Investigatory Powers Bill

Debate between George Howarth and Stephen McPartland

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

[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.