Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Bill

Part of Bills Presented – in the House of Commons at 3:19 pm on 15 July 2014.

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Photo of David Davis David Davis Conservative, Haltemprice and Howden 3:19, 15 July 2014

It is a particular pleasure to follow my old sparring partner from east Yorkshire on this as much as on any other issue.

As I have only a short time, I shall focus on one issue alone out of the four that affect the Bill. When this Government brought a different but related Bill before the House, the so-called snooper’s charter, it was, frankly, an embarrassment. It was pilloried by the Joint Committee on the Draft Communications Data Bill and heavily criticised by both MPs and Lords. One clear fact that arose from that review was that many thought that RIPA, the Bill upon which this legislation is based, was simply not fit for purpose, that it was too loose, and that if the snooper’s charter came before the House at some later stage, many would use it to rewrite RIPA. Certainly many Liberals thought that, and a number of Conservatives too, and some Members of other parties. That may be one reason why the Government are uncomfortable about giving this Bill a full procedure over several weeks, with a proper Committee and Report stage, and so on; because they may find that they get a tighter definition of RIPA than they previously had.

The House knows that I am not a great fan of the British Government being told what to do by the European Court of Justice or the European Court of Human Rights. I much prefer that British liberties—our freedom, our privacy—are protected by Parliament. But the harsh truth is that Parliament has been a weak defender of our freedoms this past 20 years, and the process we face today, crashing the Bill through the Commons in a single day—even more poignantly on reshuffle day; I see the empty Benches around me—is an awful demonstration of that. One consequence of that slack attitude is that we have bumped more and more frequently into treaty obligations and international court judgments against us, where Britain should be the shining example, not the villain of the piece. The Bill does nothing to correct that.

The Court, as a number of speakers have mentioned, branded the untargeted mass collection of our data—European rather than just ours—as a

“wide-ranging and particularly serious interference with” our

“fundamental rights.”

It is arguably the case that, in some ways, Britain is the most extreme example of that across western Europe. Because the Bill does nothing to correct that particular aspect, it is likely to face legal challenge, and may well fail as a result. It will not be beneficial to security in this country if that happens.

Much of this failure hinges on the fact that access to communication data in this country is not subject to judicial approval. It is one of the differences between ourselves and America and some other European countries. It is approved by officers of the same organisation that request it. The result of that—the point that I think Caroline Lucas was referring to—is that too many people have too much access, too easily, to too much data. That is the core point. Therefore, we use this power in that respect more often than many of our international colleagues.

There were 514,000 authorisations and notices reported in the RIPA 2013 report. It is difficult to compare countries, but to give a partial comparison—