Relations with the Department
36. In general our working relationship with the
Home Office is a good one. The Department has been helpful in
providing Ministers and officials to give evidence to our inquiries,
often at short notice. Successive Home Secretaries have been generous
in making time to appear before us. We particularly appreciate
the work that goes into supplying us with regular updates on progress
with implementing past accepted Committee recommendations (see
paragraph 12 above).
37. However, we regret that in two specific respects
the Home Office has not been as co-operative as we would wish
in its dealings with us. One is their recent failure to publish
legislation in draft form: we have commented on this in paragraphs
22 and 23 above. The other is the their failure to be pro-active
in supplying us with written information and documents relevant
to our inquiries. A case in point is the appearance on a newspaper
website in July 2005 of a leaked joint Home Office/Foreign Office
paper on "Young Muslims and Extremism". The subject
matter of this paper was highly relevant to the Committee's inquiry
into terrorism and community relations, which was in progress
at the time the HO/FCO paper was produced, but despite this, and
despite the fact that the paper did not carry a formal security
classification, neither the paper itself nor even the fact of
its existence was drawn to the attention of the Committee.
38. In July 2005 the Chairman of the Committee wrote
to the then Home Secretary, Mr Clarke, to raise this matter, and
to make on behalf of the Committee a general request in respect
of written evidence. The Chairman wrote:
"I appreciate that Government must be necessarily
selective in the information which it provides to select committees.
However, where major internally commissioned research, intelligence
assessments and background strategy papers are directly relevant
to a committee inquiry, and where there are no constraints on
grounds of security, my view is that those documents should be
made available to the Committee. I would therefore like to request
on behalf of the Committee that the Home Office should accept
in principle that such material will normally be volunteered to
the Committee where directly relevant to its inquiries. …
I hope you will look favourably on this request,
especially in the light of the comments by Peter Hain as Leader
of the House, when on 19 October 2004 he told the Liaison Committee
that 'there should be a presumption of disclosure of documents'.
We note also the statement in the latest revision of the Government's
own 'Osmotherly Rules' (July 2005) that
'The Government is committed to being as open and
as helpful as possible with Select Committees. The presumption
is that requests for information from Select Committees will be
agreed to.'"
39. The then Home Secretary replied to this letter
in November 2005. He wrote that:
"You … asked questions about the relationship
between the Department and the Committee, making specific reference
to your unanswered letter of 29 July that requested a copy of
the Young Muslims and Extremism paper. You subsequently received
a copy of the paper, but did not receive a substantive response
to your letter, for which I apologise. You asked in the letter
that in future the Committee should be provided with all papers
that are directly relevant to their enquiries. I agree with the
principle of your request, but must retain the option to review
what should be released on a case by case basis. As you say in
the letter of 29 July, "Government must be necessarily selective
in the information it releases to Select Committees." Bearing
in mind the above proviso, I do accept the principle and presumption
that documents should be released."[25]
40. We were pleased to receive this assurance from
the Government. In our most recent inquiries we have been seeking
to submit more detailed and probing requests for written evidence
from the Department than has been the case in the past. We expect
the Home Office to respond to these requests in the spirit of
the undertakings given by the former Leader of the House and former
Home Secretary. We also wish the Home Office to be more pro-active
in volunteering to us specific material relevant to our inquiries
even if we have not specifically requested this. We shall monitor
this situation and report further to the Liaison Committee and
the House in due course.
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