National Security Bill

Robert Buckland Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 16th November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order. I have miscalculated—this is one of the reasons I was never made a Treasury Minister—and I want to give the Minister an opportunity to respond at the end. Sir Robert Buckland, you can have five minutes, but then we will go to four minutes.

[Sir Robert Buckland (South Swindon) (Con)]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I will not be able to emulate the admirable record of my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Sir Charles Walker), but I will do my best to be as succinct as possible. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Barnsley Central (Dan Jarvis), who is right when he says that we have to strike a balance here: we need to protect our way of life but not protect ourselves out of the very values that we seek to defend—or, in other words, diminish the very rights that we want to protect. That is at the heart of all the national security legislation that I and others in this House have dealt with over the years. I am grateful to my right hon. Friend the Minister for Security for our conversations about these issues.

I cannot conceal my disappointment at the non-selection of new clause 8, in the name of the right hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones), which was signed by me and others. It is inevitable that this issue will be revisited in the other place. There are two issues that arise from it that are of general application to the Bill and to the future reform of the Official Secrets Act, which has to come. The first is the potential creation of a public interest defence, which in my view is an essential substitute to the rather random guessing game that we have at the moment, with jury trials—however well directed the juries might be—ending up with verdicts that, to many of us, seem perverse.

The second relates to the recommendation to create a statutory commission to allow people to raise their concerns—to whistleblow, if you like—through an approved process. The Law Commission’s report of September 2020 made those very clear and cogent recommendations and I commend them strongly to my right hon. Friend the Minister. I think they go hand in hand. The time is here for the Government to start addressing these issues and to adopt those recommendations. To quote my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne in another context: if not now, when?

[Mr Kevan Jones]

There are many things in the Bill that I support, but I think it is a missed opportunity. It has been a messy process in Committee, as has been said, as a result of the number of Ministers we have had dealing with it, the late inclusion of things like the foreign agents registration scheme and the completely missed opportunity to reform the Official Secrets Act 1989. The new Minister is very good, but he is a bit like a friendly old bank manager: he listens to you, he agrees with you and he is sympathetic, but you do not get the loan at the end of the day. The point is, however, that this Bill will be changed radically in the other place, because we have not had the proper amount of time to do it.

I want to refer to clause 27, which has been spoken to by the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) and my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley Central (Dan Jarvis). I was on the Intelligence and Security Committee when we were discussing detention and rendition, and some of the things that went on then did not make for pretty reading. We do not want to go back to those days. Things were changed in the consolidated guidance and the principles were brought forward. One of the sops for the Committee—a phrase that everyone kept using—was that there could be a chilling effect on the security services. Everyone kept asking what the chilling effect would be.

A commitment was given to allow the ISC to have classified information on this, and the Chairman of the ISC wanted that before today because it would have given us an opportunity to say whether we were satisfied. Unfortunately, that was turned down, but we have had the initial information and I and other members of the Committee are not yet satisfied that there is justification for this. We have asked for more information, which we are going to receive, but it would have been handy to have it before today. Unless there is good cause, frankly I think it will be interesting to see how this can be justified.

Referring to something that the right hon. and learned Member for South Swindon (Sir Robert Buckland) said, I am disappointed that my new clause 8 was not selected. This is one of those things in the Bill that will come back. The equivalent new clause was selected in Committee only because the hon. Member for North Wiltshire (James Gray) and my hon. Friend the Member for Bethnal Green and Bow (Rushanara Ali) in the Chair agreed to it, so I was not surprised that the Clerks knocked it out of selection, but it will not go away. My fear is that a great opportunity to modernise our national security landscape is being completely missed. I do not think we will see a Bill on public interest or reforming the 1989 Act, but it desperately needs to be done.