Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Bill (Business of the House)

Jack Straw Excerpts

Tuesday 15th July 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Jack Straw (Blackburn) (Lab)]

I support the timetable motion and will briefly set out why. I have been in the position of having to bring forward emergency legislation. It is never easy, and I am ready to give the benefit of the doubt to the Home Secretary, because she would not have done this without good justification, and neither would my right hon. Friend the shadow Home Secretary remotely have agreed to it without the closest scrutiny of what is being proposed.

I say to my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich East (Mr Watson), with the usual respect, that I have often thought that there is an inverse relationship between the extravagance of language used, and the strength—or otherwise—of the argument he has made. He was very pretty in his soundbites, but no case has been made as to why this legislation should not be dealt with today; nor have there been arguments in the briefings that suggest substantively for a second why and how the legislation goes beyond what everybody assumed to be the state of the law before the European Court of Justice judgment.

The ECJ judgment took place on 8 April, and those who have had the benefit of burning their brain out by reading it, as I have, will know that it is an incredibly dense text full of confused arguments, and it is not clear on the face of the text exactly what it meant—indeed, lawyers have now had to add glosses to it. Neither was it immediately clear whether or not it would require further amending legislation. That is the reality.

I was the Minister who brought forward the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, which was supported across the House. Why? I did so because it strengthened parliamentary and legal scrutiny over the extensive surveillance powers of the state, not the reverse. Secondly, without this emergency legislation, those of us who are concerned to deal with sexual predators and other serious criminals and terrorists—as I know my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich East is, along with many others—will see a degradation in the ability of the police and other security agencies to deal with those threats. That is what is at issue. I do not like emergency legislation any more than anybody else, but I prefer it to allowing serious criminals and terrorists to go undetected.