Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Bill — House of Commons, 2020-10-15
Topic: Law and Crime
Yvette Cooper (Labour, Centre-left): I welcome the remarks of the hon. Member for Bracknell (James Sunderland) about the important work that our security and intelligence agencies do We now have just a few short hours for the Committee stage of this Bill today. We will end up, in effect, with no Report stage. It is only 10 days since Second Reading. Third Reading is likely to be squeezed by how long it takes us to vote at the moment. I say to the Minister that this is an irresponsible way to deal with legislation that is so important. He will know that I say that as someone who strongly supports the vital work of our security and intelligence agencies, and our senior police, who deal with serious and organised crime, terror threats, and child abuse. They work with great bravery to keep us safe, and we owe them our thanks The Minister will also know that I have long supported much of the counter-terror work that the Home Office does, as well as its work with the police and intelligence agencies. I agree with the core purpose behind this Bill, which is to provide a legal framework for the difficult work that our Security Service, counter-terror police and National Crime Agency need to be able to do in order to keep us safe. But that is why we should take care to get the details of the legislation right. That is important because it is not only about the rule of law and safeguards for our democracy, but about the interests of the Security Service and the police. It in their interests to have the proper safeguards in place for the vital work they do. It protects them and it also protects individual officers, who have to take very difficult decisions under pressure with great integrity I find it difficult to believe that the court timetable has necessitated this condensed timetable. The Investigatory Powers Tribunal reported in December last year. Preparations were under way at that time for legislation, in case it might be needed. We could have had more consideration of this. We could have continued with it for a further couple of weeks in this House and then accelerated the timetable had it proved necessary at the last minute, given the court timetable and the potential for an imminent court decision. We will therefore have an accelerated discussion of a whole range of different, important and very sensible amendments that have been put forward, such as those on pinning down the safeguards for human rights considerations and putting them more explicitly into the Bill. I strongly support the words of my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) about the need to ensure that there is proper protection for children. There are measures to protect children in the use of covert human intelligence, but there should be additional safeguards in case there are ever circumstances in which children are being asked to break the law. Such safeguarding is important and does need to be seriously responded to. I also support the reinforcement of existing protections against things such as blacklisting and interference in trade union activity—protections that have been secured by work by Labour MPs on previous legislation The two key issues that I wanted to focus on—and the amendments that reflect those—are first around independent checks and secondly around the scope of the legislation. The Bill as it stands does not include sufficient independent checks. There is no independent check in advance and the independent checks in retrospect are very limited; all we have is the retrospective oversight of the Investigatory Powers Commissioner. Those are permissive provisions rather than clear requirements on the commissioner, which means that we will have no idea in the House, in retrospect, whether the IPC has been forensic, looking at every individual case, or whether it has had to focus on other issues that year as part of its report.