Loss of Secret Documents

Peter Grant Excerpts

Monday 28th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Quin]

Absolutely. Again, that is not the subject of this UQ, but my hon. Friend can rest assured that we will continue to conduct ourselves appropriately and professionally, as the Royal Navy always does and as it did last week in its innocent passage across the Black sea. That is absolutely the case. I sincerely hope that this is not a case of our adversaries having sight of these documents, but that is something that has to be confirmed by the investigation.

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

While there have been attempts today to scapegoat the civil servant involved and the BBC, the fact is that whether the civil servant’s actions were caused by carelessness, forgetfulness, malice or whatever, at least one other person had a responsibility to stop that civil servant getting those papers out the door of the MOD, so at least one other person, and possibly a whole chain of precautions, has failed. Will the Minister give an assurance, first of all, that the investigation will not be allowed to become a blame allocation or scapegoating exercise? Will he also assure us that not only will Parliament be advised of the result of the investigation, but that he or one of his colleagues will come back to give a statement and be questioned and held to account by Members of Parliament on the results of that investigation when it is ready?

[Jeremy Quin]

The investigation is partly to find out what happened and the circumstances behind the mislaying of these documents. I will not prejudge whether others were involved; it just needs to be discovered. I totally take the hon. Gentleman’s point that one should not jump to conclusions. We need to have a proper investigation. As I say, the police are involved. We need to find the conclusions of that. We also need to find out what we need to learn for the future, and I will make certain that the House is advised of the conclusions of the investigation.