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Caroline Flint: I begin by assuring the hon. Gentleman that SOCA will have a close working relationship with all the intelligence agencies in furtherance of their shared objective of combating serious crime in the United Kingdom. The fact that we appointed Sir Stephen Lander, former director general of the Security Service, as chairman-designate of SOCA is testimony to that. We are clear that SOCA and the intelligence agencies will acquire information of value to each other and they must be free to share such information in furtherance of their respective functions. The information gateways in clauses 32 and 33 will facilitate that.
Although we share the sentiment behind the amendments, we do not believe that they are necessary. Clause 3(2) already provides that SOCA may, as one of its functions, disseminate information to ''law enforcement agencies''. That term is defined in subsection (4) and includes Government Departments. The Security Service, the Secret Intelligence Service and GCHQ are all non-ministerial Government Departments; as such they already come within the definition of a law enforcement agency.
The Bill will achieve the intent behind the amendments. I hope that the hon. Gentleman is reassured by my remarks and I invite him to withdraw the amendment.
Mr. Mitchell: This is an important point. The Minister says that the Bill says ''may'' rather than makes the matter an express requirement, as is the specific purpose of our amendments, so I cannot accept her argument, no matter how lucidly it was put. Therefore I want to press amendment No. 5 to a Division.
Question put, That the amendment be made:—
The Committee divided: Ayes 6, Noes 10.
Division No. 4]
AYES
Clappison, Mr. James
Clifton-Brown, Mr. Geoffrey
Djanogly, Mr. Jonathan
Grieve, Mr. Dominic
Heath, Mr. David
Mitchell, Mr. Andrew
NOES
Baird, Vera
Cairns, David
Campbell, Mr. Alan
Farrelly, Paul
Flint, Caroline
Griffiths, Jane
Heppell, Mr. John
McWalter, Mr. Tony
Mann, John
Ward, Claire
Question accordingly negatived.
Mr. Heath: I beg to move amendment No. 84, in clause 3, page 3, line 12, after 'is', insert
'recognised by the Secretary of State as being'.
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The amendment is designed to explore the extraordinarily wide scope of subsection (4)(d), which extends the definition of law enforcement agency to anybody who does anything roughly similar to SOCA or a police force anywhere in the world. That makes the whole of subsection (2) redundant, because it empowers SOCA to inform anybody it chooses of almost anything in almost any circumstances. That is not entirely sensible. SOCA will have a great deal of sensitive information, some of which it cannot properly pass on to other people unless it is satisfied that it is doing so for the express purpose of preventing crime, since its function is to prevent crime within our jurisdiction rather than in that of others. The least we might expect is some degree of clarity about what constitutes a foreign police force—assuming that the provision refers to foreign police forces; presumably we are not considering British operatives working overseas in a policing or quasi-policing role.
There should be some accountability for passing information to other organisations. I do not doubt that SOCA will take its responsibilities seriously and will be very careful, but the British citizen is entitled to have the satisfaction of knowing that the Secretary of State has given some sort of imprimatur to the organisation in question—that it is a bona fide police force or investigation agency. Under the present wording, people carrying out a function similar to those carried out by a police force or SOCA would include bounty hunters. They would be entitled to receive information—or SOCA would be entitled to give it to them—by virtue of clause 3. I do not think that that would be a proper use of information gathered within the United Kingdom by SOCA and I suspect that SOCA would not feel that it was appropriate either. However, the legal justification for it is contained in the clause, loosely worded as it is.
David Cairns (Greenock and Inverclyde) (Lab): I am genuinely curious and not trying to trip the hon. Gentleman up. Would the effect of his amendment be to exclude organisations and agencies that do not come under the remit of the Secretary of State, such as the Scottish Drugs Enforcement Agency? Would they be affected?
Mr. Heath: Absolutely not. Let me make it clear that that is covered under a separate subsection. The Scottish DEA is defined as a separate police force, for example, and therefore comes under (3)(2)(b). We are talking about those organisations that may be defined as law enforcement agencies under (3)(2)(c). Those include the customs and excise commissioners—or the revenue and customs commissioners, as they will become. The Scottish Administration is still there—there is no problem with that. The
''person who is charged with the duty of investigating offences or charging offenders''
is understood to be within British jurisdiction under English, Welsh or Scots law. However, there are other people who may be outside the United Kingdom and exercising some power similarly to a police force or SOCA and to whom SOCA may be entitled to disseminate information. The laxity of the wording
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may have little consequence in practice, because SOCA would not be in the practice of passing on information to any person not associated with a respectable law enforcement agency—or so I would hope—but I would feel happier if the Secretary of State were at least to have a role, so that there is a degree of accountability for the citizen through Parliament for information passed to a third party which is a quasi-policing organisation in another country.
Mr. Tony McWalter (Hemel Hempstead) (Lab/Co-op): Does the hon. Gentleman want every police force in the whole world listed? If you accidentally missed one, for example the specialist force that deals with policing the Basque country, you would lose the opportunity of liaising with them. That surely cannot be what he wants.
Mr. Heath: No, I do not want that, and I am sure the hon. Gentleman does not think that I do. All I am asking for is recognition that, for instance, the police forces that are members of Interpol or Europol would automatically be recognised by the Secretary of State and indeed under statute within this country.
I do not think that the amendment implies any operational difficulties. It simply provides a safeguard against information being given to a third party abroad that may not be a genuine police force or a genuine law enforcement agency, but may have some other design. In operational terms I think it will have no effect, but in safeguarding British citizens and the constitutionality of the arrangements it will have considerable import. I therefore commend the amendment to the Committee.
John Mann (Bassetlaw) (Lab): The amendment hits right at one of the biggest tensions behind the Bill. How effective will SOCA be, since one person's accountability is another person's political interference? Let me illustrate that with a couple of examples from the drugs trade, which is one of the most serious organised crime threats we face in this country.
In its 2001 report on drug trafficking, the UN suggested that heroin production and trade in south-east Asia had virtually disappeared, based on evidence collated from Australia and New Zealand, where there had indeed been a dramatic reduction in the preceding two years. The UN gives no conclusions about why this happened, but people on the ground suggest that it was not because gangs had stopped heroin in Burma and Thailand. Instead, they stopped trafficking it rather expensively to fairly small markets in Australia and New Zealand, where they were well identified by the law enforcement agencies. Instead they shifted the northward to China. People on the ground suggest that there is a major and growing heroin epidemic sweeping China, which is particularly prevalent in its south. I suggest that the reason why the UN has chosen to overlook the evidence from the specialists on the ground in Thailand and Burma—whose evidence shows that consumption by the local population is not decreasing as the UN is suggesting, but is, in fact, rapidly increasing—is to do with some kind of political consideration, that of not wanting to upset China.
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A second example is the evidence provided by the CIA of heroin routes into this country from Afghanistan, which I have challenged on a number of occasions. The CIA's analysis is, in essence, that all the heroin goes through a geographically circuitous route via Iran, Turkey and the Balkans. No logical business person would take a product through three separate countries, particularly a war zone, because of the add-ons they would have to pay to transport it safely. Evidence of consumption on the ground suggests an alternative route through Russia into eastern Europe—Poland, the Czech Republic and particularly the Baltic states. Consumption evidence produced by Scandinavian health services reveals that that is precisely where the biggest increase in heroin consumption for the last four or five years has taken place. Far be it from me to suggest that there might be some people in the intelligence services there who have a political motive in suggesting that Iran is a bigger problem—
The Chairman: Order. I draw the hon. Member's attention to the fact that we are considering information gathering outside the UK. I think we have gone a little bit wide of the point. I appreciate the hon. Member's contribution, but I ask him to contain his remarks to the narrow issue of information gathering.
John Mann: My point is this: where there is a political imperative in the intelligence provided, it can skew the criminal enforcement. What is required is a criminal enforcement agency that is sufficiently confident in its independence, ethos and culture to look at the evidence base, rather than political presumptions.
Will the drug liaison officers that we have as UK police secondments in countries such as Colombia and other drug-trafficking countries remain in their role, or will they become part of SOCA? In other words, will they report into the agency, or be part of it? In addition, does the Minister believe that there is an increasing need for a European initiative on organised crime? Should that not be the direction that SOCA takes?
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