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Intelligence and Security Committee

It is always a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake), who, with his usual ingenuity, managed to give a number of written parliamentary questions an oral flavour. Some might well have served as essay titles. I noted that the Minister was writing furiously in preparation for his winding-up speech, and I hope that we shall all be able to obtain copies of his answers. I shall speak briefly. First, let me join Front Benchers and others in congratulating the right hon. and learned Member for Kensington (Sir Malcolm Rifkind) on the excellent work that he and his fellow Committee members have done in respect of the annual report. It was a change to be able to hear such a long and thoughtful speech from the Chairman of the ISC, rather than the limited contribution that my right hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen (Paul Murphy) used to have to make when he chaired the Committee. Things are certainly changing. I also welcome the commitment that the right hon. and learned Gentleman made in saying that the Committee intended to take oral evidence from the heads of the security services at some time in the future. I always think it odd that, although we hear about magnificent speeches made by the heads of MI5 and MI6 containing important statistics about the security threat, no one in Parliament is able to question them. We used to be told that their jobs were so secret that no one knew what they looked like, but nowadays it is quite easy to find out what Jonathan Evans and John Sawyers look like by means of the internet. There is no secrecy about their identities any more. In an intervention on the right hon. and learned Member for Kensington, I described the annual pilgrimage of the Home Affairs Committee, in a people-carrier with blacked-out windows, to a building somewhere on Millbank whose address we were not allowed to know. On arrival, we would be taken up through the back of the building into a room that was not the office of the head of the agency, but a meeting room where we were able to ask questions. We were not allowed to make notes or include what was said in our reports, although inevitably some of it had leaked out into a Sunday newspaper by the time the Committee was able to consider matters a week later. The fact is that it is much better for the heads of those agencies—both of whom I have met, and both of whom are highly intelligent individuals—to appear before the ISC, and for members of the ISC to put questions to them and receive answers. That is the basis of parliamentary scrutiny, and it is a very important step forward. I welcome the way in which the National Security Council has developed over the past 18 months. Its establishment was recommended by the Home Affairs Committee in the last Parliament. I tried hard to persuade the last Prime Minister to accept the recommendation. I told him that the NSC would be good for the country, because for the first time we should be able to co-ordinate all the various Government Departments. There would be a national security adviser who, hopefully, would give evidence to Parliament, and it would be a good way of dealing with issues relating to countries such as Yemen—foreign policy issues that also had a domestic resonance. I was pleased that, when the Prime Minister appeared before the Liaison Committee, he talked about the operation of the National Security Council. I welcome that co-ordination, and I think it important for us to hear more about what the council is doing. Obviously, in terms of its composition, the NSC differs from its counterpart in the United States, which is the model that we used when we considered the report two years ago. I do not think that Peter Ricketts or his successor, Kim Darroch, will ever quite become Condoleezza Rice—a great figure who can be brought before Parliament and make important statements about national security. That will never happen, because we will always have a career civil servant in the job. It is a pity, because I think that Prime Ministers ought to be able to choose more widely when selecting their national security advisers, but we never know: in the future, a Prime Minister may decide to do that. I want to refer to the excellent contribution of the hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis). He is entirely right to consider the threat that is facing our country. We must deal with those who are behind that threat, which is why I am so pleased that the Security Minister—the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (James Brokenshire)—has agreed to speak at the Select Committee's conference in Leicester in December, when we will consider the roots of radicalism. As the hon. Member for New Forest East pointed out, unless we confront the threat with a budget larger than that which currently exists in the units in the Home Office, we will never deal with it. The only way in which to deal with home-grown terrorism is to engage the communities involved. The previous strategy was about preventing: ““Let's try to stop them doing what they're doing.”” That cannot be successful, however. Instead, we have to engage; we have to get right down into the communities and work with them—with different mosques and organisations. We heard from a fair few of them in the Home Affairs Committee evidence sessions, and I think that, by engaging, we can deal with this threat. This annual report is excellent, and we look forward to the next one, but we also look forward to its being even more transparent in respect of the issues it addresses, as the Committee and Parliament expect.