The ‘spy powers bill’ is a step too far – all parties should unite to oppose it in the Lords

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Having served as a police officer for more than 30 years, I know that it is an undesirable but necessary part of policing to rely on informants, or “covert human intelligence sources” as they are now known. And, on occasion, those informants need to be tasked to commit crime.

In fact, I was once a “controller”, responsible for controlling the way police “handlers” used and rewarded informants, and I have spoken to many former controllers and handlers about their experiences.

Now, because of a legal challenge, the government has been forced to put that tasking on a statutory footing. That is why it has brought forward the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Bill, which we are debating in the House of Lords today.

If all this legislation did was to provide the legal authority for the police and security services to authorise informants, when necessary, to commit crime, it would maintain the status quo and the Liberal Democrats would have no argument with it. Unfortunately, the government’s bill goes much further than that – unacceptably too far.

It would give informants total immunity prior to their being tasked to commit crime, including being sued for damages, including any conduct that is “incidental” to what they have been authorised to do.

That is a complete reversal from the status quo, where the prosecuting authorities, like the Crown Prosecution Service, examines what happens after the event, and independently decides whether it is in the public interest to prosecute or not. Yet the government has been unable to provide any evidence that this change in the law is necessary.

The government claims that “we have lost intelligence and failed to recruit undercover operatives” because we do not guarantee them immunity prior to the crime. So, we asked for the evidence. How much intelligence has been lost? We don’t know, they said. We asked how many times have operational partners failed to recruit undercover operatives as a result of the status quo? We don’t know, the government said.  

We asked how many times a properly authorised agent or informant has been prosecuted for doing exactly what they had been asked to do. Again, we are told that the government didn’t know. They could not even provide one single example where this had happened – not even in private, with the sensitive detail redacted.

So why should we accept the government’s claims? Because ministers say so? Because they have been told by operational partners, who have a vested interest in being able to absolve their informants of wrongdoing, that this is the case?

Parliament set a very useful precedent on 9 November 2005, when operational partners, backed by the then Labour government, said they needed to detain terrorist suspects for up to 90 days without charge. Large numbers of Labour MPs rebelled and joined a united opposition to reject it. The House of Lords should do the same today.

Once again, the government is asking parliament to dramatically change the law. This time, so that a police officer can tell an informant to commit a crime, and for that criminal activity to no longer even be a crime, for that informant not to have legally done anything wrong at all, even if innocent people are hurt in the process. And once again, it is failing to provide any evidence to support that change.

Instead, the minister simply asserts that “the continuation of the status quo is not desirable”.

Not desirable? Police officers have to secure the prior authority of both an investigatory powers commissioner, a senior and experienced judge, and a secretary of state, before they can listen to someone’s telephone conversation, and then only if the target is suspected of the most serious criminality.

Yet this bill would allow police officers to give an informant total legal immunity to commit any type of crime, with no prior independent authority or oversight, to combat even minor offences. That is what is really undesirable.

So the Liberal Democrats will be voting for amendments to remove that immunity and preserve the status quo. I hope other parties will join us, and take the same principled stand that parliament did in November 2005.

Brian Paddick is a Liberal Democrat peer and retired police officer