Justice and Security Bill [HL]
Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale Excerpts(11 years, 10 months ago)
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Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale
My Lords, it is a particular pleasure to follow such distinguished members of the current ISC as the two noble Lords who have spoken before me in this debate. The ISC is a committee on which I have twice had the pleasure of serving in the past. I welcome the Bill which, although not long, deals with rather a large number of important issues that have been in need of being addressed for some time. At later stages I will consider whether amendments might be desirable, but at this Second Reading, I would just like to seek assurances from the Government on some points.
Part 1 of the Bill, on the oversight of intelligence and security activities, deals almost wholly with the Intelligence and Security Committee. The ISC came into being through the Intelligence Services Act 1994 for which the then Prime Minister, John Major, deserves considerable credit. Although the intelligence community had long desired such a development—especially the SIS, which until then was not officially avowed—previous Governments had been reluctant to go down that route. The excellent work of the ISC since its inception has demonstrated the correctness of Prime Minister Major’s decision at the time.
Nearly all the proposals, as far as I can see, regularise what in fact has come to be the practice of the ISC, as the noble Lord, Lord Butler, indicated. For example, it looks at intelligence activities outwith the three main agencies and examines in retrospect operations of particularly significant national interest. I would just comment here that there has been a feeling for some time that, as a Joint Committee, consideration should be given to increasing the number of members from your Lordships’ House on the ISC. It should be acknowledged here that the present Government have increased that representation from one to two members, but I think a further increase should be considered.
However, there is one point in the Bill on which I would urge caution and seek reassurance; that is, that the ISC should have powers to require information from the agencies subject to a veto from the Secretary of State rather than, as now, the head of an agency. As a general comment, I would advise the Government to be careful of eroding the authority of the heads of the agencies. I was concerned to discover that there had been changes in recent years in the writing of annual confidential reports on the three agency heads, so that where the Secretary of State had featured in the past, the first National Security Adviser was considered to be the “line manager” of the three agency heads. I understand that there has been a change with the change of National Security Adviser. I must make clear here that I have absolutely no idea what the three agency heads felt or feel about this, but that is not the point. This has nothing to do with personalities or personal feelings; to my mind, it is a matter of constitutional propriety.
I do not consider it appropriate that the three heads of agencies should be simply slotted into senior Civil Service rankings. In a democracy, it is essential that the security and intelligence services should be independent, answering to a Secretary of State and directly to the Prime Minister. Of course, in practice it will probably make little difference to refer to a Secretary of State for release of refused information, because it would be a very brave—in the Sir Humphrey usage of that word—Secretary of State who would overrule a director-general of the Security Service, a chief of SIS or a director of GCHQ on the wisdom of releasing sensitive material, and of course much fuller detailed reasoning can be given to Secretaries of State about the sensitivity of sources than can be revealed to the ISC.
However, I urge the Government to proceed with great caution here. Of course the agencies have to be accountable but their independence is crucial. That independence has to be from political or—dare I say it?—Civil Service operational interference. I would appreciate hearing the Minister’s comments on this point and would like to be reassured that there is no slippage about safeguarding the operational independence of the agencies.
Part 2 of the Bill, which deals with the disclosure of sensitive material in courts, is of course long overdue but the delay has been caused by having to wrestle with some hugely difficult problems of how to use sensitive intelligence material in our legal system without taking unacceptable risks of damaging sources, both human and technical. This set of proposals seems to tackle these problems rather well. I would just like to make two comments from my own past professional experience—one of revealing information from a liaison service and the other on the use of intercept material as evidence. Both these issues are much more complex, sensitive and difficult than they appear at first glance or to the uninitiated. I have spoken before in this House at some length on both of them, and today at Second Reading I will be very brief.
On the first point, it is a rule—in my day it was called the “third party rule”—engraved on the heart of every intelligence officer, however junior or senior, that material from any liaison service cannot and must not ever be passed on or revealed to a third party without the express permission of the originator. If that rule is violated, the intelligence flow is endangered. We, the British, would enforce this rule absolutely on our own material, so it is to be expected that liaison services would do the same to us, which in some cases would result in very serious adverse consequences and loss of intelligence, as the noble Lord, Lord Butler, and the noble Marquess, Lord Lothian, have made very clear in their speeches today.
Secondly, the question of using intercept as evidence has occupied this House at great length on many occasions over the years, as well as the whole of Whitehall, and I will not rehearse the detailed arguments again here. In spite of the ardent desire of successive Secretaries of State and law officers to achieve this, and the best legal brains in Whitehall wrestling with it, no solution has been found—perhaps until now. It has never been a question of principle but rather one of sheer practicality. A team of distinguished privy counsellors produced a report after lengthy consideration of all the evidence, and an implementation unit was set up in the Home Office to test various possible solutions in conjunction with the privy counsellors, one of whom was my much admired and now sadly missed noble and learned friend Lord Archer of Sandwell. How does all this relate to Clause 6(3)(b) of the Bill, which states that the court must ignore Section 17(1) of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, which deals with the exclusion of intercept material?
I would be grateful if the Minister could elucidate and explain how the Bill’s provisions satisfy the requirements of the report of the privy counsellors. I hope that I can be reassured on this and the other points I have raised. On receiving such assurances, I would very happily support this Bill.
Scotland Bill
Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale Excerpts(12 years, 7 months ago)
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Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale
My Lords, this Bill is the second major constitutional change for Scottish devolution that this House has considered. It is natural that those of us who were closely involved with the first Scotland Bill, the Scotland Act 1998, have many memories of that Bill revived by this one, as the noble Lord, Lord Sewel, indicated. It is perhaps difficult for those who were in neither House of the UK Parliament at that time to appreciate the enormous sense of excitement, and of making history, which so many of us felt. Having heard the noble Lord, Lord Lang, I do not say that all of us felt it, but certainly the vast majority of us felt it.
As one of the three government Front-Benchers who took that Bill through this House, along with the noble Lord, Lord Sewel, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hardie, then Lord Advocate, I remember what a marathon that Bill was: 10 days of Committee, and many sessions late into the night, and two days for Second Reading. I have vivid memories of how nervous I was as a comparative newcomer to have to open the second day of a major Second Reading debate. Those of us involved all felt it was a great privilege because, for most Scots of my student generation, a Scottish Parliament was something we had wanted all our adult lives, and although we all believed the words of the late John Smith—I think they were the words of the late John Smith—that it was,
“the settled will of the Scottish people”,
we had had to fight hard to win the national referendum held immediately after the 1997 general election.
None of us has witnessed, either before or since, the joyful scenes when the Bill finally passed in this House, and Scottish Labour MPs flooded into this end of the building in a wave of euphoria. We were aware of course even then, in the midst of the euphoria, that this was no permanent or perfect template and that it would require revisiting once the Parliament was up and running. So it was absolutely right for the Scottish Labour group in Holyrood, with the agreement of the Scottish Liberal Democrats and the Scottish Conservatives —but not, of course, the SNP—to set up the Calman commission in 2008 to review the provisions of the Scotland Act 1998 in the light of experience, and, as was said,
“to recommend any changes to the present constitutional arrangements that would enable the Scottish Parliament to serve the people of Scotland better, that would improve the financial accountability of the Scottish Parliament and that would continue to secure the position of Scotland within the United Kingdom”.
It is natural that, after some 10 years, experience would reveal the requirement for some such change, even though the contents of the White Paper preceding the 1998 Bill had been prepared from unprecedented wide consultations and debate throughout Scottish civic society, over some eight years, by the Scottish Constitutional Convention. I should declare an interest here as one of the final two co-chairs of that body, along with the noble Lord, Lord Steel of Aikwood.
Although there might not be the same degree of excitement and sense of history about this Bill, I have to say that, in so far as it contains much of what the Calman commission recommended, it is to be welcomed. The Calman commission acted in the best Scottish traditions of wide consultation throughout civic society as practised by the Scottish Constitutional Convention.
Specific points in the Bill can be considered at the appropriate later stages of the Bill. I want—very briefly in view of the long list of speakers and the time—to lay down a marker about two subjects that are not included in this Bill, although much discussed in connection with it; indeed, both were the subjects of amendments and debate in the other place.
The first point is corporation tax. In considering a different rate of corporation tax for Scotland, one cannot but be worried about the consequences for the UK as a whole. I agree entirely with the views summed up succinctly by the Chair of the Scottish Affairs Select Committee in another place, when he said that,
“beggar-my-neighbour politics on corporation tax is not helpful. The risk of driving that divide between England and Scotland by achieving a marginal gain in corporation tax revenue in the short term is not worth the candle”.—[Official Report, Commons, 21/6/11; col. 269.]
The Calman commission did consider and reject a different rate of corporation tax for Scotland, and in my opinion was completely correct in doing so.
The second point is the Barnett formula. I have heard many times in this House the views of my noble friend Lord Barnett, for whom I have the greatest affection and respect but with whom on this particular topic I do not entirely agree. In any case, whatever one thinks about the future of the Barnett formula, I think it correct that it should not be considered in this Bill. As the Minister in another place said:
“The current formula is an administrative procedure and does not appear in legislation”.—[Official Report, Commons, 21/6/11; col. 229.]
He then pointed out very clearly that it was a mechanism for allocating funding across all four countries of the UK, which would make it quite inappropriate to legislate in this Bill for Scotland in isolation.
Finally, we should be careful about this Bill. We should not of course do too little in it, but I think we should be very wary of trying to do too much. It should not, as they say, be used as a Christmas tree. In so far as this Bill satisfies the recommendations of the Calman commission, I welcome it and wish it well. I look forward to more detailed discussion on some particular aspects in the future stages of the Bill.
Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill
Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale Excerpts(13 years, 3 months ago)
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Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
I think that my noble friend is missing out on the commas. Each constituency has to be in Scotland wholly, Wales wholly, Northern Ireland wholly and either in England wholly or in England together with one or more of the home and overseas dependent territories. Those territories would be allied only to English constituencies, not to Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish constituencies. I checked all the punctuation with the office to try to make it clear that that is how the amendment would be interpreted. My noble friend Lady Ramsay, who has long experience in the Foreign Office one way or another, has said from a sedentary position, although she might like to say it from a standing position—
Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale
It is very clear what the amendment is trying to do. It is trying to incorporate the idea, which the French have employed for a long time, that their overseas and dependent territories can be in some cases considered part of mainland France. My noble friend is trying to extend that principle to our similar dependent territories, but it should be extended only into England and not into the others. It is quite clear.
