GCHQ

Tony Baldry Excerpts

Monday 10th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hague]

The legal framework is the one I have set out. The Acts that I have referred to, passed by Parliament, apply to all the intelligence gathered by the agencies. The hon. Gentleman will know that, for instance, section 3 of the Intelligence Services Act 1994 confers particular powers and roles on GCHQ, so these things are governed by the same Acts of Parliament. Procedures differ, of course, in many different situations. It is because I cannot describe all those situations in public that I cannot go into exactly what that means for procedures in every case. I therefore cannot go as far in reassuring the hon. Gentleman or the shadow Foreign Secretary as they would like, but if they could see the full details of what happens, I think they would take an enormous measure of reassurance from it.

[Sir Tony Baldry (Banbury) (Con)]

Given the comments of the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) and other former Cabinet Ministers on the Opposition Benches, can the House reasonably infer that there has been no change in policy with regard to GCHQ and information sharing from the last Government—in other words, that the system that prevails at present is identical to that pertained when Labour was in government?

[Mr Hague]

The challenges of gathering intelligence change over time, so I would not want to give the House the impression that all practices and techniques are exactly the same or used in the same way. I can say, as I said in my statement, that the general framework remains the same—the principles of our intelligence sharing with the United States and the general framework for it certainly remain the same. The values on which it is based also remain the same, as under successive Governments.