Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd (CB)

My Lords, I add briefly to this debate. When the matter came before your Lordships’ House with the passage of the CHIS Bill towards the end of 2020 and beginning of 2021, whether to move from the use of CHISs and their conduct being looked at ex post facto to it being looked at in advance was hotly debated. It is a difficult subject to debate in an open Chamber. We all accept that CHISs are necessary, but it is impossible to go into the details of those cases here. Further, it is important to concentrate not on what happened prior to 2020, although such cases are illustrative of the abuses that can occur; we are concerned with what has happened since 2021 and how well the Act is working. As things stand at present, I cannot really add much to what the noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan, has said. My experience of this area of CHISs is that we have learned an enormous amount from Northern Ireland. We ignore at our peril what the judiciary and those who have experience of Northern Ireland tell us. That peril is that we need to be absolutely clear that the system we have of authorising when CHISs engage in criminal activity is subject to rigorous scrutiny. What disturbs me, and why I support the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, is that the key to the new system was prompt, effective and detailed scrutiny, reported to the best extent possible, of the way in which the system is operating. On what the noble Baroness has said, I have looked at these reports myself. They are necessarily vague—they have to be, because you cannot put the information into the public domain—but they are delayed. I hope that the Minister will look very seriously at this and maybe meet some of us so that we can see the reality. Is this system working? If it is not working, we must revert either to the old system or to what is proposed in this amendment. It is key to public confidence in the police that we do not have a repeat of what happened in the matters that are the subject of the inquiry that has been spoken about—though this amendment has absolutely nothing to do with that—that the CHISs operate properly, and that anything that goes wrong is properly dealt with. We cannot have another scandal on the scale of that which has been investigated for the past 10 or 12 years—I have lost count of time. This is, therefore, a matter where the amendment put forward by the noble Baroness really should be investigated. I hope that the Minister will look very seriously at it. I had long discussions during the passage of the Bill in 2020 to try to ensure that we had a good system. At present, on what is available, there is no real democratic accountability and no independent scrutiny of it. We must have that, if public confidence in the police is not to suffer the kind of problems that it suffered, into which the inquiry is going on, in relation to pre-2020 events.