Tunisia, and European Council

Lord Bellingham Excerpts

Monday 29th June 2015 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his question and for paying tribute to Lisa Burbidge. We will certainly give as much help to Members of Parliament as we can. If people want to know what more information is made public, they can speak to the Foreign Office help desk and team. He is right about showing compassion and sensitivity, and indeed common sense, in how we deal with these things. Sadly, there are lots of difficulties in informing relatives, not least that the next of kin should be first—the person named in the passport—and sometimes family structures and relationships can be quite complicated. That can be another reason for delays sometimes. I know that the staff at the Foreign Office and the family liaison officers are doing everything they can to cut through bureaucracy and to make the right decisions.

[Mr Henry Bellingham (North West Norfolk) (Con)]

I represent a couple of constituents who were on holiday in Tunisia but mercifully escaped unscathed and have now, I believe, returned to King’s Lynn. The Prime Minister mentioned the power to track social media. Does he agree that the time has come for companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter to accept and understand that their current privacy policies are completely unsustainable?

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. We are urging social media companies to work with us and help us deal with terrorism. Britain is not a state that is trying to search through everybody’s emails and invade their privacy. We just want to ensure that terrorists do not have a safe space in which to communicate. That is the challenge, and it is a challenge that will come in front of the House. We have always been able, on the authority of the Home Secretary, to sign a warrant and intercept a phone call, a mobile phone call or other media communications, but the question we must ask ourselves is whether, as technology develops, we are content to leave a safe space—a new means of communication—for terrorists to communicate with each other My answer is no, we should not be, which means that we must look at all the new media being produced and ensure that, in every case, we are able, in extremis and on the signature of a warrant, to get to the bottom of what is going on.