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Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. This is not a Committee debate. It is not right to go into such detail.
Mr. Maclean: I am sorry that I began to do so. I should not let my hon. Friends lead me astray into that detail. We shall have to spend considerable time in Committee looking at the detail of clauses 2 and 3.
Mr. Fabricant: Given the broader picture that my right hon. Friend has painted, is he aware that there will be costs for manufacturing companies as a result of the Bill's scope and the sort of companies that can be investigated under its terms? Has he noticed whether there has been any compliance cost analysis?
Mr. Maclean: My hon. Friend makes an important point in his own way. I shall not go into the details of clauses 2 and 3, but the House will see the space that they take up in the Bill. The Government have built in every catch-all provision that they can to ensure that they have the details of every company, business or person engaged in research on anything nuclear. That information will then be passed on to the agency.
Mr. Bercow: Given the extent of the powers that the Bill confers upon agency investigators and the fact, which will not have escaped you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, that we have been debating the Bill for precisely 270 minutes, it is imperative that the Minister who replies should deal in detail with the concern of many of us that aggrieved individuals should have redress against abuse of power, the opportunity for which is provided deliberately or inadvertently by the Bill.
Mr. Maclean: My hon. Friend is right but slightly ahead of me. I intended to take up that point when I turned my attention to the Bill and drew attention to the lack of a redress system for those who have been aggrieved. I do not need to deal any more with the protocol because my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst dealt with it extensively.
As I pass on to the Bill, I wish merely to point out that although the Government have signed the protocol and wish to ratify it and bring it into law, we must not think that we have made a marvellous step forward. I do not think that we have, because many challenges still remain. For example, many states that are party to the non-proliferation group have yet to conclude safeguard agreements with the agency. There may be no harm in Britain being one of the few countries to have done so, but in five years' time there may be an opportunity to initiate an Adjournment debate on these matters, and we may find that Britain is still No. 9 and that no other state has signed up.
It would be a welcome development if some of the 50 other NPG states, without the safeguard agreement in force, were to review the run-up to the April conference at the end of this week. I understand that the Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office will attend the April 2000 review conference, and I hope that the House will be told that having gone there, aiming to clutch the
Nuclear Safeguards Act in his hand--I suspect that we shall not be able to make it an Act by Easter, but instead carrying the Bill--he will say, "We have completed Second Reading and we are now in Committee, and ratification will take place shortly." How many other Ministers from the 50 states that have failed to make progress will be able to make a similar report?Before we judge the Bill, we want an estimate of how many other states will sign up. I do not wish to discuss individual countries or to say that we can now sleep safely in our beds because the Pope has signed up and we shall not be nuked by the Vatican, which is reassuring. However, we are entitled to know from the Minister whether the Government expect that there will be many other states following the lead that he wishes the British Government to give.
Mr. Forth: My right hon. Friend has made a new point, which must be something of a record in the debate. He is introducing an important angle. We have been talking in terms of what the Government will want to take to the April conference. We have the unseemly spectacle of the Minister wanting to rush the proposed legislation through the House. My right hon. Friend must be correct: if we are to give the Bill a Second Reading, we should in Committee have knowledge of whether progress has been made at the international forum so that we can make a judgment about completion of the Bill's consideration. It may be that we would want to pause on Third Reading if we were not satisfied that progress was being made at great international conferences.
Mr. Maclean: My right hon. Friend, in his usual highly intelligent and erudite way, has made an exceptionally good point. One of the reassurances that I would like to hear from the Minister tonight is that he will delay going into Committee until after Easter. He would only lose one Committee session and it would not jeopardise the Bill. Or the Bill could go into Committee and the Minister could table a sittings motion for the Committee to proceed after Easter, at which point we could have a report from the Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office on the progress that he made at the April 2000 review conference. He could also give us a list of the other countries which attended clutching their own Bills.
Mr. Bercow: Am I right in thinking that the Minister, who has been somewhat lonely on the Front Bench in the past few hours, will only by leave of the House have the opportunity to speak for a second time in replying to the debate? Does my right hon. Friend agree that if the Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office wishes to brandish aloft at an international conference a piece of paper that testifies to the success of his Government in securing early passage of the provisions in the protocols, the least that he could do in courtesy to the House would be to offer to wind up this debate? The fact that he is not even attending our proceedings is further naked evidence of the contempt in which Ministers of this Government hold this elected House.
Mr. Maclean: My hon. Friend makes an excellent point in his own way. It is a point that needs repetition, but I make no accusation against the Minister who is present. He is exceptionally courteous. Indeed, I hope that the Government have not abandoned the tradition of
ensuring that, if a Minister has to be present in the Chamber all day, another Minister comes in to allow him to have a break for some beans on toast. The Minister has not had the chance for refreshment all day, and that is an unfair burden on any Minister.With regard to the substance of my hon. Friend's remarks, I cannot think of any right hon. or hon. Friend who would object to the Minister seeking the leave of the House to reply to the debate. He is a courteous Minister and I would much prefer to hear his reply than that of the Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office. No one on the Opposition Benches would object to the Minister seeking the leave of the House to speak again.
I turn now to the Bill itself. We need an indication of the extent of the regulations that will be required under clause 3, which will give the Secretary of State power to
- make regulations requiring persons of any description specified in the regulations to inform him that they are of such a description and to give supplementary particulars.
Clause 3 is wide ranging, as is clause 2, and the Government should indicate what regulations they have in mind. I recall a time, not so long ago, when what is almost a Henry VIII measure such as this would not have got through the House, or past the other place, unless the Government produced in advance the draft regulations that they intended to make. I remember several Bills that I piloted through the House that were held up until Home Office officials had drafted in advance all the regulations that we could possible conceive of making, because the Opposition and the other place demanded to see the pig in the poke.
Dr. Howells: Which regulations is the right hon. Gentleman referring to? Draft regulations under clause 3 were put into the Library on 29 November last year. They set out what it is envisaged will be required from companies under that clause.
Mr. Maclean: I am delighted to be corrected on that and apologise for suggesting that that had not been done. The extensive material that I collected from the Library did not contain them, so I assumed that the Library did not have them. If the regulations are comprehensive and make clear what the Government want, that is excellent. I withdraw my remarks without hesitation.
Mr. Bercow: My right hon. Friend should not be too apologetic. Sackcloth and ashes are not required. The Minister will recall an intervention that I made in the contribution from my hon. Friend the Member for Spelthorne (Mr. Wilshire) to inquire whether the regulations would be subject to the negative or the affirmative procedure. The Minister intervened on him with a reference to his own handwriting. Does my right hon. Friend think that we should look to the negative procedure for the regulations, or to the affirmative?
Mr. Maclean: That is a good point. I assumed that the Minister would have mentioned that, if he knew about the
regulations when he said that he did. However, there is no harm in apologising when one is wrong, and I was wrong about the regulations. I wish other Departments could be as forthcoming as his has been in producing draft regulations under the Bill.
- The powers of an authorised officer who enters premises under the authority of a warrant under this section include power--
(a) to take with him such other persons and such equipment as appear to him to be necessary.
- A constable who enters premises under the authority of a warrant.
Police provision for football matches is always recompensed, as it is additional, unusual expenditure. However, the police are worried about the burdens that are placed on them, and about the vicious Government funding cuts that have caused bobby numbers to fall. Will the chief constable of my county, Cumbria, now say that he will have to close more rural police stations and take more bobbies off the beat because his officers have been summoned by authorised officers to accompany certain persons into nuclear installations or research facilities?
Clause 8 deals with the search provision, and the Minister should get his officials to look at it again. I cannot remember the rules introduced by the previous Government on searches, but they were introduced under legislation relating to the transfer of prisoners. I seem to recall that searches range from removing a person's hat or coat to removing all his or her clothing. The severest form of search is the intimate body search by police service doctors.
The Government could save themselves a problem if they specified what sort of search they mean. I assumed that it was, as with security searches at airports, a case of patting the body without asking people to remove any more clothing than a coat--without going into grubby details.
Clause 5, by far the most contentious in the Bill, deals with the powers of inspectors to come into this country and go into any private property without a warrant. Under clause 4, a warrant must be granted before British inspectors can enter British property. When we referred to foreign inspectors invading private British property, the Minister pulled us up and told us not to be disparaging about the inspectors--some of whom are British--who have an excellent reputation. I agree entirely. I have no criticism of the inspectors in the British nuclear industry or the agency officers who have been doing such work since 1946 or 1956. They have a long-standing and noble reputation of proper, thorough, decent inspection. However, our fundamental freedoms existed even before those inspectors. So, although I have no criticism of the inspectors who may enter our property, it is nevertheless
legitimate to challenge them, along with police constables, Customs and Excise officers, or any other officers who seek extraordinary rights to invade our fundamental freedoms.The Committee considering the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill has just ended. It dealt with clauses giving draconian powers to the security service, the special intelligence service, Customs and Excise, MI5, the fisheries inspector, the Department of Health dodgy medicines inspector--even the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food egg inspector, as we discovered by accident one day. The Committee regularised their draconian powers to undertake covert surveillance, directed surveillance and, for some of the top security agencies of the state, electronic surveillance such as tapping e-mails. The Minister of State, Home Office, the hon. Member for Norwich, South (Mr. Clarke), was extremely courteous, and meticulous in assuring the Committee that the powers for people to enter private property and bag all mail and correspondence were necessary only because there were serious issues at stake. We were told that the Home Secretary could be trusted because we could always ensure that, whenever he granted a warrant, it would be done properly, and there would be a judicial committee to check on it.
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