---

Kate Hoey (Vauxhall) (Lab): To the Chamber.

Mr. Hain: Let me finish. That intelligence led the director general to make a specific recommendation that the best way of combating that threat was to erect a permanent screen. My hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough (Sir Stuart Bell) and other members of the Commission will be able to confirm that. That was the director general's recommendation. I could have spelled it out in greater detail at the beginning of the debate, but that would not have been in the best interests of the security of the House. It is all about reducing risk, not eliminating it.

Mr. Forth: No, we cannot have that from the Leader of the House. We moved the motion for the House to sit in private precisely to give the Leader of the House the opportunity to provide those details to the House. He led his troops against that move, claiming that he would be able to tell us everything necessary for the debate. He cannot have it both ways; that really will not do. It is unfair of him to say that. He should come clean with us,
 
22 Apr 2004 : Column 495
 
with all the risk that that entails. As my hon. Friend the Member for Aldershot (Mr. Howarth) spelled out in a point of order, the Leader of the House cannot now hide behind the fact that providing details would be wrong. We gave him the opportunity to do so.

Mr. Hain: I am sure that the right hon. Gentleman did not mean it when he spoke about coming clean with the House. I have been more open and frank with the House than members of the Commission would ideally have wanted. Am I to produce documents shown to me, or transcripts of conversations—including much probing—between the director general of MI5, myself and members of the Commission? Given the seriousness of the threat to Britain's security—which has resulted in arrests up and down the country—and to the Chamber, I do not believe that that would be a responsible course to take.

Mr. Forth: I shall let the record speak for itself on that.

Mr. Mackay: I listened closely to the exchanges between my hon. Friend the Member for Aldershot (Mr. Howarth) and the Leader of the House. I decided to vote against the House sitting in private, because of the assurances that I thought we had received from the right hon. Gentleman. I was misled and, if I had my time again, I would support my hon. Friend's motion.

Mr. Forth: I am grateful to my right hon. Friend. Would that procedures allowed us to have another go at going into a private sitting. Sadly, we are faced with yet another of the procedural boondoggles so often visited on us, and we cannot do that any more. We are therefore stuck, as it were, with debating the matter in public.

Chris Bryant: Does the right hon. Gentleman really believe that, if we were sitting in private, any information from my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House that was of greater substance than he has given us already would remain private?

Mr. Forth: If the hon. Gentleman were present, it would not, but I think that I would trust almost everybody else.

Mrs. Browning: Does my right hon. Friend agree that we face a difficulty in this debate? One hon. Member thought that the screen's sole purpose was to prevent attacks involving firearms. It is clear from the debate so far that some hon. Members have more information than others—members of the Commission obviously do. I am not a Privy Councillor, and have not been briefed. Nevertheless, any hon. Member who has been subject to a security threat will accept that, if the debate is to be held in open session, uniform information must be given to everyone beforehand.

Mr. Forth: My hon. Friend is right. I hoped that I would not have to say this, but she forces me to: I was a member of the Commission and, as my hon. Friend the Member for South Staffordshire (Sir Patrick Cormack) pointed out, I was privy to the original discussion of this matter. Apparently, things have changed since then, although I am not sure that they have changed that
 
22 Apr 2004 : Column 496
 
much. I was also present at the very secret meeting when very senior and important hon. Members were told a little more. Not all of us know all of the information, but we are talking about the possibility that people could enter the parliamentary estate with chemical or biological agents concealed about their persons that are impossible to detect by normal methods. Such people could therefore get those substances into the building and, by implication, into the Strangers Gallery. They could then distribute the materials to our disadvantage—or, indeed, death. That is the argument, as I understand it.

The proposition is that the screen will deal with that threat. As we are all being very frank and open this afternoon, I shall adopt the same approach and say that there is a gap at the bottom of the screen through which someone could easily distribute one of the agents that I have described. The screen's effectiveness is therefore extremely doubtful.

Mr. Heald: I assure my right hon. Friend that I took up the point about gaps in the screen. I was told that there is none, and that other measures have been taken to ensure that what he fears cannot happen.

Mr. Forth: Well, "other measures being taken"—we have all heard that one before. That may not convince the House, but the sad truth is that we remain very vulnerable, in other parts of the parliamentary estate that are not privileged in having a screen, to people releasing agents of the sort that I have described.

Mr. Robathan: Any head of MI5 is going to cover his or her back and say that all possible measures have been taken. That is understandable, and I do not blame the present head of MI5 for saying that. The security conditions are very difficult but, if there is a definite threat that a person in the Strangers Gallery might lob something into the Chamber, I am willing to go along with having that ghastly screen. However, those responsible for security may merely have scratched their heads and decided that they needed to do everything that they possibly could. The screen is one thing, but would my right hon. Friend agree with sitting in a bunker underground, for example?

Mr. Forth: My hon. Friend has put his finger on the distinction between officials and elected representatives. Officials have a proper role to play, and they are obviously playing it, but our role is very different. We have to assess the advice given by officials, and then put it in the context of our relationship with our electors and the democratic system overall.

I want to say something about money. We have become very prone to be liberal about spending taxpayers' money.

In fact, there are few, if any, mechanisms to protect the taxpayer from us. We are supposed to protect the taxpayer from the Government, but protecting the taxpayer from us is a much more difficult proposition
 
22 Apr 2004 : Column 497
 
and the body that does that, or is supposed to, is the very body that has put up the screen. It has already spent a lot of our money and wants to spend even more—

Kate Hoey rose—

Mr. Forth: Before I develop that point, I shall of course give way to the hon. Lady.

Kate Hoey: I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. I was horrified when I saw how much had already been spent and what will be spent if the proposal goes through: more than £1 million, give or take a few hundred thousand. Many of my constituents live near this place and many actually work here; few of them will be protected by the screen. In my area, we cannot find a community police officer because all the policemen have been moved from Lambeth to protect the Palace of Westminster. Is it not just as right to provide protection for my constituents? Instead, we have this pathetic knee-jerk reaction, which simply plays into the hands of terrorists?

Mr. Forth: I am sure that the hon. Lady speaks for many, if not most, of her constituents if they are as fully aware of what is going as I hope they will be tomorrow—after we have rejected the motion, ideally. We are talking not only about the money for the existing screen—that has been spent already—but about the further money proposed for the permanent screen. Indeed, were we to reach the next item on the Order Paper, there is a proposal to spend another £5 million or so. Many Members may not be aware that lurking behind that is an even more grandiose scheme for a Disney theme park approach for visitors to this place—the cost of which, when I last saw it, was £15 million.

I mention those figures because we have an alarming tendency to spend taxpayers' money even more liberally, in proportional terms, than the Government, and that is pretty difficult to achieve. I hope that, as Members examine this and the following motion, they will consider carefully what we are spending on ourselves on behalf of the taxpayer.

My final point reinforces the comments of the hon. Member for North Cornwall, in whose name the amendments were tabled—my name is on them, too. The amendments were intended to give the House the opportunity to pause for consideration, and I hope that it will look carefully at them and agree to them. For the moment, we can do nothing about the temporary screen, but I hope that the amendments will give the House the opportunity not only to consider the efficacy of that screen—not to regard it as permanent in any way and perhaps to return to the subject in the future—but to defer commitment to the greater expenditure on the permanent screen until we have had a much better chance to assess what such a screen means and what it can and, more importantly, cannot do. That was the intention in tabling the amendments. They give the House a much better opportunity than simply—

---