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Justice and Security Green Paper

The right hon. Lady is also a member of the ISC, so I am grateful for her support for our proposals. She is quite right to stress the need for public confidence generally. The present situation is wholly unsatisfactory. The Guantanamo Bay case, which we settled recently, showed exactly what can go wrong. I had to come to the House to announce that we had paid out a total of £20 million, together with costs, because we had ceased to defend the action. Everyone who was inclined to believe the detainees thought that there was secret information that would confirm everything they said, and everyone who was against the detainees thought that the security services had been crippled, that they could have defended themselves and that we were paying money to worthless people. Every conspiracy theory could flourish, depending on temperament, before we even started. That is no way to retain public confidence. In our view that definitely requires closed material procedures, which means that we must have special advocates, so we welcome views on how to improve the way in which they carry out that very difficult task.