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Intelligence and Security Committee

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham). He spoke about his pride in his constituents who do such tremendous work at GCHQ, and I join him in praising those dedicated and important staff. It is common ground among the main political parties that the Government's top priority must be to protect the people of this country. Although we all want a law enforcement and criminal justice system that is as open as possible, in order to maintain public safety we must have some level of secrecy, and scrutinising the workings of that secret world is the core task of the ISC. As ever, my right hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen (Paul Murphy) put his finger on the key issue when he talked about the importance of trust. I am sure that I speak for all members of the Committee in saying that it is a privilege that trust has been placed in us in respect of the access that we have to the agencies and confidential information. It is also a privilege to visit the agencies and meet the staff who do such important work. Some of them are long-serving and very experienced, and I pay tribute to them of course, but I have noticed during my first year serving in Committee that there are also many energetic and ingenious young people in these agencies, and they do tremendous work. What they do is a very important form of public service, and I pay tribute to them. There is much to welcome in the ISC report on what has been done in the past year. Many Members have mentioned the NSC's work and the coherence that it brings to national security. We all agree that that has been a very important step forward, not least because of the regular contact that that brings between senior Ministers and the heads of the agencies, as the ISC Chair, the right hon. and learned Member for Kensington (Sir Malcolm Rifkind), has pointed out. I am sure that that is helping to foster a greater degree of collaboration between the agencies, which is welcome. I want to say a couple of things about resources. First, I welcome the additional £600 million that is being made available to deal with cyber-security and the cyber-threat. That is an important investment and, as has been suggested, it will almost certainly not be a one-off sum and will need to be followed up in subsequent spending periods. On the funding of the agencies, the report says that the 11% real-terms cut is ““a fair settlement””, which is a fair comment by the Committee. Given the rapid growth over the past decade in the funding available to the intelligence and security agencies and given the level of cuts right across government and the public services, it probably is a fair settlement. However, as page 15 of the report states, it is essential that the funding"““can be adjusted if there is a significant change in the threat.””" I have no reason to doubt the good intentions and good faith of the Government, but their response to the Committee's report could be a bit more robust in the strength and clarity of the answer. We all accept that where things change we need to look first at reprioritising our resources. For example, the events in the middle east required a reprioritisation of the resources of the various agencies. Those agencies cannot expect simply to have new money made available if there is a new threat or a new need, but with the Olympics coming up, with the increasing threat from Northern Ireland-related terrorism and with the continuing threat from international terrorism, Parliament and the public need to know clearly from the Government that additional resources will be made available, if they are needed. On the Olympics, it is clearly recognised by government and by the Security Service that additional officers will be required by the Security Service. Some of those officers will be drawn from existing staff, but some will be new recruits. Last November, the Committee was told that the Security Service was"““seeking to recruit 100 new intelligence officers by November 2011””." Subsequently, in May, the Committee was told that 90% of these officers are expected to take up their posts by November 2011. We are now in that month, and the House will be pleased to hear in the Minister's winding-up speech that those staff have been recruited and trained and that they will be available well in advance of the Olympics. Finally, on resources, I want briefly to comment on the Communications-Electronics Security Group. That little-known group operates out of GCHQ and performs an important service in providing information assurance right across government and all its agencies. The problem is that the importance of that service is not reflected in the enthusiasm of Departments and agencies in taking it up, and as a result GCHQ is out of pocket to the tune of £7 million over the past two years. We have been given repeated reassurances that a grip will be got of that situation. It is very important that that happens and that in the next financial year we have a funding model for the service that actually means that it can be provided without having to be subsidised from the GCHQ budget. May I raise, as one or two of my right hon. Friends have done, the new counter-terrorism measures? The TPIMs are, as we know, intended to replace the control order system that went before. The Minister may or may not be pleased to learn that I do not seek to debate the principle of TPIMs as against control orders this evening, as we have done that often enough over the past few months. However, I remain of the view that the system that he is introducing is weaker, and I draw his attention to the remarks of the director general of the Security Service on page 46 of the report:"““Covert investigation does not deliver disruption””." I do not wish to go over the principles again, but we are now six weeks away from the planned implementation of the new TPIMs system. As that system relies on additional resources being made available to the police and to the Security Service, we need to find out, in this timely debate, whether the additional officers that were to be recruited to provide the additional resource to the Security Service have been recruited and trained, and whether they will be available to work on the new system as soon as it is introduced, which will presumably be early in the new year. I also wish to draw attention, as my right hon. Friend the shadow Home Secretary did, to the director general's comment in the report that"““there should be no substantial increase in overall risk.””" That of course implies that there may be some increase in the additional risk, and the Committee records that as being of concern to us. We will be taking an active interest in that in the weeks and months ahead. I am very grateful to the director general for his candid assessment of that situation, but Ministers will also need to pay close attention to whether or not the level of risk increases, and they must be prepared to act if there is any sign of an additional risk, be it substantial or otherwise. Such action must mean either additional resources or a willingness to return to this House to implement emergency legislation, which the Government have spoken about, which they intend to subject to pre-legislative scrutiny and which would impose greater restrictions on those suspected of deep involvement in terrorist activity. My view remains the same as that of my right hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears), who intervened earlier in the debate. We feel that delay would be far better than uncertainty and risk. I say again to the Minister, as plainly as I can, that this matter has gone way beyond party political squabbling, although it never was about that as far as I was concerned. I put it to him that if there is any doubt whatsoever, delay should be the first thing that he considers and that he would have the full support of Members on both sides of this House if he did the sensible thing. Although I have been a member of the Committee for only the past year, it is fair to say that Northern Ireland has probably had a slightly higher profile in the Committee's work this year than in the preceding two or three years. The Committee has been told that in 2008-09 the Security Service's effort in countering Northern Ireland-related terrorism fell to some 13% of its overall effort total, which is not surprising given the progress in Northern Ireland. Not only was stage 1 of devolution delivered in 2007, but in July that year we saw the end of Operation Banner, which meant the end of Army involvement in Northern Ireland after 38 years. At that point, just a handful of dissidents remained. They were few in number, fragmented in their organisation, more interested in the proceeds of crime than in the politics of a united Ireland and technically inept in their capability. That has changed and their number has increased. Their expertise has clearly increased and now the threat level is ““severe”” in Northern Ireland and ““substantial”” in Great Britain. The director general reported to the Committee that although he has no reason to believe that an attack in Great Britain is imminent,"““I certainly believe it's in their minds””." We know that just in recent months the murder of police officer Ronan Kerr has occurred, a 500 lb bomb was placed near Newry and there have been other attacks, including on Derry's UK city of culture office. These risks are real, and I again pay tribute to those who serve in the Security Service and to the Police Service of Northern Ireland in countering that threat.