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Intelligence and Security Committee

I thank the right hon. Member for Pontypridd (Dr. Howells) for introducing the debate in very careful terms. I join other Members in thanking members of the intelligence services for the essential role they play in ensuring our security and protecting citizens here and abroad. I pay tribute to members of the Committee for the essential work that they are doing, particularly my right hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith), who served on the Committee and has now been superseded by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for North-East Fife (Sir Menzies Campbell), who is not in his place. I am sure that he, too, will play a very significant role on the Committee. I apologise on behalf of my hon. Friend the Member for Eastleigh (Chris Huhne), who is unable to be here to lead for the Liberal Democrats in this debate. When he did so last year, he underlined the importance of debating these matters on an annual basis; on that occasion, there had been an interval of nearly two years. I welcome the fact that the annual cycle appears to have been resumed. These matters are so significant that we need to have an opportunity to discuss them regularly. I welcome the fact that, during the period covered by the report, the Committee focused on 7/7, which clearly had very tragic consequences for those who were involved. I suspect that most, if not all Members will have been to a much lesser extent affected by what happened on that day, and will remember where they were in London and whether they were able to get into Westminster. I hope that the Committee's work on that—I look forward to the report being published on 19 May—will provide as many answers as possible for the families affected, given the limitation on putting into the public domain information that should be kept secure. I shall not go over the ground that the spokesman for the official Opposition covered on redaction, but I reinforce his point about the difficulty for Members who are not on the Committee of making any assessment of the value for money of what is proposed. Explanations have been given of why it is necessary not to provide a certain level of information, but I hope that it might be possible to do so without revealing any confidences and that we will be given a little more flavour as to why it is not possible to give Members an understanding of expenditure at a high level. I understand that if expenditure were broken down to such a level that it identified, for instance, that nothing is currently being spent on monitoring messages via Facebook or those being dispatched via Twitter or any of the other new technology that is available, that would be unhelpful to our security services and helpful to our enemies. I am sure that no one is suggesting that information should be made available to Members at that level of detail. However, it should be possible to provide us with some more information, or, if that is not possible, to explain why not. I cannot quite understand what our enemies would be able to extrapolate from high-level figures that did not break down expenditure to a lower level.