Plans to grant police and intelligence officers new powers to monitor suspects online will not get through parliament without a requirement for judges to sign off on spying warrants, the former Conservative shadow home secretary David Davis has said.

The backbench MP was speaking before the publication of a draft of the investigatory powers bill, due on Wednesday, with the Home Office so far refusing to indicate whether the proposed legislation will include judicial approval of applications made by the security services to intercept communications.

Speaking on BBC1’s Sunday Politics show, Davis said: “Actually I don’t think this bill will get through either Commons or Lords without judicial authorisation … There’s a new consensus on this right across the board – across the experts, across the spooks, across the parties, across both houses of parliament.”

Davis, who has campaigned with Labour’s deputy leader, Tom Watson, against what they see as draconian surveillance legislation, denied that a system requiring judicial approval would be less accountable. “Every time I’ve asked a question of any minister on a security matter … they say ‘we don’t comment on security matters.’ There is no accountability.”



The Home Office has already said that it has dropped several contentious proposals from the bill, including plans to allow the police and security services full access to everyone’s internet browsing history. The climbdown was prompted by concerns that the government would be unable to get the legislation through parliament because of unease of its implications for civil liberties.

A report published in June by David Anderson QC recommended that judicial rather than ministerial authorisation of individual, targeted intercept warrants should be required. His position runs counter to parliament’s intelligence and security committee, which said in March that responsibility should remain with ministers. The Royal United Services Institute favours an approach under which government authorises some warrants and judges others.



Speaking on BBC1’s Andrew Marr Show, the home secretary, Theresa May, said she sets time aside every day to consider such warrants. “I will be explaining the government’s position to parliament this week,” she said.



Davis said: “At the moment, the home secretary does about 10 of these warrants in a working day. It’s impossible for any one person to do this. It’s bad practice, it’s bad managerially, it’s bad legally and it’s bad in terms of counter-terrorism.”

Speaking to on the Murnaghan programme on Sky News, the former Liberal Democrat leader Lord Ashdown said the upper house would ensure that judicial oversight of warrants was added to the bill if it was not included in the draft. “This is precisely constitutionally the kind of bill within which we should be intervening if indeed the legislation is deficient,”he said.

The shadow home secretary, Andy Burnham, said on Thursday that Labour would not support the investigatory powers bill unless it included judicial oversight of national security warrants. A spokesperson for Burnham said the shadow cabinet had agreed the party’s position, including the opposition leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and his deputy, Tom Watson, who both voted against the current emergency legislation.



Speaking on BBC1’s Sunday Politics programme, the shadow home office minister, Keir Starmer, a former director of public prosecutions, said judicial authorisation of new intercept powers was a red line for Labour.

“We’ve got the chance to have a modern comprehensive law that sets out the powers for law enforcement and the security services and, at the same time, we’ve got the chance - a historic chance - to get the safeguards right. And one of the safeguards that’s really important is judicial authorisation of intercept warrants,” he said.

“There’s a big difference between data and content, and by content we mean what are people actually saying to each other. That should be signed off by a judge. That’s what happens in other countries.”

The Sun reported on Thursday that the attorney general, Jeremy Wright, had advised May against giving judges oversight. A minister told the paper: “The attorney general’s advice was very clear. It would be totally irresponsible of government to allow the legal system to dictate to us on matters as important as terrorism. Not only would they tie things in knots very quickly, but they are not elected and answerable to nobody.”