Treatment of Detainees

Ben Wallace Excerpts

Tuesday 6th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I have only been doing this job for a few weeks, and I am very happy to look at that issue. I know that it has been discussed before. Can we change the nature of the Intelligence and Security Committee? Can we help it to do its job even better? I am very happy to look at that. However, I do not think for a moment that we should believe that the ISC should be doing this piece of work. For public confidence, and for independence from Parliament, party and Government, it is right to have a judge-led inquiry. I say to Opposition Members who take a different view that these events relate to 2002-03. If the ISC was the right answer, why on earth did it not come up with it in the previous years?

[Mr Ben Wallace (Wyre and Preston North) (Con)]

The gathering of intelligence is not the same as the gathering of evidence: sometimes intelligence is required much more urgently and in a hostile environment. Could the Prime Minister give the House an assurance that after the inquiry is over, he will think very carefully before reintroducing any extra guidelines or regulations for our intelligence services that might prevent them from doing the job that they do so well at the moment?

[The Prime Minister]

I know that my hon. Friend has experience of these issues and thinks about them a lot. All I would say is that there is no doubt that there are serious allegations about what happened in the past. I do not want to pre-empt the report, but one thing that it needs to do is ask how we stop such things happening in future. One way to stop them is by having better guidance, so that our security services have a clearer understanding of what is and is not acceptable. That is not easy, and inevitably some people will say that the guidance is quite bureaucratic. I totally accept and understand that, but we have to have some way of trying to prevent what happened from happening again.