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Dr. John Reid (Motherwell, North): Just before the right hon. Gentleman leaps forward, will he tell the public whether he accepts the findings of Scott in sections D4 and D8, that the Chief Secretary to the Treasury "deliberately" and "designedly" misled Parliament? If he does, how can the Chief Secretary remain with honour in the Cabinet?
Mr. Lang: With respect to the hon. Gentleman, those were not Sir Richard Scott's words. If he contains himself, however, I shall try to cover all points of relevance as I proceed.
Mr. Menzies Campbell (Fife, North-East) rose--
Mr. Lang: I must get started. The report rightly focused on the serious and defamatory charges that had been made and of which the Government now stand acquitted. But in my statement 10 days ago, I also took care to draw attention to Sir Richard's criticisms, to which I referred repeatedly, and to his conclusions and recommendations on which I should like today to indicate more of the Government's thinking.
To recap on my earlier remarks, mistakes were made. There are lessons to be learnt. The Government have accepted the inquiry's criticisms concerning the distribution of intelligence material, and have already taken action to improve it. We have accepted the criticism about export controls and licensing procedures and have already undertaken to publish a consultation paper on that, as Sir Richard Scott recommends.
We have already undertaken to consider further and very carefully Sir Richard's comments on the use of wartime export control legislation. We accept the principle of the need now for greater supervision by the office of the Attorney-General of Customs and Excise prosecutions in relation to export control matters, and I shall say more on that. We also accept many of his other recommendations.
Mr. Menzies Campbell:
Will the Secretary of State give way?
Mr. Lang:
If I give way now to the hon. Gentleman,I shall not be able to give way to him later.
Mr. Campbell:
Does the Minister accept the Scott report's central conclusion, which was that policy was changed and that the change was deliberately kept from Parliament?
Mr. Lang:
No, I do not; there is a difference between the Government and Sir Richard on that matter. I accept his report's two central conclusions, on the question of secretly arming Saddam Hussein and on the question of gagging the courts and risking the imprisonment of innocent men.
I should like to address the recommendations that I have mentioned, including, in particular, the issues of openness in government and accountability to Parliament.
Mr. Gerald Kaufman (Manchester, Gorton)
rose--
Mr. Lang:
No, I must make some progress, if the right hon. Gentleman will allow me to do so.
As I said in my statement, there is a continuing line of criticism running through the report of the conventions--which are long established in the House--whereby successive Governments have undervalued, as Sir Richard Scott sees it, the public interest in the disclosure of information. The Government have a good record of improving openness in government, and the debate on how much further openness in Parliament might go should be seen in that context. We have, for example, introduced or supported numerous measures that, for the first time, open up specific areas of government, even the most sensitive, as with the Intelligence Services Act 1994. More generally, we published the first White Paper on Open Government in 1993, and the code of practice that it proposed a year later.
As a result of all those measures, and of other citizens charter initiatives--which was another first for the Government--much more information is now released, whether on the background to Government decisions,on medical and other records, or on school, hospital and local government performance data. More than 48,000 previously confidential public records have now been released.
The new departmental Select Committee system was introduced under this Government, in 1979, as a major step towards more open and accountable government.We have avowed, for the first time, the Secret Intelligence Service, put it on a statutory footing and made it subject to a statutory oversight committee. The Government have also published--they have been the first to do so--detailed lists of ministerial cabinet committees and "Questions of Procedure for Ministers", which are causes dear to the heart of the right hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr. Benn), to whom such openness was denied by the previous Labour Government.
Closer to the issues of foreign policy and export controls, in 1991 my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Social Security, who was then my predecessor at the Department of Trade and Industry, took the
unprecedented step of publishing the detailed lists--70 pages in all--of the exports licensed for Iraq between 1987 and 1990.
Despite the Government's good record, I hope that we can go further down the route of open government--further, as we have already gone, than in the traditional answer, which I quoted to the House 10 days ago,to questions on defence sales when answered by the Labour Government in the 1970s. The right hon. Member for Bethnal Green and Stepney (Mr. Shore) then said:
We hope to go further, too, than the answer given by the hon. Member for Oldham, West (Mr. Meacher), who said:
Mrs. Helen Jackson (Sheffield, Hillsborough):
A year ago, I was given a misleading answer to a parliamentary question. Since then, and after a great deal of pressure from my right hon. Friends on the Labour Front Bench,I have received an apology, which was printed in Hansard on 9 February. Why is it that, when Sir Richard Scott and the Government recognise that so many misleading and false parliamentary answers have been given, no apology has yet been made to any of the hon. Members concerned?
Mr. Lang:
Sir Richard Scott has identified answers that he concluded are misleading, but he has also recognised that they were given in good faith by Ministers who thought that they were accurate.
Mr. Peter Shore (Bethnal Green and Stepney):
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for having the courtesy to inform me that he was likely to mention my name. I am inclined to think that, in recent days and weeks, no ministerial speech is complete without some mention of the fact that, when I was the Secretary of State for Trade, I stated clearly and with agreement the doctrine that we did not give information about exports of defence and weapons equipment to other countries. That has made good sense, but if I may say so, that is not the issue. The issue--the basic issue--is whether we should have been supplying the amounts of defence-related equipment that we did to the two most odious regimes in the world.
Mr. Lang:
That is an issue to which I shall come shortly. At the moment, I am addressing the question of openness in government and the conventions in the House that have been observed by successive Governments, including the ones of which the right hon. Member for Bethnal Green and Stepney was a Member.
Dame Elaine Kellett-Bowman (Lancaster):
Following on from the intervention of the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hillsborough (Mrs. Jackson), is my right hon. Friend aware that I was sent a letter by my right hon. Friend the Member for Bristol, West (Mr. Waldegrave) when he was a Foreign Office Minister? Is he further aware that I was not in any way misled by that letter, and that I wrote to inform Sir Richard Scott that that was the case? On 4 May, the Minister told me that the guidelines were applied on a case-by-case basis in the light of prevailing circumstances, including the ceasefire.
Those words were not tablets of stone, and should not be applied in a mechanical way. It would be madness to expect guidelines to be so imposed. Although the Government remain committed to those guidelines, I was not misled, and I do not see why anyone should say that I was.
Mr. Lang:
I am most grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point clear.
"Erskine May", the standard authority on the conventions and procedures of this House, sets out--
Mr. Mike O'Brien (North Warwickshire):
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Lang:
No, I must make progress.
"Erskine May" sets out a number of subjects on which successive Administrations have declined to answer questions on grounds of public policy. At present, those include discussions between Ministers, or between Ministers and their official advisers; the proceedings of Cabinet, or its Committees; security matters; operational defence matters; and details of arms sales to particular countries.
Here I come to the particular point that Sir Richard Scott has raised in relation to parliamentary questions on the sale of arms or defence-related equipment. He said that the long-standing practice should be re-examined. The Government are content to do this and my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster has today placed in the Library of the House a document setting out the current position in relation to informing Parliament on the export of arms, together with an explanation of how that practice has evolved.
That is an important step forward and I hope hon. Members will find that document a useful basis on which to take the discussion forward. Serious issues are involved. The Government's policy on defence sales is based on a respect for the right of other countries, and sovereign states, to protect their independence and to exercise their right to self-defence. That right is recognised explicitly by article 51 of the United Nations charter.
The countries to which we export arms have a legitimate right to maintain the confidentiality of the strength of their armed forces and the equipment they have available. Strategically, the export of defence equipment benefits our own defences through reducing the overall cost of equipment.
"It has been the policy of successive Governments not to reveal information on the supply of arms to individual countries".--[Official Report, 10 June 1974; Vol. 874, c. 396-97.]
"the list of recipient countries is not published because defence purchases are regarded as confidential".--[Official Report,20 December 1976; Vol. 923, c. 26.]
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