My Lords, way back in 2004 I was the Deputy Mayor of London—when there was only one deputy mayor and not a whole host of them. In that role I attended DSEI, the arms fair. What struck me was that there was a terrifying amount of military equipment being sold and repurposed for use by police forces and Governments against their own citizens. That was a few years ago and I imagine the situation has got much worse since.
On another occasion I was outside a kettle in Whitehall chatting to the senior police officer trying to give him some good advice about how to communicate with the crowd. He had a phone call, he stepped away to take it and when he came back, he said “I’ve just been told not to speak to you any more.” I asked, “Who by?” and he pointed at the helicopter that had been flying over us. That was the first time I realised just how powerful the cameras were; they had not only been able to photograph me but also recognise me which, from the top of my head, I would have thought almost impossible.
There is always a great amount of mission creep with this type of technology and people can get carried away with it. Our own Prime Minister infamously wasted hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money buying illegal water cannons when he was Mayor of London. They ended up rotting down in Kent and I
am not sure we ever managed to sell them—perhaps we sold them for scrap. As far as I know there is still no oversight or regulation of the facial recognition technology. I would be very interested to hear the Minister tell me about that, because I have been agitating for that for some time.
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Amendment 132B would help bring the commissioning and procurement of weapons, surveillance equipment and investigatory technology under the supervision of the Government—whom, of course, we all trust. It is important to ensure that these technologies are commissioned coherently, with proper political oversight and judgment. Ultimately, these are questions about the balance of power between the state and the population. I would like to see even greater oversight—perhaps even a Lords Select Committee should be set up to consider these issues and make recommendations. I hope that the Government will listen.