Investigatory Powers Bill

Matt Warman Excerpts

Tuesday 1st November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

That is not what the amendment does. It includes all the press, so the Midsomer Norton, Radstock and District Journal will be included, as will the Farrington Gurney parish magazine. Every single publication will be included and will be under this threat.

[Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)]

I hesitate to criticise the wisdom of my hon. Friend the Member for South West Wiltshire (Dr Murrison), but, from a journalistic perspective, I humbly submit that nobody in the modern media world feels as though they are working in an enormous environment with oodles of cash swimming about the place. This will have a chilling effect across national, local and regional media.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

My hon. Friend is right. Although some newspapers are part of bigger media groups, those media groups will not be willing to fund indefinitely loss-making newspapers. The journalism that is the core of not only the print media but most of what people get online, which is not covered by the measure anyway, comes from a narrowly profitable print media. If that ceases to have any chance of being profitable, where will all the internet content that people read for nothing come from? Where are the resources to provide us with investigations into wrongdoing? Wrongdoing—not only of politicians, but of institutions—is revealed year in, year out. Great footballing institutions were investigated by The Sunday Times. How will the newspaper be able to do that if it gets sued and has to pay double damages on merely the allegation that hacking has taken place? This is a real threat to press freedom.

Press freedom is of the greatest possible value, and it is one of the reasons why the United Kingdom is such a stable polity. The press shines a light on corruption, on criminality and on wrongdoing. It holds people to account. It brings them to book. Why do we give an absolute protection to whatever is said in the House, so that it cannot be contested in any court outside Parliament? We give ourselves that protection because we so value freedom of speech. We should be extending that protection as widely as possible—not holding it narrowly to ourselves, but allowing the country at large to enjoy the same benefit.

The chippy speeches made by those in the other place, and unfortunately in this House too, who have come under the spotlight of the press and had a rude story printed about them that they did not like—about a big scandal, a little scandal, something that caused offence or something that upset their spouse—ought not to be used to take away a fundamental constitutional protection of the greatest importance. That should not be done by the back door, by tacking something on to a completely different Bill in a hissy fit because the Secretary of State has not done it under existing legislation. That is quite a wrong way to proceed.

That brings me on to the second part of what I want to say. The first part is of overwhelming importance: the freedom of the press is an absolute, and it is much, much better to have a free and irresponsible press than it is to have a responsible but Government-controlled press. As my hon. Friend the Member for North Dorset (Simon Hoare) would like me to say, the principle of England free rather than England sober should be at the heart of our understanding of the press.

The constitutional aspects of how we legislate are also important, however. In this House we have very strict rules, which are implemented fairly by the Clerks and the Speaker, about the scope of Bills, and we cannot tack on random things that we feel it would be nice to have. The House of Lords, being a self-governing House, can tack things on. Its Members have lost the self-restraint that they used to have of following constitutional norms in relation to legislation. They showed that in the last Session of Parliament in relation to boundaries, and they are doing so again now. I am concerned that the SNP is not more worried about the Sewel convention.

--- Later in debate ---

[Richard Drax (South Dorset) (Con)]

I am honoured to be called to speak in the debate, and I rise to talk about Lords amendment 15. I understand that I have two and half minutes to speak, to allow my other colleague time to speak. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Wantage (Mr Vaizey) has pointed out, it is extraordinary that we are talking about the press when the Bill is actually about the security of our country. Lords amendment 15 is clearly in the wrong Bill. In the six years that I have had the privilege of representing South Dorset, I have noticed that the decisions made in this place are often knee-jerk decisions made to satisfy a public reaction that has nowadays often been fed by Facebook or Twitter, to which too many of us react too quickly.

I suspect that, over a period of time, many sensible people in this place—the majority of people here are sensible—have come to think that we cannot use the state to interfere with the freedom of the press in this country. It is mainly Opposition Members who are making this point, and I remind them again that phone hacking is already illegal. It is a criminal offence and people who commit that offence go to jail. I worked in the press for 17 years, including at national level, in radio and for local newspapers. Never once in that time was I influenced by a producer or asked to concoct a story in any way other than honestly and accurately. That includes my nine years working with the BBC. My point is that the offences that so many Members are almost ranting about are being committed by a tiny minority of the press, and that punishing everyone—as the House is thinking of doing—would be totally and utterly wrong.

[Matt Warman]

This short, impassioned debate about the freedom of the press has surely proved that a 90-minute debate on a Lords amendment shoehorned into a Bill about national security cannot be the right place to make a decision as important as this one. This Bill is supposed to regulate hacking, yet the Lords are seeking to hack the Bill by putting in something completely irrelevant to the vital matters of national security that it covers. As the previous Prime Minister and the present one have said, this is one of the most important—if not the most important—pieces of legislation in this Parliament. Were I to dare criticise either of them, I would contend that the freedom of the press is even more important than some aspects of the Bill. It is absurd for anyone seriously to suggest that we can deal with this matter in 90 minutes.

I have a great deal of sympathy with the view of my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg) that the chilling effect of the proposals in section 40 would have a hugely negative impact across not only the national media but the regional and local media. Over hundreds of years, we have seen the good that a vibrant, boisterous and scabrous press can do, as other Members have said, and we need to preserve that. We do not need to damn it in a 90-minute debate. I hope that Members of all parties can see that this is not the right place to take such a momentous decision.

[Mr Wallace]

Every morning I go into my office and I open a number of documents. They are not nice reading. They usually focus on those people that want to kill us, want to rob us, want to corrupt our country or want to spy on us. This is not a subject to take lightly. This is not a subject to which to politically attach something to settle a score elsewhere. The Bill is about giving our brave men and women in the security services and the police forces up and down the country the powers to do their job, to make sure that we put away those people that pose a threat to this country.

Those men and women are watching this debate today. Instead of seeing this House debate the hundreds of amendments that this Parliament has collectively produced to reach a consensus to make the Bill something to go forward with, they see political opportunism being played out on another subject: press regulation. They do not see us discussing how we are going to protect them and society. We should not forget that.

What is important is that this Bill is not like any other Bill. This Bill is here because we have to bring it forward to replace the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014. DRIPA has a sunset clause and will expire on 31 December. The irony of that is that if DRIPA expires, we lose the requirement that we can place on internet companies and CSPs to retain data—data that we need to catch phone hackers, to catch child killers, to put away paedophiles. That is the risk that hon. Members are taking, with amendment 15. That is what they are making us decide on. We should reject the choice that they are putting before us and focus on the good things in the Bill and what it has done to strengthen and protect our security forces to ensure that we put away the right people. We should not play politics in this House or the other place.

Lords amendment 11 disagreed to.

Lords amendments 12 to 14 disagreed to.

After Clause 8

Motion made, and Question put, That this House disagrees with Lords amendment 15.—(Mr Ben Wallace.)

Calais

Matt Warman Excerpts

Monday 24th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)]

A number of my constituents have got in touch with me to express their compassion for those in the Jungle camp, but a number are also worried about the age of those who we are being seen to take. Can the Home Secretary tell us a little more about the numbers that we are rejecting on the grounds of age, and also about the comprehensive security package relating to those we take in the first place?

[Amber Rudd]

I would like to reassure my hon. Friend that the best way to assess age is by using experienced social workers. That is what we are doing in order to assess people’s age on the ground. Most of the young people we are talking to—children, minors, whatever we care to call them—are teenagers. We are prioritising those under 12, but most of them are teenagers and most are young boys. I still think that this is the right thing to do, and I ask my hon. Friend to reassure his constituents that we will always do the proper safeguarding checks to ensure that people are indeed who they say they are.

Rights of EU Nationals

Matt Warman Excerpts

Wednesday 19th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)]

It is with some trepidation that I rise to speak in this debate; my constituency has seen, proportionally, more EU migration than any other in the country. Drawn by the UK’s relatively high minimum wages, literally tens of thousands of people have come from Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and elsewhere to Boston and to Lincolnshire more generally in search of better lives, more money and greater prospects. They were drawn here by the rights mentioned in this debate. They may not be able to vote for us in this House, but, as I have said here before, we should all be keenly aware that those people are our constituents wherever they were born and whatever passport they hold.

Those new communities are in many cases home to model citizens; head pupils in schools in Boston are now from a diverse range of communities in a way that they were not in previous years. In schools, children show that children treat children equally, whatever their nationality. Done wrong, immigration, wherever it is from, leads to talk of “them” and “us”; done properly, “them” becomes “us”.

Boston’s agricultural economy relies on migrant labour from eastern Europe just as in previous centuries it relied on labour from the midlands, Ireland or Portugal. We have a lower rate of empty shops than the comparable national average because new communities come not just to work in our fields, but to set up their own firms, and to improve their lot. They come to do all that, and they are able to do all that, because of the rights that we are talking about in this debate. Done right, the town benefits from all of this.

When it comes to today’s motion, I hope that Europe will see the benefits that British people bring to the continent and grant them the right to stay after the UK leaves the EU, and then the UK can do likewise. In many ways, Boston and Skegness’s continued economic growth depends on that reciprocity. That basic equality seems to be uncontroversial; it should be straightforward.

I wish to talk a little bit about why there are parts of this country, my own included, where we have got migration badly wrong, making debates such as this too shrill, too partisan and frankly sometimes too difficult to attract genuine contributions. With hindsight, the expansion of Europe to far poorer economies than our own was inevitably going to draw large numbers of people to areas where labour was abundant and very often casual. The Government of the day bungled the figures; we did not see changes coming and we failed to invest in local public services to keep pace with demands for schools, hospitals, GPs, and even housing and roads.

Today, while Boston still needs the bypass that has been on the drawing board for 100 years, schools have caught up but the NHS has not, and that raises tensions and causes debates such as this. No longer required to have a job before travelling to the UK, many people were tempted by inaccurate representations of life in the UK, and found themselves doing desperately hard work in freezing fields before returning home to a rented room unfit for human habitation in which they were allowed to occupy the bed only when it was their turn. Boston’s work in tackling rogue landlords has been rightly lauded in this House, but migration has worsened a problem that the Government should have foreseen. The consequences of those poor housing conditions has led to tensions, such as street drinking, antisocial behaviour and violent crime. Some Bostonians ask what those add to an historic town that was once a port second only to London.

Fast forward to 2016 and Boston is called—wrongly in my view—the least integrated town in the country by Policy Exchange. That report is wrong because it does not measure recent work done on street drinking, rogue landlords, and community integration, but it is talking about a real problem. Some constituents have asked me why everyone should be allowed to stay.

The solution to these issues is not to blindly pretend that every aspect of Boston or Britain is either better or worse for migration. There are a host of opportunities that we must seize and a host of nettles that we must grasp if we are ever to make these debates more sensible. We should depoliticise debates such as this and treat people like people.

I want to close by reading a few comments that were posted on my own Facebook wall. I went to see a superb new agricultural development that will create around 100 new jobs. Underneath the photographs some of my constituents wrote: “We all know who will be filling the labour requirements here”; “We shall see how many locals get a job”; “They don’t employ English. I got told that when I went for a job, so I didn’t even get an application form so it won’t be local people.”

When we get immigration wrong, we divide our country, we divide our towns and we foster radical parties that bring out the worst in good people. We end up having debates such as this. There is no easy way to encourage integration, especially when predominantly young men work in my constituency’s fields, largely in groups from their own countries, and go out in their precious leisure time with little motivation to integrate. But if we are to sensibly conclude debates such as this, we should have a care to those concerns just as much as we do to the rights of migrant workers, whether we are speaking of a Briton in Spain or a Lithuanian in Boston.

Investigatory Powers Bill

Matt Warman Excerpts

Report: 2nd sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 7th June 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I would like to call the Solicitor General no later than 5.48 pm, and there are three people whom I wish to accommodate before then—Members can do the arithmetic for themselves. We have just under nine minutes to go. I call Matt Warman.

[Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)]

I rise to talk briefly about both journalists and internet connection records. I have heard an awful lot of comments about journalism, and I agree with all of them. Indeed, had the Government not moved some of the material from the codes of practice into the Bill, I might have struggled to support it. At every stage, we will struggle to construct anything useful unless we define what a journalist is, and I find it hard to see how that is possible. In this modern age, I am painfully conscious that, in some senses, we are all journalists ourselves. Almost all of us write columns for our local paper. Arguably, we could all be regarded as journalists simply because we commentate via Twitter on what is going on in politics. I struggle to see what more the Government can do—as much as I would like them to do it and as much as I would like to support new clause 27. Unless we come up with a workable definition of journalism, I struggle to see how we will make what I regard as genuinely very necessary and very helpful progress on a hugely important issue.

On the second point on internet connection records, it strikes me that although they have frequently been compared with a telephone record or an itemised phone bill, it is simply not a sensible comparison in the modern world when we make far fewer voice calls. That sense of an ICR telling us simply that a user has gone to Facebook misunderstands the fact that knowing that someone has gone to Facebook if they are a missing person, for example, allows us then to go to Facebook and make that crucial next step to find that person. Although an ICR does not tell us a huge amount of information, it tells us enough. We in this House have a duty to do everything that we possibly can in this regard and to bear it in mind that it is not us but communications providers who hold that information. I very much welcome what the right hon. Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham) said about having concerns about access, rather than about the principle of what I hope we can all agree is a potentially vital tool in this vital battle against both crime and missing persons.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

--- Later in debate ---

[Matt Warman]

It has been my privilege to serve on not one, not two, but three Committees examining this Bill. Whether it is the Joint Committee, the Bill Committee or the Select Committee on Science and Technology, they were just three examples from a huge number and an unprecedented level of scrutiny that this hugely important Bill has received.

In the Bill Committee, on which I served with the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry), we saw a remarkably conciliatory approach from those on the Front Bench. I also thought it was a genuine privilege to be in the same room as an Opposition who took a view that went so far above party politics, because this is a Bill that is above party politics. That is because what our constituents worry about, even more than the vital privacy concerns that the SNP has persistently raised, is the threat that we face in a global and unstable world. The threats that we have seen on the Committees examining this Bill are greater than they have ever been before and they need to be tackled in a fundamentally different way from that provided for in the broken legislation that is currently in force.

I would therefore argue, and I hope the whole House would agree, that this is legislation that transcends party politics and goes beyond what we have seen from the legislation that exists today. What is demanded from us in this House is legislation that understands and is adaptable to technology that is unlike that in the world that the previous legislation was built to combat. I believe sincerely—from a principled position, I could even say—that, whether on ICRs, protection for journalists, bulk powers or bulk datasets, this Bill struggles and finds the balance that we all need to keep our constituents safe. That is why I will be voting for it this evening.

Removal of Foreign National Offenders and EU Prisoners

Matt Warman Excerpts

Monday 6th June 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

I assure my hon. Friend that we look constantly at our contracts with those who provide services to the Government. There can be a complex range of reasons why in some cases it is difficult to deport people, or some last-minute problem with deportation, but if someone who expects to be deported is not deported, we make every effort to do so at the earliest opportunity.

[Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)]

Boston in my constituency has seen more than its fair share of serious crimes committed by foreign nationals, and people are rightly worried. Does the Home Secretary think that the process of negotiating 20-plus new bilateral agreements, or the outcome of that, could conceivably make those people safer?

[Mrs May]

Again, my hon. Friend has specifically raised the concerns of his constituents on that issue, and my answer is that being within the European Union, and having the single prisoner transfer framework decision and various other tools, makes us safer. There is uncertainty and delay in having to negotiate bilateral arrangements—indeed, nobody knows whether it will be possible to negotiate bilateral arrangements that are of equal benefit to the British public as those that we have as members of the EU.

EU Migrants: National Insurance Numbers

Matt Warman Excerpts

Thursday 12th May 2016 Commons Chamber

[Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)]

In my constituency, Boston has seen the highest level of eastern European migration anywhere in the UK, driven largely by seasonal work. I agree with the Minister that NI numbers would be a terrible way of measuring migration in an area such as mine, but does he agree that, in areas that have seen unusual concentrations of migration, we do need a better way of measuring migration if we are adequately to plan for public services?

[James Brokenshire]

Although I entirely recognise the point that my hon. Friend makes about the particular pressures that certain areas in the UK have experienced as a consequence of migration, I also recognise the benefits that are attached in terms of the contribution to our economy. It is why we are seeking to introduce the controlling migration fund, which will assist areas that are experiencing that growth in population linked to migration.

Investigatory Powers Bill (Fourth sitting)

Matt Warman Excerpts

Committee Debate: 4th sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 12th April 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)]

Yes they did.

[Victoria Atkins]

Okay, out of the air. The Joint Committee arrived at that figure on the basis of no evidence. That may assist the hon. and learned Lady.

Investigatory Powers Bill (Second sitting)

Matt Warman Excerpts

Thursday 24th March 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Christian Matheson]

Q Under the terms of the Bill, you are being asked to collect a large amount of data, some of which will be quite personal and some private. How confident are you of BT’s capability in terms of maintaining the security of those data from hacking or theft, particularly bearing in mind the fact that other communications service providers have been hacked into? When you consider the rest of the industry more broadly—without naming names—do you think BT is in a stronger position than other CSPs to maintain security against hacking or theft where there might be vulnerabilities elsewhere?

Mark Hughes: The security of any data we hold and retain is clearly a matter that we take extremely seriously. That is of the utmost seriousness for our organisation for any type of data. The type of data that the Bill refers to specifically is, though, perhaps different from other types of data that need to be interfacing the public on a bigger scale, for example. This is not that type of data; it is going to be restricted and allowed to be viewed by only very few individuals who have the correct authority to be able to get to the data when they need to.

The level of security applied to this type of data is clearly factored into the type of data that is being retained, so we have to put very significant security measures around it to ensure that the access is controlled properly and that the data are very secure when stored. That absolutely has to be factored into the cost and the way we operate. It is not something new. We are currently subject to laws and regulations under which we have to make sensitive data available, so we are used to doing it, but that clearly has to be factor in for, for example, some of the new datasets we are potentially going to be asked to retain under the Bill.

[Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)]

Q On the Joint Committee on the draft Bill and on the Science and Technology Committee, we heard CSPs talking about the level of engagement they have had from the Home Office, and we have heard from the Home Office that that has increased recently. That seems to tally with what you are saying. Could you give us a sense of the scale and extent of that engagement, and some reassurance that, in this fast-moving world, you are confident that the relationship is such that that engagement would be there in future as well, rather than it just being about getting the Bill to this stage?

Mark Hughes: We have had extensive periods of consultation and meetings on a very frequent basis. The Home Secretary has invited many of us representatives of the CSP community to meetings with her on two occasions before this, as well as to many working-level meetings with various Home Office officials. We discussed the technical, legal and procedural points about the proposed legislation as well, which is markedly different from how things have been before.

On the point about the future, which is important here, the Bill itself clearly specifies and puts in place a regime whereby consultation is enshrined in the legislation through the consultation process that has to happen before a notice is issued and, indeed, because the reconstituted technical advisory board can be called to come together at any time. That power did not exist in the past. The consultation is in a better place and I think that the Bill itself will help to ensure that that continues in future, because it will be a point of law.

[Peter Kyle]

Q Is everything in the Bill technically deliverable?

Mark Hughes: There is nothing that we have yet come across that we think is technically not deliverable. However, I will caveat that by saying that we provide many different services. There are different service providers that do different types of things and operate their communications networks differently from us. I can only really comment on BT and our networks, both mobile and fixed, but from where we are coming from it is—

--- Later in debate ---

[Victoria Atkins]

Q When you were standing up in the House of Commons at the Dispatch Box explaining what the security services and the police were doing, how important was your personal oversight of that, as opposed to just a judge doing it by themselves?

Charles Clarke: The implication of your point I could not agree with more. My personal experience was very important. It did lead me, personally, directly to have relations with the individuals in the security services who were involved with these things, and I think that helped my whole job as Home Secretary.

[Matt Warman]

Q You talked about updating the legislation and the importance of that. Do you see an internet connection record or something equivalent to it as a key part of updating this legislation for the world we live in now?

Charles Clarke: I do personally, yes.

Lord Reid: I do as well. Not to test the Committee, but two years after 7/7, on 6 August 2006, there was a plot to bring down seven airliners. There would have been 2,500 victims, and intercept was absolutely essential in protecting those lives—absolutely essential—with both the internet and telephone communications.

[Suella Fernandes]

Q It has been raised before, but some witnesses have said that warrantry should be solely within the Executive function—

Lord Reid: What, sorry?

Investigatory Powers Bill (First sitting)

Matt Warman Excerpts

Thursday 24th March 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Victoria Atkins]

Q I am driven to ask, Mr King, against your evidence that you do not know much about how security services work, how many lives you are willing to sacrifice for your very pure plan of privacy?

Eric King: None. I do not think that any lives should be sacrificed for a pure view of privacy. We need both; we need security and privacy. Both are values that we hold in this society and are values that we should be ensuring that we get right in the Bill. That is why it is so important that we have long scrutiny on this because we should not simply provide an unlimited set of powers to our security and intelligence agencies. They must have some, and they must be formidable powers, but they need to be checked.

They need to be provided for by Parliament. We need to have proper authorisation and oversight for that. That has been my work for the past five years. So, no, while I do not hold a security clearance, it does allow me to come before you and talk about all the things that I do know. Regrettably, if I did hold a security clearance, I would not be able to be in that position.

[Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)]

Q Building on that, the Joint Committee did ask for an operational case for bulk powers to be published, and that has been seen and assessed by the ISC who do have the security clearance that you do not have, who do have visibility on all of the things that you are not able to see. The ISC says that they are happy with that operational case. It seems to me that the more people know about this, the more comfortable they are with that operational case. I wonder whether you are questioning their judgment or simply saying that you disagree.

Eric King: No. It is certainly true that the more you see about some aspects of agency practice, you do get more reassured. Certainly, in the process of Investigatory Powers Tribunal cases that have taken place, I was pleased that there were areas that had safeguards when I did not originally think there were.

I have also been fantastically disappointed in other areas, where I thought there should have been very obvious safeguards, such as areas of legal professional privilege that were found wanting and unlawful by the IPT. I am afraid I have become a terrible judge on which bits I think the agencies have got right and which bits they have got wrong. I seem to be very poorly predicting it. On the operational case, I think the issue here is that we need a whole range of experts outside the ISC to be looking at this. I am not sure that it is the perfectly placed organisation or body to be looking at this. It has known about these powers and approved of them right the way through. I think that at this time, now that they are being put before Parliament plainly for the very first time, we should be looking to do what they have done in the US, which is to have an independent scrutiny of many of those cases, so that you can test them.

It is not enough simply to provide a list of cases where this worked. They need to be really looked at, because, as we found in the US, some powers that many thought would work, like the bulk acquisition of communications data, turned out not to be terribly effective. The 64 cases that the agencies in the US put forward, to say that these were powers that were needed, turned out to be false. Only one was of relevance, and it was not a terrorism case. So it is vitally important that we scrutinise them and have the time to do so.

[Lucy Frazer]

Q I would like to pick up on something that you said in your evidence was about internet connection records. I would just like to ask you first of all, do you respect the work of David Anderson?

Sara Ogilvie: Absolutely.

Brussels Terrorist Attacks

Matt Warman Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

The hon. Gentleman raises an interesting point, on which there has been some commentary in the media. The practical problem is that if security is instigated at an earlier stage, a crowd is simply created in a different place. That is why that suggestion will not necessarily solve the issue of removing the ability to mount an attack on a large number of people. As I have said, the police presence and the visible security presence at certain airports has been increased, but I do not think that the hon. Gentleman’s proposal would necessarily remove the opportunity for terrorists to attack a large number of people.

[Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)]

The appalling events in Brussels highlight the vital work done by our security services to keep us all safe. In the recent debate on the Investigatory Powers Bill, all parties adopted a conciliatory tone. Will my right hon. Friend join me in welcoming that tone and does she share my hope that in the course of the Committee stage we can arrive at a Bill that all parties can support?

[Mrs May]

Yes, I hope that we can achieve that. We responded to the reports of three parliamentary Committees and revised the Bill accordingly. The Bill before Committee has had those revisions made to it. Both the Minister for Security, my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr Hayes), and the Solicitor General, my hon. and learned Friend the Member for South Swindon (Robert Buckland), will take the Bill through Committee.

Given the tone adopted in the debate and in the interventions today, I think we could see a constructive process taking place in Committee so that we will shortly have a Bill on the statute book that delivers the safety and security that the people of this country need.