Investigatory Powers Bill

Debate between David Hanson and Andy Burnham

Tuesday 15th March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Hanson (Delyn) (Lab)]

I wanted to contribute to today’s debate, because, like several other hon. Members in the Chamber, I served for four months on the Joint Committee on the draft Investigatory Powers Bill, which considered the Bill in some detail. They may be four months of my life that I will never get back, but scrutinising the Bill was certainly a worthwhile experience. The Joint Committee was appointed by the House in October and met from 25 November under the chairmanship of my noble Friend Lord Murphy of Torfaen. I pay tribute to him and to the Clerks of the Committee for the way in which they stewarded its deliberations. We had 54 witnesses and nine evidence sessions. We met in public and in private to scrutinise the Bill, in recess and out of recess, when the Commons was sitting. We received 148 submissions and more than 1,500 pages of evidence. We visited GCHQ and the Metropolitan police, and we gave detailed, fair, cross-party consideration to a difficult subject to bring forward proposals on. Our conclusions were relatively unanimous.

The first conclusion was that we need to modernise the current legislation, including that which expires on 31 December. There is therefore a clear need for this Bill, in order to modernise RIPA, the terrorism Acts, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 and other legislation to hand. We have to look at, and we ensured that we did look at, not only the issue of privacy, but the issue of security, both of which were central to our concerns. Although we welcomed consideration of the report, we did make 86 recommendations. If people want to read about this, as I am sure they will, they will see that our report contains 157 comments and recommendations in the summary and conclusions to improve the Bill and make it stronger, and to address some of the concerns that people raised.

I wish to draw the House’s attention, first and foremost, to our first recommendation, which states:

“Resolving the tension between privacy and effective law enforcement in this area is no easy task. The Home Office has now come forward with a draft Bill which seeks to consolidate in a clear and transparent way the law enabling all intrusive capabilities. The Committee, together with the many witnesses who gave evidence to us, was unanimous on the desirability of having a new Bill.”

The Labour party members, the Conservative members, the SNP member, the Liberal member, Lord Strasburger, the bishops and the independent members were unanimous on the need for a new Bill.

The question is: why do we need this Bill? I believe we need it for several reasons. First and foremost, we need it to tackle terrorism, strong and serious organised crime, paedophilia and organised crime across the board. If we look at the annexes to the reports presented to us as part of our evidence from, among others, David Anderson, we will see cases where terrorism has been stopped by activities dealt with under this Bill. For example, in 2010, an airline worker in the UK who had access to airline capability was stopped as a result of access to bulk data. We have information on GCHQ intelligence uncovering networks of extremists who had travelled to Pakistan and then been stopped as a result of the acquisition of bulk data. We have GCHQ evidence on bulk data that have tracked down men who have been abusing hundreds of children across the world and are now in UK prisons because of the powers dealt with in this legislation. We have information on criminal investigations into UK-based crime groups that were supplying class A drugs from south America, where intercept evidence provided intelligence on their modus operandi and they have subsequently been put in prison, resulting in fewer drugs on our streets. We have evidence, and we took such evidence in the Committee, about criminal investigations into London-based gangs, money laundering and dark web activities.

I took some of the previous legislation in this area through as the then Minister for Policing, Crime and Counter-Terrorism under the Labour Government, but things have changed since then. Six years ago, I did not use Twitter, I never had Facebook, and I did not have WhatsApp or the Fitbit that I have on my chest today—now I can talk to my family using them. We have not got the information material now to be able to keep up with the technology, which has advanced. If we look at the type of activity being covered by these Bills, we will see that terrorism is pretty low on the list, at only 1%. Other offences are crucial, such as those relating to vulnerable or missing persons, as well as drug offences, homicide and financial offences, and they cover a large bulk of the amount of work done to date. As I have said, the Joint Committee made 86 recommendations and the Government accepted 46 of them. I hope that we can look in Committee at 20 other recommendations that the Joint Committee made. To do that, this House needs to pass this Bill. I support the decision by my Front-Bench colleagues and the SNP to abstain, but, given that there are Conservative, Labour, SNP and, indeed, Liberal Members who support the Joint Committee’s report, I hope there will not be a vote today and that we will let the Bill go through and then deal with the key issues that my right hon. Friend the Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham) has mentioned, which are important to the Labour party. I hope we will also look at the 20 or so Joint Committee recommendations that have not yet been adopted by the Government.

The key issues include those mentioned by the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) with regard to the definition of internet records. They also include targeting warrants for equipment; recommending and removing emergency procedures; recommending further safeguards for the sharing of information with overseas agencies; and more support and recommendations for strengthening the protection the Bill affords to journalistic material.

[Andy Burnham]

I am listening very carefully to my right hon. Gentleman and I agree entirely with everything he has said. Before he finishes, will he say a little more about the Committee’s recommendation on the definition of national security? The Committee raised that as a concern and the term has been used to cover a multitude of activities. Does he agree that it would be better for the Government to provide a clear definition of national security in the Bill and to drop the justification of economic wellbeing for the more intrusive warrants?

[Mr Hanson]

I cannot speak for the Committee as a whole, but my right hon. Friend makes a very important point. We asked, “What is national security?”, and the answer we got was, “What the Government deem it to be.” Perhaps it is time to make a definition.

My right hon. Friend said that the Labour party would set important challenges. If he looks at the 20 cross-party recommendations that have not been accepted—I am sure that he and the Government will do so—he will see that we have the ability, here and now, to make real and effective changes that would improve the Bill further. The key one is that relating to the definition of internet records and, as I asked the Home Secretary earlier, their deliverability. I genuinely do not have a great problem with the principle of defining an internet record or with the question of how we store it and eventually track individuals who have committed crimes or who could commit crimes in the future. The key point, however, is that we do not yet have a definition, nor do we have clarity on how the Government will fund and manage the storage of internet records.

I hope that the Bill Committee members will look at the written evidence received from Vodafone, TalkTalk and EE. They are very clear that they can use the budget set by the Government over 10 years to develop and manage the storage of internet records. We need a better, more effective way to deal with the issue.

I hope that there will not be a vote. If there is one, I will abstain—it is not my job to support the Government’s Bills through the Commons—but I really hope that the Bill will make it to the statute book in due course, after meeting the strong challenges set by my right hon. Friend and the cross-party Joint Committee. If that happens, the Bill will be used appropriately to stop paedophilia, organised crime and drug trafficking, to prevent terrorism, and to protect our citizens, which is the first duty of this House. That is what we should aim to do this evening.

Police Funding, Crime and Community Safety

Debate between David Hanson and Andy Burnham

Wednesday 24th February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham (Leigh) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House recalls that the Chancellor announced in the Autumn Statement 2015 that there would be real-terms protection for police funding; notes that, based on the scale of cuts proposed, police budgets will fall by between nine and ten per cent over four years in real terms; further notes that the failure to provide real-terms protection for the police budget will lead to further cuts in police numbers in addition to the 18,357 police officers already lost since 2010; notes that the inclusion of cybercrime in crime statistics will show that crime has doubled; notes the heightened threat of a terrorist attack in the UK and the operational role of neighbourhood police in preventing such an attack; and calls on the Government to honour the Chancellor’s statement to the House and provide real-terms protection for the police budget.

We called this debate for one simple reason: the public have not been told the truth about police funding or crime figures. With the second police and crime commissioner elections just weeks away, people need the facts so this evening we set the record straight.

A matter of weeks ago the Chancellor of the Exchequer stood at the Dispatch Box and made this explicit promise to the police and to the public:

“There will be real-terms protection for police funding. The police protect us, and we are going to protect the police.”—[Official Report, 25 November 2015; Vol. 602, c. 1373.]

I am sure Conservative Members remember that because they waved their Order Papers. It could not have been clearer—“real-terms protection”. That was not an off-the-cuff remark or a slip of the tongue. It was the centrepiece announcement of the Chancellor’s autumn spending review statement, made with the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister at his side; it was the traditional rabbit out of the hat that we have come to expect on such occasions, designed to produce mass waving of Order Papers.

There was once a time when, if the Chancellor of the Exchequer made a statement of that kind in that way to this House, it would have meant something more than just a grab for the next day’s headlines. People could trust it to be true, because it had been said by a Chancellor of the Exchequer at the Dispatch Box in the House of Commons, but it seems that we live in different times. Ministers these days, from the Prime Minister downwards, are decidedly less attentive than they used to be to the veracity of what they say at the Dispatch Box. Every Member of this House should worry, because in the end it goes to the heart of trust in this place and what we all do.

Surely, of all public services, the police should be able to trust the word of Ministers of the Crown when commitments are given here. Would it not be a sign of disrespect to people who put themselves in harm’s way on our behalf day in, day out if the Chancellor was writing cheques that he knew he would not be able to cash? You would think so, wouldn’t you, but in today’s politics Ministers think they can say what they like and get away with it.

This evening I will present to the House new analysis which shows that the Chancellor has broken his promise to the police and to the public. He has failed to provide real-terms protection for police budgets in 2016-17. In fact, he is about to cut those police budgets yet again, for the sixth year in a row. For the six years that he has been Chancellor and the six years that the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) has been Home Secretary, we have had six years of cuts to the police. What a record! And to think that the Conservatives used to call themselves the party of law and order.

The issue before the House tonight is this: are we prepared to let the Government think that they can get away with making promises to this House and then breaking them within days, or are we going to do something about it? Are we going to hold them to account and make them honour the promise they made to our local police forces?

[Mr David Hanson (Delyn) (Lab)]

I do not want to go too far back in history, but if my right hon. Friend looks at 3 February 2010 he will see that there were 18,000 more police officers under the Labour Government, but the increase in the budget for 2010-11 was 2.7%, and the Conservative party felt that it was not enough at the time.

[Andy Burnham]

I was just about to make that very point. The cuts that we are now facing come on top of the loss of 18,000 police officers over the previous Parliament, as my right hon. Friend has just said, and 12,000 of them were front-line officers. Thousands of police community support officers and civilian staff have lost their jobs. We have begun to see the break-up of neighbourhood policing, which was a great achievement of the previous Labour Government, bringing police out of their stations and cars and back into communities, restoring trust and bringing down crime. That is a record that Labour should be proud of.