Justice and Security Bill [HL]

Baroness Manningham-Buller Excerpts

Monday 9th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hamwee]

My Lords, like other Members of the Committee I am a bit puzzled about how polarised the debate became a few minutes ago. It seems to have swung back now. I do not see all the distinctions that have been drawn, and I certainly do not see the distinction between the committee being there to ask questions in public or as something different to get to the bottom of an issue.

I agree, of course, that the committee must have the confidence of the agencies and that it must have public confidence. I would add, perhaps as a subsection of that second point rather than as a third category, that it must also have the confidence of those affected by events. When I was a member of the London Assembly, I was involved in some work following the events of 7/7, and one of the benefits of our being able to undertake some work was that it fulfilled the need of some who had been affected to tell their story and to have their story listened to. I am not suggesting that this is a pattern or even relevant to the majority of the ISC’s work, but I would not want it to be forgotten.

I think that this debate is leading us towards there being a Select Committee and that badging it as such is important because of what that says about the focus of Parliament’s responsibility to the public. I do not think it would require the rules to be fiddled with, but it would require them to be made fit for purpose. Perhaps it is naive and untraditional of me, but I do not see why the rules of a Select Committee cannot be made fit for purpose. It might require a lot of work, but I think it ought to be done.

I have some very non-technical and rather inelegant amendments later, but the point that they are intended to raise is that the default should be that the committee works for the public and in public, not as a stage show—absolutely not, because to take up one of the points that has just been made, I for one think that the most important questions that tend to be asked are the supplemental ones. I am glad that we are having this debate because I think that it is taking us in an important direction.

[Baroness Manningham-Buller]

My Lords, I declare what I hope is an obvious interest—my membership of the Security Service for 33 years—although I should warn the Committee that I retired five years ago and so am out of date.

I should like to reiterate a couple of points. I listened with great interest to the points made by both former members of the ISC, current members and others with a close interest in this matter. It is certainly the case—and I do not think that I am out of date in saying this—that it is in the interests of the security and intelligence community to have either a Select Committee or the present committee as it stands seeking to give reassurance to Parliament and the public that these agencies are properly run, obeying the law and doing a reasonable job. As the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, said, they will make mistakes—it would be a delusion to suggest that any organisation was free from making mistakes—but certainly when I was reporting to the ISC I hoped to own up to and discuss those mistakes.

The support of members of the public is necessary not only in terms of general support for the organ of government but because, to do their work, the agencies require that support every day of the week. They need the public to join them as recruits—they want to attract high-quality recruits—they need them as sources of information, and they need them to help in whatever way possible. Someone might be asked, “Can I come and sit in your bedroom with a camera?”. I might say no but people say yes to the officers of the Security Service daily. Therefore, when we talk about public opinion, the services require the help of the public to do their job and, in my experience, they get it.

When we talk about whether to go for a Select Committee—a proposal with which I have a lot of sympathy—or an improvement on, or development of, the last one, I share the view of the noble Lord, Lord King of Bridgwater, that we will get there at some stage, although whether we will do so at the speed at which the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, would like, I do not know.

I am sorry but I feel that I must take slight issue with the noble Lord, Lea of Crondall, about the amount of information on the services that is available in the public domain. For certain, my service took its heart in its hands and commissioned a centenary history of the Security Service. We made the professor of contemporary history at Cambridge a temporary member of the service and allowed him into our records. We said, “You can make any judgment you like. We won’t seek to query it. There will be a few things that you can’t publish for national security reasons but we will keep those to a minimum”. If you look at our website—I must stop saying “our”; I left the organisation. If you look at the Security Service’s website, you will see quite extensive amounts of information.

Why do these organisations exist? They exist to try to protect the United Kingdom and its citizens, and it is in their interests that as far as possible the confidence in them is well founded and, as far as it can be, widely and publicly known. To that extent, I should like to say how much I welcome the arrival of the ISC and how much I look forward to its continuing evolution.

[Lord Butler of Brockwell]

My Lords, I wish to make a brief point. In doing so, I know that I risk being regarded by the noble Lord, Lord Deben, as the siren voice of cautious officialdom—or, in my case, cautious former officialdom. However, I want to raise a question on what the noble Lords, Lord Campbell-Savours and Lord Deben, said.

The argument of the noble Lord, Lord Deben, was that the badging of the security committee would be improved if it were called a Select Committee. I can see the case for that. I think we all agree that the ultimate purpose is that the public should have confidence in the committee’s scrutiny of the intelligence services. However, it was clear from the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, that if this were to be a Select Committee, it would have to be hedged around by a very large number of parliamentary resolutions, and that would have the same effect as the constraints that are written into the Bill. The question is: would that make it more convincing if it were a Select Committee when it was a Select Committee unlike any other because it would be so inhibited by those restraints?

They say that something which looks like a duck and quacks like a duck can be regarded as being a duck, but this would not look like or quack like a Select Committee; it would be something completely separate. I suspect that this might reduce, rather than increase, public confidence in it because people would see that it was a Select Committee that did not operate like any other Select Committee and could not really be regarded as a Select Committee in the true sense in which the public understand it.

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[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.

[Baroness Manningham-Buller]

I am pleased to hear from the noble Marquess, Lord Lothian, that the committee is currently thinking of whether there are ways that some things could be held in public because I think it is the case that there are issues—the noble Lord, Lord King of Bridgwater, suggested some—that could conceivably be considered in public without any danger to national security. Having said that, I would also say that, whenever I gave evidence to the committee, on practically all occasions I was discussing secret information and very often top secret information. Therefore, the time that you could have an open hearing would be very restricted indeed. On whether this would improve public confidence, it would be narrow so it might or might not. However, if the committee is thinking that way, that is welcome.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Henley]

The noble Baroness is right: there was that commitment. She also knows that pre-appointment hearings are a relatively new phenomenon. Since 2008, Select Committees have conducted pre-appointment hearings for a number of posts, and there is Cabinet Office guidance on the process and on who should be heard. The important thing to note about the list of pre-appointment posts is that the posts concern public bodies, such as the chair of Ofcom and the chair of the Social Security Advisory Committee. The most recent one that my department had an interest in was Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary. There is no suggestion that the pre-appointment process has been used to appoint civil servants. Indeed, the noble Baroness is not suggesting that before appointment each Permanent Secretary should go before the appropriate Select Committee.

The heads of the intelligence and security agencies are Permanent Secretary-level civil servants.

[Baroness Manningham-Buller]

They are not civil servants; they are Crown servants.

[Lord Henley]

I stand corrected by the noble Baroness, but it makes little odds; Crown servants are in fact at Permanent Secretary-level, although I accept that rebuke.

The recruitment process is therefore expected to follow the process for the appointment of Crown servants of such seniority. I could go through the details of the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act, but I can give an assurance that they are exempt from that. They will necessarily follow the spirit of the civil servant recruitment principles, which we consider to be the best process. We do not consider it to be the appropriate mechanism for recruitment to public bodies, whether the process is conducted in public or in private. It might be appropriate for the other posts that I mentioned but not for the public bodies that we are talking about.