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Intelligence and Security Committee Annual Report for 2010-11

My Lords, I thank my noble friend the Minister for a very comprehensive reply—one which, indeed, saved me having to say very much. I will try to be as brief as I possibly can. I also thank my colleague the noble Lord, Lord Butler, who also dealt in his speech with a number of the subjects that I thought I might have to deal with in finishing up. Perhaps I may say to my noble friend the Minister that I was disappointed in his response to the rebuttable presumption, as that has been put forward by a number of very senior people. I know that I am a mere Scottish lawyer, as indeed is Sir Malcolm Rifkind, but many lawyers feel that the rebuttable presumption gives some strength and weight to the principle of control and would be helpful to the judges in the long run. I hope that before the consultation is finished, my noble friend will look at that again but I was reassured by many of the other responses that he gave us tonight. I have two or three very brief items. The noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, talked about having public evidence sessions in future, something which we are looking at very actively in terms of the reformed committee. It is not easy to do if they are to be genuine because of the nature of the information that we are dealing with but we think—as do the agencies—that there may be areas where we can have very genuine public evidence sessions. As the reforms go forward, we hope to be able to get somewhere towards that. Secondly, in answer to the noble Lords, Lord Hennessy and Lord Triesman, the committee takes very seriously the question of the intelligence machinery and we will continue to do so. We will be looking in our evidence this year to pursue some of the points that have been made in this debate, and when we come to our report next year we will be reporting on whether we think that the new machinery is working. I assure your Lordships that the committee will take that very seriously. Finally, there is something which is a slight bee in my bonnet. We were talking earlier about staff retention. I am particularly concerned about GCHQ, which really is a world leader in what it does. Rather than listen to me, perhaps I may briefly quote a little of what the director of GCHQ said, and which we published in our report: "““I need some real internet whizzes””—" he calls them whizzes— "““in order to do cyber … They will be working for Microsoft or Google or Amazon … And I can’t compete with their salaries; I can offer them a fantastic mission, but I can’t compete with their salaries … we do have a steady drip, I am afraid. Month-on-month, we are losing whizzes who’ll basically say: ‘I’m sorry, I am going to take three times the salary and the car and whatever else’””." That is not really a problem of government or administration but a real, practical problem if we are to retain the valuable work that is done at GCHQ. We all need, together, to try and find a way of addressing that. Very finally, and I have left this deliberately to the end, can I say thanks to the staff of the Intelligence and Security Committee? After six years, I can say that I have never come across staff who are so hard-working—in fact, they are overworked, as I think the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, would recognise—and who constantly produce work of the highest quality and standard, without which we would not be able to operate. I also give my thanks to them. Motion agreed.