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Intelligence and Security Committee Annual Report for 2008–09 (Cm 7807)

My Lords, this is the second opportunity I have had to report on the work of the committee to this House and to open the debate as the Lords member of the Intelligence and Security Committee. It is a welcome innovation that we now have debates on the report of our committee in both Houses. I have had the rare privilege of representing your Lordships' House on the committee since 2007 and I have found it a most interesting and rewarding responsibility. I also wish to put on record my particular thanks to the chairman of our committee, the right honourable Dr Kim Howells. I and the rest of the committee are particularly grateful to him for his leadership and even more so for his good humour during what has been a very busy, difficult and challenging year, as noble Lords will know if they have read the reports—as I am sure that they have. I also wish to acknowledge the contribution of those members of the committee from another place, particularly those who are standing down at the forthcoming election. They have all taken their duties very seriously and added enormously to the important work of the committee. They have done so—indeed, we all have—in a spirit of cross-party consensus and with very little public recognition of the hard work that has been done. I can honestly say that it is one of the best-attended committees on which I have served in nearly 30 years in Parliament. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord King, will testify from his own experiences as chairman of the committee that the members are very diligent in their attendance. We are also served by a loyal and diligent band in our secretariat. We are particularly grateful to them in what has been a challenging year. Finally, I pay tribute to the men and women who work for the intelligence agencies. While we have at times been critical of the agencies—as noble Lords will see—we nevertheless recognise the vital importance of the work that their officers do in safeguarding this country. It is important for us all to put on record our thanks to all those who carry out this challenging and sometimes very dangerous work. In doing so, we can remember our recently departed dear friend Daphne Park—Lady Park of Monmouth—who served so well in the service and in this House. I remind the Committee that the Intelligence and Security Committee has a statutory remit to examine the administration, policy and finance of all three of our security and intelligence agencies. We report on these annually to the Prime Minister and meet with him to discuss our findings. The two annual reports that we are discussing today cover the periods between December 2008 and July 2009 and between August 2009 and March 2010 respectively. During those periods the committee had a total of 41 formal meetings and 19 other meetings—60 in total, including a number of visits to the agencies. However, it is unfortunate that there has been such a delay in the publishing of our 2008-09 annual report, which occurred some eight months after the reporting period had concluded. This meant that the report was considerably out of date by the time it was published. Of course, it was followed very shortly afterwards by our 2009-10 annual report. That is why we are considering them together today. The committee has made it clear to the Government that such delays are unacceptable, since it does not enable this House or indeed the other place to discuss the committee’s work in a timely fashion. We welcome the fact that our 2009-10 annual report has been published much more quickly and we trust that this quicker turnaround will be continued. During the period of our 2008-09 annual report, much of the committee’s work focused on the essential workings of the agencies—their finance, their administration and their policy. This is central to our oversight role, and increasingly important as we seek to ensure that the considerable, and considerably increased, resources given by the Government to the agencies are properly deployed and accounted for. However, although the committee’s official remit covers the Security Service, the SIS and GCHQ, it is clear that those agencies cannot and do not work in isolation. Given the challenges that they face, constructing close partnerships with the wider intelligence community is essential. Therefore, in overseeing the security and intelligence agencies, we also examine the work of the wider intelligence community. This includes the Defence Intelligence Staff; some areas within the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism in the Home Office; the intelligence structure in the Cabinet Office, including the Joint Intelligence Committee—which the noble Baroness opposite knows something about; and the assessment staff, the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre and the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure. Our work therefore goes well beyond our statutory remit. That has happened over time and is a welcome development. We do not shy away from criticising either the agencies or the wider UK intelligence machinery if we think that it is justified. For example, in our 2008-09 annual report, we strongly criticised SIS for the loss of data on a camera memory stick; we criticised GCHQ for the loss of laptop computers; and we criticised both the Security Service and SIS for poor record-keeping. We have also consistently pressed the agencies on the need for robust business continuity arrangements. The primary focus of all the three intelligence and security agencies, both last year and this, is rightly on international counterterrorism work. However, they also dedicate resources to countering further threats, including those posed by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, by regional instability and by espionage. In addition, the agencies continue to provide unprecedented operational support to United Kingdom military operations overseas. We have been able to examine some of that work very closely. The current threat to the UK from international terrorism is assessed as "severe". This means that there is a continuing high level of threat to the United Kingdom and a high likelihood of a terrorist attack in this country. The threat of international terrorism comes from a wide range of sources, including al-Qaeda and its associated networks and those who are inspired by its twisted ideology. The source of these threats is constantly evolving. Recent events such as the Christmas Day bomb plot in Detroit highlight the continuing and shifting nature of the threat. The Detroit bomb plot has led the intelligence agencies to focus increasingly on al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. They have been able to respond and adapt quickly to those new and emerging threats, which is encouraging. The past 18 months or so have sadly seen an increase in the threat within the UK from dissident republican terrorists in Northern Ireland. This threat remains very real. The director-general of the Security Service told us that the largest number of life-threatening investigations being conducted by the Security Service in January 2010 related to dissident republican terrorists in Northern Ireland. It is reassuring that the service has been able to adapt its priorities in line with this ever-changing threat. The threat from espionage also remains high. Several countries—I shall not spell them out—are actively seeking UK information and material to advance their own military, technological, political and economic programmes. This threat comes from both traditional espionage and, now, new technological espionage. Electronic attack is an example of one important area that the committee recommended in its 2008-09 annual report should be given higher priority. We are reassured that there have been developments in this field during the past year, with the publication of the Cyber Security Strategy of the UK and the creation of a number of new bodies. We are glad that this threat is now being taken seriously, although we also caution against an apparent proliferation of new bodies in this field, since it is vital to avoid duplication of effort. The committee also addressed issues that affect the intelligence community as a whole. For example, in both annual reports we strongly criticised the failure of phase 2 of the SCOPE IT programme. As we indicated in our 2008-09 report, we had hoped to report substantively in our 2009-10 report on the reasons for that failure. The committee took detailed evidence on the failure of phase 2 of SCOPE and we have formed clear views on the reasons for it and where responsibility lies. However, we have been advised—and we have accepted the advice—that because of ongoing commercial arbitration proceedings, publication of our detailed comments at this time could jeopardise the process of arbitration. Therefore, solely for reasons of public interest, we have removed that detail from our 2009-10 annual report. We will, however, pass on our findings to the next committee for it to publish as soon as the legal proceedings are concluded. During the period up to July 2009, the committee also spent a considerable time on two separate investigations. First, on 20 May 2009 we published our updated review of the intelligence on the London terrorist attacks on 7 July 2007 to reflect developments that, for legal reasons, we were not able to cover in our original report on the attacks. Secondly, following new information coming to light in the Binyam Mohamed case, we took further in-depth evidence from the intelligence and security agencies and from the FCO. We reported our findings on a number of aspects, including the issues raised on the policies of the UK security and intelligence agencies, and we wrote to the Prime Minister on 17 March 2009 with our recommendations. The letter has been included as an annexe to our review of the Government’s draft guidelines on detainees which we hope will be published shortly. Today, however, I urge noble Lords and people beyond this Room not to jump to conclusions based on claims made by one individual and his representatives. Following that letter to the Prime Minister, he wrote to the committee inviting us to review the UK intelligence and security agencies’ guidance regarding the treatment and interviewing of detainees overseas. Unfortunately the consolidated guidance was not provided to the committee until 18 November 2009 and we could not comment on that work in our 2008-09 annual report. However, during 2009-10 we spent a large proportion of our time taking evidence on the guidance. Our findings were submitted to the Prime Minister on 5 March 2010, along with our 2009-10 annual report. We were initially assured that both reports would be published before 18 March for the debate in the other place. We are therefore disappointed that that has not been possible, although we understand that the Government have delayed publication to give serious detailed further consideration to our comments, and we understand the reasons for that. We hope that the Government will publish both our review of the draft guidance and the revised guidance itself in the very near future. I hope that the Minister can give an indication on that. The other major issue that has preoccupied the committee in the past year is the important matter of its independence. The committee is confident in its ability to hold the agencies to account and to do so independently of government. The Intelligence Services Act 1994, which established the committee, allows us to set our own procedures. Over the past 16 years, as I indicated earlier, these procedures have evolved. That has happened naturally through both written agreements and verbal assurances. However, events in the past year have made it clear that corporate knowledge of these procedures within government has been lost. There was little awareness of our procedures, some of which date back to when the committee was first established in 1994, as the noble Lord, Lord King, will recall. In some cases this has led to serious misunderstandings by civil servants about the statutory independence of the committee and its work and the nature of the relationship between the committee and the Prime Minister. As the chairman of the committee said in another place, these misunderstandings relate to, ""the nature of the ISC’s relationship with the Whitehall administrative machine"." He went on to say that, ""there are some within the Whitehall bureaucracy who, for reasons of their own, have not understood or refuse to accept that the independence of the ISC is sacrosanct".—[Official Report, Commons, 18/3/10; col. 996.]" In order to ensure that the bureaucracy is clear about the committee's evidence, and for the avoidance of doubt, we have revisited and clarified the principles, policies and procedures that have governed, and continue to govern, the work, status, remit and responsibility of the committee. As the noble Lord will see, these are included as an annexe to our 2009-10 annual report.