Draft Investigatory Powers Bill — House of Lords, 2015-11-04
Topic: Law and Crime
Michael Bates (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, for his broad welcome of this. He is right to point to the antecedents of this whole process. It rests very much in a cross-party approach. We recognise the seriousness of the problems we face. This legislation is important to see in a context. Although it is very different from the draft communications data Bill in 2012, it is part of a long string and timeline of argument and debate that we have had. All of the recommendations in the report of my noble friend Lord Blencathra’s Joint Committee on that Bill have been accepted here. More than 200 recommendations were made in the three reviews to which the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, referred. They are also reflected in the draft Bill. He is absolutely right on that I turn specifically to the questions that the noble Lord asked. He asked whether the serious crime threshold will still be there. The answer is yes, absolutely. Warrantry will be undertaken in the same way as it currently is. There is no change in that. Bulk storage of data is a critical issue currently being discussed with the communications service providers. That covers some of the points that the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, raised. I will come back to that. We are in constant dialogue with them. My noble friend Lady Shields, who is the Minister for Internet Safety and Security, plays a crucial role in that dialogue, as did Sir Nigel Sheinwald, who produced his report last year. That work with the industry is ongoing In respect of parliamentarians, there was the Wilson doctrine in 1966, which was about wire-tapping. I do not want to have a whole debate about that but it is quite interesting to go back and look at what the Wilson doctrine actually was: effectively a requirement, as I understand it, for the Prime Minister to make a statement when communications had been intercepted, at a time when it was appropriate for national security to allow him to do so. That additional element—requiring the Prime Minister to be consulted—is a very real safeguard. In terms of the appointment of judges, we are in dialogue with the Ministry of Justice, as would be expected, and also with the Lord Chief Justice, to ensure that the appointments process is done correctly and we identify the specific skills that we are looking for in the team of judges. We anticipate that about seven judges—judicial commissioners—will be required On the point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, about social media, what we are really getting at here—what the police and the security services are saying—is that wireless telephony, in the space of just five years, has gone from a position where a mobile phone was the way in which people communicated, to one in which they now use Skype, WhatsApp and other social media. A third of calls are made through internet service providers, and everything suggests that that proportion will increase. That is why the argument for going for the internet records—specifically which app or site they were using to communicate—is so important The noble Lord’s question quite rightly referred to the fact that when David Anderson did his review he said, "If the case was made". The noble Lord is right to pick up on that point: we discussed it a lot. That is why the operational case for the powers that was put forward by the police is also being published today. It is available on the website, but I can make sure that copies are available in the Printed Paper Office, if that is helpful In regard to the costs of doing this, an impact assessment accompanies the Bill. That puts the cost to the industry at about £174 million over 10 years. Those costs, and the impact assessment, will be precisely the types of detail that the process of pre-legislative scrutiny should thrash out and test. I hope that it will do so.