Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015 (Risk of Being Drawn into Terrorism) (Amendment and Guidance) Regulations 2015

Debate between Lord King of Bridgwater and Baroness Smith of Basildon

Monday 23rd March 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord King of Bridgwater (Con)]

The noble Baroness knows perfectly well that the Home Secretary has always made it clear that she attaches great importance to this issue; unfortunately, however, it was not possible to get the measure through this House, so it will have to come back, whichever party comes to power.

[Baroness Smith of Basildon]

The noble Lord refers to one issue, but the Home Secretary raised several today, and I assume that this guidance forms part of it. I hope that it is not a delaying tactic for the order before us today. On a rare occasion, I disagree with my noble friend Lady Lister, who said that it was “regrettable” that it was not with us. Although it is in some ways, it is also an opportunity. The noble Lord was very helpful, and when we had our discussions previously he said that he would engage—or that there would be engagement, if not with him personally—with those who would be responsible for implementing such guidance. I always think that guidance and legislation are effective only if they can be implemented in practice—the workability test that was spoken about so often with regard to other legislation. It cannot just be a theory; it has to be something that works. I hope that this will be an opportunity for the Government to engage with the universities and those who will have responsibility for implementing the guidance on who has responsibility for the duty so that they can discuss with the Government—I hope that those discussions are taking place now—how to make this sensible, practical and effective.

One final point, which has been raised by other noble Lords, is the relationship between HEFCE, as a monitoring body, with other bodies. It is not a funding body; I share the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Butler, that it is to be hoped that the Government are not planning to set up a completely new quango to monitor that. However, I understand that meetings were due to take place last week, on 20 March, with HEFCE and other bodies to discuss how that could work. It would be helpful if the Minister could enlighten us on any progress that was made at those meetings.

A number of questions have come out of this debate, but I hope that the noble Lord will take away with him our gratitude for having seen significant changes; we are grateful to him for listening, because that is not always the case. I hope that we have not wrecked his career by thanking him too much. The guidance we have now is certainly better than what was presented to your Lordships’ House and discussed in Committee.

Justice and Security Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord King of Bridgwater and Baroness Smith of Basildon

Monday 19th November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord King of Bridgwater]

My Lords, I support what the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, has just said—in the knowledge that there is no back pay in this world. It does seem very weird to be considering this. I am not sufficiently familiar with the remit of IPSA, but although we have been arguing about the extent to which this committee is or is not part of Parliament, in the area of pay and rations it appears to have been put right inside it.

[Baroness Smith of Basildon]

My Lords, my name and that of my noble friend Lord Rosser have been added to this amendment, as was the case in Committee. We argued then, and argue again now on Report, for the establishment of the ISC along lines similar to that of a Select Committee, and indeed preferably the same lines. It would therefore be inconsistent not to argue that the chair of this committee should be remunerated in much the same way as the chair of a Select Committee. The work that is undertaken is enormously serious and therefore the role should be recognised and fairly compensated on par with that of a chair of a Select Committee.

We have just heard comments about whether IPSA is the appropriate body for this role, and in Committee it was the Minister who said that it was. I have been involved in politics both in your Lordships’ House and in the other place for a good many years and I still enjoy irony, which is much underused in politics, so I find the argument of the Government rather ironic given the debate over Select Committee status which has underscored the difference between this committee and a committee of Parliament. Perhaps the Minister can change the Government’s position and we will accept the amendment.

The details of the committee’s arrangements are to be established in statute, but when it comes to discussing remuneration, it will be for IPSA to decide. It really does not seem appropriate for that body to do so, and the Government cannot have it both ways. If the ISC is to remain a body provided for in statute and ultimately accountable to the Executive, which is the case in this Bill, then regardless of any closer ties to Parliament it remains a creature of the Executive. It therefore seems completely illogical for IPSA to be the body which decides on the remuneration of the committee’s chair. I support the amendment. If the Government think that IPSA is the way forward, they have got it wrong, and I hope that the Minister will be able to accept the amendment.

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[Baroness Smith of Basildon]

My Lords, I am not sure that the noble Baroness has understood the central point that I am making and if she has, she has not answered it to my satisfaction. The query that I have with this amendment is the level of the Minister who can exercise a veto. I entirely agree that it is an exceptional measure that will be used only in exceptional circumstances. It takes the power from the agency’s head so that it rests with the elected representatives of the Government who are ultimately accountable to Parliament. But I have not heard from the noble Baroness an adequate justification from the Government as to why they have chosen to downgrade the level at which the veto is held from a Secretary of State to a Minister of State.

I mentioned the Cabinet Office because that was the department mentioned by the Minister previously. The noble Baroness responded and said that it could be another department that does not have a Secretary of State. The point being made is the level of Minister who can withhold information and exercise a veto against the ISC. It is entirely reasonable that it should be the Secretary of State or a Minister at the same level, not downgraded to a Minister of State level.

[Lord King of Bridgwater]

The answer my noble friend gave was extremely encouraging and recognised the importance of the seniority of the person. The only thing I do not understand is whether paragraph 3(5)(b) of Schedule 1, which reads,

“if no Minister of the Crown is so identified, any Minister of the Crown”,

will survive.

The noble Baroness appeared to be saying that if a particular Secretary of State is for some reason not available—which is perfectly possible, particularly if you are dealing with the Foreign Office—any other Secretary of State will do. Would it not be much better to have a Minister of State in the same department who is familiar with the matter to deal with it, rather than some other Secretary of State? Have I got the noble Baroness wrong?

[Baroness Smith of Basildon]

No. The noble Lord is absolutely right. At the moment it is a Secretary of State but the Bill proposes to downgrade that to any Minister of the Crown. I know the noble Baroness says that there will be a MoU that will identify certain Ministers of the Crown but these decisions should be taken at Cabinet level.

[Lord King of Bridgwater]

I understand what the noble Baroness is saying but if the information concerns the Foreign Secretary, who is responsible for SIS and GCHQ, or the Home Secretary, who is responsible for the Security Service, or, in certain circumstances, the Secretary of State for Defence, who is responsible for the DIS and so on, and if by chance that Secretary of State is not available to deal with an urgent matter on which a reply is requested, it would be much better that the Minister of State in that department deals with it and that we do not have the Secretary of State from Defra or from some other department shifted in merely because he is of equal seniority and that meets the requirement.

Justice and Security Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord King of Bridgwater and Baroness Smith of Basildon

Monday 9th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord King of Bridgwater]

I have now unlearnt something which I thought I had learnt, and I am grateful to the noble Lord for his intervention. I certainly think that when we come to Amendment 3 there are strong arguments for moving in that direction, provided that the arrangements can be established to ensure security of intelligence. I think that the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, was with us when we went to Washington. One is struck by the number of Senate committees there. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is held in a totally secure room, and there are badges for all 19 government agencies that the committee oversees as part of its various responsibilities. It is a completely different facility. If, as I understand it, the proposal is that the facilities will now be provided by Parliament, as opposed to the separate facilities that existed in the Cabinet Office, it will be necessary to think about what sort of facilities will match up to the requirement for total security and the proper safeguarding of intelligence.

[Baroness Smith of Basildon]

My Lords, one thing that the debate has shown so far—and this will also apply to the debate on the next amendment—is that the Government have not yet done enough to satisfy your Lordships that the arrangements for independence for the committee are adequate. This debate has been interesting. I think I understood the noble Lord, Lord King of Bridgwater, correctly when he said that he was quoting me quoting the Deputy Prime Minister on the “veneer of expertise”. I in no way associate myself with that comment, nor with the one that I am told the Liberal Democrat spokesperson from the House of Lords made on TV today—that we are a House full of dead-beats and has-beens. I think that this debate will prove how wrong both those comments are.

The arrest just last week of alleged Olympic terror plot suspects was a clear reminder of the vital and largely hidden work that the intelligence and security services undertake. Part of the discussion that we are having now is based on the fact that the strength and health of our democracy in the UK depends on a very fine balance between the Government, who are empowered to protect our national security, and the strength, credibility and authority of the institutions that have oversight of that power.

I suspect that during the course of Committee the majority of debate will understandably be reserved for the changes proposed to the judicial element of that oversight. However—and I make this point very strongly—our system of democracy is, unlike that of the USA, based on the concept of parliamentary sovereignty. That means that Parliament, as representative of the public, is the ultimate check over other government institutions—not the Prime Minister or the Government. A powerful security service demands equally powerful and independent parliamentary oversight, and the Intelligence and Security Committee is a very important plank in this oversight mechanism. However, it is widely recognised that, while the committee has in some ways developed its remit in response to the changing nature of government intelligence and counterterrorism activities, the law has not kept pace with that change.

The committee was set up in 1994. We saw in its 2009-10 annual report that the committee itself recognised that reform was necessary to maintain public confidence in its oversight function. It asserted that corporate knowledge of the committee’s procedure within government had been lost over time and that in some cases this had led—this is a serious point—to misunderstandings about the statutory independence of the committee and its work and about the nature of the relationship between the committee and the Prime Minister. The committee has suggested a number of reforms which I think we will hear more about and discuss today.

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[Baroness Smith of Basildon]

My Lords, I did not hear what the noble Lord said as he turned away from the microphone. Will the noble Lord repeat what his concern was because we missed it on these Benches? I did not hear what his objection was.

[Lord King of Bridgwater]

The point was that it may be decided to hold some proceedings in public which presumably would be televised as well. The noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, referred to a point that I was also going to refer to. The annual appearance of what was previously the ISC was the publication of the annual report. We used to have a press conference after that and it was televised and open to all the journalists. Of course there could be an inquiry of one sort or another that came outside the annual cycle. The classic illustration of that was Mr Mitrokhin and the Mitrokhin report. I have a copy of the press release that we put out on 13 June 2000 on the Mitrokhin report.

It is interesting about pushing back the boundaries. This is pervasive and accepted by the Government in the whole concept of the initial clauses of this Bill on the wider remit that has grown for the ISC. The committee agreed to conduct this inquiry on the understanding that it would have access to all the relevant documents, including advice given to Ministers as well as evidence from key witnesses. We were given this access. This was never included in the original Bill and was an illustration of the way in which the committee gradually covered a wider area and had greater access. The idea that the committee hides away in private and is not prepared to appear in public is not right.

Amendment 17, in the name of the noble Baroness and her colleagues on the opposition Front Bench, states that the committee,

“may decide to hold some of its proceedings in public, subject to sub-paragraph (2)”.

Sub-paragraph (2) states:

“The ISC may not hold public hearings … if it might lead to the disclosure of—

(a) sensitive information”.

That is the whole problem. As the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert, who has now joined us as a former member of the committee, said, if you have an effective committee with effective questioning, where may it lead? If you are discussing serious issues, you cannot be sure at the start of it. You may have started out with a wonderful public agenda but things may emerge in the evidence that make it thoroughly undesirable at that stage that it is held in public. I was trying to think what the issues are because I was myself in favour of trying to see whether the committee could have the occasional public meeting, not as an obligation and having to explain each time why it was not having it in public, but just to show that there are issues, that it is an effective committee and that it could hold the heads of the agencies to account.

One of the problems when we started was that the heads of the agencies did not always want to appear in public and have their faces too easily recognisable. That situation changed and the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, was an exception. She was extremely good at bringing a more public face to the essential activities of MI5. I wondered about the sort of subjects on which we could see the committee in action. One of them might be recruitment for the Security Service: the issue of whether it is recruited from too narrow a sector of society, the efforts that the agency is making to recruit across a wider section of community, the importance of diversity, and the importance of access to a wider range of languages and of being involved with and recruiting from all sections of our multicultural society, which is so important at the present time. That is the sort of issue—I got a small nod as I said this—that I thought could be handled in a public hearing.

I would like to have had a public hearing on the accommodation arrangements of GCHQ and our criticisms of the control of that project. This was one of the biggest scandals that we uncovered during our time in Government, where the estimate for the expenditure on the new facility in Cheltenham, the donut, which is now well photographed, rocketed beyond an initial brave estimate of £20 million and ended up closer to £220 million. Issues of accommodation are perhaps relevant, although you can get bogged down in all sorts of tabloid sensations. One of the accommodation issues was the cost of the trees on the balcony of SIS and who was paying for those. The committee has to be careful not to get bogged down—we always took this view—in chasing the individual tabloid shock-horror story of the week and to concentrate instead on the issues that are of fundamental importance.

There is a real difficulty in trying to say that in principle the hearings should be in public. My noble friend Lord Lothian illustrated to those who were not at the earlier session what happened with the Senate Intelligence Committee and how it was a put-up job with planted questions and planted answers because that was all it felt safe to handle in public. I do not think that helps credibility and it looks as though the committee is just part of the conspiracy.

I do not support the idea that in principle there should be public hearings and that the committee should explain why if they are not, which is the theme of these amendments. Public confidence is best achieved by taking the opportunity where possible for a public hearing and showing the sort of way that the committee operates but not having it as a presumption in every case.