National Security and Investment Bill

Debate between Lord Campbell of Pittenweem and Lord Lansley

Committee stage
Tuesday 16th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly to my Amendment 86 in this group and express my support for Amendments 78 and 79, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord West of Spithead. I will not repeat his arguments; I thought they were compelling. Amendment 86 would put the investment security unit of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy into the remit of the Intelligence and Security Committee in the Justice and Security Act.

I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Fox, for supporting the amendment; I am sure he agrees with me on this. We would not need it if Ministers would permit adding the investment security unit of BEIS to the memorandum of understanding, as part of the remit of the Intelligence and Security Committee. If forced to, it would be better to amend the Act to put it into the remit, rather than to put something in the legislation that directly impacts the memorandum of understanding. That is not the way that the MoU should work.

I remind your Lordships that the memorandum of understanding, which was published with the annual report in 2013-14, said:

“The ISC is the only committee of Parliament that has regular access to protectively marked information that is sensitive for national security reasons: this means that only the ISC is in a position to scrutinise effectively the work of the Agencies and of those parts of Departments whose work is directly concerned with intelligence and security matters.”


That is precisely the point being made here: the ISC must complement the other committees, including the BEIS Committee, in its scrutiny of this work. As the footnote to the MoU said:

“This will not affect the wider scrutiny of departments such as the Home Office, FCO and MOD by other parliamentary committees.”


It is consistent with scrutiny of activity generally but, for scrutiny relating to intelligence and security matters to happen, confidential material may need to be supplied to the ISC and the ISC needs to have it added to its remit. I hope my noble friend can give us that assurance, if not today, on Report.

[Lord Campbell of Pittenweem (LD)]

My Lords, I too shall begin by declaring an interest, having been a member of the Intelligence and Security Committee for seven years, five of which were enhanced, if I may say, by the presence of the noble Lord, Lord Butler of Brockwell. I have a further advantage because I have been listening, along with other noble Lords, to the three preceding speeches in this debate, which have set out the principles clearly and powerfully against what appears to be intransigence on the part of the Government. At this point, therefore, I shall adopt what has been said by the noble Lord, Lord West of Spithead, with which I agree entirely. I am also influenced to some extent by the fact that your Lordships have been exemplary in the dispatch of business today. I have been watching from the pavilion, as it were, and it seems that the conduct of this Committee stage so far could be recommended or possibly even compelled for the Committee stages of other Bills.

There is nothing that I can usefully add to the arguments put forward by the three preceding speakers, but I can make one further contribution. In advance of the debate today, I consulted the 2013 report of the Intelligence and Security Committee entitled Foreign Involvement in the Critical National Infrastructure. The noble Lord, Lord Butler, and I were members of the committee at the time and the chair was Sir Malcolm Rifkind. Among other things, the committee applied its mind to the issue of Huawei, in particular to its entry into the United Kingdom market and the fact that in doing so it entered into contractual arrangements with BT. What happened was that BT did as it was supposed to do and advised the relevant government departments of the position, but the officials then communicated what had been brought to their attention by BT not to any of the Ministers with responsibility for national security but to the then Secretary of State at the Department of Trade and Industry. That was done on the ground that the only thing which appealed to the officials to draw to ministerial attention was the possible impact on British businesses.

That having happened, for quite a long time, Huawei enjoyed not a privileged but certainly an unremarkable position in the British economy. It was only some years later that it became clear that there were other implications to be drawn from its interest in the economy of the United Kingdom. At that point, the Intelligence and Security Committee deemed it appropriate to include it as part of the inquiry whose report I have described. As a consequence, the committee was able, as has been hinted at already, to come to a much better and more informed judgment about Huawei because of its access to intelligence that would not otherwise have been available either to committees or to Parliament itself. I recommend the report as a good illustration of how an inquiry of that kind should be carried out and how profitable, if you like, the consequences are of so doing.

The issue is clear. If, at the stage of the involvement of Huawei in the economy of the United Kingdom it had been understood and perused by those with access to a very high level of classified intelligence, perhaps, since the moment of Huawei’s arrival into this economy, there would have been a much greater understanding throughout government of the significance of its entry into the United Kingdom and the implications for security which that has necessarily involved. For these and other reasons that I have indicated previously, I support the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord West of Spithead, to which I have added my name.

Business and Planning Bill

Debate between Lord Campbell of Pittenweem and Lord Lansley

Report stage & Report stage (Hansard) & Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 20th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lansley]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 61 in my name. Indeed, in this group, there are nine amendments, Amendments 61, 62, 64, 68 to 70, 72, 76 and 77, which, in relation to Clauses 17, 18 and 19, all have the effect of moving the extension of planning permissions and listed building consent from three months to four months. I will not, at this late hour, repeat what I said at Second Reading and in rather more detail in Committee. All I want to say is that I very much appreciate that my noble friend the Minister took very seriously what I said in Committee.

We have had some extremely productive conversations on a practical level about what the construction industry’s difficulties might be with the delays in the pipeline. In pursuance of those conversations, I tabled these amendments in the hope that the Minister will tell the House that he is able to accept them. Were he to do so in response to the debate, when the time comes, I will formally move those amendments in my name.

[Lord Campbell of Pittenweem (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I propose to speak only to Amendment 56, tabled by my noble friend Lady Pinnock and to which I have added my name. It is approximately seven hours since this stage of proceedings began. Throughout, I have been reminded endlessly of two lines of a poem by Robert Frost:

“But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep.”

However, noble Lords should not be apprehensive, because I hope only to make some comments in addition to those of my noble friend, to underline what I believe is the very strong case for this amendment.

At Second Reading and again in Committee, I raised the question of the impact on amenity of extending construction hours. I hope the noble Lord, Lord Greenhalgh, will forgive me if I say that I have been a little disappointed in the responses, both from him and his noble friend the Minister who has dealt with other parts of the Bill. It is worth reminding ourselves that an extension could go on until 1 April 2021, could be seven days a week and could extend to a whole day. It does not take much to realise that there is considerable potential for impact on the amenity of households, churches, hotels, hospitals and care homes.

It is helpful to ask why planning authorities imposed conditions for working hours. As my noble friend has already indicated, the purpose is to provide a balance, and part of that balance is the protection of amenity. In every instance, an authority will have been required to reach a judgment about how that balance should be constructed. It seems to me that it follows logically that any increase in hours will tilt that balance against amenity and in favour of the applicant.

The difficulty with what we are considering is that we do not know to what extent that may occur on any one of the occasions in which an extension is sought. That is why I believe it is a matter of necessity to require applicants to produce an impact study to the planning authority, together with plans for mitigation. I believe it can reasonably be argued that that is in the interests of both the planning authority and the applicant. First of all, the planning authority is working against a very tight timetable, and, so far as the applicant is concerned, it is obviously in their interest that as much information as possible can be provided to the planning authority. I believe therefore that an impact study is a necessity.

Indeed, I go further than that: the decision of the planning authority is an administrative one, and any administrative decision of this kind could be subject to judicial review. It would be much easier to resist any such application for judicial review if it could be demonstrated that the applicant had produced the impact assessment to which I have referred and that the planning authority had taken it into its considerations.