Lord Purvis of Tweed:

Moved by Lord Purvis of Tweed

112: After Clause 89, insert the following new Clause—“Report on actions taken in response to the ISC report on RussiaWithin six months of the passing of this Act, the Secretary of State must lay before Parliament a report on the effect of the action taken by the Government in response to the recommendations of the report of the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament on Russia (HC 632 of Session 2019–21).”Member's explanatory statementThis new Clause requires the Secretary of State to report to Parliament on the actions the Government has taken in response to the report of the Intelligence and Security Committee on Russia.

My Lords, I move Amendment 112 and will also speak to Amendment 118. I will introduce the amendments, but my noble friend Lord Wallace of Saltaire will also speak on this group. Amendment 118 is a probing amendment designed to be helpful for the Government and to allow the Minister to inform the Committee about what their views are on the interaction of the Bill—what will be the National Security Act—and the work of the highly regarded Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament. In many respects, it makes absolute sense for the provisions under the Bill to fall within the oversight and scrutiny of the Intelligence and Security Committee. Obviously, as it is a parliamentary committee, and because of its remit, there are ways that it will interact with the Bill, but I would be grateful to know whether the Government would support that.

Amendment 112 links to what was a remarkably prescient report from 2020. When I re-read the recommendations of the Intelligence and Security Committee report on Russia before Committee, I found that it highlighted in an almost spooky way many of the practices and approaches of Russia that have come to bear, a year on since the aggression against Ukraine. The amendment seeks for there to be an update from the Government, not just as a response to the recommendations of the committee, which were provided in July 2020 and which I read with interest, but on the ongoing actions as a result. The report had a mixture of seeking clarifications and seeking action, so I would be grateful to know where the Government are with some of the recommendations.

It was interesting to note that the committee report sought clarity on the overseeing of the strategic direction and co-ordination by the National Security Council. It has been re-shaped twice in recent months: Liz Truss got rid of it and changed its operation into a standardised Cabinet sub-committee; I understand that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has now restored it to what it was previously, but this is an opportunity on the record for the Minister to state exactly what the National Security Council is, how it is composed, and how it will interact with the implementation of the Bill. If he wishes to write to me on that point rather than respond today, I would be very happy.

The committee report highlighted in particular some issues directly linked with the Bill on the powers of the Electoral Commission, as we have discussed previously in Committee. We still believe very strongly that the committee’s recommendations on enhancing the powers of the Electoral Commission are valid, and an update on the Government’s position on that would be helpful. The committee also asked for action to be taken on election material and digital imprints; there has been considerable debate about this, but it would be useful to know how that will be operational. The committee also asked for protocol on social media providers, when it comes to hostile state acts. That was one of the areas where the Government noted the recommendations, but I would be grateful to know what action has been taken.

Finally—I know that my noble friend will be referencing this—the committee went into some detail scrutinising illicit finance and the fact that London has been a laundromat. It highlighted some areas that would be needed for action, notwithstanding that it was positive that the Government, in some respects, have brought forward this legislation in response to the ISC’s report. But there are still unanswered questions with regard to how we are operationalising the need to reduce the scope for illicit finance. Now we have economic crime Bill No. 2: the Government dragged their feet somewhat in bringing the first economic crime Bill to us, but we have the first and the second.

I want give one statistic which is illustrative of what I and certainly my noble friend have been highlighting for a number of years regarding the scale of the issue in London. All along the way, the Government said that we were overestimating the impact of illicit finance, not just from Russia but particularly from Russia. I have debated with the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, all the Russian sanctions that were put forward. I have welcomed them all, and in some respects they have not gone fast enough, but we have worked together collegiately across all Benches, including the Labour Party. The statistic that I have seen, which the Government published in their anti-corruption work, was that the amount of Russian money in September 2021 that was frozen— not seized—was £44.5 million. That is a substantial sum of course, but we felt that there was more illicit finance operating through London. The most recent figures, since sanctions have been put in place against Russia over the last year, show that that figure is now £18 billion. The gap between £44.5 million and £18 billion highlights the scale of the issue that we were warning against; the Government say that those warnings were unnecessary.

I do not expect the Minister to have any of the details to hand, and I would be grateful if he would write to me giving more information and a breakdown of the difference between the £44.5 million and the £18 billion. That is a colossal sum of money. The Government have found a reason to freeze, as a result of the Russian aggression, assets in London, but that is a very clear example of why there is more to know about the extent of illicit finance through London, and I will be grateful if the Minister will provide more information about that. I beg to move.

My Lords, my name is on Amendment 113, and I commend the intentions of the amendments put down by colleagues on the Labour Benches.

What we are talking about here is how we alert the public to the nature of the threat. The Security Minister in the Commons indeed said that one of his greatest concerns in approaching this Bill was to make the public aware of the threats which we face. In the Minister’s absence, one of his colleagues on the Bench, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Bellamy, said that the overriding purpose of several clauses in the Bill is to convey a message. He said that this is above all a declaratory Bill, rather than a Bill which actually intends to do things, but these amendments are about the Government failing to send a message and, indeed, preferring not to talk about some of the threats which we face. After all, the Bill should alert us not only to the nature of the threats but to where those threats are most likely to come from. I note that the Minister said very little about Russia and not that much about China, North Korea or Iran but did his best to defend the idea that what we regard as friendly foreign powers should be included in our potential concept of threats, as if the message of this Bill should be “Beware of foreigners, particularly those associated with Governments whether democratic or not”. I hope that is not the intention of the Bill, but that is what it looks like at present.

The ISC report states very clearly that there are a number of threats—of course it is concerned with Russia —and that

“it is … the Committee’s view that the UK Intelligence Community should produce an … assessment of potential Russian interference in the EU referendum and that an unclassified summary of it be published”.

The Government have refused to do that, and the only statement in their response about why not is that they have received no evidence of successful interference in British politics, which means that they are aware of a whole range of attempts to interfere in British politics. It might be quite helpful to inform political parties and the public about what those could be.

The Government’s July 2020 response to the ISC’s Russia report is very interesting in a range of ways. It has a section which it entitles

“Defending UK Democracy from Foreign Interference” and flags up the new defending democracy programme, which was established in 2020, about which, so far, Parliament has been told remarkably little. The Security Minister made a speech about it some weeks ago which was not that much more informative, but he assured us that the defending democracy task force had held its first meeting in November last year, two years after July 2020. I think it would be helpful in informing and alerting the public if we were all told a little more about the defending democracy programme and the defending democracy task force.

The Government’s response goes on to state:

“The Committee will also be aware that … the Government has concluded that it is almost certain that Russian actors sought to interfere in the 2019 General Election.”

The public were not told about that very much either. We all understand that this is mainly because the interference was towards the Conservative Party and the Conservative Party has many links with Russia, Conservative Friends of Russia and so on, which it prefers not to spell out, which may be partly why we are talking about so many other different countries. We remember Boris Johnson’s attempt as Prime Minister to hobble the Intelligence and Security Committee. Thankfully, that has now passed, but the issue of foreign interference in UK politics and public life is an important part of what we are focusing on and should receive more attention.

I have on a number of occasions in recent years argued for a proper review of the golden visa scheme—the tier 1 investor scheme. The Government finally closed it last year and promised to conduct a review. Instead of publishing that review, we had a Written Statement on 12 January 2023 with which the Minister will be familiar because the Statement to this House is in his name. It has no reference to national security risks under this programme. It talks entirely about illicit finance and criminal effects, and in a short two pages it says really very little about the problem as a whole. It states:

“The route attracted a disproportionate number of applicants from the countries identified in the UK’s National Risk Assessment of money laundering and terrorist financing 2020 as particularly relevant to the cross-border money laundering risks faced and posed by the UK.”

The Statement does not say, as the Wikipedia entry on Ben Elliot says, that Ben Elliot raised £2 million in and around the 2019 general election from Russians resident in Britain who were close to the Putin regime. That is something which ought to concern us and about which the Government certainly ought to have been a great deal more concerned. The ISC Russia report indeed talks about the growth of a community of “enablers” in London to service the Russians who had penetrated British political and public life. Ben Elliot’s company, Quintessentially, was one of the leading aspects of this and declared that it specialised in servicing Russian clients.

I stress this not simply to raise a particular name but, after all, he was co-chairman of the Conservative Party—with James Cleverly, the current Foreign Secretary—for 18 months, so we are getting fairly close in to influence and interference here with someone who was described as the Tories’ main fundraiser. Much of this was informal, of course, but the Bill talks a great deal about informal arrangements.

These amendments ask for proper information to Parliament, a stronger role for the Intelligence and Security Committee—which the last Prime Minister but one attempted so ignobly to cut down—and the publication of the review of the golden visa scheme so that we can understand just how far these people penetrated into British public and political life. I remind the Minister that the ISC Russia report says at one point that the penetration of rich Russians into British society and public life had gone so far that it was difficult to disentangle and that we now had to be concerned to mitigate those risks rather than to remove them.

All that the Government say on illicit finance and money laundering in their response to the ISC Russia report is:

“The Government agrees that the transparency of information about political donations is important.”

They then go on to talk about links to Members of the House of Lords. They say nothing about the duties of political parties to ensure that they know where they are getting donations from. No doubt we will come back to this before and during Report.

There are a number of holes in what needs to be done in the Bill to make sure that we strengthen our national security against foreign interference. I trust that the Minister will have some good answers and will come back to us off the Floor to discuss some of these concerns further.

My Lords, I will speak primarily to my Amendment 120A but I thank the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, for his Amendment 112, signed by the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, which raises some extremely important points around the Russia report published by the ISC in 2020 and the frustration that many of its recommendations either have not been implemented yet or simply will not be implemented by the Government. It would be helpful for the Committee and for us all to know the Government’s intention with respect to all that. As the noble Lords, Lord Purvis and Lord Wallace, said, many important points were raised and it would be interesting to see the Government’s view on that. With respect to the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, and Amendment 113, some very important points were made about tier 1 visas, where all that has got to and what progress we have made.

Amendment 116 from my noble friend Lord Ponsonby, which has been referred to in passing by other Members of the Committee, deals with reporting on disinformation originating from foreign powers. I think it was the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, who referred to the issue of how far this country is witnessing attacks from foreign powers that wish to pollute and infect our system, whether businesses or our electoral system. It would be interesting for us to know the extent of that and what the Government are doing about it—as far as the Minister can say within the constraints of this.

It is a question worth asking, because one of the things I think the public want to know is who is responsible for co-ordinating the activity across government to ensure that our country is protected. Is it MI5? Is it GCHQ? Is it the various security parts of different departments? Who brings all that together? I think it is legitimate and does not compromise national security in any way to ask who is responsible for that. How is the activity co-ordinated between a national level, a regional level and a local level? The integrity of all our databases requires action not only in Westminster but in a rural village in the middle of nowhere. Those are legitimate questions, and I think the public would like to know about that.

What is the Government’s view of how far they can inform the public of the threat, in so far as the public can then help with respect to maintaining their own security and, by doing so, that of our country? That was the purpose of Amendment 116. It is obviously a probing amendment, but it seeks to understand something about the scale of the threat we are facing regarding this information and what can be done about it.

My Amendment 120A—which I should say at the outset is supported by my noble friend Lord West, who for personal reasons is unable to be with us, and, as I understand it, by the ISC—would require the Government to revise the memorandum of understanding between the Prime Minister and the Intelligence and Security Committee to reflect any changes to the intelligence and security activities undertaken by the Government as a result of this Bill. In other words, it seeks to update the ISC’s remit to ensure that it has the power to effectively scrutinise intelligence and security activity that will be taking place across government under this new national security regime.

Alongside the Justice and Security Act 2013, the ISC’s Mo outlines, among other areas, the ISC’s remit and the organisations that it oversees. This includes the expenditure administration policy on operations of the agencies, as well as several organisations that form part of the intelligence community. The Bill modernises the offence of espionage and creates a suite of new tools for the intelligence community and law enforcement to defend the UK against state threats.

Given the national security focus of the new regime, the ISC already has the remit to oversee much of the intelligence and security work that will take place. Nevertheless, as stated in the ISC’s most recent annual report, published in December 2022, intelligence and security activities are increasingly being undertaken by a wider collection of government departments, including those that generally do not carry out national security-related activity, such as BEIS, DCMS and DfT. Those teams are not covered by the ISC’s MoU, which therefore could be said to be out of date. It urgently needs updating, since effective oversight of intelligence and security matters has, to an extent, been eroded. If the Government continue with this trend, and establish new teams as part of this Bill that sit outside the ISC’s remit, then this amendment would ensure that the ISC’s MoU was updated accordingly.

The amendment is therefore important. It would help to reverse the increasingly large gap that has emerged in Parliament’s ability to effectively oversee intelligence and security activity. These concerns have been raised repeatedly in this Chamber and in the other place, particularly during Parliament’s considerations of the National Security and Investment Act 2021 and the Telecommunications (Security) Act of the same year. Effective oversight of intelligence and security matters can be undertaken only by the ISC, which, as the Minister will know, unlike other Select Committees has the security infrastructure to scrutinise classified material, such as intelligence, that often underpins decisions on national security. In theory, members of the Select Committee may be given sight of sensitive information but they do not have the appropriate office equipment or the cleared staff for reviewing such information, or indeed the security clearance themselves.

The Government provided a clear undertaking to Parliament during the passage of the Justice and Security Act 2013 when the then Security Minister told Parliament of

“the intention of the Government that the ISC should have oversight of substantively all of central Government’s intelligence and security activities to be realised now and in the future.”—[Official Report, Commons, Justice and Security Bill Committee, 31/1/13; col. 98.]

The Security Minister at the time made it clear that the ISC’s MoU was designed to be a document that could be updated where necessary to reflect changes in the defence, intelligence and security architecture.

Unfortunately, the National Security and Investment Act 2021 and the Telecommunications (Security) Act 2021 showed the Government’s failure to recognise that commitment and to appreciate the importance of such oversight. There have been repeated attempts to provide the ISC with these oversight provisions to cover these recent bits of legislation, with new teams being created, but so far there has been no progress with respect to the Government. The Government have refused so far to update the committee’s MoU.

The issue of the committee’s statutory remit has been raised with the National Security Adviser on several occasions. At a meeting in January 2022 the then National Security Adviser relayed the Government’s position that they did not feel bound by the statements made by the then Security Minister during the passage of the Justice and Security Act. In its most recent annual report, the ISC said:

“We are deeply disappointed and concerned that the Government has taken this view, and is therefore actively avoiding the effective scrutiny by Parliament of national security issues across Government. The absence of proper scrutiny, which can only be carried out by the ISC, is genuinely troubling”— hence the amendment that I felt it necessary to bring to the Committee.

With that stinging criticism of the Government, I say to them: is it not the case that they should, at the very least, be considering updating the ISC’s MoU to reflect what the ISC itself has said? Should they not ensure that the body that was set up by this Parliament to give Parliament, as far as it possibly could, some sort of parliamentary oversight of the intelligence and security matters as they face our country, has the proper MoU for that to happen? I would be grateful to hear the Minister’s response to that and what he has to say on my Amendment 120A.

My Lords, I thank noble Lords very much for contributing to this relatively short debate. Let me first address Amendments 112, 117 and 120A.

Amendments 112 and 117 seek to impose on the Secretary of State a duty to implement the recommendations of the ISC’s report on Russia and to produce a report setting out the action taken. The Committee will already be aware that the Government published their response to the Russia report on the same day that the report itself was published, 21 July 2020. All the recommendations that could be identified within the report were addressed.

On the point just made by the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, a majority of the ISC’s recommendations had already been implemented by the Government before the report was published: for example, those covering co-ordination of government work on Russia, close working with international partners, and continued exposition and attribution of malign Russian activity. The then Home Secretary reiterated this in a Statement made in the other place on 17 January 2022. I also say that there is ongoing engagement with the committee on these recommendations. The Bill is itself a part of that response, by introducing effective new tools and powers for the police, and security and intelligence agencies, to use against the sophisticated range of threats and actors that we face in the modern day.

I turn to Amendment 118, explained by the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, as a probing amendment. Section 3(2) of the Justice and Security Act already provides, as the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, has just noted, for the ISC to make reports

“as it considers appropriate concerning any aspect of its functions.”

This provides the ISC with the ability to report on aspects of the Bill which fall within its remit. Furthermore, the amendment as proposed might be taken to imply that the ISC requires explicit legislative nomination to conduct oversight work on a relevant area of security and intelligence policy. The Government therefore cannot support this amendment.

Amendment 120A seeks to mandate the Prime Minister to update the memorandum of understanding between the ISC and the Government. The Committee will be aware that the MoU is subject to continuous review, as again noted by the noble Lord, Lord Coaker. We welcome the ISC proposing changes that it would like the Prime Minister to consider, whether due to this legislation or other aspects of its security and intelligence remit. The Prime Minister will consider the proposed changes in due course. The MoU itself states that it is important to avoid duplication. Some of the organisations that the ISC has proposed that its remit should include are very new, and there are discussions under way regarding whether they are best overseen by other parliamentary Select Committees.

I am sure that answer will not particularly please the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, but I hope he would accept that it is a reasonable answer, given the current state of affairs.

My Lords, I apologise for interrupting. I am sure the Minister recognises the damage which was done to the relationship between the ISC and Parliament, and to maintaining public trust, by the various manoeuvres while Boris Johnson was Prime Minister. There was the delay in the publication of the Russia report and the attempt to have a chair appointed by the Prime Minister rather than elected by the committee, et cetera. We need to be reassured—and by “we” I mean Parliament and the interested public—that the ISC has a very clear and respected role, and is not subject to the whims of changing Prime Ministers.

My Lords, with the greatest respect, this is a different Government and we have moved on. The ISC very much has the respect of certainly this part of the Government. If I may say so, I have answered the principal question that was being asked: the Prime Minister will indeed consider the proposed changes in due course.

I understand that the Minister is saying that the Prime Minister will review it, but does he agree with me that it would help if the Prime Minister actually met the ISC? The Intelligence and Security Committee annual report states:

“Since its establishment in 1994, and for 20 years thereafter, the Committee met annually with the Prime Minister to discuss its work, report on key issues … However, the Committee has not had a meeting with a Prime Minister since December 2014. In the previous Annual Report, we stated that we would seek a meeting with the Prime Minister this year; unfortunately, despite requests for suitable dates, we are yet to receive a response from the Prime Minister. The Committee urges the Prime Minister to meet with it as a priority.”

May I ask the Minister to take that message to the Prime Minister? If he is looking at reviewing the MoU in due course, it might help him to meet with the committee.

The noble Lord makes a very fair point. I will certainly make sure that that message is conveyed. As I have said, the Government do not think it would be appropriate at this point to mandate the Prime Minister to update the MoU as proposed, therefore we cannot support this amendment.

I now turn to Amendment 113. The Committee will be aware that the Government committed to a review of visas issued under the route between 2008 and 2015. The Home Secretary made a Written Ministerial Statement on 12 January setting out the findings of that review, including that the review had identified a minority of individuals connected to the tier 1 investor visa route who were potentially at high risk of having obtained wealth through corruption or other illicit financial activity and/or being engaged in serious and organised crime. The Government have set out the findings of the review of the operation of this route and acted to close it. I think it was in February 2022. I therefore submit that the amendment is not necessary.

I note that the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, was selectively quoting back to me various aspects of the WMS. I might selectively quote back to him—I suppose I am quoting myself here. I also said:

“Given the importance of ensuring the independence of the law enforcement process I am unable to say more on the operationally sensitive work being taken forward in this area. Whilst unable to comment specifically due to operational sensitivity of work - as an example of the range of actions we are taking I can say that we have already sanctioned 10 oligarchs who had previously used this route as part of our extensive response to Russian aggression in the Ukraine.”

I think that gives answers as to why we have perhaps not commented in the detail the noble Lord would like.

The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, has also accused me of not talking enough about certain states and talking too much about our allies. He, I think, suggests that this is for party-political reasons. I am disappointed that the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, would think so little of the Government Front Bench in this House. I gently remind him that, when I am talking about our allies, I am usually responding to questions he has asked me.

I say to the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, that I am afraid I do not have all the stats he asked for about Russian money, but I will endeavour to find them. I do not know if they sit within the Home Office, but I will find out where they are, and I will happily write to him.

My Lords, I apologise if I have gone—as the Minister is advising me—a little far. The point I am making is that the lack of distinction in “any foreign power” is one of the fundamental faults in this Bill. The ISC Russia report on several occasions refers to the threats mainly coming from China, Russia, Iran and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. That is what I understand as well, although I am well aware that there are other potentially hostile states. One of my strongest memories is watching a demonstration outside the Libyan embassy and a policewoman being shot. These things happen; there are hostile states out there. However, that does not mean we cannot distinguish between allies with whom we work and open societies, and those from which there are likely to be threats. It is very important that we do so.

This Bill does exactly that. We have been talking about FIRS over the last couple of days—the foreign influence registration scheme. There are different tiers specified in that. There is no doubt that this Bill acknowledges where our principal threats come from. Other countries, unfortunately, are also sometimes used as proxies. That is another discussion we have had at considerable length from this Dispatch Box with various noble Lords who have raised that point. I think it has covered very widely exactly what the nature of the threats are and where they come from.

Amendment 116 would duplicate existing work being carried forward by the Government to ensure that the threat posed by disinformation spread by foreign states is monitored effectively. The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, asked me for more detail on the Defending Democracy Taskforce, and I am happy to supply it. As he pointed out, it was announced in November 2022. As it has become apparent that the threats to our democratic institutions and wider society are growing, the taskforce’s mission statement is to reduce the risk to the UK’s democratic processes, institutions and society and to ensure that they are secure and resilient to threats of foreign interference. It will work across government and with Parliament, the UK intelligence community, the devolved Administrations, local authorities and the private sector on the full range of threats facing our democratic institutions. The work of the taskforce will report to the National Security Council and more details will be set out in the update of the integrated review. I have no more details at this point.

That leads nicely to the work of the National Security Council, which the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, asked me about. That is the main forum for a collective discussion of the Government’s objectives for national security and about how best to deliver them in the current financial climate. The key purpose of the council is to ensure that Ministers consider national security in the round and in a strategic way, and it is chaired by the Prime Minister. In answer to one of the questions from the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, the National Security Council co-ordinates His Majesty’s Government’s work on national security policy. Unfortunately, as the noble Lord knows—this answer will disappoint him—the convention is not to speak about the working of Cabinet committees, for which I apologise; I would like to go further, but I cannot.

The Government have robust systems in place to protect UK democracy, bringing together government, civil society and private sector organisations to monitor and respond to attempted interference, in whatever form, to ensure our democracy stays open and vibrant. The Government have amended the Bill in the other place to make the foreign interference offence a priority offence in the Online Safety Bill. That will require companies in scope of the regime to conduct regular risk assessments of the presence of content which constitutes an offence, and to put in place proportionate systems and processes to mitigate the possibility of users encountering that content. That will include disinformation spread by foreign states that is intended to undermine our democratic, political and legal processes. Furthermore, the Online Safety Bill’s advisory committee on disinformation and misinformation will provide cross-sector expertise on disinformation and misinformation and provide advice to Ofcom about how providers of regulated services should deal with disinformation and misinformation.

Finally, I will discuss the Electoral Commission recommendation, as that was requested by the noble Lord, Lord Wallace. The Elections Act 2022 introduced a restriction on ineligible foreign third-party campaigning above a £700 minimum threshold. The Government’s digital imprint regime, also introduced by the Elections Act 2022, delivers the ISC’s recommendations to introduce a requirement to add an imprint on all digital paid-for political advertising. Those proposals represent a significant step forward and will make United Kingdom politics even more transparent.

For all the reasons I have outlined, the Government cannot accept the proposed amendments.

My Lords, I am grateful for the Minister’s thorough reply, notwithstanding some of his responses, which he prefaced by saying that he knew they would disappoint the noble Lord, Lord Coaker.

There’s nothing new there. I am joking.

The noble Lord is a very cheerful person for someone who is disappointed. One of the telling facts he highlighted was the difficulty of the committee having an annual meeting since 2014—that speaks for itself. I am grateful to the Minister for saying that he is going to take that message back.

I am also grateful that the Minister has committed to provide some more information, which is quite helpful. On the issue of the tier 1 visas and golden visas, we are in a slightly ridiculous position where we have a discrepancy between what should be on the public record as to who received them and what is on the public record as to who is sanctioned. However, the Government are refusing to put the two together and to say who they are, which means we will have difficulty learning lessons as to how this came about, why they were able to secure the visas and what they have done. If the Minister is writing to me with more information, I would be grateful if he could state who is currently under sanction by the UK and has received a tier 1 visa. That would be very helpful information to receive.

I am grateful for the information on the co-ordination and the security council, and for the other information that the Minister provided. With Amendment 120A from the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, and my amendment, I think we are aiming for the same destination but with a different route. I think that the Minister said that the ISC would be able to scrutinise the implementation of all national security aspects of this Bill. If I have taken that incorrectly from the Minister, I am happy for him to correct me on the record. However, I think that we will pursue that aspect. As the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, and my noble friend, said, we want national security to work and, for that to be done, proper scrutiny by the committee of Parliament needs to be facilitated, with no gaps across the whole panoply. National security is complex and multi-departmental, and a whole-government function, as the Government say—and I respect that—between BEIS, DCMS, the Cabinet Office, the Treasury and FCDO. This is a complex area, and the committee is best placed to do it, but it must be equipped to do it. We may want to return to this issue after we have reflected on the Minister’s responses. In the meantime, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 112 withdrawn.

Amendment 113 not moved.