Patrick Finucane Report

Tony Baldry Excerpts

Wednesday 12th December 2012 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

The right hon. Gentleman makes an important point. Making sure that others in Northern Ireland can find justice is, I think, the work of the Historical Enquiries Team. As I said, it should continue with its work. As to what the right hon. Gentleman says specifically about wrongdoing by the IRA, the report could not be clearer that it bears an enormous responsibility, as I read out in my statement, for an extremely bloodthirsty campaign and for a huge amount of the suffering caused. Sir Desmond de Silva could not be more frank about that, but that does not mean that we should not do what a proper democratic state under the rule of law does, which is to explain what went wrong and how we learn lessons from it.

[Sir Tony Baldry (Banbury) (Con)]

Will my right hon. Friend confirm that Sir Desmond in his report finds that successive Governments failed to put in place proper guidelines for agents and their handlers, which resulted in agents participating in serious crime without adequate control by their handlers? Will he reassure the House that there are now proper guidelines and adequate controls?

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend makes a very important point. This is one of the report’s key findings for government: successive Governments, one after another, did not crack the problem of putting in place a legal basis for the security services and agent handling, or indeed provide guidance and processes. In my experience as Prime Minister for the last two and a half years, I believe that does now exist. We have the regulation of investigatory powers; we have intelligence commissioners and intercept commissioners; we have annual reports by the heads of the services; we have the Intelligence and Security Committee, which has given an enormous amount of access and information; and we have ministerial oversight by the Foreign Secretary and the Home Secretary of the two principal services. I think the situation is transformed. Even since I have been Prime Minister we have issued quite a lot of guidance—at the time of the Guantanamo detainees issue—to try to make sure that we deal with this problem properly. I am always open to further suggestions, but the situation has been transformed over the past 20 years.