civil actions, often at great expense, against the News of the World, News International or the Metropolitan police.

I praise the investigation that has now begun and I trust that the deputy assistant commissioner will follow where the evidence leads. I only wish that her predecessor had done the same. I suspect that even hardened cynics will be shocked when they know the full extent of the operation that went on, but I praise those who have taken courageous action in the courts, especially Sienna Miller and Kelly Hoppen.

There are many unanswered questions. Why was it left to the News of the World to do its own internal investigation and, in particular, why did the News of the World rather than the Metropolitan police impound Ian Edmondson’s computer? How did e-mails relating to Ian Edmondson that were not available a year ago suddenly become available once he was implicated in Mulcaire’s papers relating to Siena Miller, which the Met had had in its possession for at least four years? Why were key figures at the News of the World, including Neville Thurlbeck, not interviewed by the police? Why did the Met choose a narrow, false interpretation of the law on interception? How many journalists commissioned Glenn Mulcaire’s illegal activity? How many senior executives at News International were aware of what was going on on their watch? Were Rebekah Brooks, Andy Coulson, Les Hinton and Neil Wallis aware? For four years now, the argument from the Met and the News of the World has been consistent: there was just one rogue reporter, there were very few victims, it is very difficult to prove anything and every avenue of investigation was pursued. Every shred of that argument is now in tatters.

I fully understand that there will be people who think none of this matters, and that it is just a storm in a metropolitan teacup, but the freedom of the press is far too important and was won too hard to be sullied by such illegal activity. Investigative journalism is so important in uncovering malfeasance that it is vital readers know that the stories they read are properly, reliably and legally sourced.

In the end this is about who runs Britain. Are the press above the law or subject to it? Is the law there to protect the press or to pursue every avenue of investigation? In time, I suspect we shall see that this has been a full-blown, copper-bottomed scandal.