Procurement Bill [HL]

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments
Monday 11th September 2023 Lords Chamber

To further reassure noble Lords, as far as I am aware no supplier to the UK public sector has been involved in forced organ harvesting—though if they were, the exclusion grounds would apply. Although I sympathise with the noble Lord’s concern—he has been very eloquent in this area in successive debates on the Bill—I am not convinced of the case for this amendment. I hope that, in the light of what has been said, he may decide not to press this amendment today, bearing in mind all that I have said about our approach to this abhorrent practice. I beg to move.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I begin by thanking the Minister. I will come back to that in a few moments, because she has been extraordinarily helpful, and I know we have made significant progress from when the first amendment was moved on this issue.

In parenthesis, before I begin—and because I will not weary the House with a second speech later, even if the opportunity is there—I would like to say how much I support what the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of King’s Heath, is trying to achieve with Motion 102A and Amendment 102B. Again, I have spoken on those previously, along with the noble Baronesses, Lady Northover and Lady Brinton, the noble Lord, Lord Ribeiro, from the Conservative Benches, my noble friend Lady Finlay—who is unable to be with us this evening—and many others who want to support what the noble Lord is trying to achieve.

I turn to Clause 65 and Amendment 47B in Motion 47A in my name. As the Minister said, it would require a timeline for the removal of surveillance equipment that is connected to the internet and subject to the People’s Republic of China’s national intelligence law. I did say that I would like to start my remarks, and I do, by paying tribute to the Minister’s own efforts and those of her officials, who have met with me now on several occasions—most recently on Thursday last—to discuss the concerns of Members of both Houses when it comes to the presence of Chinese-made surveillance cameras in our public procurement chain.

As recently as yesterday, the Sunday Telegraph reported that the Co-op has decided to ban Chinese CCTV for “ethical and security reasons”. Given the Minister’s professional background in a previous life, she will know that, in doing this, it is following the example of Tesco. It would indeed be odd if supermarkets were ahead of public bodies in recognising the dangers posed by the CCP’s surveillance state. I was also very struck that the Deputy Prime Minister, the right honourable Oliver Dowden, speaking in another place this afternoon about allegations concerning espionage on the estate of your Lordships’ House and that of another place, made a point of saying that one of his first actions in Whitehall had been to have surveillance cameras linked to Hikvision removed from his department. This is something that Sajid Javid also said when he became Secretary of State for Health. I simply say that, if supermarkets and departments of state are not suitable places for these cameras, where is? It would indeed be odd if we did not think about the 60% of public bodies that are estimated to have Hikvision cameras in use.

This is not a new question that I am putting to your Lordships’ House; this is something I have raised on over 40 occasions in the House or in Grand Committee since 2020. Both the Minister and the Leader of the House, the noble Lord, Lord True, have taken this issue seriously. When the noble Lord was in charge of this Bill, in its earliest stages, we had a meeting to discuss Hikvision. Because I want to get on with seeing a resolution of this issue, I am able to welcome the clear commitment from the Minister, given at the Dispatch Box, for a timetable for the removal of this surveillance equipment and these cameras from sensitive sites. However, it is worth noting, as I have said, how we got here.

As the Government have recognised, there are at least a million Hikvision and Dahua cameras in the UK, installed across our high streets, job centres, schools, police forces, hospitals, universities, local government buildings and even government departments. I gently say to the Minister that, although she is right that military barracks or GCHQ are clearly far more sensitive sites than, say, hospitals or schools, some of this is about data collection. That involves every single citizen of this country, so it poses dangers for them too. I commend to her the recent Channel 4 documentary on Hikvision and the fantastic work of IPVM, Big Brother Watch, Hong Kong Watch—of which I am a patron—and other organisations that have outlined the security risk that these cameras pose, particularly in those sensitive public sector sites, but not exclusively so.

It is quite something to consider that, as a country, we have willingly handed over the majority of our surveillance infrastructure, which watches the often public and sometimes intimately private moments of our lives, not just to the police or local authorities but to an authoritarian Government that the House of Commons has found, on a resolution of the House, credibly accused of genocide. I declare a non-financial interest as vice chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Uyghurs.

How ironic it is that we are debating this on the day we have learned that an alleged CCP spy has been operating across Parliament, based in the office of a Member of another place. We urgently need a bicameral group of senior parliamentarians to investigate this shocking lapse. The Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament has warned against the infiltration of our universities and other institutions. Only last week, the University of Cambridge ended a partnership with a subsidiary company developing Chinese weapons and military hardware. The line between crass naivety and outright collaboration is a fine one. We recall the Cambridge spies and the Soviet Union, and some of the disastrous consequences. It should send a shiver down the spine of every freedom-loving person to see swathes of the public surveillance procurement supply chain handed over to Chinese companies that are blacklisted for complicity in gross human rights violations by the United States and which are legally compelled under the PRC national intelligence law to pass on data to the Chinese Communist Party state.

As we debate the timeline for their removal from our public procurement supply chain, the definition of what we should consider “sensitive sites” and the oversight that Members of this House and another place will have should be high on our agenda. Surely, for too long government policy towards China has favoured investment and trade at the expense of our national security, our values and human rights. We have underestimated the PRC, ignored the voices of those Uighurs, Hong Kongers, Tibetans and others who have been persecuted by the CCP and know it best, and failed to produce a coherent strategy to deal with the threat that the PRC poses. I am always struck by the phrase used by the noble Lord, Lord Patten of Barnes, who knows a thing or two about China. He describes it as cakeism—wanting to have your cake and eat it—to want trade deals on the one hand, but recognise the country as a threat to your national interest on the other.