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Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament

My Lords, this has been an excellent and highly-informed debate which I have certainly learnt from. The noble Lord, Lord Anderson, made a typically modest speech in which he paid tribute to everybody except himself, but his reports informed much of the work that the committee did. They were immensely valuable, and I thank him for that.

I am also grateful to the Minister for her response. She knows that there are certain areas where we did not find that we were of a common mind. I hope that she will take them back and reflect on them. I raised them only because they make it more difficult for the committee to do the work that I think essentially Parliament expects us to do. It is worth the Government reconsidering them.

I hate to admit that I have been on the committee since 2006. It is only in the past three years that a Prime Minister has refused to meet us. We have found those meetings exceptionally useful because a lot of the criticisms that I have brought up today we could quietly bring up with the Prime Minister and, very often, they were resolved by doing so. I hope that we will go back to the habit of meeting the Prime Minister annually. I thank everybody for partaking in this debate.