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Intelligence and Security Committee

The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point. We look forward to his speech, if he manages to catch your eye later, Madam Deputy Speaker. The Committee rightly says that it is "appalled" by the decision to scrap phase 2 of the SCOPE system. It says:""We sincerely hope that lessons have been learnt from the failure and that they will be used when plans for the future are being drawn up."" The Government must address that as a matter of urgency because, yet again, a major IT project has gone wrong, this time in a secure environment. On intercept evidence, the Committee says:""We welcome the fact that the Chilcot conditions meet our concerns that the Agencies' capability must not be damaged should their intercept material be adduced in court. We are concerned, however, as to whether it will be possible to met these conditions."" I think that there is a clear case for doing everything we can to ensure that intercept evidence can be used in court, when appropriate, especially given the pressures of the control order regime. We may need to re-examine the conditions to see whether they are right for the circumstances. I appreciate that this is a difficult matter, but it is one in which we should aspire to deliver results and make as much information as possible available, where it is possible to do so. Finally on the criticisms in the report, the Committee refers to the need to improve understanding of '"the path to extremism"', and it""welcomes the establishment of a new team analysing open-source and academic material in this field."" However, it also raised questions about where that sits within the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre, and expressed concern about JTAC's capabilities being diluted by the change. I hope that the Government will look at that very carefully. My worry, when I look at the Government's response to the report, is just how limited it is. So many of the responses to the points raised in the report are cursory. Of 17 recommendations, 11 get only a one-line response. Of course, there are limitations to how much the Government can say in response to the points raised, but surely their response to point F on flooding could be a little more detailed without sacrificing too many secrets. In point H, the Committee considers how oversight of the agencies' work might be improved, but could the Government not do better than the one-line response that is given? Point N deals with the failings of the SCOPE project: the Government say that they will co-operate with the next report, but could they not say a little more about that? On the Committee's final point about intercept evidence, the Government's response reflects the lengthy process that is being undertaken to enable them to make a decision about its use. The matter is, of course, complex, but it is a shame that the Government did not start the process a long time before they did. If they had, we might have reached a resolution by now. Briefly, I shall set out for the House some of the areas in which we think improvements need to be made, and where we hope the ISC will apply its efforts to securing improvement. We remain concerned that the "National Security Strategy" is a descriptive document. A proper strategy would set the overall framework and direction for security policy across Government. We have argued for a proper national security council, rather than an amalgamation of existing Committees. We think that such a council would provide strategic direction and drive national security policy. We need to look carefully at the role and grading of the JIC chair and the security adviser, who both need to have the requisite authority to carry out their important roles.