Justice and Security Bill [Lords]

Debate between Malcolm Rifkind and Hazel Blears

Tuesday 18th December 2012 Commons Chamber

[Sir Malcolm Rifkind]

I agree with my right hon. Friend. There has to be an ultimate right for the Prime Minister to decline to allow the Committee to receive certain information. However, until now, the agencies have been able to exercise that power. To be fair to them, they have rarely, if ever, tried to do so.

On operations, the statutory basis is crucial. The Committee has accepted that our oversight of operations should be retrospective. We do not wish to interfere in ongoing operations. That would be unreasonable and would put an intolerable burden on the agencies. As long as the oversight is retrospective and there is a significant national interest—we will have debates over what that phrase means—I believe that there is a sound basis.

Thirdly, until now, the Intelligence and Security Committee has been able only to request information from the agencies, not require it. To be fair to the agencies, they have not, for all practical purposes, ever refused us information, but they have been in control of the information that has been provided. Real problems have emerged over the years. On some occasions, it has been found, subsequent to the publication of a report, that important documents had simply not been made available to the Committee. That may not have been done in bad faith, but the consequence was embarrassment for the agencies and for the system of independent oversight. That cannot be allowed to continue.

We have also found that when the agencies have responded to a requirement of the courts, the resources and the time that they have devoted to finding every relevant document have been slightly greater than for a Committee that can only request information and not require it. That is going to change. I pay tribute to the agencies for accepting the need to make this change. The Committee will now have the power to require information from the agencies, including information on operations, subject to one or two important safeguards.

I come now to the crucial difference. Until now, the problem has been that although the agencies hold vast amounts of information on any given subject, we do not expect them, when we request information, to fill several forklift trucks with information and dump it at our offices. That would be absurd, and we will not expect that when we require information in the future. However, until now, the agencies have done the editing themselves. Even if it is done entirely in good faith, that does not enable the Committee to be confident that it has seen all the information that it would wish to see before it brings forward its proposals.

We have proposed that we will appoint additional staff—assistants to the Committee, who will be our employees and be answerable to us—who will go to the agencies when we require information on a particular subject from them and discuss all the information, including the raw material, that they have in their files. I pay tribute again to the Government and the agencies for agreeing to that. I hope that there will be a process of agreement and discussion, but at the end of the day, it will be our staff who decide which parts of the available material the Committee is likely to want to see. We, Parliament and the public will therefore be able to have confidence that the decision will be taken by the Committee itself, not by the agencies, however much they would be trying to do their best in good faith.

That is an enormous culture change for MI6, MI5 and GCHQ to accept. For the first time in their history they will be not just providing information to people who are not employees of the agencies or part of the Government—we are not part of the Government, and in future we will be part of Parliament—but allowing them to come into their offices, see material and discuss what the ISC would like to evaluate. I pay tribute to the agencies for accepting that. Of course they have some reservations and concerns, and a memorandum of understanding is being discussed. It is referred to in the Bill and will be published in due course. It will explain in greater detail how the system will work on a day-to-day basis. We may have to review it in a year or two in the light of experience.

I pay tribute also to both Her Majesty’s Government and Her Majesty’s Opposition, because such a change is not just a potential rod for the back of the agencies but will occasionally create problems for the Government of the day. Both Front-Bench teams know that the Bill will mean that intelligence oversight will have the teeth that it has not had in the past, because it will be on a statutory basis and include the real powers that I have described. That is why I and the Committee feel confident in saying that we will have a tougher, more effective and more reliable system of oversight than we have ever had in our history or than can currently be found in almost any country in the western world or globally.

[Hazel Blears]

I pay tribute to the right hon. and learned Gentleman for his leadership of the Intelligence and Security Committee. I do not think we would have quite such robust proposals had it not been for his work.

May I remind the right hon. and learned Gentleman of one small point? As the Bill is drafted, it would prevent the Committee from examining ongoing operations. If the Government were to ask us to consider a matter that was ongoing and not retrospective, that would be forbidden. The Bill therefore needs to be amended on that point.

[Sir Malcolm Rifkind]

I must first reciprocate the right hon. Lady’s compliment. She has made an enormous and much-respected contribution to the Committee’s work.

The right hon. Lady raises an important point. Of course we accept that our oversight of operations must be retrospective and on matters of significant national interest. However, there have been circumstances in which the Prime Minister of the day has invited the Committee to examine an ongoing operation on some specific matter. In addition, there are sometimes occasions when, because of leaks and press awareness, an ongoing operation becomes a matter of public discussion and debate. There must be flexibility in the Bill to allow the Committee to examine such matters. The House should feel confident that, although we wish a number of improvements to be made in Committee, we are entering a new phase of intelligence oversight.

I want to say a few words about part 2 of the Bill. A number of my right hon. and hon. Friends who serve on the Committee will undoubtedly wish to speak about it as well. It goes without saying that closed material proceedings are not very satisfactory, but in the imperfect world in which we live, the choice is sometimes between good solutions and bad solutions but more often between bad solutions and worse solutions. As has been said, public interest immunity is not a feasible alternative. The £2 million settlement that was made just a couple of weeks ago was a case to which intelligence material would have been central if it had gone to court. There could not have been PII, because that would have excluded all the material. That leaves us to introduce a system that, as the former Lord Chief Justice Lord Woolf has said, is certainly preferable to PII. I say to hon. Members who still have their doubts that the system is not perfect, but it is a lot better than the one we have at the moment. That is why it is in the national interest to support the Bill.

Intelligence and Security Committee

Debate between Malcolm Rifkind and Hazel Blears

Monday 21st November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Sir Malcolm Rifkind]

I can give my hon. Friend a very straightforward answer: all members of the Committee are subject to the Official Secrets Act. We see the most secret information and we have therefore all been considered suitable for that purpose. Like any other United Kingdom citizen, we cannot reveal information that is in breach of the Official Secrets Act, which is an Act of this place and must be respected. In the unlikely event of the circumstances to which my hon. Friend refers, that would be the response.

The third major reform relates to the fact that the 1994 Act states that the Committee may “request” information from the intelligence agencies. If the Committee has the power to request, the agencies have the power to decline. I have to be fair and say that the agencies have never used that power, but they are able to decline and that is no longer acceptable. Our view, which we have recommended to the Government, is that the Committee should have the power to require information to be shared by the intelligence agencies, and only the Government, not the agencies, should have the power to override that if, for example, a Secretary of State or Prime Minister believe there is some overwhelming national interest in doing so. That would have to be reported to Parliament.

The power to require information is not just a change of words. At the moment, if the Committee wants information we request it and the agencies, which sometimes have massive files, produce a summary of the information. I am sure that they do it in good faith, but we are allowed to see only that summarised version. The power to require information will mean that we will have our own staff who can have informal discussions in a constructive and positive way with the agencies and see all the available information. Ultimately, they will decide what summary we might wish to see, which will enable us to put questions to the agencies if we decide to take evidence from them. That is a much more sensible procedure, which I am sure will work. However, it is obviously a very important change compared with previous practice.

[Hazel Blears (Salford and Eccles) (Lab)]

The right hon. and learned Gentleman has talked about balance in relation to the Green Paper. If there are to be more closed proceedings, is it not absolutely essential that there should be more rigorous parliamentary oversight? The Committee should therefore have more resources, not to aggrandise itself but to do properly the job that the Government are asking us to do

[Sir Malcolm Rifkind]

Yes. The right hon. Lady is a very senior member of the Intelligence and Security Committee. In the Green Paper, the Government have combined enhanced oversight with proposals for reform of the control principle precisely for the reason she mentions. In addition, even if there had not been a Green Paper and there were no Government proposals, I am sure the Committee would have taken the view that the time had come for a fundamental root-and-branch reform of oversight, and would have been making the recommendations we are discussing today to the Government. I do not know—and we will never know—what the Government’s reaction might have been. That would have been a different situation.

The final major change we are recommending relates, again, to the 1994 Act. The Act states that we have oversight of the Secret Intelligence Service, which is MI6; the Security Service, which is MI5; and GCHQ. That is all that is mentioned but, as the House will be well aware, the intelligence community is considerably wider than that. I mentioned defence intelligence a few minutes ago, and there is the Joint Intelligence Committee and the new National Security Council, which has a role partly concerned with intelligence. The reality is that, over the years, these additional agencies and parts of government have voluntarily subjected themselves to scrutiny by the ISC. That is right and proper, but it is time that the legislation caught up with the formal position. That has also been accepted by the Government.

In conclusion, the House might think, “Well, that’s all very well. We know what the Government’s view is and we know what the Intelligence and Security Committee’s view is, but what about the agencies themselves? How comfortable are they with these proposals?” I cannot speak on their behalf, but I can say that our relationship with the agencies is very positive and that they have sometimes publicly said that it is time for reform.

The agencies have taken an entirely constructive approach to the kind of issues we have been discussing today. Of course, there is a very good reason for that. Not only are the agencies great national servants operating in the national interest, but one of the big developments in intelligence oversight over the past 16 years has been that a Committee such as ours, whose primary role may seem to be to criticise agencies or the Government if something goes wrong, has also occasionally been the agencies’ champion if we conclude they are being unfairly attacked either in the media or elsewhere and are unable to defend themselves.

The obvious example of that is the 7/7 bombings, when serious representations were made that because the names of the people responsible for the bombings were on the Security Service’s files, what happened could surely have been stopped and it was all a disastrous mistake. I was not involved in that investigation, but our predecessors looked into the matter in enormous detail. It is significant that the conclusion they came to was in all material respects the same as that the coroner came to a few months ago: although various criticisms could be made, the Security Service was being unfairly accused on the central question of failing to stop that terrible event in the circumstances. The agencies have trust in the Committee partly because it has operated in a mature and sensible way. Although on many occasions the Committee may have criticised things the agencies have done, we are also prepared to speak on their behalf in public and private if we think the facts justify it.

Intelligence has been a hugely important issue for the United Kingdom for many years. The single most important intelligence achievement was Bletchley Park during the second world war, which had a material impact on our winning the war. More recently, how intelligence operates has changed fundamentally. However, the crucial aspects of intelligence remain the same: our national interest requires that intelligence agencies remain secret in their most crucial activities. That is how I started and that is how I conclude my comments. On behalf of the Committee as a whole, I commend our report to the House.