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Intelligence and Security Committee

I am glad to see that my hon. Friend does not think that. However, the underlying assumption of many of the writers of the articles criticising our Committee over the recent past seems to be that states should never hold any secrets—or that if they do have any secrets, there should be some means of making them public. I do not know how we could function in that way. No doubt more will be said about this during the debate, but it has already been pointed out that in reality, in the dangerous world we live in—a world where people are willing to strap on explosives, go into London's transport system and blow themselves up, along with anyone within a reasonable radius—public safety, state secrets and what we know about what people intend to do are of paramount importance. If we cannot protect that information we are, to be frank, a less safe nation. That may seem a trite and obvious thing to say, but the tone of much of the media criticism levelled against our Committee seems to start from the presumption that it does not really matter whether the state cannot keep its secrets. Well, I beg to differ. On occasion, we have been given evidence about incidents that might have happened but, mercifully, information was intercepted. That evidence has made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up in fear of the true potential for such an incident happening in this country. The state has to hold secrets. The question then is how we oversee the organisations that hold those secrets. There has been an argument about whether we should use a Select Committee model, or whether the model we have is the right one. I think that there are real reasons why John Major's Government set up the Committee the way they did. It was not that they did not want effective oversight. The right hon. and learned Member for Kensington and Chelsea (Sir Malcolm Rifkind) told the House earlier that they thought long and hard about the matter, giving it a great deal of consideration. What they wanted was an effective way of overseeing what the agencies do, while ensuring that the confidential, secret nature of much of the material was protected. It is because we work in that way that I sometimes think we are unfairly criticised. I shall describe a few characteristics of our work in order to explain that point better. First, and uniquely, members of our Committee have to sign the Official Secrets Act. I do not think that any other Member, sitting on a committee of any description, is in that position. We do so freely, and we are not complaining, but it provides some indication of not only the personal commitment we have to make but what follows from that—the fact that we have access to classified material, which often cannot be discussed in public, bearing in mind the point that I have already made about the state's right to hold secrets. The second point, to which I think the hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton referred in an intervention, is that we meet in premises that are suitably secure. We do not meet in the House; we meet in offices that are suitably secure, as my right hon. Friend described them, so that the dialogue that we need to have with the agencies can take place. The third point for which we draw some criticism is that our reports often contain redactions: things are blanked out. Often, they are figures. We as a Committee try to minimise the number of redactions, because we think it is in everybody's interest if we publish as much as we can. Indeed, the more that is published, the more people might be reassured about what is going on. However, we recognise that some figures and material of which we are made aware cannot be put in the public domain. The legislation requires that our reports go, first, to the Prime Minister, so we have to inform him of everything that we know, even though that means that, for public consumption, some sections of the report have to be redacted. I understand why, for a journalist looking at such matters, it must be hugely frustrating to pick up one of our reports and find out that the information that they would love to know and write about simply has not been published. I can understand why Members feel frustrated on occasions, too, but the alternative is to give a less than complete picture to the Prime Minister, and it would be a dereliction of our duty if we did not bring to the attention of the Prime Minister everything that we thought he needed to know—even though some of that cannot be made public. On the question of whether we should be more like a Select Committee, I would have no difficulty with some of our sessions, when appropriate, being held in public, although I share my right hon. Friend's concern that, on occasions, they would look rather staged. Let us be honest: there would not be a full, free and frank exchange of information between ourselves and our witnesses, because they would not be able to say in public the things that we would have to discuss in private. Nevertheless, we could do a couple of things in public, and, after the election, were I still to be a Member of the House and a member of the Committee, I would be open to conducting such experiments.