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Terrorism Bill

First, I apologise for not being here at the beginning of this; I did not quite fall asleep, but I did not realise that it was on. I will be very short. It seems to be black or white—either we have total disclosure or we have non-disclosure. I cannot believe that either of those is in practical terms what we need to have on the ground. The world is not like that. Why is it that certain people when asked a certain question—heads of the security services or whatever—say, ““This threatens our people completely and absolutely, and you disclose anything””? Why is that others say, ““You need not disclose it””? I am not as eminent as the noble Baroness, Lady Park, or indeed the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, and I certainly do not know as much as they do. To put it in slightly different terms, in Northern Ireland, we may have had information from those types of intercept or other types of information that we did not wish to disclose. There were mechanisms whereby that information was not used until such time as there could have been another source for it so that the sensitive source was not exposed. I cannot speak from their level, I fully accept that, but from my level, which was fairly low. In practical terms you have to balance what you are going to get and what you are prepared to sacrifice—if indeed you are prepared to sacrifice it—and how you might take the action that you wished to all along without exposing the individual, individuals or systems that originally set you on to it. I was not in the Second World War, but I believe that the noble Baroness opposite would be able to describe occasions when exactly that sort of thing happened—when an operation took place and the original, sensitive sources were not exposed. We are being rather blinkered about the issue; I cannot understand why the Government and certain people are being so. I am sure that if you offered the security services the assurance that under no circumstances would they be exposed if they did not want to be, but that such information could be used when they agreed to it, they would say, ““Yes, go ahead””—so why are we not working on that?