Investigatory Powers Bill

Debate between Stephen McPartland and Tom Tugendhat

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

[Stephen McPartland (Stevenage) (Con)]

I will speak to the amendments that stand in my name, amendments 153 to 160, which would remove clauses throughout the Bill that allow for the modification of bulk warrants. I will not press them because, like the rest of my amendments, they are probing amendments designed to tease out information from Ministers and ensure that there is further debate in the other place.

As I said in yesterday’s debate, I am not a lawyer, but in my humble opinion, major modifications of a warrant have the potential to completely change the key components of that warrant. I would like to understand at what point it becomes reasonable for a new warrant to be drafted.

I listened carefully to the Minister for Security yesterday and he said clearly to the House:

“I entirely accept the point that it would be completely unacceptable to have a robust system for issuing warrants and a less robust system for modifying them. Warranting has to be consistent throughout, and there can be no back-door way of weakening the process. That is not what the Government intend and not what we would allow.”—[Official Report, 6 June 2016; Vol. 611, c. 982.]

That is very reassuring and greatly welcome. I look forward to seeing how the robust system for modifications will be introduced as the Bill progresses. I accept that the Government have tabled a number of amendments to try to help in this area and, as I said, I will not press any of my amendments to a vote.

On a final point, I am not a particular fan of the bulk powers in the Bill. I have listened with great interest to the debates today and yesterday, and to the points that the Chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee has made about how bulk powers are used at the moment. In my view, surveillance should be targeted and the subjects of that activity clearly identified. That may well be naive in some senses, and I appreciate that there may be some areas where we require bulk powers, to identify the haystack, as has been said. But the carte blanche on bulk powers should not be the first resort; it should always be the last resort.

There has been a lot of talk about postbags, and whether the country is at war and so on. The debate in general has been very conciliatory and Members on all sides have tried to get a Bill that, at the start of this Parliament, was very difficult to a place where most people can stomach most elements of it. I am still not in a position where I feel I can support it, but, realistically, a lot of people now feel it has been greatly improved and there is a lot of trust in the Minister for Security and the Solicitor General because of their work in listening to people and accepting amendments.

I am also very grateful that the Home Secretary has tried to alleviate concerns and agreed to an independent review of the bulk powers in the Bill, led by David Anderson, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation. I look forward to his recommendations and what comes forward from them.

[Tom Tugendhat]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Madam Deputy Speaker, particularly as you are appropriately attired in something that may indeed be collecting bulk data.

We are talking about amendments that would fundamentally undermine the very Bill that we have come to support, and would change the very tone of the debate. I speak very much in support of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve), who has gone through various aspects in quite significant detail, explaining to us time and again why the controls over the collection of bulk data are entirely appropriate. I also speak in support of the hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer), who has been through the Bill with the eye he has as a former Director of Public Prosecutions, seeing both the loopholes and the potential abuses, and covering them off.

I also speak in support of the Solicitor General, who has done exactly the same for us, and the Minister for Security, who has brought forward a Bill that answers the very questions that this state must always ask itself: how we guard our citizens and keep them safe while also keeping them free. This Bill does exactly that.

My first encounter with bulk data collection came in the constituency of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield, where the Defence School of Languages was sited. I was going through vast amounts of Arabic text. Although I was doing so in a most junior and rather ineffective manner, I learned how it was done properly. I was only a student; the masters have learned from that great Scots mathematician John Napier, who in the 17th century developed the logarithm, and whose lesson to us all, through mathematics, is how to build the pattern, understand the shape and break the code. That is why bulk data matter. We cannot build patterns without data and without volume, and we cannot make shapes without substance.

The bulk data are not themselves intelligence. As an intelligence officer in Her Majesty’s armed forces I was very proud to work on intelligence. It is not the raw product. It is what is analysed, what is useful and what decisions can be made from. That is not the bulk or the mass—the intelligence is the product. I am sorry to say that there appears to be a slight misunderstanding as to what is the intrusion. The intrusion is surely not the clay from which the form is made, but only the detail on the individual that could be used against them. The Bill does not allow that without the tightest of safeguards, both from former judges and from serving Ministers.