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Intelligence and Security Committee

I have to say that my hon. Friend can occasionally be funny; on this occasion he was not. It was also good that my right hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen (Mr. Murphy) took part in the debate. He led the Committee very well, with his often understated way of presenting himself. He was a great leader of the Committee and, I am pleased to say, he will still be with us after the next general election, subject, of course, to the electorate re-electing him. I also want to echo the comments that have been made about the secretariat of the Intelligence and Security Committee. It has gone through a difficult period over the past few months and I do not intend to trail through the entrails of that, but each and every one of its members provides us with a fantastic service. They put in huge numbers of hours above those that they are contracted to, and to preserve the independence of the Committee they have, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Pontypridd said, put their careers in jeopardy on occasion—not because they have done anything wrong, but simply because they have stood up for the independence of the Committee. I hope that, as my right hon. Friend said, when the Dissolution of Parliament takes place—I hope that the Minister takes note of this—it will not be seen by some senior civil servants as an opportunity to get rid of the current secretariat and put somebody else in before a new Committee is formed. It is important both for the integrity of the future Committee and as a matter of fairness that that does not happen. The hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Mr. Davey) almost invited me to speak on the question of intercept as evidence. I am not saying this as a criticism—I realise that it was difficult for anybody to get to grips with all the information in the time that they had to read the 2009-10 report—but at paragraph 58 on page 19 there is a whole section headed "Intercept as evidence". The most important thing to draw to his attention is the fact that the Home Office carried out a trial of a system—indeed, some members of the Committee were able to attend sessions of that trial—in which it tried out some cases in a synthesised situation to see how it would work if intercept were used as evidence. As a result, the Home Secretary produced a report, the conclusion of which was:""The collective view of the departments, intercepting agencies and prosecution authorities engaged in the work programme is that despite best efforts to design, build and test the model, it does not provide a viable basis for implementation, without breaching the operational requirements set out by the Privy Council."" It is, therefore, not true to say that they threw their hands up and said, "It's all too difficult." It was as a result of trying to make a system work that it was concluded that it probably could not.