Examination of Witnesses (Questions 125-139)
MR CHARLES
FARR, OBE AND
MS GILLIAN
MCGREGOR
26 FEBRUARY 2009
Q125 Chairman: Mr Farr, Ms McGregor,
the joy of these Sub-Committees is that we can be as informal
as we wish or as formal as we wish, and patently, the questions
that we ask—please, I can assure you we are completely in
camera; the report when it is drafted will patently be cautiously
redacted in terms of any elements that we cannot put into the
public domain. It would be enormously helpful to us therefore,
with those rules of engagement established, if you could be as
frank as possible. Mr Farr, can I start with you, if I may, please?
Could you briefly explain the role of the Office of Security and
Counter-Terrorism in counter-terrorism policy and specifically
in operations?
Q126 Mr Farr: Sure. I
thought, subject to your views, of course, it might be useful
if I did a minute of background about why we were set up first.
Is that a good idea? I apologise if this is very familiar to you
already. OSCT dates from August 2006 or, more specifically, to
the consideration about counter-terrorism operations and policy
led, I think, by the then Home Secretary, with other ministers
and the then Prime Minister. People sat down and considered again
whether we had got it right in the UK in terms of how we were
developing our strategy, how we were running our operations, and
that process lasted from the end of 2006 through to early 2007.
At the end of it a series of recommendations were made and agreed,
one of which was that responsibility for the development of the
strategy for counter-terrorism—in other words, CONTEST—should
move from the Cabinet Office, where it had been vested since 2003,
to a new organisation, which became OSCT, Office for Security
and Counter-Terrorism. There was then a separate discussion, as
you can imagine, about where with OSCT itself should be placed,
because it was not inevitable or necessarily obvious that it should
be in the Home Office. After all, CONTEST is a strategy about
international terrorism. But in the end that is where it went,
I think partly because John Reid argued very strongly for that,
and passionately believed it, because he judged—and I confess,
I think he was absolutely right—that there was a greater
synergy between the work that was envisaged for OSCT and the work
that was already going on in the Home Office. So OSCT was established
in the Home Office first to do strategic planning for counter-terrorism.
By that I mean as well not just writing a strategy but governing
it and, to the extent that one can, measuring its impact. That
was a strategy—and we can talk if it is helpful to you—which
had certain limits but certainly embraced everything that was
going on in this country and a significant measure of everything
that was going on overseas as well so far as UK agencies and departments
were concerned. It did not from the outset include military operations
in Afghanistan and Iraq, which come under a heading of insurgency
and are outwith the scope of CONTEST. Once OSCT had been set up
in the Home Office, before my arrival there, a number of other
things happened. The first and most important thing was that joined
to OSCT were all the other functions which the Home Office were
already performing on counter-terrorism, which, broadly speaking,
were not in the strategic planning space but in delivery. That
was a rather miscellaneous range of activities from legislation,
control orders, deportation strategy, broadly under the Pursue
area, through to protective security issues from the Prime Minister's
residence through to what happens at borders and into some aspects
of what we now call Prepared, police exercising and contingency
planning, and a few other things as well. We moved all those into
OSCT, which gave us, as it were, our second function after strategic
planning, which was delivery of aspects of the strategy. We then
did two other things. We also moved into OSCT another bit of the
Home Office which was responsible for oversight of the Security
Service. As you know, the Home Secretary is the Minister responsible
for MI5. There is a small section and has always been in the Home
Office looking at that, and it made sense to move that into OSCT
as well. We also moved in a section of the Home Office responsible
for crisis planning. Finally, in December last year, in circumstances
we can go into if we have time and you would like, we moved the
Olympic security plan into OSCT as well.
Q127 Chairman: We will touch on the
Olympics.
Mr Farr: So we ended up—and
it is a long way of answering your question but I think the background
is useful—with four functions: strategic planning, the delivery
of aspects of the strategy, oversight of the Security Service
operations in this country, crisis management, and Olympic security
and strategy. The only other thing I would add is that when Reid
and the Prime Minister reported—and I do not think there
was ever a written report, by the way, or not a published report—they
also argued that another area we had not got right in this country
was CT-related communications. They meant by that I think two
different things: one, outward-facing official communications,
what we said both about the threat and about our response, but
secondly, and I think very importantly, they also meant that we
were not challenging the messaging that was coming to us from
al-Qaeda , the propaganda that was coming to us from al-Qaeda
, directed on the Internet ...
Q128 Ms Buck: I think I need you
to flesh this out a bit, because it is incredibly important.
Mr Farr: That recommendation,
led to the formation of something called RICU, the Research, Information
and Communications Unit, a rather Cold War type of acronym I am
afraid but one that we inherited. RICU, a cross-government agency,
Communities and Local Government, the Foreign Office and the Home
Office, now MoD as well, was set up and put in OSCT too. I know
that is not your question. Can I address your point? RICU has
two functions within our organisation. It is responsible for advising
the rest of government but actually, not just government, officialdom,
from a brigade commander in Helmand province through to a chief
constable in Yorkshire, about how they may wish to characterise
the threat we face and describe the response that we are making
and, secondly, rather different, they are responsible for challenging
the propaganda which comes to us from al-Qaeda and associated
groups—generally not from people in this country; usually
from the incessant 4,500 websites that are in one way or another
associated with radical Islamist terrorist organisations around
the world. That is a very difficult task and it has only been
going really substantively staffed for a year, about 35 people,
across government, and a bit of the private sector in there to
advise us on aspects of communications.
Q129 Chairman: Excuse me interrupting
on that one, but can I ask about the website? You know I have
a certain interest in all of this. Why has it taken so long for
there to be the formation of a specific analytical unit for the
aphorism "know your enemy"? I am surprised that it has
not been established before.
Mr Farr: No, I think it had been.
If I may, I would want to make a distinction. A huge amount of
work since 9/11 has been done mainly by the agencies and to a
certain extent by JTAC, Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre, to understand
how al-Qaeda—and when I say "al-Qaeda" I am using
shorthand: al-Qaeda -related organisations—use the Internet
and use propaganda, the messages they are complaining conveying,
the weaknesses of those messages and what we might do about them.
That has been done. The analytical piece has been done. What had
not been done as much was the delivery of a response. That was
the weakness and that was what RICU was really partly set up to
do. I still think it is an incredibly difficult thing, by the
way, but we have made some progress. I am happy to talk about
it whenever you like, now or later, but I would think it is one
of the most challenging things we have to do. Suffice to say,
before I stop, we have four main functions but we kind of have
a fifth because we house this interdepartmental entity, RICU.
It is pretty small in the overall scheme of things, 35 people.
Q130 Ms Buck: What I am hearing,
very helpfully, is a sort of procedural response to the question.
What I was trying to get at was more about the substance of the
critique and what you have learned from that in terms of these
two comments on communication strategy. From what angle was that
critique driven? Was it framed in terms of illustration and example?
I do not have a picture of what that critique is and what it means
in terms of the language and the message that should have been
going out to the public about the threat in terms of internal
communications, particularly to the public about the threat.
Mr Farr: It is easy for us to
send you some RICU papers, if it is helpful.
Q131 Chairman: It would be, thank
you.
Mr Farr: What were we trying to
do in this area? A lot of the focus has been how you communicate
the threat in and through Muslim communities in this country,
what language is appropriate and is true to the threat we face
but resonates with the communities we need to work with. The starting
point for a lot of RICU work was to address those questions. They
came up with a number of proposed formulae that our work with
Muslim communities indicated was acceptable but which, critically,
we felt remained true to the nature of the threat that we face.
So, very simply, we do not tend, as we know, to talk about war
on terror; we do not tend to talk about Islamic terrorism, not
because in certain circumstances that is an inaccurate description
but because the language admits of a number of interpretations
which are not always helpful to us. So RICU has initially operated
to try to convey to, for example, local authorities, the Chief
Constable, proposals about issues of that kind: how to catch the
threat in a way that actually is faithful to the threat we face
but, equally, does not alienate the communities we need to work
with. I saw in draft yesterday the latest paper that RICU are
planning to send to local authorities, people working on community
cohesion projects, local police, neighbourhood policing teams,
which goes through and updates earlier advice we sent, talks about
how to communicate the threat, talks about how you might begin
to challenge ideology—a very alien concept to many of the
people we are selling this to—and I think, from the feedback
we get from local authorities and other readers, is useful when
they are, for example, with a Muslim community organisation or
in another community forum. I do not want to give the impression
that RICU's sole purpose is to communicate with Muslim communities
in this country. It is not. I think probably it made sense for
us to start there because that was the most difficult communications
task. Generally speaking, outside Muslim communities communicating
about the threat and about our response to it is a bit easier.
It is not straightforward but it is a bit easier.
Q132 David Davies: Mr Farr, this
is probably going to sound like a very stupid question but I am
just wondering how all of these different organisations fit in
and what their roles are, if there is a big picture. I have always
understood that the Security Service deal with internal threats,
the SIS deal with external threats, people abroad, and GCHQ listen
to their phone calls. I could go into a bit more detail but obviously
not a lot more than that, to be truthful. I am wondering how your
organisation and how things like the JTAC and JIC fit into this
picture. For example, do you answer to the Director-General of
the Security Service or does he answer to you? Where do all these
organisations fit in with each other?
Mr Farr: Your characterisation
of what the organisations do is broadly right, of course. Let
me try and explain it in a bit more detail. I am the SRO for CONTEST,
the senior responsible official, which means, in government speak,
senior civil servant responsible for the strategy. We provide,
we aim to provide, we were set up to provide a policy and strategic
framework for the activities of delivery organisations working
on counter-terrorism in this country and overseas. That would
include the police, Communities and Local Government, the Foreign
Office, but it would also include the agencies. We provide them
with parameters, a strategic framework—it is as simple as
that—within which we expect them to be operating. Once we
have established that framework, the day-to-day conduct of the
operations is not my business; it is their business and, in pursuit
of those operations, fulfilling their operational mandate, they
do not report back to me. They report respectively to the Home
Secretary in the case of the Security Service and to the Foreign
Secretary in the case of GCHQ and SIS. We will certainly keep
an eye that their operations are within the strategic framework
and objectives that we collectively have set and established.
Q133 David Davies: That is a good
answer because it is clear.
Mr Farr: The same, by the way,
if I may interrupt, applies exactly to the police. My role with
the police is to provide them with a policy framework in which
their operations should take place. I then have oversight of the
operations and I know what they are but I do not run the operations.
Q134 David Davies: The important
thing for me to understand is that, whilst you do not run the
operations day-to-day, those agencies, whether it be the police,
the security agencies or whatever, effectively report back to
you as to how those operations have been conducted within the
parameters that you have set?
Mr Farr: That is precisely right.
I would, if I may, go further and say that after we were created
we developed for the first time in this country a PSA, public
service agreement, which set targets for every one of our stakeholders.
I am descending into a bit of arcane civil service speak so forgive
me, but this PSA 26 has, I think, 12 key outcomes that we expect
for the community, from the police, through other departments
into the agencies, 12 outcomes that we are looking for and which,
in our view, will define the success or failure of this programme,
and those outcomes, I am afraid, have a number of indicators against
which we will measure whether we are meeting them or not. To that
extent, not only do we keep an eye on what they are doing and
make sure it is within the strategic framework we have set for
ourselves, but we keep an eye on the outcomes, and we are beginning
to be able to track whether we are actually succeeding or failing.
You may well say, "What happened beforehand?" We were
not taking place in a performance management vacuum but we were
operating with performance management silos. In other words, each
department reported separately against their counter-terrorism
objectives.
Q135 David Davies: Would it be fair
to simplify, for myself and others perhaps, that in some ways
you were doing the job that would previously have been done by
the Ministers, in that the Ministers previously would have set
out how they wanted the different agencies to work? You can go
into that in far more detail because you are dealing with all
of the agencies and you can get a better overall picture, whereas
previously, as you have said, the Home Office were dealing with
the police and the Security Service and the Foreign Office with
GCHQ and SIS. Is that too simplistic?
Mr Farr: I think part of that
is true. We could talk as a whole separate meeting about the tasking
and control of agencies in this country. I do not want to at all
imply that we inherited a vacuum. There was a tried and tested
method but it was not centralised in quite the way that it is
now. Critically, it did not take place within the context of a
strategy for counter-terrorism. It took place off to one side
of that. Now what we have is a strategy from which flows tasking,
as it were, guidelines for operations, and against which we can
now performance-measure. You are right to say that all that means
we can operate with the agencies at a level of detail that was
not previously possible in terms of tasking, oversight, and performance
assessment. I think that is fair.
Q136 David Davies: Lastly, how does
that work fit in with that of the National Security Secretariat?
Mr Farr: The National Security
Secretariat is part of the Cabinet Office. It ranges, as you may
have seen in their National Security Strategy, the first one,
over a vast swathe of areas of which counter-terrorism is just
one. The counter-terrorist bit of the National Security Strategy
was written, drafted, by us, and our bit of the national security
spectrum slots into the much bigger bit which is run from the
Cabinet Office.
Q137 Ms Buck: Is there an argument
for full integration of all these different agencies into a single
specialist terrorism organisation or does it not matter in a sense
where you draw the borders because you are still going to have
to pull together lots of different threads?
Mr Farr: There is certainly an
argument for it, and it has been voiced in this country and, for
rather similar circumstances, in many other countries overseas,
almost continuously since 9/11 and specifically actually after
incidents, where people immediately think "What should we
do? Let's have a reorganisation." There are two things I
would say. One, there is a huge amount of integration already.
Every one of the key agencies—the police, the Security Service,
SIS, GCHQ and, although we are not an agency in quite the same
way, us—have representatives in one another's organisations.
Many of them have whole sections which are in effect, as we call
them, joint operational or analytical sections and, of course,
JTAC is a fully inter-agency beast. SIS, the Security Service,
everyone else funds their own bit. Everyone has secondees. So
there is a huge amount of inter-agency co-operation, "jointery",
sharing of people, sharing of sections already.
Q138 Ms Buck: So if I pushed you
to say would you recommend that there should be further reorganisation
to create a single agency, what would you say?
Mr Farr: I would say definitely
no because I think what we have at the moment is the best of both
worlds. We have synergy—we could probably get more of it,
by the way, but we have synergy, we have "jointery",
we have shared operations, we have technical capabilities. If
you push it much further than that, you create enormous organisations
which become bureaucratically unwieldy and are trying to do too
much in a way that is unsustainable. The work that goes on in
this country, a very simple example, is very different from the
work that goes on overseas. It requires completely different skills.
Although, of course, it is nominally all counter-terrorism, it
is counter-terrorism of a very different kind. By the way, as
well you do not save money; you actually end up spending even
more than you started by.
Q139 Ms Buck: In 10 years' time would
you see a significantly different organisational model, or do
you think it will be about refining and improving within the structure?
Do you think this is now a settled structure? I do not mean will
other people come along and mess it up; I mean if it was your
decision.
Mr Farr: I have no doubt it will
evolve actually. It is inseparable from another question, which
is what is going to happen to the threat, what are the national
security challenges we are going to face. I would be very surprised
if it did not carry on evolving. I cannot entirely predict which
way it will go. I think there will probably be more joint sections,
more exchange, more joint reporting, more joint, full stop actually,
not least because of economic constraints that will be imposed,
and I think that is fine. I do not really see an operational case
for the sort of change that you were describing earlier, in other
words, much greater centralisation. That is not to say it will
not happen. As we all know, different parties have different policies
on this. I do not myself think it is absolutely compelling.
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