Murder of Lee Rigby

Liam Fox Excerpts

Tuesday 25th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I agree with everything that the right hon. Gentleman has said. First, on the work done by MI5 and our agencies, I will repeat the quote from the director general of MI5 that says it all:

“We are not an army that has battalions waiting in barracks for deployment. We are fully deployed all the time so the only way to go on high priority cases is to stop low ones.”

That gives a sense of the pressure that, inevitably, organisations such as this are under; they are trying all the time to think of how they best triage these cases and make sure that they have the maximum input into the most dangerous cases.

The second point that the right hon. Gentleman made was about taking up personally with the US the engagement on the importance of communications data. I can guarantee absolutely that that happens at every level, including with the President. It is a shared challenge for both of us to get this right. We are very clear: wherever these companies are headquartered, if they provide services in the UK they should be subject to UK law. The point he makes with respect to the companies is absolutely right. Of course they worry about their public image in terms of wanting to be in favour of data security, and one can understand that. But they also need to worry about their public image if they are being used by terrorists to plot attacks and they have information about those attacks that they do not pass on. We need to make that point tell in the conversations to come.

[Dr Liam Fox (North Somerset) (Con)]

The intelligence services do a magnificent job but we spend on all three services in a year what we spend on the national health services every six days. The funding settlement has indeed been generous as the Prime Minister said, but is he satisfied that the problems set out in the report are problems of procedure and practice and not of funding priorities? In other words, are the intelligence services big enough to do the job we are asking them to do in this increasingly dangerous era?

[The Prime Minister]

My right hon. Friend asks a very good question. The fact is that we spend over £2 billion a year on our intelligence and security services. We have protected that spending, as we did for counter-terrorism policing. But the truth is that there is no upper limit on what we could spend if we wanted to do more and more activity. We have to make a judgment about what is right.

As I say, I meet the heads of our intelligence agencies regularly and talk to them about the pressures they are under. The reason for providing some extra money today is that there is a specific and growing challenge from these self-starting—they are sometimes called “lone wolf”—jihadis, who have been radicalised on the internet because of what has been happening in Syria but are not necessarily linked up with other terrorist networks. That puts extra pressure on and we need to respond to that. But it is a permanent judgment about how much to spend. We try to give the agencies a long-term perspective so they can plan and bring all their resources to bear.