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Mr. Campbell: I propose to focus on my own points. If anything, the Minister's quotation supports the point about imminence and immediacy.
I ask hon. Members to consider a hypothesis. Let us suppose that the Government had said, "Saddam Hussein has failed to implement some 17 Security Council resolutions on weapons of mass destruction. We believe that he still has such weapons and he may be capable of using them, but we do not believe that their use is imminent or immediate. Notwithstanding that, we want to take military action before Dr. Blix has finished his inspections." Let us suppose that those criteria were put before the country and the House. Would anyone judge other than that they were less than persuasive?
I began by acknowledging Committee members' contribution. They are good men and women and true. I have no doubt that, in normal circumstance, they are able to effect the necessary and responsible scrutiny of the security services.
Going to war is not normal. Doing so in circumstances in which there is such public controversy over intelligence cannot be regarded as normal. Indeed, the extent of public anxiety, which brought more than 1 million people on to the streets of London, over proposed military action, was hardly normal.
In such circumstances, we require an inquiry that is answerable not only to the Prime Minister or the House, but to the public. Notwithstanding the efforts of the Foreign Affairs Committee and the Intelligence and Security Committee, the proper form of inquiry would be independent of the House or the Prime Minister, and led by a member of the judiciary; otherwise, I do not believe that the questions of trust can be properly answered.
3.26 pm
Dr. Gavin Strang (Edinburgh, East and Musselburgh): I am pleased to follow the right hon. and learned Member for North-East Fife (Mr. Campbell). Hon. Members of all parties value the interest that he takes in the matters that we are considering and his contributions to our debates.
I join colleagues in paying tribute to the intelligence and security agencies and to the many dedicated and skilled public servants who work for them. The agencies are important to our country, and we all know that those in the front line put their lives at risk every day.
Let me consider the Intelligence and Security Committee annual report. My right hon. Friend the Member for Dewsbury (Ann Taylor), who chairs the Committee, has already referred to one of the most forceful points that the report makes. It relates to the ministerial committee on the intelligence services, which has not met. My right hon. Friend sets out the position starkly in the letter that prefaces the report. The Committee made the point in four consecutive annual reports that CSI has not met. In November 2000, the Committee expressed surprise that CSI had not met since 1995. Imagine how much more surprised our predecessors would have been if they knew that, three years later, it still would not have met.
The point is not purely mechanistic. We do not say that CSI has to meet simply because it exists. We believe that working only on a crisis-led basis means that Ministers on the CSI are not sufficiently engaged in setting requirements and priorities for secret intelligence. Rather than simply endorsing officials' recommendations individually, those Ministers should meet and discuss the longer-term requirements and priorities before collectively agreeing to them. They should also examine the work of the services across the board. The democratic process requires that. Ministers' contributions and decisions would be enhanced if they regularly participated in a continuing process through CSI.
The Government's response is most interesting. Paragraph 10 states:
- "Every year the Intelligence Requirements and Priorities Paper is formally submitted to CSI."
- "The Government agrees that CSI has an important function especially in relation to the resourcing and future prioritisation of the Agencies' work, and should meet when appropriate to consider this work."
- "under the new arrangements,"
- "will be involved at the beginning of the annual process as well as in authorising the final requirements."
My right hon. Friend the Member for Dewsbury referred to Bali, but did not have time to say much about it. Perhaps it would be useful if I said a little more. In October, the Committee was asked to report on the Bali bombing and a debate was held in the House in March—unfortunately, for family reasons, I was unable to be present. As hon. Members will recall, the ISC produced a report that criticised the security services' assessment of the risk in Indonesia and the Foreign Office's consequent advice to British visitors. We also proposed a change in the threat levels used by the service. While the Security Service did not agree with the Committee's conclusion on its threat assessment, we were told that our recommendations informed its review of the threat assessment system, and that the definitions of threat levels were now more informative to customer departments.
The Foreign Affairs Committee also issued recommendations on travel advice, and the Government have reviewed the policy and the mechanisms. Travel advice should now give a clearer indication of the situation in a country, and the likelihood of a terrorist attack there. Advice given to travellers should not differ from that given to British residents in the country. Our annual report welcomes those improvements, to which the Minister referred.
I think the Bali report illustrates that when the Intelligence and Security Committee has criticisms to make it is free to make them, and does so. That point is worth making in the context of the work we have been doing, and will be doing, on Iraq.
We completed our annual report in the first half of May. By then, as the report says, we had agreed that we would examine in more detail the intelligence and assessments available and their use, and would publish a further report dealing with Iraq. Our commitment to such a report was, of course, given more prominence by the subsequent argument about the Government's use of intelligence.
On 4 June, the Prime Minister told the House that the ISC would conduct an investigation, and later that day its investigation was approved by a vote in the House. The Foreign Affairs Committee is currently conducting an investigation of the decision to go to war in Iraq, and I look forward to reading its report. I am sure that our Committee will also produce an assessment worth reading, given its access to information that is not available to other Committees. On 4 June, the Prime Minister told the House that he would give the ISC all the assessments of the Joint Intelligence Committee. That information, among other sources, will inform the conclusions of our report.
In conducting its investigation, our Committee will operate just as we did during the Bali investigation: we will take oral evidence and examine documents. We will, I am sure, investigate how human and signal intelligence resources were deployed to obtain information in recent months and years. As was pointed out by the right hon.
and learned Member for North-East Fife, quality is important, but so is volume. We will consider the intelligence provided, and its reliability; we will also analyse the degree of co-operation with the United States and others as the UK Government reached their conclusions on the situation in Iraq. Our report will be subject to debate in both Houses.The relationship between the Government and our Committee has been misrepresented in some quarters. Some have argued that Ministers can amend ISC reports before their publication. For obvious reasons, highly sensitive security or financial information is redacted, just as information is redacted—for reasons of national security or commercial confidentiality—from Select Committee reports. However, it is not true to say that Ministers amend our reports at will. As we say in our introduction,
- "To date, no material has been excluded without the Committee's consent".
As we consider these issues, I find myself drawn into wider questions about the legitimate use of intelligence. Governments use intelligence all the time. Obviously, intelligence data are crucial in informing many ministerial decisions, but Governments can also refer to intelligence in explaining why those decisions were made.
There must be restrictions on how intelligence is used publicly. It is clear that publication must not jeopardise national security or the work of the agencies, and must not put those who work for them at risk. In terms of procedure and presentation, a good example of what not to do is provided by the so-called dodgy dossier: intelligence was mixed up with all sorts of other material, material was not attributed, and the document was not properly cleared.
Dos and don'ts must be laid down on the publication of intelligence. Key questions arise in that context. First, it must be recognised that in drafting documents for publication, any Government will tend to favour intelligence that supports their overall policy. The question is, should we accept that? Should we endeavour to remedy it or should we discourage Governments from publishing intelligence material at all? One could argue that, in the interests of democracy, we should aim for the maximum openness.
The use of intelligence in the public domain is a difficult and sensitive subject, and should be approached with caution. The Committee may want to consider it further in the coming year and perhaps comment on it in our next annual report.
When the Intelligence and Security Committee was set up in 1994, I was one of those who was rather sceptical about its value, because it depended entirely on information provided by Ministers and the heads of agencies. Having served on the Committee for two years, I believe that it plays a useful role. The fact that it operates, as it must, within the ring of secrecy, enables it to give the House greater confidence in the work of our
agencies. Clearly we have important work ahead of us next year, and I am sure that the House will be interested to hear the results of our inquiries.
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