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Intelligence and Security Committee

If I were to look up "wriggle room" in the dictionary, I would be provided with exactly what the hon. Gentleman has just said, so I am grateful to him for deliberately un-clarifying the situation. My right hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen (Mr. Murphy)—this has been something of a Welsh debate—was a much respected Chairman of the Committee. I shall not praise him as fully as I have others, because he is continuing as a Member. He raised the issue of whether some sessions of the Committee could be held in public, and that issue has been much discussed this afternoon. I note what was said earlier about when Ministers say, "My own personal view," but my own personal view is that there must be occasions when it would be possible to hold some elements of the Committee's deliberations in public, but, as nobody has denied, it is also absolutely the case that the Committee must have the power to reserve the large proportion of its sessions for deliberation in private; otherwise, it simply would not be able to consider secret material. There is more or less a consensus in the House on that. My right hon. Friend asked whether the Committee should move from the Cabinet Office to the Ministry of Justice, where he said he did not get his pay for a month. That is what trade unions are for, of course—to make sure that one does get one's pay in time. However, I am unconvinced that the move from the Cabinet Office to another Department is the most important element of the reforms that will need to take place. Although I fully accept that the Committee's recommendations in relation to the Cabinet Office have some merit, not least because in terms of security issues the Cabinet Office has taken on a much more significant role than it had when the right hon. Member for East Hampshire joined the Committee, I do not think that where it is based is the single most important issue that we need to address. The hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Mr. Davey) spoke about a series of different issues and, in particular, about intercept evidence. The committee said in its report:""There has now been a comprehensive examination of the issues involved in allowing intercept material to be adduced as evidence in the UK. That it has failed to provide a viable model is unsurprising, given the complexities of the issues involved. We await the outcome of the further work now being done. We recommend that if this too fails to provide a workable solution then the issue should be considered closed."" Many of us have always hoped that a magic wand would allow intercept evidence in the British justice system to become a valuable tool for securing more convictions and appropriate evidence, but I have yet to see a single instance, in any prosecution in the world, of the intercept evidence that has been allowed in that country making any difference to the prosecution.