I again welcome the approach that the Security Minister has taken in reaching consensus on these matters.
First, and this is a very important principle, in this Bill we have maintained and preserved the right to receive legal advice in private. It is a very important principle and, as the Security Minister knows, I pressed him on it at a very early stage of and throughout the proceedings on the Bill. There was a concern either that someone who had been stopped and detained would use the ability to contact a lawyer to communicate the fact that they had been stopped—in other words, to contact someone who was not a lawyer—or, alternatively, that a genuine lawyer was contacted but that the lawyer would then somehow, inadvertently or otherwise, pass on information about the stop. I pressed the Minister on the solution that is now in the Bill at quite an early stage about a kind of duty solicitor scheme that could deal with both of those concerns, but also ensure that we preserved the very important right of legal advice in private. I am pleased that we have reached this stage on the Bill and that the Government have made that concession.
I now turn to a set of Lords amendments, starting with Lords amendment 14, on the urgent procedure for retaining and copying property at the border. I have looked at the Court of Appeal judgment in the David Miranda case. As the Minister says, the judgment, at paragraph 96, identified that there is
“no provision for authorisation by a court or other independent and impartial decision-making body in a case involving journalistic material prior to the use of the Schedule 7 power or, in an urgent case, immediately after the obtaining of the material pursuant to the exercise of the power.”
I fully accept that there are going to be very urgent situations, and this is expressed in terms of an imminent threat of loss of life or of injury. I am pleased to hear
what the Minister has said about the code of practice, which we can look at in due course. I previously suggested that there could be situations where a decision maker was available at the end of a telephone line, but I appreciate that there will be truly exceptional cases. The key to this is that, while I fully accept the law needs to be brought into line with what has been suggested in the Miranda case, we have to understand that these must be truly exceptional cases. That is something we can set when we come to debate the code of practice, being very clear that in these particular circumstances there will have to be a genuine, imminent threat that needs to be dealt with. Again, however, bringing the law into line with what the Court of Appeal has suggested is, on the whole, to be welcomed.
I want to speak to two other sets of Lords amendments. I will start with Lords amendments 17, 19, 26, 28 and 29 on the definition of hostile activity. The difficulty is that if this is defined purely in terms of criminal activity, that does not capture other types of hostile espionage activity, which may not necessarily bring into play parts of the criminal law. I did think that there was a danger of this being drawn too broadly, and I am pleased that these amendments narrow the definition, so that when we talk about threatening the economic wellbeing of the UK, we have now added
“in a way relevant to the interests of national security”.
The key is to ensure that we have the powers we need while also being precise about what we consider “hostile activity” to be. It is a welcome amendment that improves the Bill.
Finally, Lords amendments 41 and 42 relate to information sharing. Schedule 3 provides that an officer questioning someone at the border can hand over information to appropriate bodies, as decided by the Secretary of State. I think that narrowing the provision to bodies exercising public functions is to be welcomed, but I have regularly made the point to the Minister during the passage of the Bill that bodies such as local authorities will need the appropriate resources, expertise and support to handle the information, particularly when it is likely to be highly sensitive.
Taken together, I think that the Lords amendments that I have spoken to, covering the four themes I have referenced, make the Bill a better and more effective piece of legislation, although I am keen to engage with the Minister when the codes of practice to which he referred come before both Houses.