We on the Labour Benches are in no doubt about the importance of the Bill. Transnational repression and interference from hostile state actors and their proxies are testing the UK’s defences as never before. As the global landscape continues to change at a staggering pace, interference from countries that do not share our values is nothing new. However, the breadth and enduring nature of the threats we are now facing is a contemporary challenge, combined with the technology and methods used by those seeking to undermine us, which are new and enhanced.
Today is World Press Freedom Day, giving us a chance to recommit ourselves to defending press freedom, but also to acknowledge that many of the threats to which our security services and counter-terrorism police are responding here in the UK relate to the protection of journalists, from the—thankfully disrupted—assassination and kidnap plots against UK residents who are perceived as enemies of Iran owing to their coverage of the protests and the regime’s brutal crackdown, to the unacceptable harassment reported by Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC and her colleagues acting on behalf of the British national Jimmy Lai, the pro-democracy newspaper owner currently detained in Hong Kong. We must challenge that overseas and refuse to tolerate it here.
We have always understood that we need the new provisions in the Bill, but the Minister will understand where I am coming from when I say that this has been far from a shining example of best practice in passing legislation. The churn in the Government since the Bill was tabled in May last year, coupled with the late and lengthy additions to it, has meant that scrutiny has been truncated on occasion, but it is all the more crucial as a result. It is unusual for a Bill to come back from the other place with—if I am not mistaken—no fewer than 117 Government amendments, but that is why I, like the Minister, am particularly grateful to our colleagues at the other end of the building, where operational expertise in particular has had a positive impact in shaping and sharpening these measures to ensure that they deliver the protections we need and the safeguards we can all trust.
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Let me begin by discussing the Government amendments, secured in the House of Lords, that amend the foreign influence registration scheme, which is a case in point. It constitutes a comprehensive section of the Bill, but provisions on it were not tabled until the final stages of the Bill Committee in the House of Commons. It was a recommendation in the Intelligence and Security Committee’s Russia report, and it is something that we have consistently supported in principle. As the Minister knows, however, it will require a degree of fine tuning to get the balance right. We are broadly supportive of the plethora of Government amendments, given that scrutiny in the House of Lords has brought about some of that fine tuning. We look forward to further guidance on this, and will work with the Government to ensure that we capture what we need to capture without impeding genuine activity and interactions that are benign to national security.
I welcome the fact that the Government have listened to journalists’ concerns by clarifying the scope of offences in part 1, and the fact that part 1 will be subject to oversight as a consequence of Lords amendments 33 and 34, which was an ongoing ask from the Labour party throughout the Bill’s passage in the House of Commons.
As the Minister knows, we also had serious concerns about the Bill’s changes to the Serious Crime Act 2015, outlining our reasons in detail at this Dispatch Box and in Committee and voting to remove that clause on Report having been unable to shift the Government’s position. I am therefore pleased that Lords amendment 26 means that clause 28 has been significantly reshaped with, I understand, some assistance from the Intelligence and Security Committee. We pleaded with the Government to engage in that dialogue, and I thank all those, in this place and outside, who helped to bring clause 28 to a much better place. However, I understand the points raised by the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) in his amendments. I therefore invite the Minister to put on record once more the Government’s commitment to the Fulford principles, and to stress that
“The UK Government does not participate in, solicit, encourage or condone unlawful killing, the use of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment...or extraordinary rendition. In no circumstance will UK personnel ever take action amounting to torture, unlawful killing, extraordinary rendition, or CIDT.”
Lords amendment 122, tabled by Lord Coaker, will introduce a duty to update the Intelligence and Security Committee’s memorandum of understanding to reflect the provisions in the Bill. This follows a recommendation made by the ISC in its 2021-22 annual report. As noted in the report, during the passage of what became the Justice and Security Act 2013, the then Security Minister told Parliament that it was
“the intention of the Government that the ISC should have oversight of substantively all of central Government’s intelligence and security activities to be realised now and in the future.”––[Official Report, Justice and Security Public Bill Committee, 31 March 2013; c. 98.]
Ten years on, intelligence and security activities have continued to fall under the remit of different policy Departments, yet those Departments have not been added to the ISC’s memorandum of understanding. I think it fair to say that as a result, the ISC is not functioning as originally intended. Indeed, one of the
starkest revelations from the report is that although, in the 20 years following the ISC’s establishment in 1994, the ISC met the Prime Minister annually to discuss its work, the ISC has not been able to secure a meeting with a Prime Minister since December 2014. There have been five Prime Ministers in the intervening time.