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Intelligence and Security Committee

The Foreign Secretary shakes his head, because he is obviously about to say that we are debating future guidance. However, the point that I wanted to come to is that the past guidance is not going to be published and so it will not be available to us. In answer to a question that I put to him on Thursday 11 March, the Prime Minister made it absolutely clear that the Government have no intention of publishing the previous documents, even in redacted form. It may be that the members of the ISC have looked at this matter and that they have asked questions and taken legal advice about it, but it is clear that many people both in this House and outside—including very senior lawyers and judges—are concerned that the previous guidance in operation was inadequate and could have exposed some of our officers. Of course I shall not go into the details of the police investigation, but one point is really important in that context. If officers have acted against the guidance, they may be in a difficult situation: however, if they operated within the guidance and the guidance is found to have been faulty, the heads of the various intelligence services and the Ministers who signed off the guidance have legitimate questions to answer. I asked the Foreign Secretary about that when he made his most recent statement on Binyam Mohamed, but he made it clear that he was going to avoid such questions. This is a very important matter, and those of us who want to ensure that the reputation of our intelligence services is restored and that individual officers are not hung out to dry need to get to the bottom of it.