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

My Lords, I am very much an outsider on this matter compared with the previous speaker although for many years I have had professional relations with people engaged in these activities—indeed, since the early 1970s when I first met a rather determined and impressive young diplomat called Pauline Neville-Jones. I am impressed by the evidence of hard work which we have heard about—30 meetings a year is roughly one for every week that Parliament meets. My respect for the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, goes up when I remember that he is also involved in parliamentary duties in Edinburgh. Therefore, he takes on a very large number of activities. I support very strongly what has been said about the status of the committee and the importance of preserving and strengthening its independence. This is a very odd committee in its current set-up. We live in a constitutional system in which we are told that Parliament is sovereign, but in which there remain a very large number of areas of government that are handled under the royal prerogative by the Executive. There are many other areas in which Parliament needs to strengthen its position vis-à-vis the Executive. There are also many other areas of the royal prerogative which this Government have abused—particularly, in my opinion, under the prime ministership of Tony Blair. It is high time that this committee became fully a parliamentary committee. Under the next Parliament, I look forward to many of us working together to push further in that direction as part of the necessary process of constitutional reform. Some of the expressions used by the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, in referring to the difficulties that we have experienced in the past 12 months suggested that the committee has encountered real difficulties. If that is the case, clearly it needs to be looked at a good deal further and the committee needs strong support from across the parties in Parliament to enable its independence to be strengthened. I also support strongly what the noble Baroness has said about the need to ensure that the public are informed about and have confidence in our security and intelligence services so that they will support them adequately. We are all conscious that some of the allegations about the treatment of detainees, extraordinary rendition and awareness of what was happening at Guantanamo and elsewhere have damaged the reputation of our security and intelligence services. Ministers have—including, on occasion, when answering questions that I have posed—assured us that things have not happened with reference to Diego Garcia or elsewhere only for us to discover, some time afterwards, that they have happened. That has shaken our confidence in the ability of our Government to keep a check on what is going on. It is particularly important that we maintain a clear responsibility for parliamentary scrutiny because, as both of these reports say, there has been a very substantial increase in resources and personnel in recent years. The noble Baroness referred to entering a harsher resource environment, but over the past three to four years these services have necessarily done very well, as evidence in the reports indicates. Therefore, we need to know as much as possible about this if we are to assess whether we should defend them against the harsh cuts that will take place across government, whoever wins the election, or whichever combination of parties comes out of it. Languages expertise comes up in various reports. Speaking as an academic, I argue that we are as a country losing our languages expertise. The extent to which languages expertise is falling back in schools and universities is appalling. I understand that Oxford University now gives remedial grammar courses to its first-year French students. That tells us something about how far expertise is slipping back. I moved from a think tank to Oxford University in 1990. I recall people from the Foreign Office coming to see me and saying, "Do you know anyone in the academic community who knows anything about central Asia?" It was not a resource that they had thought to be highly necessary for the previous 20 or 30 years, but, all of a sudden, having expertise on obscure cultures and languages within our broader academic community was appreciated. In terms of cross-departmental contacts and coherence of government, I say to the Minister that, as cuts are imposed on universities, it is precisely those skills in marginal languages and knowledge of marginal foreign cultures that will be cut. It has happened on a number of occasions during the past 60 or 70 years, only for us to discover about 10 years later that it would have been quite useful to have people who understood Dari or Somali, for example. We need to maintain that expertise outside government, because it is a resource for government. I note with concern the references to China and Russia at various stages in the report. We now have a substantial and very rich Russian community in this country; we also have a large number of people who divide their time between Moscow and London. There is concern as to where some of their money has come from and whether it has been entirely legitimately obtained.