Security in the UK

Baroness Manningham-Buller Excerpts

Monday 10th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Manningham-Buller (CB)]

My Lords, I start by endorsing the Minister’s concern for the victims, thinking about those who have suffered, those who have been bereaved and those who will live with life-changing injuries. I intend to raise five questions and wonder whether we can draw conclusions on any of them. I attach a caveat: I retired from MI5 10 years ago. I am out of date. Therefore, I am not going to stray into the other threats, such as cyber, on which I will rapidly fail to be convincing, but will focus on terrorism.

What conclusions can we safely draw from considering the following questions: the tempo of attacks, of which we have seen quite a few in recent months; the scale of the problem; the type of attack—the noble Lord, Lord Harris, mentioned several; the knowledge of the perpetrators; and the performance of my former service, MI5, and the police?

On the tempo, it is clear that the pace has accelerated markedly. During the five years I was privileged to lead M15—2002 to 2007—we had 15 significant plots, three of which were not detected in advance. These were: 7/7, evidently; 21/7 two weeks later, when the detonators failed to work; and Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, who was stopped by an alert air hostess. Now we know from the Home Secretary that after Westminster and before Manchester my former colleagues and the police detected and prevented from materialising five other plots in as many weeks. That shows there is a very high level of plots indeed. As the Minister mentioned, the current level of severe—meaning that an attack is highly likely—is strongly justified and the tempo is intense. Therefore, the pressure on the police, who I think have performed magnificently in recent weeks, M15 and the other agencies is relentless.

The second factor is the scale of the problem—we have already heard the figures—which I think is genuinely unprecedented. I am not one to exaggerate but when we are told that MI5 has 500 active investigations involving 3,000 subjects of interest—as well as a vast pool of some 20,000 others whom it cannot focus on at the moment but about whom there have been past concerns, and whom it would like to go back to look at if time and resources allowed—it is pretty serious. Even I find this scarcely imaginable. In 2006, I gave a speech at Queen Mary College—not invited by my noble friend Lord Hennessy but by somebody else—and I mentioned 30 plots, not nearly 500. That figure was thought at the time to be astonishingly high. At that stage, MI5 was looking at about 1,600 people. The scale of change is dramatic.

On methods, the noble Lord, Lord Harris, has quite rightly encouraged us not to think narrowly in this area. We have recently seen attacks that involved few people and were unsophisticated and low-tech, using knives and vans, as well as the shrapnel-packed bomb vest of the Manchester bomber. But none of us in this House can judge whether this is a pattern: whether it will continue to be low-tech, which in some ways is more difficult to detect in advance; or whether the large-scale conspiracies with which I am familiar from my time in MI5 might return—or, a whole lot of other, different techniques. We do not know—and will not, unless we have been paying attention—whether there are cases going through the courts at the moment in a run of terrorist trials that show other sorts of methods and attacks. Among the thwarted attacks ending in prosecution or, less satisfactorily, disruption there may be ones with quite different characteristics from those that we have seen so visibly and recently. There is a suite of tools and methods that the terrorists can use, and I am confident that the authorities will not narrow their scrutiny to the most recent but be ready for a spectrum.

My next point is our knowledge of the perpetrators. Some of the perpetrators were known to the authorities in advance. I know that I would say this—but I think that that should be a cause for praise, not criticism. Intelligence had worked and identified some of those people, who were likely to have tried hard to keep their activities secret. As my colleague and noble friend Lord Evans of Weardale—who is not meant to be here, and on his behalf, I apologise to the House that he cannot be here at the end of the debate to speak—said when he was head of MI5:

“You can know of someone without knowing what they will do”.


Given the scale of the problem, there are always going to be acute choices about where to focus, where to prioritise and how to rate the threat from individuals and groups.

That brings me on to performance. I very much welcome that there was not a rush to label the recent attacks as “intelligence failure” without knowing more. Failure in intelligence clearly can occur, but you have to look back to see whether what happened was really preventable. Context and scale are important. This House should have confidence that the reviews conducted by MI5 and the police, overseen by the former Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, David Anderson QC, will be rigorous. I have little doubt that the Intelligence and Security Committee will also have a role. It was certainly the culture of MI5 when I was there—and I am confident that this will absolutely not have changed—to subject itself to a good deal of self-criticism and self-scrutiny in a search for constant improvement. We were never satisfied that we could not do better. We were always searching for fresh ways of maximising our chances against, sometimes, a clever opponent. We were never misled by a recent success to assume we would stop the next attack. My colleagues will have been devastated by the recent attacks, but that will not affect their determination to do their utmost to stop further ones. As the Minister said, we should not forget that 18 plots have been stopped in the past four years, saving lives and leading to the conviction and imprisonment of terrorists.

I have a few further observations on matters that I am sure will come up in this debate, the timing of which is very welcome. Terrorist groups here are directing, encouraging and inspiring people here and overseas to mount deadly attacks, and not just in London. For too long people assumed that this was a London problem, but Manchester graphically showed that it is not. Planned attacks have involved guns, as the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, said, and we must not rule them out as a possibility. We are not alone in this. Many other countries are suffering high rates of terrorism, and substantial intelligence will continue to be shared with our friends and allies. One of the things that is nearly always said after a terrorist attack is that we need to share more information. Vast amounts are shared already, but even sharing everything will not prevent some attacks.

Those are five observations, under five headings, and I have some conclusions to pick up on. In Downing Street on 4 June, the Prime Minister made four pledges: to defeat the ideology; to address the “safe spaces” of the internet; to address the safe geographic spaces; and, finally, to review the UK’s counterterrorist strategy. I will pick up only the first and the last of those.

The belief that Islam is under attack from the West, which is corrupt and decadent, holds appeal for too many in our society and around the globe—and generates, to some degree, the outrageous right-wing response to those sorts of attacks. But we need to look at the whole pattern, not just rely on the security and intelligence organisations, the police and many other people. Here I pay tribute to the vital work of MI6 and GCHQ, as well as of MI5 and the police. But we should not rely just on them to deal with the worst manifestations of this belief at the end, as it were, of the chain. All the weight should not fall on them. To use a medical analogy, we have to look at the whole epidemiology of the disease—its causes, its transmission—not just its terminal, in every sense, result. The Home Office Prevent programme, on which I fully admit I am out of date, has been much criticised but I recognise that prevention, if achievable, is the best option.

Finally, on the counterterrorism strategy, we must never tolerate language which misleads people into thinking that this can magically be cured in the short term, however hard everybody works and whatever bright ideas people have, or that all attacks can be prevented. This is a long-term problem and requires our continued resolve. But to try to cheer myself and your Lordships up at the end of my speech, I will say that as we face the challenge, we draw on great strengths, such as world-leading police, intelligence and emergency services—some of the things the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, said were very reassuring to me—equipped with the powers they need to do their job. Many of your Lordships will have been in the Chamber during the passage of the Investigatory Powers Act and know that they have the powers to do the job, alongside deep and enduring international partnerships, and the resilience and courage of our people, including the members of the public who behave so bravely in many of these attacks.