The noble Lord is getting closer to the possible political reality. To be fair to the Home Office, it studied our report carefully. I and one or two others had the privilege of seeing the revised draft Bill, which took into account everything we had said and delivered about 95% of what our report suggested. Unfortunately, that revised Bill did not find favour with all the members of the coalition and therefore it has not emerged in that form.
I say to my noble friend the Minister that if in the next Parliament the Government produce a Bill largely along the lines of the redraft, I am certain that it will have a chance of getting through both Houses of Parliament. But if they are encouraged from any quarter to go back to the original so-called snoopers’ charter, they will merely tack on more powers to a discredited RIPA. In my opinion, RIPA is no longer fit for purpose. It was designed at a time when we had push-button telephones that could hold two or three messages at most, not the modern communications machinery that we have today. If they go back to that old charter, they will face massive opposition in the country and in Parliament, and they do not need to because the blueprint for a better Bill exists.
Finally, I will make a couple of observations that may be slightly more contentious. As we were deliberating on the powers the police needed to look at e-mails and other data in order to capture paedophiles, stories began to emerge of police forces around the country—for example, in Bradford or Leicester—which had ignored complaints over the past 15 years from hundreds of young girls of systematic and habitual rape. The police turned a blind eye to those cases and have only now started prosecuting. I believe that they turned a blind eye because the perpetrators were mainly from the Pakistani community and they did not want to prosecute because of political correctness. Of course the police and security services must have the powers they need to deal with paedophiles on the internet but they must also prosecute hard cases of children being raped and brutalised in reality in this country.
My very final point, which again comes from my experiences on the Bill, is that we discovered that police training was often inadequate to deal with the amount of communications data available. The executive from Twitter told us that she would often get a request from the police saying, “Give me everything you have on Blencathra’s tweeting”, when the answer was, “Look on the net yourself”. We do not need a special order for that. It is out there in the public domain, and they were not fully aware of that. There is a range of things that our modern iPhones and other Samsung-type devices have and the police need to get up to speed on the information that is currently available on the world wide web before seeking some draconian powers to look at a few hundred million e-mails each year.
With those little caveats and pieces of advice to my noble friend on how to take forward serious crime measures and a new data communications Bill, I warmly welcome the Bill.
6.24 pm