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Dr. Godman: My hon. Friend referred to the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs. I remind him that its report on the Sierra Leone affair recommends that the Foreign Office should show a mature attitude
- towards controlled access for the Foreign Affairs Committee to appropriate intelligence material and to witnesses from the Secret Intelligence Service.
Mr. Campbell-Savours: I understand my hon. Friend's concern. I do not want to show any disloyalty to my Committee but, in the structure that I want established, it would not be necessary for the Foreign Affairs Committee to carry out investigations in the way that he suggests. A parliamentary Committee--the Intelligence and Security Committee--would carry out such inquiries and it would be able to transfer information across the parliamentary Select Committee system to other Committees provided that it had the approval of the Prime Minister and resolutions gave it permission to do so.
The reasons for Select Committee status were set out in--if I may say so--my modest contribution to a debate at column 617 on 2 November 1998 in which I outlined
the mechanics of my proposed system. I hope that those with an academic interest in the subject will take the opportunity of referring to that modest contribution. My speech centred on the ability to refer matters to other Select Committees; the power of Parliament to call for persons and papers, an issue on which I am not able to go into detail today; the power to take evidence on oath, a power that Parliamentary Committees have and that the Standards and Privileges Committee exercises occasionally; the power to offer the defence of privilege to statements given by our witnesses, a matter that has still not been satisfactorily resolved; and the greatest power of all, which is the power to hold witnesses in contempt if they mislead Members of Parliament when giving evidence.The latter is the ultimate power. I do not believe that we are being misled, but we should have the power to hold people in contempt if we are misled. That would signal to the outside world that we will not be misled, because members of the agencies will know that they will be held in contempt if what they say is subsequently found to be untrue. I do not question what the witnesses say, but we must have such a failsafe arrangement.
We have been told--we have heard it again today--that legislation would be required to implement my proposal. Let me make it absolutely clear. That is nonsense. Legislation is not required; all that is required is a resolution of the House of Commons. That is not my view, but that of the Clerks when I approached them two years ago to check my analysis of the changes that would be required.
Safeguards would be needed, and I know that hon. Members have expressed their concerns. Some argue that no way can be found to restructure the practices and procedures of the Select Committee so as to ensure Executive influence for reasons of national security over material that it may seek to publish. That is simply untrue. A resolution of the House could require that the Committee sought the approval of the appropriate agency before reporting to the House. The resolution could further provide that in the event that a dispute arose between the agency and the Committee over the publication of information or evidence in a report to the House, the matter of the dispute could be referred to my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister for his decision and the Committee could be required to comply with his decision.
If, in unforseen circumstances, the Committee or any member of it were to threaten to breach the Committee's rules of procedure as approved by the House, it would always be open to the Leader of the House, on the instruction of the Prime Minister, to dissolve the entire Committee or remove any member of it on a resolution tabled on one day and that took effect the next.
We are told that such a Committee could not be prevented from taking evidence in public session if that were the wish of the Committee. A resolution of the House could introduce a general prohibition on the Select Committee taking evidence in public session. A resolution of the House could introduce a general prohibition on the Select Committee publishing reports, and it could further place a requirement on the Committee to seek the
permission of the appropriate agency, and the Prime Minister in conditions of dispute, if it wished to publish a report.There is no reason that the resolution of the House should not stipulate the procedure to be used in the publication of reports. It could require the Committee to publish its reports subject to sidelining by the Prime Minister for reasons of national security, as currently happens.
Mr. Mates: I am sorry to interrupt the hon. Gentleman, because I wish to make my own remarks on this subject. However, all the exceptions that he has just listed would turn his brand new Select Committee back into the Prime Minister's ISC.
Mr. Campbell-Savours: The hon. Gentleman obviously did not hear me when I said that hon. Members should read my modest contribution of 2 November 1998. In it, he will see the answer to the question that he has just asked.
I have referred to some of the changes and some of the differences, but there are many powers that the ISC does not have which would rest with a new Select Committee.
Mr. Winnick: With respect to the Opposition Members who are present now and who were around at the time of the original debate, I cannot recall any of them advocating any sort of parliamentary oversight for the security services. The hon. Member for East Hampshire (Mr. Mates) points at himself, so perhaps he did so, but that makes him the exception. Almost no Conservative Member that I can recall stood up and advocated such oversight.
Mr. Campbell-Savours: In fact, we do have support on the Opposition Benches--there are some Conservative Members who feel strongly about these matters, but they are not present in the Chamber today.
As I said, my last speech on this subject before my retirement gives me my only chance to raise certain controversial issues, one of which is the general principle of the treatment of whistleblowers. Every organisation has aggrieved people--we even have them here in the House of Commons. Wherever people congregate to work, there will be some who have problems and grievances. In most organisations, there are established routes for dealing with those grievances and I wish to explore those available within the services for which we have some monitoring responsibility.
If a person within the services generally has a grievance, he can go to his trade union or staff association, depending on which service he works in. He can go to line management within the organisation at progressively more senior levels, depending on the response he receives. In the services, he can go to his staff counsellor, who has been given the powers to deal with certain problems that might arise. I suppose, in extreme circumstances, if that individual still feels that his argument is not being heeded, he can go to the Cabinet Secretary and argue the case there. There is also a system of employment tribunals that has been recommended by the Committee. We await the details, in the absence of the regulations mentioned by the right hon. Member for Bridgwater; we have expressed our concerns about the delay, but the new structure is being set up.
What happens if, even at that stage, having gone through all those processes, a person who is grieving feels that he is not being listened to? Recent experience has drawn our attention to the fact that people in those circumstances tend to move abroad, even though, in doing so, they apparently break the law. They feel that their voice can be heard only from outside the United Kingdom. The problem that then arises is that when people say that they should not be prosecuted, they misunderstand the response that the state must make in such circumstances: the idea that the services can ignore the breaking of the law is preposterous; the state has to respond in one way or another, depending on the circumstances.
In such conditions, can complainants who remain dissatisfied seek redress by some other route? I cannot say that the ISC should receive and deal with complaints, as that is not within our remit as currently defined and set down in the law. It is clear that the ISC is not a vehicle to be used as a receptacle for complaints. The question remains, therefore, what can complainants do if all else fails?
I wonder whether they can approach a Member of Parliament to find a solution to their problem. As we all know, there are Members of Parliament who specialise in such matters. It may well be that a whistleblower will choose to go to his Member of Parliament and set out his case--hopefully, without breaching the Official Secrets Acts, which he should avoid doing at all costs. Even if he did breach the Acts during the course of the conversation, if it could be shown that he did so without malevolence and not in a deliberate attempt to bring matters into the public domain, it strikes me as improbable that the prosecuting authorities would want to prosecute--although that is a matter for their judgment.
I would never invite people to go to their Member of Parliament and break the law by spilling the beans, even as a last resort. None the less, people who feel such a strong grievance that they are impelled to act in a way that I personally would regard as thoroughly irresponsible might consider going to their Member of Parliament before acting.
It has been an honour for me to serve on the Intelligence and Security Committee. I always used to say that my most enjoyable experience was serving on the Public Accounts Committee for 11 years, but the ISC has proved a wonderful experience. The comradeship among the membership, despite our minor disputes, has been first class and we have worked together extremely well. To those outside who wonder about the structure, I repeat: the structure needs reforms, but it does work--it does work.
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