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The Foreign Secretary has just said that the guidance will be published at the earliest possible opportunity, but he then went on to point out that the Committee would be away all next week, and that he would be away for the first two days of the following week. As I understand it, the House will then go into recess, and the election will be called the week after that, unless it is not going to happen until June. The earliest possible opportunity is therefore not going to be very early. Only
a week ago, however, the information was to be provided before today's debate. The Government's proceedings are not only slow but incompetent. They continually make these commitments, but this does not fortify public confidence in their approach to the work of the Committee or in the way in which our intelligence services operate.
Mr. Davey: The right hon. Gentleman is making a powerful point, and he has our full support on this matter. Is there not also a serious issue of substance behind the fact that, without the new guidance coming into force, our security services are working under the old guidance? Presumably, that guidance is no longer comprehensive, which could raise further questions.
Mr. Hague: The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. That should be a major concern, and there are others that I shall come to in a moment.
Mr. Mates: I noticed the Foreign Secretary wincing slightly when my right hon. Friend said that the delay was due to incompetence. Why does not he ask the Foreign Secretary why the guidance was delayed at the last minute?
Mr. Hague: My right hon. Friend is quite right to ask that question, and if the Foreign Secretary wishes to intervene on me in order to explain that to the House, I am sure that the whole House would welcome his contribution.
David Miliband: I am very happy to do so. The Committee has raised some very important issues about the way in which the guidance is organised and phrased, and we want to ensure that we take them fully on board. I am going to meet the Committee again, with my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary, and it seems to me that that is the right thing to do. The most important thing is to get this guidance right, and that is what is determining every single aspect of the Government's work on this issue.
Mr. Hague: I am grateful to the Foreign Secretary for that, but, if I may, I shall offer my own translation of what he has just said. My hypothesis is that the Government did not want to publish the Committee's report because it was highly critical, and that the detainee guidance is now in the process of being frantically rewritten. Of course it is important to get it right, but if that is the situation, the Prime Minister should not have told the Chairman of the Committee a week ago that it would all be published in good time for this debate. Clearly, the work is not going on to bring it to a conclusion at the earliest possible opportunity.
It is also surprising and, in my view, potentially damaging, that references to the guidance have been published in the FCO's human rights report-also published this morning; it is extraordinary how many things have been published this morning-because that will lead to many questions being asked about the guidance without it actually being available. I was surprised to see those references being published in the human rights report without the details being made available.
Another result of the delay-in addition to the consequence that the hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Mr. Davey) has just pointed out-is that the Prime Minister's second pledge designed to restore public confidence, which was to task the intelligence services
commissioner with monitoring compliance with the guidance and reporting to the Prime Minister annually, has not even got under way. I learned in a written answer from the Prime Minister three weeks ago that the commissioner cannot begin this work until the guidance has been published.
It would not have been unreasonable for the House, having heard the Prime Minister make his pledge a year ago, to have expected the commissioner to produce his first report by about now. At the current pace, however, there will be no report to Parliament by the commissioner on this issue until some time in 2011, which will be at least two years after the Prime Minister's statement. That is why this extreme tardiness is more than just tardiness; it reveals incompetence right in the middle of the Government. There does not appear to be any effective ministerial control of these issues, taken as a whole.
Sir Malcolm Rifkind: As my right hon. Friend is quite likely, in a few weeks' time, to be sitting where the Foreign Secretary is sitting now, will he give the House an assurance that among his first priorities will be the publication of the guidance, as well as giving the work of the Committee the priority that he is quite rightly drawing to our attention?
Mr. Hague: Given all that I have said, it would be a very high priority to get that guidance published, although I do not know what state it is in. So I cannot say that, on the first day of a new Government, we are going to-
Mr. Davey: Getting your excuses in early!
Mr. Hague: Yes, I am already anticipating the problems. But we do not know what state it is in.
Mr. Hague: The Committee knows, and perhaps my right hon. Friend will be able to enlighten us on that.
Mr. Mates: The House would benefit from a little more openness about what the problem is. There were eight months between the Prime Minister's statement and the Committee receiving the guidance. There were a number of good reasons for that: it is very complex, and it had to go round the Law Officers and all the other Departments. We then got stuck into it, took evidence, and published to the Prime Minister our report on that guidance, with recommendations. So the draft guidance and the report both exist, and they are the property of the Prime Minister.
The problem is that there is a difference of opinion about something that we have written in our report, which needs to be resolved. That is not going to change our report, however. Whether it changes the Government's guidance or not is another matter. I hope that that helps the House to understand where the dilemma is, because that is at the heart of the matter. We have reported, and that report must, at some stage, be published. Further interviews will take place with the Foreign Secretary and the Home Secretary in 10 days' time, and if that changes something that we write, it will be an addition,
not a substitution, because the Committee has unanimously signed off the report that has gone to the Prime Minister. I hope that that is helpful.
Mr. Hague: It is very helpful. Indeed, we have just learned more from my right hon. Friend in a couple of moments there than we learned from the Foreign Secretary in several attempts to gain information over the past 20 minutes. It is an entirely legitimate process for the Committee to have taken those hearings, done that work and given a different view from that of the Government. It is legitimate for work to be done to try to reconcile those views or to see whether the Committee's advice should be taken. The problem clearly lies in the eight-month delay before all that started. That reflects the lack of urgency in the process, which did not correspond to the strong statements by the Prime Minister a year ago.
Mr. Cash: In the context of what we have just heard, and without in any way criticising the Chairman of the Committee, may I say that it is becoming abundantly clear that the information that is being elicited by my right hon. Friend the Member for Richmond, Yorks (Mr. Hague) is greater than that which we were given by the Chairman of the Committee? Without making any criticism of the current Chairman, does my right hon. Friend agree that there is a need to ensure that the chairmanship of that Committee is occupied by an Opposition member?
Mr. Hague: I am not going to join in any criticism of the Chairman of the Committee, because he gave a trenchant and powerful speech and, as I explained earlier, he has been a good friend of mine for 21 years, and I am not going to be nasty about him just as he is leaving the House. I would not do that anyway, because he was clear in his speech about the difficulties that the Committee has been facing. I have no dogmatic view about where the chairmanship of the Committee should lie. In a Committee of this kind, I think that that depends much more on the individual than on the party that they belong to. Also, I am not sure that the Opposition would necessarily want to take the chairmanship of this Committee, if that meant that they would lose a chairmanship elsewhere in our Committee system. I have no fixed view about that, however, and we can listen to representations about the matter in the future.
I should like to proceed with the procession of tardiness that I was going through in my speech. An even better illustration of it is the fact that the 2008-09 report that we are debating today has already been superseded by the Committee's next annual report, which it submitted to the Prime Minister a week before he allowed this one to be released, and which was made available to Parliament at about 10 o'clock this morning-at least, that is when I received it, only a couple of hours before this debate began. That is insulting to the House of Commons, to the intelligence services and to the Committee. It is another example of the mounting incompetence that the Government have demonstrated on these matters.
I note that the right hon. Member for Pontypridd has complained about the delay, pointing out that the 2008-09 report is considerably out of date as a result, which also does little to reassure the public and Parliament that we
are being kept fully abreast of any relevant issues. In his comments in the report published only this morning, he also complained that it has been
"a matter of grave concern to the Committee"
"independence has been threatened over the last twelve months".
That is a striking thing for the Chairman of the Committee to feel constrained to say. None of the members of the Committee, from any part of the House, strikes me as being an unreasonable or strident person, so the fact that they could become so angry about a matter that is generally approached in a cross-party spirit of working together speaks volumes about the conduct of Ministers or ministries in that regard.
Mark Pritchard: Does my right hon. Friend agree that the tardiness of the Government on the issue might be interpreted incorrectly outside this House as the tardiness of the security services, which would be most unfortunate indeed, given the praise that the Foreign Secretary himself rightly gave?
Mr. Hague: It would be most unfortunate, although I hope that people would not think that, because they should not. Knowing what I do about our intelligence and security services, and knowing what I do about the Cabinet Office and one or two other Departments, I am 100 per cent. clear where the delay lies, and I assure my hon. Friend that it will not be with the people working in our security and intelligence agencies.
Taking those things together, the Government will continue to be suspected-and quite rightly in many quarters-of wishing to suppress difficult issues or to delay their consideration until after a general election. The intelligence services and the country as a whole will suffer from the Government's failure to draw a line under the issue. The whole House agrees that, as the Foreign Secretary quite rightly said, torture and complicity in torture are utterly unacceptable under any circumstances. They are contrary to our international legal obligations and contrary to what Britain stands for. The continued allegation that Britain might have been complicit in torture, even in isolated cases, is used against us by those who serially commit human rights abuses and violations.
We have always argued for full investigation of all credible allegations of UK complicity and for action by the Government to draw a line under this episode, but it is much harder when the guidance has not even been published. There is a clear need to find a way to ensure that the problems of recent years have been investigated and addressed-and to do so as expeditiously as possible-and to draw a line, so that the UK intelligence and security agencies can focus on the present and the future, without having to look back to the past all the time. This is a difficult issue, but in that regard we would be inclined to have a judge-led inquiry to ensure that the lessons have been learned and that processes have been changed, where appropriate. The timing of such an inquiry would have to take current criminal proceedings into account and ensure that there is no risk of such proceedings being jeopardised. I know that the Foreign Secretary disagrees with that and is worried about it, but the Government have failed to find any
other way of drawing a line, thereby helping the services and agencies to move on and satisfying the public that the issues have been addressed.
Let me turn to some of the issues raised in the 2008-09 report. The most significant development since the House last debated the Committee's work is the Court of Appeal's decision in February to order the disclosure of seven paragraphs based on US intelligence information describing aspects of the detention of former Guantanamo Bay detainee Mr. Binyam Mohamed. We have always held that the intelligence co-operation relationship between the US and the UK is unique in the world and of immense value to both countries, and that its disruption would have serious consequences for our national security.
As the Foreign Secretary will recall, we have argued in this instance that we could have tried to uphold the principle of control of intelligence while seeking an exception from the United States in the specific case of Mr. Mohamed. We do not know whether that would have succeeded, but it remains our view that it would have been a better course of action than having the matter dragged through the courts, which had the effect of fuelling the accusation that the UK was withholding evidence and exposed our relationship with the US to particular strain. I hope when the Minister winds up that he will comment on whether the Government see the need to take any further action to reassure the House and the United States about upholding the principle of control.
Given all that Ministers have said about the importance of the intelligence relationship with the US-sentiments that we endorse-it is all the more extraordinary that some parts of the Government, albeit not Foreign Office Ministers, have shown something of a cavalier attitude to that relationship in recent months. Commenting on the Detroit bomb plot, the Prime Minister's official spokesman said to the press that
"there was security information about this individual's activities...that was shared with the US authorities."
That was interpreted as implying that Britain had shared information that could have averted the attack, breaching the principle that we do not comment on intelligence matters and eliciting an embarrassing dispute about whether information was passed or not.
That is not the way to co-operate with the United States, and nor was the bungling of the Downing street statement of 2 January, in which it was claimed that the Prime Minister had agreed with President Obama to launch a new initiative to tackle al-Qaeda in Yemen. However, the next day, after a senior Obama official said that he was
"unaware of any new joint effort,"
the Prime Minister admitted that the proposal was not new, that
"the truth is we've been doing this for some time,"
and that he had "not directly" spoken to Obama since the failed bombings. In our view the relationship with our closest ally needs to be handled in a competent way, in Downing street, as well as by the Foreign Office and our embassies, yet it has not been handled in that way on those intelligence matters in recent months.
On a closely related issue, the report contains significant criticism of the Government's handling of allegations of rendition flights suspected of leading to torture. We
have taken the view that rendition flights leading to torture are unacceptable-of course-and held the Government to the repeated assurances provided by the then Foreign Secretary, the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw) in 2005 and 2006, that
"the US had at no time since 9/11 rendered an individual through the UK or through our overseas territories".
However, we accepted in good faith the Government's explanation of events when it was discovered that those assurances had turned out to be false, and that the US had in fact rendered individuals through Diego Garcia twice in 2002. When the Foreign Secretary informed the House of that two years ago, he gave clear assurances that
"For the avoidance of doubt,"
a full list of all flights of concern would be compiled and specific assurances sought from the United States that
"none of those flights was used for rendition purposes."-[ Official Report, 21 February 2008; Vol. 472, c. 548.]
It is therefore extremely concerning that the 2008-09 annual report describes the Foreign Office as
"unable to respond adequately to allegations of UK knowledge of, or involvement in, US rendition flights,"
"there is no guarantee that the information uncovered to date is in fact complete,"
"This situation is clearly unsatisfactory".
The report also reveals that the Foreign Office told the Committee that
"records on flights transiting Diego Garcia were only kept for three or five years and are therefore no longer available."
Given that concerns about rendition flights were raised in 2005, that suggests that records relating to flights in and out of the territory may have been destroyed while Parliament and several Select Committees, including the Intelligence and Security Committee, were scrutinising these issues. Surely it would have been right and proper for the Foreign Office to issue an instruction about record keeping and insist on additional scrupulous recording during that period. Do the Government accept the Committee's recommendation that
"the UK must be more robust in verifying"
assurances given about the use of Diego Garcia in future, and if so, how will this be done?
On funding, the whole House will be concerned by the Committee's finding that particular areas of concern are not sufficiently resourced, in particular counter-espionage, and it will want to heed the Committee's warning that it
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