National Security and Investment Bill — House of Commons, 2020-11-17
Topic: Mixed Topics
Aaron Stuart Bell (Conservative, Centre-right): It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Rother Valley (Alexander Stafford), and indeed colleagues around the House, as the last Back-Bench speaker in this debate This has been a very thoughtful debate with lots of interesting suggestions for the Minister from all sides. I thank the Secretary of State for his opening remarks and the Minister for his engagement with these issues. He met the Science and Technology Committee last week to talk through the Bill. It was obviously time well spent, because three of my colleagues from the Committee have already spoken, and now he has me as well—so well done to the Minister It is tempting, from a science and technology perspective, to seek to widen the scope of the Bill to attempt, for example, to protect start-ups in these fields, which are very innovative. Ultimately, however, I come down in the same place as the Chairman of the Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark). Countries that try to legislate themselves into self-sufficiency instead end up self-satisfied, and that would then strangle the very innovation that we all seek and want to see in our businesses in the spheres of science and technology. I am therefore pleased that the Bill is drawn narrowly The Bill sits at the nexus of our domestic economy and our international relations. If we were to widen its scope beyond the fairly narrow way it has been drawn, that could have unintended consequences for both those things. We heard the excellent and witty speech from the former Leader of the Opposition, the right hon. Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband), who clearly has lots of ambitions in the area of industrial strategy. I look forward to him putting that into the next Labour manifesto, perhaps, and that is where we can discuss these things, but this Bill is not the place to try to detail all the elements, whether it is about confectionery companies, union control or any of those sorts of things. This needs to be a narrow Bill so that we do not move into too many unintended consequences. On international relations, as my hon. Friend the Member for Wantage (David Johnston) said, we need to move with the times and in response to events. The exact nature of the threats we face evolves and changes over time. I trust my right hon. Friends the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister, and we need to give them the leeway to make judgments about national security in the face of what the international situation is at the time. This Bill is not just for the next five years. It is not just for the threat that we clearly face from the expansionist tendencies of Russia and China. It needs to stand the test of time, and by drawing it narrowly, we give it a better chance of doing that I support the Bill as it is, although many colleagues around the Chamber have made thoughtful suggestions for amendments, and I know the Minister will speak to those when he winds up. First, it gives us more security. Others in this place are far more expert on national security than I am, but it is clear that the developments we have seen over the past decade have meant that we have had to re-evaluate our relations with potentially hostile actors, such as China. My right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) spoke very firmly about that. This Bill gives us a proportionate defence against hostile actors who are targeting sensitive UK assets, and in ever more novel and complex ways that we could not have imagined in 2002 when the Enterprise Act on which our current defences rest was passed. It is time to update those powers, and I hope we can do so in a way that will stand the test of time. It is also right that we update those powers with a turnover requirement, because, again to echo my hon. Friend the Member for Wantage, national security is no respecter of the size of a company or where it is in terms of growth. Sometimes very nascent companies could have a significant impact on our national security in future The Bill provides more certainty for businesses and a regime that prioritises swift resolution of referrals and call-ins. That is absolutely, fundamentally important. My hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Andrew Griffith) was very much to the point on this. Businesses deserve certainty. If the answer is no on national security grounds, that is fair enough, but we cannot leave things in limbo. One might think that the five-year period does leave businesses in limbo to some extent. I acknowledge my hon. Friend’s point that most lawyers will probably suggest that they notify the Minister, and so, as he said, publishing statistics on notifications would be welcome. We need to maintain the UK as a premier foreign direct investment destination, because it is so important to our future, to our recovery from covid, to meeting our net zero targets—I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs on his appointment on that—and to levelling up. It is particularly relevant to me, in Newcastle-under-Lyme in north Staffordshire, that we continue to attract foreign direct investment so that we can continue to regrow our national economy and our local economies in areas that have not had much investment in the past couple of decades To sum up, this Bill will give us a regime in line with some of our strongest allies in the world. It will protect our national security and ensure that Britain remains fully open for business, and for all those reasons, I will be supporting it on Second Reading.