Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill — House of Lords, 2015-01-26
Topic: Law and Crime
Alan William John West (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, my name is also on this amendment in support of the noble Lord, Lord King, along with those of the noble Lords, Lord Carlile and Lord Blair. I will mention some history as well, which is important because of the time lags and time. In 2009, when I was Minister for Security and Counter-Terrorism, I was made aware that changes to communications technology meant that a record of communications information would no longer be held by the communications service providers and that technology was changing the type of data that were available. This information was held purely as it was needed for the companies’ billing procedures—that is why they kept it—and, as such, was available for use by properly authorised state officials, in particular for prosecution of serious crimes and in terrorism cases. New technologies and methods of communication meant that firms were beginning to, and going to, charge differently Over time, communications material, which, as has already been said, was used to help to gain convictions in over 95% of serious criminal cases, was going to be lost—a very serious and irrevocable loss that would impact on the security and safety of our nation and our people. To try to ensure such information would be kept, and to access these new technologies, we started to draft a new communications data Bill. There was then an election, the coalition came into power, and the coalition drafted a new Communications Data Bill which was passed to Parliament for pre-scrutiny, as has been mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord King. It had many flaws and underwent considerable redrafting —the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, will, I am sure, talk about this later—to ensure that there were sufficient safeguards and so on. Indeed, the Home Office, as the noble Lord, Lord King, has mentioned, did a considerable amount of work to rectify all the faults with that Bill. Subsequently, for political reasons, it was kicked into touch. We find ourselves today, some six years—not two and a half years—after we started to try to draft legislation that would ensure no loss of what we already had, having done nothing but expend a great deal of hot air. Week by week we are losing the ability we once had; for example, to place a criminal close to the scene of a crime on a certain day, as has just been mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Blair The Prime Minister and the Home Secretary have both said in the past few weeks that this legislation is needed urgently—and they are right. So why is nothing happening? Well, yes, there are reviews going on, not least by the Government’s Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, Mr Anderson, and that is very sensible. But perhaps as a nation we should move more expeditiously on such a crucial matter One of the great strengths of this House is that it contains globally admired experts on almost every issue under the sun, and it can also act as a conscience for the elected Chamber in the other place. The noble Lords, Lord King, Lord Carlile and Lord Blair, are acknowledged experts in this field and clearly their advice has to be taken very seriously. They have identified this window of opportunity to rectify the growing shortfall in our ability to prosecute crime, whether criminal or terrorist. Do we really want murderers, people traffickers, serious organised crime and terrorists to be able to communicate and plot out of the reach of our law enforcement agencies? Do we want them to be able to avoid detection and prosecution in a way that they have not been able to in the past? The answer, surely, has to be no That does not mean that there do not have to be sufficient safeguards; for example, to ensure data that are properly looked after, as the communications providers have indeed always had to do, and to decide how long such data need to be held for. In addition, we need to investigate the costs because companies will be keeping data they no longer require for themselves so will want to charge us—they will probably want to overcharge us—for the privilege. The Government should be very hard-nosed on this point Much has been, and will be, said about individual privacy but, as the European human rights legislation points out, privacy is not an absolute right. There is much emotive claptrap using words such as "snooper". It is, in that context, interesting to note that the judges at the tribunal looking into the allegation that GCHQ is involved in mass surveillance have just reported and were all absolutely clear in their judgment that there is no "mass" but rather only highly "targeted" surveillance properly authorised. Indeed, as the noble Lord, Lord King, mentioned, the data we are looking at here are not the contents of the letter, but what I would call the outside of the envelope. To be quite honest, the people we should be really worried about looking inside the envelope are various private companies, firms and ne’er-do-wells—not the Government.