Investigatory Powers Bill (First sitting)

Peter Kyle Excerpts

Thursday 24th March 2016 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

Can we keep questions and answers as brief as possible to get everybody in, please?

[Peter Kyle (Hove) (Lab)]

Q I, too, am not a lawyer but, unlike Mr Hoare, I do not apologise for it. Mr King, it was quite striking when you gave a flavour of the quantity of data that is being harnessed. Do you know whether that has ever led to an unlawful arrest, or a wrongful arrest?

Eric King: No. At the moment we have almost no visibility on how our security and intelligence agencies work on a day-to-day basis with our National Crime Agency. We know that they co-operate very regularly and we know there is a lot of material that is shared around, particularly for organised crime circumstances. I imagine that lots of the relevant material is passed to the NCA and others, and that will lead to arrests and occasionally presumably also unlawful arrests. But no, that is not material that is in the public domain.

[Victoria Atkins]

Q Mr King, there was a phrase you used quite a few times during your evidence. That is, “We don’t know.” How long have you worked for the security services?

Eric King: I don’t work for the security services.

--- Later in debate ---

[Victoria Atkins]

Q In the nightmare scenario that there was a wrong ’un in the agencies, how would they be able to find that person and prevent them from misusing their powers?

Lord Evans: It is inevitably the case that you cannot ensure that everybody in the service is brilliant and saintly, because it’s human nature. As a result, we maintain a strong, continuing vetting procedure. Your vetting is reviewed on a regular basis and it is built into the way we do our appraisal to raise security-related issues. Also, particularly in the management of access to sensitive information, there are arrangements to ensure independent oversight of what is being done on the systems that the service has in place. In the same way that, if you were running a trading system in a bank or something, you would monitor the activities of the traders to try to identify improper activity, something similar is applied to the systems operating within the intelligence services. We rely on good recruitment and on continuing security vetting, but we also have some wired-in ways of trying to identify misuse of official resources for personal use or whatever.

[Peter Kyle]

Q I would like to turn your attention from the efficacy and professionalism of your staff to that of the politicians you have had to deal with over the years. You have had to have relationships with several different Home Secretaries in your time. Have you always been able to get the time and attention you need from each of them at the moment at which you need it?

Lord Evans: I served under four Home Secretaries from both the Labour party and the Conservative party. I saw the Home Secretary without fail once a week, and quite often twice a week. All of them took a great interest in the work that the service was doing and its operations, and were regularly briefed. From that point of view, I think we were given very good airtime. In addition to that, there is the question of the time to look at warrants. They were not presented by the director general but were processed and nominally presented by the Home Secretary’s officials, so on top of that there was a lot of time spent by Home Secretaries on warrants. I can say, without going into great detail, that they did not all go through with a tick. Occasionally, warrants would come back and they would say, “Actually, the Home Secretary doesn’t want to sign this.”

[Peter Kyle]

Q You have answered my second question, which does great service to your profession. Does the same stand for you, Mr Inkster?

Nigel Inkster: Yes. Obviously, our service’s interaction was more with the Foreign Secretary, but our experience is comparable. I cannot think of a single case of a Foreign Secretary who did not take a serious and sustained interest in this area of work. I cannot think of a Foreign Secretary who did not take a serious and sustained interest in the kind of warrants and submissions that they were asked to approve. My experience, like Jonathan’s, is that these did not go through on the nod. There was lot of self-policing in the system, because we knew that a weak case would not stand. There was no point in putting it forward, because its fate would be clear, so one did not do that. The only other thing I would add is that my experience has been that, without fail, the senior politicians involved in this business owned the decisions that they took, stood by them and did not, as they well could have done in many cases, try to fend them off on to somebody else.

[Peter Kyle]

Q My final quick question is: is there much difference in the behaviour towards issuing warrants between Home Secretaries, or do you find it a consistent experience?

Lord Evans: Broadly speaking, all the Home Secretaries took a similar view on this. I have never come across a Home Secretary who was pro-terrorism, obviously. I suppose, in practice, what happened early on in the time of a Home Secretary being in post was that you tended to get more questions, which is entirely as you would expect. If a new Home Secretary came in, quite often they would say, “I don’t understand that. Bring me somebody to explain it.” So they are doing their job. Of course, that is an iterative process because if you understand that a Home Secretary has particular concerns about area x, you will put a little bit more effort into explaining it and making the case. You would tailor it to some extent to the particular concerns of any particular Home Secretary, but the overall threshold employed was roughly the same.

I would say one other thing. I do not want to name names for this purpose but I can remember at least on one occasion briefing a new Home Secretary on something we were doing that was really quite intrusive, although it was lawful. I said, “I need to tell you about this.” Their initial reaction was, “That’s fine,” and I said, “No it isn’t. You need to think about this. You cannot just say ‘This is fine.’ You need to be aware that this is potentially quite audacious. May I suggest that you look at this in a little more detail rather than go with something off the top of your head?” We did try to ensure that Ministers really were internalising this. We were not just trying to get it past them without them thinking about it, not least because if something then comes up, you do not want to be in a position where the Home Secretary says, “You never told me this could get me into trouble.”

[The Chair]

Okay, we have to move on to the Minister now.