Parliamentary scrutiny of the
intelligence and security services
15. In our Report of July 2003, we also commented
on the status of the Intelligence and Security Committee, as follows:
The Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) is
a committee formed of members of both Houses of Parliament, appointed
by the Prime Minister. It is a creation of statute, not of the
Standing Orders of the two Houses. Its secretariat is provided
by the Cabinet Office. It reports to the Prime Minister, who lays
an annual report on its activities before Parliament. The ISC
exercises oversight of the three intelligence and security agencies
of Government, and also regularly meets the JIC. It always meets
in private.
The Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC) is a select committee
of the House of Commons, set up under the Standing Orders of the
House and appointed by it. Its secretariat is provided by the
Clerk of the House. It reports to the House and publishes its
evidence with its Reports. The FAC scrutinises the expenditure,
policy and administration of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office
and its associated public bodies.
When the ISC was created (by the Intelligence Services
Act 1994), the then Foreign Secretary, Lord Hurd, assured the
House that it would not "truncate in any way the existing
responsibilities of existing committees." However, since
the ISC was set up, successive Secretaries of State have on more
than one occasion refused to allow FAC access to the agencies,
on the grounds that Parliamentary scrutiny of those agencies is
carried out by the ISC.
We have attempted, so far in vain, to explain to
Ministers that for the FAC to discharge effectively its role of
scrutinising the policies of the FCO, it will on occasion require
access to intelligence material and, on rare occasions, to the
agencies themselves. The present inquiry is a case in point. Ministers
base their refusal to grant such access on the existence of the
ISC, suggesting—in our view wholly wrongly—that Lord
Hurd's undertaking has been honoured, because there was no such
access before 1994. This leads us to wonder what "existing
responsibilities" Lord Hurd could have had in mind.
We are particularly concerned that there is no symmetry
in the Government's position. Our colleagues on the ISC produced
a useful and well received Report on the Bali bombing, a substantial
part of which commented on the administration of the FCO and was
based on evidence taken from the FCO. Because the ISC operates
in conditions of secrecy, we do not know how hard they had to
press the FCO to allow them to scrutinise its procedures, but
we do know that they succeeded. By the FCO's own logic, it should
have applied its policy of avoiding "competing jurisdictions"
to the ISC's wish to scrutinise the work of the consular division
of the FCO, as it applied it to our request for access to intelligence
papers which formed the basis of the FCO's travel advice at the
time of the Bali bombing.
We regard the Government's refusal to grant us access
to evidence essential to our inquiries as a failure of accountability
to Parliament, the more so as it does not accord entirely with
precedent. As our predecessor Committee noted in 1998, the Foreign
Affairs Committee was granted access to the highly classified
"Crown Jewels" papers on the Falklands War in 1984;
while in the course of its inquiry into Sierra Leone the Committee
enjoyed some limited success in obtaining copies of classified
telegrams. In both cases, parallel inquiries were under way (the
Franks and Legg inquiries respectively). It is, as we have already
observed, a matter of great regret that those precedents have
not been followed in this case.[9]
The FAC does not seek to duplicate the work of the
ISC, which has a valuable role to perform as the Committee responsible
for scrutinising the work of the agencies. But there will be occasions,
inevitably, when the work of both overlaps. This is quite normal
with select committees, but the problem is that the ISC is not
a select committee.
We note that the Foreign Secretary has now gone on
the record as supporting the recasting of the ISC as a select
committee of Parliament. This option would offer a number of
advantages: the possibility of joint hearings, joint inquiries
and joint reports; established structures for the management of
overlap; a more open way of working; and a seat for the ISC Chairman
on the Liaison Committee. We recommend that the Intelligence and
Security Committee be reconstituted as a select committee of the
House of Commons.[10]
16. In 1994, Parliament decided in creating the Intelligence
and Security Committee that it should be a statutory committee,
appointed by and reporting to the Prime Minister.[11]
That was ten years ago, and we believe that it is now time for
Parliament to reconsider this matter.
17. We invite the House to consider, and to reach
a view on, the following questions:
- What should be the status of
the Intelligence and Security Committee?
- What principles and procedures should govern
relations between the Intelligence and Security Services and Committees
of this House?
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