Security in the UK

Lord Janvrin Excerpts

Monday 10th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Janvrin (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister and the Government for finding time for this timely and important debate. I want to focus my remarks on the intelligence community—namely, the three intelligence services and their co-ordinating structure in Whitehall. I draw attention to the fact that I was a member of the Intelligence and Security Committee during the last Parliament.

I pay tribute, as others have done, to all those who work in our intelligence community, and in doing so I readily acknowledge that there are others in this House who know their work far better than I do. They work under sustained and relentless pressure, in some cases in conditions of personal danger, and the very nature of their business is that their work goes largely unrecognised. Day in, day out, they play a crucial role, along with their colleagues in the police and the other law enforcement agencies, in enabling the rest of us to go about our daily lives.

The intelligence community has, of course, been under huge pressure of late, and I was interested in what my noble friend Lady Manningham-Buller was saying about the tempo and scale of the threat we are facing. Counterterrorism obviously remains the highest priority in the aftermath of the attacks we have seen and has naturally formed the focus of this debate. But, in parallel, we have seen an upsurge in co-ordinated, possibly state-sponsored hacking and cyberattacks, presenting new challenges to our intelligence services.

Yet, at the same time, old challenges do not fade away. In such an unstable and volatile time in world politics, the traditional need for high-grade political and economic intelligence has never been greater. Have the intelligence agencies the resources to meet this pressure? Despite the severe restrictions on public spending in recent years, the expenditure on all the three intelligence services has been, as the Minister reminded us, increased significantly, not least in the November 2015 spending review. While I think there was widespread acceptance that these increases were justified, there is, in my view, a continuing case for the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee to continue to scrutinise how these significant extra resources have been used. It should examine whether this additional expenditure has been deployed effectively across all three services, bringing them closer together, particularly in ways that not only deliver further capability but, at the same time, encourage further savings when necessary by pooling resources between the three services.

Looking more closely at the three specific priority areas that I have mentioned, let me focus first on counterterrorism. In the aftermath of the series of attacks that we have endured, it is important to recall that the intelligence services have constantly reminded us, as others have today, that we cannot be guaranteed 100% security. Tragically, there will be attacks which succeed and get through the net, with such horrific and life-changing consequences for those directly involved, their friends and families. The important thing is to learn the lessons of these incidents; it is imperative that we do so and, where possible, be seen to do so.

I welcome the appointment of David Anderson, the former Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, to oversee a review of the handling of recent terror attacks. He knows the intelligence world and brings incisiveness and clarity to difficult issues. Has he been given a date on which to report, and will a redacted version of his review be made public? A starting point for his analysis may well be in looking again at the issues raised by the Intelligence and Security Committee in the aftermath of the brutal murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby in 2013, as referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell, who was a member of the committee at that time.

Some of the issues may well be very relevant as we search for lessons from the recent attacks. Obviously, there were many questions then about resources, but there were also questions about process. Can MI5 progress low-priority casework even when under the huge pressure of running an increasing number of high-priority investigations? How can we deal with “self-starting terrorists”, who are increasingly security conscious in how they go about their business? As we have heard today, the question of communications service providers came up in the report; I welcome the Government’s activity in that important area. How do the agencies manage the vast amount of data on individuals not assessed as posing a risk to national security, and how do they process more effectively intelligence from local communities, which may prove vital in any investigation? All those issues were exposed in 2013, and I suggest that they may be very relevant as we look to learn lessons in 2017.

The second area for further scrutiny is in the field of cybersecurity. We have been reminded over recent months of the threat faced not only by organisations regarded as critical national infrastructure but by those further afield. The establishment of the National Cyber Security Centre has been an innovative and creative response to the need to build a bridge between the necessarily secret work of GCHQ and the more open world of assuring the security of business and public bodies. There is a widely recognised need to raise public awareness and provide high-level advice—and I salute the work of the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, in promoting that. As the Minister reminded us, the centre has not yet been open a year, but I think that, before long, there will be a case to take stock of its work and to learn lessons from how it is carrying out its vital role.

Finally, in the more traditional world of intelligence there is always an insatiable requirement for high-grade political and economic intelligence on the many trouble spots in the world. What are the Russians’ intentions in Ukraine or the Baltic? What do we know about the shifting political sands in the Middle East, the Gulf, Syria and Iran? What do we really know about intentions and capabilities in North Korea? The list is endless; the resources are finite; priorities need examining. Continuing scrutiny of the work of the intelligence services in these areas, as well as the effective use of their resources, is the proper function of the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee appointed by the Government. I hope that this parliamentary body can be reconstituted soon, given recent events. In another place last month, the Home Secretary fully recognised the need for this. Does the Minister have further news on the re-establishment of the committee? The committee has a vital and crucial role both in explaining the intelligence community to the public and in holding it to account. That it does so effectively is in the interest of the public, of Parliament and of the intelligence community itself, as it can only be really effective if it continues to enjoy the widest possible public trust that effective scrutiny brings. I firmly believe that it deserves that trust, but we should never take it for granted.