Striking the right balance between liberty and security is one of the most difficult judgments we have to make as a society. Anyone who has prosecuted and defended in our criminal courts—I see several here—well understands the tension that exists between the need to protect the public from harm and preserving our precious individual freedoms. This is therefore an immensely difficult issue, and if we get it wrong, the consequences are indeed serious. But the fact that we are able to approach this Bill in a calm atmosphere, and not against a backdrop of the panic and emotion of a recent outrage, is in no small part due to the constituents of mine working at GCHQ. Their quiet, brilliant work saves lives. They avoid the limelight and do not seek our thanks, but we owe them a profound debt of gratitude.
It would be a great mistake for calmness to give way to complacency, as serious plots are thwarted with alarming regularity. Before I came to this place, I was part of the team that prosecuted five young British jihadis who had travelled from Birmingham to Dewsbury intending to detonate an improvised explosive device filled with nails at a public rally. Had the plot succeeded, the potential for carnage would have been horrifying, and I have no doubt that we would be experiencing the repercussions today.
In my experience, the people in the intelligence agencies I have met, both as a barrister prosecuting terrorism offences and since my election, are scrupulous about remaining within the law. That means we have a covenant with them. We must provide them with a piece of legislation that gives them the tools to keep us safe, but we also owe it to them to create a framework containing the safeguards needed to command public confidence—nothing less than that will do. I believe that this Bill gets that balance broadly right and it deserves a Second
Reading. That judgment has been possible because the Government have listened carefully and responded in appropriate detail to the legitimate concerns raised by the Joint Committee on the Draft Investigatory Powers Bill, the Intelligence and Security Committee and the Science and Technology Committee. However, valid points have been raised today, for example on whether we ought further to limit the pool of agencies to which ICRs can be available, and on the threshold for the type and seriousness of criminality that ought to trigger their use. Those legitimate points have been properly raised, but they can be raised in Committee.
I do not have the time to examine more than a fraction of what this Bill contains, but I wish to say a few words about bulk powers. The bulk data powers in the Bill are not new. The law today has long allowed the security and intelligence agencies to acquire bulk data under RIPA and so on. Those powers underpin a significant proportion of what our security services already do.