Intelligence and Security Committee: Annual Report 2011-12

Lord Butler of Brockwell Excerpts

Monday 21st January 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Butler of Brockwell]

My Lords, it has been a privilege to serve for a second year as one of your Lordships’ two representatives on the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee, along with the noble Marquess, Lord Lothian.

The intelligence and security agencies of the state continue to have a high profile in government. New requirements and threats arise, which the intelligence agencies have a vital role in addressing. As the noble Marquess, Lord Lothian, said, technology develops very fast, providing new tools both for the agencies and for those who threaten us. New issues arise in striking the balance between transparency and secrecy, and between the effectiveness of the agencies, on the one hand, and the freedom of individuals on the other. It is evidence of the prominence of these issues that a major element of the programme of this parliamentary Session is the Justice and Security Bill as well as pre-legislative scrutiny of the proposed legislation to require mobile telephone and internet providers to retain data for the use of the intelligence and law enforcement agencies. The Intelligence and Security Committee has been, and is, closely involved in all these matters.

As the ability of the state to intrude on the privacy of citizens has increased over the years, so successive Governments and Parliament have rightly put in place means of scrutinising the activities of the agencies to provide protection against abuse. Since the activities of the agencies have to be conducted in secrecy if they are to be effective, so the scrutineers on behalf of the public have to be admitted within the ring of secrecy. What is more, if the public are to have confidence that they will have effective protection, they also have to have confidence in the independence and integrity of the scrutineers.

Our legislation gives judges the duty to enter the ring of secrecy and ensure that the intelligence agencies are operating within the constraints of the law. Since 1994 it has given the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee the duty of exercising a more general scrutiny on behalf of the public and Parliament. The judicial commissioners—and we have two very distinguished former commissioners present today—have carried the confidence of the public. However, the Intelligence and Security Committee has appeared to be the creation of the Government and, because it operates within highly constraining legislation, it has carried less public confidence.

I believe that this criticism of the committee has been largely unfair. Although the ISC has not had the power to require information from the agencies, the track record of the committee in protecting secrecy has given the agencies increasing confidence to provide information fully and frankly to the committee. The committee’s scrutiny has extended well beyond the limits of policy, administration and expenditure—which were the limits on it set out in the 1994 legislation. In the Justice and Security Bill now before Parliament, the legislation is catching up with reality and carrying it forward by making the committee more genuinely a committee of Parliament and by giving it the power to require information from the agencies and not just request it.

Of the matters which the committee has examined this year and which are covered in the annual report, there are many which have had a high salience in public consciousness. Perhaps chief among these, as the noble Marquess, Lord Lothian, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, said, was the role of the agencies, police and Army in protecting the security of the Olympic Games, or perhaps I should say the security of the nation during the Olympic Games. Like others, the committee was worried last year that the Games would necessarily be such a preoccupation of the security agencies that they would open the way to attacks elsewhere. In the event, the actions which the agencies took to pre-empt and deter attacks were so effective that the efforts directly devoted to the Games themselves, although large, did not drain other areas of the resource to the extent feared, and protection in those areas remained in place. Overall, I echo the comments of others that that aspect of the Games, like other aspects, was a spectacular success.

Overseas, the greatest challenge to the agencies, in addition to the ongoing requirement to support our Armed Forces in Afghanistan and to monitor the breeding grounds of al-Qaeda terrorism, was the upheaval created by the Arab spring. As the noble Marquess, Lord Lothian, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, pointed out, recent events in Mali and Algeria have tragically demonstrated that overseas eruptions of this sort, even when they occur in areas known to be volcanic, are often unpredicted—and perhaps unpredictable—by intelligence, but they create a requirement for urgent action to catch up with events. The fact that such unexpected events have happened at various times in our history emphasises the need for the agencies to maintain at least some capacity in all areas where British interests are involved. Of all the agencies, GCHQ has the potential flexibility to respond quickly in such situations, and overall the committee was impressed by the rapidity and effectiveness of the response that it and the Defence Intelligence Service were able to make to the events in Libya.

Another area where the Government have been devoting substantial effort—and need to do so—is cybersecurity, as has already been mentioned. The committee has been monitoring the way in which the Government have been using the £650 million they devoted to the National Cyber Security Programme in the most recent public expenditure settlement. It appears that the publicity given to this issue, not least by the welcome initiative of the Foreign Secretary in holding the London Conference on Cyberspace in November 2011, has been effective in drawing attention to the danger that this form of espionage presents to the UK and in alerting companies to the need to take action to protect their commercial interests. Much more needs to be done, but within Government there are still only hand-to-mouth arrangements for funding the protective action necessary and the committee has had to repeat the recommendation it made last year that a more stable long-term funding mechanism is needed for this vital work.

Because of my personal background, I have taken a particular interest in the ISC’s work in looking at how the central machinery for handling and using intelligence has been developing. I think it is generally accepted that the establishment of the National Security Council, bringing the heads of the agencies to the top table with senior Ministers in planning the UK’s defence and security priorities, is a welcome development. I follow the noble Marquess, Lord Lothian, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, in saying that it also has its dangers, by bringing the purveyors of intelligence directly into contact with senior policymakers without the sieving mechanism that the country so wisely put in place in the form of the assessment staff and the Joint Intelligence Committee. It risks bringing the intelligence moths too close to the policy-making flame. That risk was increased by the fact that the operations of the Joint Intelligence Committee had become, as the National Security Adviser himself admitted to the ISC, a little “stately and formal”.

In this fast moving situation, particularly when British troops are engaged in active military operations, it is all the more important that policymakers have the use of immediate—but properly assessed—intelligence: the very purpose for which the Joint Intelligence Committee was established in the Second World War. It is therefore welcome that the new chairman of the JIC, Jon Day, who has extensive experience of assessment, has taken steps to make the assessment machinery more fleet-footed in meeting the day-to-day needs of senior Ministers, as well as producing longer-term assessments to meet the requirements of the NSC.

I will end with two more general remarks. First, it is striking how much the challenge of dealing with internationally based terrorism has had the effect of requiring all the agencies to work more closely together, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, noted. The work of detecting and pre-empting al-Qaeda attacks on the British homeland requires the co-operation of the Security Service, SIS and GCHQ as well as the police and, in some cases, military assets. I believe that they have responded to the challenge very well.

It would be idle to deny that tensions occasionally arise between the services, but on the whole they are rare. Would it be better if we had a unified intelligence service to deal with these interrelated threats? The noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, hinted at this question. I think that the answer is no. As things are, each of our agencies and services brings to bear its own skills, traditions and roles, which are separate. As long as they work closely together, and the ISC both monitors and encourages the agencies in that area, they are more effective as a partnership than as a single entity.

That brings me to another point. Intelligence work has always raised ethical issues, and again the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, referred to these, but modern intelligence work, requiring extensive international co-operation, raises such issues acutely. Our intelligence and security agencies find themselves from time to time working with uncomfortable bedfellows. As the de Silva report brought out clearly in the Finucane case, agents who penetrate terrorist organisations inevitably sail close to the wind. But working with other Governments also brings our agencies into co-operation with those who may have different standards and different methods. It is therefore essential, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, said, that our agencies have clear guidelines about boundaries which they should not cross. I believe that the agencies and Ministers have given much attention in recent years to creating such guidelines. However, it would be foolish not to recognise that difficulties will sometimes arise, for example, when a partner at one moment turns out to be a rogue at another. This is just one of the many risks that members of our agencies and security forces have to run. In general, what I have seen as a member of the ISC and previously reassures me that we can have confidence in the ethical standards to which our agencies and security forces seek to operate.

The world in which we are living has all sorts of instabilities and dangers that are made greater by the power of technology in creating new and ever more potent threats. It is the job of our intelligence and security agencies to defend us against them without crossing lines that would infringe the very liberties they are there to protect. They have continuously to make hard decisions about priorities in using resources, and those resources are necessarily limited. The agencies welcome the scrutiny to which they are subjected because they know that it helps to keep them honest and defends them against criticisms which are unfounded or unjust. I believe that the Intelligence and Security Committee and the commissioners are necessary to that scrutiny and I am proud to take part in that work. I endorse everything the noble Marquess, Lord Lothian, has said about the contribution of the staff of the ISC and the need to give them the necessary resources as the committee’s work expands. I am very glad to support the noble Marquess in his Motion that the House takes note of the committee’s report.