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5.29 pm
Sir Peter Emery (East Devon): I am sorry that the debate is not called "The conduct of Ministers and their relationships with a Select Committee", because those are the most imperative matters to come out of the report.
I shall make, I hope, only one remark that will be viewed as incredibly political. I honestly believe that Ministers have to ask questions and that those with responsibility for dealing with Sierra Leone in Parliament had enough external evidence to make more inquiries of their officials in the equatorial African department in the Foreign Office, which is concerned with Sierra Leone. If they had done so, much of the fiasco would not have arisen. I shall deal with the relationship between the Select Committee and this House, and the Government, which the report has highlighted.
I have been concerned with Select Committees since their inception under the then Leader of the House, Lord St. John-Stevas, and have twice chaired the Procedure Committee when it has monitored the work of Select Committees--first in the 1980s, and then in the 1990s. It is important to me that the work of Select Committees should be able to proceed properly and fully. I believe that this is the first time that the Executive, by their action, have frustrated or attempted to frustrate the examination of one of their Departments. If I am to make that claim, I must substantiate it--and I shall.
I accept immediately the right of Ministers to ask certain appointees to examine an internal problem in their Department. That cannot be denied, but it should not be a means of frustrating or delaying the work of a House of Commons Select Committee. In this case, we were told time and again during the Committee's proceedings that details on matters, witnesses and papers could not be made available until the Legg inquiry had reported. That massively delayed the Committee, and extended the time that it took to produce its report. The Foreign Secretary criticised that delay but he was responsible for it.
Ministers and Departments should readily and willingly release papers that are necessary for an inquiry, when requested by a Select Committee. The Foreign Secretary claimed that never had more papers been made available to a Foreign Office inquiry. That may be so, but let it be understood that those papers had to be dragged out of the
Department. A request was made, and refused; a further request was also refused. Finally, following another request, the Committee was offered the option of just three of its members being allowed to go to the Foreign Office to inspect certain of the papers. The Committee grudgingly accepted that, although, following the publication of the Legg Report, all such papers had to be made available.
When the permanent secretary was first cross-examined before the Committee on 14 May 1998, he agreed to the existence of one set of papers and promised that he would do something about the matter. We did not receive the papers until five months later. That is hardly the sort of co-operation with the Committee that the Department has suggested has occurred.
Departments should not set out actively to mislead; surely that is imperative. There were several illustrations in the giving of evidence of activities which, in the kindest terms, can only be described as deliberate obfuscation. Perhaps the prime example of that was only recently, when my hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs. Gillan) asked the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
Instead of misleading, the Government should ensure that the Minister volunteers all necessary information to a Select Committee engaged in an inquiry. I believed that that point had been established--I had something to do with it--when the Conservative Government were criticised by the Trade and Industry Committee, of which I was a member. Towards the end of our inquiry on Concorde we stumbled on several papers--accounts--that had not been presented to the Committee, and which considerably affected our inquiry. The outcome brought an assurance by the Leader of the House that it was the Government's job to help, not frustrate, the working of Select Committees, and that they should be willing to provide any documents that they knew about concerning a Committee's inquiry. I believe that that must be established absolutely in any consideration given by the House or any of its Committees, because that must be the proper way for the Executive to be held to account.
Lastly, I return to the subject of the Foreign Secretary's refusal to meet the request of the head of the Secret Intelligence Service to be seen by the Committee. The Foreign Secretary's constant refusal of any of the Committee's requests is in direct contrast to the behaviour of the Secretary of State for Defence, who was willing for the Committee to see the Chief of Defence Intelligence, Vice-Admiral Alan West. We did so very satisfactorily. The Foreign Office's refusal of our requests seems even stranger in light of the fact that it said that there was very
little that "C", the head of the Secret Intelligence Service, could say. If that was the case, why prevent his appearance? Surely that made it more likely that people would ask, "Why, oh why?" and suggest that there must be something to hide.
Today's Foreign Affairs Committee report is before the House. I hope that, in dealing with these matters, the Standards and Privileges Committee, which will have to take up the matter, will be certain to ask the right question. If documents were in the hands of a political adviser to a Government, surely no one would believe that that official would not try to ensure that Ministers, when they were preparing to make their statements, really understood what had been in the Committee's report, although that report had not been published until a few minutes before the statements were made. If the Committee's recommendations were given to the Secretary of State's political assistant, it is beyond credibility that that had no influence on the fact that Ministers, after the report was published, set out to rubbish the report merely so as to subvert the Committee's recommendations. That must not be allowed to happen again.
Mr. Ted Rowlands (Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney):
I shall not follow the right hon. Member for East Devon (Sir P. Emery) in much of what he said because, in some respects, there is common ground between us on a Select Committee's role and functions and, in particular, on the powerful reaffirmation of that role which is contained in our report.
In that context, I particularly underline those conclusions and paragraphs which state that we had every right to hold an inquiry of the kind that we did. If, every time a Select Committee considered undertaking such an inquiry, it was within the gift of the Executive to set up an alternative inquiry, the Select Committee would be neutered and that would be wrong. I am sure that we have common ground in that regard, and I hope that we would gain the support of the majority of hon. Members--at least, those on the Back Benches.
However, the Opposition motion, which seeks to lay special emphasis upon ministerial responsibility, is unjustified and unjustifiable, given the totality of the Legg report and of the Select Committee's report, and the mountain of evidence that was collected. For such an emphasis to be laid by the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard) in his speech and in the Opposition motion is, in a curious way, an addition to the catalogue of misleading elements that have dogged the affair.
That is because that emphasis distracts from the most extraordinary feature that emerges from all the evidence and inquiries, which is that Ministers were kept in the dark about sensitive political issues that were going on and being discussed, initially within the bowels of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, but which gradually rose to the top, to the level of permanent secretary.
I, like everybody else, have found that one of the most mystifying and mysterious aspects of the whole affair was that, despite all the Select Committee's efforts to discover quite what had happened and why, the central feature of all the evidence that emerged, which jumps out at one, which screams at one, was that Ministers were kept completely in the dark about quite fundamental aspects. That is why I do not agree with the emphasis of the Opposition motion. However, it is a question that we must try to answer, or at least address.
I need not illustrate that too much because the Select Committee's report is a detailed catalogue, as in some respects is the Legg report--I agree with the muted criticisms of that report by my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, East (Mr. Anderson)--although it does not bring out the matter to the same extent.
"who was the first person in his Department to have sight of a copy of the Foreign Affairs Committee report on Sierra Leone; and at what time and on what day it was seen."
The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office replied:
"Copies of the report were collected from the Foreign Affairs Committee office . . . on 9 February by the Head of Parliamentary Relations Department and the Parliamentary Clerk."--[Official Report, 16 February 1999; Vol. 325, c. 751.]
That is factually correct, but is misleading to the nth degree. The Minister must have known that the Foreign Secretary had had sight of the report at another time. Ministers and the Government must not give a Select Committee such misleading information.
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