My Lords, we have covered a good deal of the ground of Amendment 27 in the previous debate. I will try not to repeat too much
of that. The basis for a criminal conduct authorisation under new Section 29B(5)(c) is the economic well-being of the United Kingdom. Amendment 27 seeks to qualify that with the words,
“so far as those interests are also relevant to the interests of national security”.
I said that I was not going to repeat too much of the previous debate, but I have made a note that I want to echo the wise words of the noble Lord, Lord Judd. Of course, today is not the first time that Parliament has been presented with grounds for doing something that it considers unappetising or justifiable only in quite extreme circumstances or where it is concerned that the grounds are too wide. I am not referring only to today, but the range of public authorities that fall into this Bill is wider than we have seen before by quite some margin.
Under the Investigatory Powers Act 2016, which allows for bulk acquisition warrants to be issued for the acquisition of data, if the Secretary of State considers it necessary in the interests of national security, the warrant is authorised. It is also authorised for the purpose of preventing or detecting serious crime or in the interests of the economic well-being of the UK, and then the words in Amendment 27 follow. Those qualifying words were not in the Bill as it was introduced. They were introduced and added after amendments and debate. I cannot now recall why we did not end up simply relying on the original national security grounds to cover economic well-being as well. These were words that the Government accepted; they were also words to be found in the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act 2019, to which the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy referred, in the definition of a hostile act that entitles questioning and detention at the border.
3.15 pm
As the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, has said, the subject of this debate and this Bill is at the extreme end of what is being authorised. Perhaps we should simply have aimed for the deletion of new paragraph (c), but my noble friend Lord Paddick and I wanted to be constructive about this. Of course, however, we have to address the wide variety of issues that come within the umbrella of the country’s economic well-being. In considering the qualifications that anyone granting an authorisation must consider, and which would be considered in the supervision of the use of these powers, I refer not just to the general qualifications, but to the fact that under new Section 29B(6), which tells the grantor what must be taken into account, this is only in considering requirements under new subsection (4)(a) and (b). I am sorry: I am misreading my notes, partly because it is getting very dark here, so I shall leave that.
I have noted what the Minister for Security said in the Committee in the Commons, when he defended the economic well-being provisions as
“an established statutory purpose for investigatory powers”.—[Official Report, Commons, 15/10/20; col. 613.]
If the words are familiar to the Minister, it is because she has just said exactly the same thing, so my response is the same. The examples were used of cyberattack, critical infrastructure and financial institutions: yes, but qualified in the way that I have explained.
The noble Baroness talked about the full CHIS function: function, yes, but not the use of powers. As my noble friend Lord Paddick has said, there is a world of difference between deploying a CHIS and granting the right to use criminal conduct with immunity. There is an established statutory purpose, but I refer again to the existing qualification in the Investigatory Powers Act, and that is the threat to national security. I beg to move.