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Intelligence and Security Committee (Annual Report)

I am just about to answer those points. If the second point is true, I certainly would be not only surprised, but deeply disappointed, and I undertake to look into it. I am not quite sure about my hon. Friend’s reference to the utility player, but I play the role of Jamie Carragher. I am grateful to my hon. Friend for what I take to be an accolade. I deeply regret it if that material was not available to hon. Members through some fault in the arrangements. That was exactly implicit in my remarks, as he said, and I made those comments without knowledge that the report was not available to hon. Members. As I said, I do not want to dwell on the conclusions reached in either report. Suffice it to say that the Government very much welcome the Committee’s report and particularly the recognition it pays to the efforts that have been made to build counter-terrorist capacity since 9/11. Each agency has received additional funding and is undergoing expansion and modernisation. We have tried to respond in the document that we issued today—or rather ought to have issued and made available to hon. Members today—to the Committee’s main points and recommendations, including some worries that it has expressed about certain things. I have mentioned something that we welcome: the expansion of the agencies’ activities and the resources going into them. Similarly, we welcome the Committee’s view that, despite the diversion of efforts in the wake of the July bombings, the agencies have continued essential work on all fronts. Although we rightly concentrate on counter-terrorism, we should never forget the importance of the agencies’ work on, for example, espionage, counter-proliferation and serious crime. Indeed, the Committee’s report makes it clear that the agencies are being both adaptive and innovative in dealing with the challenges that they face in what the Committee rightly describes as difficult times. In the context of such challenging times, I want to say a few words on the nature of intelligence, rather than to repeat what is in the Government’s document. The House will be aware from the Committee’s report on the 7/7 attacks that a failure of intelligence was not to blame for the London bombings in July last year. Despite the Committee’s report, much of what is said and written about that attack continues to show, at best, a rather over-simplistic understanding of the nature of intelligence. It is absolutely crucial that we understand and convey to others the complexities and uncertainties inherent in the nature of intelligence, so that we can have a more informed dialogue. Of course we should expect, and we receive, 100 per cent. commitment and 100 per cent. effort from the men and women in the intelligence and security agencies and from the police. Although there may be 100 per cent. commitment and 100 per cent. professionalism and dedication, there can never be a 100 per cent. guarantee that we can prevent every terrorist attack. Intelligence work is not an exact science; it is an activity that is conducted by human beings and that is concerned with the possible actions of human beings and, however perverted or misguided they may be, with their motivations and actions. Whatever the success in importing technology or scientific methodology, it can never therefore attain the predictability of a physical science. Moreover, whether it comes from agent reporting or the interception of communications or from other types of surveillance, intelligence information is invariably fragmentary and partial, rather than a complete picture. It is information that is generally acquired against the wishes and usually without the knowledge of targets, and a complex combination of analysis, evaluation and validation is invariably required to make sense of it. Those difficulties were highlighted in the Government’s response to the Intelligence and Security Committee’s report on the London terrorist attacks on 7 July 2005. Intelligence is never an end in itself. It serves to inform our understanding of risks and threats, to provide warnings and to direct police investigations and/or disruptive action, and it plays a vital part in helping us to develop our counter-terrorism policies and strategies, as well as our operational and tactical direction.