Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament

Marquess of Lothian Excerpts

Monday 9th September 2019 Grand Committee

Moved by

[The Marquess of Lothian]

That the Grand Committee takes note of the recent work of the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament.

[The Marquess of Lothian (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to introduce this debate on the work of the committee since 2015. These debates used to be a lot more regular, but, for some reason, this is, I think, our first since that time—so a very large body of work is in front of us if we wish to discuss it. I say “we” because your Lordships’ House is represented on the committee not only by me but by the noble Lord, Lord Janvrin, who will share with me today the introduction to the work of the committee, which since 2013 has been independent and self-tasking.

The ISC oversees the seven organisations that make up the UK intelligence community. As members, we are all subject to the Official Secrets Act and are cleared to have sight of highly classified information. We meet in private and all evidence we take is given in complete confidence—trust in which confidence is essential to the highly sensitive security subjects that we work on. Noble Lords who follow our work in some of the reports that we put forward will realise that large portions of it consist of asterisks. I am not sure how one expresses an asterisk orally, so today I shall avoid getting into those areas of detail.

The ISC oversees the whole gamut of the work of our intelligence and security agencies, from international counterterrorism, Northern Ireland-related terrorism and cybersecurity to oversight of administration and expenditure. We examine their priorities and how they allocate efforts and resources. Issues such as recruitment and staffing are important, because intelligence, even in this technological age, is essentially still a people business. We need therefore to make sure that we have the highest-quality people.

Our remit allows us to look at the security and intelligence aspects of the subjects that we investigate, which by definition cannot fall within the remit of parliamentary Select Committees. In this debate, I propose, along with the noble Lord, Lord Janvrin, to look at the main work carried out since September 2015. We have agreed to share this task between us.

I shall start with our report on the UK lethal drone strike, which we published in April 2017. In it, the committee addressed intelligence issues relating to the conflict in Syria, and in particular the lethal UK drone strike against Reyaad Kahn on 21 August 2015. This strike was exceptional in that it was the first time that the UK had conducted a lethal drone strike against a terrorist target outside of participation in a military campaign.

In investigating the strike against Reyaad Khan, the committee’s focus was on the intelligence on him and the resulting assessment of the threat he posed. Other parliamentary committees had considered the legal, policy and military aspects of the strike, but were unable to scrutinise the intelligence basis, given that the intelligence was highly classified.

Our committee did not seek to reach conclusions as to the legal basis for the strike but was able to determine that, in terms of the severity of the threat posed by Reyaad Khan, the intelligence reports and assessments we were shown would suggest that Khan was a prolific recruiter and a successful attack planner. While we were in no doubt that Reyaad Khan posed a very serious threat to the United Kingdom, there was nevertheless a question as to how the threat was finally quantified and assessed.

Regrettably, the committee was unable to consider how Ministers made that assessment, since we were denied sight of the key ministerial submission. This was despite the fact that our work is carried out within the ring of secrecy—and anyway, where necessary for national security reasons, is always subject to redactions. This failure to provide what we considered to be the relevant documents was profoundly disappointing, and we hope that the Government will give serious consideration to changing this approach in the future, because oversight depends on primary evidence. It is therefore essential that the Government open up the ministerial decision-making process to secure scrutiny on matters of such seriousness.

I turn now to our detainee report, which we published in June 2018. This was a major inquiry into detainee mistreatment and rendition during the period 2015 to 2018, which we were originally invited to undertake by the Government. In the end, we published two reports: the first covered the period 2001 to 2010; and the second, the current situation since the publication of the Consolidated Guidance in 2010. This entailed the committee taking 50 hours of oral evidence, reviewing 40,000 original documents and devoting over 30,000 staff hours to investigating the actions of the UK agencies and Defence Intelligence in respect of detainees and rendition.

Our report on the historic issue of detainee mistreatment and rendition concerned the period 2001 to 2010. It contained 27 conclusions and outlined some serious concerns. While we did not find any evidence that UK agency officers or Defence Intelligence personnel directly carried out physical mistreatment of detainees, we did, for example, find incidents where UK personnel witnessed at first hand a detainee being mistreated by others, or were told by detainees that they had been mistreated by others. Some cases were investigated, but not all. The committee also found cases where United Kingdom personnel continued to supply questions or intelligence to liaison services, even after they knew or suspected mistreatment. There were also instances where UK personnel received intelligence from liaison services that had been obtained from detainees whom they knew had been mistreated.

The inquiry uncovered new material that had not been presented to or considered by any previous inquiry or review. However, we wished to examine certain matters in greater detail; in order to, we wanted to hear from officers who were involved at the time. In 2017 the Government, much to our regret, denied us access to those individuals, and we were therefore able to publish only the information we had found up to that point, leaving, in our view, our report sadly incomplete.

Turning now to the current report, covering the period from 2010 onwards, one of our key recommendations concerned what is generally referred to as the Consolidated Guidance. We have consistently suggested, since it was first published in 2010, that it should be renamed. It is not guidance, and to call it so was misleading. We made this point in 2018, and I am delighted that it has now been renamed Principles. So we made some progress there. The new Principles are overseen by the Investigatory Powers Commissioner and reflect the important changes we recommended in our report. These include, for example: specific reference to extraordinary rendition, alongside torture and what is known as CIDT—cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment; the application of the Principles to joint units and non-state actors; regular review; and that the agencies must follow the spirit of the Principles and not just the letter. This is a major step and it was most encouraging to see that there has been real change as a result of our recommendations.

The story of rendition has been less positive. Our inquiry found that there had been little improvement since we last reported in 2007. There is still no clear policy, and not even agreement on who has responsibility for preventing United Kingdom complicity in unlawful rendition. It was particularly surprising that Her Majesty’s Government have still failed to introduce a process to ensure that allies cannot use United Kingdom territory for rendition purposes without prior permission. Given the clear shift in focus signalled by the present United States Administration, the current reliance on retrospective assurances and the voluntary provision of passenger information are completely unsatisfactory.

Further, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office position that the United Kingdom is absolved from complicity in permitting transit or refuelling of a possible rendition flight because it has no knowledge of what the aircraft has done or is doing, is not acceptable to us. We are unconvinced that the Government recognise the seriousness of rendition and the potential for the United Kingdom to be complicit in actions which may lead to torture or CIDT.

Our report made a formal request that the Government should publish their policy on rendition within three months of publication of this report: that was September 2018. Sadly, we are still waiting, and we find the Government’s bland assertion that there is no need to be wholly unsatisfactory. It is to be hoped that the Government appreciate that, where they refuse evidence, bar witnesses or delay in making information available, they merely enhance suspicions in the minds of those who believe that the Government have something to hide.

While the committee’s primary output tends to be through its inquiries, we also address intelligence issues as and when they arise. In relation to Syria, for example, we examined the intelligence that led to the decision to conduct co-ordinated strikes, undertaken by British, French and American forces, on three sites in Syria on 13 April last year, with the aim of degrading the Syrian regime’s chemical weapons capability. We examined summaries of the evidence that had been considered by the Government, including assessments by the Joint Intelligence Committee and its post-strike analysis.

While the committee was reassured that the intelligence available supported this action by the United Kingdom against the Syrian regime following its strike on Douma, we also identified a worrying divergence in views within the intelligence community on the impact of the strikes. On this occasion, we reported our findings in our annual report of 2017-18, which was published in November 2018. The ability of the committee to probe and question the intelligence community on matters such as these is, I believe, invaluable to the agencies and to related organisations. It proves that robust oversight is an important mechanism for them, as well as for the wider public.

These reports show the breadth of the committee’s work over the three years since 2015. We have since been working on a number of other inquiries. While I cannot go into detail regarding the committee’s current work programme, I am able to confirm that our inquiry into Russian activity against the United Kingdom is ongoing. The committee agreed to begin this inquiry in 2017 and we commissioned evidence from the Government in December 2017. The poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in March 2018, and the subsequent attribution of the attack to Russia by the United Kingdom, highlighted the importance of this inquiry. We irritatingly did not receive the final evidence until 30 June 2018 and could only begin taking oral evidence that July. The committee nevertheless hopes to publish its Russia inquiry shortly.

In conclusion, I would like to take the opportunity to thank the committee’s staff, who work so diligently to provide expert support to the committee, and indeed to pay tribute to our chairman, the right honourable Dominic Grieve MP, for steering the committee through what has been a busy and productive period. I believe that we have achieved much. However, the committee’s resources are stretched and we are woefully underresourced by comparison with our international counterparts. This is an issue that we have been keen to discuss with the Prime Minister. It is a matter of deep regret to members that, despite making a number of requests, we have not had a meeting with the Prime Minister since 2014. We used to have them annually.

Finally, I would like to end by paying tribute to the men and women who work in our intelligence community. They work tirelessly, often under enormous pressure and in very challenging circumstances, on behalf of us all. We applaud the vital work that those in the intelligence community are doing to safeguard our national interests. We are grateful for their dedication and courage. We owe them not only our thanks but our undying admiration and respect. I beg to move.

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[The Marquess of Lothian]

My Lords, this has been an excellent and highly-informed debate which I have certainly learnt from. The noble Lord, Lord Anderson, made a typically modest speech in which he paid tribute to everybody except himself, but his reports informed much of the work that the committee did. They were immensely valuable, and I thank him for that.

I am also grateful to the Minister for her response. She knows that there are certain areas where we did not find that we were of a common mind. I hope that she will take them back and reflect on them. I raised them only because they make it more difficult for the committee to do the work that I think essentially Parliament expects us to do. It is worth the Government reconsidering them.

I hate to admit that I have been on the committee since 2006. It is only in the past three years that a Prime Minister has refused to meet us. We have found those meetings exceptionally useful because a lot of the criticisms that I have brought up today we could quietly bring up with the Prime Minister and, very often, they were resolved by doing so. I hope that we will go back to the habit of meeting the Prime Minister annually. I thank everybody for partaking in this debate.

Motion agreed.