National Security (State Threats) Bill

Lord Beamish Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 30th June 2026 Lords Chamber

Our world is being remade, and the front line is no longer somewhere distant or abstract—it is here. It is embedded across our infrastructure, our institutions and our daily lives. If we fail to act now, we risk confronting a crisis at a point when control has already slipped beyond our grasp. This amendment is not about alarmism; it is about preparedness. It ensures that we recognise this emerging category of threat before it materialises, not after. We must write the rules before the systems outgrow them.

[Lord Beamish (Lab)]

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, and the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for the amendments in their names. It is timely to have a debate and to keep raising—as I know the noble Lord, Lord Alton, does regularly—the threat we face from China. The ISC in its China report outlined the very detailed structure which the Chinese state, which has the largest security services in the world, uses not just at home for repression but abroad for undermining other nations’ ability to act, and in persecuting individuals who oppose the Chinese communist regime.

The issue around the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office is an obvious one which has raised concerns. The Bill is needed because whenever we have made the operating environment more difficult for states to use diplomatic cover, they have gone to other lengths. The success in identifying individuals who are using diplomatic cover for other activities shows that our security services are conscious of this. The response to the Salisbury attacks—in this country and across Europe among our allies, where a number of individuals were expelled from Russian embassies because of their links to intelligence services and activities which were not in keeping with their designation under the Vienna convention—certainly proved that point.

The problem I have with Amendment 4, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, is in defining strategy. That would be very difficult in terms of the united front. We all know what our adversaries get up to and what the aims are. The Bill is important because, as the operating environment has become more difficult, they are subcontracting this to individuals. So it is not necessarily about not understanding what the Chinese state is up to—we have a very clear understanding of this, and it is very complex and broad. The other thing the ISC report highlighted is that it is not just the scale but the lengths it goes to, both to intimidate individuals here and across the globe and to suck up information—which many of us might think is pretty irrelevant—for economic purposes and for building up a picture, a matrix, of what is happening in various political systems around the world.

It is good that these issues have been raised, because it throws a spotlight on what is happening not just in terms of China but what both Iran and Russia are doing. As I said at Second Reading, it is important to have that public debate to keep highlighting the dangers this country faces, and I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Alton, on his tenacity in continuing to do this. These dangers are on multiple fronts, whether it is universities being targeted, and individual diaspora members being targeted there, or IP thefts from both companies and universities. This is something that needs constant vigilance.

[Baroness Ludford (LD)]

My Lords, I was pleased to co-sign the amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter. All the amendments in this group—Amendments 1, 3 and 4 in particular—are expressing frustration with the limited scope of the Bill. Perhaps the Minister might be able to give an idea as to whether the national security Bill that was heralded in the King’s Speech will be able to pick up some of these themes, if we are not successful in persuading the Government today to make amendments to this state threats Bill.

There is a feeling of concern that some threats that have been experienced, or that are pretty obvious, are not being sufficiently dealt with by the Government. This is particularly in relation to China, where we have been urged to wake up and not be naive about the underwater crocodile. Whether the Government are being naive or shaped by other considerations towards China, there is a feeling that there appears to be so much going on—demonstrated in the recent trial concerning the staff of the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office, and otherwise instanced by the transnational repression towards residents of this country from Hong Kong who are being persecuted by the Chinese state, while they are supposedly under the protection of this country and this Government, which is intolerable—that we need to wake up and smell the coffee in relation to China.

I would like to hear some reassurances from the Minister that if he cannot take up some of these points in this Bill, the Government will take them up in the forthcoming national security Bill, which is intended to:

“Consolidate the Government’s approach to countering state threats to align more closely with the approach to countering terrorism”.