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Alan Howarth: Does my right hon. Friend share some of my concern in reading the Government's response on that point? The Government say that they anticipate that

"the review will ensure that the overall level of funding should reflect the value of BBC Monitoring to each stakeholder."

Is it not important that the overall level of funding should reflect the value of BBC Monitoring to the Government as a whole? Is it acceptable for individual
 
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stakeholders to make their own judgments about the extent to which they should opt in or out of that commitment?

Dr. Strang: I am grateful to my right hon. Friend, who expresses the point precisely. We must be alert to that. He is absolutely right that we should view the matter across the board. We can appreciate that there will be arguments among the different bodies that fund the organisation and that Departments are under pressure over spending. However, isolated assessments of the contribution that BBC Monitoring makes may understate what is required. My right hon. Friend will know about the significant co-operation between BBC Monitoring and the Foreign Broadcast Information Service of the US. We get a good deal from that. If we are serious about the need to strengthen our guard against international terrorism—I think that we all are in this House—there is no case for cutting the resources of BBC Monitoring.

In conclusion, the whole House recognises that the threat to the British people from international terrorism is much higher than it has been in recent years. More resources are being devoted to the intelligence necessary to increase the protection of our people, and I congratulate the Government on that. However, there are certainly no grounds for complacency. We need to be ever more vigilant and do all that we can to reduce the risks.

3.44 pm

Mr. James Arbuthnot (North-East Hampshire) (Con): Apart from the issue of counter-terrorism, the main work of the Intelligence and Security Committee during the year—and the main intelligence interest for the country—has been on the war in Iraq. We did a separate report on that, which came out in September last year. Inevitably, this year's annual report contains an element of mopping up. Nevertheless, the Committee's work has been quite hard and very varied.

I want to pay tribute to the Committee's Chairman and Clerk, and to its staff and investigator who have worked extremely hard to help us all. It is a great pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Edinburgh, East and Musselburgh (Dr. Strang). I do not think that it breaks the official secrets legislation to say that he brings a certain laconic wisdom to the Committee, and to everything that he does. Above all, I pay tribute to the intelligence and security services. As many have said, they do an enormous amount to protect this country and its interests.

I shall be very brief, as there is no need to repeat what the report says. I shall deal with only three points. The first is the funding of GCHQ, to which my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (David Davis), the shadow Home Secretary, referred.

Paragraph 52 of the report deals with the huge cost increases examined by the Committee's report for 1999–2000. We note that resource accounting for GCHQ has always been a bit of a problem but, for the first year in three years, GCHQ has produced unqualified accounts. Most private companies would consider that to be of little moment, but I think that we
 
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should welcome it with open arms. It is very good news, but it is difficult to get the bean counting right and the Committee will continue to keep an eye on the matter.

The report deals with the eventual vacation of the Oakley site. We express concern that resourcing had not been provided for that. In their response, the Government say that the site will be vacated by 2012, at the latest. There is always a dilemma in such matters: do we have two sites, and therefore an element of planned redundancy, or do we have one site in the interest of efficiency and cost-saving, but lose the element of redundancy that is sometimes needed? The pendulum swings from decade to decade on that dilemma.

My second point has to do with detainees. I refer the House to page 23 of the report, in which the Prime Minister's rather disturbing although deadpan letter is reported. It states that interviews have

"with the following exception . . . been conducted in a manner consistent with the principles laid down in the Geneva Convention."

The report does not actually say that we are dealing with Guantanamo bay. However, having raised that subject, I think that it is right to draw attention to the fact that the US still does not accept that the Geneva convention applies to the people held there. The effect of that is that they are not entitled to legal representation. The failure to apply the Geneva conventions to those people and to give them access to lawyers is precisely what has given rise to the sort of behaviour that the report describes.

I welcome the Supreme Court's recent decision that the Guantanomo detainees should be subject to the rule of law. Frankly, that should come as little surprise to anyone with an interest in justice or fairness, but the failure of the US willingly to give those detainees access to lawyers and to the rule of law has fuelled deep resentment across the world about the US—and therefore about Britain's behaviour in allying itself with the US. That has fuelled resentment in the United Kingdom against the US. It is a divisive approach, and it should stop. The letter from the Prime Minister states:

"The detainee showed no signs of distress and made no complaint of being hooded or otherwise during the interview."

Well, he was shackled. It is not clear from the letter how the detainee would make signs of distress apparent—

Mr. Mates: Perhaps he rattled his chains.

Mr. Arbuthnot: Indeed. As we say in the report, we intend to take evidence on all those matters and there is much for us to consider.

My final point concerns counter-espionage and the reduction in the proportion of the espionage budget spent on it. That is a particular worry in relation to the espionage against economic targets in this country. Our companies' secrets—our intellectual property, which, in a highly developed country such as ours, is the keystone of our prosperity—are being stolen and we are not doing enough to protect them. When we went to the US, we discovered that it treated intellectual property and commercial secrets as part of the critical national infrastructure. As the right hon. Member for Newport, East (Alan Howarth) said, our intellectual property
 
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should be regarded as part of our national infrastructure, and I welcome the interest that the Chief Secretary to the Treasury showed in that point when he appeared before us. If we connect the vulnerability of our computer systems to our economic vulnerability, it is plain that we have much to do to catch up.

3.52 pm

Mr. Andrew Tyrie (Chichester) (Con): I pay tribute to the work of all those who seek to protect us and whose work largely goes unsung. The brevity of that remark should not be interpreted as an indication of the strength of my feelings, and I echo the sentiments that have been expressed time and again this afternoon.

The Intelligence and Security Committee might have been an interesting parliamentary backwater, but the war has tested it to the full. That is because, first, the country was taken to war almost entirely on the basis of intelligence information provided by several institutions that the Committee has the responsibility of overseeing. The second reason the Committee is now centre stage is that the war was undoubtedly the most divisive event in British politics since Suez. I was, and remain, deeply sceptical about the need for military action—certainly at that time. Many people sense that we became involved in the invasion without sufficient clarity about our objectives and real purpose. It is vital that we now do our job to express the electorate's questions and articulate their concerns.

The third reason why the Committee is now centre stage is that it has become increasingly clear that the Government have no intention of co-operating fully with the efforts of many parliamentarians in finding out what really happened in the run-up to the Iraq war. I hope that those on the Treasury Bench will not challenge that remark. The Committee described the Government's response to its report on weapons of mass destruction as "extremely unsatisfactory". The Foreign Affairs Committee has documented the extensive obstructionism that it has encountered in several reports. I shall not go into those in detail unless challenged. As a result, the minimum level of required democratic scrutiny after a war has not yet been achieved by this Parliament.

We still do not have adequate information to answer some basic questions, which I shall list. Did Saddam Hussein really present a threat when we went to war? Was the Prime Minister being clearly told about that threat at the time? Was the threat imminent enough to require action? We have had some information that helps us to provide answers to those questions, but not enough.

Much less information is in the public domain about several other crucial questions on assessing the Government's action. What assessment did the Government make before the war about the consequences of the invasion of Iraq for the middle east and about the likely effect of invasion on moderate Muslim opinion in the middle east and elsewhere? What assessment was made before the war of the task of post-war reconstruction in Iraq? What assessment was made of the prospect of holding the country together and moving it to democracy? What assessment was made of the effect of invasion on other rogue states and their likely behaviour? What conclusions did Ministers, especially the Prime
 
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Minister, draw from those assessments?Above all, what assessment was made before the war of its likely impact on the western alliance as a whole, and on the strength of the collegiality of interest in the west that is the bedrock of our security?

The plain fact is that for the most part Parliament has been thwarted in its efforts to find answers to those and similar questions. Much the same obstructionism is evident in Washington. The Executives of the world's two greatest democracies have exhibited an unremitting determination to deny parliamentary or congressional access to information about the decision to go to war. They have been equally careful to ensure that the remit of the independent inquiries they were forced to set up was as narrow as possible. The damage arising from that has been colossal.

First, the Executive's lack of candour has accelerated the decline of public confidence in politicians. It has extended the electorate's cynicism about domestic politics to the foreign arena. In fact, the Prime Minister's determination to thwart a full examination of the issues has damaged his Government's credibility far more than anything that was likely to have been revealed had there been more candour from the start.

Secondly, our failure to get to the truth has eroded the public's respect for democratic institutions, and especially for Parliament, which is obviously of concern to us. It should be our role to force candour, but we have not, so far, succeeded.

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