Investigatory Powers Bill

George Howarth Excerpts

Report: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Monday 6th June 2016 Commons Chamber

[Keir Starmer]

I am grateful for that intervention, because what amendment 14 makes clear—the point is sometimes missed—is that these, or indeed any, investigatory powers affect an individual’s privacy. We have to be absolutely clear: the right to privacy is fundamental, but it is not absolute. The Bill gives the state a power to interfere with privacy—that is what it is about. The question then becomes: is there a case for the interference in the first place, and if there is, is that interference necessary and proportionate? Obviously it is for the Minister to respond to our amendment, but in a sense it is all of our duties to remind ourselves that this is all about an interference with privacy, and that is why the safeguards are so important.

The third reason the overarching privacy clause is important is that it is now linked to the test for judicial review of the Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary’s decision, so it has real application every day when one of the warrants is applied for.

Finally, let me say a few words about the appointment of judicial commissioners, an issue that has cropped up a number of times. Under clause 194, it is for the Prime Minister to appoint the Investigatory Powers Commissioner and

“such number of other Judicial Commissioners as the Prime Minister considers necessary for the carrying out of the functions of the Judicial Commissioners.”

Before doing that, he must consult the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, the Lord President of the Court of Session, the Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland, the Scottish Ministers and the First Minister and Deputy First Minister in Northern Ireland. Our amendment 298 would ensure that the Prime Minister acted on the recommendation of

“the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, in relation to Judicial Commissioners appointed from England and Wales,”

and likewise the recommendation of the Lord President of the Court of Session and the Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland in relation to Scotland and Northern Ireland.

The reason is that it is envisaged that judicial commissioners will be appointed from among those who are already very experienced judges—High Court and above—either serving or retired. They will obviously have gained the qualifications to be judges and will be appropriately skilled and qualified to take these decisions, so in truth the exercise of appointing a judicial commissioner will be an exercise in deploying, from the pool of available judges, those who will sit as judicial commissioners.

That is an important consideration. Our amendment is tabled on the basis that it is not appropriate for the Prime Minister to decide that sort of deployment—he does not have the skills and experience to do it—nor, in a sense, should it be a political deployment. This is something routinely done by the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales. Our amendment would ensure that the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, the Lord President in Scotland and the Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland make a recommendation that binds the Prime Minister. The appointment is, of course, the Prime Minister’s, but that is the right way to carry out the appointment to this important judicial role, rather than the version in the Bill.

[Mr George Howarth (Knowsley) (Lab)]

I am grateful to my hon. and learned Friend for giving way again. If the recommendation should be a judicial one and if, as I think I understood him to say, the Prime Minister would not have the ability to overturn it, I fail to understand what the point would be of involving the Prime Minister at all.

[Keir Starmer]

The answer to that is twofold, although I should say that if the decision was on the recommendation of the Lord Chief Justice and so on, it would not be open to the Prime Minister not to follow that recommendation. We need a slight reality check. At the moment under clause 194, if the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales—or, I am sure, the equivalent in Scotland—was consulted and made his or her views clear, it would be highly unlikely that any Prime Minister would act in a way that was contrary to the advice they were receiving from the senior judge in those jurisdictions, but our amendment would bind the Prime Minister. The question is: what is the point of involving the Prime Minister? The answer to that—to some extent this is to the Minister—is that there is the question of accountability for making the appointment.

There is also the point, as the Lord Chief Justice has pointed out, that he—or she, as the case may be—is not in the business of making judicial appointments as such, and will therefore be reluctant to have that power. The Minister might want to confirm that, because he has been having those discussions, not me. I think the Lord Chief Justice and others are reasonably happy to help with the deployment exercise, but not with the business of appointing judges.

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[Joanna Cherry]

That is an excellent suggestion that the Government should consider carefully.

I also mentioned on Second Reading that the United Nations special rapporteur had expressed concern about the Bill’s provisions, especially the bulk powers. That is why it remains the SNP’s position that until such time as a case has been made for the necessity of bulk powers, they should be removed from the Bill.

I make no apology for tabling numerous amendments, because this is a constitutionally important Bill. Their purpose is to try to bring the Bill into line with international human rights norms and to make it properly lawful. If the Bill is passed in its current form, there is a real risk that it will be the subject of challenge. Many of the threads running through it, such as the retention of data and bulk powers, have already been the subject of successful challenges or are awaiting the outcome of decisions. We need to be careful about passing powers into law when their legality has already been questioned by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, and a court in England.

In reality, I know that our amendments will not be accepted because we are already running out of time. We simply have not had enough time to consider the Bill. We have two days for Report, which I know is unusual, but we have short periods of time to speak about important parts of the Bill. I am only at the stage of making some introductory remarks and will have to curtail what I say about part 8 in the interest of other Members getting the right to speak. That will happen as we go through each part of programme motion.

[Mr George Howarth]

I share the hon. and learned Lady’s concern that maybe there is not enough time to consider the Bill as fully as she or I would like, but I am a bit confused. If that is the case, why did she not oppose the programme motion?

[Joanna Cherry]

I knew that that was a pointless exercise that would have eaten into the time that we have, so not opposing it was a practical decision.

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[Lucy Frazer]

Privacy is the right to be left alone. It was once proclaimed to be the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by civilised men, which is why the privacy provisions in the Bill are important. There are many such provisions interweaved in the Bill. To give three important examples, targeted and bulk inception can take place only in the interests of national security, of tackling serious crime and of the economic wellbeing of the UK. It can take place only with judicial authorisation, and communications data—who, where, when—obtained from service providers have to be justified on the basis of a necessary and proportionate test. The relevant clauses all ensure that any interference with privacy is kept to a minimum.

I am pleased to have served on the Bill Committee, where the issue of privacy was raised with some force by the hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer). I am pleased that as a result of the points that he and other Members made the Bill will be amended with an overarching clause on privacy to further protect and ensure the privacy of individuals. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Sir Simon Burns) said, new clause 5 provides for the public authority to have regard to the question of whether the action can be reasonably achieved by “less intrusive means”. It also provides a new requirement for the consideration of the public interest in the protection of privacy. New clause 6 provides for an overarching civil liability, adding to the extensive criminal penalties in the Bill.

Those safeguards strike the right balance between privacy and scrutiny. As the hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras said, safety, security and privacy are not an either/or. That balance has been recognised in Europe, where the ECHR provides under article 8 respect for private and family life and also states that interference by a public authority is legitimate in some circumstances—in fact, the very circumstances outlined in the Bill, including the interests of national security, public safety, the economic wellbeing of the country and the prevention of crime and disorder.

The same balance has been recognised by the UN. In 2014, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights stated:

“Where there is a legitimate aim and appropriate safeguards are in place, a State might be allowed to engage in quite intrusive surveillance”

if

“it is both necessary and proportionate”.

That balance is recognised by the public. A TNS BMRB poll in 2014 stated that 71% of respondents prioritised the reduction of the threat posed by terrorists, even if that eroded people’s right to privacy. The Bill seeks to ensure that the balance is right, and in enacting it we ought to remember that interference with privacy is often too much until it is too little.

[Mr George Howarth]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. and learned Member for South East Cambridgeshire (Lucy Frazer). She took the opportunity to highlight the big principles, and showed how they are included in UN documents and the ECHR. It is useful to be reminded of that.

I speak as a member of the Intelligence and Security Committee, and support the amendments and new clauses tabled by the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve) and other members of the Committee, including me. I will not read them all out, because he dealt with them comprehensively. However, I wish to make some points about a couple of our proposals. Before doing so, however, I want to refer to the report that the ISC produced in the last Parliament after taking evidence on the provisions in the draft Bill. My right hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) and I both served on that Committee. I want to highlight two things in that report. First—and the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield covered this—the overriding principle of privacy, which the hon. and learned Member for South East Cambridgeshire discussed, had to be made clearer in the Bill, and set out as unambiguously as possible.

Secondly, the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield raised the issue of penalties. The measure does not exactly conform to what we wanted. We were concerned that the legislation was not consolidated into one measure. I shall deal with that more fully in a moment. Thirdly—if I do not take too much time dealing with the first and second concerns—I shall come on to the debate about judicial involvement in oversight. I hope to say a brief word about that.

I welcome new clause 5, which is helpful and goes much, if not all, of the way in meeting many concerns expressed by our Committee and by other parliamentary Committees, including Select Committees that have looked at the issue. However, in amendment 14—I know the Minister is going to refer to this, so I am not going to make a hard and fast principle out of it—we attempt to put privacy at the forefront of the Bill. If the Minister has found another way of doing that that would satisfy me I would be very pleased, but having read the Bill carefully, I do not think that there are sufficient safeguards to make it clear that that is the case.

The right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield referred to new clause 4, and was rightly exercised by the issue of penalties. I want to approach that issue from a slightly different direction. The Bill relies on existing legislation, including the Data Protection Act 1998 for which, if memory serves, I had ministerial responsibility. No apologies there—I think that the measure has served us quite well, although there might be other legislation for which I would apologise, but I am not going to say what it is. The Bill also relies on the Wireless and Telegraphy Act 2006, the Computer Misuse Act 1990, common law, as the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield said, and, finally, misfeasance in public office. It is important that we have more information about penalties because, with such a sprawling collection of existing legislation, if someone breaks the provisions in any of those measures there should be clear and unambiguous penalties. I think that the Minister is going to address that matter shortly.

New clause 2 was tabled by the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield, other members of the ISC and me. The right hon. and learned Gentleman made the point—nobody seems to have noted it, including the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry)—that a commissioner’s functions are not in any sense judicial. I am not going to argue the case fully at the moment, but I could envisage constructing a system where the process is more administrative—indeed, it is an administrative process—so the skills needed to operate it do not necessarily need to be judicial.

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[Tom Tugendhat (Tonbridge and Malling) (Con)]

rose—

[Mr Howarth]

Having mentioned lawyers, I guess I have to give way to one.

[Tom Tugendhat]

I am no lawyer, but having sat at the table of a judge for many years, I can tell the right hon. Gentleman that judges are well used to explaining their judgments. Indeed, if one reads their judgments, one will normally find an explanation so detailed that it would torture the mind, so I would not be at all surprised to hear that the commissioners will be very ready to give an explanation.

[Mr Howarth]

I have to say to the hon. Gentleman that that is not my experience. The right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield, who chairs our Committee, gave a specific example of where someone was unwilling not only to explain themselves but even to engage with the Committee. That is why I support new clause 2, which gives the Intelligence and Security Committee the ability to refer a matter to the commissioner and to at least give them a nudge in the right direction in terms of concerns that need to be looked at.

I do not share the complete pessimism of the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West. The Bill has moved an incredibly long distance since the original draft Bill. There is some way to go, but we may hear further concessions today or tomorrow. However, I would be grateful if the issues I have raised could be addressed by the Minister when he replies.

[Stephen McPartland (Stevenage) (Con)]

I will keep my remarks short, Mr Deputy Speaker, as I appreciate that you want them to be short. I want to speak to new clause 16 and to amendments 189 to 195, but I will group them together.

I welcome new clause 5 because it puts privacy at the heart of the Bill. Although I found the draft Investigatory Powers Bill to be some kind of absolutely Orwellian nightmare that I would never have been able to support, this Bill goes some way towards being something that I would be able to support. It is horrible that we live in a society where this House, as a cross-party organisation, will have to legalise mass surveillance of every man, woman and child in the United Kingdom who has an electronic device, but sadly that is the society we live in, and we have to have a trade-off between what keeps us free from terrorism and what keeps us free in terms of privacy. I appreciate the Government’s efforts in trying to put privacy at the heart of the Bill.

On my new clause and my amendments, I want to look at possibly introducing into the Bill notification of surveillance against innocent people. I have tabled 63 amendments because I know there will be a review before the Bill gets to the upper House. The Government have been incredibly conciliatory and have provided concessions all the way through. I consider both the Ministers on the Front Bench friends, and I have been speaking to them about the Bill for many months—for well over a year, in fact. I have tried to be constructive in my disagreements with them; my amendments are probing amendments—they are there not to cause difficulty but to try to tease out more information.

The Bill fails to provide a viable system of notification of surveillance, particularly for those who have been wrongly surveilled. The current drafting covers only error reporting, and it places a higher importance on public interest—I understand that that is the source of the dispute about whether we should have new clause 5 or new clause 21, in terms of privacy and what is in the public interest. The concepts of public interest and serious error are difficult to define, and that leads to the problem of the judicial commissioners and others having to decide what those concepts are, and whether there are varying degrees of them. I want the Bill to state very clearly what we want them to be, so that we do not have that mission creep.

Adding notification to the Bill through a new clause would go some way towards ensuring that privacy is further enhanced as the backbone of the Bill. To put the issue into context, the countries that permit notification of surveillance include America, Canada, New Zealand, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, Ireland, Switzerland, Slovenia, Montenegro and Hungary, so this is not something that will be specific to the United Kingdom, and we will not be leading the way; we will be trying to catch up with our partners. I appreciate that each of those countries offers a different threshold in terms of how people will be surveilled, but there is no possibility of notification in the Bill at the moment. The Ministers have been very conciliatory, and if they want to intervene on me to say that they will accept my new clause 16, I will happily sit down. No, I didn’t think so. Never mind—we will keep trying.

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[Andy Burnham]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Those were people who were trying to protect their workmates and colleagues. An individual who protested outside Fiddler’s Ferry power station near us in the north-west was trying to safeguard people’s safety at work, but they were subjected to this outrageous abuse of their rights.

[Mr George Howarth]

My right hon. Friend is making a very powerful case. I do not know whether he is aware of this, but when the issue first arose during the last Parliament, I took it up with the Metropolitan Police Commissioner to ask whether there was any involvement on the part of the Metropolitan police. I got a letter back not from the commissioner himself, but from a senior member of his staff, who now works for one of the agencies, flatly denying that there was any such involvement. Something was happening, as the excerpt my right hon. Friend has read out shows, yet even as recently as three or four years ago, the Metropolitan police utterly denied it.

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[Mr George Howarth]

The difficulty with the hon. Gentleman’s argument is that he assumes that the Prime Minister of the day, regardless of which party he is in, would take such a decision in a vacuum, but it simply could not happen that way. He would have to be satisfied first with proper legal advice that it is in the interests of national security. Secondly, he would have to be satisfied that it is both necessary and proportionate. Passing all those tests requires a lot of advice, and I doubt that any Prime Minister would take the decision lightly. Bringing any Speaker into that decision-making process means that they must be linked to that legal and security advice to satisfy themselves in the same way as the Prime Minister would have to do. I therefore cannot see the difference.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

I can see what the difference would be in a time of national crisis. The information will be clearly set out by the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister. I do not believe that it would be beyond the abilities of any Speaker now or in future to take an informed decision and to be convinced by the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary that the interception was not a political interference but a matter of national security.

All hon. Members agree on that—that the communications can be intercepted if it is a matter of national security—and we all agree that they should not be intercepted because it is politically expedient to do so. All I am asking is that the Speaker, who by the nature of his office does not consider political expediency, can say, “Yes. This is a matter of national security.” I do not believe that that is beyond his abilities. After all, he is ably assisted—is he not?—by the Clerk of the House and a band of parliamentary Clerks, most of whom have spent years accumulating knowledge, wisdom and experience of the ways of the House. They are not radicals or people who will take decisions lightly or wantonly. Together, they form a deposit of institutional memory, which the Prime Minister and No. 10, by the nature of their daily tasks of government and political management, can never be. They must always, necessarily, take a short-term view. That is not a criticism but the nature of the office.

Each of the privileges of this House, in addition to being daily fought for and won over the centuries, exists for a reason. Like many traditions and customs, we interfere with them at our peril. I appeal to the Minister of State, who is deeply aware of the importance of traditions and customs. We may wonder today why this or that one exists, but if we disregard them, we will soon find that the dangers they protect us from are very real.

We also may doubt the day will ever come when a Prime Minister would dare to authorise the monitoring of Members’ communications for politicised reasons, but it is therefore better to remove even the possibility of that temptation existing by simply requiring the Secretary of State to consult the Speaker. It has been said before but it is worth saying again. Nearly 375 years ago, William Lenthall reminded the sovereign that the Speaker had

“neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as the House is pleased to direct me, whose servant I am here.”

All I am asking in amendment 1 is that that tradition be maintained. We would do well to continue to put our trust in that defender of our law and our liberties.

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[Mr George Howarth]

Will my right hon. and learned Friend give way?

[Ms Harman]

I will, but I have a feeling that, sadly, I will disagree with my right hon. Friend, because I heard his intervention earlier and think that he too is barking up the wrong tree. To find myself barking up the same tree as the hon. Member for Gainsborough is a very sorry state of affairs, but I have the hon. Member for Stevenage (Stephen McPartland) on my side.

[Mr Howarth]

It is typical of my right hon. and learned Friend to get her defence in before hearing the attack. She has been a Law Officer, and when she was Solicitor General I had every confidence in her to be able to sort out the legal advice she gave as Solicitor General from whatever political position she might have taken. Why would she doubt that a Prime Minister could do the same?

[Ms Harman]

Because the Prime Minister is the Executive, and we need the separation of powers and the balance of powers. I disagreed with the hon. Member for Gainsborough when he was talking about what a great guy the Prime Minister is, so it is not a problem with him, but it might be with the next one. I am on my fifth Prime Minister now and they all have something in common: they regard being held to account as a bit of a nuisance. They do not welcome scrutiny—it is just the nature of the beast. We have to take that into account and accept the fact that, for the rule of law, we have to protect lawyers; for freedom of speech and expression, we have to protect journalism; and for holding the Executive to account, we must protect our rights in this House.

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[Mr Grieve]

I am grateful to the Minister, and I leave the matter there.

I turn now to amendments 19, 20 and 21, which deal with the renewal of warrants. They may appear somewhat complicated, but they deal with a very simple issue. Warrants for interception last for up to six months. Under clause 29, the warrant can be extended by a further six months at any time before the original warrant expires. That creates a loophole because it would theoretically allow for a warrant to be renewed immediately after it was issued, thereby permitting interception for 12 months. That is clearly not what the Bill intends. The Secretary of State might well argue—logically—that the commissioner would never approve such a renewal, and that she would not either, but this is nevertheless a loophole that can and should be closed, and these amendments would ensure that it is. I hope very much that the Government can accept them.

I should mention that the amendments in my name relate only to warrants for interception and bulk interception. I would be grateful if the Minister could assure the House that, if the Government accept my amendments, that acceptance will be extended to other consequential amendments of a like character, to ensure that the power cannot be abused elsewhere.

Amendment 16 relates to clause 45 and interception in accordance with overseas requests. The clause gives effect to the European Union’s convention on mutual assistance on criminal matters and permits an overseas authority to request the support of the United Kingdom in undertaking the interception of communications. Curiously, and probably accidentally, it does not repeat the protection that exists in the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, which ensures that requests can be made only where a person being intercepted will be outside the United Kingdom. That seems to us be another loophole that ought to be dealt with. Although the Government had indicated that it could be dealt with in secondary legislation, the Intelligence and Security Committee do not consider that to be satisfactory. It is far too important an issue to be left to secondary legislation; it should be dealt with in the Bill. If our amendment is accepted, the matter can be resolved without more ado.

Finally, may I touch on an issue that has been raised by the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry) and others, namely economic wellbeing? When the Intelligence and Security Committee first came to consider the issue as a subset of national security in our initial evidence-taking sittings, we came to the conclusion that it ought to be possible to remove economic wellbeing as a criterion altogether. That is why we made the initial recommendation that economic wellbeing, so far as it is relevant to national security and relates to people outside the British islands, be removed from the Bill as grounds for interception. We took the view that it could all be safely contained in the subset of national security. After we published our report, the Government provided us, through the agencies, with additional evidence regarding their reasoning for including it as a separate ground. They also provided us with a number of examples of where it was being or might be used, which illustrated areas where it was useful to have it as a separate category.

[Mr George Howarth]

Although I am conscious that the right hon. and learned Gentleman will not, for obvious reasons, be able to go into detail on all of the examples that were given, one thing that can be avowed under this particular rubric is critical national infrastructure, which is an obvious area where the public and the state need to be protected.

[Mr Grieve]

The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. The consequence of damaging national infrastructure would be to cause a severe economic shock to the United Kingdom. At the end of the day, the most persuasive argument of the lot was that listing economic wellbeing separately added transparency as to the purposes for which an investigatory power was being sought. We came to the conclusion that it would probably assist the judicial commissioners in their consideration of the necessity and proportionality of the warrant, precisely because it highlighted that it fell within a category in which economic wellbeing was present; it was therefore in practice likely to be subject to very detailed scrutiny. For all those reasons, we did not table a further amendment on that point.