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Intelligence and Security Committee

The Minister says the doyen, but I suppose he is more continentally minded than I am. Above all, I pay tribute to the ISC's Chairman, the right hon. Member for Pontypridd (Dr. Howells). Listening to the tributes during today's debate, he must have at times feared that he was in a dream and listening to the eulogies at his own funeral. With all due respect to the hon. Member for Thurrock (Andrew Mackinlay), I must say that the Chairman delivered a formidable demonstration of independence in his opening speech. When I from time to time debated against him from our respective Front Benches, he occasionally came out with a comment from the Dispatch Box along the lines of, "My personal view is", at which point one could see the shudder spreading along the row of civil servants in attendance to support him as they wondered quite what their Minister was about to say next. This debate has centred very much on how to strike the balance in our country between secrecy and the accountability of the security and intelligence services, and I wish to discuss that theme a little later. The debate also touched upon many aspects of the work of the security and intelligence agencies, and the report goes into rather more detail about that. I wish to allude briefly to some of those aspects. The report contains quite a lot about how the agencies set about establishing relative priorities and how the priorities for intelligence-gathering change over the years. For example, I believe that some 15 per cent. of the work of the Security Service is directed towards tackling threats from east Africa, and Somalia in particular. I hope that the successor Committee in the next Parliament will take forward that work and will also examine what demands are being placed on our services by concerns about terrorism within Yemen, which has been in the news a lot recently. I also noted the increased concern expressed by the Committee, on behalf of the agencies, about the worrying resurgence of dissident terrorism in Northern Ireland. That is clearly something in which the House needs to take a continuing interest and I hope that the successor Committee will pursue it. I am sorry that this afternoon's debate has not covered at all the threat from cyberterrorism. One worrying point that emerges from the Committee's report is the plethora of acronyms—the number of different Government bodies charged with addressing the threat to cybersecurity. The Committee expressed doubts about whether the Government's approach to cybersecurity was being co-ordinated effectively. Those of us outside the curtain who rely on media reports still know enough from what is in the public domain about the growing threat to this country's interests from cyberterrorism to believe that that should be a prime area for the Committee's work in future. My right hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire rightly talked about the central importance to the effectiveness of British intelligence and security agencies of their being able to share information in confidence with allies—in particular, our critical intelligence-sharing relationship with the United States of America. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Richmond, Yorks (Mr. Hague) made clear during his speech, Conservative Members regard the integrity of that intelligence-sharing relationship as of the highest importance to the security of the United Kingdom. We support the control principle, and I reiterate the question that my right hon. Friend posed to the Foreign Secretary. In the light of the recent court judgments, do the Government believe that, regardless of the circumstances of any particular case, there is a need either for legislation or for some other means to assert the principle of control of intelligence by its originator and to ensure that that is protected against conceivable future challenges, or do they believe that the recent Court of Appeal judgment upheld that principle to such an extent that they can have confidence that it will not be threatened? Having read through the reports, I came to the view that one important aspect of the ISC's work is the Committee's concern about the stewardship of resources by the various agencies. Perhaps with the exception of the hon. Member for Thurrock, who touched on performance targets, we have not really debated this today, but that element of scrutiny is significant. It was concerning to read that the Committee was dissatisfied with the amount of detail to which it was being given access over GCHQ's SIGMOD—signals intelligence modernisation—project, given that that involves the expenditure of many millions of pounds of taxpayers' money. The saga of the SCOPE interdepartmental IT project is also disturbing. According to the Committee, that major project was initiated in 2001. By January 2008, it had clearly run into problems, but the Cabinet Office said that concerted efforts were being made to deliver it successfully and on time. Yet the implied note of exasperation comes through from the Committee's comment that, just three months later, the Cabinet Office announced that the project had been abandoned altogether. The Committee relates that that has probably meant the loss of tens of millions of pounds. We know that the Committee has investigated that apparent debacle, but no report has yet been made publicly available. I do not know whether one will be, and it appears that contractual disputes between the Government and the contractor or contractors involved are delaying that further. I hope that those long-dragged-out arguments can be resolved quickly, because it is in the public interest that we know as much as it is possible for us to be told about how mistakes came to be made in the management of such an important contract, and what lessons can be learned and applied for the future. In paragraph 18 of the 2009-10 report, the ISC quotes all three agency chiefs as saying that they know that their agency is entering a period of financial austerity in which difficult decisions about resources and priorities will have to be made, despite the overall increase in expenditure that I am happy to acknowledge. Given that financial stringency, it is all the more important that Parliament makes sure, through the ISC reports, that the money being made available is stewarded properly and that the taxpayer and the British public get the best possible value for it. To nobody's surprise, I think, my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Mr. Tyrie) spoke at length about the unhappy saga of extraordinary rendition. I should like to congratulate him on his dogged—and, in the early months and years, rather lonely—persistence in following this issue through. There is no doubt in my mind that this business damaged the standing of our security and intelligence services in British public opinion. It has also harmed the reputation of the US, a development that I believe is very unwelcome indeed. Given the importance of being able to put the episode behind us and draw a line beneath it, I am surprised that the Government have baulked at the sort of judge-led inquiry to which my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester alluded, and that they seem to be dragging their feet when it comes to subscribing to the UN convention on enforced disappearances. The former Minister, Lord Malloch-Brown, championed that international instrument when it was agreed back in December 2006, but as yet the Government have neither signed nor ratified it. After I had been pressing this matter, the Foreign Secretary wrote to me in October 2008 to say that the Government were considering their position with regard to signature and ratification. He said that the FCO was consulting other Departments, but he also said:""As the UK does not hold people incommunicado, or subject any person to enforced disappearance, we had not considered the ratification of this treaty an urgent priority against other business."" Now I am no lawyer, but it seems to me that what we now know about the renditions through the UK territory of Diego Garcia leaves open the possibility, at the very least, that we would have been in breach of our international obligations, had the UN convention been in force. I hope that the Minister for Europe will be able to assure me—either now, or when he replies to the debate, or perhaps in writing later on—that the Government are now showing rather more urgency in addressing this matter than they have up to now. The core of the debate has been the question of how we strike the right balance between secrecy and accountability. Critical to that is the independence of the ISC, and its relationship with the Government and Parliament. I am more than willing to agree with the right hon. Member for Knowsley, North and Sefton, East (Mr. Howarth) that the state has matters that it must keep secret, in all our interests. That is completely unavoidable and any grown-up involved in politics has to accept it. However, it is also inevitable that secrecy breeds suspicion and mistrust, especially in an age when people are no longer deferential and when they are much less inclined to take on trust anything said by any kind of public agency. People are also now used to being able to access and collate vast quantities of information instantly through the internet. Allegations of torture and mistreatment in particular do untold damage to the UK's reputation, not only here but worldwide. When a senior foreign visitor to the UK was detained and temporarily imprisoned the other week, it was striking that within a matter of hours international satellite television channels were reporting that this man was being denied consular access, visits by relatives and legal advice as though it were fact. I do not want to stray into the details of that case, but it illustrates how quickly this country's reputation can suffer around the world, and not just among our own people. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kensington and Chelsea (Sir Malcolm Rifkind) pointed out that when we are dealing with the issues raised by allegations of torture or mistreatment, we need to look not only at the detail of individual cases, but at processes, at habits of working by the agencies, both internally and in their relationships with agencies in other countries. We have to assure ourselves, largely through the Committee, that we have been able to draw a line under previous allegations and that we have the systems in place to ensure that we are true to the values and standards that we champion in the world and to which we urge others to adhere. Our inclination to support a judge-led inquiry derives from our concern to draw a clear line and to allow the agencies to get on with their job on behalf of all of us in the future. Parliament and the public need the confidence that the ISC has all the access it needs to do its job, that it will be given all the information it seeks from the agencies, that Government will respect its independence and respond fully to its criticisms, and that Ministers will publish reports without undue delay and then take action and carry through the reforms that they have publicly promised to make. It does not give me pleasure to say this—because this above all should be an issue where we should be able to count on the maximum level of cross-party consensus—but all through the debate we have heard from both sides of the House a catalogue of examples of delay, incompetence and failure to co-operate fully with the Committee. My right hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire spoke about the Government's failure to fulfil their promise to make available the Committee's report on the guidance on treatment during the interview of detainees overseas and to publish the guidance by the promised date. I think he said that publication was put off because certain people would find it embarrassing. The Foreign Secretary, in response to an earlier intervention from my right hon. Friend, seemed completely unsighted on the proposal for an investigation into vetting. I hope that the Minister will have brief available when he replies to the debate, but it struck me as extraordinary that Ministers charged with the supervision of the intelligence and security agencies apparently did not know that such an investigation was being proposed. Most trenchantly, we had the opening speech from the right hon. Member for Pontypridd (Dr. Howells), the Committee Chairman. He gave an account of his battles with the Cabinet Office, and denounced the "Whitehall insiders" who were trying to thwart the efforts of his Committee to do its job and the unnamed officials who refused to co-operate with the Committee or who even sought to intimidate the staff assigned to work directly for it. Frankly, if that were happening in any part of Government I would regard it as scandalous, but it is a national disgrace for it to be happening in respect of a body whose independence is so critical to public confidence in our secret agencies. It is the responsibility of the Ministers in the Government of the day to know what is going on, to take appropriate action to put things right and to ensure that certain behaviour ceases without further delay. The right hon. Member for Pontypridd argued for measures to entrench the independence of the Committee, including a move from the Cabinet Office to another Department. Whoever forms the Government after the next general election should address seriously and urgently the proposals that he made and the proposals that have come from other Members of the House who have contributed to the debate. As the right hon. Gentleman said, the agencies are the first to realise that they benefit most from rigorous scrutiny and from being seen to be accountable, through his Committee, to Parliament and to the British people. The safety of every family in this country depends in considerable part on the professionalism, dedication and, in many instances, raw courage of the people who work for our security and intelligence agencies. They cannot respond to criticisms or challenges. We collectively owe it to them to protect their public reputation, and that imposes on us the duty to ensure that we have effective, trusted arrangements for scrutiny and accountability and that Parliament and Government do a better job than has, as the report makes clear, been the case in the past two years.