Assisted Dying

David Davis Excerpts

Monday 29th April 2024 Westminster Hall

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

I am not a religious man, but I have always viewed life as sacred. For most of my life, I have been disinclined to accept the arguments of people who are in favour of assisted dying, but various events have changed my view in the past several years. Some time ago—a long time ago—my mother died of brain and lung cancer in considerable agony, pain and, I suspect, terror, too. I am pretty sure that the doctors in charge of her accelerated her demise. I am glad they did. It was a miserable, miserable time for her, and in my view it was a good thing for her to go more peacefully with an excess of morphine, if you want to put it that way.

I suspect that it was the unstated norm to do that in those days, and doctors took those decisions quite properly themselves. But I also suspect that that changed after the Shipman scandal. Dr Shipman killed hundreds of people, and doctors then became rather fearful of the legal consequences of doing what I have just described. That, in my view, alters the balance of this argument.

Later, Bishop Bill Westwood—some may remember him; he was probably the only Thatcherite bishop in history—became a constituent of mine. He also argued with me that we should change the law to allow assisted dying. I was surprised at that because of his faith. I thought that was really quite material.

And then, only a few months ago, one of my constituents talked to me about her father, who had motor neurone disease. He was terrified of getting to the end of his life and being unable to do anything about it, so he told her that he intended to end his life earlier than the inevitable outcome. He was a very wealthy man, and was able to afford a private jet to fly himself and his whole family to Dignitas in Switzerland and go through the process there to deliver what my constituent described as a beautiful death—certainly a painless death. I have come to the conclusion that as long as extremely strict controls are put in place so that no one feels pressurised to end their life, I am supportive of the legalisation of assisted dying.

But let us be clear: we must not make the same mistakes as other countries. I am thinking particularly of Canada and the Netherlands. In the Netherlands, for example, several people with autism and intellectual disabilities have brought on the end of their life, some of them before the age of 30. That is not acceptable. Similar weaknesses apply in Canada. We must ensure that safeguards are in place.

Given the time, Sir Robert, I will finish with these comments. There have been references to a private Member’s Bill. That is the wrong mechanism for this. A multi-day Second Reading and a many multi-day Report stage are required to take this through and get it right. Once we get it right, unless we are going to accept that we are stepping on a slippery slope, we have to make that the final decision as a Parliament.

I was a friend of Frank Field for 50 years. We were close friends and allies on all sorts of things over that time. Like me, he opposed this proposal for a long time and changed his mind at the end. I am honoured to follow him on that course.

Investigatory Powers (Amendment)Bill [Lords]

David Davis Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 25th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Dan Jarvis]

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

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

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

[Dan Jarvis]

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

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[Dan Jarvis]

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

[Sir David Davis]

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

[Dan Jarvis]

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

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

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

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

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

[Sir David Davis]

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

[Sir John Hayes]

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

[Sir David Davis]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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[Mr Kevan Jones]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Sir David Davis]

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

[Mr Jones]

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

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

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

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

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[Mr Jones]

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

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

“cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment”.

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

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

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

[Sir David Davis]

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

[Mr Jones]

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

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

[Sir David Davis]

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

[Mr Jones]

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

New clause 4 would

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oral Answers to Questions

David Davis Excerpts

Monday 3rd July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Chris Philp]

I cannot set out a precise timeframe—it is being actively worked on—but I point out that Festus, the police and crime commissioner for Bedfordshire, is doing a fantastic job for the people of that county. It is thanks to his active, energetic, persuasive and eloquent interventions that Bedfordshire has received these special grants. Its base budget has also gone up by £6.1 million this year thanks to his fantastic work.

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

Last week, Nigel Farage publicised the cancellation of his bank account under the politically exposed persons regulation, but he is only the latest of a number of people to have had their lives wrecked by that regulation. Recently, Lords in the other place tried to correct the policy, but with only partial success, because, I understand, of pushback from the Home Office and the security services. Will the Minister explain why that is and what he will do about it?

[The Minister for Security (Tom Tugendhat)]

I am delighted to be asked a question. Yesterday, the Treasury and the Home Office came together and agreed various things that were announced in the House of Lords: the PEPs agreement. Such a closure on political grounds, if that is indeed what has happened—after all, we have only the allegation of it at this point—should, therefore, be completely unacceptable. PEPs is there to prevent the corrupt use of banking facilities by politicians in corrupt regimes. It is not there to silence individuals who may hold views with which we may or may not agree.

Stop and Search

David Davis Excerpts

Monday 19th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Suella Braverman]

I thank the right hon. Lady for her response. It is not just my view, but the view of police that stop and search is fundamentally about saving lives and keeping the public safe. Where used proportionately, stop and search works. Since 2019, more than 40,000 weapons have been seized through stop and search, and 220,000 arrests have been made. The 2021 inspectorate report concluded that the vast majority of stop and search decisions are based on reasonable grounds. That is potentially thousands of lives saved and countless violent incidents prevented.

To those who claim it is a disproportionate tool—a racist tool—I say that we must be honest about what that means for victims. The right hon. Lady, when she was Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee, stated:

“Stop & search is more disproportionate now than 22yrs ago, with no adequate explanation or justification for nature & scale of racial disparities.”

Yet again, she is on the wrong side of the argument, and yet again she is not on the side of victims.

What is disproportionate is that black people are four times more likely to be murdered than white people. What is disproportionate is that young black men are more likely to be victims of knife crime than young white men. That is the disproportionality that I am focused on stopping. It is important that we look at the matter with a cool head and on the basis of the evidence.

The emerging picture based on London suggests that when we adjust the data to consider the proportion of suspects in an area and its demographics, rather than considering the data for the country as a whole, the disproportionality of stop and search falls away hugely. I urge the right hon. Lady to consider and reflect on those facts rather than jumping to knee-jerk assumptions. Of course it is right that the powers are used in a responsible and measured way—that is why engagement with communities must be respectful—and it is right that the powers are subject to the highest levels of scrutiny. We now see very few complaints about individual stop and searches. Training on legal and procedural justice has improved and we have seen confidence levels increase.

Overall, I am very proud of this Conservative Government’s achievements: a record number of police officers ever in the history of policing, 100,000 weapons seized since 2019 and falling crime—in fact, serious violent crime has fallen by 40% since 2010. What has Labour done? Labour Members voted against our measures to strengthen the police. They voted against tougher sentences for rapists. They voted against our Bill to stop the militant protesters. Same old Labour—they never fail to miss an opportunity to be on the wrong side of the argument. This Conservative Government are on the side of common-sense policing and on the side of the British people.

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

Everybody in the House will share the Home Secretary’s laudable aim of cutting knife crime. However, she will remember that when we debated the new stop-and-search powers—I think it was the day after the Casey report came out—I cited some examples from that report where police officers had justified carrying out a search based on the person’s ethnicity alone, had been rude or uncivil while carrying out the search, or had used excessive force, leaving people, often young people, humiliated and distressed and thus damaging trust in the Met. Casey called for a “fundamental reset” of the Met’s use of stop-and-search powers. At the time, I took it that the Home Secretary agreed with the Casey report. Can she tell the House how what she is proposing today, which may have considerable merit, takes on board that reset? How has she absorbed that reset into what she is doing today?

[Suella Braverman]

This Government and I fully support the police in the fair use of stop and search to crack down on violent crime and to protect communities. Every knife taken off our streets is potentially a life saved. That is the value that stop and search brings to fighting crime. Today’s announcement brings together a series of measures, including an obligation to do more reporting and a greater increase in the data—something that has been commented on by previous inspectors and reports—so that we have a clearer picture of the use and efficacy of stop and search. Guidance will be issued by the College of Policing, but already we have seen an improvement in accountability and in scrutiny and, as a result, a fall in the number of complaints.

Coronation: Policing of Protests

David Davis Excerpts

Tuesday 9th May 2023 Commons Chamber

[Chris Philp]

I have the greatest respect for the hon. and learned Member and take her questions seriously. She asked about pressure; the police are operationally independent and make decisions independent of Government. Ministers received a briefing, particularly as the intelligence picture escalated in the 24 hours before the event. The Mayor of London also received briefings, as did the shadow Home Secretary on Friday, I believe. There is nothing out of the ordinary in Ministers receiving briefings, not least because the police and other security and civilian agencies need to co-ordinate. The House has just debated and scrutinised the legislation at some length, and there are no plans to change it.

On the six people arrested and the question of protests more generally, I repeat the point I made in my initial answer: hundreds of people exercised their right to protest peacefully. As the hon. and learned Lady said, that was done following engagement with the Republic protest group. The fact that hundreds of people were able to protest peacefully is testament to the right of peaceful protest.

I do not want to get into the details of the six people because, frankly, neither the hon. and learned Lady nor I has all the facts. But clearly, when the arrests were made, the police reasonably believed that there were grounds to do so. I emphasise again that several hundred people were able to peacefully protest on that day, as is their absolute right.

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

Nobody should question that it was a difficult time and a difficult task for the Metropolitan police. Nobody should question that, to a large extent, they carried it out brilliantly and gave us a marvellous occasion this weekend. That being said, within one week of the Public Order Act entering the law, and in its first serious use, we end up with the head of the Met having to apologise to people who were wrongfully arrested. In the event that the Home Affairs Committee reviews this matter and comes back with recommendations on how to change guidelines and perhaps laws, will the Home Office take that on board?

[Chris Philp]

I caution my right hon. Friend against asserting that those people were wrongfully arrested. That is a legal threshold and it has not been established that it was met. On the issue of testing the legislation, I draw the House’s attention to the fact that this was a once-in-a-lifetime event, which took place against an intelligence backdrop that suggested that there were multiple, well-organised plots to cause serious disruption. Had they proceeded, they would have been taken very seriously by this House and been seen around the world. I do not think one can infer from what happened at the weekend that the recently passed legislation is defective.

Public Order Bill

David Davis Excerpts

Consideration of Lords message
Monday 24th April 2023 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Jones]

My understanding is that the agreement to include some aspects of the amendments in PACE code A does not go the whole way towards what we are suggesting in this legislation. The attitude from the Government—that plenty of long-established safeguards already exist, as the Minister said at the start of his contribution—is wrong. We have lots of regulations in PACE code A and other places that are clearly not always adhered to. Louise Casey has identified this as a problem, she has made a suggestion and we suggest putting it in the Bill, which I think is a reasonable response.

We know that stop and searches can go wrong when there is a communication failure from the officers carrying out the search. We welcome the changes announced in the Lords, although we do not know exactly what the changes to PACE code A will be, or how or when they will happen. Our colleagues in the other place tried to add points about communication into the Bill and suggested increasing the seniority of the officer allowing a suspicionless stop and search, but both amendments were rejected. Baroness Casey suggests as a minimum that Met officers should be required to give their name, their shoulder number, the grounds for the stop and a receipt confirming the details of the stop. Lords motion A1 built on Louise Casey’s recommendations and attempted to add them to the legislation.

It is worth remembering that a recent report by Crest Advisory examining the experience of black communities nationally of stop and search found that 77% of black adults support the use of stop and search in relation to suspicion of carrying a weapon, but that less than half of those who have been stopped and searched felt that the police had communicated well with them or explained what would happen.

It would be helpful to understand whether the Minister agrees with Baroness Casey’s recommendations in full and, if he does not, whether he thinks she is wrong or believes that something else should be done instead. The Casey report was devastating, and Ministers have so far been unable to offer any solutions to make the reforms we need in policing. Here is an opportunity for the Minister to signal the Government’s intent to make those reforms. We have heard the warnings from former police officers that some of the powers in the Bill risk diminishing trust in public institutions. The Peel principles on policing by consent said that

“the police are the public and the public are the police”.

The Home Secretary said in her statement to the House on the Casey review:

“When it comes to changing the law or introducing any frameworks that are necessary, we in the Home Office will do that”.—[Official Report, 21 March 2023; Vol. 730, c. 167.]

Here is a chance for the Home Secretary to keep her word. It will not change anything in terms of who can be stopped; it will just make the process more transparent and better for everyone. On the 30th anniversary of the murder of Stephen Lawrence, wouldn’t that be a good thing to do? I urge Members across the House to back the Lords amendments and reject the Government’s motion tonight.

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

I find myself, I am afraid, in agreement with the Opposition spokesperson. I also support the Casey recommendations, based as they were on a horrifying report about the behaviour of the Met over the years. Let us be clear: no Government of any persuasion have managed to get the Met to behave—and not just the Met; other police forces, too—in a manner that is acceptable to the public, bearing in mind that there have been Governments of both orientations since Stephen Lawrence.

The second point I would make very quickly is that when the Home Secretary in 2010—my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May), for those who do not remember—limited stop and search, she did not do so out of an excess of liberal sympathy. She did so because, at that point in time, stop and search was being used in such a way that it caused serious race relations problems in several parts of the country. That was because stop and search was largely targeted at stopping violence, and at that point—it may well still be true today—the perpetrators of knife crime and the victims of knife crime mostly came from minority communities. Although minority communities themselves were not happy about the operation of the system, they understood why it was there. That was a different order of magnitude from using suspicionless stop and search to control demonstrations.

Don’t get me wrong: I think that we should have some fairly fierce legislation—which we do have now—for dealing with people who deliberately destroy the lives of the public, or uproot and disrupt the lives of the public. I am a great believer in the right of demonstration, but I do not think it should go beyond a certain level. That is why I support the Lords amendment to put this provision on the face of the Bill.

To respond to the Minister’s question to the Opposition spokeswoman, we should turn the question on its head: why should it not be on the face of the Bill? After all, that would broadcast in clear terms what we want to happen. We want the police to behave in a respectful and careful manner when they use this power. Indeed, I am slightly surprised that the Lords amendments did not also include making sure that video footage from the body cameras was available, including to the lawyers of the people who were stopped and searched after the event, if need be.

I think this is a worthwhile amendment. As has been said, I think it is very much in line with the Casey report, and we as a Government have to set our minds to ensuring that every recommendation of the Casey report is put in place and to returning the Metropolitan police and other police forces to the level of public respect that we wish they had now.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Roger Gale)]

I call the SNP spokesman.

Illegal Migration Bill

David Davis Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 27th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Sir William Cash]

I voted for the Bill on Second Reading because it was most emphatically going in the right direction, but I emphasised that we wanted to be sure that it would actually work in the national interest by preventing illegal immigration. The Bill is getting better with the amendments proposed by the Government today, for which all credit to the Home Secretary, the Immigration Minister and the Prime Minister. The number of Back Benchers who are supporting our constructive amendments, including mine, is growing.

This Bill to stop the boats is both legally and politically necessary, because illegal migration is out of control, partly because of a failure to distinguish between genuine refugees and others who are illegal and economic migrants. This is not only a real problem in the UK; increasingly, it is a real global and European problem as well, as can be seen from the dreadful tragedies in the Mediterranean in the last few weeks and months.

This legislation sets out a fair regime for dealing with people who have arrived here illegally. It gives them a reasonable but limited ability to raise any exceptional reasons as to why it is unsafe for them to be sent to Rwanda or another safe country. These are known as suspensive claims, and they are clearly defined in clause 37. Those claims ensure that we are compliant with our international obligations and that we would not send somebody overseas if they were not medically fit to fly or if they would face persecution in the destination country.

The success of this scheme depends on it working predictably and quickly. Those who come over on small boats need to know that they will not be able to stay here and that the vast majority of them will be removed to Rwanda or elsewhere. If courts intervene in unexpected ways, it removes the deterrence and the whole scheme breaks down, along with our ability to control our own borders.

However, this is also a procedural, legal and judicial issue, because under the Human Rights Act 1998, the UK courts have not been given suitable guidance by Parliament via statute to draw the appropriate boundaries that are needed in the national interest. As I pointed out on Second Reading, for example, the international refugee convention does not apply between the UK and France, because France is not a country where asylum seekers fear persecution, yet the European Commission is by all accounts refusing to make legal changes to EU law to allow returns of illegal asylum seekers from the UK to France. There are also provisions setting out other named safe countries. I ought to remind House what happened when the Dublin regulation was torn up by Angela Merkel and 600,000 or so refugees were allowed to pour into Europe.

When the Human Rights Act was passed in 1998, I was in the House of Commons. Human rights lawyers and activists claimed that the Act was a “constitutional Rubicon” enabling the courts to override parliamentary sovereignty. This was a massively overstated and exaggerated claim that is refuted by clear statements, which I hope those on the Labour Front Bench will take on board, made by the then Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine of Lairg, in the House of Lords on its Second Reading on 3 November 1997. He said of the legislation:

“It maximises the protection of human rights without trespassing on parliamentary sovereignty.”

He also stated that

“the remedial action will not retrospectively make unlawful an act which was a lawful act—lawful since sanctioned by statute.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 3 November 1997; Vol. 582, c. 1229.]

But the question remained: what does statute provide?

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

I agree with my hon. Friend. In fact, that was demonstrated when we had the case of prisoner votes and Jack Straw, who took through the Human Rights Act, supported my motion to give instruction to the Government to get by exactly that issue.

[Sir William Cash]

I could not agree more with my right hon. Friend. In that context, “takes into account” is what the courts have to do with respect to the convention, but not necessarily to obey the Court. That is precisely what happened there.

In the House of Commons during the passage of the Human Rights Act, the Home Secretary Jack Straw made similar observations. The Government rejected giving the courts the power to set aside an Act of Parliament, which was being considered. This was a Labour Government rejecting giving the courts the power to set aside an Act of Parliament. He stated that this was because of

“the importance which the Government attaches to Parliamentary sovereignty”.

The White Paper at the time made that abundantly clear, even in respect of declarations of incompatibility by the courts, and furthermore made it clear that declarations of incompatibility would not necessarily lead to legislation.

I was glad to note, in principle, clause 1(5) regarding the application of section 3 of the Human Rights Act. In the context of parliamentary sovereignty, it is clear from the pre-eminent authorities that, in respect of section 3 of the Human Rights Act, any suggestion of a limitation of Parliament’s sovereign will would be permissible only to the extent that in doing so the courts give effect to the intention

“reasonably to be attributed to Parliament”

in enacting section 3. It must surely be clear to all of us, in the case of illegal immigration, that Parliament would never intend to condone illegality or criminality.

This analysis that I have put forward as to the interpretation of the Human Rights Act clearly requires further discussion with the Government. Furthermore, the pre-eminent authority also states that

“the Courts are thus not empowered to construe legislation compatibly with the convention at all costs”

and must not cross the constitutional boundaries, which would include not endorsing illegality.

Public Order Bill

David Davis Excerpts

Consideration of Lords message
Wednesday 22nd March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

I can now announce the result of today’s deferred Division on the draft Criminal Justice Act 2003 (Home Detention Curfew) Order 2023. The Ayes were 290 and the Noes were 14, so the Ayes have it.

[The Division list is published at the end of today’s debates.]

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

I will be brief because much of what I have to say agrees with the Opposition spokesperson, the hon. Member for Croydon Central (Sarah Jones).

I remind the House that the biggest curtailment of stop and search in modern times was in 2010, when my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) was Home Secretary. The reason she did it, in large part, was the feeling that nearly all the stop and searches were in the Met—there were only about 50 in Scotland one year, but thousands down here—and ethnic minorities felt that they were targeted at them. The way they were pursued made race relations in the capital worse.

[Sarah Jones]

On that point, I remind the right hon. Gentleman that every year that the former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson), was Mayor of London, the number of stop and searches went down.

[Mr Davis]

I suspect that my right hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire (Kit Malthouse) wants to intervene on that point.

[Kit Malthouse]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend. What he says is incorrect. At the time, we were dealing with a huge spike in knife crime in London, which was disproportionately reflected in the black community. Young black men were dying on an almost daily basis and, sadly, the vast majority of the perpetrators were also young black men. There was definitely a campaign to try to eliminate weapons from within that community, which worked. In 2008, 29 young people were killed in London, and by 2012 that was down to eight, so the campaign was successful. During that period and up to about 2016, confidence in the Metropolitan police rose to an all-time high of 90%, including rising confidence among minority communities in the capital. I am afraid that my right hon. Friend’s basic premise is not correct.

[Mr Davis]

I have allowed my right hon. Friend to make his point, but the simple truth was that the reason for the Home Secretary of the day curbing stop and search was concern about its impact on ethnic minorities. He is also right that the biggest number of victims of knife crime came from ethnic minorities, so I take his point. My answer to him—and the general concern here—is that bad policing is not improved by bad law, which is what I think this is.

That brings me to the Casey report. The hon. Member for Croydon Central was right to cite the criticism of the Metropolitan police. The report said that there were numerous examples of stop and search being carried out badly. There were examples where officers

“justified carrying out a search based on a person’s ethnicity alone”.

That should not apply under any circumstance. There were examples where officers

“Had been rude or uncivil while carrying out a search”

and

“had used excessive force, leaving people (often young people) humiliated, distressed, and this damaged trust in the Met”.

Those are all bad things from our point of view.

We all want—I include the Opposition—the disgraceful trend in modern demonstrations brought to an end. It is designed not to demonstrate but to inconvenience—there is a distinction. But the Bill is a heavy-handed way of doing that. The Minister tried to say that the Lords had accepted the principle. They had not. What they have sought to do with these amendments is leave the tool in the hands of the police but constrain it in such a way that it is used more responsibility.

The Lords amendments will change the level of seniority required to designate an area for suspicionless search from inspector to chief superintendent or above. Whatever Lord Hogan-Howe says, that is not a crippling amendment. Changing the maximum amount of time for which an area can be designated from 24 hours to 12 hours is not crippling but practical. While my right hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire was doing his job in London, I was on the Opposition Benches as shadow Home Secretary, dealing with a number of Metropolitan Police Commissioners. That is a perfectly practical change. Changing the level of seniority required to extend the authorisation by a further 24 hours to chief superintendent is, again, a practical change.

We talk about suspicionless stop and search. What does that mean? It means the right to stop and search innocent people who have no reason to be stopped and searched whatsoever. We are handing the discretion to a police force that has been called upon to reset its approach to stop and search. The Government are doing almost precisely the opposite of what Casey is calling for. The final amendment states:

“The chief superintendent must take reasonable steps to inform the public when the powers conferred by this section are in active use.”

Those are all practical changes. The smart action of the Government is to accept them, carry on and try to improve on the Metropolitan police that we have today.

[Stuart C. McDonald]

I will be brief because I agree entirely with the two previous speakers. There should be no suspicionless stop and search powers anywhere near a Public Order Bill. It is pretty grim that removing clause 11 entirely from the Bill is now off the table. All we are debating, in essence, are a few inadequate safeguards, yet still the Government are not listening to or understanding the concerns of those who will be stopped and searched.

As we have heard, yesterday the Casey report spoke about the UK’s largest police force needing a fundamental reset on stop and search, because it was being deployed at the cost of legitimacy, trust and therefore consent. Among the report’s stark conclusions was that enough evidence and analysis exist to confidently label stop and search a racialised tool.

Suspicionless stop and search is a counterproductive, disruptive and dangerous police tactic for a whole host of reasons. Yet here we are, the day after Casey, and the Government still insist on handing out a ludicrously broad and totally disproportionate power to do just that. It is not good enough for the Government to say that the use of the powers will be restricted, as the Minister in the other place sought to do. The same Minister said that the whole reason for keeping public nuisance in the scope of clause 11 was that it was an offence committed so frequently. Suspicionless stop and search to prevent the possibility of someone being seriously annoying or inconveniencing someone would almost be funny if it was not so deadly serious. The Government should at least get public nuisance out of the scope of the clause.

The Minister said that he was trying to seek consistency on the rank of the authorising officer, but it is comparing apples and oranges if the Government think that a power to tackle nuisance has to be consistent with the power to tackle serious violence. It is also selective because, as was pointed out in the other place, no-suspicion stop and search powers in relation to terrorism require a far higher rank before they can be authorised.

I will finish my brief contribution with the Casey report, which states:

“We heard that being stopped and searched can be humiliating and traumatic. Yet we could find no evidence of the Met considering how this would impact on how those who had been stopped would use the police service”.

The Government’s insistence on this power means that exactly the same criticism can be levelled at them. They do not recognise the serious disruption caused by suspicionless stop and search. The fact that they have been so tin-eared to concerns raised is pretty worrying. The Lords amendments are the barest minimum that we can do to restrict a severe and draconian power, and we should support them.

Public Order Bill

David Davis Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Tuesday 7th March 2023 Commons Chamber

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

May I start by commending the hon. Member for Hemsworth (Jon Trickett)? I agree very much with what he had to say, but I say to him that, although the laws and the constitution underpinning these matters are, as he said, up to 1,000 years old, much of the tradition of modern demonstrations goes back to the 1930s, when the behaviour of the police towards demonstrators led to the creation of the National Council for Civil Liberties, for example. I know that because my grandfather led more than one demonstration and was arrested—after being baton-charged by the police—for inciting violence. He was sent to prison for six months—although the judge gave him the option of being bound over for six months and not making irritating speeches, and he said he would rather go to prison, so there we are.

My hon. Friend the Member for Northampton South (Andrew Lewer) made one of the best speeches I have heard in this House for a very long time on something as fundamental as the right to prayer without intercession by the state. That is an issue that is thousands of years old, and he was absolutely right.

This is problematic. What we are debating is the outcome of an over-heavy-handed Bill—that is where it starts. We were all outraged by the behaviour of some of the demonstrators—disrupting ambulances and Lord knows what else—and the Government reacted to that, but they overreacted, frankly. The Lords have corrected that, and the Government have conceded on a number of important points. They have removed the possibility that a serious disruption prevention order—one of the most restrictive measures we have short of imprisonment—can be imposed on people who have never been convicted.

I say to the Minister that five years after a conviction is a very long time. Most non-violent convictions are spent after one year, so five years is a devil of a long time to allow such restrictions to be put on somebody. The Lords have removed the electronic tagging requirement again. The idea that creating nuisance should lead to someone being tagged is, in my view, a barbaric proposal, and it is gone. An explicit provision that the police cannot use their powers against journalists was carried by about 90 votes in the Lords. That should not even have come up; it is so obvious that that is undermining for us.

The SDPOs are still very restrictive for what are relatively simple offences. They involve bans on using the internet in certain ways, bans on being in certain areas, bans on intended protests, and many other restrictions. They resemble control orders, which—remember—are counter-terrorism measures. That is a crude approach. As I said, five years is too long for the criminal offence to be unspent, so I hope that the Government will look at that again, or, if they do not, that the Lords send it back again.

The organisation Liberty, which, as I said, came into being because of these sorts of problems with demonstrations in the ’30s, has raised concerns about the possibility of political interference, which is really serious. The Secretary of State may issue “guidance about identifying persons” to whom the police should apply an SDPO. In that, we in this House will have no say. That is, again, a critical concern.

The most important thing was raised by the hon. Member for Hemsworth: suspicionless stop and search. Stop and search is an abuse of our freedoms, full stop. Being stopped by a policeman and required to strip off, or to empty one’s pockets and bags, is an abuse that we do not allow in this country. Let me be clear: the vast majority of police are responsible, decent and public-spirited people, but the past year has shown that there are also some other people in there. The Sarah Everard offence has been referred to; Couzens was charged with other offences just recently. That demonstrates the danger of handing over unfettered power to people who might abuse it. That is the simple point, and what the state is doing is handing over that power. What we are looking at here—suspicionless stop and search—has to be restricted or eliminated. If we do not do this, we will be in the same position as some states with which we have no sympathy.

Last, I want to reinforce my point with quotations from His Majesty’s inspectorate of police. Inspectors went round 10 police forces asking for their opinions, and right enough, there was a spectrum, but I want to read out a few sentences from their report. They said:

“At one end of the spectrum, an officer we interviewed described the current legislation”—

that is, the existing legislation, not this Bill—

“as providing ‘an arsenal’ of weapons for the police to use, including many appropriate for use in the context of disruptive protests. Consequently, that interviewee”—

a police officer—

“and many others saw no need for change. Arguing against the proposal for a new stop and search power (Home Office proposal 5) another officer stated that ‘a little inconvenience is more acceptable than a police state’.”

That is a policeman speaking. His Majesty’s inspectorate said:

“We agree with this sentiment.”

His Majesty’s inspectorate, with all its knowledge—much greater than that in the civil service and the Home Office—think that the proposal is unnecessary and that to keep it is to veer towards a police state. On that basis alone, I say to the Minister, please think again about getting rid of the amendment.

[Stuart C. McDonald (Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis). Our view remains that, despite the best efforts of the other place, the Bill continues to represent a draconian and utterly unjustified attack on protest rights. It is fair to acknowledge that the Government have given some ground, but it is far from enough, so we will vote against a number of the Government’s motions to disagree.

Let me deal first with no-suspicion stop and search, in clause 11. It is horribly ironic that as part of a Bill which the Home Office claims—unconvincingly—is designed to tackle “dangerous and highly disruptive” tactics, the Home Office itself is turning to one of the most dangerous and highly disruptive police tactics: suspicionless stop and search. It is a tactic that achieves next to nothing, yet causes considerable harm, including shocking racial disparities—a fact which I do not think the Government have properly acknowledged during the course of the Bill’s passage.

The profoundly negative impact of stop and search on individuals and on community faith in the police came across loud and clear to me as a member of the Home Affairs Committee when we heard evidence as part of our “The Macpherson Report: Twenty Years On” inquiry. Nobody with reasonable knowledge of the Macpherson report, numerous subsequent inspection reports, or the Home Affairs Committee report could responsibly think that expanding no-suspicion stop and search is a sensible way to go, or the answer to any of our problems. Our Committee report warned of the dangers of such search powers resulting in injustice and undermining the legitimacy that is fundamental to the model of policing by consent. In doing so, we echoed earlier inspectorate reports and the words of the former Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May), who in 2014 spoke about the huge damage done to the relationship between the police and the public when innocent people are stopped and searched for no good reason.

Similarly, when looking at the Bill, the Joint Committee on Human Rights—we will hear from its Chair, my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry), shortly—objected to these powers. We fully support the Joint Committee’s conclusions on the inherent risk of arbitrary and discriminatory use, and the point that post-exercise accountability is simply not enough. The Committee rightly highlighted that such powers have been used only for really significant and serious offences, such as terrorism or serious violence. Now, the Government want to use them for non-violent activities that are only just now being made criminal offences. The question is: what comes next? It is a very, very slippery slope and a totally inappropriate use of such powers.

The trigger for the powers is also ridiculously low: it could be the possibility that someone somewhere is seriously annoying or inconveniencing somebody else—the public nuisance offence—or that somebody somewhere could lock on to a fence or a gate in a way that is capable of causing more than minor disruption to two people. Suddenly, the whole neighbourhood can be searched in the name of stopping that serious annoyance or the more than minor disruption for two people. The right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden quoted the police officer who told His Majesty’s inspectorate that

“a little inconvenience is more acceptable than a police state”.

That is absolutely spot-on. In short, it is a totally ludicrous proposal of dubious consistency with human rights law. It is similarly ludicrous and disproportionate that the penalty will put at risk of imprisonment completely innocent people who simply challenge an officer over an asserted use of a blanket power. That is a dangerous road to go down.

Turning to serious disruption prevention orders, we acknowledge again that the Government have come some way in diluting these highly objectional orders made otherwise than on conviction, but we remain of the view that the whole idea of SDPOs is utterly Kafkaesque and threatens an unjustified infringement on the right to protest of huge numbers of people each and every year. We support the critique provided by Lord Anderson in the other place. It is not long since terrorism prevention and investigation measures were reluctantly introduced, which see significant infringements of a person’s liberty without the use of a criminal court to protect the public from a risk of terrorism. Recently, this House gave cautious support for state threat prevention and investigation measures, but the application of similar ideas, not for the purposes of countering terrorism or espionage, but in the field of protest, is utterly disproportionate and unnecessary. The nature of the SDPO is less defined and lacks similar oversight, limitations or protections compared even with TPIMs or STPIMS, and that is extraordinary. The possibility of a prison sentence for a breach is ridiculous, and the trigger for the imposition of an SDPO is many times lower. Again, the question is: where next? It is a slippery slope indeed. The police do not ask for these powers, and the whole notion should be removed from the Bill.

Finally, we support new clause 1, which seeks to clearly define the meaning of serious disruption and put an appropriate threshold on it. That definition is crucial for a number of other offences and powers. The Government amendment in lieu puts in place so low a threshold that we would prefer no definition at all. If this Government want serious harm simply to be “more than minor”, that triggers all sorts of crazy and unacceptable consequences. Crimes could be committed simply because two people or an organisation had to face moderate or even moderate to minor disruption. Frankly, it is such a wishy-washy low bar that the Bill would be better off with no definition at all. Our view remains that this whole Bill is rotten, overblown, unwelcome and a dangerous threat to human rights, perhaps a bit like the Government themselves. It is a dreadful attack on rights, and it is also dreadful that the constitution allows it to happen. Anything that waters it down is welcome, but in reality the whole Bill should go altogether.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Charles Walker]

I am relieved to hear that.

[Mr David Davis]

The Minister is quite right—that describes exactly what the Government are doing—but he has left out one thing: the conviction is up to five years before. Usually in British law, convictions are spent after a certain period. Non-violent convictions are all spent after one year, but the conviction for causing a nuisance will last five years.

[Sir Charles Walker]

We are so lucky to benefit from my right hon. Friend’s wisdom, which has been built up over a 30-year period, and I thank him for making that important point.

I know that you want Members to make brief contributions, Madam Deputy Speaker, so I will conclude. We are at this point, because we criminalised protest during the covid pandemic, and the Chamber did not push back when the Executive did that. We are paying the price. It is all very well being wise after the event. I have always believed that protest was a right, but I was mistaken because rights cannot be taken away from people. Actually, protest is a freedom, and we discovered that during the covid pandemic, when people up and down the country gathered in small town centres and village squares to protest at the restriction on their freedom, perhaps to earn a living as artists and performers. They were often rounded up by the police and arrested. At the time, many of us warned that once this poison was in the country’s bloodstream it would be difficult to get it out. I am deeply disappointed that the Chamber went missing in action for so long. We allowed the Executive, as I say, to get away with appalling abuses of our unwritten constitution, and we are now paying the price for that. I do not think that we should do that, and I will certainly vote against the Government’s attempts to strike out the Lords amendment.

Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill

David Davis Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 25th January 2023 Commons Chamber

There is a lot more the Government could be doing. Let us get this done and get it right this time.

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

I am going to be brief and speak simply to new clauses 1 and 2, which stand in the name of the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne), in my name and in the names of a number of other long-standing defenders of justice in Britain. The new clauses, in effect, make SLAPPs near impossible where they are used to protect economic crime. The provisions are far too narrow, by the way, but that is what the Bill demands. I will leave it to him to explain the mechanism, but I want to talk for a couple of minutes about how important this is and how we got to where we are today.

The issue dates back to about 2000, or perhaps a bit earlier, when London had become liberalised and the Putin oligarchs and others, including some Chinese people, were looking for places to hide their ill-gotten gains and behaviour. London was a wonderful target for that. There were vast flows of money in which they could hide the billions they were stealing from the Russian people and others.

At the time, there was pretty slapdash corporate admin—we were talking about that yesterday in respect of Companies House—and, I say this quite brutally, the complete feebleness of the British establishment, by which I mean everybody: both parties; and the agencies tasked with controlling this, the Serious Fraud Office, which has been a waste of space, and the NCA, which has not been good enough. It was created to tackle this but has not been good enough. All those things were happening. I say to the hon. Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock) on the Opposition Front Bench that it goes wider than the Conservative party. It starts with Blair/Brown and goes on to Cameron/ Osborne. All of them made mistakes. The golden visa that the hon. Gentleman talked about was created just as we were rushing into the collapse of western financial capitalism under the previous Government. We were too soft—

[Stephen Kinnock]

The right hon. Gentleman makes a valid point. I agree that the creation of the scheme was under the new Labour Administration, but the point I made in my speech was that a number of those golden visas were given after the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014. He is right that successive Governments are guilty of naivety and complacency, but there is a point in 2014 when we really needed a different approach.

[Mr Davis]

There is no doubt that the more recent you are, the more salient the case. Frankly, I can remember being ashamed of a British Prime Minister hosting Putin at the Olympics only a few years after Litvinenko was murdered in our country in the most cruel and overt act of state terrorism. Neither Government dealt with that. Cameron’s action was grotesque in the extreme, but neither Government dealt with it. Similarly, both Governments kowtowed to China after Tibet and all the rest of it. That has been done too many times. It is the entire system, not just one Government or another.

London is a fabulously attractive place for the Russians or the Chinese. If you want to be somewhere else than Russia, this is the place to be. We have facilitated that at every turn. Here comes the issue to which SLAPPs relate. We have a legal system that is probably the most brilliant in the world in delivering fair outcomes and good justice, but it is also phenomenally expensive, which means it is one-sided in its operation between an oligarch and an ordinary citizen, journalist or whoever they may be.

In conjunction with that are the things that flow from it, such as the behaviour of solicitors, to some of whom my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely), who is not in his place, gave a fair old pasting yesterday, but one that was deserved. The private investigators industry, unregulated, undertakes crimes to gather information for use as weapons against other people. Our courts—not uniquely, but outstandingly—allow that information to be used. In each individual case that might be the right decision, but the collective effect of that is to suck criminally based information into our system and therefore engender and help the industry.

All that is why new clause 1 and 2 are vital. That all had the effect of creating a vast, possibly unintentional institutional cover-up for criminal activity: money laundering, fraud and concealment of evil actions abroad. Let us bear in mind that some of the oligarchs we are talking about are murderers. The system murders people. It is evil activity. That is why new clauses 1 and 2 are incredibly important.

What the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill is proposing in new clauses 1 and 2 is a second best option. We already heard the best option in earlier interventions: a freestanding Bill immediately, because this is happening now. There are court cases going on as I stand here in which people are having their lives destroyed by SLAPPs. The next best is to have it in the Bill of Rights, but we know that that is way down the timetable, for all sorts of reasons. We may not see it before the next election, in which case we will have lost two more years.

The new clauses amount to a way of dealing with this criminal—or near criminal—activity in a way that is not susceptible to a finely turned piece of law. I listened with fascination to my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for South Swindon (Sir Robert Buckland) on that point. Getting that right is difficult; getting this right is not, because the greatest enemy of evil is a free press. In our country in the last couple of decades we have allowed our free press to become gagged and crippled. If we can take that gag away and remove those bonds, we will suddenly expose all the things that we need to deal with. We will see the weaknesses I talked about—the SFO and the NCA—and put them right, one by one. That is why we should support new clauses 1 and 2. I talked before about the weaknesses of the SFO and the NCA. We will see those weaknesses and we will put them right, one by one. That is why we should support this measure today.

[Dame Margaret Hodge]

I shall be very brief, because I took a lot of time in the House yesterday. I strongly support many of the new clauses being moved by Back Benchers across the Chamber today. If I can just say something about politics, this heartens me and shows that there are ways in which we can work together to pursue the national interest across the political divide. It breathes a bit of confidence and life back into the political process that we have all chosen to join in our careers, so I commend those individual Back Benchers who have put themselves forward and who are speaking today.

The proposals from the hon. Member for Cheadle (Mary Robinson) on strengthening the support for whistleblowing are hugely important. Whistleblowers are an essential part of our armoury in the fight against money laundering and fraud, and we know that, despite all the legal rights, they are not protected. People lose their jobs, their families get destroyed and they are left penniless. Therefore, the establishment of a capability that will do nothing other than protect and promote whistleblowers in the crucial work they do is really important, and I hope that it will be adopted.

The importance of legislating to tackle the abuse of our legal system by oligarchs and others, which the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) has just talked about so eloquently, is also really important. I want to be blunt about this and say to those on the Government Front Bench that, if they do not accept this new clause, they will not get a Bill during this Parliament. I bet that is right, so for heaven’s sake let us use this opportunity to get this bit of legislation in. It does not cover everything we would like it to cover, but it will have an impact. It will also give us the experience to see whether we have got the legislation right. I am sure that all the lawyers who helped to draft these new clauses put their best brains into them, but if they have not got them right, we will be able to learn those lessons when we come to extend these measures beyond economic crime.

The right hon. and learned Member for South Swindon (Sir Robert Buckland) made an excellent contribution on the reform of criminal corporate liability, and I want to say something about that. It is not that we want to suddenly bang up a whole load of lawyers, accountants, companies, service providers and all those people who we know are the ones that facilitate or collude with much of the economic crime that takes place. Only the best preventive mechanism that we can think of will force a change of behaviour, and we are not doing that on the back of hope; we are doing it on the back of reality. We know from the Bribery Act 2010 and from the regulations on tax evasion and on health and safety at work that putting this sort of liability on individuals and corporations is the only way to transform behaviour. Last week’s amendment to the Online Safety Bill by the Conservative rebels showed the mood of the House, and I would urge Ministers to think about that. The mood of the House is to use this effective tool to try to transform behaviour in all spheres of life, whether in relation to online harms or to economic crime.

I hope that we will hear from the hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr Djanogly) soon on the issue of “freeze not seize”. I know he is going to make a number of propositions, and I hope he will not mind if I say something about this. We have been working with an extensive group of lawyers to see whether we can move to a position where we do not just freeze the assets but seize them in order to repurpose them and, particularly in the current context, use them to support the reconstruction of Ukraine. We have finally got a chink in the armour in that regard, but let me say something else first. The lawyers we have talked to work with non-governmental organisations in this field, and the advice they give is always going to be slightly different from the advice that comes from the lawyers working in the Government service. I think we bring a new perspective, and I urge Ministers to listen to what we have to say. The chink is worth examining at this stage, even if we do not go for the further propositions, to show that we mean it when we say that we want to seize this money.