Investigatory Powers Bill

My Lords, my noble friend has very helpfully referred to the qualification of economic well-being as a justification by reference to national security and he rightly probed why it appears in that form. It gave me some satisfaction, in a sense, that it was qualified in this way because, in my years on the Intelligence and Security Committee, I occasionally thought that the concept of economic well-being was capable of extraordinarily wide interpretation. If it was being interpreted very widely in order to support actions which might in some way touch upon economic well-being, it is appropriate that it should be qualified if the powers engaged are sufficiently wide as potentially to affect the rights and liberties of other people. In this legislation we are talking about powers which can impinge upon the lives and liberties of other people unintentionally or not as part of the purpose but as a necessary consequence of being able to use things such as bulk datasets or equipment interference. Therefore, I hope that the reason that economic well-being is qualified by reference to national security is a recognition that some of the powers given in this Bill require particularly stringent qualification to be permissive and used. If that is so, I welcome it.