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Intelligence and Security Committee Annual Report for 2008–09 (Cm 7807)

What I can say—I must choose my words carefully—is that certain officials in the Cabinet Office treated the staff of the committee as if they were their line managers. The line manager of all the staff of the committee is the chair of the committee. That misunderstanding had to be resolved. However, I make it clear that the problems have not arisen because of difficulties in the relationship between the committee and the intelligence agencies. The agencies recognise that proper, effective and robust oversight is in their interests, and have made no attempt either to challenge our independence or to interfere with our work. I should also make it clear that in referring to the Whitehall machine, I do not include our staff. Members of our secretariat are fiercely independent and work extremely hard on behalf of the committee, even to the extent of perhaps jeopardising their own careers. As a previous chairman of the committee—I think it was the noble Lord, Lord King—said, if they are doing their job well, they will not be popular in the rest of Whitehall. It has become very clear to us from the difficulties that we and our staff have experienced over the past 12 months that it is no longer appropriate for the committee to be based within the Cabinet Office, where it has been hosted since 1994. The original arrangement was made for ease of administration, as the Cabinet Office was a central department that was used to handling classified material, suitably cleared staff and so on. However, the intelligence role of the Cabinet Office, as the noble Baroness will know, has developed substantially since then, as has the remit of the committee, since we now oversee those parts of the Cabinet Office. As a result, we find ourselves in a difficult position. We sit in a government department that has a significant role in the UK intelligence community and which we oversee. I am sure that the noble Lord will see how conflicts of interest arise, especially since we sometimes criticise that part of the Cabinet Office. The fact that the Cabinet Office decides and allocates the committee's budget and employs our staff is another area of potential conflict of interest. Separation and independence are the key issues here. We strongly believe that the committee, its work and its staff, must be placed on a firmer footing and its independence safeguarded as it looks to the future and seeks to build on the hard work done, and progress made, over the past 16 years. As a result, we recommended to the Prime Minister and to the Cabinet Secretary in November last year that the ISC be moved to another government department—one without a central role in security and intelligence matters. We suggested that the Ministry of Justice would be a suitable alternative. We also recommended that our budget should be based on a set percentage of the single intelligence account, which would provide the necessary flexibility to enable the committee’s activities and capabilities to reflect those of the services that it oversees. We did not make this request lightly. We are therefore disappointed that the Government’s response to our report, which noble Lords will have seen, to some extent kicks the issue into the long grass. The Prime Minister has clearly affirmed the committee’s independence and appears to be strongly behind us, but it is clear that Cabinet Office officials are less prepared to release their grip. That is why we have taken the unprecedented step of raising the issue publicly—some Members opposite might say that it is unprecedented for me to be criticising Her Majesty's Government. We urge Ministers to take the matter into their own hands and to ensure that officials do not continue to obstruct the committee. I am encouraged by the Foreign Secretary saying in another place that he had previously been unaware of the strength of feeling about this matter on the committee. I can assure the Committee that we take seriously our responsibility for holding the agencies to account in an independent manner. Given the sensitive nature of the work and the information to which we are privy, we cannot, however, publicise every detail. Nevertheless, where we do not believe that we have been given proper access to information, we say so and openly criticise the agencies for it. Such public criticism ensures that the agencies take seriously their responsibility to keep the committee informed. For example, we strongly criticised them in our 2008-09 annual report for poor record-keeping, because all the relevant information was not provided to the committee in a timely fashion. Our criticism of the agencies has led to significant improvements in their record management. In our 2009-10 annual report, we criticised GCHQ for not providing the committee with sufficient detail on its major SIGMOD programme. We do not settle for superficial information, and the agencies now know better. Further detail on GCHQ’s SIGMOD programme has now been received by the committee, for which we are grateful. I can assure noble Lords that we ask many challenging and difficult questions of all our witnesses in our evidence sessions. We press for detailed explanation and justification, and I am confident that none of the witnesses who have appeared before the committee would describe their evidence session with us as comfortable or cosy. We also spend many hours pursuing points, examining evidence and considering our comments. We are a robust group, which takes its work seriously.