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David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con): I, too, received a very courteous letter from the Chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee, explaining that she could not be present today. We quite understand why. I am sure she will be well represented by the right hon. Member for Rother Valley (Mr. Barron), but he will forgive me if I say that we will still miss her presence, as she is a formidable Chairman.
There was much to agree with in the Home Secretary's opening remarks, even his lay preacher quote, which I think was from I Corinthians 13. I join him in paying tribute to the intelligence and security agencies and the whole of the UK intelligence community for their constant hard work—so far, fortunately, successful hard work, and I am touching wood, as is the Foreign Secretary—at a time when the threats and challenges we face have never been so great.
I join the Home Secretary in thanking the Intelligence and Security Committee for its persistent scrutiny of intelligence undertaken on behalf of the House, and I also pay tribute to the Committee. Looking back through previous debates, it seems traditional to tease the Committee for the sheer number of asterisks in its reports. Paragraph 37, for example, reads:
"We have been told that ***
***. We are concerned that ***
***
***
***
***
***. We will return to this matter."
That was an interesting paragraph. The Government's response states:
"The government notes the Committee's concern and its intention to return to the matter."
I wonder, frankly, whether there is any point in including such a paragraph in the report. I understand the redaction process that goes with it. As hon. Members have said in previous years, we should consider how liberal we can be with information. Some of it could be more forthcoming, particularly on financial figures—an issue that I raised before in a previous incarnation.
As the Home Secretary said, the threat that we face is real and immediate. It is sad that historically we—the UK is not alone—have consistently underestimated the threat to our security. The Committee states:
"The number of people willing to become involved in terrorism is rising",
"They are fanatical in their determination to succeed".
The Director General of the Security Service tells us at paragraph 9:
"The initiative generally rests with the terrorists. The timing of any attack is of their choosing".
That is why we must always be ready and, in the words of the Home Secretary in his White Paper, I think, be one step ahead.
I welcome the Home Secretary's comments on resources. Because we are dealing with the security services, he is in a considerably better position than I am to make a judgment about the exact numbers involved. The ISC report goes into resources in some detail and states that resources should be made available sooner. The report analyses the shortfall in funding and comments, at paragraph 135:
"A turning point could have been the East African Embassy bombings in 1998, which first demonstrated the power of Usama Bin Laden and the Al Qaida network, but this resulted in no significant changes to priorities or resources."
It goes on to analyse the continuing shortfall in funding at the turn of the century, points up the delays implicit in training staff, and says of the agencies' request for a sizeable increase last year:
"This was too late and it is why they do not have the level of resources that they need for all their priority requirements. We hope that the period of under-expansion has now been ended by the significant increase in funding for the Security Service. However, we remain concerned that the SIS and GCHQ will need further additional funds if the collection gaps are to be reduced and the UK's ability to identify, monitor and disrupt threats from abroad is to be improved."
At paragraph 125, the Committee goes on to identify another key failure. It states:
"We were also informed that the JIC had not assessed the threat to the CNI"—
the critical national infrastructure—
"from electronic attack since 2002. Capabilities to attack the CNI exist, and, while both NISCC and CESG sought to reassure us that they were reducing the vulnerability of the CNI to technical attack, we were not convinced."
That is entirely consistent with the rather slow response elsewhere by Government to the more unglamorous parts of defending ourselves against terrorism—the important services to deal with the aftermath of an attack, such as the NHS's ability to deal with chemical, biological and nuclear attack, the failures of the emergency planning mechanisms, or the lack of urban search and rescue equipment for firefighters. If there was ever a need for joined-up government, it is now and in this area. The critical national infrastructure is a key part not to be forgotten.
Before I turn to the fundamental issue of intelligence in the report, I shall ask some specific questions relating to the Home Office. I am happy to take an intervention from the Home Secretary, as I did not quite pick up the timing of one or two aspects to which he referred. The ISC notes that the Home Office paper on the formation of the Serious Organised Crime Agency states that the review of whether intercept evidence should be admissible as evidence in court was to be completed by June 2004—in other words, already.
To say that the report was time critical would be an understatement. The liberty of individuals and the safety of the whole nation will be materially affected by
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its conclusions. The Home Secretary did not mention that in his general or specific remarks. Will the report be available very soon, or was this the report he referred to for next year? I hope the Foreign Secretary will pick up the issue later. We need to know what progress has been made.
We welcome the work set out in paragraph 60:
"As part of this work a group, led by NCIS, will produce a new national intelligence requirement by June 2004. We will monitor how this requirement for crime-related intelligence will feed into the JIC Requirements and Priorities for secret intelligence and we will take evidence on the impact that the formation of SOCA will have on the Agencies."
That is one of the Home Secretary's better inventions, if I may say so. It holds out hope for serious improvement in the way we deal with international crime, in particular.
One of the specific criminal and security concerns that the ISC raises is the possible threat to national security posed by the importation of dangerous goods via the post. Paragraph 149 notes that the Committee warned the Government about "this potential vulnerability" two years ago. This is not just a terrorist issue; it is a criminal issue too. There is considerable anecdotal evidence of readily convertible imitation weapons coming in by post from overseas suppliers, for example. Although we appreciate and support the role of the police intelligence systems in detecting the flow of such weapons, we believe that much more widespread screening of packages from abroad should be instigated. That is a matter of relatively straightforward policy. I should be interested to hear the Government's proposals in that regard.
Before I deal with the general intelligence picture, I shall raise one question about a paragraph in the report that struck me as surprising. It is about the performance of GCHQ. My question is aimed at the members of the Committee. The report states in paragraph 55:
"GCHQ has successfully managed the PFI contract".
I accept that GCHQ is world class in its capabilities in decoding, interception and intelligence gathering, and the ISC reflects that. However, in relation to the management of the private finance initiative, the Public Accounts Committee heavily criticised the GCHQ management. In addition to the six specific criticisms in the report, the Chairman of the PAC said:
"There have been unwelcome cost increases on this programme. The process of moving the technology so critical to GCHQ's business will take longer and cost well over £300 million more than initially estimated, including extra running costs during the transition period. It is astonishing that GCHQ did not realise the extent of what would be involved much sooner, given how critical these systems are to its core business."
Perhaps the Committee could explain whether it took the PAC report into account, or whether it simply disagrees. That is rather important.
I turn to the central issue: intelligence. Intelligence is gathered to assess threats. That is self-evident. The purpose of intelligence is to inform policy-makers. The question that has been hanging over us with the Butler report and which cannot be avoided in this debate is whether we have used intelligence in such a way that the Government got what they wanted to hear, rather than what they should have heard. That means, of course, that intelligence ceases to be useful. The ISC report on weapons of mass destruction cast serious doubt as to
8 Jul 2004 : Column 1051
whether that line was crossed. The issue comes up again in this report. Before I turn to the substance of that issue, I shall raise a number of apparent failures to keep the ISC properly informed during the course of the year.
The ISC itself raised the Government's failure to provide it with eight Joint Intelligence Committee papers relating to Iraqi WMDs and UN inspections, and it was mighty generous to accept the Government's apology and statement that no deliberate attempt was made to withhold information. It seems extraordinary that the Cabinet Office's intelligence and security secretariat, an arm of Government whose sole function is information handling, was incapable of handling information on that occasion.
In its investigation for last September's report on WMDs, the ISC was not told that two members of the Defence Intelligence Staff had registered their concern about the 24 September dossier. Indeed, it was told that no such concerns had been expressed, but the report states that three members of GCHQ and the Secret Intelligence Service were moved from Gulf war duties, presumably because of similar concerns. I am not sure of the extent to which the Committee was made conscious of the level of dissenting opinion in the agency in drawing up both its September report and this report.
In paragraph 87, the Committee states:
"we are not satisfied with the Government's response"
to the September report on WMD.
"It emphasised only four key conclusions while either rejecting or failing to address fully"
"conclusions and recommendations. We regard this as extremely unsatisfactory and we recommend that the Government explicitly address each of our recommendations and conclusions in future responses."
The Government response, which was published this week, states:
"we regret the Committee found its response unsatisfactory . . . The government accepts the Committee recommendation and future responses and will adopt the format used in this response".
After one ISC report and a Government response, and another ISC report and another Government response, we still do not have the answers to the fundamental questions raised by the ISC. If I ask the Government some of those questions again today, perhaps we will be lucky.
I will not go through all the fundamental questions, but I shall ask four of them. First, why did the JIC assessment not precisely reflect the intelligence provided by the SIS? Secondly, why did the JIC assessment not highlight in its key judgments the uncertainties and gaps in the UK's knowledge about Iraq's biological and chemical weapons? Thirdly, do the Government not accept that through deleting comments on the nature of the threat to the UK, the case was not balanced? A rounded judgment on the threat to the UK should have been reached. Finally, the failure to be specific in the dossier was irresponsible and misleading. The Government should have provided the public with clear and accurate information. Those concerns highlight an uncertainty or lack of knowledge about the real threat, which stands in stark contrast to the confident public position initially struck by the Government.
8 Jul 2004 : Column 1052
The simple truth is that only four of the conclusions and recommendations were dealt with explicitly because that suited the Government's agenda at the time, which is another example of an Administration caught up in denial and blame. Let me remind the House of the Prime Minister's statements on the matter. In the preamble to the September dossier, the Prime Minister said:
"What I believe the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt"—
"is that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons".
"I and other Ministers have been briefed in detail on the intelligence and are satisfied as to its authority"
In July 2003, the Prime Minister told the Liaison Committee that he had
"absolutely no doubt at all that we will find evidence of mass destruction programmes".
However, in his evidence to the same Committee earlier this week, he contradicted himself by saying:
"I have to accept that we haven't found"
"and that we may not find them".
What is the Government's position? Is it that the weapons existed, but that we have not found them, or is it that they did not exist all along? That issue is unavoidable in a debate addressing the effectiveness and use of our intelligence gathering services.
The Prime Minister said that he and other Ministers
"were satisfied as to the authority"
of the intelligence. Was he referring to the Home Secretary and the Foreign Secretary? If so, will the Foreign Secretary tell us whether he is still satisfied as to the authority of that intelligence? When Ministers reached those opinions, was it on the basis of knowing the qualifications and possible weaknesses of the intelligence or was the intelligence that they saw stated as a certainty? Was the intelligence changed or were qualifications and doubts removed in order to satisfy the Prime Minister's agenda? Was the intelligence changed in order to persuade the public that Iraq was an imminent threat when it seems now that that may not have been the case?
The normal procedure, where there is doubtful intelligence, is that the chairman of the JIC attaches a caveat note to the Prime Minister. Did those caveats remain attached to the intelligence containing information provided by, for example, dissident Iraqi cells, and if not, why not? If so, why did the Prime Minister allow dubious intelligence to be included?
The aim of the intelligence dossiers in the run-up to the war in Iraq was to outline the current threat in the context of UN resolutions to the public. It is fundamental in a democracy that such a document should give a balanced view, and documents of such importance should have been analysed word by word. This question must be answered, and we may get the answer today or we may get it after the publication of the Butler report: were the public let down, not through the inaccuracy of the agencies, but through the selective
8 Jul 2004 : Column 1053
and improper use of information? Did our Government subordinate the nationally vital issue of intelligence to the politically convenient demands of propaganda?
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