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Intelligence and Security Committee

I beg to move,"That this House has considered the matter of the Annual Report of the Intelligence and Security Committee for 2007-08, Cm 7542, and the Government's response, Cm 7543." I have had the privilege of chairing this Committee since October last year and this is the first opportunity I have had to talk about the work of the Committee before the House. I believe that this is the first time that such a debate has been opened by the Committee Chairman. I have been asked by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs to offer his apologies for being unable to attend this debate. He is representing the Prime Minister at the Eastern Partnership summit in Prague. While we wish the Foreign Secretary well at that conference, I am sure that all present are delighted to see my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary participating in today's debate. On behalf of the Committee, I wish to put on record our thanks to my predecessors: my right hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen (Mr. Murphy), who was Chairman until January 2008 and my right hon. Friend the Member for Derby, South (Margaret Beckett), who was Chairman until October 2008. I am grateful to them for the excellent leadership they provided. In the period covered by the annual report, the Committee held 26 formal meetings and 25 other meetings—51 in total—and undertook a number of visits. Its members attended the vast majority of those meetings—well over 90 per cent.—so I want to thank them for their hard work and the constructive approach they brought to the Committee's work. I have certainly never served on any other Committee where attendance has been so high or its members have been so expert—an issue to which I shall return. The Intelligence and Security Committee has a statutory remit to examine the administration, policy and finance of the UK's security and intelligence agencies. We report on these annually to the Prime Minister and meet him to discuss the details of the report. The report covers the period from December 2007 to November 2008. That is the period that we are looking at today. Our most time-consuming task during that period was the completion of our review of the intelligence on the London terrorist attacks of 7 July 2005. That was the subject of a separate, detailed report, which was sent to the Prime Minister in July 2008. It could not be published then for legal reasons. A trial going on at the time has now concluded, and reporting restrictions have been lifted. To reflect recent developments, the Committee has updated the report—not in a rewrite, as some have suggested, but in a separate, additional annexe. We sent that update to the Prime Minister yesterday, and I am informed that he will publish both the report and update on Tuesday 19 May. I will not comment further on the report during this debate. As the annual report makes clear on page 44, during 2008, the Committee also began investigations into a number of other areas—investigations that were continuing when the annual report was published. Some of the investigations have now concluded, and we will report on them in our next annual report. Properly, the annual report deals mainly with the nuts and bolts of the agencies' operations: their administration, policy and finance. I will provide an overview. A wide range of threats, both terrorist and non-terrorist, continues to be posed to the United Kingdom.