Security Services: Supervision

Lord Rosser Excerpts

Thursday 7th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rosser (Lab)]

My Lords, I add my thanks to my noble friend Lord Soley for securing this debate. It is timely as today, as my noble friend Lord Reid of Cardowan has graphically pointed out, is the first public hearing for the Intelligence and Security Committee in front of the cameras with the intelligence chiefs. Of course, it is timely also because of the recent spate of stories in our national press about some alleged activities of our intelligence services that has raised the issue of oversight and the effectiveness or otherwise of current legislation.

There have already been significant changes in legislation over the past year or so relating to the Intelligence and Security Committee. These have led to the committee reporting not to the Prime Minister of the day but to Parliament, which also now has the final word on who will be the members of the committee, and to the committee in future choosing its own chairman from among its own members rather than that being a decision for the Prime Minister.

The Justice and Security Act 2013 now requires the intelligence agencies to respond to requests from the committee for information and to provide the information that it is seeking. Previously, the agencies could decline to give the information requested. Included in the information that now has to be provided if sought is that regarding nationally significant operations. The committee is also now in a position, which it was not before, to send its staff into GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 to look at papers and files that relate to an investigation that it is undertaking, and it is for the committee and the staff concerned to decide what it is they want to see. Those are significant recent changes as far as the powers of the ISC are concerned.

In addition, we have the two commissioners, the Intelligence Services Commissioner and the Interception of Communications Commissioner, with responsibilities for overseeing the performance of the agencies, including GCHQ, under Parts 2 and 3, and under Part 1 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act respectively.

My noble friend Lord Soley referred to the advances in technology and the way in which the speed of technological innovation can quickly overtake Acts of Parliament set up to define the limits of surveillance. As I understand it, the Intelligence and Security Committee intends to conduct an investigation into whether the Human Rights Act, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and the Intelligence Services Act, and the interaction between them and the policies and procedures that underpin them, remain relevant with regard to the balance between security, liberty and privacy, given the significant advances in technology over the past few years.

An investigation of that nature is important, and we also need to be sure that the oversight arrangements are operating effectively, and are such—and remain such—as to inspire public confidence that what our intelligence and security services are doing is what they should be doing and are authorised to be doing, and is proportionate, not what they may have the capability of doing, which is something else. Co-operation is vital in the field of intelligence gathering, not least in the sharing of information with friendly countries and allies. Any activity that calls into question that trust could have serious security implications.

At a political level the intelligence agencies are ultimately responsible to the Prime Minister, but on a day-to-day basis it is Secretaries of State who are expected to balance national security considerations against the need to protect against an intrusion on individuals’ right to privacy. In the House of Commons on 10 June this year, the Foreign Secretary said that ministerial oversight and independent scrutiny was there as well as the scrutiny of the Intelligence and Security Committee, and that,

“the idea that operations are carried out without ministerial oversight, somehow getting around UK law, is mistaken”.—[Official Report, Commons, 10/6/13; col. 37.]

Opening e-mails or tapping a phone requires a warrant in the United Kingdom, and effective legislation and oversight arrangements should ensure that that is what happens. However, in the light of the Foreign Secretary’s statement that the idea that operations are carried out without ministerial oversight is mistaken, will the Minister confirm that that statement also covered any operations that may be conducted by or with the knowledge of our agencies outside the UK, whether in relation to United Kingdom bodies or citizens or to bodies or citizens of other countries?

We all recognise the importance of the work that our intelligence and security services undertake in protecting us against criminal and terrorist activity, international cyberattack and international global terrorism, and in ensuring our national security. We also recognise the reality that nearly all operations that have foiled a terrorist plot in this country in recent years have been dependent on information from communications data. I suspect that we will never fully appreciate or understand the debt we owe to our intelligence and security services since, for obvious reasons, the detail about what they do and how they do it cannot be in the full public domain.

It was Sir David Omand, a former head of GCHQ, who said that democratic legitimacy demanded that where new methods of intelligence gathering and use were to be introduced, they should be on a firm legal basis and rest on parliamentary and public understanding of what is involved, even though the operational details of the sources and method used would normally need to remain secret.

A number of issues and concerns have been raised in the debate, not least by my noble friend Lord Soley, who also made some proposals for change. I very much hope that the Minister will go as far as he feels he can in responding to them.