The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office (Lord Bridges of Headley) (Con)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris, on securing this debate on the Chilcot inquiry. I also thank all noble Lords who have contributed to this debate—there have been some extremely good and informative speeches. Once again a number of your Lordships, but by no means all, have spoken eloquently of the need for the inquiry to publish the report as soon as possible. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris, and my noble friend Lord Dykes, said, uppermost in our minds are the families and friends who lost loved ones in Iraq, as well as those who were severely injured, who have been waiting for years for the publication of the report.
Despite this sense of disappointment that the report has still not been published, I am sure that everyone here would agree that, as my noble friend Lord Finkelstein remarked, this inquiry is unprecedented in its scope and scale. Never before has a UK public inquiry examined in such depth and detail a decision to go to war and its consequences with unprecedented access to question the people who took those decisions and advised on those decisions, as well as having access to the papers surrounding discussions. I think there will be surprise at the number and extent of highly classified and sensitive material that will be published with the report.
As has been said, it is more than six years since this inquiry of privy counsellors was set up by the previous Labour Government and no one at the time expected it would still not have published its findings in 2015. Sir John himself said, not long after the inquiry was launched, that he expected it to conclude within 18 months. However as Sir John said earlier this year:
“I don’t believe it was possible then … to have foreseen the nature and range of issues that would be disclosed progressively from the examination not only of witnesses in the oral hearings, but of the extraordinarily wide-ranging and voluminous archive”.
As a number of noble Lords have said, I am sure that when the report is published and its conclusions have been considered, we will also wish to debate what lessons we can learn from this inquiry, as the noble Baroness just said, in terms of the process that has been followed, be it on Maxwellisation, that the noble Lord, Lord Marks, spoke about or other matters, such as its remit or how it was established. However, I would argue that that debate is best had when the report is published. As to the publication of the report, since I last answered the noble and learned Lord’s Question in the Chamber last July there has been some progress. As we have heard, Sir John has confirmed that all the individuals who received provisional criticisms under the Maxwellisation process have responded and Sir John is currently evaluating those responses. Crucially, last week, the inquiry informed No. 10 that Sir John would write to the Prime Minister by 3 November with a timetable for the completion of the report. Therefore, by early next month, we should know when the report will be delivered.
I turn now to the noble and learned Lord’s question for debate. In the light of these developments, he will not be too surprised when I say that the Government do not believe there is a case for discharging the chairman and members of the inquiry and inviting the Cabinet Secretary to set out a mechanism for an interim report to be produced on the basis of the evidence gathered. As the noble Lord, Lord Butler, said, in less than two weeks we will have a timetable for publication, and we owe it to the families to continue with this inquiry as it aims to provide the answers that they desperately want. Discharging the inquiry at this stage would obviously not help that process.
As has been mentioned, the inquiry is fully independent of government. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris, said, this inquiry was not set up under the Inquiries Act. This means, of course, that it has no statutory basis as such. If the Government were to accept the course of action set out in the Question, it would undermine the fundamental independence of the inquiry. Therefore, we have to see it through, otherwise any outcome will be significantly devalued and it will delay closure on what has been such a controversial episode in British political history, as the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, set out very eloquently.
Once the report is published, there will be an initial Statement from the Government in both Houses. Then, once we have all had the opportunity to read and digest what the report has to say, there will be an opportunity for a full debate in both Houses.
I will now touch upon a couple of points that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris, mentioned, in particular about the release of papers relating to Tony Blair’s correspondence with President Bush, a point that the noble Lord, Lord Butler, also referred to. I should make it completely clear at the outset that the inquiry has had full access to the information that it has requested. The discussion was about the disclosure of the information that the inquiry had access to. I hope that noble Lords will forgive me for setting out in a little detail what actually happened.
On 15 July 2013, Sir John Chilcot wrote to the Prime Minister confirming that he had begun a dialogue with Sir Jeremy Heywood about the material that the inquiry wished to reflect in its analysis of discussions in Cabinet and Cabinet Committees and the references that the inquiry wished to make about the contents of Mr Blair’s notes to President Bush and discussions between Mr Blair and Mr Brown and Presidents Bush and Obama. As Sir Jeremy Heywood made clear when he addressed the then Public Administration Committee in the other place in January this year, he approached the question of declassification with a bias towards transparency, including Tony Blair’s memos to George Bush and the Cabinet minutes. I should add that Sir John told the Foreign Affairs Select Committee in the other place:
“I have no indication that Sir Jeremy acted otherwise than properly throughout”.
On 28 July 2014, Sir John wrote to Sir Jeremy Heywood confirming that agreement had been reached on principles underpinning the disclosure of notes and records relating to the Prime Minister and US President’s discussions, and that agreement had been reached on the detail of what the inquiry would release in relation to the Cabinet and Cabinet Committee discussions. As Sir John told the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, this process took 13 months.
The noble and learned Lord is perfectly justified to ask why this process took so long. The simple answer is that disclosure in this way of papers involving communications between a Prime Minister and a US President is, as far as I understand it, almost unprecedented. I say almost, because the Franks report into the Falklands War did refer to the contents of communications between Margaret Thatcher and President Reagan, although these were direct references rather than extracts.
As the noble Lord, Lord Butler, said, the inquiry’s request for disclosure raised issues of long-standing principle; for example, the importance of preserving the privileged channel of communication between the Prime Minister and the US President. In taking the decision to allow disclosure of this information, Sir Jeremy had to balance the possible damage to UK-US relations, and the potential that, in future, free and frank exchanges might be inhibited by this disclosure, against the exceptional nature of the inquiry and the central importance to the inquiry’s work of these exchanges. The negotiations were worked through in good faith, with the aim of enabling the inquiry to publish as much material as possible. However, all this took time to resolve.
I turn to an issue that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris, the noble Lord, Lord Parekh and the noble Earl, Lord Attlee also raised—about the value and worth of releasing such material if it is redacted. Clearly, the best time for us to judge the answer to this question will be when the report is actually published. However, as Sir John Chilcot made clear earlier this year when he appeared before the Foreign Affairs Committee in the other place, it is essential to establish an account of what happened—an account that people can trust.
The inquiry has spent time and effort in ensuring it can publish the material it needs from those documents. I would, however, make a few observations. First, as Sir John Chilcot wrote to the Cabinet Secretary on 28 May 2014, regarding the use of quotes from the gist of notes pertaining to communications between the Prime Minister and the President of the United States:
“Consideration will be based on the principle that our use of this material should not reflect President Bush’s views. We have also agreed that the use of direct quotation from the documents should be the minimum necessary to enable the Inquiry to articulate its conclusions”.
Secondly, in all inquiries where national security is an issue, documents have to undergo a declassification process to protect sensitive information. As your Lordships will know, for the Iraq inquiry this process was conducted under a protocol agreed between the Government and the inquiry which established strict parameters within which the Government could seek redactions, principally on national security or international relations grounds. This states that, if the inquiry believes proposed redactions are not desirable, it can write to the Cabinet Secretary to seek a redaction. If no agreement is reached and the material is not published,
“it would remain open to the Inquiry to refer, in its report, to the fact that material it would have wished to publish had been withheld”.
Our aim has always been to allow the inquiry to publish as much material as possible.
In conclusion, we all agree that this inquiry must be fair and impartial but, above all, rigorous, with its conclusions firmly based on the evidence. To do that, it must be independent of Government and therefore, however frustrating it may be that the inquiry has not published its report, it must be allowed to complete its job.