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Intelligence and Security Committee (Annual Report)

If my hon. Friend will forgive me, I think that he is blaming the wrong person. We cannot blame the Committee for the extent to which the House or the Government take action on the basis of its recommendations. That is purely the responsibility of the House and the Government. The Committee does the best job it can within the limits of its remit and my hon. Friend highlights a good example of one of the things that it illustrated. The burden of the ISC’s work this year has been the report into the London terrorist attacks of 7 July, about which I do not intend to go into great detail as I suspect that the story will change over the coming year. When the Committee published its report, I paid tribute to it as ““extremely insightful””, but although the Committee is impartial, astute and of the highest integrity, as I have said before, there are limitations on what it can achieve. I shall read a quotation to the House:"““No one wants to play the blame game. No one wants an investigation to find one person who was at fault and make them pay. But we need to fully understand what happened on July 7. And there is a very simple reason - it is the best way to stop it from ever happening again. The public need to know if there was anything that could have been done immediately before the attacks to prevent them. They need to know whether there were things the police or security services might have done which could have saved all those lives.””" Those are the words not of some wild revolutionary, but of the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Denham). So if the Home Secretary will not listen to me, perhaps he will listen to his right hon. Friend who, as the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee and a former Home Office Minister, has a good deal more experience in these matters than almost anybody else—even members of the Government. It is worth pointing out that almost every serious breach of security under previous Governments has resulted in an independent inquiry, generally led by a member of the judiciary, such as the Radcliffe inquiry in 1962, the Denning inquiry and the Franks inquiry. The least that the Government can do, to ensure that no stone is left unturned in learning the lessons from last July, is to order a full, independent inquiry. So far, the Home Secretary has shown himself willing to reconsider some of the decisions taken by his predecessors. I hope that this will be another issue on which he is prepared to be independently minded and to do what is best in the interests of the public. The ISC reports that the Home Secretary intends to toughen the Official Secrets Act. We hear that he intends to remove the common law defence of ““duress of circumstance””, or necessity, as a defence for so-called whistleblowers, and that the maximum penalty for breaching the Official Secrets Act could be doubled from two to four years in prison. I shall wait until the Bill is published and we have had a proper chance to examine it in detail before I comment on its contents and before the Opposition decide on their stance. It is surprising, however, that the Home Secretary wants to change the law when the Government have failed to test its operation in crucial cases, most recently in the case of Katharine Gun, which, I understand, led to the proposals. I should make it clear that I do not approve of what Ms Gun did, but if the Government believed that her actions represented a breach in security, or had endangered the interests of the United Kingdom, they had a duty to take the case to court in the national interest. However, the case was reportedly dropped just five hours after the defence sought the disclosure of the Attorney-General’s advice to the Government about the Iraq war. Whether or not there is a public interest or similar defence in law, it is possible that a jury would still decide a case based on its own interpretation of the public interest. I hope that the Home Secretary will pay particular attention to this part of my argument, as that is an important test; for example, such an interpretation of the public interest may have been the reason for the acquittal of Clive Ponting, under a previous Government. The Government came to power with an admirable reputation and enthusiasm for freedom of information, for protecting whistleblowers and for civil rights—an apposite point given the issues that were raised with me earlier—which has, sadly, faded in recent years. The Government’s behaviour towards legitimate—indeed, public spirited—whistleblowers has bordered on the disreputable. There will be a fear that the Official Secrets Act is being used to conceal embarrassing facts, rather than secrets that are essential to the security of the state. If the proposed measures represent the former, the whole House will resist them, but if they are really necessary for the defence of the state, they will receive our support. That distinction is vitally important.