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Intelligence and Security Committee

I am grateful to the Foreign Secretary for that, but, if I may, I shall offer my own translation of what he has just said. My hypothesis is that the Government did not want to publish the Committee's report because it was highly critical, and that the detainee guidance is now in the process of being frantically rewritten. Of course it is important to get it right, but if that is the situation, the Prime Minister should not have told the Chairman of the Committee a week ago that it would all be published in good time for this debate. Clearly, the work is not going on to bring it to a conclusion at the earliest possible opportunity. It is also surprising and, in my view, potentially damaging, that references to the guidance have been published in the FCO's human rights report—also published this morning; it is extraordinary how many things have been published this morning—because that will lead to many questions being asked about the guidance without it actually being available. I was surprised to see those references being published in the human rights report without the details being made available. Another result of the delay—in addition to the consequence that the hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Mr. Davey) has just pointed out—is that the Prime Minister's second pledge designed to restore public confidence, which was to task the intelligence services commissioner with monitoring compliance with the guidance and reporting to the Prime Minister annually, has not even got under way. I learned in a written answer from the Prime Minister three weeks ago that the commissioner cannot begin this work until the guidance has been published. It would not have been unreasonable for the House, having heard the Prime Minister make his pledge a year ago, to have expected the commissioner to produce his first report by about now. At the current pace, however, there will be no report to Parliament by the commissioner on this issue until some time in 2011, which will be at least two years after the Prime Minister's statement. That is why this extreme tardiness is more than just tardiness; it reveals incompetence right in the middle of the Government. There does not appear to be any effective ministerial control of these issues, taken as a whole.