Clause 20
Counter-Terrorism Bill
6:14 pm
Tony McNulty (Minister of State (Security, Counter-terrorism, Crime and Policing), Home Office; Harrow East, Labour)
No, I have not used “undue specificity” either, but I am sure that we will return to that in due course. As the hon. and learned Gentleman has said, when subsection (4) states that
“Nothing in the section shall be read as casting doubt on the legality”,
it is simply referring to the disclosure provisions. It would be utterly mischievous if someone were to remove that clause from the Bill, look at it in a broader context and say, “Here we are. We have found a way to absolve the intelligence agencies of anything they have done in the past.” That is what the hon. Gentleman implied but did not pursue. The clarity that I talk of is the clarity of the relationships between, and the responsibility of, the agency and others regarding the disclosure of information, and no more. We are clearly setting up—in the jargon—the information gateways to put all that on a statutory footing, and it is a much clearer statutory footing than the previous root in common law. I shall return to the hon. Gentleman, but first, there may be some who suggest that if we are setting up the information gateway to afford the agencies the ability to disclose information in that fashion, there was no legal basis to do so before. There was, however. To get rid of any notion that the legal basis was not rooted in common law, or that somehow things are different now, we think that in the context of clauses 19, 20 and 21, the clause, however elegantly or otherwise written, is entirely appropriate and utterly relevant.