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Intelligence and Security Committee

My hon. Friend raises a point of principle and another specific point. He has the perfectly legitimate point of view that something that is not conducted in the public domain cannot be effective. I do not agree with him, but I recognise that that is his point of view. I agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Pontypridd, the Chairman of the Committee, who says that if it met only in public, it would have far less impact as an accountability mechanism than it does in its current form, however imperfect or in need of reform it is. On the specific question of the Omand review, I will have to get some work done this afternoon and ask the Minister for Europe to respond to my hon. Friend. The issue of lost laptops is not referred to in the 2008-09 ISC report, because that was in a separate review by Sir David Omand and was not to do with particular ISC documents. I am not even sure whether they were Security Service documents, but I will ask the Minister to fill the House in on that when he speaks. It is important to be open where we can. Important steps have been made to bring aspects of the intelligence community into the light since the 1994 Act, for which the right hon. and learned Member for Kensington and Chelsea (Sir Malcolm Rifkind) claimed some responsibility in an intervention. He rightly made the point that we cannot allow bodies such as the ISC simply to stand still; they should develop. Of course, until 1994, even the existence of the Secret Intelligence Service was officially denied. In the early years, ISC reports contained no published figures for agency expenditure, for example, but that has now changed. The latest report contains more unredacted data on the funding and administration of the agencies than ever before. However, that does not mean that we should not seek to go further. Since 2007, we have made a number of proposals for ways to strengthen the role of the Committee, including an offer to discuss how it might hold some annual evidence sessions in public, which was raised by my right hon. Friend the Member for Pontypridd, who rightly said—I think this is more or less correct—that a patsy session is not worth having. That must be true, but equally, demystification is important, and there are points of principle and judgment that can be discussed openly. Actually, the public debate would benefit from a more public discussion of such things. I believe that the country would also benefit from a more open discussion of the priorities given to different kinds of threats, which the Committee has raised in successive reports. There is some meat for public discussions that would not put Committee members in an impossible position, in which they would be required to give advance notice of all their questions to they extent that they become patsy questions, nor would Ministers or agency heads be put in a position in which their answers look pathetic—for example, if they had to say, "I can't answer that question." It is sobering to be reminded that the debate on public sessions has been going on since 2001, but as I said, my reflection is that it is worth trying to demystify and demythologise the process. I hope that the Committee can take that forward.