Terrorism Act 2000 (Video Recording with Sound of Interviews and Associated Code of Practice) (Northern Ireland) Order 2020

Lord Holmes of Richmond Excerpts

Friday 10th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Non-Afl) [V]]

My Lords, I pay tribute to my noble friend the Minister for the manner in which he introduced this instrument, with his customary courtesy and clarity. I also take this opportunity to give my thanks and complete support to all those women and men in the security services: those in the west country and those based in town. They do their work invisibly—understandably so—but they are true heroes and heroines who keep us safe at all times. They deserve all our support and enduring thanks.

I support the order. On one level, they are very straightforward and clear, but I associate myself with the comments of my noble and learned friend Lord Garnier, and indeed those of my friend through sport, the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Pittenweem. They go to the heart of a number of issues essential to the whole criminal justice process. In light of this change, have the Government done a piece of work, not just in the Northern Ireland context but across government, to understand other situations where cassette tapes, fax machines and other largely redundant, obsolete and—certainly from a security perspective—woefully inadequate sub-technology is still in use? I think it would be an incredibly important piece of work and I would be happy to help.

Finally, I associate myself with the comments of my noble friend Lord Wei. There is so much technology which needs to be deployed and could be helpful in this particular use case, not least distributed ledger technology. I gently guide the Minister to a report that I wrote in 2017 and updated in 2018, Distributed Ledger Technologies for Public Good. This kind of thing—albeit not exactly this—was one of the use cases set out there. It has such huge potential to transform the state, and the relationship between citizen and state, in a new, transformed, digital, smart social contract. I would welcome any comments the Minister might like to make on those issues.