Tunisia and European Council

Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean Excerpts

Monday 29th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston]

I am not familiar with the detail of the processes that are in place these days for vetting staff. However, I am confident that there is appropriate vetting of any individual who is employed by this Government, wherever they are based, to ensure that they have the appropriate clearance for the task they are given. As to my noble friend’s point about non-British nationals being locally engaged in embassies to carry out entry clearance for visas and that sort of thing, again, I would imagine that there is no reason to doubt the processes involved in recruiting local personnel.

[Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean (Lab)]

My Lords, in answering an earlier question on the Statement, which she repeated, the Leader of the House said that the issues would take time. One of the really difficult things is the feeling that we may not have an awful lot of time to deal with some of them. There are now 4 million displaced people in Syria, which is causing huge disruption and real difficulty in Jordan and Lebanon. We know that this is not happening just in Tunisia; we are seeing it split apart countries such as Syria, Iraq and Libya. What progress is being made in the work undertaken by Sir John Jenkins to look at the sources of funding and weaponry for ISIL? That very important report was announced some time ago, and it would be enormously helpful to have an idea of when we might expect publication.

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston]

The noble Baroness has a lot of expert knowledge of this area. I will write to her in response to her question about the report by Sir John Jenkins.

Clearly immediate action needs to be taken, and it is being taken. There is military intervention in Syria, albeit that America is taking the lead there with our Arab partners. We are providing some security and intelligence effort. We are contributing very directly in Iraq and are the second largest contributor to air strikes. Ultimately, the answer to stability in that part of the world lies in good governance. We must support these countries to get to a point where they have Governments in place who can properly represent all the peoples of their individual nations so that together they can combat this terrible, perverted ideology. That will take some time.