My Lords, I too shall begin by declaring an interest, having been a member of the Intelligence and Security Committee for seven years, five of which were enhanced, if I may say, by the presence of the noble Lord, Lord Butler of Brockwell. I have a further advantage because I have been listening, along with other noble Lords, to the three preceding speeches in this debate, which have set out the principles clearly and powerfully against what appears to be intransigence on the part of the Government. At this point, therefore, I shall adopt what has been said by the noble Lord, Lord West of Spithead, with which I agree entirely. I am also influenced to some extent by the fact that your Lordships have been exemplary in the dispatch of business today. I have been watching from the pavilion, as it were, and it seems that the conduct of this Committee stage so far could be recommended or possibly even compelled for the Committee stages of other Bills.
There is nothing that I can usefully add to the arguments put forward by the three preceding speakers, but I can make one further contribution. In advance of the debate today, I consulted the 2013 report of the Intelligence and Security Committee entitled Foreign Involvement in the Critical National Infrastructure. The noble Lord, Lord Butler, and I were members of the committee at the time and the chair was Sir Malcolm Rifkind. Among other things, the committee applied its mind to the issue of Huawei, in particular to its entry into the United Kingdom market and the fact that in doing so it entered into contractual arrangements with BT. What happened was that BT did as it was supposed to do and advised the relevant government departments of the position, but the officials then communicated what had been brought to their attention by BT not to any of the Ministers with responsibility for national security but to the then Secretary of State at the Department of Trade and Industry. That was done on the ground that the only thing which appealed to the officials to draw to ministerial attention was the possible impact on British businesses.
That having happened, for quite a long time, Huawei enjoyed not a privileged but certainly an unremarkable position in the British economy. It was only some years later that it became clear that there were other implications to be drawn from its interest in the economy of the United Kingdom. At that point, the Intelligence and Security Committee deemed it appropriate to include it as part of the inquiry whose report I have described. As a consequence, the committee was able, as has been hinted at already, to come to a much better and more informed judgment about Huawei because of its access to intelligence that would not otherwise have been available either to committees or to Parliament itself. I recommend the report as a good illustration of how an inquiry of that kind should be carried out and how profitable, if you like, the consequences are of so doing.
The issue is clear. If, at the stage of the involvement of Huawei in the economy of the United Kingdom it had been understood and perused by those with access to a very high level of classified intelligence, perhaps, since the moment of Huawei’s arrival into this economy, there would have been a much greater understanding throughout government of the significance of its entry into the United Kingdom and the implications for security which that has necessarily involved. For these and other reasons that I have indicated previously, I support the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord West of Spithead, to which I have added my name.
