National Security and Investment Bill

Lord Rooker Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 4th February 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rooker (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, that was an excellent maiden speech by my noble friend Lord Woodley. I have no interests to declare but I note that vested interests on all four sides of the House have been well out in force today, and I encourage the Minister to stand firm on this issue during the passage of the Bill, to which I give my full support. It has been a long time in gestation.

I have fully supported many of those Tory MPs concerned in recent years in a very vocal way at the activities of Huawei in the UK and elsewhere in the West. I have never believed a word of the Huawei PR machine operating in Westminster. There is a pattern, and you can see it now, around Burma and China: when you strip away the covers, you find that the revolutionary guard, the army and the Communist Party actually own the companies and the capacity of the country. Free trade is a good, but it is one that needs looking after. It is the very openness of the West that is used against us by those who seek to oppose and undermine our way of life. How far we go in protecting our openness by clamping down is a paradox. In my view, the Bill is a step in the right direction.

I welcome the speed with which the Government are operating now that the Bill is with us—it is less than three months since the Bill was introduced and published on 11 November. I fully accept that, to protect the economy, it was not possible to publish well in advance the sectors of the economy where notification to the Secretary of State was required. I hope that definitions of the sectors will be well-defined, so as to avoid loopholes emerging. I await with interest, as will others, the secondary legislation that will list the sectors in detail.

I also think attention needs to be paid to the mainly London-based blue-chip accountants and legal firms that facilitate foreign investments, particularly those where it is going to be found that they fall down on national security items. A fortune has been made by some of these companies in recent years, but they operate under the cloak of respectability, and that needs stripping away. The Bill needs to be operating as soon as possible.

If I may just turn around the title of the Bill, I think we need a Bill to encourage investment in manufacturing as a means of enhancing national security. If the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, had made it to Prime Minister, we would have had such a Bill a long time ago. Yes, I approve of foreign investment in the UK—after all, we do a lot of it overseas—but we need more homemade investment to give our economy greater security. I am not for turning the clock back to, say, the 1960s and 1970s, when I worked in UK-owned factories making and exporting things that we no longer make or export, but the shift against manufacturing at home has gone too far. We should pull some of it back, particularly from areas without the rule of law, such as China.

Remarkably, with the Covid crisis, the manufacture of PPE is being pulled back from abroad—relating to national security, when one looks at it that way—and that is a step in the right direction. Obviously it has been born out of the tragedy of the virus, but it ought to be part of our national plan. We have plenty of land for new premises, by the way; only 12% of England has been built up, so there is no argument that we do not have the space, and we certainly have the people. I hope the Bill can make a difference.

A figure in one of the briefings caused me to go back and check an issue that a previous speaker has mentioned: only 12 transactions have been reviewed on national security grounds since 2003 under the current regime, whereas in table 1 in paragraph 83 of the Bill’s impact statement, the estimate is that between 1,000 and 1,830 transactions are expected to be notified in a year. As a previous speaker pointed out—who had loads of interests to declare, although I am not criticising him—1,830 is a very peculiar figure. It could have been from 1,000 to 2,000. You cannot be that precise in these circumstances. The point is that this is serious work compared to what has happened in the past, so it will need key resources. The Minister has to convince the House that the resources will be there.

My final point is that I agree entirely with my noble friend Lord West of Spithead regarding oversight. There is a big gap here. The Bill is a step backwards, leaving it to the BEIS team. The ISC must be involved; it is clearly fit for purpose. My noble friend’s suggestions —there were more than one—are very positive, and I hope the Minister’s response is equally positive.