National Security Bill

Debate between Liam Byrne and John Hayes

2nd reading
Monday 6th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

I apologise to the Home Secretary, who is not in her place, for missing the first 11 minutes of her opening speech.

As I think the Minister will have spotted, there is wide consensus across the House about many of the provisions in this Bill that is matched only by a level of frustration that the Bill has been an awful long time coming. We have been debating the risks of hybrid warfare, from Russia and from others, in this Chamber for at least four or five years. Therefore, having waited so long and having debated so much, I think we are within our rights to have expected a rather more substantial package from the Government.

In the spirit of consensus, which I see is running large in the House today, I hope that we will be able to add substantially to the provisions in the Bill. I do not want to criticise sins of commission today, but I do want to criticise three sins of omissions: in particular, the lack of security in defence for data; the lack of security for our democracy; and the lack of security for those defenders of freedom and those people such as brave journalists who are prepared to name and, where necessary, shame foreign influencers who are at large in our country.

Let me start with data, because it is impossible to talk about espionage in this day and age without talking about information and intelligence, and therefore about data and the channels that move that data between our country and foreign players—the companies that are on the cutting edge of the technology revolution. I am afraid I think there is a very real risk that this Bill will be out of date by the time our sovereign inks her signature on the parchment.

What is well understood by the Americans and the Chinese, and I have to say by our intelligence services, is that artificial intelligence—not simply intelligence, but artificial intelligence—will be the key to the future of warfare and conflict between states. That is why both China and the United States are seeking to be the world leaders in artificial intelligence by 2030. It is also why the head of MI6 warned last year about the risk of countries around the world falling into data traps, because there is very real alarm that the huge datasets necessary to train the algorithms that power artificial intelligence are being exfiltrated from around the world. These are the datasets that train the algorithms that will be absolutely critical in co-ordinating drone swarms, running global surveillance systems, and creating mass information—through the mountains of contents that it is possible to create with artificial intelligence—to fire at the west a fire hose of falsehood to confuse us or, still worse, to divide us.

[Sir John Hayes]

The right hon. Gentleman is making a compelling point, because there are two implications of what he is describing: the problem of scale and the problem of methodology. The scale of what he is describing will be hard for any single nation to cope with. On methodology, it is hard to conduct covert operations as we have historically against that backdrop.

[Liam Byrne]

The right hon. Member puts his finger on precisely the lesson that we should draw from allies such as the United States. Today, the United States has a battery of eight types of controls and measures that are regulating and controlling the export of—or, frankly, efforts to steal—technology and data to countries such as China.

The Bill says that it will be an offence to engage in

“conduct…that it is reasonably possible may…assist a foreign intelligence service”.

I am afraid that negligence must be part of that conduct. Our American allies now have: provisions for delisting Chinese firms, which they have applied to companies such as Sina Weibo; an investment prohibition list that has now hit 59 Chinese firms; a ban on share trading; export bans and restrictions that have added scores of Chinese entities to the unverified list, which therefore have tougher rules on receiving shipments from US exporters; an export ban; provisions for revocation of trading licences; data controls, which first President Trump and then President Biden ordered; and, of course, targeted sanctions. My question for the Minister is: where is the similar framework for the United Kingdom? We are now in grave jeopardy of a control gap emerging between the United Kingdom and our closest ally.

When I tabled parliamentary questions on those eight different measures to the Government asking where our similar framework was, I got a lot of waffle from the Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Scully). I then asked the Government what controls are in place on nine of the 1,100 key companies now controlled in some way, shape or form in the United States: those such as Huawei, ZTE, Hikvision, Hytera and Alibaba through to China Unicom—I will not go through them all. Despite our adding China to the UK arms embargo list earlier this year, the only one company that the Minister could name that is subject to UK controls was Huawei.

I am afraid that we are now at risk of a control gap, and we are still behaving as if we believe in free movement of weapons-grade intelligence. That is presumably why individuals such as Clive Woodley, funded by the UK university system and the Ministry of Defence, are still wandering around organising conferences on weapons in China. Given the poor job that the National Security Council did on co-ordinating complex operations such as the evacuation from Afghanistan, I am seriously concerned that the Government lack the capacity to co-ordinate the Treasury, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, the Department for International Trade, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and the intelligence agencies in controlling what needs to be controlled. I would like to see a duty on Ministers to report to the House on companies of concern, particularly those operating from countries where we have arms embargoes, with clear measures to control them.