Lord Mandelson Humble Address: Government Response

Lord Beamish Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

My Lords, Olly Robbins was dismissed because the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary lost confidence in him, as has been set out publicly before. As has always been the case, we do not comment on individual employment cases.

[Lord Beamish (Lab)]

My Lords, the ISC has spent many hours and days doing the task which Parliament set it. I put on record my thanks, on behalf of the committee, to the staff who have worked behind the scenes on this. I also thank the committee members, including two Members of our own House, my noble friend Admiral Lord West, and the noble Baroness, Lady Brown of Cambridge, who have worked very hard on this long task.

I wrote last week to the Prime Minister raising four points: the use of WhatsApp in government; the use of low-side systems for transmitting confidential and secretive information; the lack of record-keeping, particularly within the Foreign Office, of audit trails; and the way in which security advice was handled by officials and Ministers. They are nothing new. The committee raised them with the last Government, including the Foreign Office, which had a very bad reputation for keeping records or WhatsApp messages. I understand that the Government have now committed to a review of this, but I say to my noble friend that there is an urgency in this. This needs to be done very quickly, because this is not something new. It was raised with the last Government, it was ignored by the last Government, and it now needs to be put right as a matter of urgency.

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend for the work he has done, as well as my other noble friend and other colleagues in your Lordships’ House and the other place. This has been an extraordinary volume of work for many people, not least members of the committee and their officials, and we are very grateful to them for it.

I will take the four points he raised in turn. He is absolutely right; there has to be a positive in everything that happens, and one of the positives is that we will now review each of these areas to fix what is not working, the first of which is the use of WhatsApp. There will be a review on the use of non-corporate communication channels—we really need a better phrase for them than NCCCs, but I am sure we will come up with one. On record-keeping, I assure your Lordships’ House that the Cabinet Secretary has this week written to all the heads of departments—in other words, to every other Permanent Secretary—to remind them of their responsibilities, and we are reviewing the guidance that is issued to private offices going forward. My noble friend is absolutely right about low-level platforms and security information, and those two will be taken in train. I realise, as I reference that, that one of the questions asked by the noble Lord, Lord Pack, was about why some material should be deleted. I am not sure of the detail, because I have not seen some of the security elements behind it, but I would suggest that it may be because that information should not have been on that level of platform.