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Intelligence and Security Committee

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman, who is perfectly correct in his description. It is worth adding that when the Committee is at the stage of discussing with the agencies, or even Government Departments, what should and should not be redacted, we do not take those decisions lightly. There can often be weeks of interchange between the Committee and the relevant agencies as to what is and is not published or remains unredacted. As I said, we have tried very hard to avoid, as much as possible, the need for redaction in the reports we have published, safe in the knowledge that where national security is involved, and we can be convinced that that is the case, that device has to be available to us. I want to move on to whether we should be a Select Committee. I certainly do not think that we should. In the past few weeks, among the great cacophony of voices that have called us everything from useless to unworthy of the position—many of them I do not hold in a great deal of regard anyway—I was concerned to hear the voice of Baroness Manningham-Buller, who is a distinguished ex-director general of the Security Service. I had no criticism to make of the noble Lady when she fulfilled those duties. She was an outstanding leader of her service, and I admired her enormously. Whenever she met the Committee, she bowed to nobody and gave nothing away in the defence that she mounted on behalf of her service, and we all admired that quality in her. When we needed to be put straight as a Committee—perhaps we had misunderstood something or were simply getting it wrong—she never failed to tell us. We took a great deal of notice of any evidence that she gave. I was therefore surprised to find that she recently suggested that perhaps the time was coming when the Committee should become a Select Committee. On no occasion that I can remember did she make such a suggestion when she gave evidence to our Committee. Indeed—other members will correct me if I am wrong—I seem to recall that on several occasions she praised our work. I find it a little surprising and disappointing that somebody I regard highly and respect makes that suggestion now; had she made it to the Committee at the time, we would have taken it very seriously. The final point that I want to discuss is our relationships and intelligence sharing, particularly with the United States. In the Binyam Mohamed case—I think the right hon. Member for East Hampshire is likely to cover this in more detail—information that was owned by the United States was sequestered by British courts and then used in evidence. Concerns have been expressed that that might affect the important relationship that we have with the United States in terms of intelligence sharing. Indeed, as recently as this month, the United States director of national intelligence said:""The protection of confidential information is essential to strong, effective security and intelligence cooperation among allies. The decision by a United Kingdom court to release classified information provided by the United States is not helpful, and we deeply regret it."" That is a diplomatic way of saying, "We're very concerned about this, and it may affect the co-operation between us in future." Some 12 months ago, an official in Washington put it rather more bluntly to the Committee, saying, "Well, the way things are, we'll tell you if they're about to blow up London, but beyond that we'll have to take it on a case-by-case basis whether we share things with you or not." [Interruption.] I do not say that to be humorous. It means that the US could hold information about matters that could in the long term lead to a serious incident in this country, but because of what happened in the recent case there would be a reluctance to pass that information on to the UK. That is a serious problem that has to be addressed, and the right hon. Member for Richmond, Yorks (Mr. Hague) was right to refer to it.