National Security Bill

Rosie Winterton Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Wednesday 3rd May 2023 Commons Chamber

King’s and Prince of Wales’s consent signified.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I must draw the House’s attention to the fact that financial privilege is engaged by Lords amendments 33 and 34. If they are agreed to, I will cause the customary entry waiving Commons financial privilege to be entered in the Journal.

Clause 28

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[The Minister for Security (Tom Tugendhat)]

I beg to move amendment (a) to Lords amendment 26.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:

Lords amendment 26, and amendment (c) and Government amendment (b).

Lords amendment 153, and Government amendment (a).

Lords amendment 22, and Government motion to disagree.

Lords amendment 122, and Government motion to disagree.

Lords amendments 1 to 21, 23 to 25, 27 to 121, 123 to 152 and 154 to 174.

[Tom Tugendhat]

Let me start on a personal note by thanking the Clerk who is sitting in his place and congratulating him on becoming Clerk of the House. It is the first time that he has been in his place when I have spoken from the Despatch Box. He has been a friend for many years, so I am glad to have the opportunity to put on record that the Clerks keep us all on the straight and narrow, and in some cases get us out of rather a lot of trouble. I thank them very much indeed.

It is a pleasure to bring the National Security Bill back to this House. A number of changes have been made in the other place to improve it. The House will know the importance of the Bill: it gives our intelligence and security services, as well as law enforcement, a new toolkit to tackle state actors who threaten the safety and security of the United Kingdom. It also takes steps to prevent public funds from being given to those who could use them to support terror. As always, this Government have listened. I pay tribute to Lord Anderson and Lord Carlile for their work to improve the Bill—[Interruption.] I am glad to hear the acknowledgement from the Opposition Benches. That has improved the Bill for all sides.

We have heard the views of the other place, of industry and of many others, and we have focused the foreign influence registration scheme into a more targeted weapon against those who would do us harm. Arrangements to carry out political influence activity will now be registerable only when directed by a foreign power. Receiving funding from a foreign power, absent a direction, will not trigger a requirement to register under the scheme. For example, cultural institutes that make an important contribution to life in the United Kingdom will not be required to register simply because they receive funding from a foreign power. That is in line with the original intention of the scheme.

Only where organisations or individuals are directed by a foreign power to carry out political activities will that arrangement need to be routinely registered. We will publish guidance to support understanding of the scheme and circumstances in which arrangements will need to be registered. It remains the case that criminal offences will be attached to failures to register.

The Government made a number of changes in the other place following concerns expressed about the Bill’s potential impact on journalistic freedoms and other legitimate activity. I pay enormous tribute to Lord Black for his contribution to the debate. The Government are clear that the Bill’s focus is on protecting the United Kingdom from threats from those acting against the UK’s interests, not interfering with press freedom. The Lords amendments clarify the scope of offences and requirements in part 1. That includes amending the language in the phrase

“knows, or ought reasonably to know”

to put beyond doubt that it would need to be proved what an individual knew rather than capturing individuals acting unwittingly. That applies in every instance when the phrase appears in the Bill, including in the foreign power condition.

Further drafting changes have been made, including to clarify the scope of the offence of assisting a foreign intelligence service and the meaning of foreign power threat activity.

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[Tom Tugendhat]

The hon. Gentleman has tempted me to approach the issue a little early in my speech, but let me put this firmly on the record. I have met the high commissioner of Cyprus, and my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary has spoken to its Foreign Secretary. I want to make it clear that any references in the Bill to the sovereign base areas of Akrotiri and Dhekelia shall be in accordance with the 1960 treaty concerning the establishment of the Republic of Cyprus, shall not affect the status of the sovereign base areas as defined in the treaty, and will not in any way undermine its provisions. References to the sovereign base areas in the Bill in no way indicate a change in UK policy towards their governance. I hope that is extremely clear.

If we had these powers now, I would already be encouraging the police to use them against those who side with our enemies. As always, I want to share my admiration and appreciation for the services, their work and all their efforts that so often go unseen, although the impact does not go unnoticed. I hope that right hon. and hon. Members will support the Government’s changes, and our opposition to the amendments relating to the ISC and political party donations.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I call the shadow Minister.

[Holly Lynch (Halifax) (Lab)]

We on the Labour Benches are in no doubt about the importance of the Bill. Transnational repression and interference from hostile state actors and their proxies are testing the UK’s defences as never before. As the global landscape continues to change at a staggering pace, interference from countries that do not share our values is nothing new. However, the breadth and enduring nature of the threats we are now facing is a contemporary challenge, combined with the technology and methods used by those seeking to undermine us, which are new and enhanced.

Today is World Press Freedom Day, giving us a chance to recommit ourselves to defending press freedom, but also to acknowledge that many of the threats to which our security services and counter-terrorism police are responding here in the UK relate to the protection of journalists, from the—thankfully disrupted—assassination and kidnap plots against UK residents who are perceived as enemies of Iran owing to their coverage of the protests and the regime’s brutal crackdown, to the unacceptable harassment reported by Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC and her colleagues acting on behalf of the British national Jimmy Lai, the pro-democracy newspaper owner currently detained in Hong Kong. We must challenge that overseas and refuse to tolerate it here.

We have always understood that we need the new provisions in the Bill, but the Minister will understand where I am coming from when I say that this has been far from a shining example of best practice in passing legislation. The churn in the Government since the Bill was tabled in May last year, coupled with the late and lengthy additions to it, has meant that scrutiny has been truncated on occasion, but it is all the more crucial as a result. It is unusual for a Bill to come back from the other place with—if I am not mistaken—no fewer than 117 Government amendments, but that is why I, like the Minister, am particularly grateful to our colleagues at the other end of the building, where operational expertise in particular has had a positive impact in shaping and sharpening these measures to ensure that they deliver the protections we need and the safeguards we can all trust.

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[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I call the Chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee.

[Sir Julian Lewis]

It is clear from the opening contributions of both Front Benchers that there is a considerable degree of common ground on this legislation, and I would like to congratulate both of them on the way they have made their presentations. The Intelligence and Security Committee strongly welcomes the National Security Bill. The Committee has long called for reform of the Official Secrets Acts regime and highlighted the grave dangers posed by hostile state actors to the UK’s national security. Most recently, as we have heard, the ISC’s Russia report of 2020 made it clear that the Official Secrets Acts regime was outdated and not fit for purpose. It recommended that new legislation be urgently introduced to provide new tools to help our law enforcement and intelligence community, who work tirelessly to defend the UK’s national security.

The Bill modernises the Official Secrets Acts espionage regime and creates important new offences such as sabotage, foreign interference and assisting a foreign intelligence service. As recommended in the ISC’s Russia report, the Bill also creates the long-awaited foreign influence registration scheme. That must be a cause of particular satisfaction to the Minister for Security, my right hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat), who strongly promoted that policy during his very successful term as Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee.

Together, these changes will increase the transparency of those threats and help to make the UK a more difficult operating environment for foreign intelligence services to act. They will help to deter hostile foreign powers from undertaking harmful activities and disrupt them at a much earlier stage. There have been several justified concerns about the way in which the Bill was handled, but after considerable scrutiny, especially in Committee and in the upper House, it has been greatly improved.

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To conclude, if the Government will not ensure that the ISC’s memorandum of understanding is kept updated —and they have not been ensuring that—each piece of new legislation devolving intelligence and security matters away from the bodies already overseen by the ISC must come with a commensurate expansion to that MOU. I know that this is not the Minister’s fault. I speak to Minister after Minister—I am not saying anything about this particular one—but Ministers do not seem to understand why this keeps happening. I just wonder where exactly in the Government machine this necessary change that was always envisaged in the ISC system is being blocked.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Before I call the SNP spokesperson, let me say that, obviously, this debate is time limited, and I am sure that hon. Members will want to leave some time for the Minister to conclude.

[Stuart C. McDonald (Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East) (SNP)]

Once again, it is a pleasure to have the opportunity to scrutinise what we recognise as an extremely important piece of legislation. Like both the Minister and the shadow Minister, I wish to start by paying tribute to all those who are involved in protecting us and our security.

The National Security Bill has had SNP support from the outset, but we have also highlighted significant problems with it: things that were not in the Bill that should have been; things that were in the Bill that needed fixing; and things that were in the Bill that had no place in there at all. I welcome that many of those concerns were also raised in the House of Lords, and recognise that the Government have responded positively to several of them.

We welcome the amendments that have added clarity to the scope of some of the offences in the Bill, particularly around the state of knowledge required before offences are committed. In general, we welcome the changes to the registration schemes, which will make them more targeted. We also welcome the broadening of the oversight provisions to ensure that the measures in part 1 of the Bill are properly scrutinised.

On omissions, we continue to think that the failure to reform the Official Secrets Act 1989 is a major opportunity missed, and we regret that there has been no addition of a public interest defence, which is something to which a number of Members have alluded. That is an issue that will have to be returned to urgently.

Some improvements have been made to the Ministry of Justice’s clauses in the Bill relating to legal aid. However, we remain of the view that the legal aid provisions should have been taken out altogether. In relation to the award of damages in clause 83, improvements have been made, but, yet again, not enough. It is welcome that reductions in awards of damages now can happen only where there is a direct link between the alleged act of terrorism and the claim for damages. However, there is still concern about how this will operate when foreign Governments—Governments who have carried out torture based on UK intelligence—simply use the smear of an unproven terrorism allegation to justify or defend their actions.