I beg to move,
That leave be given to bring in a Bill to provide for a power to require a person to grant access to their digital devices in the course of a lawful inspection under the Customs and Excise Management Act 1979 where there is a reasonable suspicion that the device may contain child sexual abuse material; to provide that refusal to grant such access constitutes an offence; and for connected purposes.
I begin by outlining the scale of the problem this Bill seeks to tackle. Up to 835,000 individuals in the United Kingdom represent a sexual risk to children, according to the national strategic assessment. We also know that 85% of online offenders are hands-on abusers, too. One in four girls and one in six boys are sexually assaulted before the age of 18. Child sexual abuse material—or CSAM—is abundant online, so much so that almost 30 million unique CSAM files are known to UK law enforcement, and the number is growing all the time.
The digital age has brought with it tremendous opportunities for advancement in many areas, communication has never been easier and the world has never been smaller, but as the world has become smaller, criminal networks have grown larger. Law enforcement is still having to play catch up, and as a result—tragically, unforgivably—more and more children are becoming victims to sexual predators.
The UK Border Force is our first line of defence against people travelling with the intent to cause harm, whatever that may be. Its search powers have been sufficient to stop terrorists and drug smugglers, but they are not sufficient to stop child abusers. That is because the law governing the scope of its search powers was drafted in the 1970s—long before the digital age. A single photo taken from one of today’s smartphones could easily exceed the entire capacity of even the highest-spec 1970s floppy disk, then at the revolutionary cutting edge of computing. It was an era when it was not even conceivable that sexual predators would be travelling across borders with potentially thousands of illegal photos and videos in the palm of their hand.
The outdated law in question is the Customs and Excise Management Act 1979. It grants the power for a Border Force agent to search an individual and their baggage to detect the import or export of prohibited goods. Border Force does not require reasonable grounds to suspect that the individual is in possession of prohibited goods to utilise this power of search in a port environment. While existing powers permit Border Force to require an individual to present their baggage, including their digital devices, those powers do not extend to requiring a person to open that baggage—to unlock a device. If they refuse to do so when asked, there is nothing that Border Force can do.
In previous decades, CSAM would amount to a stack of polaroids, which were often unmistakable and readily detectable. Now all this material is carried digitally, and often behind encryption software and passcodes. To expand on this point, there have been several examples of lone individuals identified as possessing belongings associated with the commission of sexual offences against children—for example, toys, lubricants, condoms and children’s underwear. In these circumstances, where it is reasonable to suspect that the individual may be in possession of digital CSAM, Border Force cannot inspect the digital device unless the individual consents. Each time this happens, we could be letting a dangerous abuser into the United Kingdom undetected. As I mentioned in my Westminster Hall debate on the same subject late last year, even when notified, it can take weeks for the police to trace an individual, and there have been cases where a suspect has raped two or more young girls before being caught.