Viscount Stansgate (Lab)

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend the Minister for the Statement. I broadly welcome it, and I think there is a broad, cross-party consensus on the national security requirements. When I hear my noble friend talk about threats from Iran and Russia, as a member of the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy I can tell him that we looked in great detail at the nature of some of these threats—for example, in regard to ransomware—and produced a report on it. The question I wanted to ask my noble friend relates to the political tier. I quote from the Statement: “For the first time, Members of this House will now be able to check whether anyone who seeks to influence them is doing so at the direction of a foreign power”. I wanted to raise the issue of all-party parliamentary groups, because one of the concerns that has been expressed over the years is that they could be a vehicle for unwanted influences—certainly financially—buying their way in and influencing the way all-party groups operate. I am the president of the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee, which is the Parliament’s oldest all-parliamentary party group. I hope the Minister can reassure the House that this scheme will enable it to be absolutely clear that no all-party parliamentary group that operates in this House—or in Parliament generally—is in any way open to the type of foreign influence that this Statement is designed to prevent and that as a result Parliament can have confidence that all-party parliamentary groups will be protected under this scheme to some extent by the work being undertaken, and that when FIRS goes live, we will have this confidence open to view.