It is a pleasure to speak after the right hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones), who in admirable brevity covered the gamut of the Bill. The House will be relieved to know that my speech on Second Reading will be even more concise than that. First, I welcome and support the thrust of this Bill, and I echo the comments made by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright) and congratulate him warmly on his knighthood.
I want to develop a further point about what we do not see in this Bill. I know that is warming to a theme we have already heard from a number of contributors to this debate, but it is, I am afraid, one that we cannot get away from. This was an opportunity not just to recast the pre-war legislation from 1911 right through to the late ’30s, but for us to do something to a Bill that, when it became law in 1989, was addressing a world that was already vanishing. That Act came right at the end
of the cold war, as the Berlin wall tumbled, and already it was somewhat behind its time. That has become even more apparent with the rise of the internet, the complete transmogrification of how disclosures can now be made and the myriad scenarios that now exist in regard to the unauthorised disclosure of classified material.
It is a matter of regret that the Government have not chosen to pursue reform of the Official Secrets Act 1989 in this Bill. I get the point that this is difficult, and the Home Secretary rightly made that point on a number of occasions in response to Members’ interventions at the beginning of the debate, but frankly, it is the job of this House to do difficult. We are here to do difficult. That is what our voters send us to do, and it is right on Second Reading to talk about what opportunities have potentially been missed.
I know that the scope of this Bill has been carefully crafted by the draftspeople. Knowing them as I do, I respect their work and they will have had—certainly in this case—clear instructions from policymakers. That might mean that I cannot table any amendment that I would seek to table, but I will continue to explore the matter, because it is too important an issue to leave for another occasion. The issue that I wish to deal with is the question of what to do with disclosures that are made in the public interest and in circumstances that clearly support the public interest.
Let me set out what I regard as a two-limbed test for any such defence to apply. Of course, this is not just an idea of mine; it is a carefully crafted set of proposals from the Law Commission that was published back in 2020, when I was still in the Government. I read the recommendations at the time and reread them in preparation for this debate. It is interesting to note that at the beginning of its chapter on the public interest defence, the Law Commission’s provisional conclusion before the publication of its final report was that there should not be a public interest defence but, as a result of the consultation it carried out, it changed its mind and came to the clear view that there was a clear case—a mandate, if you like—for the introduction of such a mechanism.
Currently, we have no mechanism that allows us as legislators or, indeed, us as a country to strike a reasonable balance between the importance of secrecy and the importance of accountability, while ensuring that those such as Julian Assange who dump data in a way that has no regard for the safety of operatives and other affected people are still subject to criminal sanction. In other words, this is not an attempt to try to open the door to create a free-for-all; it is an attempt to allow people to act carefully and in good conscience in a way that clearly serves the public interest.
Currently, in effect we delegate our responsibility as legislators to individual juries. As you know, Madam Deputy Speaker, I have spoken many times of my great belief in the jury system. I have probably addressed more juries than most Members in my work as a criminal barrister, both prosecuting and defending. I have huge faith in the jury system—it is a cornerstone of our liberty, and I mean that with every fibre of my being—but it is just plain wrong, in a society such as ours, for us, dealing as we do with the complexities of modern life, in effect to wash our hands of the process and leave it to individual juries. However carefully directed juries might
be and however careful are the arguments put forward by counsel or advocates, it seems to me to be an abrogation of our responsibility.
To those who say that this idea is unprecedented, I say that that just is not the case. Plenty of examples of public interest defences exist in law. Indeed, the Law Commission set out a number of them—for example, section 40 of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, and the well-known Criminal Justice Act 1988, which deals with a person who has an item with a blade or a point in a public place. There are legal defences that place the onus in law on the defendant to prove that they were acting lawfully, so we are not asking for something revolutionary. We are not suggesting something that is wholly out of place; this idea is well known to the criminal law and can equally apply to disclosures made by public servants, journalists and people acting in the public interest. It is important to remember that we should not focus on the occupation, profession or rank of the individual—it is not about journalists; it is about material that might have that public interest value. We have to be really precise in our terminology.