I do not know in precise detail. I used to know when I was responsible for these matters as Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary. Even when I was Foreign Secretary and Home Secretary, when there were fewer telecommunications providers, the ones that were wholly UK-based inevitably had a different and closer relationship than those based overseas but which were providing telecommunications services in this country. The latter were, for reasons one understood, much less willing to enter into voluntary arrangements than those based in the UK.
I do not know whether the hon. Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan) was in the Chamber when I drew attention to the fact that this provision is genuinely a clarification of the extraterritorial application of the RIPA Act and not an extension of it. I refer him, for example, to a definition of a telecommunications system in section 2:
“any system … which exists (whether wholly or partly in the United Kingdom or elsewhere)”.
The clear intention of that Act was that it extended extraterritorially. The legal advice is that the wording has not worked quite as intended and that overseas telecommunications providers particularly want more clarification.