Data Protection Bill [Lords] (Fourth sitting)

Peter Heaton-Jones Excerpts

Thursday 15th March 2018 Public Bill Committees

[Victoria Atkins]

What we are doing is transposing the requirements of the Data Protection Act 1998 into the Bill. It is difficult to see a situation in which a national security certificate will be granted on the basis that the work of the security and intelligence agencies of the Crown does not require secrecy.

[Peter Heaton-Jones (North Devon) (Con)]

Is there not a bigger, more general overall point here, which is that we should not be considering doing anything in Committee that risks making it more difficult for the security services to protect us? This week of all weeks, surely that should be uppermost in our minds.

[Victoria Atkins]

Very much so—indeed, this debate ran through the passage of the Investigatory Powers Act 2016, which was one of the most scrutinised pieces of legislation. Senior parliamentarians who served on the Committee on that Act during long careers in this House, including the then Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr Hayes), said that it was an incredibly well scrutinised Bill. There was constant debate about the battle, or tension, between ensuring the national security of our country in the most transparent way possible, and the fact that by definition there has to be some secrecy and confidentiality about the ways in which the security agencies work.

What was important in the debates on that Act, as it is in those on the current Bill, was making it clear that the idea that rogue civil servants or security agents can run around with people’s information with no checks is very wrong. We are replicating in the Bill the system that has been used for the past 30 years, because we consider that that system has the appropriate and necessary safeguards in the often very fast-moving context of a national security situation.

--- Later in debate ---

If someone is the subject of investigation or suspicion, and the security services neither confirm nor deny, when someone who is not under suspicion puts in an application, the great tension for the security services is whether they answer differently in one case from another. In such circumstances that would have ramifications, because people will work out that this answer has been given or this answer has not been given. Of course there is a tension. That is why the exemptions exist and why so much emphasis is placed on the data controller, and that is why it meets the international standard as expected by the modernised Council of Europe convention.

[Peter Heaton-Jones]

On the specific narrow point, is it not the case that clause 130 already provides for the publication of certificates, so the amendment is simply not necessary? On the wider point—at the risk of repeating my earlier one—I fear that we are at risk of stumbling into a law of unintended consequences where we will make it more difficult for our security services to do the job that we want them to do. While we have been sitting here, I saw on my phone that the international community has recognised that what happened in Salisbury is the first recorded attack using a nerve agent on a European country since 1945. Let us remember that.

[Victoria Atkins]

That is a particularly sobering development. I know that we all feel the gravity of our responsibilities when considering the Bill in the context of national security today. I am grateful to my hon. Friend.