Investigatory Powers (Amendment)Bill [Lords]

David Davis Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 25th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Dan Jarvis]

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

[Sir David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)]

I was the Minister who took through the House the Bill that created the ISC. At the time, the intention was that it would evolve to become a very powerful Committee, but it did not absolve the entire House from some responsibility. Two elements are involved here. One has just been mentioned by the hon. Gentleman—the Prime Minister’s appearance before the Committee—and the other is minimal redaction of the reports that the Committee creates. One of the problems we have encountered in recent years is excessive redaction of those reports. Has the hon. Gentleman any views on that?

[Dan Jarvis]

The right hon. Gentleman has made two important points, both of which I agree with, about redaction and about the attendance of the Prime Minister. I do not think it unreasonable to expect that once a year the Prime Minister should seek to meet what is a very important cross-party Committee of this House. I should be happy to give way to the Minister should he wish to add his own views on this matter, but given the basis of my sense of where the House is and given previous debates, I think most Members will agree that it is not unreasonable to ask the Prime Minister to turn up once a year.

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[Dan Jarvis]

I am grateful to the Minister for clarification on the response to new clause 2. He understands that we have tabled it because we genuinely think that it is a mechanism that—let us be honest about it—would not be particularly onerous for the Government, and would be helpful in focusing minds across Government. I completely agree with the point he made about his civil servants, who have been excellent throughout the passage of the Bill. We just happen to differ on this issue, because the Opposition think that the new clause would provide a useful forum for the Government to consider the challenges. He is absolutely right about the rapid evolution of technology, and we think it would be no bad thing to condense Government thinking into a report that would be issued on an annual basis.

[Sir David Davis]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way again. May I address the iterative issue that the Minister and he both raised? It is not just the development of technology that is important here; it is also about the development of other countries’ security systems. For example, the Germans are putting in place laws that require end-to-end encryption—the very thing that we were worried about—so we will have to manoeuvre over the course of the coming years to make sure that what we do fits not just with the technology companies, but with what our allies are doing.

[Dan Jarvis]

That is a very important point, and I completely agree. These are complex and difficult matters of public policy, and I completely understand that none of this is easy from the Minister’s perspective. However, if the right hon. Gentleman does not mind my saying so, his point strengthens the case for new clause 2, because we think it would provide a useful mechanism for the Government to track the development of these important matters, but also provide a mechanism for Members of this House to hold the Government to account on them. I am very grateful for the points he has made.

Before turning to amendment 24 on BPDs, which stands in my name, I would be very grateful if the Minister could say whether any progress has been made on arrangements to notify the Investigatory Powers Commissioner when adding new BPDs to existing category authorisations. It might not be in the Bill, but we think that even a reference to it in the IPC’s annual inspection would be helpful progress on this matter. The Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for North Durham and I have discussed that, and I would be grateful if the Minister could said something about it.

I acknowledge the amendments on BPDs that were tabled by the hon. Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East (Stuart C. McDonald). Both of our parties have concerns about the definition of “low or no expectation of privacy” for BPDs, which we debated in a pretty constructive fashion on Second Reading and in Committee. However, Labour does not oppose the concept of “low or no expectation of privacy” for BPDs, which is why we will not support amendment 7, which was tabled by the SNP spokesman. Instead, amendment 24, which stands in my name, seeks further clarification on how “low or no expectation of privacy” will be applied to BPDs, with the aim that the parameters must be as clear as possible for the House to understand.

In Committee, the Minister used the Panama papers as an example of leaked and widely republished material being defined as a BPD with a low or no expectation of privacy. I understand why the Minister chose to use that example, but most other leaked documents containing personal information do not attract anywhere near the same level of media attention. Again, I would be grateful if the Minister took this opportunity to provide another example of information from a leak without widescale press coverage that would be suitable for the designation of a bulk personal data set with a low or no expectation of privacy.

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To conclude, this important Bill has demanded strong and careful scrutiny through its journey in the other place and in this House. Our personal liberties and our national security depend on it. It is in the national interest to get it right and to ensure that legislation like this is both appropriate and proportionate in its scope. It must also be effective in maintaining the powers that our police and security services already have to disrupt and defeat criminals and malign actors who seek to harm us and undermine our way of life. I hope that the Minister will listen carefully to the points made by Opposition Members and to the other right hon. and hon. Members speaking after me, all of whom will be working in the national interest and wanting to ensure that the Bill protects both our safety and our liberty.

[Sir David Davis]

I start from the perspective that we are highly likely to regret some elements of this Bill within the next 10 years, and I will come back to that in a moment. I will also start by commending the Minister for Security, my right hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat), for his approach. It has not always been like this. The real precursor of this Bill was the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014, all stages of which was taken in one day because the Government of the day claimed it as an emergency, even though they had spent three months thinking about it and even though they took nine months to implement it afterwards, such was the emergency. As a result, I challenged it in the High Court, and it was struck down. The Investigatory Powers Act 2016, which this Bill amends, was in effect the replacement for that. It was not a terrific improvement, but it was an improvement. As I say, the Minister’s approach to this Bill has been much more democratic, much more open and much more valuable.

[Sir John Hayes]

I said that we are not going to be partisan in this debate, and the shadow Minister started in that vein, but my right hon. Friend has been highly contentious about the Bill that I took through the House. Bear in mind that it had pre-legislative scrutiny with a Committee of both Houses, it had at least three reports in advance of being considered by this House, and it was debated in this House at length, in the same spirit that I mentioned earlier, and many amendments were tabled, many of which were accepted by the Government. I have described the pretty full consideration and scrutiny that it received, which is why it is such an essential piece of legislation, as the Minister will confirm, and is used by the security services and the police every day.

[Sir David Davis]

I will not go over it again, but the High Court and the Court of Appeal came to a different view from that of my right hon. Friend, I am afraid, and that is why the legislation was struck down.

Some of the elements of this Bill are not very wise. The Opposition have agreed that the pre-notification of tech companies will act to drive business away from our shores. That is, as I said earlier, the opposite of what the German Government are doing, and we are going to have to modify our approach to deal with some of our allies along the way.

I also have serious concerns about the bulk collection of data, which the Scottish National party has tabled an amendment on. I think it was Stalin who once said that, at a certain point, quantity has a quality all of its own. That is certainly true of information technology and bulk data. It was interesting to listen to the earlier brief debate on so-called “no expectation” and “low expectation of privacy”, by the way. Those are completely different things. They sound similar but they are completely different, as will become clear, I suspect, when the SNP spokesperson speaks to that amendment. Even today, “low expectation of privacy” data can tell a Government with quite primitive software vast amounts about our lives and about what we are doing every minute of every day, but with artificial intelligence that is going to be multiplied many times and become much more powerful than before.

To give colleagues a feel for how this might work, let us look back to the covid period, which in some senses was almost Orwellian. The Government had three different disinformation units of various sorts that looked at everybody’s comments. If someone commented on flaws in the modelling of the virus, questioned where the virus came from or quite properly stated that the vaccine did not stop transmission—it stopped deaths, but it did not stop transmission—this would lead to all their low or zero expectation of privacy documentation and all their online stuff being monitored by the Government. A number of Members of this House were monitored on that basis—in my view, entirely wrongly. That was all within the law as it stood then, so it was not massively important, but it nevertheless demonstrates the mindset of Whitehall when dealing with these things.

Today, however, nine out of 10 of us—if not more—carry a smartphone. That makes it easy to access our shopping habits, our purchase history, our bank records, our automatic number plate recognition records, and on and on and on. Do we really want the agencies of Government to be able to peer into all that data? It belongs to people who are, remember, entirely innocent of any crime. Our entire approach to law and order in this country has been to focus on people against whom there is a reasonable expectation or a reasonable suspicion, not to monitor everybody. It seems to me that this intrusive surveillance is a dangerous route to take and, as I say, I think we might regret it within 10 years, because the power of artificial intelligence will make this bulk data much more informative than we are conscious of today. I worry about it. I did not put an amendment down on it because others have done so, but it is something that we must concern ourselves with in the longer run.

One of my two principal concerns today is how the Bill relates to the expansion of powers around the surveillance of Members of this House. Until 2015, it was widely understood that the Wilson doctrine protected MPs’ communications from interception. This protection was repeated in unequivocal terms by successive Prime Ministers—even Tony Blair, who is not someone with a great reputation for worrying about Members’ civil liberties. Despite clear and unambiguous statements that MPs and peers would not be placed under surveillance, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal held in 2015 that the doctrine had been unilaterally rescinded by the Government.

In an attempt to ease concerns, the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 created a regime—the one we have now—whereby a Secretary of State must first secure the approval of the Prime Minister and a judicial commissioner before authorising the interception of an MP’s communications. Frankly, I have served under nine Prime Ministers as a Member of Parliament, and I cannot say I am happy that all of them would have taken a very responsible approach to exercising this power. This is an almost judicial power that is given to a person whom it is our job to challenge and hold to account every day.

The Bill seeks to expand the list of people who can sign off on the surveillance of MPs way beyond that, from the Prime Minister to effectively five Secretaries of State. There was a long argument in the Lords and in Committee about introducing words such as “unable” or “unavailable.” I think they had in mind that Boris Johnson was sick and laid up for a month or so and perhaps could not act in that capacity. Even by that logic, we do not need five Secretaries of State to be able to deputise, unless we are imagining a mass-casualty event in the Cabinet. Frankly, this seems far more like a precursor to a general loosening of the policy than a serious and sensible protection of the ability to sign this off. I worry about that, and I do not like it at all.

I do not like the idea of the surveillance of MPs except under incredibly strict circumstances. I am not casually asking for MPs to be somehow above the law, not at all. This protection is vital to safeguarding what we do. We are here to hold the Government to account, not the other way round. The relationship between constituents and their elected representatives is sacrosanct. It is the bedrock upon which our representative democracy stands, and constituents expect that, as they should. But it is not just constituents who rely on the sanctity of their communications with Members.

It is truer and more obvious today than at almost any time in my 30-odd years in this House that, in doing our job, we deal with campaigners—think of the sub-postmasters—journalists, whistleblowers, victims of injustice who may be terrified of being identified and, of course, other Members of Parliament, and that is just a few. They all trust us to keep what they tell us absolutely rock solid, private and confidential.

This Bill will do nothing but further undermine people’s trust in bringing serious matters to our attention. The Horizon scandal, Mid Staffs, sweetheart tax deals with large companies, the mistreatment of prisoners by the British Army, involvement in rendition and torture, and dishonest briefings for immoral wars—every single one of them was brought to our attention by a whistleblower who, in many cases, faced criminal prosecution if they were discovered. Are people likely to continue blowing the whistle with a loosening of the Wilson doctrine? I do not think so.

If I had my way, I would amend the Investigatory Powers Act to prevent communications to and from Members of Parliament from being intercepted at all. At the very least, I would change this proposal to require that the Prime Minister secures the approval of a Supreme Court judge before signing off on any warrant permitting the interception of a Member’s communications. That would take the process completely outside the normal approach under which the Investigatory Powers Tribunal and all the machinery around it routinely says yes to requests, day in and day out. Calling for, allowing or permitting the interception of the communications of a Member of this House or the other place ought to be something clearly extraordinary in the life of a Prime Minister. A Supreme Court judge is far more likely also to have the authority required to face down poorly justified demands, which has not always happened in the past. The Executive should not wield the power to order the surveillance of Members of this House at their sole discretion. The very senior judiciary should provide a vital check on that power.

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[Mr Kevan Jones]

First, let me put on record the apologies of the right hon. Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis), who chairs the Intelligence and Security Committee. Unfortunately, he is attending Lord Cormack’s funeral, and I thought it was important to put the reason why he is not here on the record.

First, let me refer to new clause 1, which stands in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley Central (Dan Jarvis), and say that it is disappointing that we have to have this debate. I am the longest serving member of the ISC, having been on it for nearly eight years. It is a serious Committee; its members take its work seriously and work collegiately. We work on the basis that we support the work of our security services, recognising the difficult job they sometimes have and the dangerous work they do, but that we are also there to provide scrutiny and oversight. If anyone cares to look at our reports over the years, they will see that they are not only thorough, but forensic in their approach. So it is disappointing that the current Government and the previous few have downplayed the Committee’s role.

On Second Reading, I referred to the scrutiny of our intelligence services being a bit like a three-legged stool, as we have the Investigatory Powers Commissioner, the tribunal and the ISC. Together, we should be an effective mechanism to reassure the public that there is oversight of our security services. This is important because the work they do cannot be discussed in open session, and that mechanism gives the confidence that in a parliamentary democracy, where we take freedom of speech and democracy seriously, we have that oversight. The problem with the Government is that, for whatever reason, they have set out their course to undermine our work—I put that on the record.

The new clause will say that the Prime Minister should attend our meetings. It should not be necessary to include such a provision—I believe you served on the ISC at one stage, Madam Deputy Speaker, and so you understand the work we do—but we have a situation where it seems this is seen as not important. The only one in recent times who offered a meeting was the right hon. Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss), but that was because she was looking for friends in the last dying days of her Administration, so I do not think it counts. Again, I do not understand the reason behind this. The walls on the way into our office have various photographs of the Committee—you are on one of them, Madam Deputy Speaker—with various Prime Ministers of the day. But this is not about that; it is about the Prime Minister of the day knowing exactly what we are doing and our being able to raise things directly in our secure setting, which we do. That is important, but there is also a wider point to be made about how we scrutinise our security services and give the public that opportunity.

The amendments I have tabled also stand in the names of five other members of the Committee, and we support this Bill. Will we be back in a few years’ time with another Bill? Yes, we will, because, as was said by my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley Central, technology is changing very fast and we will have to react to it. When the original Bill was taken through by the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes), he recognised that it would not be set in tablets of stone and that this new Bill would be required. The right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Sir David Davis) is right to say that AI will set some other tests that we have not perhaps thought about yet and those might have to be covered by future legislation. Are we reactive as a Parliament? We always are reactive, but this Bill is important because it will give our security services the abilities to react to the ever-changing world that we face.

I wish to refer to two pairs of amendments that relate to clauses 22 and 23, which go to the issue associated with the triple lock and the authorisations—

[Sir David Davis]

Before the right hon. Gentleman moves on, I wish to pick up on his point about the need for continually keeping up with the changing technology. One thing that was expected when the ISC was created was that it would become, if not quite a grandees Committee, a Committee of people who knew exactly what they were doing and took very seriously the issues before them, including the confidentiality of what they do. At least one of the Chairmen of the ISC has complained in the past about the level of redaction of ISC reports. That matters in the context of keeping up with the times because the only way the House of Commons has of understanding the ISC’s opinions is by reading its reports, and if Members are reading a lot of blank or black lines, they will not learn very much.

[Mr Jones]

I understand the right hon. Gentleman’s frustration, but, as Madam Deputy Speaker knows, there are good reasons for those redactions. The Committee does not just agree to everything being redacted; a thorough process takes place and we have some long arguments with the agencies. I would not want anyone to go away thinking that the members of the ISC are a pushover on redacting information. A lot of attention was given to why certain things were redacted from the Russia report. I am comfortable in the knowledge that the things redacted in that report could not have been put in the public domain. The main reason for this is not to save embarrassment for government or any of the individuals; it is about the ability to protect the tradecraft of our services. If we did put certain things in the public domain, our adversaries who want to do us harm would be able to work certain things out. I assure the House that we push back hard and some redactions that have been put forward over the years have been silly, as other ISC members in the Chamber tonight will recognise.

Let me get back to the issue about the triple lock, which is important. The issue is sensitive because it relates to intrusion into the communications of Members of this House and of devolved Administrations. We are talking about what is commonly known as the Wilson doctrine, but, it is like a lot of things in this age; it was announced in 1966, when it was about telecommunications and picking phones up, but we are in a different world now, as the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden said. We now have smartphones, and God knows what is going to be invented in the next few years in terms of how we communicate. As with a lot of things, the convention was thought to be the way forward, but clearly in 2015 it was found that the devolved Administrations were not covered by it and neither were MEPs. The Investigatory Powers Tribunal found that it had no legal enforcement at all, so it was credit to the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings and the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 that a formal process was put in place for it—that is important.

Currently, the 2016 Act has three layers of safeguards: the Secretary of State who asks for the warrant; a judicial commissioner who examines the communication that is the target of interception and the type of equipment involved, if it relates to a member of a relevant legislature; and, thirdly, the Prime Minister, who, as the final stop, has to agree this.

The Bill will allow the Prime Minister to designate “up to five” Secretaries of State who can approve the warrants in the event that he or she is unable to be available. As has been raised, the obvious example was when Boris Johnson was incapacitated through covid. When we think about the issue, this measure makes sense. The ISC recognised other unique situations when a Prime Minister may not be available, for example if they were abroad and secure communications were not possible. The ISC was keen that the circumstances needed to be exceptional, but we accept that there is a need for the requirement.

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[Mr Jones]

Victory at last—there is such power in changing one word. The Minister has given a solemn undertaking on the Floor of the House that the code of practice will change the word “should” to “will”. A small victory for the ISC, but I am sure my colleagues will take it in the spirit in which it is offered. I say to the Minister gently that we could have agreed that the other day when we met, but no doubt the issue that we will be voting on tonight was concentrating his mind.

With that great victory under my belt and those of the members of the ISC, I turn to other amendments. New clause 3, in the name of the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden, deals with

“cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment”.

I understand why he has proposed the new clause. It is always worthwhile debating the issues, which run through the entire Bill. Am I assured that there are processes in place that protect our civil liberties? Yes, I am. However, there are occasions when things can go wrong or people ignore them. I think they have been strengthened greatly, but the right hon. Gentleman refers to an important point. I was on the Committee in 2017 when we did the inquiry into detention and rendition. That took a long time, but it was a good report given where it got to. It unearthed things that were not pleasant but had been done in our names as a democracy.

One conclusion the Committee came to was that in its view the UK tolerated actions and took others that were regarded as inexcusable. Well, they were inexcusable, because as the report outlined, we passed on information to allies who then used it. I think things have changed, and to give Members an example of how the ISC can improve things, we called for a review of the consolidated guidance surrounding the way that security operatives should operate regarding issues of rendition or torture. That led to the Fulford principles, which I think have moved on and tightened up the rules and guidance for members of our security services. That was a big movement forward.

I do not think the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden will push the new clause to a vote, but it reinforces the point that if we have a situation whereby, again, we get information that is passed to one of our allies, we must ensure that those principles are upheld. Am I confident that they are upheld now? I think I am, but how did we get to that pretty damning report in 2017? We got there because those principles and the guidance in place were not followed. We must be vigilant about that, and over the years the right hon. Gentleman has done not only this House but the country a service through his tenacity on these subjects.

[Sir David Davis]

I will not press new clause 3 to a vote, but I tabled it because in 2010-11 David Cameron, the then Prime Minister, made a promise that there would be a review and that the issue would be investigated properly, but that never happened. The implicit undertaking was that we would not do it again, and we did it again—over and over again. That is why at some point we needed to put our foot down. The problem is that whenever we put our foot down and make an absolute requirement, somebody says, for example “What about the Russians, with the terrorist attack in the last few days?” I am afraid there comes a point where we say, “We are not going to provide information if you torture people.” If we are clear about that, it helps the country and probably also helps the international battle with terrorism.

[Mr Jones]

I agree totally with the right hon. Gentleman, and I think that is where we are as a Government. Certainly those are the Fulford principles—that we do not share information. Again, some of the people who perhaps do not understand what our security services do, and those who want to malign their great work on our behalf sometimes say, “They are doing x, y and z.” Well as I know from seeing some examples, there are occasions where we deliberately do not pass on information to our allies because of the fear that the right hon. Gentleman set out. The detention and rendition report raised that issue, and the Fulford principles now give us strong guidance. Those principles have been put into being and sewn into the DNA of all new officers. As a result of a huge training programme, not just for existing officers but for new entrants into the service, officers now see that as an important part of their work. That is how it must be done, but it is always important to have this debate.

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There may be situations regarding Members of Parliament and warranting powers in which they are not the main target, but they may be a target themselves, so such a measure would be difficult. Again, I will not say too much, but I think this provision is used more often than we think for those reasons. It is not because Members of Parliament, or Members of the Scottish Parliament or the Welsh or Northern Ireland Assemblies are doing things wrong, but because increasingly those who want to harm us are targeting our communications.

[Sir David Davis]

Again I do not intend to press the matter, but if the ISC discusses this issue in the future, I point the right hon. Gentleman to the German model. They look at something and do not always release information if it is operationally sensitive.

[Mr Jones]

I agree, but that then places an unnecessary burden on the system. The current process with the Secretary of State, the judicial commissioner and the Prime Minister is robust enough to ensure that people are not doing this to find out what someone ordered on Amazon Prime this weekend or to look at their Tesco account, so I think those assurances are fine.

New clause 4 would

“remove the ability of the Secretary of State to authorise the interception of the communications of, or the obtaining of communications intended for, or private information belonging to, Members of Parliament.”

Again, it is good to have this debate, but I would support such a measure for the reasons I have outlined.

The other change in the Bill concerns bulk data. The right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings covered the original investigatory powers in detail, but there are now big data sets held not only by public authorities but by others, and that has made it more important that our security services are able to access them. Whenever we do this, however, it means more intrusion, so let me deal with the issue of oversight in the Bill, and with the broader, more intrusive powers to obtain internet connection records for the discovery of targets.

Again, that is something that I and other ISC members totally support, but the authorisation process is internal. One stance that the ISC has taken throughout all this is that if we are to give more powers to our security services, there must be a balance. There will not be a situation whereby what people have seen can be identified, but this power will drag in a lot of people who, as the right hon. Gentleman said earlier, are completely innocent. As I said, there is a need for such a power, but we thought there should be more oversight from the Investigatory Powers Commissioner. Therefore, the points I made about amendment 15 are important.

The Investigatory Powers Commissioner’s Office does a great job of ensuring public support for what we do, but, again, there is an issue around bulk datasets. Some of the examples that were given to ISC members—thanks must go to the Minister, who arranged a meeting for the Committee to be briefed on this—make sense when it comes to the issue of low or no reasonable expectation of privacy. It is burdensome, for example, to access the electoral register, but today the Government have said that somehow that is a secret document. Well, that is not the case under this Bill, in which case it is important that the security services should be able to use it, rather than having to go through the warrantry process. That goes to the point, which my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley Central raised earlier on, about the definition of “low expectation”.

Another perfectly legitimate reason that the security services need these measures is related to testing new AI models of learning. They need access to these new big datasets, which are out there and which companies use, and the Bill will allow them to have it without going through the warrantry system. If intelligence is going to be on the front foot when it comes to AI, we will have to have these big datasets that will teach the systems how to do it.

The problem comes back my hon. Friend’s question of what is deemed a low or no reasonable expectation of privacy. That is something we have considered throughout this process. One thing the ISC has considered is adding to the existing categories. One suggestion we put forward was that, when the agencies do this, they should have to email the Investigatory Powers Commissioner to notify them that they have done it.