My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, who knows a lot about this area. I do not need to repeat many of the very good arguments that have been made, including the obvious case about the delay between the European Court passing its judgment in April and this Bill being rushed through now, which is right. The Government have to answer for it. I do not wish to pursue it. I agree that the legislation needs to go through and that it is very good that the Government have accepted some of the amendments dealing with reviews, the sunset clause, and so on.
I heard the Minister say in his opening speech that he accepted the second recommendation in the Delegated Powers Committee’s report. I did not hear him say that he accepted the first recommendation, which deals
with the affirmative procedure being used after the regulations have been brought into effect. Will the Government accept that recommendation in paragraph 7 of the report? The noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, made a number of interesting points. If I understood him correctly, as regards Clause 3 on grounds for issuing warrants and obtaining data, his question deserves an answer. Why are the Government using the words “necessary and proportionate”, which is a weaker phrase, when the European Court of Justice refers to “strictly necessary”? I am relieved to see the noble and learned Lord nodding because I did not quite follow some of the legal points that he made. That seems to be an important point.
I now turn to the issue in its wider sense, which has been very important to me for some time. I have had a long involvement in legislation, as the noble Lord, Lord Howard, will know, including in the Prevention of Terrorism Act in the House of Commons. The noble Lord, Lord King, made the point that about 30 to 40 years ago there was a department in, I think, the Home Office, which steamed open letters to see what was written in them. My memory is of making a speech in about 1979 pointing out that MI5 and MI6 did not have an existence in statute. No statute recognises the existence of those two organisations despite the fact that MI6 probably was the most famous secret service in the world, thanks in no small part to James Bond and, rather less romantically, to the Cambridge spy ring. What interested me was that they had no legal existence in the normal sense. As a result of the questions that I and others asked at that time, legislation was passed in the early 1980s which gave them a statutory basis.
It is also right to say that Bletchley Park, which was unacknowledged, emigrated after the war to Cheltenham and became GCHQ. I am not quite sure of the history. I asked the noble Baroness, Lady Trumpington, but I am not sure that she knew either at what point it became part of statute. To put this in a historical perspective, the interesting reason is that it is difficult for democratic states to deal with legislation of this type. Although everyone has been rightly saying that our security services are very good and deserve praise, it is also right to point out that the various civil liberty groups and individuals who rattle the bars at times of legislation of this type going through at high speed are absolutely right to do so. Although some people might get frustrated with them, a healthy democracy, if it did not have such groups and individuals, ought to invent them. It is worth pointing out that they are as necessary as the security services.
I strongly agree with the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra; we have discussed before how the Regulatory and Investigatory Powers Act was unfit for purpose before it hit the statute book. It was already out of date. In a sense, my main point, which also relates to the speech made by the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, is that we should be extremely proud in this country that Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web. We underestimate how much he is appreciated around the world. In the context of this debate, we also underestimate massively the complexity of the path before us with modern technology.
There is a balance here. We all know that the balance is between the powers of the state and the rights of individual—freedom, citizenship, privacy and so on. It is a recognition that, because of the nature of modern weapons, the threat particularly from terrorism—although the Bill goes wider than just terrorism—is profoundly dangerous, far more dangerous than the 19th-century anarchist going around with a smoking bomb, ready to throw it. We are now talking about the death of thousands, or perhaps tens of thousands, of people.
On the other hand, there is the complexity of the technology; it brings us great freedoms and we ought to be grateful for that. I am sorry that the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, was a bit depressed by it. I find that, with the invention of modern technology, the freedoms and the ability to deal with problems accelerate. I will give a very brief example. I was out walking in the Oxfordshire countryside at the weekend and came across a cow stuck in a pool of mud and water. It was drowning. Thanks to modern technology, I was able to give the precise latitude and longitude of the position to a police officer—using the 101 number, not the 999 number. Within 35 minutes—we were 30 minutes away from the nearest track—two firemen appeared and pulled the cow out. It might seem a minor example, but you have only to think of all the examples in your life in which modern technology had been profoundly useful and had opened up all sorts of possibilities. If that had been the old days, I would have had to walk for miles to find a phone or a farm, and I probably would not have got back in time for this debate. The difference is massive and, of course, it opens up all sorts of possibilities in real life.
I come to my main point in this debate. I was very glad that the Government had accepted the recommendations about reviews, sunset clauses and so on because I believe that the challenge to us is to use this time that we have, in this House and in the House of Commons, to devise better ways of looking at legislation, particularly in relation to issues of this type. We do not have a structure for examining legislation in a way that keeps us up with technological change. I agree with all the comments that have been made about some of the committees and so on. I feel that this view applies not just to this Bill but to many Bills, which are often slightly dated by the time they come into effect because they have been overtaken by technology.
Legislation such as this is particularly important because the control of the security services evokes the Nineteen Eighty-Four argument about how much power should be given to the state and how much you risk if you take those powers away and leave yourself at risk from the activities of other groups. I wish that I had a nice, simple model to offer to the Minister and could say, “This is the sort of structure that we need to develop in this House in order to have the processes that could keep us up to date with technological change on the legislation that we are passing”. I do not have such a model, and the challenge to this House and to the House of Commons is to devise such structures. Both Houses are famous—and rightly so—for their ability to defend and speak up for freedom over the centuries, but we are in such a strange situation.
I return to what the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, said about technology. Her speech was important because it was the only one so far in this debate that put it in the context of the digital revolution. As we try to legislate now, I do not think of myself as at the cutting edge of the digital revolution; I manage, but it is more of a struggle than a great success. Yet it is so important. It affects so many walks of life and so many people, and there is a danger that the public see us as not being relevant, in part because we cannot keep up our legislative processes with the speed of technological change.
There is an opportunity here to use this Bill and the period working up to the sunset clause to start looking at more effective ways of keeping legislation up to speed with technology. The importance of this Bill is massive because of the balance between the security of citizens in the face of threats from crime and the protection of their rights, of which we are so proud both in this House and in the House of Commons. I urge the Government to acknowledge that we all need to focus on how we can improve our legislative processes so that we do not have situations like this and, if we have to rush something through, that we examine and process them in a way which does not mean that we end up losing some of the freedoms that we value so dearly.
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