Belhaj and Boudchar: Litigation Update

Philip Hollobone Excerpts

Thursday 10th May 2018 Commons Chamber

[The Attorney General]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. He will recognise that some of the changes that have been made since this incident have, I hope, encouraged us to ask better questions and to ask them more persistently. I made reference to the consolidated guidance, of which he will know, and in relation to such documents, we make it very clear that intelligence operatives should ask questions, before information is handed over, about what will be done with that information and what may then happen. Therefore, we do need to see better questions asked more repeatedly, and that, I believe, is one of the changes that is occurring.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

If there was a failure of the intelligence services under the Tony Blair Government then it is right that an apology should be made. However, my constituents in Kettering will be stunned by the scale of the compensation; half a million pounds is a sum to which they could never aspire. I would like to know how that sum was arrived at. I believe that I heard the Father of House correctly when he said that there was an earlier opportunity to settle this case without that scale of compensation. Can the Attorney General update the House on that?

[The Attorney General]

There certainly have been other efforts made to resolve this matter. They have not been successful for a variety of different reasons. The resolution of the case on this occasion did, as I said in my statement, involve some compensation to Mrs Boudchar. I hope my hon. Friend will understand that many of the details of that settlement are confidential and I cannot discuss them in the House, but he has my assurance that, conscious as I am of the need to ensure that no further taxpayer money was spent that did not need to be spent, I would have needed to satisfy myself that compensation of this nature was appropriate. Again, I do not wish to go into the detail of what happened to Mrs Boudchar. She has said some of that herself, and it is in the public domain, but I am afraid that the necessity of compensating for what happened to her is, in my view, beyond doubt and is part of the appropriate approach that the Government now need to take.