Recall of MPs Bill
David Davis Excerpts(10 years, 1 month ago)
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Greg Clark
The hon. Lady makes an important point in the context of Northern Ireland. My understanding is that the Bill would not apply to those Members because they have not taken the Oath to sit in the House, but she will no doubt wish to raise that point in Committee.
Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)
I favour a recall Bill and understand that my right hon. Friend has found it difficult to get an agreement, but might we at least have some logic in this process? Under the mechanism set out in the Bill, a Member of Parliament who was arrested at a demonstration and imprisoned would be forced to take part in a new election if 10% of his constituents disapproved of his position.
Greg Clark
My right hon. Friend clearly exposes one of the aspects of our debate. The decision would be in the hands of that Member’s constituents in two respects: a petition of 10% of the electorate would be required to occasion a recall by-election; and then that Member could stand in the by-election. My right hon. Friend has experience of standing in a by-election—not caused by any wrongdoing, I hasten to say, but because he was making a point—and he won the support of his constituents for his action, so his experience might provide some reassurance.
Stephen Twigg
I agree with the hon. Gentleman and will return to that point in a moment.
The constant pressure of notices of intent, even if they are supported by only a very small minority in a constituency—a notice of intent could be triggered by just 5% of the electorate—could prove destabilising to the ability of the Member of Parliament to fulfil his or her duties, both in this place and, frankly, in their constituency. Politicians often have to make decisions that are unpopular in their constituency, but they may be decisions that are ultimately right for the country as a whole. In our system, a Secretary of State is accountable to this House, but if they are a Member of this House they also have a constituency. Does it make sense for a Secretary of State to face recall for making a decision that may be unpopular in their own constituency but may make sense for the country as a whole?
Mr David Davis
I thank the hon. Gentleman for referring to our committee, but I think he underestimates the wisdom of the public. When I had my by-election, the policy I was campaigning against had the support of 72% of the public, and yet I was returned by 75%. In the proposal authored by my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith), the thresholds are sizeable: there would need to be, in effect, 15,000 votes in a normal constituency and then 50% of the constituency would have to agree before a recall could be triggered. That is a much higher threshold than this rather ill-thought-through Government proposal.
Stephen Twigg
The right hon. Gentleman has anticipated the next and, Members will be relieved to hear, final part of my speech. I accept that his committee produced rather high thresholds for the later stages of its proposal, but the 5% threshold for a notice of intent is low. There are sensible ways in which some of these concerns could be countered. Is there a way in which we could ensure that MPs could be recalled only for their misconduct?
Chris Bryant
I am very fond of the hon. Lady, but I think she has deliberately misunderstood what I was saying. Judges regularly say in their summing up that they are taking into consideration the fact that because the person is a Member of Parliament they would lose their job as well if they were to be given a custodial sentence of more than a year. It is a matter of fact that these matters are taken into consideration.
There is another problem with the Bill. Having set a very high threshold—that the courts or MPs get to decide whether somebody is subject to the recall process—it then sets the very low threshold of 10% for throwing someone out. As I said, no Member has achieved election to this House by 50% of the total electorate, so the idea that it would be difficult to find 10% to force them out of their seat, notwithstanding the remarks of the hon. Gentleman, is to live in cloud cuckoo land.
If those two thresholds are wrong, what is the right one? Should we just leave it to the public, which in essence is what we heard from the hon. Member for Richmond Park? As many Members have said, there is a danger that the extremely wealthy could pervert the process; they could spend lots of money in individual constituencies—or perhaps 10, 20 or 30 at a time—and subvert the proper democratic process. Arguably, big money is already doing that in the British system. We need to look again at how people spend money and at the rules governing not just general elections, but by-elections, because the last thing I want is an American-style democracy where only the rich can ever get elected.
Of course there is a danger of timid MPs, but there is that danger today, and the honest truth is: I would trust the public. I say this for a simple reason. In 2003, I got into a bit of trouble with the electorate, The Mail on Sunday and a whole load of journalists after the paper revealed that I had been using a gay dating website called Gaydar, and there were pictures and so on. The story was not quite as it was presented in some of the newspapers, but be that as it may—
Chris Bryant
I will once I have finished my point.
One Mail journalist told me they were taking bets in the office on when I would commit suicide. The campaign was malevolent, but it still would have been perfectly legitimate for some of my constituents to say, “Let’s start recall.” People could legitimately have asked about my conduct. However, I also have absolute confidence in the electorate and the people of the Rhondda, and in the people of this country for that matter. They might have got 500, 1,000 or 1,500 to sign the recall, but The Mail on Sunday did its own opinion poll and found that the vast majority of the people in this country did not think I had done anything wrong or that I should resign. Having gone through that hell in November 2003, I say that it is perfectly legitimate, and the wise thing for us to do, to leave it to the public, as long as we make sure that the threshold is decent enough that it is not just about people being vexatious and as long as big money cannot determine the outcome. In the end—
Chris Bryant
This is my last sentence, and I am sure that people have heard quite enough from me—
Chris Bryant
I am sorry, I did promise to give way to the right hon. Gentleman.
Mr Davis
At the risk of repeating the hon. Gentleman’s point, I remember that we discussed that issue at the time. Surely the outcome of his whole argument is that the public are wiser than we give them credit for. They were wiser about his private life, they are wiser about the influence of big money and they are wiser about our politics. There are many Labour members in my constituency who vote against me religiously but would never vote for a recall, because they think that I am doing my job. Is that not what we end up depending on?
Chris Bryant
The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. The proof of that is that after those events, in the 2005 election, I increased my majority. I can only assume that that proves that it pays to advertise.
My argument is simple, really. Yes, let us have recall; it is an important next stage in the democratic process. We have to open up that little sliver of democracy in the political process, because the leviathan is groaning. We need to change, but we need to ensure that we sort out the financial thing, that this cannot be done vexatiously and that we have a high enough threshold.
Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)
I think that 10 years ago I would have opposed the Bill, because I would have taken the conventional view that has been expressed by one or two Government Members today. The last decade, however, has led me to believe that the chasm that has grown between the political classes and the ordinary voters—the population of the country—has become too wide. Some of that has, of course, been due to the expenses crisis, but it is by no means either the only or the first reason. As my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith) pointed out, the current trend has been ongoing for a long time, but I believe that it is now approaching a crisis point.
I have therefore concluded that a recall Bill is necessary, and, like the hon. Member for Clacton (Douglas Carswell), I shall vote for this Bill, although I must add that I do not view it as a recall Bill. If anything, it is a parliamentary expulsion Bill, because it makes it easy for the establishment of the House to expel someone from the House. Let us imagine the circumstances. A Member is found wanting by his peers in the Standards and Privileges Committee—no doubt amid a vast hue and cry from a number of tabloid and red-top newspapers—and his constituents are then told “If 10% of you vote in the referendum, this man will go.” No matter that 90% of them might want him to stay; in those torrid circumstances, only 10% need to vote, and he will be expelled. I do not think that anyone who was criticised and set up in that way would survive the process, or would be reselected by his party thereafter. He might stand on his own account like Dick Taverne, like the hon. Member for Clacton, or indeed like me, but he would not survive the normal political process. This is, as I have said, a mechanism for political expulsion.
I might find that tolerable if our mechanisms in the House met any sort of judicial test, but, having been here for some 25 years, I suggest Members conduct an experiment. I say this with no ill reflection on the people who serve on and chair the Standards and Privileges Committee. I suggest that Members make a list of the names of all who have been ruled against by the Committee, separate them into two columns consisting of Front Benchers and Back Benchers—I do not suggest that the two columns should consist of those who are within the gilded circle and those who are the mavericks—and compare the treatments of people who have committed the same crime. They will then find two classes of justice. We do not deliver justice in this House; we deliver an opinion of the establishment of the House, and that is why the public are not wrong to view our systems as intolerable.
Let me give one example. I shall not give the examples of those who have been let off, because that might be mean in the circumstances, but I will give an example of someone who, in my view, was very badly treated. It was someone who was no friend of mine and, indeed, no friend of almost anyone in the House: Ken Livingstone. About a decade ago, he received income from a series of speaking engagements. He went to the Registrar of Members’ Financial Interests and asked how he should declare that income, and he then declared it in the way the Registrar recommended. Later, someone found out how much money he had made. I think that it was more than £100,000, but in any case it was a lot of money. He was then suddenly hauled before the Standards and Privileges Committee, and forced to make an apology here in the Chamber. Why? He was an outsider. He was a maverick. He had no friends in the House, or at least no friends in the parties in the House. His was not the only case of that kind—I could have picked a number of others—but that was not justice, it was not democracy, and it would not improve this House to formalise such a process by means of the mechanism with which the Minister has presented us today.
Such a system could be made to work only if we replaced the standards and privileges process with a judicial process. I do not think that the House really wants to introduce the law into its mechanisms, but if it wants to adopt a test it will have to be a judicial test. I suspect that, if I were ever in front of the Standards and Privileges Committee, I would be looking for a judicial remedy immediately. So this is not a recall Bill as it stands; it is a parliamentary expulsion Bill, and we should understand that.
I support the proposals made by my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith), who has been a principled campaigner for these reforms for some time. I shall not take up much more of the House’s time, but I want to remind hon. Members of the differences involved. The Government’s proposal would take either a criminal mechanism or the House’s judgment and turn it into a one-off, 10% referendum. Then it would be over. My hon. Friend’s proposal would have a 5% first threshold to start the process. That would trigger the timetable, and a 20% threshold would follow. In my constituency, that would equate to just short of 15,000 voters. I have never seen a campaign in my constituency get 15,000 voters to go out voluntarily and put their name on a petition.
Richard Drax
I am listening carefully to my right hon. Friend. If, as a result of such a referendum, a political scalp were gained and a seat lost, does my right hon. Friend agree that supporters of an opposing party would get out and vote, as they would at a general election? I accept that the numbers would be down, but there could still be significant numbers voting. The numbers that he is talking about would certainly be possible if a seat could be gained in that way.
Mr Davis
This point has been made a number of times, particularly by the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant)but also by others. My hon. Friend is presuming that his constituents would vote on the basis of a simple political judgment, according to whether they wanted a Labour Government, a Tory Government, a Liberal Government or even a UKIP Government, but I do not believe that our constituents behave like that. I believe that they behave in a moral way and make judgments about us. I have discussed this matter with my constituents. Many of those who have never voted for me in my 20-odd years in the constituency would not vote to remove me on that basis. They would not make such a judgment on a political basis. They would recognise that this was a quasi-judicial judgment. That is why we are better off trusting the public than trusting the hierarchy in this House.
Mike Thornton
Much of what the right hon. Gentleman says about our constituents is true. However, he is perhaps slightly out of date in regard to the collecting of signatures. We have seen 38 Degrees inundating us with e-mails, and with modern technology it would not be as difficult as it used to be to get a great number of signatures.
Mr Davis
The hon. Gentleman misses the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park made. This would involve not an electronic collection but a physical collection of votes. People would have to get out and go down to their town hall or their polling station. I think we have nominated four locations for any given constituency. We thought about this very point; indeed, it is one of the things we crowd-tested with 40,000 people. They recognised, as did members of 38 Degrees, that an electronic vote would be the wrong way to carry out this process. It has to be a process in which people exercise a moral judgment and overcome a physical hurdle by going down to one of those locations and doing something about it. Again, this shows that we are better off trusting our own constituents.
There was much argument in Committee about the figure of 20%. Some people talked about 25%; others talked about less. The simple truth is that 20% is pretty much the norm internationally. Most, if not all, other countries exercising this mechanism do not experience many vexatious actions. The hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones)made legitimate points about the role of big money in this exercise, but only a Californian governor has been replaced throughout the century in which this mechanism has been in place in America, despite the fact that many people would have been vehemently opposed by big corporate interests. In any event, we can deal with that through the regulations and laws that will surround this Bill when we make it an Act of Parliament.
This is an incredibly important Bill, but the Government have got it quite materially wrong. This is one of those rare occasions on which it is for the House of Commons to make a judgment that will decide our own future.
Oral Answers to Questions
David Davis Excerpts(10 years, 2 months ago)
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The Prime Minister
Of course there are pressures on our NHS; everybody knows that. We made some big decisions on becoming the Government, which were to go on spending on the NHS—we put £12.7 billion more in—and to cut the bureaucracy so that there are 20,000 fewer administrators and 6,000 more doctors, including, crucially, 1,000 more GPs. We need to go on to ensure that the reform plus the money eases the pressure on our health service so that we can continue to see the sort of success that we have in our NHS today.
Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)
Q3. As the Conservative party and only the Conservative party will deliver a referendum and a renegotiation on Europe, will the Prime Minister tell us his intentions of bringing to this House the red line issues that will feature in his renegotiations, and can he give us a preview of some of those issues today?
The Prime Minister
I have set out some of the things that need to change. They include safeguards for the single market, the ability to block new regulation, ensuring that Britain comes out of ever-closer union and, crucially, as I said in my conference speech, addressing the issue of immigration. I am looking forward to addressing all of those issues in the months ahead.
Iraq: Coalition Against ISIL
David Davis Excerpts(10 years, 2 months ago)
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Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)
I want to take up my right hon. Friend’s exact point. Does the lack of strategic objective not manifest itself in one particular way? We have heard that this could go on for some time, but we have not heard a criterion for stopping, let alone a criterion for what we are going to achieve.
Sir Alan Duncan
My whole point is that we have to live with that uncertainty, because we are living in an age that lacks the clarity of the past, but that does not mean that we do nothing. We will be acting in a region the turmoil and disruption of which are more difficult to comprehend than anything we have ever seen, and that means—and this is exactly my answer to my right hon. Friend—that the path ahead is far from obvious. Personally, I have been in favour of the UK taking action only if it is part of a co-ordinated international effort. We now have that, and it is reassuring to be alongside Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, and of course the United States and France. Again I say that none of this will be straightforward. Wisdom is not weakness, particularly in the middle east. In the complicated melee of today’s middle east, we would be wise to appreciate that we are confronting a new threat in a new way, and therefore we should calibrate our expectations accordingly.
In passing, I must say that I am a little uncomfortable with the language of some people—essentially outside this House—who seem to see this decision as a test of the United Kingdom’s virility. That is no way to look at this issue, and it harks back to an age and a mentality that simply do not suit the world of today. The country needs to know why we are doing this. The justification for our involvement is best expressed in terms of what it will do to improve Iraq, its people and the region itself and less well expressed by saying that it is mainly because terrorists directly threaten us here in the UK. That threat exists anyway, and it will not be eliminated even if ISIL is forced into submission.
As my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex (Sir Nicholas Soames) said, we must also be realistic about how little we really know. The rise of ISIL has taken us all by surprise, and knowing in detail and with confidence who they are and what exactly is happening on the ground will not be easy. Our well of understanding about the region has run rather dry. If I might say so, this House would do better not to be so quick to mock the hon. Member for Bradford West (George Galloway).
Debate on the Address
David Davis Excerpts(10 years, 6 months ago)
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Sir Malcolm Bruce
What I said was that had there not been a coalition delivering stability in Government, there would have been a run on the pound, or it is likely that there would have been a run on the pound, and there would have been a sharp rise in interest rates—and as the only coalition possibility was the one that actually happened, yes, I am saying that had we not entered the coalition, that would have been a real risk.
There is also a presumption that, a short time after the 2010 election, there would have been, or might have been, a second election, which might have produced a similarly indecisive result because the economy had been seen to deteriorate even more, but which, in some people’s opinion, would have produced a Conservative majority Government. I can only say that if that had happened, we should have heard a very different Queen’s Speech from the one that was delivered today. For instance, I do not believe that the Government would have delivered the raising of the tax threshold to £10,000 this year, and the further increase to £10,500 next year. That was not in the Conservative manifesto, and the Prime Minister said that it could not be done, but it has been done, because we were there fighting for it. It has been popular, and of course Conservatives want to be associated with it, but it was and is our policy. It will cut income tax for 24 million people by £800 annually from next year, and it has taken 2 million people out of tax altogether.
If there had been a Conservative majority, we would certainly not have introduced the latest round of the most radical reforms of our state and private pension arrangements since the days of Lloyd George, who, as some Members may recall, was a Liberal. Our pensions Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Thornbury and Yate (Steve Webb), has secured a legacy as a great reformer. He is probably the best informed, best qualified pensions Minister that the country has ever had, and I believe that the measures he has introduced will serve as the foundation for both public and private sector pensions for decades to come.
Those two measures in themselves represent huge and positive reforms that have happened only because Liberal Democrats have been in government, but Liberal Democrat Ministers have also been the driving force behind the growth of apprenticeships, and we are on target to achieve 2 million by the end of the current Parliament. Liberal Democrats, led by the Deputy Prime Minister, have secured extra child care support, free school meals for every infant, and targeted support for disadvantaged pupils. Those measures have made a significant difference to families and others living in deprived circumstances, and are having, or beginning to have, a qualitative effect on the outcome of education.
Liberal Democrats have led the way towards a reform of the electricity market which, unlike the measures proposed by the Opposition, would keep the lights on, keep bills down and promote green energy. Liberal Democrat Ministers have secured a commitment to zero-carbon homes and to international agreement on climate change. Numerous other Liberal Democrat measures pepper the Queen’s Speech, including restrictions on plastic bags, support for garden cities, protection for pub landlords, a definition of child cruelty through a Cinderella clause, tough powers to tackle female genital mutilation, and legislation for the recall of Members of Parliament. None of those measures would have been in the Queen’s Speech if Liberal Democrats had not been in the coalition.
There are other parts of the speech which I warmly welcome, too. As I represent a constituency in the north-east of Scotland, I welcome the fact that maximising North sea resources is committed to in the Queen’s Speech, as is implementing the proposals of the Wood review, which the Government—indeed, the Liberal Democrat Energy Secretary—commissioned and which was supported by the Prime Minister. This will be achieved first through co-ordination between the Government and industry and also by maintaining a tax regime that encourages development. I hope the Government can simplify the tax regime over time, because it is becoming complicated. That is serving to unlock investment but it is also making it very difficult for businesses to assess that against international comparators. We also need to stimulate exploration, which is essential for future development.
I should say in passing that the industry has a concern. It will support this co-operation between Government and industry to maximise returns and to co-ordinate the use of infrastructure, but the regulator that is required to achieve that could be costly and it believes that if there is shared co-operation the costs should be shared, not imposed entirely on the industry. However, this calculation has, in the end, to be made: whatever is done has to enable the industry to make the investment that will ensure we get the maximum returns in the long run.
I also welcome the implementing of new financial powers for the Scottish Parliament. It is the essential next step in devolution. The right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood) has left the Chamber, but he was right to say that if—or when, as I believe—Scotland votes to stay in the United Kingdom, the further transfer of powers to Scotland and what is happening in Wales and Northern Ireland will lead to a demand for devolution within England. I recognise that that is a matter for English MPs, but I personally think it would be a welcome development, leading to decentralisation and more localism.
This is the reality in Scotland: the coalition Government had to tackle the recession and the hole in the finances and had to take all the tough decisions, whereas all the Scottish Government had to do was spend the block grant, but they have done that while hurling abuse at all the difficult measures which, frankly, any Government would have to take, and while having no responsibility for those decisions. Giving the Scottish Parliament the responsibility to raise its own revenue and not just spend the block grant will increase transparency and accountability.
Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)
Does my right hon. Friend agree that had we given the Scottish Parliament those powers of full control in raising and spending revenue at the time of the 1998 Scotland Act—this point was made back then—we would have reduced the demand for independence?
Sir Malcolm Bruce
I do agree. I would not say “full” in this context, because in a quasi-federal system each tier in Government needs to have access to its own tax base, but I agree that if the Scottish Parliament could have accessed most of its own revenue and resources, that would, indeed, have been the case. I think it would also have led to a more adult debate in Scotland about how priorities are determined. It is very easy for MPs in the Scottish Parliament to attack the difficult decisions involved in dealing with the deficit, as they have no responsibility for making those decisions.
Mrs Gillan
The matter of compensation has been extremely badly handled. Not only did the courts find against the Government, but we are still waiting for a compensation consultation. We do not have the dates yet and we still do not know what the final compensation package will be. I have always said that if the Government are going to press ahead with HS2, they must do two things: they must protect absolutely the area of outstanding natural beauty that will be violated by it and they must deliver the best possible compensation to the people most affected. Nothing else will do. I am sure the House will look at the issue. The Chair of the hybrid Bill Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Poole (Mr Syms), is present and I hope he will have noted my words, which were not directed at my Front-Bench colleagues on this occasion.
Media reports lead me to think that the long-awaited power of recall will be reasonably controversial. Personally, I do not think it is necessary. However, if it is there to make sure that people trust and have confidence in their elected representatives, I will support it, because that is considerably more important than any luxury we may have to serve continuously even if we commit a crime, including one that results in a custodial sentence. There is, however, an inequity: if MPs are going to be subject to the power of recall, why not other elected representatives, such as Welsh Assembly Members, Members of the Scottish Parliament and Northern Assembly Members?
Mrs Gillan
Why not MEPs and why not councillors? We need to make sure that elected representatives are treated fairly across the board. I hope the Bill will examine the possibility of applying the same conditions to other elected representatives in other parts of the United Kingdom, so that we do not just single out MPs. That is really important.
I think that now is also the time to consider Cabinet collective responsibility, which is an extremely difficult issue. It seems to be observed by some and not by others. I speak from my own experience of the difficulties I had when I was a serving member of the Cabinet. I was delighted and privileged to hold that position, but I could not, of course, talk in public about how HS2 was affecting my constituency so badly. I would not like to see others go through such an experience. If we are going to consider recall and the constitutional position of an MP, this may also be the time to refresh our views on Cabinet collective responsibility and perhaps allow some exceptions in the future. That would make life a great deal more agreeable.
This is a good Queen’s Speech. The economy is going in the right direction and we have a long-term economic plan, which was markedly absent in the earlier contribution of the Leader of the Opposition, who did not seem to have a plan for anything. I hope we will increase people’s sense of well-being and their financial security. We have shown that we are a party that is firmly in charge, and I look forward to the day when we can escape the Liberal-Democrat-limiting coalition and offer a clean constitutional and legislative programme to the electorate at the next election.
Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Joan Walley). I do not agree with everything she has said, but her belief, clarity and lucidity shone through in her very good speech.
The House will probably know that I would not be embarrassed to criticise the coalition Government if I felt it necessary. I was a little nervous in the run-up to the Queen’s Speech by the possibility that, with 10 months to go and two parties anxious to jockey for electoral advantage, it would be a hollow vessel. Indeed, we saw a bit of that in the contribution of the right hon. Member for Gordon (Sir Malcolm Bruce), who is sadly not in the Chamber—his speech was clearly about who gets the credit for the good bits of the speech. In fact, I need not have worried. This is a remarkably good Queen’s Speech, particularly for one that must fit into the last 10 months of the Parliament. I had a wry smile when my right hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs Gillan) referred to the comments from Labour Front Benchers about a zombie Government. That is rich coming from them. They depend on rent control, price control and a variety of policies that did such horrible damage the last time they were used that I thought they were dead and buried at the crossroads with a stake through their hearts. It was an interesting comment, but wholly wrong.
I agreed very much with the brilliant speech made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood) and the equally brilliant speech made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South (Sir Richard Ottaway), the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee. They dealt with much of what I had to say, so you will be glad to hear, Madam Deputy Speaker, that means my speech will be much shorter.
I want to focus on just a few parts of this valuable Queen’s Speech. The centrepiece in domestic policy terms is undoubtedly the pension reform proposals. They have their genesis in all parties, not just the Conservative party. Indeed, they have their genesis abroad, in Holland. In many ways, they are overdue. The Dutch pension provision system has long been better than almost anybody else’s, and it has certainly been better than ours following the difficulties engendered by the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown) as Chancellor a decade or so ago. The Dutch system has been much less expensive and has provided much better returns over a 25-plus year period, which is what we have to look at for pension returns. It is something like 30% to 40% better than what we achieve in this country—it achieves astonishingly higher numbers than we do.
The proposal is therefore a very good one, but it is just the foundation stone. As we saw in 2008, the British financial services industry has something of a habit of using the asymmetry of information between the provider and the consumer to the advantage of the provider. For example, with-profits life policies were similar in principle to the proposal, but they did not work well because the benefits went to pension fund managers and not to customers. Therefore, the Bill must include very strong trustee management to make up for that asymmetry of information and to ensure that schemes are run firmly in the interests of the customers—pensioners.
The proposed schemes must also have very good communications. Even a scheme such as the one proposed must accommodate a tightening of the belt from the point of view of pensioners when the markets turn down dramatically. However, to give the House some context, in 2008, the Dutch had on average a 2% reduction in benefits given. The biggest reduction was 6%. In Britain, annuity values dropped by 20% in the same time. That must be communicated so that pensioners and customers understand it, but the scheme will be far more robust.
The scheme is enabling rather than mandatory, so it will work only if employers take it up. They must understand that it is a defined contribution scheme. Their liabilities will be minimal, so it ought to be beneficial to them and encourage a great deal of take-up. I know that a number of large companies want to take it up. That is why the National Association of Pension Funds, the CBI, the TUC and pretty much all parties in the House are in favour of the proposal. However, I flag up one concern. When there is no controversy between those on the two Front Benches, the legislation is almost invariably bad and flawed and goes wrong later. We therefore ought to be ultra-careful.
The proposal is not of itself a complete policy. Pension policy is one of the neglected areas of modern politics. We need a much more comprehensive policy. My right hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham mentioned the Equitable Life scandal and the fact that the Government are just about providing appropriate benefits or compensation—it is still not good enough, and they must revisit it.
I have one point to make and I hope those on the Front Bench will note it. The policy must not just be about automatic enrolment and the pension proposal I have described; it must also be about our tax approach to pensions. At the moment, there is hypocrisy in that. The Treasury run by the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath introduced the lifetime allowance, the purpose of which, I believe, was to stop people using pensions as a tax avoidance facility. That is fair enough and perfectly understandable, but the regime has been tightened so that, currently, somebody on the salary of a head teacher, a GP, a middle-ranking manager or a reasonably successful solicitor—in other words not mega-millionaires, but ordinary people who have had moderately successful lives and who earn about half as much as Cabinet Ministers—will run into pension taxation of 55%.
Currently, that applies to perhaps 1% or 2% of the population, but if the pension scheme works and provides 30% greater returns, it will apply to a much bigger proportion of the population. What is more, when the Treasury is dependent on such a large tranche of money for a while, it is unable to retract it. I therefore ask the Government to think about that. If we are once again to have a successful pension system and one of the best systems in the world, we should think not just about the systems we use, but the tax treatment, which can be unfair on good citizens who have done the right thing and put in money in the proper way.
In what was, I think, a flash of good intentions, the coalition Government promised a recall Bill at the beginning of this Parliament. They have regretted it ever since, because it has proved unpopular with colleagues for fairly obvious reasons. The Deputy Prime Minister’s proposals received pretty rough treatment from the relevant Select Committee for a number of reasons. I support the idea of recall—I guess I am the only person in this House to have recalled myself; I failed and got sent back—but I have one simple concern. I fear that the original proposal—to make a recall subject to a House of Commons trigger—would be very unfair.
Looking back over about 20 years of the Privileges Committee and the other mechanisms that penalise Members for greater or lesser misdemeanours, it is as plain as a pikestaff—I am not going to pick out individual cases, so please do not intervene to ask—that people outside the system, the mavericks who are perhaps not popular with those on their own Front Benches, receive a different standard of treatment from those inside the system such as Cabinet Ministers and shadow Cabinet Ministers. Members do not need to take my word for it, but need only look at the list of the most draconian and least draconian penalties. I therefore resist fiercely any proposal that gives the decision to any organisation controlled or influenced by the Whips Office—I used to be a Whip—by those on the Front Bench of either side, or even by the establishment of the House. I would rather see a solely democratic recall that originates in constituencies—right enough, with a decently high hurdle so that it is not misused—than one under the control, whether indirectly or directly, of the establishment in this House. I give warning to those on the Government Front Bench that I shall be actively pursuing this case and trying to ensure that the vice I have described is avoided.
In every Queen’s Speech, there is the phrase:
“Other measures will be laid before you.”
All of us hope that that will lead to legislation on matters left out that we would rather see in the speech. I want to raise an issue that will surprise my colleagues on the Government Benches: there is no reference to a national health service Bill. Many will be wiping their brow thinking, “Thank God for that.” In modern times, NHS Bills have always had some ideological content that has divided the parties and often those within parties. The Labour party has had its internal divisions, as has the coalition—of course, one NHS Bill pretty much crashed and burned. That ideological battle has covered up the serial failures of the health service—such as at Mid Staffs, the lack of use of best practice or the tens of thousands of people every year who die unnecessarily for a variety of reasons. A responsible Government—and the coalition Government have shown in the past year that they are a good one to take this up—therefore have the scope to take some non-ideological action on the health service. I shall cite one example, although I could cite dozens, but Madam Deputy Speaker would like me to be brief.
The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence was set up by the Labour Government with the very best of intentions. It was a sensible idea: since we have the rationing of drugs and therapies, we should have a rational approach to that. Sadly, although it has done a reasonably good job, over the years it has become apparent that many of its approaches are incredibly judgmental. It is clear that the so-called quality adjusted life years are very judgmental. It makes forward-looking judgments or predictions on the effectiveness of drugs, and that is done as a rationing and cost control mechanism. It has become out of date in the last year or two, because there is now a deal between the Government and the pharmaceutical industry that limits the maximum spend on drugs. A rebate will be paid back from the industry to Government in the next two years—I think it is £12 billion—and, after that, there will be a limited growth rate. This means that new drugs have, in effect, a zero marginal cost.
Nobody in the health service has thought things through. The problem has been raised once or twice, but we ought to change NICE’s approach to make it far more aggressive, far more experimental and far more willing to try out a drug for a year or two in the marketplace to see if it actually delivers. That will have two effects. First, it will save thousands of lives. Secondly, because of the way the rebate mechanism works, the innovators will gain and the non-innovators will lose. I put that out as one example, but it is by no means the only one.
Charlie Elphicke
My right hon. Friend’s idea is interesting and powerful. What would he say to those who worry about new drugs and massive innovation in the marketplace? New drugs sometimes go wrong and people worry about negligence claims and the claims that are made against pharmaceutical companies.
Mr Davis
Drugs already have their safety protocols established by the time they are put in front of NICE, so safety would not be a problem. In an article the other day, Professor John Waxman cited the use of drugs for those with prostate cancer who are going to die. The drugs are for the extension of life, not complete rescue. Safety is not an issue but the use of such drugs affect the prospects of life for people with terminal diseases, so they are well worth using.
Finally, I would like to make a constitutional point, precipitated by the comments of my right hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham, on collective responsibility. One of the most contentious issues in the past year or two within and outside the coalition has been a referendum on the European Union. Last year, of course, the Conservative party, in effect, introduced a private Member’s Bill. Why did that happen? Although there are approximately only 60 Liberal Democrat MPs on the Government Benches, both sides of the coalition have an effective veto on introducing legislation. That is entirely improper and undemocratic. Let us take my example of the referendum Bill, although the problem does not just apply to it. If there is an argument inside the Government, why not let the House of Commons decide by putting the Bill to the House of Commons? After all, we no longer accept that a vote lost in the House of Commons will lead to a fall in the Government. That is explicitly prevented in the Fixed-terms Parliament Act 2011, so why not put such things to the House? When we go into the next election, people would then be able to see exactly how everybody voted and we would no longer be relying on the promises of parties, but on their actions. Something has gone wrong in the structure. It may well be something in the civil service or the original coalition agreement, but if we are going to have a proper coalition, it should be more open than closed. It should give more power to the House of Commons, not less. If we did that, it would really make this an extraordinarily good Queen’s Speech.
Oral Answers to Questions
David Davis Excerpts(10 years, 9 months ago)
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Mr Hurd
In fact, the excellent Centre for Social Justice report actually highlighted how much progress this Government have made in doing what we said we would do, which is transferring power to people, opening up public services so that more and more organisations can come in to help us to deliver better services, and encouraging social action. As I said, giving in this country has remained constant since 2010 and volunteering has risen, which I hope the hon. Lady would welcome.
Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)
T1. If he will make a statement on his departmental responsibilities.
The Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General (Mr Francis Maude)
My responsibilities are for the public sector Efficiency and Reform Group, civil service issues, industrial relations strategy in the public sector, government transparency, civil contingencies, civil society and cyber-security.
Mr Davis
The Wilson doctrine is a convention whereby Government agencies do not intercept communications with Members of Parliament without explicit approval from the Prime Minister. In a letter to my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield North (Nick de Bois) in 2012, the Minister told him that the Wilson doctrine did not apply to metadata, thereby exposing whistleblowers to risks from which parliamentary privilege should protect them. Will he review this policy, discuss it with the Prime Minister and report to the House?
Deregulation Bill
David Davis Excerpts(10 years, 10 months ago)
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Mr Letwin
I am grateful to my hon. Friend, the Chairman of the Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport, for raising that issue, which is indeed important. It was a late entrant, in the sense that it was no part of the intention of clause 47 to have the effect that some of the media organisations are worried about. Those organisations have been worried that the clause would obviate the need for both parties to be in court when a court orders what is called a production order, which typically requires, for example, a bank to produce the accounts of a person accused of a particular malfeasance, where those accounts are relevant to the trial.
In the case that the media are concerned about, a production order would be used to ask a media organisation to produce some piece of information it holds. Those media organisations were worried that they would no longer have the guarantee of their day in court to contest such a production order, because the effect of clause 47 would be to replace the need for the existence of primary legislation governing inter partes rules with the criminal procedure rules committee. The media were afraid that the criminal procedure rules committee might in some way weaken the inter partes rules. I have good news for my hon. Friend and his Committee, and indeed for the media organisations—which, incidentally, I have offered to meet later in the week or next week. As it was no part of the intention of clause 47 to do that, we are now looking for ways specifically to exempt journalism and all such media items from the clause. If I may, I would like to discuss with him and his Committee the precise drafting of that change, so that we can be sure that the media organisations themselves and the Select Committee are content with the changes we make.
Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)
As my right hon. Friend says, the reason this problem arises is that criminal procedure rules are effectively being delegated to a subordinate body, not to this House. Unlike in most areas of the Bill, where I am absolutely behind the Government, this is an area where some of the rules are constitutionally quite important—we have just heard one example. There might be a number of other areas, which have not come up so quickly, where we would not want to undermine our constitutional protections, so will my right hon. Friend rethink clause 47?
Mr Letwin
My right hon. Friend, who obviously has an immensely distinguished record of concern for civil liberties—which he and I have both fought for in various ways over the years—is right to draw attention to the significance of clause 47. One of the things I have asked officials to look at today is the possibility of going out to a further consultation on clause 47, to see whether anyone else comes forward. In point of fact, because the draft Bill went through pre-legislative scrutiny—there was a Joint Committee of both Houses looking at it, and so on—it had a good airing. It is probable, therefore, that other people would have come forward already if they had concerns, but I do not want to take the risk. I think it would be sensible to have further consultation, to see whether we elicit any responses from others who might be concerned. If in the course of that my right hon. Friend discovers any other bodies that are concerned, or any groups of people who might or should be concerned, my door is open to him to have discussions about that.
I want to say one further thing about the background before coming to some of the other, most important clauses in the Bill. There is a strange state of affairs in our country, which is that although a great part of the regulation that governs us is either in directives and then UK legislation or in UK legislation, including statutory instruments as well as primary legislation, a great part of the regulation that de facto affects our businesses is not in any such place, but in the vast reams of statutory guidance.
These are enormous items. I certainly cannot claim to have read the totality of any major area of statutory guidance, because it would be impossible for one person to embark on such a task with any hope of success if that person was carrying out any serious set of ministerial duties. Some of those items of guidance are tens of thousands of pages long. We have therefore undertaken a massive programme of spring cleaning: for instance, we are hoping to achieve an 85% reduction in the sheer volume of health and safety guidance and legislation.
That does not, of course, necessarily equate to a reduction in the burden of the substance of the guidance. What it does is make it possible for people, for the first time, to be clear about what the wretched stuff is trying to do. My experience in dealing with this morass of over-verbose, under-specific and often extraordinarily badly phrased guidance is that the people who are responsible for enforcing it often do not really know what is in it. We are trying to reach a point at which we do know what is in it, and at that point we shall be able to judge whether it needs to be adjusted. That is another important part of our activity, which is not included in the Bill.
Let me now draw the House’s attention to a few of the most important clauses in the Bill, apart from clause 61, which I have already mentioned, clause 59, which I mentioned in response to an intervention from my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood), and clause 47, which we have just been discussing. I shall begin with clause 1, which the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr Wright) will be able to find quite easily if he opens the Bill. It is on the first page.
Under clause 1, about two thirds of the people in the country who are self-employed will no longer be covered by the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, and will therefore not have to engage in a number of activities in which they are currently required to engage because they are covered by the Act. The one third who will continue to be so covered are those who engage in high-risk activities, which will be specified and which will be precisely the activities that the House would expect to be covered, such as the activities of the nuclear, construction and chemical industries. That is a major gain in itself.
Syria and the Use of Chemical Weapons
David Davis Excerpts(11 years, 3 months ago)
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Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)
When the Prime Minister wanted to take military action in Libya, most of us supported him because there was a clear moral imperative: if we had not acted, tens of thousands of lives would quickly have been lost. That clear moral imperative does not stand in the action we are countenancing.
There is no doubt that the Assad regime is evil, but that is not our casus belli: our casus belli is the monstrous crime of killing hundreds, perhaps more, of civilians with nerve gas. The use of chemical weapons is not the first monstrous crime of this regime: at least 100,000 people have been killed in the civil war, most of whom were civilians. Death by dismemberment, burning, being crushed under falling buildings, gangrene or all the other outcomes of the use of conventional weapons is no better than death by nerve gas—these are monstrosities, however they are delivered. In moral, as against legal, terms many people will rightly, as they have in this debate, ask: why intervene now?
To press their case, this Government and the American Government, now supported by the JIC, have asserted, in effect, that the gassing of a large number of Syrian civilians could have been carried out only by the Assad regime. Perhaps. There are three possibilities. The first, and probably the most likely, is that nerve gas was deployed by Assad, but even the JIC says that this is an irrational and incomprehensible act. My hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) pinned that perfectly. Another possibility is that it could have been done by a rogue or panicky military unit in the Syrian army without Assad’s knowledge—that may be the most likely explanation—or it could have been done by the Syrian rebels with the direct aim of dragging the west into the war. These are the only people who have a clear motive that fits the crime. The JIC discounted that last possibility, but there are many reasons for us to worry about this concern. We do not want to be conned into a war, in effect, by actions designed to do just that.
There are plenty of facts around, or at least reported facts. It is reported that the UN representative for human rights for Syria thought there was concrete evidence of rebels having sarin gas. There were reports that the Turkish authorities arrested 12 al- Nusra fighters with 2 kg of sarin gas, and other reports that Hezbollah fighters are in Beirut hospitals suffering from the effects of sarin gas.
A number of people, most notably my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South (Richard Ottaway), the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, have said that we must have clear evidence to show the House that, if there is a casus belli, it is real, not confected or constructed. That may mean more aggressive disclosure of intelligence than we would normally have. Given where we have been before in this House, we must consider that our intelligence as it stands might just be wrong. It was before, and we must test it rigorously.
Mr Jenkin
It is impossible to imagine how the rebels would have the capacity to shell a single location from seven different locations, which is what occurred on that occasion. Do we honestly think our own security services have not learned the lesson from Iraq or that they are not extremely cautious about the advice they make public on which decisions are going to be made? Should we not have faith in these devoted and courageous public servants, instead of joining the post-Iraq panic that is paralysing this country?
Mr Davis
If I had 10 minutes to take my hon. Friend through the forensics, I probably could. There is plenty of forensic evidence that will come out of the UN investigation and out of other data that we can obtain by other methods. It is not a question of panic; it is a question of getting the facts right before we act. It is very simple: when we are going to do things which will lead to the death of people, civilians in particular, we should get our facts right first.
That brings me to the Deputy Prime Minister on the “Today” programme this morning, talking about chemical weapons and saying—let me quote him exactly—that it is
“the first time in close to a century”
that we have seen—in Syria, he means—
“the ever more frequent use of chemical weapons.”
I recommend that he speaks to our American allies. The CIA has recently declassified and published its information on Iraq’s use of chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq war, in which the west provided intelligence data in order for the Iraqis to be able to target their activities more effectively, killing 50,000 Iranians. How will our stance now be seen on the Iranian street? What will the pressures be on the Iranian Government when we make our holier-than-thou arguments about chemical warfare now?
I do not have time to conclude the arguments that I want to put. I will make one last point. Putin has said that the reason he provided anti-aircraft missiles to the Syrians was, in his words, to balance the war and prevent external intervention. What will his response be if we attack Syria? His response will be to feed this war more weapons, more deaths—
Debate on the Address
David Davis Excerpts(11 years, 7 months ago)
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Mr Kennedy
Well, on the immigration matters, let us see the detail first. We have got some initial inklings and there will probably be quite a lot of detailed and, I suspect, sticky debates to be had on some aspects of how this is going to be done. On Europe, the Prime Minister has made it clear in his letter to his parliamentary colleagues in just the last 24 hours that he cannot go in the direction many of them are urging precisely because it is a coalition Government. We can point to our presence having some constructive restraining interest, although I will enter one caveat, which is a challenge for the Liberal Democrat side of the coalition.
The snoopers’ charter is a controversial and high-profile issue, which has been fiercely argued in public, in this House and elsewhere only a matter of months ago—it is not in the Queen’s Speech. That is a significant example of the difference between having an unfettered majority Conservative Government and having a Conservative party in government that is having to take account of another set of views. Although Liberal Democrats are right to argue—my colleagues and I do so regularly—that we can temper this, prevent that, or perhaps improve on how something might otherwise have been done, the bigger challenge for us over the next couple of years, starting with this Queen’s Speech, comes from the fact that simply saying, “Vote for us. If you didn’t, it would be worse” is not the most persuasive of electioneering clarion calls. We have to turn that into a more persuasive pitch—we have two years in which to do so, and I am sure that we can.
Mr Davis
Very occasional.
Does the right hon. Gentleman not think that the appeal of the Liberal party would be greater if it was sometimes more robust on some liberal causes? For example, in the previous Session the Liberal party let through the provision on secret courts, despite it being completely against its traditions of more than a century.
Mr Kennedy
I am not party to the internal machinations of coalition relationships, but the little that my antennae allow me to pick up—the right hon. Gentlemen must know this from his right hon. and hon. Friends—is that more than a few Conservatives, both within government and further afield in the parliamentary party, feel that these damn Liberals are enough of a fly in the ointment as it is, thank you very much, without the likes of him, of all people, encouraging us to become even more obstreperous. I am sure that those on the Government Front Bench have noted his constructive contribution, and I wish him well.
I have a final point to make on coalition politics. The Queen’s Speech, which I welcome—who among us could disagree with it—says that the Government remain committed to
“a fairer society where aspiration and responsibility are rewarded”.
D’accord, no problems there whatever. Earlier in the year, a number of Liberal Democrats could not give our support to the capping of welfare benefits and went a little further than the hon. Member for Mid Worcestershire (Peter Luff) in our rebellion; we not only abstained, but took a few steps further in the direction of the alternative Lobby. Others among us have expressed our opposition to or voted against the so-called “bedroom tax”, certainly as it is constructed now. Governments have to nudge people in certain directions and influence behaviour, but the difficulty is that that is different from being drawn into the potential political quagmire of social engineering. The Lib Dem voice needs to be heard loudly on that, within the echelons of the coalition and among the public: in supporting reward for aspiration and responsibility we are not losing sight of the fact that those aspirations can sometimes be given adequate opportunity only if the Government of the day recognise their responsibility towards the social composition they have inherited; and we cannot necessarily achieve mission impossible with all our desired social reforms, given the country’s difficult demographic backdrop.
Therefore, the principles of social justice, which I hope will continue to underpin not only the Liberal Democrat contribution, but the conduct of the coalition as a whole, need to be heard, loud and clear, on the telling domestic issues, such as immigration, and on the absolutely critical international issues, such as Europe. On those issues and others, I believe that our Conservative colleagues, for reasons best known to themselves, are allowing a gap to open, rhetorically and in reality, in British politics, which, in terms of our responsibility in government, we must develop.
I notice that Labour is achieving up to a glass ceiling but seems to have difficulty getting much beyond that, so our voice needs to be heard all the more on such issues, unambiguously, without any sense of retreat, nipping and tucking, or dodging and weaving. On many of these vital matters, we are going to get too much of that from the Labour leadership over the next period. We should be clear, consistent and unafraid, because what we are saying needs to be heard, in much the same way as what we said about Iraq—even though many in this place thought there was not much of a vehicle for that—needed to be heard out there. Sometimes people will respect you even if they do not necessarily agree with you on the issue of the day. Let us not be afraid, let us give the Queen’s Speech our support, but let us use it as the launch pad for the next two vital years in British politics.
Keith Vaz
I agree with my hon. Friend. That comment was made to me and the shadow Minister for Immigration when he came to my constituency recently by the settled British Asian community and others who feel that people should make a contribution. However, the figures show that of the 500,000 Poles who came to this country after 2004, only 7,000 claimed benefits. The other almost 500,000 made a huge contribution to our country. However, she is right that nobody should assume that on arrival they can automatically claim for benefits to which they have not contributed. If we stick to those principles and put aside the arms race that seems to be developing on immigration, we will do much better.
I think that the only way to settle this issue is to have a referendum on whether we should stay in or come out of the European Union. I have said that many times before, and I know I am in a minority on the Opposition Benches. I did not favour that when I was Minister for Europe, but it is important that the British people have the say over whether we should stay in or come out. I actually think that it should happen before the general election. I do not see why we should wait until after the negotiations have occurred. Frankly, I am not as optimistic as the Prime Minister that he will get many concessions from the 26 other countries of the European Union, and I think he will be bitterly disappointed. Why pretend to the British electorate? They understand the issues, and it is quite right that we should put our views to them now. That should be part of a wide public education campaign that would allow people to understand the issues involved and not just rely on a few tabloid newspapers.
I am glad that there is a policing Bill in the Queen’s Speech, because we have some unfinished business as far as policing is concerned. I support the Government’s ambitious programme for a new policing landscape, but the problem is that the jigsaw is not complete. Many bits are still missing, and we are running out of time.
Mr David Davis
Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that the focus of police reform should be not simply on efficiency and effectiveness but on integrity? There have been concerns about police integrity in a number of cases in recent years, and they need to be resolved in the interests of the police as well as the public.
Keith Vaz
The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right, and as a former shadow Home Secretary and someone who still speaks with great authority on home affairs, he will know that that is at the heart of how we can get an efficient and accountable police force. At the moment there are a number of investigations, from Yewtree to Alice and a whole lot of others—I think I last totalled them at 10—which are costing the taxpayer millions. One of the problems with such investigations is that they go on endlessly with no timetable. There needs to be an end for those who make complaints, otherwise the process is never-ending. It is not the job of the Home Affairs Committee to hold the police to account, although we will do our part, otherwise we would constantly be having evidence sessions on the matter and writing letters. As far as the Metropolitan police are concerned, the Mayor and Deputy Mayor of London have a responsibility to act, as police and crime commissioners now act outside the capital.
The right hon. Gentleman is right that integrity is important, which is why it is right that the Government have included in the Gracious Speech more flesh on the bones of the College of Policing. We need to know who will be responsible for integrity and who will keep the register of interests for chief constables. We still do not know that, and there is no register of interests for police and crime commissioners, so the whole agenda, which might be seen as esoteric, is actually central to the nature of policing in this country.
There are other matters to consider. For instance, where will counter-terrorism responsibility sit? Will it be in the National Crime Agency, or will it be kept with the Met? The public demand that we examine such issues and complete the jigsaw.
I have three final points. First, I am very disappointed that there is nothing in the Queen’s Speech about a minimum unit price for alcohol. The Home Secretary said on 23 March 2012:
“We will therefore introduce a minimum unit price for alcohol”.—[Official Report, 23 March 2012; Vol. 542, c. 1071.]
That was quite a definitive statement. Alcohol-related crime now accounts for 50% of crime in this country, and billions are spent on dealing with it. The Government are clearly committed to introducing a minimum unit price—at least, the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister were committed to it when they made their statements earlier this year. The whole consultation came after the event. The Government were consulting on the level of the unit price, not on whether there should be one, because the Home Secretary had made it clear that that was what she wanted.
Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)
Until the last line, I was rather enjoying that speech. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant). As always, he entertained me.
We last debated a Queen’s Speech rather more than a year ago. On that occasion, the House gained some amusement from my ability to summarise the matters in it with which I agreed in less than 60 seconds, but today I shall take a different approach.
The element of the speech of which I approved most was the one that was not in it. I refer to the fact that the Government have dumped the idea of a snoopers’ charter. We were told that the proposal had been vetoed by the Deputy Prime Minister, which amused me, as there were more Conservatives against it than there are Liberal Democrats in the House of Commons. Nevertheless, we must give credit where it is due.
I am pleased that the proposed legislation has been dumped, because it was offensive and intrusive and would have shamed, I should have thought, either a Liberal or a Conservative Government, let alone a Government consisting of both parties. I am also pleased that the Deputy Prime Minister is on our side on the matter. I only wish that he had been equally robust last year in respect of the secret courts Bill. I hope that the Government do not try to bring back the snoopers’ charter in one of the “other measures” to which the speech refers.
The purpose of a Queen’s Speech is to set out the Government’s strategy for the country, and to specify how the Government will deal with the great threats and maximise the benefits that the country can obtain in the coming year. It normally consists of three parts, dealing with foreign policy, economic policy and domestic, or home, policy. I shall comment briefly on each of those in order to give the House an idea of where I think the Government are going and, perhaps, an idea of where I think they ought to go.
In the context of current politics, the most obvious element of foreign policy—apart from the issue of Syria, which was dealt with by my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell)—is the matter of the European Union. Lord Lawson of Blaby’s comments in the last couple of days have added a whole new tenor to the Prime Minister’s proposed strategy relating to what we do in the EU. As everyone knows, what Lord Lawson said, in a nutshell, was that he would vote to withdraw. However, the keystone of his argument, with which I do not agree, was his statement that the negotiations that the Prime Minister could undertake would be inconsequential, and that we would achieve very little in terms of reform of our relationship with the European Union.
I do not think that that is necessarily so, although of course it has been true historically. Very few nations have been able to win their own way, as it were, in the European Union, and very few British Governments have been able to do so. If we look back on our history since we joined the EU, we may conclude that Margaret Thatcher’s recovery of the rebate constituted one dramatic victory for a nation state over the European elite, and that, interestingly, John Major’s exclusion of us from the euro constituted another. Those were both massive issues in their day and in their effect, but they were the exceptions, and, what is more, since those days the balance of power between the European Union and its member states has moved towards the EU rather than the nations.
In principle, therefore, one would assume that Lord Lawson was right, and that it would be impossible to achieve anything of any serious consequence. However, there are some exceptions. It is a pity that the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz)—the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee—is no longer in the Chamber, because he would appreciate some of the points that I am making. The exceptions, essentially, are Denmark, Ireland and, together, Holland and France, all of which have changed the course of a negotiation materially: Denmark in respect of domestic issues, Ireland in respect of domestic and constitutional issues such as abortion rights as well as financial issues, and Holland and France by, famously, stopping the constitutional treaty in its tracks.
The common denominator in the effectiveness of those countries was their holding of prior referendums. They all held referendums before the negotiation was over, which produced a formidable increase in their Governments’ negotiating power. The European Union officials—with some reason, given their ideology—take the view that Governments are temporary, whereas Europe, or the European project, is permanent, but they cannot say that in response to the statement of a people, because peoples are permanent; and they are afraid of referendums.
What is problematic about the Government’s present strategy is that they are using referendums in the same way as Harold Wilson—as a solution to a domestic problem, rather than as a mechanism to solve the European problem. That is why some of us argue in favour of the holding of a mandate referendum—a referendum on the negotiating tactics that we are taking to the European Union—before we do so. That, we believe, would enable us to get probably 70% of the country to support the new model of relationship that we want, and the Prime Minister would then have a chance of achieving some sort of victory.
What will happen otherwise, if Lawson is right, is that there will indeed be an inconsequential outcome, and the Prime Minister will find himself in the position of arguing in favour of staying in the European Union, because Prime Ministers and Foreign Secretaries never admit to error or failure in negotiations. I will give way to any Member who can tell me of an occasion when any of them has done so. The Prime Minister will have to come back and say, “This”—this limp rag of an outcome—“is a terrific success, and I want you to stay in the Union.” Of course, he will be defeated, and the consequences for Britain in terms of subsequent negotiations will not be clever.
I ask the House to think very carefully about that. It seems to me that if we are to go down this route, a referendum is an inevitability, but if we are to go down this route, we ought to give the British people the right to choose between two good outcomes, rather than one good outcome and one bad outcome. The way in which to do that is to hold two referendums, one—soon—on the negotiating strategy that we are seeking to present, and the other, a decision referendum, at the end of the day.
The second strand with which I wish to deal is the economic strategy. I have some sympathy with those who argue that the Government’s current strategy is necessary but not sufficient. Of course we must gain control of the deficit and the debt levels—that is a given—but, beyond that, we must ensure that we have a growth strategy. I do not believe that the answer is to adopt the Keynesian approach that Labour Front Benchers want to pursue, but we nevertheless need a growth strategy. A good many Government Members would argue that to get that we need less regulation and lower taxes, what could be described as a supply-side growth strategy.
In that context, an aspect of the Queen’s Speech of which I disapprove is the Government’s approach to energy costs. Their current approach is leading to an increase in the cost of living for ordinary families, and to the loss of jobs as industries move from here not just to China, Brazil and India but to Germany and France, because the current carbon pricing arrangements mean that we are disadvantaged in relation to our European competitors. Whatever view we hold on green policy, it cannot be an advantage to export jobs and export the emissions that go with them. I am concerned about that.
I want to focus on one element of the economic arm of the Queen’s Speech: the welfare reforms. Broadly speaking, the welfare reforms are the unsung success of this Government. This is the most difficult part of their policy to carry through. It is the most contentious and the hardest part to get right, but it is the step that is leading to employment increasing rather than reducing. It is getting more people to go out and look for a job now than have historically. It is not easy. All of us have in our constituencies people who have got on the wrong side of the assessment process, but it is a necessary process.
Mark Tami
What about those people who come to see us in our surgeries who have been told they are fit to work, but who, in the real world and the very difficult economic climate in which we find ourselves, are not going to get work? Just saying they are fit for work, under whatever system, does not mean they are going to go out and get a job. Does the right hon. Gentleman accept that an acknowledgement of that is what is lacking?
Mr Davis
There is an element of that, and that is what I was alluding to just now. There is no doubt that the system makes some mistakes, but I have the advantage of having been an MP for a long time, and I can remember when we changed the disability rules the other way, and we had a 400% increase in people claiming disability benefits of one sort or another. It was the right direction to go in, but it went vastly too far. The problem is that we now have a situation in which people are basically taken completely off the job market. To be frank, it suited past Governments of both political persuasions to have those people out of the job market, because the figures looked better, but that does not mean we do not now have to put this right.
My argument here—it is the argument I will make throughout what I have to say in the next five or so minutes—is that the difficult decisions we face now have to be faced up to, but we must always, time and again, come back and apply a fairness test. The hon. Gentleman would probably agree with me about that, although maybe not about where that test would fall.
I particularly approve of the proposed changes to pensions. Last week I was worried that the Government effectively were proposing to ignore the benefit that arises from stay-at-home mothers, but, in fact, the reverse is true. The Queen’s Speech states that the Government will
“create a simpler state pension system that encourages saving and provides more help to those who have spent years caring for children.”
If there is one thing in the Government’s economic strategy that I disapprove of it is the presumption that the only useful mother is one that goes out to work. Raising children—particularly raising three or four children—is a difficult task in its own right and a very important social task, and I am surprised that a Conservative Government, of all Governments, do not recognise that more and do more about it. This at least appears to be a move in the right direction, and if it lives up to the advertising in the Queen’s Speech, I will support it enthusiastically.
Indeed, I would go further and say that the Conservative party had a manifesto commitment to have transferable tax allowances for married couples as well, and I see no reason why we should not hold to our manifesto commitment. I understand that is budgeted for in the Treasury anyway, so why do we not do it?
The one element of the Leader of the Opposition’s speech that I sort of half-agreed with was that we have not been fast or robust enough in our approach to banking reform. There has been a lot of talk recently about populist measures—about “Thatcherite giveaways” of the nationally held shares in the banks. That is neither here nor there to me. What matters is the structure of the banks. We should be breaking up our banks. At the level at which economies of scale run out in commercial banking, we could have 30 high street banks in the UK. Some 30 or 40 years ago, that is exactly what we did have, and I have to say levels of service in banking have gone down since then, not up.
We have ignored competition law. We have ignored the virtues of competition and the impact on stability of having banks that are too big. We need measures on that. They are not in today’s Queen’s Speech because the Banking Commission is yet to report. As soon as it does report, we must have urgent action. This is not something we can put off for five years. We should do it now.
Neil Parish
I agree with what my right hon. Friend is saying about our banking system. I am finding that many businesses in my constituency are still being denied credit, and especially credit at affordable rates. Is he finding the same thing happening in his constituency? If we had greater competition between more banks, we could get the rates for lending to businesses down.
Mr Davis
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. A large part of the reason for that is the state of the UK banks’ balance sheets. They are getting money effectively for free, but they have got such bad, or untrustworthy, loans on their balance sheets that they dare not lend money, and the Government are putting constraints on them to limit their lending, too. The outcome is that our small businesses in particular are having a terrible time. Patches are being put over this problem, such as the Chancellor’s mortgage support scheme in the Budget, but we need to sort out the problem at source.
Rory Stewart (Penrith and The Border) (Con)
Does my right hon. Friend agree that banking reform is necessary not just because of its economic benefits or the element of fairness, but because this is the ideal time to do it in terms of popular legitimacy? Breaking up the banks could not be done at a better time.
Mr Davis
My hon. Friend is entirely right. He is a better historian than I am, and he could probably refer back to the United States of America in about 1900 or just before, when politicians used the same popular view of big business to create a model of capitalism in the United States that for the next century beat the world. We could do the same, and we should do the same, but I am afraid that at the moment I see no enthusiasm for that. I will certainly pursue that in the next year, however.
Finally, on home affairs, immigration has come to the fore, particularly because of the UK Independence party’s activities in the past few weeks. I dealt with the issue for a long time when I was shadow Home Secretary. The difficulty is to come up with a set of measures that is both firm and will deal with the issue without being uncivilised—without being barbarous, or perceived as barbarous, in approach. That applies to both the immigration problems the Government are attempting to solve in the Queen’s Speech: the ability to deport immigrants who come here and become criminals or terrorists—such as Abu Qatada—and mass migration.
On the issue of criminals, I am the last person to give way to anybody on human rights in this House of Commons. I suspect most people would accept that, yet I take the view that the misuse of human rights legislation by the likes of Abu Qatada brings the whole question of rights under the law into disrepute.
It is important to resolve this issue in a way that is both fair and effective. The European Court of Human Rights and the British courts are acting against their own long-term interests by being pig-headed in their approach. Qatada serves as a good example. If Qatada faced torture or death abroad, I would lie down in the street in front of the black Maria taking him away, but the truth is that we are talking here about making judgments about other countries’ justice systems, and we simply cannot do that. If we do that, we will start to challenge the whole question of whether we should send someone back to America. Let us consider the treatment of Christopher Tappin. He was extradited under the extradition rules. That was not justice; it was a parody of justice. Then there is the treatment of some of the people who have been dealt with in Greece, let alone Romania and Bulgaria, which, frankly, do not have working justice systems.
We therefore have to think very hard about where we will draw the line, and I draw the line on the treatment of the individual we are sending, not on the justice system of the country we are sending them to. I do so within reason, of course; if there were a dictatorial fiat, that would be another matter, but we are not talking about that here, because this argument is about what sort of evidence might be used.
We have had lots of talk from the Government, including the Home Secretary, and lots of posturing, but the issue could have been dealt with already. I say that because about two months ago my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton (Mr Raab) tabled an amendment to primary legislation to say, “We will take into account articles 2 and 3, but not article 8 and the others, when making these decisions.” Why would this work? It would work because the Human Rights Act, of which I am no great fan, can be trumped, not by regulation or ministerial decision but by primary legislation passed by this House. We could have fixed this problem, but the Government talked the measure out—it was the day of the Leveson debate—and did not attempt to create time for it. They should have passed it. I do not know what we will get now, but it will be different. Importantly, the legislation must great clarity, because the courts will interpret any vagueness to the advantage of the person who might be deported. That is inevitable; it is what has happened over the past few years. We can fix this problem, but we need to face up to the need for clarity and for a decision on what we are really saying about the European convention on human rights.
The other element of the immigration debate is mass migration. I agree with the Government that we must limit the ability of people who have made no contribution, perhaps having come here temporarily, to claim welfare benefits and social housing in the UK. I am not at all sure, however, that I agree with the Government’s idea of withholding health care from people coming to this country, and I return to my point about acting firmly without being uncivilised—without being barbarous. I find it difficult to imagine doctors in an accident and emergency department in a London hospital finding someone with a foreign accent on a trolley in front of them and asking, “Where are you from? If you are Hungarian, you can be treated; if you are Bulgarian, you can’t.” I do not see how that is going to work. Most of us get reciprocal health care if we go to European countries on holiday, to retire or to live, so I do not see how we are going to amend our provision. I am not sure, in my heart of hearts, that I want to say to someone who has been run over in the street, “You can’t have health care, because you’re a foreigner.”
Kate Hoey
I understand what the right hon. Gentleman says about people falling over in the street, but people come from Heathrow airport to the A and E department at my local hospital, St Thomas’s, with something that they knew perfectly well they had before they came. It is not as simple as saying, “We must look after the sick”; clearly there are limits. This is a form of health service tourism.
Chris Bryant
I always presumed that life-threatening conditions were not to be included in this—otherwise, as the right hon. Gentleman rightly says, we would be entering into a barbarous situation. The other issue is notifiable diseases, because it is in all of our interests for people in this country—of whatever nationality— who have tuberculosis or another notifiable disease to be treated. I hope he agrees on that; we do not want to cut off our nose to spite our face.
Mr Davis
Let me deal with those very good points in order. First, health tourism is not new; people may now be coming from Romania, but we have had people coming from the middle eastern states for a long time. I used to live near King’s College hospital, which has a great liver treatment centre, and a significant proportion of its patients at one time were from Arab countries. [Interruption.] They were not paying, that is the point. Of course we have to do something about health tourism, but we also have to be wary of unintended consequences. I mentioned A and E because in London, as the hon. Lady knows, and in some other parts of the country it is acting as a secondary GP service. In a huge, three-hour queue of people coming to A and E to get secondary GP services, I do not know how we distinguish between those born in Britain and those born in Hungary or Romania. There is a great risk of getting this wrong, and the medical profession would not go along with it and be the arbiters. As the hon. Gentleman rightly said, communicable diseases are a problem, irrespective of whether someone is a British citizen or born abroad. They have to be treated differently and separately, but that is not a question of payment or of health tourism; it is a question of getting it right.
This morning, the Health Secretary talked on the radio about the pull factor, characterising medical care as such. That is the case for a health tourist, and we can do something about it, but we could not do something about the half a million Polish immigrants that there were at one point. The pull factor for most of the Romanians and Bulgarians will not be health care, welfare or housing; it will be simple economics, because the average income in Romania and Bulgaria is approximately one third of our minimum wage. Most Romanians and Bulgarian could treble their standard of living simply by coming to the UK and doing almost any job.
We have to face up to that fact, which also faces Germany and all the European countries closer by. One would have thought that if we really did have a working European Union, we would by now have been able to say to each other, “When we devised the rules about the freedom of movement of people, they were not devised for an organisation of states that had a tenfold difference in average incomes.” Let me say that I am a free marketeer, so I think those things are terrific and I am a believer in the free movement of people, but we have to think of a better way of dealing with this matter, because these people will not be the last ones who come along—and they are coming in January next year.
Chris Bryant
I just want to correct the right hon. Gentleman on one other thing about the reciprocal rights between different countries. About 1 million British people live in Spain and another million live in France, but if they have not reached the retirement age, they are not entitled to the full use of the Spanish or French national health services and many of them end up getting trapped. So the law of unintended consequences might also apply to a lot of British people who are no longer living here.
Mr Davis
The hon. Gentleman is almost exactly right, but there are sets of different regimes, with some applying to retired people, some to working people and some to people who are neither working nor retired—I checked these things this morning, just to be sure. There are three different regimes and they alter by country, too—surprisingly so, in the European Union. The whole European economic area, including Switzerland and Norway, has a regime under which people in almost every category get some form of health care.
Mr Davis
For two months. Health tourists coming to this country to get a single operation or a single course may be wanting only the two months, so this is another area where we have carefully to think through the obverse effect of these actions. I know the pressures on politicians are high following the UKIP flurry in the past week or two, but we have to think carefully.
Jim Shannon
I understand that the statistics show that those coming from Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and other eastern European countries bypass Italy and Germany to come to Great Britain because of the better NHS treatment and the better benefits system, so does the right hon. Gentleman feel that that has to be addressed?
Mr Davis
I am afraid that that is not true. I do not want to end up giving a lecture on this, but let me say that the previous Government made a simple mistake in allowing access before the transitional periods were up for those from the entire A8 group of accession countries—Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and so on. Therefore a large number of people who could not get into Germany and France at that time came to this country, because they were allowed legitimately to do so; ours was the only big country to do that. As a result, we end up with a Polish community—with Polish shops, Polish newspapers and so on—and so where do Poles go when everything is opened up? They come to where there is an indigenous Polish community, and that is perfectly reasonable. All of this is rational behaviour on the part of people who want to work, make a living and get on in life, and I cannot disapprove of them doing that. So one mistake was made then and that is what it led to. We are not going to be in the same position in respect of Romania and Bulgaria, so it is difficult to predict the numbers. I was the shadow Home Secretary who challenged the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett) when, as Home Secretary, he said that 13,000 eastern Europeans would be the total number coming to this country. He eventually got so nervous about this that he started saying, “I am the Home Secretary, but the Home Office is saying this.” He realised that his numbers were wrong and the real number turned out to be millions.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. There are 11 speakers to come, and there are no time limits, but to ensure that everybody gets in, may I ask Members to exercise some self-restraint?
Mr Davis
That was the last intervention I was going to take, Mr Deputy Speaker.
The simple truth is that we must be wary of doing something we do not intend to do, under political pressure. More generally, in our approach to difficult economic decisions in the next year or two, I hope that this Government, of all Governments, will work hard to balance the fairness against the difficult decisions. We are going to make hard decisions, which will lead to huge opprobrium from Labour Members for all sorts of reasons. That does not bother me, but what does bother me is that we get the balance of fairness right.
Justice and Security Bill [Lords]
David Davis Excerpts(11 years, 9 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Sadiq Khan
Let me begin by making it absolutely clear to the House where the Opposition stand on the issue of closed material procedures in civil proceedings. We accept that there may be rare examples where it is preferable for a CMP to be used because there is no other way a particular case can be heard. Our position has been influenced to a large extent by the views of the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, Mr David Anderson QC. He has written two memorandums on the proposals in the Bill and has given evidence to the Joint Committee on Human Rights. He has said that
“there is a small but indeterminate category of national security-related claims, both for judicial review of executive decisions and for civil damages, in respect of which it is preferable that the option of a CMP—for all its inadequacies—should exist.”
We are persuaded.
There may be rare examples where it is preferable for a CMP to be used because existing tools used by the court—for example, public interest immunity, redaction, confidentiality rings and in-camera hearings—may not be sufficient to allow sensitive intelligence material to be disclosed in court, meaning there may be no other way a case can be heard. However, we do not give unqualified support and shortly I will deal with some of the conditions we consider must be attached to the extension of CMPs, conditions which David Anderson said were important.
Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)
I apologise for intervening so early in the right hon. Gentleman’s speech. David Anderson used the word “small” in those comments, but the Government’s impact assessment indicated that there will be about 15 of these cases a year. We should therefore not underestimate exactly what we are talking about.
Sadiq Khan
I believe that one of the impact assessments gave a figure of seven, whereas the press reports I read over the weekend mentioned one of 15. For those reasons, it is important to attach great weight to the conditions to which David Anderson refers. We would not wish, inadvertently, to see more cases than the Government say they expect to be reaching a CMP.
Hazel Blears
I hear what the right hon. and learned Gentleman says. He has been very inventive and creative in trying to table amendments, and it would not be beyond him to put something in the Bill that reassured people that there was a proper check on whether the Secretary of State had properly considered whether other methods could be used. I leave him to reflect on that.
Amendment 70 seeks to add inquests to the Bill. It originates from my right hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Paul Goggins) and he will speak to it with his depth of knowledge, experience and appreciation of the issue, and I simply say that I will support him on it 100%.
It is important in a justice system for people to have sufficient notification of the circumstance to be able to give instructions, but at the moment the bar is set a little high, because there may well be circumstances in which the gisting goes right to the heart of national security. Therefore, by giving a gist that is wide enough to enable instructions to be given, the national security case is given away. Again I wonder whether something could be included about there being a presumption in favour of gisting that could be subject to rebuttal in circumstances that merited it. I would feel more reassured if there were something along those lines. The process adopted so far has been an attempt to try to get some agreement and consensus on these issues. It is difficult to do so, but the issues at stake are so important, both for our national security and for the integrity of our justice system, that we need to keep trying to see whether, on a couple of those issues, even at this stage, there is room for a little more movement to get us to a better place.
Mr David Davis
It is a particular pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears). Her speech was well thought through and persuasive. We do not always agree on these issues, but on one aspect she persuaded me, and I shall say in a minute what that was. In this area of argument, which goes right to the heart of what makes British justice special and right to the heart of our national security, we are all inclined sometimes to put things rather too heavily in black and white. I have every sympathy with the agencies that are trying to preserve their own security. They have plenty of threats: past agencies, the David Shaylers, the Richard Tomlinsons, leaking their information, even Ministers—I remember that Ted Rowlands once in the House gave away some Crown jewels—and most ironically of all, Washington. Given the genesis of the Bill, some of the biggest leaks relate to our biggest ally, whether it is Pentagon papers four years ago or, only two months ago, what sounds from the British papers to be the putting at risk of the life of an Anglo-Saudi agent whom it used in one of its operations and then talked about afterwards. Nobody, certainly not I, would challenge the right of the agencies to preserve their own proper security—I stress “proper security”.
Mr Tobias Ellwood (Bournemouth East) (Con)
My right hon. Friend mentions how things have changed over 40 years and how things have happened. It is clear from this debate how things have moved on. The clandestine community is very different from what it was in the past. It is now scrutinised in a way that has never been done before. We can now mention John Sawyer and Jonathan Evans, names that could never even be mentioned in the Chamber, let alone in MI5 or MI6. Will he concede that we are now having to look at a new level of scrutiny, and that that is why these CMPs have to be put in place. Forty years ago, we could not even discuss the matter.
Mr Davis
As one of the two junior Ministers who took the Secret Intelligence Service Bill through the House and asked the then head of MI6 whether he really meant this, I can take his point. But the simple truth is that we have to live up to those standards of accountability, and that means open justice wherever we can have it.
One of the interesting divides that has taken place in all this is almost a generational one. We have had closed material procedures only since—
Mr Davis
Yes, 1997; for only a decade or two. A generation of special advocates have taken a strong stance on this, and they have taken a different stance from everybody else because they have experienced both sorts of procedure. Nearly all of them have personally understood the closed material procedure and the PII procedure, and most of them know both procedures inside out. One of the things they argue—a point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Mr Tyrie) in his brilliant speech, every word of which I agreed with—is that PII has been misrepresented. Any special advocate will say that PII is a much more complex, judge-created, judge-evolved process than is being represented. Of course there can be simple blocking; of course, in addition, there can be redaction; of course there can be circles of confidentiality; of course there can be in-camera hearings. The Minister without Portfolio rather dismissively said that this is the system that gave us arms to Iraq. Even in that process, which involved at least one ex-Minister and one Minister in the House today, early on in the development of PII we saw one category of certificate refused, one category accepted and one category heavily redacted. That gave the court enough information to make Alan Clark face the interrogation in which he came out with those famous words “economical with the actualité”, which collapsed the case because the prosecution recommended an acquittal on the basis of the evidence.
Yasmin Qureshi
Just to continue to emphasise the PII point that the right hon. Gentleman makes, he will be aware that at this moment and for many years in our country, covert operations have been carried out evidence from which has been used to convict people, yet the methodology used, where the operatives were and the locations were always kept secret, and that was part of the PII application. PII is not about excluding evidence, it is about including evidence, but not letting the other side know what is adduced. The majority of people seem to be working on the totally wrong basis of what a PII is.
Mr Davis
The hon. Lady is of course right, but let me come to the point that I was driving towards, which is that none of the systems that we are talking about is perfect. PII clearly has weaknesses. Everyone who has spoken has said something to that effect, and the hon. Lady was particularly correct about that; there are weaknesses to PII. We should not accept that that is the perfect outcome either.
Mr Kenneth Clarke
My right hon. Friend rightly says that in PII, because people do not like excluding all the evidence, there is a perfectly legitimate argument about how much we can gist and how much can be redacted, and then it can be put into the open court. But everything that does not get there is entirely left out; it is not available to claimant, judge, lawyers or anybody else. In a CMP, exactly the same thing can be done, because the judge will be required to consider how much we can gist, how much we can redact, and what can be shared with the defendant. The only difference is that in a CMP, the evidence, including, as my right hon. Friend said, some things that might be absolutely key to the case that cannot unfortunately be disclosed, can be considered by the judge. PII shuts out all that which is not possible to gist. With a CMP, there can be all the gisting and redaction that one wants, but all the evidence is considered.
Sir Malcolm Rifkind
As a Minister who signed a PII certificate in the Matrix Churchill case and was vindicated by the Scott inquiry for having done so, may I say, yes, of course, some things can be permitted through PII? As my right hon. and learned Friend the Minister said, the real issues that would damage national security cannot be considered either by the judge or by anyone else. My right hon. and learned Friend perhaps does not appreciate that even when closed procedures may be approved by the court, once special advocates have been appointed, if the special advocates, having had access to the secret material, put forward a convincing case to the judge that some of that need not continue to be held under closed procedures but can be held in open court, the judge, if so persuaded, is perfectly free to do so. The special advocates themselves, unlike their clients, can put forward that argument, and have done so in immigration cases, and that point has not been mentioned in this debate so far.
Mr Davis
I do not dispute any of that; that is where I am coming to with respect to the attitude of the special advocates. Clearly, of the two they do not like CMPs, for reasons on which I am about to elaborate. That means not that CMPs should be impossible to use, but that restriction should be the order of the day.
The best outline of the weakness of closed material procedures came from Lord Justice Kerr, who effectively said—I am now desperately paraphrasing—that unchallenged evidence can be “misleading”, which was the word he used. That came up any number of times during the Lords debate from a number of lawyers. Helena Kennedy, for example, cited a case in which a tape recording of a conversation that appeared to incriminate a defendant was played in court. When the defendant heard it, he said, “I’m sorry, but I left after about five minutes.” People listened carefully and could hear the door opening and closing as he went. So a piece of evidence that appeared to be incredibly incriminating became not incriminating at all. David Anderson put a similar point to the Lords Committee when he was giving evidence.
The issue of challenge is important; it is critical to our judicial process—completely different from any other judicial process around the world. The challenge is vital. Without it, the judicial process is not operating properly. That is why we have to take on board what the special advocates say and effectively build it into the structure of the Bill—to create, as it were, a hierarchy. We have to go through that thought process.
I am cognisant of the point made by the Minister without Portfolio. We do not want a Minister to be pinned down for a year working on one PII. I am sure—indeed, I know from experience—that some of the Guantanamo cases are incredibly complicated and involve very many documents. I do not think it is beyond the ken of the House to achieve that.
I will support the Opposition’s amendment today, although I am open to argument if we can find better wording to get what we are trying for. I am talking about a hierarchy, a priority—first, open hearings; then the PII process, if that is appropriate; if it is not, CMPs in the final analysis. I agree with my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kensington (Sir Malcolm Rifkind) that the process should be more open than it currently is.
Paul Goggins (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)
The right hon. Gentleman is making a characteristically interesting speech. He has referred several times to a hierarchy in relation to openness, in which he places PII above closed material procedure. I am sure that the House would be interested to know his rationale.
Mr Davis
All right, let me give the right hon. Gentleman an example. The question is whether or not there can be a challenge; if the evidence can be in court, it should be capable of being challenged. There is an example that goes back to 2006 relating to the current CMPs used in the Special Immigration Appeals Commission. I shall read from the Press Association release:
“A judge in a secret hearing has criticised the Home Office over contradictory MI5 intelligence in the trial of two terrorism suspects. The intelligence only came to light because—by chance—the same barrister was acting in both cases.
Mr Justice Newman said the ‘administration of justice’ had been put at risk in the trial of Algerian Abu Doha and a suspect known as MK…Both sets of contradictory evidence had come from MI5.”
There had been a false passport that was claimed to have been used by two different people in two different places at the same moment on the same day—clearly impossible. That became apparent only because the same barrister was acting as a special advocate in each case. The problem is that there was no process of challenge; if there had been, the contention would have been denied and struck out. As it was, both cases were struck down because they were clearly implausible. The process of challenge is vital.
For that reason, I am entirely with what the Joint Committee on Human Rights wants—gisting, if it is possible.
Mr Davis
Forgive me, but I am just coming to an end.
The right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles was persuasive in arguing that if there is to be some sort of opt-out on gisting if things are really serious, only the judge should decide that. I take that point, and it is a good argument. There should be proper, explicit judicial balance in the decision to go to a CMP that takes into account all the interests of justice, and not just national security. There should be the argument of strict necessity; that is what I mean by the hierarchy. On that basis, the House could come to a conclusion in which we effectively have the best of all worlds.
Mr Straw
I begin by drawing the House’s attention to the fact that, along with Her Majesty’s Government and an official, I have been a defendant in civil actions brought by two Libyan nationals and their families— Mr al-Saadi, whose case was settled just before Christmas, and Mr Belhaj. In the case of Mr Belhaj, proceedings are still active; in the circumstances, I am sure the House will understand how constrained I have to be in respect of those matters at present. I hope to be able to say much more about the cases at an appropriate stage in future. However, I should make it clear that at all times, in all the positions that I occupied as a Secretary of State, I was scrupulous in seeking to carry out my duties in accordance with the law.
My purpose in rising to speak now is to explain why I believe that the Government’s formulation for the conditions for a closed material proceeding are to be preferred to those of the Opposition. However, I want to make two more general points to begin with.
First, the freedoms that we in this country take for granted are built on our system of justice, which is among the very best in the world. It is independent, fair and fearless—and it is transparent, for the very obvious but crucial reason that justice must not only be done, but be seen to be done. It follows that we should permit departures from that principle of openness only in the most exceptional circumstances.
Whenever Parliament has been asked to agree to having part of a court’s proceedings in camera or to having the identity of witnesses, or most seriously the evidence itself, withheld from one of the parties to the proceedings, it has scrutinised the legislation with the greatest care. It has nonetheless been convinced that, in some cases, the interests of justice do require such special procedures.
Thus in 2008, Parliament agreed, in the Criminal Evidence (Witness Anonymity) Act, new statutory procedures for the taking of anonymised evidence in criminal trials. That evidence has to be heard by the defendant and the jury, but its origin—the names involved and often the exact circumstances in which it came to be produced—is kept secret and away from the defendant.
More relevantly to today’s proceedings, in 1997 Parliament decided on a cross-party basis to establish the first arrangements for closed material proceedings in respect of persons whose deportation had been ordered on grounds of national security but where the evidence against them could not safely be disclosed to the deportee or their representatives.
I note what the special advocates have said, because we are all reluctant to see such a system operate, although it has to because it is better than any alternative. In the intervening period, that system has worked for the Special Immigration Appeals Commission, and worked reasonably well. The senior judges who preside at these proceedings, in SIAC, have shown themselves to be robustly independent. Of 37 substantive cases before SIAC since 2007, the tribunal—a senior judge with colleagues—has found against the Government in at least seven. The procedures in the Bill build on the 15 years’ experience of SIAC.
Secondly, I commend my right hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan) and his colleagues for the constructive approach that they have adopted towards the Bill. I spent 18 years on the Opposition Benches between 1979 and 1997 and then witnessed the Conservative Opposition during their 13 years on these Benches. The temptations on Oppositions to oppose in a destructive way are considerable, and so too are the pressures from outside on them to operate in that way. We in my party succumbed to those pressures too often in 1980s, and, I am afraid, so did the Conservative party on many occasions, including on Bills like this, during part of its 13 years in opposition.
By contrast, my right hon. Friend and his colleagues, from the outset of the publication of the Green Paper—I well remember his response to that a year and a half ago—have accepted, as he said in his opening remarks, that there may be circumstances in which closed material procedures have to be applied in civil cases, but argued that there should be greater safeguards in the Bill and, crucially, that the court, not the Secretary of State, should decide whether a CMP should operate in any particular case. As a result, the Bill has been significantly improved, and my right hon. Friend and his team can rightly claim considerable credit for that.
Let me turn to the key amendments 30 and 31 and the amendments to which they are linked. The amendments seek to reword clause 6(6) and to add a third condition. Thus the Government propose,
“The second condition is that it is the interests of fair and effective administration of justice”
to use a CMP, while the Opposition instead propose that the second condition should be a relative one—that
“the degree of harm to the interests of national security if the material is disclosed would be likely to outweigh the public interest in the fair and open administration of justice.”
They also propose to add:
“The third condition is that a fair determination of the proceedings is not possible by any other means.”
As the Minister said, this is colloquially called the Wiley balance test. However, when I looked at the definition of the Wiley test I noted that the Joint Committee on Human Rights has turned it into something else. It is a test, but it should not be adorned with the phrase, “the Wiley test”, because it goes considerably further. I do not dispute anybody’s motives in dealing with this incredibly difficult issue. However, shifting the test, even if it were the accurate Wiley test in respect of PIIs, to CMPs has the defect of arguing by analogy. It is appropriate in PII cases but not in this regard.
We have had a great deal of elucidation. I commend—but do not, with respect, agree with—what the hon. Member for Chichester (Mr Tyrie) said about the uses of PIIs. I also accept the comments of the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis). During the nine years for which I was responsible for the various agencies, I quite frequently had to make applications to a court for a PII. Even in respect of marginal evidence, PIIs are hugely time-consuming. It is not like dealing with a letter to a Member of Parliament on an issue that one knows backwards where one can virtually top and tail it in one’s sleep. One has to read every single piece of evidence that one is certifying ought to be—in one’s own view, although it is a matter for the court—excluded on grounds of national security, or whatever the grounds may be. I accept the burden of what the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden and the hon. Member for Chichester said. Yes, it is true—this was brought out by the court’s judgment in al-Rawi—that when the court receives an application for PII it is able not only to accept or reject it but to take a middle way—a third way, as it were—of gisting, confidentiality rings, and so on.
However, the profound difference in this regard is that ultimately, if the respondent party, which in civil cases is inevitably the Government—it is completely different in criminal cases, but this is not about criminal cases—do not like the decision that the court has come to, they have to decide not to contest the case at all. That is why there is a lacuna in the current arrangements, and that is the mother and father of this Bill. That does not apply in respect of CMPs, where the Government will not be able to use PIIs to exclude evidence as they can now, because the judge will say, “Hang on a second. Why are you applying to exclude evidence which is absolutely central to the case? You need to put it in, and I will decide, thank you very much, whether it should be kept completely secret or there ought to be some kind of gisting or summary of that evidence.” The right that accords to the state in respect of PII does not accord to it in respect of CMPs.
Justice and Security Bill [Lords]
David Davis Excerpts(12 years ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)
Will my right hon. and learned Friend give way—on that point?
Mr Clarke
Let me just explain. All of this is relevant.
Some of our critics appear to be arguing decisively that the status quo is somehow defensible and should continue, but I believe that that position is untenable now. It is simply not possible for a judge to hear these matters, and, as was pointed out by the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears), all kinds of insinuations are made about cases in which it ought to be obvious to everyone that the intelligence agencies were in no position to call any evidence that would seriously address the issues.
The serious evidence that might be called and might be relevant—I am not commenting on the merits of any individual cases—might relate to the precise nature of the British intelligence agencies’ involvement in the issues concerned. What did our agents know about either an individual or an organisation at the time when the events being described were taking place? What collaboration was taking place between the British Government and partners in overseas agencies, and what information was being shared? Those are all very sensible questions, given the nature of some of the claims that have been made about the behaviour of British agents.
As I have told the House before, I do not think that any country in the world would tolerate a legal system in which our spies and our agents and their collaborators cheerily appeared in open court, in front of the parties, their lawyers and the press, and gave evidence on these matters. It would be exceedingly damaging. Public interest immunity, on which people now rely, has one obvious defect. If a Minister obtains it, that means that the material is entirely excluded from the court, and neither party can rely on it.
What continually happens, certainly in relation to defence evidence, is that—although there has been no proper hearing of all the evidence—the parties settle, the taxpayer pays up, claims are made which are damaging to the reputation of the service and no one knows whether or not they are justified, and we have to move on from there. I want us to reach a point at which cases are not being settled simply because our court procedures are not capable of allowing sensitive national security material to be heard in the few cases in which it is plainly relevant. It has always been obvious to me that what is needed in civil actions of this kind is the very limited use, in exceptional cases, of the closed procedures that were created by the last Government, which would enable a High Court judge to consider all the evidence from both sides, but to do so in necessarily closed conditions if national security was at risk.
Mr Clarke
Of course it is being appealed, but that does not alter my point. Depending on which side one is on, it is no good saying that we cannot have closed material procedures if the wrong side is going to win. In that case, the Government lost and Abu Qatada won using a special advocate and a closed material procedure.
Mr David Davis
On exactly that point, my right hon. and learned Friend—and he is my friend—said that these proceedings were created under the Labour Government. They were, and there are now 69 special advocates, 32 of whom are experienced in closed material procedures. The vast majority of them—nearly all of them—oppose the Bill as they think PII works better than the procedure they have been operating for the past few years. Why does he think that is?
Mr Clarke
The special advocates surprised me with the ferocity of the evidence they provided. They start from the side of the argument that challenges the security services and is suspicious of what goes on, and judges have told me—some have said this publicly—that they underrate their effectiveness in such actions. They are used to practising the present law and I assume that their position is that the present law is perfectly all right and that they wish to continue with it. I am surprised by the adherence to PII, which has not hitherto been evident.
Let me give the example of another case to show that special advocates can successfully challenge the evidence put forward in closed proceedings by claimants. Ekaterina Zatuliveter, the Russian girlfriend of a Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament, won her deportation case after a closed hearing in which a special advocate challenged the argument that she was a threat to national security and should be deported. It is simply not the case that in closed procedures it is impossible to challenge these points. Such cases are comparatively new, as no one dreamed we would have such litigation until 10 or 15 years ago.
The claims are getting steadily more numerous as we have an attractive jurisdiction in which the person against whom one makes allegations will probably not be able to call any evidence and one will be paid millions of pounds. The best way forward is the one that has been successfully used in the two cases I have already cited, which is, despite our very limited experience, having closed proceedings and special advocates. It is less than ideal, but it is justice, not secrecy. Secrecy is what we have at the moment, with an uncertain and debatable outcome in all these cases.
Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Aberavon (Dr Francis), whose Committee—the Joint Committee on Human Rights—produced the best guide to the Government’s proposals and their weaknesses, and to the threats they pose to our current civil liberties.
In recent months, the Prime Minister rightly received plaudits for how he handled the apology for the Bloody Sunday massacre and the Finucane murder. He did so with great openness and sensitivity. Both inquiries exposed unlawful killing, either directly or indirectly, by agents of the state, and subsequent cover-ups. Thankfully, that sort of thing is extraordinarily rare in the UK. One reason why it is rare is that such things are exposed and deterred by an open and transparent system of justice—the whole system of justice, including the criminal judicial system, the inquest system and the civil courts system.
Measures in the Bill create the power to take parts of that civil judicial system not just out of the public domain —that already happens in some ways—but completely out of the normal judicial testing procedure. Under the Bill, evidence can be presented by the Government that the other side and their defence lawyers cannot see. That evidence cannot be tested, and therefore may be wholly wrong and misleading, which undermines the very thing that makes our system work.
Mr George Howarth (Knowsley) (Lab)
What role does the right hon. Gentleman imagine a defence lawyer would have in such proceedings?
Mr Davis
A defence lawyer has the role of challenging the evidence, but I will come back to the right hon. Gentleman’s point later.
The Bill is, in the words of Lord David Pannick, a leading barrister—indeed, he is the Government’s leading barrister of choice—“unnecessary, unfair and unbalanced”. He said it is unnecessary because we already have the public interest immunity system.
Sir Malcolm Rifkind
My right hon. Friend has chosen to quote Lord Pannick, but in the debate in the House of Lords on 11 July, he also said:
“I recognise that there may well be a need in some exceptional cases for a…closed material procedure, but…this should be a last rather than a first resort.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 11 July 2012; Vol. 738, c. 1176.]
Mr Davis
If my right hon. and learned Friend will forgive me, I have run out of injury time.
If a case involves sensitive information, the Secretary of State asks the judge’s permission to keep documents away from the court. The judge examines the evidence and makes a decision that balances national security with the interests of justice. Under the PII system, evidence can be shown in an edited form, and witnesses, whether spies or special forces or whoever, can speak from behind screens. Suspects can be given the gist of the case against them, and the court can sit in open session or in camera. All those operations are possible under the PII system, which has served British justice well for decades, not just against the current threat of terrorism, but against the Soviet threat, which in many ways was much more professional, and the previous Irish terrorist threat. The proof of the PII system is that no Government, including this one, can point to a single court judgment that has undermined national security—not one judgment.
Mr Davis
PII balances the demands of national security and justice—that is exactly what it does. I do not want to be distracted for too long, but I discussed this at some length with Lord Pannick, whom my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kensington (Sir Malcolm Rifkind) mentioned, with a number of lawyers who operate in this system all the time—not just as an aside or even as criminal lawyers, but all the time—and with the special advocates. This is not just the view of some civil liberties extremists, as the Minister without Portfolio tries to imply. It is the view of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, which is unpersuaded —the word it used—that the existing law is not up to the task. It is the view of almost all the special advocates, the lawyers who make closed material procedures work and understand the procedure better than anyone else—indeed, I would argue that they are the only people who understand both the strengths and the weaknesses of the procedure they operate. It is the view of Lord Pannick, as I said, and the view of the former Director of Public Prosecutions, Lord Macdonald, who had a formidable record of prosecution in terrorist cases in his time as DPP.
The Government, the security agencies and their proxies say the opposite, just as they did—in fact, we had the reference earlier—when the 7/7 inquest was proposed. What did MI5 say? It said that holding the inquest in public would amount to “handing over the keys” to its headquarters. It said that if evidence was not heard in secret then it might have to release information from top secret intelligence files. No such thing happened. Instead, we learned a great deal about what happened on 7/7. We learned about failings in operations, data handling and management—all perfectly proper things for the British public to know, and not a single failure of security or intelligence. As the right hon. Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Paul Goggins) said, Dame Justice Hallett ran the inquest very well indeed, as we expect our security-experienced judges to do. That balance was managed nearly perfectly. There is no doubt that this sort of important information about the scrutiny of the state is far more likely to come out in an open court of law than by any other means. I even include in that the Intelligence and Security Committee, good job though it does; an open court is even more important than that.
Many of the Government misdemeanours I have just mentioned have been and gone—inquests held and claims settled. However, the problem of Governments using the rhetoric of national security as a shield for politically embarrassing information has not gone away. In recent years, we have seen allegations of Government complicity in torture and extraordinary rendition. We have seen Gaddafi’s political opponents seized and handed back to the Libyan dictator to face imprisonment and torture—the case that was settled last week. I suspect we will be involved in the use of drones, which have killed scores of innocent people, because of intelligence. This issue of exposure of state misdemeanour in the courts, therefore, is still very current indeed.
It is worth looking at an example of how the state currently uses closed material procedure when it is able. As luck would have it, we have a topical case right now—the case of Serdar Mohammed. Two weeks ago, a British court heard allegations that a suspected Taliban terrorist, captured by UK forces, was tortured by Afghan security services. A secret document was presented to the court in redacted form, the way it would have been in a closed material procedure. Indeed, the document was in the Maya Evans evidence case that my right hon. and learned Friend the Minister without Portfolio referred to earlier. The court did not allow the redaction of the secret UK eyes only document, so we now have both the redacted and unredacted copies in the public domain. We can, therefore, see what was redacted, supposedly for security reasons.
Paragraph 20 talks about a visit to this prisoner by British embassy staff and Royal Military Police. It states:
“The detainee showed the visit party...some of the injuries which he claimed were made as a result of being beaten several times with steel rods to the areas of his legs and feet which he claims left him unable to stand afterwards. Photographs of some of the alleged injuries are also annexed.”
Where the security interest of the British state is in redacting that, I do not know. It was absolutely material to the case in front of the court on Serdar Mohammed. The information posed no threat to any agents, no threat to any techniques, and no threat to any British national interest and yet that was one of the redactions. The only negative effect of showing it in court, of course, was the possible political embarrassment that we may not have met our duties under international law and under the rules of war in protecting a prisoner who was technically under our command. This is exactly the sort of public interest information that could be concealed if the Bill became law.
With closed material procedures enshrined in law, the intelligence agencies would inevitably be tempted to protest that any information relating to their activities was “sensitive”. We have seen that before in the Binyam Mohamed case. More cases would be heard in secret, with no defence lawyers, victims, press or public present to challenge or report what transpired. Evidence heard in secret cannot be easily challenged, and we need to address that. Inconsistencies cannot be spotted and witnesses cannot be properly cross-examined. Under these conditions, evidence may not be worth the paper it is written on.
Let me give the House another example of how this system can fail. A few years ago, there was a control order case, under the previous Government, where the suspect was accused of entering Britain at a specific date and time using a fake passport, which was part of the evidence. Shortly afterwards, exactly the same evidence, including the same fake passport, was used against a different suspect in another, totally unrelated case. They were both supposed to have used the same passport on the same day, which was clearly not possible. It was only by lucky coincidence that the same special advocate, out of approximately 70, was handling both cases. He recognised the evidence and was able to point out that this was false. I do not believe that it was an intentional misleading of the court by the agencies; I think it was simply a mistake. However, it is a matter of public record and the special advocate concerned is now a judge. That demonstrates how easily the CMP can fail miserably in critical issues of justice. That is why Supreme Court Justice Lord Kerr, former Government prosecutor in Northern Ireland during the troubles, subsequently Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland, said:
“It would be, at a stroke, the deliberate forfeiture of a fundamental right which has been established for more than three centuries.”
The Justice and Security Bill is being sold as a fair way to protect our national security and justice. It does neither.
Hazel Blears
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. Since the terrorist threat to the country has increased, particularly since 9/11, and remains a significant threat, clearly other measures have had to be taken.
That is exactly the point: although everyone is saying that these proposals are a radical departure, actually we have trodden this path before. As the Minister responsible for taking the control order legislation through the House, I know only too well the depth of feeling among Members on both sides of the House—this is hugely controversial stuff about which people have very strong feelings. It is contentious among the legal profession, and there are many different views among judges and practitioners, but, as has been said, none of us wants to go down this path—it is not something that we relish doing—but, if we are to protect national security and to have a fair hearing of these issues, we have no other option.
Last night, I tried something that the judges will have to do, which was a little balancing act: I drew up a table of arguments for and against the proposals to highlight in my own mind where the balance in the Bill should lie. First, on the “for” side—the reasons I support the proposals for closed procedures—was the need to protect our international relationships and liaison with countries across the globe. Yes, that is about America, but it is not just about America; increasingly, many of the plots that threaten the UK have an international element and much more work now has to be done upstream—in the words of the security agencies—to disrupt terrorist training and plots that might manifest themselves in this country unless we can do work internationally as well as in this country. That means we have to have these relationships. They are fundamental to the success of our fight against terrorism.
Some people have asked whether the threat that America might not co-operate with us as much as it has in the past is real, or whether it is something that the security agencies are making up to force us down this path. As the Americans would say, “You bet it’s real”. When the Committee visited America last year, we were told in no uncertain terms by law officers, the CIA and a whole host of agencies that the damage done not so much by the information in the Binyam Mohamed case, but by the breaching of the control principle had shaken that relationship—I would not say to its foundations, because it is a very strong relationship, but it had shaken it—and resulted in a lack of information sharing.
Mr David Davis
The right hon. Lady might not be aware, but the greatest release of intelligence information in history prior to WikiLeaks came in the Pentagon papers. In that case, the American Government brought the control principle before their courts, and they were turned down and vast amounts of data provided by foreign countries were released into the public domain—and that was not the last time; it has happened several times since. Indeed, evidence to the Binyam Mohamed trial stated that the US understood the issues about control because the courts in the states were independent.
Hazel Blears
I think the right hon. Gentleman gets the balance wrong in that case. I think of the information that the US has provided us with to protect our security. I think of the bomb plot in April—the second underpants bomb plot—where the liaison between the US and this country was essential to preventing an incident that could have cost many lives. We have to strike a balance, but national security is our first responsibility to the country.