| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. I can deal with both points of order that the hon. and learned Gentleman has raised. I shall take them in reverse order. On the second point, issues relating to that Committee are entirely matters for its Chairman and nothing whatsoever to do with me, as occupant of the Chair. On the first point,
owing to an administrative error, the Retirement Income Reform Bill was placed in the future business for consideration on Friday 4 July, as he said. It should have been placed in the future business for Friday 11 July, as item 4, after consideration of the Female Genital Mutilation Bill. The future business will be corrected in tomorrow's Order Paper. The Votes and Proceedings correctly state that the Bill is to be considered on Friday 11 July.
Mr. Colin Challen (Morley and Rothwell): On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. During the debate on the Hunting Bill on Monday afternoon, the official Opposition spokesman—he was pressed several times on this—said that the Hunting Bill was a waste of parliamentary time. In fact, he also said:
- "It is a total and utter waste of time."—[Official Report, 30 June 2003; Vol. 408, c. 74.]
- "the opposition said a future Conservative government would make the parliamentary time available to overturn the ban."
Mr. Deputy Speaker: I suspect that the issues that the hon. Gentleman raises are matters for debate, both inside and outside the House, and are therefore not matters for the Chair.
Mr. Paul Marsden (Shrewsbury and Atcham): On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. In the statement on Iraq, the Minister of State for International Development said, "I have today placed in the Libraries of both Houses details of the reconstruction work being undertaken in Iraq." When I checked, the Library had not received that list, and it was only on my prompting that it contacted the Department and received it. May I ask—through you, Mr. Deputy Speaker—whether Ministers could be a little more prompt and, when they say that they will place documents in the Library, they do so?
Mr. Deputy Speaker: The hon. Gentleman has made the point for himself.
BILL PRESENTED
National Minimum Wage (Amendment) Bill
Mr. Michael Connarty, supported by Jim Dobbin, John Robertson, Mr. Dennis Skinner, Vera Baird, Mrs. Anne Campbell, Mr. Parmjit Dhanda, Mr. Bill Tynan, Mr. Jimmy Hood, Linda Gilroy, Mr. Bob Blizzard and Angela Eagle, presented a Bill to amend the National Minimum Wage Act 1998 and the National Minimum Wage Regulations 1999 to exclude tip gratuities from the calculation of wages and salaries; and for connected purposes: And the same was read the First time; and ordered to be read a Second time on Friday 11 July, and to be printed. [Bill 138].
Intelligence and Security Committee
Motion made and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Jim Murphy.]
2.15 pm
The Minister for Europe (Mr. Denis MacShane): I begin by offering the apologies of my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary, who has just returned from a trip. He and his team must have ingested something because they have all been ordered to their beds. I am sure that my right hon. Friend will be back on his feet soon. Of course, he regrets his absence, because, as the House will agree, reporting to Parliament is something that he takes very seriously indeed.
I will ask you for your forbearance, Mr. Deputy Speaker, if I am not here for the completion of the debate because I am expected in Gibraltar later this evening, to carry out ministerial duties.
The debate is an opportunity for the House to review the performance of one of our most important Committees and a chance to measure the Government's performance against perhaps the most critical yardstick of all—the extent to which we are protecting the lives of our citizens both at home and overseas. That subject has always been a matter for serious discussion, but its prominence has increased exponentially since 11 September 2001, when our values—the values of liberal democracy—suffered one of their most grievous assaults in memory. That day brought a dreadful new resonance to threats to national security, which have been with us for many years. Fears about the uncontrolled spread of weapons of mass destruction have haunted humankind for over half a century. Terrorism has blighted the lives of millions, not least the British people, for years.
What makes the situation today truly unprecedented is that our long battle against those threats has reached a turning point. In one direction lies a new global consensus against the spread of weapons of mass destruction, and an unyielding international commitment to the defeat of terrorism and the treatment of its causes. In the other direction, if we do not take action, lies a world where the forces of chaos become ascendant and where future generations have to live with the day-to-day possibility that terrorists may use nerve agents or even nuclear materials to inflict slaughter on an unimaginable scale.
This year's annual report by the Intelligence and Security Committee reflects that grave new environment. Before I examine its conclusions and recommendations, I pay tribute to the work of my right hon. Friend the Member for Dewsbury (Ann Taylor) and her fellow members of the Committee, many of whom are present in the House today. The ISC plays a vital role in holding to account the agencies and the Ministers who are responsible for them. The Chairman and her colleagues have performed that task with distinction during the past 12 months. Having given oral evidence to the ISC for the past six years, as both Home Secretary and in his current post, my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary can personally testify to the integrity and rigour that former and current members of the Committee bring to their work. The fact that Ministers from four Departments provided evidence to the Committee this year indicates the value that the Government attach to the ISC's role.
The Intelligence and Security Committee helps to make the UK's system of oversight for the intelligence and security agencies what it is: the most comprehensive such system in the democratic world. By the standards of most, if not all, of the world's democracies, the ISC is able to subject those agencies to intense scrutiny. To have managed that without reducing the effectiveness of our intelligence services has been a remarkable achievement.
Mr. A. J. Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed): I am grateful to the Minister, not least for his very kind comments, but he slightly overstates the case in relation to the United States, where congressional intelligence committees have responsibility for the appropriations, thus the funding of the bodies, so the description that he gave might be misleading. Nevertheless, our experience is that the system that we have developed is much admired in much of the rest of the democratic world.
Mr. MacShane: I think that that is right. The Prime Minister appears in front of the Committee, and he will appear before the Liaison Committee next week and can answer any questions that hon. Gentlemen wish to put to him, which is not an experience that the President of the United States has to go through.
Andrew Mackinlay (Thurrock): As the issue has been opened up by one of the members of the Intelligence and Security Committee, can my hon. Friend share with us an example of one other democracy in which the oversight committee is selected by the Head of Government?
Mr. MacShane: I think that very few other democracies have such an oversight committee.
I welcome the recognition in the Committee's report of the work of the agencies in protecting national security. I have been deeply impressed with the professionalism and courage shown by their staff and I know that many officers work in the most dangerous and stressful circumstances imaginable. Their dedication to public service is therefore all the more laudable. We should recall that the nature of the agencies' work means that they rarely if ever receive praise for their efforts. I will not set out an exhaustive list of their recent achievements this afternoon, but I am sure that the House will join me in praising their integral role in support of British troops in Iraq. GCHQ supported at the strategic and tactical levels of command in its largest operation since world war two.
One of the harsh truths about intelligence work is that despite our best efforts we will never have advance notice of every potential terrorist act on our interests. That is a lesson that we have had to absorb in Northern Ireland over many years. In the past nine months we have had terrible reminders in Bali and Saudi Arabia of that truth. Many of the families of the British victims of the Bali atrocity will be in London today and tomorrow to attend the public inquest into it and I know that the entire House will join me in extending our sympathies to them at this distressing time. In the period following the incident in Bali, the agony of those who had lost loved ones was compounded by the speculation that the Government could have done more. In particular, there
were allegations that we did not act on specific intelligence pointing towards an attack in Bali, and failed to inform the public of the dangers in advance.It was for that reason that in a statement to the House on 21 October, my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary commissioned a review by the ISC of the Government's handling of the intelligence in the run-up to the Bali atrocity. On 3 March, the House had an opportunity to debate the Committee's findings. I reiterate today my welcome of its central conclusion: that on the basis of the available intelligence, there was no action that the UK or our allies could have taken to prevent the attack.
That said, the Committee did identify several areas for improvement, including in respect of the threat assessment system. We have reworked that system and have established a joint terrorism analysis centre—JTAC—and that multi-agency body launched on 2 June has developed rapidly with the support of Ministers, the Joint Intelligence Committee, the intelligence services and the relevant Departments. JTAC will be responsible for the long-term strategic assessment of the terrorist threat as well as the day-to-day response to specific intelligence.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |