Brussels Terrorist Attacks

Lucy Frazer Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

I think there is absolute unanimity around this House in our condemnation of these terrible attacks. There are two elements to the upgrade of the Metropolitan police’s armed response. I think that the 600 figure to which the right hon. Gentleman refers is not the recruitment of new firearms officers but the training of existing officers in certain parts of the Metropolitan police. As I understand it, that training is under way. The uplift in armed response vehicles across the country, which I referred to earlier, is also under way.

[Lucy Frazer (South East Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

The events yesterday underlined the fact that this is an international threat that requires an international response. We are making every effort to strengthen our domestic capability in the Investigatory Powers Bill. Will the Home Secretary assure the House that, in talking to international partners, she will ensure that the Bill can be practically and swiftly enforced elsewhere?

[Mrs May]

I am very happy to give my hon. Friend that reassurance. One key issue in the Bill is the ability to issue lawful warrants against communication and internet service providers who are located elsewhere, in particular the United States of America. We continue in the Bill to assert the territorial jurisdiction that we and previous Governments have always asserted in relation to those powers, and we are discussing with the US Government the possibility of an agreement that will ensure a very solid basis on which such exchange of information can take place.

Investigatory Powers Bill

Lucy Frazer Excerpts

Tuesday 15th March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Lucy Frazer (South East Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

I am sorry to backtrack slightly, but I have just looked up the provision relating to “economic well-being”, which is fairly qualified. Clause 18(2) ties economic well-being to

“the interests of national security”.

However, it also states that a warrant will be necessary

“in the interests of the economic well-being of the United Kingdom so far as those interests are also relevant to the interests of national security”.

That provision is further qualified by subsection (5), which states that a warrant will be issued only

“if it is considered necessary…for the purpose of gathering evidence for use in…legal proceedings.”

Subsection (4) refers to

“information relating to the acts or intentions of persons outside the British Islands.”

It is clear that the position is extremely limited.

Let me add that, as a barrister who has presented a number of cases to judges, I believe that judges who look at legislation every day are perfectly adequate to the task of considering these principles.

[Andy Burnham]

I thank the hon. and learned Lady for the law tutorial. Her point may be one for Committee rather than Second Reading. However, I did refer to it earlier. The Bill uses the word “relevant”; it does not use the words “directly linked to national security”. She pulls a face, but I am sure that I speak for every Labour Member when I say that there is no room for ambiguity when it comes to these matters. The Government must be absolutely clear about what they mean. We have seen trade unionists targeted in the past on the basis of similar justifications, and we will not allow it to happen again.

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[Lucy Frazer]

If the hon. and learned Lady thinks that international comparisons are important, does she agree that the judicial authorisation procedure proposed by the Home Secretary goes further than in other European examples, such as Germany, the Netherlands and France?

[Joanna Cherry]

We need to compare apples with apples and oranges with oranges. A more correct comparison is with jurisdictions such as Canada and America, the systems of which are more similar to ours than the continental European jurisdictions that the hon. and learned Lady describes, but I will come back to that when I get to authorisation.

I am sure everyone in this House wants to get the balance right between protecting civil liberties, and giving the security services and the police the necessary and proportionate powers to fight serious crime and terrorism. However, we in the Scottish National party believe that the Government’s attempt has not got that important balance right and we are looking forward to working with other parliamentarians to try to get it right. We are worried that the Government are not giving sufficient time for the consideration of this enormous Bill. The 14 Home Office documents relating to the Bill that were released to Parliament on 1 March, including the Bill itself, extend to 1,182 pages, which is almost treble the amount of material released with the draft Bill last November. There is a suspicion that the amount of material being released in large tranches, coupled with relatively short timescales within which to consider and amend proposals, is an indication that the Government do not really want proper parliamentary scrutiny of this. We are determined to do our best to make sure that sufficient parliamentary scrutiny is provided.

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[Lucy Frazer (South East Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

Every day we compromise our right to privacy. Consciously or not, we are increasingly willing to share aspects of our everyday life with others. I will take just three examples.

The first is Google. Google’s online terms of service expressly state that it analyses content, including emails, to provide personally relevant product features. Secondly, by having location services enabled on our phones, we are allowing a third party to record and keep track of where we have been, for how long and how often. Thirdly, we are privately recording each other. According to a recent estimate, in one day in Manchester a person is likely to be caught on CCTV 100 times, in circumstances in which 1.7 million of the 1.85 million surveillance cameras are privately owned.

We are therefore already exercising choice, limiting our own privacy, and we do so willingly, simply to maximise convenience and to allow us to use a free service. There is a saying, well known in security circles, that unless you are one of a very small group of people, Tesco already knows a great deal more about you than MI5 ever will.

The question I have is this: when we are happy to share such information with international corporations, which have expressly stated that they will share our data with third parties, why do we push back at the prospect of the intelligence, police and crime agencies collecting data to improve the security of our nation and to protect our citizens, and especially when it is proposed that these powers be exercised with clear safeguards, transparency and judicial oversight?

I have had the privilege of working as a barrister. I have been fortunate to act for the National Crime Agency and HMRC, to bring those allegedly involved in money laundering to justice and to recover tax, and I am acutely aware of the need for investigation and evidence when calling to account those who are adept at covering their tracks.

I have read the detailed and thorough report that David Anderson prepared as part of his initial review, and I should also declare that I was fortunate to be his pupil when starting out as a barrister. [Hon. Members: “Ah.”] “A Question of Trust” highlights the importance of communications data in every aspect of security and crime detection and prevention. In his report, David Anderson stated that in 26 recent cases of terrorist activity, where 17 resulted in a conviction, 23 could not have been pursued without communications data, and in 11 cases the conviction depended on the data. That compares to Germany where, at the time of the report, data retention arrangements were not in operation. There, 377 suspects were identified, seven could be investigated and no arrests were made.

The right to privacy is not an absolute right. As individuals we choose daily to trade it in for our own convenience, but even lawmakers in the field of human rights have recognised that it is circumscribed. Even in article 8(2) of the European convention on human rights, which protects the right in generic terms, the right is qualified in the interests of national security and the public interest. The price of freedom is constant vigilance, because freedom is not anarchy.

Proceeds of Crime

Lucy Frazer Excerpts

Wednesday 20th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hayes]

I shall answer one or two points on the first of the codes, then, with your permission and indulgence, Mr Speaker, I shall move the subsequent ones formally.

The points that have been made are all in the spirit of wanting the measure to work. I am grateful to the House for that. The shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey), made the telling point that this has long been a consideration of this House and of successive Governments. He referenced in particular the 2002 Act and he will know that subsequent legislation to which I referred earlier builds on that Act and brings it up to date, because as crime changes, the proceeds of crime and our ability to recover them change too. Very much in that spirit, I welcome what he said.

I note the hon. Gentleman’s point about the way the measure is explained. Although with typical courtesy he did not draw the attention of hon. Members to the fact, I am aware that the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee felt that the explanatory memorandum that accompanied these orders was not sufficient. I agree that the policy background in the memorandum was insufficient and did not set out that the powers will operate in the way I want them to, as he said. To that end, I am delighted to be able to tell him that this very morning I asked my officials to redraw the explanatory memorandum in exactly the form that he requested, with worked examples of how these things might work in practice. These are complex matters, but none the less it seems to me that they need to be articulated in a way that makes it absolutely clear how the codes will introduce the kind of safeguards that we all favour.

To that end, I can assure the House that my officials are well aware that the explanatory memorandum must do just that. I am delighted to be able to tell the House that the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee has said that were that to be done with the speed and in the fashion that I have described, it would be satisfied. The hon. Gentleman has done a service to this House and it is not his fault that I have anticipated his point by doing what I have described this morning. Indeed, it shows that we are on the same page.

My hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire (Kit Malthouse), who has moved—he is in his place, but his place has changed—made the interesting suggestion that the police might be incentivised, if I might put it in those terms, to go still further if they were to recover some of the costs of their inquiries. That is an interesting suggestion. It would be above my pay grade and outside my remit to agree it on the Floor of the House at this very moment, but I shall certainly take it back to the Department to discuss with the policing Minister and others.

[Lucy Frazer (South East Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend rightly mentioned that the explanatory memorandum could go into a little more detail, and I welcome that suggestion. Paragraph 4.9 of the explanatory memorandum suggests not only that there have been new additions but that:

“The code has been slightly restructured to make it easier to read and understand.”

Would it be possible to set out what is a clarification and what is a new provision, so that when that is considered in due course it will be clear that some points are just clarifications rather than new provisions?

[Mr Hayes]

With the eye for detail that my hon. Friend’s scrutiny increasingly shows, and for which she is building a substantial reputation, she draws attention to precisely one of the matters that I discussed with my officials in the conversation I had with them this morning, to which I referred in relation to the comments made by the shadow Minister. It is right that we should clarify that point. She is also right that we need to consider the whole of the explanatory memorandum in a similar spirit, and that is precisely what we intend to do. I am grateful to her for allowing me to illustrate that not only she has an eye for detail, but the Minister has too.

The points made by the hon. Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan) seemed to me to be absolutely on the button. It is important that these things are dealt with consistently and that we take them seriously. I make no comments on his remarks about the previous history in the Province, but I can assure him that we are determined that the powers shall apply across our kingdom and that they will be pursued with appropriate vehemence. There can be no greater mission than to ensure that criminals do not profit from what they do. That is precisely what we intend to achieve. I am grateful for his support and for the comments he made about that.

The hon. Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East (Stuart C. McDonald) spoke about immigration officers’ powers. I take his point; they have been generally expanded so that they are now mainstream law enforcement officers, like the police, the NCA and others. There is appropriate training—he is right that it is very important that that takes place—and appropriate safeguards and oversight, as there always should be in such matters. This is in relation to the 2002 Act, as I said, and I will pass concerns on to the Minister for Immigration so that the people for whom he is responsible are equipped with the information and skills they need. As I said in response to the hon. Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan), it is important that we behave consistently, and I am grateful for his contribution to the debate.

The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) spoke about effective enforcement, and not only is it important that these codes are clear, established, transparent and comprehensible, but the powers that they effect or give appropriate safeguards to must be used. As he said, it is right that there has been a determination in this House, but we must ensure that that is seen through to the point of impact. It is all very well having intent, a legislative vehicle and safeguards, but there must also be a determination that this is seen as an important priority in the Province and across the United Kingdom.

This has been a useful debate, and I am grateful for the spirit in which the House has considered these matters. It is perhaps best to end not with Yeats—although I could, and I am tempted to—but with C. S. Lewis, who said in “The Weight of Glory” that

“the art of life consists in tackling each immediate evil as well as we can”.

The proceeds of crime are an evil that this Government are entirely determined to tackle, and these codes will help us to do so. In that spirit, I commend the motion to the House.

Donald Trump

Lucy Frazer Excerpts

Monday 18th January 2016 Westminster Hall

[Lucy Frazer (South East Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes of the US Supreme Court said:

“The principle of free thought is not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought we hate.”

Of course, there are limits to freedom of expression, even in a libertarian democracy, where statements will cause real harm. However, if we fear all outrageous statements, if we fear a swell of support for unpopular views and if we fear challenge, we will stifle not only free thought but independence and liberty. We will lose the opportunity to rebut and to expose to argument, analysis and scrutiny, and we will lose the opportunity to win over those who may have listened, silently supported and agreed.

Limiting free speech does not always quash unwelcome beliefs. France has more laws restricting free speech than any other western democracy. It also has Europe’s largest far-right party. In 2009, Nick Griffin appeared on “Question Time”, watched by 8 million people. At the time, the BNP polled 6.26% of the national vote. In the first general election after that it not only failed to win a seat but fragmented in the polls. Last week, the Electoral Commission announced that the BNP had been stripped of its status as an official political party. The New Statesman referred to the poor performance on “Question Time” as a factor in eroding Nick Griffin’s popularity and the support of the BNP. To persuade those who may share the beliefs of a speaker, we need to do more than silence that speaker. We need to address the real grievances of those who may support them. We need to listen. We need to take note, and then we need to respond.

[Tulip Siddiq]

I thank the hon. and learned Lady, who is also my constituent, for giving way. Does she know that in the 24 hours after Nick Griffin had the platform of appearing on “Question Time”, 3,000 people joined the BNP?

[Lucy Frazer]

It is important to have free speech, so that we have debate. Nick Griffin’s appearance on “Question Time” will have evoked a number of responses. When there is an advocate for something, there will always be people who follow them. It may be a small minority. What we need to do is put those voices out there in order to slam them down. That, ultimately, is what has happened to the BNP.

Donald Trump’s statement that all Muslims should be banned from the US wrongly categorises an entire religion with a few extremists. His statements should be exposed as such. Now is not the time to ban him. Now is the time to say clearly that extremist Islamists are wrong and must be rooted out and stopped. Now is the time to say that the Muslim community is not Daesh. Now is the time to say that Muslims have given us such things as algebra and transformed the study of light and optics—discoveries that founded one of the bases for our modern technologies.

The other real difficulty is that Donald Trump is a presidential candidate. If we banned the leader of every country who made offensive, inappropriate or inflammatory statements or who took steps we did not approve of, we would have a much more limited foreign policy. Indeed, we may not even have a Leader of the Opposition.

I welcome both petitions and this debate. We live in a democracy that respects freedom of expression. When people make unacceptable statements, we need to use our capacity to expose their weaknesses and then ultimately defeat their arguments.

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[Anne McLaughlin]

Thank you, Sir David. The hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) talks about Republican politicians, but there are other politicians and activists in the United States of America who do not agree with Trump’s assessment of the situation.

I want to look at Donald Trump, the man and the boy. As his first name suggests, he is the son of a Scottish immigrant, and I apologise for that. Like countless others, his mother, Mary Anne MacLeod, left her homeland during the great depression and went to what was, after all, the land of liberty. The same desire for economic opportunity is what motivates many migrants from many other countries to go to America today. The Mexican migrants whom Trump so roundly defamed are engaged in the same quest as the one his forbears undertook. As a man who purports to be proud of his New York heritage, Trump would do well to look to Lady Liberty for some advice on immigration.

Of course, we would do well to remind Donald Trump, the son of a Scottish Presbyterian, of the countless generations of immigrants who left these shores and went to the US in search of religious toleration. The Puritans may have got a shock when they landed on Plymouth Rock, but they went on to forge a society where someone’s religion was, to a greater or lesser extent, irrelevant in public life. Although trailblazers such as Al Smith and John F. Kennedy faced anti-Catholic prejudice when they ran for office, they were always able to fall back on the fundamental truth that religious bigotry goes against all the enlightenment values that America shares with Europe.

It is easy for those of us who are protected by this parliamentary bubble to consider proposals and rhetoric such as Trump’s to be distasteful, opportunistic, funny or crude. However, I do not think that anyone here would disagree that all of us in public life have a duty to work for the common good and to oppose discrimination.

[Lucy Frazer]

The hon. Lady said earlier in her speech that she hoped that the Home Secretary would consider whether this case is any different from others that have been raised. Does she not think that this case is considerably different from the other cases in that we are discussing a presidential candidate? If a presidential candidate was banned and then became President, the ability to forge links and to discuss policy on a whole range of issues would be extremely difficult.

[Anne McLaughlin]

That is why I am summing up by giving both sides of the argument. I am maybe just a bit more vociferous in my opposition to Donald Trump the person. I understand the hon. Lady’s argument, but the way in which I see this case as being different because Donald Trump is a presidential candidate is that he should be less likely to get away with such things because he has far more influence over many more people.

Oral Answers to Questions

Lucy Frazer Excerpts

Monday 11th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

I am well aware of the concerns of journalists, specifically about the powers to access information that might lead to the identification of their sources. They feel that that could have a chilling effect. We have already made a change in the code of practice to require a higher level of judicial authority to allow access to something that could relate to journalists’ sources, and we will legislate on that in the draft Investigatory Powers Bill.

[Lucy Frazer (South East Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

The David Anderson report refers to Cambridgeshire county council’s Operation Magpie, which relied on communications data to protect more than 100 elderly and vulnerable persons from attempts to defraud them. Does the Secretary of State agree that such operations may benefit from the powers in the Bill to protect the most vulnerable?

[Mrs May]

My hon. and learned Friend raises a very important case, and provides a good example of why it is necessary sometimes for local authorities, such as Cambridgeshire county council, to have access to such powers so that they can do that important job of keeping people safe. After the Government were elected in 2010, we increased the requirements on local authorities in terms of gaining access to the most intrusive surveillance powers, but as she makes clear, in trading standards and other such areas, these powers are necessary to keep people safe.

Policing

Lucy Frazer Excerpts

Wednesday 4th November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

My hon. Friend tempts me on to important ground: we are considering today not only the overall size of the cake for the police—how much money the police budget gets from the spending review—but how that cake is then divvied up. This week, PCCs of all political colours, have come together to say that the rushed changes to the police funding formula could seriously destabilise our police services. I would be interested to know what response the Government will make to the letter they have received.

[Lucy Frazer (South East Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

I spoke to my local PCC yesterday and he confirmed to me that

“we are in a strong position to face future financial challenges”

while maintaining front-line services. Does the right hon. Gentleman therefore agree that many factors influence performance, of which finance is just one?

[Andy Burnham]

That may well be the case—I do not know, as I have not seen the details. May I gently point out to the hon. and learned Lady, however, that that is not the position everywhere? I refer her to the comments that the chief constable of Lancashire made yesterday before the Home Affairs Committee. He said that if these cuts go through,

“people in Lancashire will not be as safe as they are now”.

The chief constable of Cumbria has said that that force may not be viable, and we face the closure of police stations across the country. Complacency will not serve Conservative Members well in this debate.

Refugee Crisis in Europe

Lucy Frazer Excerpts

Tuesday 8th September 2015 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

I agree with the right hon. Gentleman that we need to do both. We cannot simply ignore people who have already fled out of such desperation, been on very difficult journeys and seen many terrible things along the way, including children who have endured all kinds of difficult and degrading treatments, whether at the hands of traffickers or in the form of the abuse they have left behind. We should help them because that is happening on our doorstep: we should be providing help in European countries, as well as in Syria itself, and we need to do so as part of a wider European plan.

We need a bigger plan, and Europe should be part of that plan. We do not have time today to debate a long-term solution for Syria, the military strategy against ISIL or the Government’s current approach to the Assad regime. We urgently need a new diplomatic initiative drawing on all the countries of the region, Russia, Iran, the US and countries from the Gulf and the EU, but no one believes that there is a simple foreign policy or military intervention that will swiftly restore millions of people to their homes.

We need a serious plan to cope with the humanitarian consequences, which could be with us for many years, and a plan for the region and the neighbouring countries of Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, which have shown great generosity. However, as long as the refugees in those countries have no proper homes and no schools for their children and as long as they cannot work and have no hope, they will of course seek sanctuary in European democracies. In effect, we need a Marshall plan for the area to provide the long-term support that we need to provide the stability that we need.

[Lucy Frazer (South East Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

The right hon. Lady mentioned that we do not have time to debate the bigger issue of what we do about ISIL, but in brief, how far does she think we should go to defeat ISIL in the region?

[Yvette Cooper]

The Prime Minister himself has said that acting against ISIL is a challenge for a generation. A response is taking place in Iraq and Syria at the moment. We wait for the Government to set out any further proposals that they have, and we will need to look at those in due course. However, that does not change anything about the humanitarian response that we need for those who are fleeing the conflict—not just those from Syria, but people from other countries who are crossing the Mediterranean.