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Intelligence and Security Committee: Annual Report 2007–08

I congratulate the committee on its hard work and on the production of this report, and I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, on the way he has presented it to us today. It is clear that the committee was not asterisked out, and I do not regard this as an asterisked whitewash, as people might think. Having looked at the asterisks, it is obvious that they deal with resources that are not of a great deal of interest. A number of points raised by the committee makes me confident that it takes its task seriously and is critical when that is justified. Perhaps I can put the points that concern me in the hope that the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord West of Spithead, will be able to answer some of them, subject of course to any asterisk that may be necessary, but those are probably asterisks that he uses in a naval capacity. The first issue is that of recruitment. Paragraph 42 points out that GCHQ has long-term problems in recruiting and retaining specialists, including linguists, analysts, technologists and internet network experts. In 2007 it introduced a new policy to ensure that it paid the market rate to its operatives. However, the report records that the director remains concerned about the retention of these specialists because people drop out after five to eight years, when they have become experienced, because the rates of pay are simply not comparable with the earnings they can achieve in the outside world. The noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, pointed out to me the other day that there is no shortage of information. Indeed, the services are overwhelmed with information, so analysts who are highly trained should be encouraged to stay. If it requires more pay to do that, they should receive it. As part of the Government’s implementation of the recommendations of the Butler review, a new post called the professional head of intelligence analysis was created, and Miss Jane Knight was appointed to be the champion—a favourite word of the Government—on behalf of analysts and to establish a distinct career specialism for this group. In the earlier report we learn that the committee had taken evidence from the professional head of intelligence analysis. Her team promulgated an analytical competence framework for professional development and conducted a survey of analytical capabilities across the intelligence community—developing courses, filling in perceived gaps in training and so on. This is a critical issue and could go very much to the future effectiveness of the security services. I see also from the report that the Defence Intelligence Staff suffered a cut of 20 per cent of posts based in Whitehall. The committee was concerned about that and commented on it at paragraph 157. I see that the Government’s response to the committee’s criticism of the cut in these services states that: ""Analytical effort will be carefully prioritised"," with regard to the cuts being imposed. When one hears from the Government about the security of this country, I wonder whether it is appropriate that specialised and experienced people of this kind should be lost to the service by reason of what they do. I am grateful to the committee for raising a very important point. The committee states that the focus of the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre is on current and immediate threats based on secret intelligence, and its purpose is to analyse the threat from international terrorism and to use those assessments to set the UK threat level. However, it appears to have been given an additional task in March 2008 with quite a different remit. The noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, emphasised that it is crucial to implement the Prevent strategy, which is a strand of the Government’s counterterrorism strategy. I am grateful to the committee for setting out in paragraph 117 what it considered to be the important features of the Prevent strategy, which are: ""challenging the ideology behind extremism and supporting mainstream voices; disrupting those who promote violent extremism and those who support the institutions where they operate; supporting individuals who are vulnerable to recruitment by proponents of violent extremism; increasing the resilience of communities against violent extremism; and addressing the grievances that ideologues are exploiting"." To my mind, that is the long-term solution for terrorism and the threat of terrorism in this country. The noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, was right to say how crucial it is that that service should be given priority. The committee felt that it was wrong that the task of investigating the path to violent extremism had been handed to a small department of the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre, which seems to have a completely different remit. It made a recommendation at paragraph 137 of the report to the effect that consideration should be given to moving the new team to a more appropriate location such as the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism in the Home Office. It is a complete mystery to me what goes on inside the Home Office—I have my darker suspicions and your Lordships have very often heard me voice those suspicions—but the committee may have hit on something important. A small department in, I have to use the phrase, JTAC—this is like appearing in a military case where one is surrounded by initials of this kind—is not the way to put forward an extremely important part of the counterterrorism strategy. The noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, and the report referred to SCOPE. A major cross-government programme aiming to improve the intelligence community’s secure communications, it was apparently subject to constant delays. Phase 1 crept in but phase 2 has been scrapped with tens of millions of pounds thrown away. He said that we will hear in the next annual report what happened to the tens of millions and why phase 2 was scrapped. I hope that we might have a little more transparency in that regard. At this stage, I think that it would be appropriate for the Minister to explain to us what went wrong and what is to be put in its place. I look forward to that. I turn to the subject of intercepts—a favourite topic. I note that the committee was unconvinced that intercept evidence should be heard in court, but it is very interesting that the Chilcot review agreed with the principle that intercept as evidence should be introduced. We heard a short time ago from the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, that the point was first raised in 1988 and that there has been no objection to it in principle either from the department that she headed or from the other agencies. Therefore, we continue to plod towards what I am sure we will ultimately be given—that is, some access to intercept evidence in the courts, which of course I know a little more about. The Chilcot review set out nine requirements. I do not know whether there was a criminal lawyer on the review but those requirements, or recommendations, which had to be satisfied before intercept could be used as evidence, rule it out completely. Let us look at the first requirement: ""The intercepting agency shall decide whether a prosecution involving their intercepted material shall proceed"." All of a sudden, the Chilcot inquiry takes away from the Director of Public Prosecutions—or, in the ultimate, the Attorney-General—the right to decide whether a prosecution should proceed. That is a very interesting and unusual introduction into the criminal justice system of this country. The second requirement was: ""Intercepted material originating from the intelligence agencies shall not be disclosed beyond cleared judges, prosecutors, or special … advocates, except in a form agreed by the originator"." Therefore, MI5, MI6, GCHQ or whoever can carry out their own redaction of material that they have and that apparently binds everyone. It will not even go before a judge to decide whether the redaction should be kept secret or made more public. The third recommendation or requirement was that material intercepted using sensitive Sigint, which I understand is signals intelligence techniques— ""shall not be disclosed unless the Secretary of State is satisfied that disclosure will not put the capability and techniques at risk". " Therefore, we have the agency determining whether a prosecution will proceed, how much intercept evidence should be disclosed and in what form and how it should be redacted, and the Secretary of State having an overall responsibility to decide whether material intercepted using these techniques should be disclosed at all. At the end comes requirement nine, which makes me think that a criminal lawyer was not involved in the Chilcot inquiry: ""At trials (whether or not intercept is adduced as evidence) the defence shall not be able to conduct successful ‘fishing expeditions’ against intercept alleged to be held by any agency"." Presumably it can conduct unsuccessful fishing expeditions but it is not allowed to conduct successful ones. That is paranoia about the way in which criminal lawyers go about their business. Fishing expeditions have never been allowed. Disclosure of documents does not depend upon fishing expeditions, whether successful or not. The judge controls a trial and he controls what disclosure is necessary. If disclosure is objected to, the judge will control what can and cannot be disclosed. There is a paranoia about lawyers, echoed yesterday by the Prime Minister, when he said that to hold the inquiry into Iraq in public would mean "lawyers, lawyers, lawyers"—echoes of Tony Blair's "education, education, education". That is the paranoid approach to the way in which we lawyers go about our business. I will not pursue the intercept argument any further, but simply note that the committee is unconvinced—and remains to be convinced, I am sure—of the value of intercept evidence in trials. After all, we want people who are guilty to be convicted. That is the important point. All parties in Parliament want the guilty to be convicted. That depends on evidence and on proof. If intercept evidence can make the difference between proving and not proving things, it should as a matter of public policy, as it is everywhere else in the world, be part of the trial process. I have probably spoken for too long. I again congratulate the noble Lord on the report.