PARLIAMENTARY DEBATE
Security of Ministers’ Offices and Communications - 28 June 2021 (Commons/Commons Chamber)

Order. Before we come to the next urgent question, I want to say something about the implications for this House of the apparent security breach involving the Department of Health and Social Care. We do not comment on the detail of security arrangements on the Floor of the House. However, I want the House to be reassured that I have directed senior officials to consider what implications there are for security arrangements in the House from the recent event in Whitehall and to take any necessary steps with urgency. I will not take any points of order on this matter.

(Urgent Question): To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office if he will make a statement on security arrangements relating to ministerial offices and communications.

Thank you, Mr Speaker, for granting the urgent question and for your comments. I thank the Minister for her response, but it seems to me that the revelations over the weekend that the Secretary of State for Health’s personal office had recording devices in it should be of national concern. If Government and parliamentary offices have recording devices in them—whether audio, visual or both—it is of the utmost concern. Since the disclosure, several Cabinet Ministers have gone on the record to say that they had no knowledge that their offices might be subject to surveillance.

It is totally unacceptable for private conversations between Ministers, civil servants, Members of Parliament and members of the public to be secretly recorded. It also brings into question whether the Wilson doctrine has been broken. Since the premiership of Harold Wilson, it has been a long-standing rule that secret recordings of Members of Parliament by the police, security services or state are outlawed, so I have a number of questions for the Minister on which I hope she will be able to be a little more forthcoming.

First, do the offices of Ministers or Members of Parliament have recording devices in them? If so, who authorised them? Who has access to the recordings? What is the purpose of the recordings? How long are they kept? Has the Wilson doctrine been broken? Are there currently any Members of Parliament under surveillance by the police, intelligence agencies or the state? What measures are taken to ensure that there are no illicit recording devices in ministerial and parliamentary offices? Are they routinely swept for those devices?

Before you answer that, Minister, I should say that you have no responsibility for the House. That is a responsibility of the House that I am looking into, but everything else is fair game.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone) on securing this urgent question, and I thank the Minister for her opening comments regarding CCTV and the limitations, but, given how little we currently seem to know, will she come back to the House when she does have some answers regarding this?

Incredibly, this is not even the biggest scandal of the day when it comes to ministerial security and communications, and the Minister alluded to this comments. This morning, a Government spokesperson claimed that all Ministers only conduct Government business through their departmental email addresses yet I have, right here, the minutes of a departmental meeting in which senior civil servants report Government contracts being approved from a Minister’s private email address. Who is telling the truth? It is a pity that the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster could not be here in person, given his personal experience of the perils of using his private emails to conduct ministerial business and to try and avoid freedom of information laws.

And it goes well beyond one Department. Last week, the Cabinet Office refused to answer my questions about the Prime Minister’s mobile phone. Today, it has been reported that he, too, will not deny using private email addresses. Can the Minister now say from the Dispatch Box, categorically and on the record, that no Minister or Prime Minister has used, or does use, private email for Government business, especially when it involves spending public money?

This morning, the Justice Secretary agreed that private email was a huge security issue. He admitted that this revelation does raise legitimate questions. On this, he is right. Now it is time to answer those questions. Will those involved refer themselves to the Information Commissioner so that a genuinely independent investigation can take place? If any Ministers have used private email for Government business, what action will be taken and what will be done to prevent it from happening again? What steps have been and will be taken to preserve private emails as evidence for the public inquiry into the Government’s mishandling of the covid pandemic?

Our country faces daily threats from hostile foreign states that have already, for example, hacked the private email account of the right hon. Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox). What advice have the Government taken on the security of Ministers’ private email accounts? What does it say about this Government that they will launch an inquiry into leaks of CCTV but not into their own Ministers?

That’s all right, then!

I thank my hon. Friend for coming to the Dispatch Box to answer the urgent question from my hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone). As she will know, the Wilson doctrine covers deliberate surveillance, so what safeguards are there for whistleblowers who may inadvertently discover material that is in the public interest?

I will follow your strictures precisely, Mr Speaker—all my questions are about ministerial offices.

Was the former Health Secretary aware, and indeed, was the security officer in his Department aware, of the CCTV camera in his office? Is the Minister aware of similar CCTV cameras in any other ministerial office? Who installs such systems in Ministries and who monitors them and has access to their feeds? Do they record video only or is it sound and vision? Given that there were reports of this footage being touted on Instagram for some time, is it true that staff from private companies manage those systems and monitor the footage? If it is true, who is responsible for vetting, and what is the process for vetting, such staff?

Finally, and most importantly, how confident is the Minister that others—states and non-state actors who would do us harm—have not already compromised other staff or gained direct access to some of these CCTV feeds?

During a pandemic, the position of Secretary of State for Health and Social Care is one of the most safety-critical roles. People should have been able to have the frankest of conversations with him regarding the nation’s health without fear of being recorded. Throughout this awful crisis there have been a number of leaks, with the most notable being the one before the second lockdown in November last year. Will the Minister assure the House that, along with cameras, ministerial offices should not have microphones hidden in them, and that any review of security will ensure that all ministerial offices are checked for them regularly?

Crikey, Mr Speaker—who would be a Minister on a day like today?

I do not want to go into the detail of what happened on the day in question, but it occurs to me that the security camera—I think we are accepting that it was a security camera—must surely to goodness have been pretty covert. I know where the security cameras are in my local high street where I live in the highlands. The more we go into this matter, the odder it gets. The public deserve an absolutely open explanation as to what has happened. If the cameras are covert, or semi-covert, why are they? Why does a Secretary of State not know, on a need-to-know basis, about this sort of thing and where the cameras are?

There is currently a lot of speculation in the newspapers about the implications in respect of foreign powers using these sorts of surveillance tools. Will my hon. Friend confirm that at this stage there is no reason to believe that foreign powers have been involved in respect of this particular camera at the Department of Health and Social Care but that the investigation will look at whether there is any connection?

I accept the need for external CCTV coverage to ascertain entry and exit, but have any checks been made to establish whether any other internal offices, where Ministers, MPs or staff could be monitored, have a device installed covertly? Has the country of origin of the device used in this instance been established?

The leaking of footage from inside private ministerial offices raises two important questions. Why had a camera been installed? If it had been done legitimately, how did the footage come into the public domain? Will my hon. Friend confirm that the matter will be investigated with the urgency it requires?

The Minister did not give a straightforward answer to my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner), so I will ask her again: is she confirming that Ministers did use private email addresses to approve contracts and that the Department of Health and Social Care therefore misled the public in its statement denying categorically that that happened? Given just how serious this is, will she agree to refer it to the Information Commissioner so that there is an independent investigation, not another Government whitewash?

Ministers will often need to discuss matters of the highest confidential nature and see highly confidential documents, so does the Minister agree that Ministers should be able to make such decisions in the British interest, without any fear or favour?

Does the Minister know whether there are rules common to all Departments on where security cameras can be sited and where they must not be sited?

The shadow Secretary of State asked the Minister directly whether any Minister or the Prime Minister used private emails to conduct Government business, and in response the Minister basically repeated the guidelines, which seem to suggest that, yes, Ministers can use a private email and it is up to them to police themselves. Given the stench of cronyism around this Government, can she not see how that answer is completely unacceptable? All this needs to be opened up, and transparency must be the order of the day immediately.

Although I welcome the Department of Health and Social Care’s rapid investigation, this case raises potentially serious concerns about the security of all private offices. Can my hon. Friend assure me that the Department will work with security teams across Government to protect the privacy and security of all Ministers?

It is not acceptable to have covert surveillance at work for Ministers, Members or anyone else, but the public are entitled to transparency on issues raised about things such as private emails. The Government already have answers to give on donations for the Prime Minister’s flat, peerages to donors, tax breaks by text and unlawful contracts to associates, so does the Minister agree that her Government’s murky dealings are the real sordid affair that the public should see a light shone on?

If I understood the Lord Chancellor correctly this morning, he said that when he wants to read a sensitive document, he goes to a separate room in his Department to do so. Could we have a look at what procedures are in place across Government to make sure that Ministers can read sensitive documents safely?

Something really does not add up here. As I understand it, the Minister is saying that the camera in the office of the Secretary of State was not covert. In other words, the Secretary of State knew it was there, yet we have all seen the video. If that is true, he must be the stupidest man on earth. Is the Minister really trying to persuade us that he knew that there was a camera in his office? When he had meetings with other Ministers, were they informed that those meetings were being recorded? Is that really what she is trying to suggest? It blows my mind, this idea.

As a former Minister in the Department of Health and Social Care with the previous Secretary of State, in candidness, no one ever told me that our meetings were being observed. I never asked, it is true, but I was certainly never told. The issue, to my mind, is of course that they were being recorded, but more, who had access to those images? Does the Minister think that things would be made much easier for everyone as the Department of Health and Social Care begins the investigation if the, let us remember, profit-making media organisation involved simply made it clear how it was able to see inside a senior Minister’s office?

The Minister has astonished us all by saying that this was not a covert device, yet we have just heard from a former Health Minister that he did not know about it. The Minister is somehow asking us to believe that the now departed Secretary of State somehow knew about it, but clearly if he did he would not have behaved in the way he did right in front of it, so I think that she is stretching credibility. When I was a Minister, we were not allowed to use our own inboxes or our own private emails for Government business. We were told very, very bluntly at the beginning of our ministerial career that this would not be allowed. Why on earth is it different now?

I have lost count of the number of times my colleagues and I have raised issues about the lack of transparency, honesty and integrity under which too many Government Ministers operate. The ministerial code is not worth the paper it is written on. The whole sordid affair follows on from the former Health and Social Care Secretary being found to have acted unlawfully in his disclosure of contracts for personal protective equipment, contracts for mates, and now the revelation of the use of private emails. This, as others have said, smacks of his covering his tracks.

On the cameras, if Ministers were unaware of them, that is nothing short of Big Brother. What other Department buildings have similar cameras of which we are not aware?

On the use of private emails for Government business, will the Minister confirm the legal position under the Freedom of Information Act? My understanding is that if a public authority—the Secretary of State clearly is a public authority—uses a private email for Government business, that private email and those emails are subject to the Freedom of Information Act, and the destruction of any emails in order to prevent them from being disclosed would be a criminal offence. That information will obviously be of some reassurance to people. Is she able to confirm that from the Dispatch Box?

When the investigation into this matter is concluded, will the Minister come back and tell the House whether this leak has reached the threshold to warrant an investigation by the intelligence agencies?

Like my good and hon. Friend the Member for Winchester (Steve Brine), I joined the Department of Health in moving into this new building, 39 Victoria Street, at the end of 2017. Will the Minister ask the Department to consider in its internal investigation whether the devices were installed as part of the new build or subsequently? Will she also please develop a protocol from the Cabinet Office across Government that all Ministers, and frankly all people working in Government buildings, are notified of any official listening, visual or other sensors in their place of work, so that they are aware of it rather than, as we have been today, surprised by it?

The Secretary of State, engaged—at least as we thought—on matters essential to our national security, health and wellbeing is filmed, unbeknownst to him, and that film is leaked to a national newspaper when it could just as well have been a foreign power. I have to say that I find the Minister’s complacency incomprehensible. Can she at least confirm that the Government know where each Government CCTV camera is, who has access to them and whether outsourcing has led to a plethora of private security firms and other contractors having access to the footage?

The truth is that the days when officials asked Ministers for instructions via papers placed in locked red boxes are long gone. The truth of the matter is that officials in Whitehall Departments expect Ministers to be in contact with them 24/7. It can be very difficult for Ministers in those positions to access secure devices to look at things. May I ask the Minister to instruct the Cabinet Office to really challenge the guidance that is given to officials and Ministers about this, so that Ministers are not finding themselves unwittingly having to use private emails, as I found quite often as a Minister in the Department of Health?

The Government’s lax security has resulted in information and communications ending up in the wrong hands, and the Government’s lax procurement processes via text, private email and a word down the pub have led to billions of pounds of public money ending up in the wrong hands. Sensitive information and public money are neither safe nor secure, so how will the Minister ensure that there is an end to this casual approach to information and communications relating to security and spending? And for the third time, what discussions have taken place with the Information Commissioner over these casual communications since these revelations have come to light?

Our Prime Minister has had to have his phone wrested from him by the security services for conducting Government business by WhatsApp, and now a Health Secretary has been using his Gmail for official purposes. Can the Minister please answer the second question posed by the right hon. Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper) and confirm to us that it would be a criminal offence for any Minister to destroy communications they have made about Government business on private emails or private messaging apps for the purpose of defeating the ends of justice regarding our freedom of information request or, indeed, defeating the ends of justice in any future inquiry into the covid crisis?

My hon. Friend has said that the ultimate responsibility for security lies with the Department, and that the Cabinet Office sets best practice. Given the importance and sensitivity of security, should we not centralise this to ensure that every Department complies and that there is no aberrant behaviour?

The Minister said that this was not a covert device and that it was known about, but then she said that they only found out about it on Friday in a fast-moving situation, so she needs to get her story straight, not least because we have two respected former Ministers in the Department—the hon. Member for Winchester (Steve Brine) and the right hon. Member for Ludlow (Philip Dunne)—in the Chamber who knew nothing about these cameras. The hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone) rightly talked about the Wilson doctrine and the importance of monitoring the surveillance of Members of Parliament, so would it not be a good idea if the Prime Minister now made a statement to the House to tell us exactly when he first knew about this device and about the content that was on it?

Mr Deputy Speaker, you will be aware, as everyone in this House is, how livid Mr Speaker and many people here were at the leaking of the second lockdown and how Mr Speaker asked for a full investigation into the incident. What has emerged over the weekend has blown all that up. The leaking could have involved a whole number of people who were never even considered as part of that investigation, which, as Mr Speaker has informed us on Privy Council terms, is still ongoing. Will my hon. Friend the Minister liaise with her Department and with the Cabinet Secretary to ensure that any information of who had access to that video footage and covert surveillance of that office is fed into the investigation that Mr Speaker has asked for to find out how things were being leaked to the press before this House knew about them?

Does the Department of Health and Social Care handle its own ministerial office security, or is that done across Whitehall by other organisations such as the police?

As parliament- arians, we all have sympathy for the Minister being sent here to respond to these questions without many of the answers to them. We had all expected that her boss would be here for these questions, as indeed he would have been had he thought he had the answers to give to them. May I ask her, the next time she meets the Cabinet Secretary, to stress how unsatisfactory this situation is, how dangerous it is to the security of this nation, and that the House demands not only that this situation is never repeated, but that we get the answers that she has been unable to furnish us with today?

Is the Minister able to reassure the House that, in considering the findings of the Department of Health and Social Care’s own internal investigation into this matter, she will not rule out considering whether this leak was a breach of the Official Secrets Act?

First of all, is a Department-led inquiry sufficient for the gravity of this situation? We need to know whether these recordings extend to other Departments, who all this footage is offered to, and who benefited from the release of the footage. We need to understand the security risks of Ministers doing business by private email, as has been said. The Minister cannot just say, “Oh, it’s complicated.” It is simple. We have a parliamentary email address and Ministers should use it—end of story. Also, it is only because of this leak that we have found out about yet another crony appointment that the Government did not bat an eyelid about, so who is taking the lead in investigating all these other matters?

I am grateful to Mr Speaker for granting the urgent question of my hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone). With one Department spreading documents behind a bus stop and another one publishing CCTV, I cannot say that I am terribly surprised if Ministers do not want to use their private offices. Does my hon. Friend, who is doing a very good job at the Dispatch Box, agree that we need a root-and-branch change in the trust and behaviour of the civil service?

May  I say to the Minister first of all that this House should take precedence in the priorities of the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, not travelling to Scotland?

When I was a Minister, neither parliamentary emails nor private emails were allowed to be used for Government business. Will the Minister therefore confirm whether using private email accounts to discuss sensitive Government business is in breach of the Freedom of Information Act, the Official Secrets Act, the Data Protection Act or the Public Records Act 1958, which place specific requirements on the use of Government information?

I thank the Minister for coming today to respond to Peter Bone’s urgent question and for responding to 37 parliamentary questions in total. We will now suspend before the statement on covid.