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I shall describe a few characteristics of our work in order to explain that point better. First, and uniquely, members of our Committee have to sign the Official Secrets Act. I do not think that any other Member, sitting on a committee of any description, is in that position. We do so freely, and we are not complaining, but it provides some indication of not only the personal commitment we have to make but what follows from that-the fact that we have access to classified material, which often cannot be discussed in public, bearing in mind the point that I have already made about the state's right to hold secrets.
The second point, to which I think the hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton referred in an intervention, is that we meet in premises that are suitably secure. We do not meet in the House; we meet in offices that are suitably secure, as my right hon. Friend described them, so that the dialogue that we need to have with the agencies can take place.
The third point for which we draw some criticism is that our reports often contain redactions: things are blanked out. Often, they are figures. We as a Committee try to minimise the number of redactions, because we think it is in everybody's interest if we publish as much as we can. Indeed, the more that is published, the more people might be reassured about what is going on. However, we recognise that some figures and material of which we are made aware cannot be put in the public domain. The legislation requires that our reports go, first, to the Prime Minister, so we have to inform him of everything that we know, even though that means that, for public consumption, some sections of the report have to be redacted.
I understand why, for a journalist looking at such matters, it must be hugely frustrating to pick up one of our reports and find out that the information that they would love to know and write about simply has not been published. I can understand why Members feel frustrated on occasions, too, but the alternative is to give a less than complete picture to the Prime Minister, and it would be a dereliction of our duty if we did not bring to the attention of the Prime Minister everything that we thought he needed to know-even though some of that cannot be made public.
On the question of whether we should be more like a Select Committee, I would have no difficulty with some of our sessions, when appropriate, being held in public, although I share my right hon. Friend's concern that, on occasions, they would look rather staged. Let us be honest: there would not be a full, free and frank exchange of information between ourselves and our witnesses, because they would not be able to say in public the things that we would have to discuss in private. Nevertheless, we could do a couple of things in public, and, after the election, were I still to be a Member of the House and a member of the Committee, I would be open to conducting such experiments.
Mr. Mates:
The right hon. Gentleman made a very important point about redactions and the frustrations that exist, and it is worth repeating-I have said it before in this place-that the Committee has the final say on redactions. The statute allows the Prime Minister to seek to redact anything that might affect national security, and only that, but the Committee has to agree. If the Committee were not to agree, it would make that
fact public, and no Government would want made public the fact that we insisted on having published something that they did not want, because then the matter would not be about national security; it would be about embarrassment. I make this point because that is precisely what will have to happen with the report we have just submitted to the Prime Minister about the guidance. He cannot take out the bits he does not agree with, because they have nothing to do with national security.
Mr. Howarth: I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman, who is perfectly correct in his description. It is worth adding that when the Committee is at the stage of discussing with the agencies, or even Government Departments, what should and should not be redacted, we do not take those decisions lightly. There can often be weeks of interchange between the Committee and the relevant agencies as to what is and is not published or remains unredacted. As I said, we have tried very hard to avoid, as much as possible, the need for redaction in the reports we have published, safe in the knowledge that where national security is involved, and we can be convinced that that is the case, that device has to be available to us.
I want to move on to whether we should be a Select Committee. I certainly do not think that we should. In the past few weeks, among the great cacophony of voices that have called us everything from useless to unworthy of the position-many of them I do not hold in a great deal of regard anyway-I was concerned to hear the voice of Baroness Manningham-Buller, who is a distinguished ex-director general of the Security Service. I had no criticism to make of the noble Lady when she fulfilled those duties. She was an outstanding leader of her service, and I admired her enormously. Whenever she met the Committee, she bowed to nobody and gave nothing away in the defence that she mounted on behalf of her service, and we all admired that quality in her. When we needed to be put straight as a Committee-perhaps we had misunderstood something or were simply getting it wrong-she never failed to tell us. We took a great deal of notice of any evidence that she gave. I was therefore surprised to find that she recently suggested that perhaps the time was coming when the Committee should become a Select Committee. On no occasion that I can remember did she make such a suggestion when she gave evidence to our Committee. Indeed-other members will correct me if I am wrong-I seem to recall that on several occasions she praised our work. I find it a little surprising and disappointing that somebody I regard highly and respect makes that suggestion now; had she made it to the Committee at the time, we would have taken it very seriously.
The final point that I want to discuss is our relationships and intelligence sharing, particularly with the United States. In the Binyam Mohamed case-I think the right hon. Member for East Hampshire is likely to cover this in more detail-information that was owned by the United States was sequestered by British courts and then used in evidence. Concerns have been expressed that that might affect the important relationship that we have with the United States in terms of intelligence sharing. Indeed, as recently as this month, the United States director of national intelligence said:
"The protection of confidential information is essential to strong, effective security and intelligence cooperation among allies. The decision by a United Kingdom court to release classified information provided by the United States is not helpful, and we deeply regret it."
That is a diplomatic way of saying, "We're very concerned about this, and it may affect the co-operation between us in future."
Some 12 months ago, an official in Washington put it rather more bluntly to the Committee, saying, "Well, the way things are, we'll tell you if they're about to blow up London, but beyond that we'll have to take it on a case-by-case basis whether we share things with you or not." [Interruption.] I do not say that to be humorous. It means that the US could hold information about matters that could in the long term lead to a serious incident in this country, but because of what happened in the recent case there would be a reluctance to pass that information on to the UK. That is a serious problem that has to be addressed, and the right hon. Member for Richmond, Yorks (Mr. Hague) was right to refer to it.
Andrew Mackinlay: If my right hon. Friend reflects on what he has just told the House, which I am sure is 100 per cent. correct, will he not pause to think that what he has conveyed is a deliberately menacing message from some official in the United States? We should be told who it was, because it is a threat to the United Kingdom. The US should be reminded that it works both ways.
Mr. Howarth: The quote that I gave is on page 19 of the report, and it is from the director of national intelligence.
Andrew Mackinlay: No, the one that you've just mentioned.
Mr. Howarth: Will my hon. Friend let me answer in my own way? The second point was made by a senior official who spoke to the Committee on terms of privacy, and I am not going to going to break those terms in the House of Commons or anywhere else.
It is significant, however, that the relationship between us and the United States has deteriorated over the current case to such an extent that the Committee has heard evidence from heads of agencies that they have recently noted a significant decrease in the amount of information that the United States is providing. It is impossible to say whether that is because there is a significant decrease in the information available or whether it is a result of the concerns that have been expressed. Nevertheless, we need to be concerned about it and it worries me greatly. The net consequence is that something could be going on that we do not know about, which could otherwise be prevented. That is a serious matter.
I hope that what I have said has not sounded self-serving and protective of the Committee's work. I wish to say in conclusion that of all the committees I have been involved with in my political career, which stretches back quite a long way, including some that I might prefer to forget I was ever a member of, the Intelligence and Security Committee is the most meticulous, fair-minded and hard-working. I hope that whatever happens in the general election, it remains that way afterwards.
3.9 pm
Mr. Michael Mates (East Hampshire) (Con): It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Knowsley, North and Sefton, East (Mr. Howarth), with whom I have been happy to serve on the Committee for the past five years. As has been said, I have been on the Committee since it was formed in 1994-16 long years-and I am very proud indeed to have been able to contribute to it over that time. I have enjoyed it and found it stimulating, and it really is good to work with.
I have seen five Chairmen come and go, and I am happy that two of them are here today-from both parties. The point about the Committee is that there is practically no party politics whatever. We are there to do a serious job that is not normally in the party argument. We try to come to the right conclusion having been given a lot of information that no other Committee gets. I happily pay tribute to my two Welsh colleagues and friends, the right hon. Members for Torfaen (Mr. Murphy) and for Pontypridd (Dr. Howells), for their handling of the Committee in their periods in office.
It is a sadness that this last year of the 16 has been the most difficult, in terms not only of what has been happening, but of a distinct change in the attitude of the authorities in the Government-I will not say Ministers-to what the Committee does and how it goes about its business. I could not set those difficulties out better than the right hon. Member for Pontypridd, but I trust that what he and others said will put an end to the thought, which is much too active in the media, that Committee members are simply puppets or, as one hon. Gentleman said, poodles, of the Prime Minister. I have been described as many things in my life, but never yet as a poodle, and I do not think it is particularly apposite.
I shall speak about that difficulty only briefly, because the Chairman covered it in much more detail, but there has also been a lot of terrorist activity to report on. However, the most difficult matter has been the question and dilemma of torture, and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, to which I will refer as CIDT to spare my teeth. Reading the press, one would think there was no difference between torture and CIDT, because they write only about torture. Torture is absolutely out: we are all clear about that. One must not do any physical harm to anybody in one's custody if one belongs in a civilised society. The Government do not tolerate it, their predecessors did not tolerate it, and no member of our security and intelligence services tolerates it. That is a given. I hope that nobody doubts those words.
However, CIDT is another matter. Obviously, there are degrees of CIDT, and it is not clearly defined in law, which gives everybody a problem. Some months ago, one judge said that slopping out in jail was CIDT. Slopping out might be degrading, and it might be part of an antiquated Prison Service that is trying to improve itself, but we cannot in any way liken it to torture or talk about it in the same breath. I do not think that anyone would be found guilty of partaking in, or allowing, CIDT if a prisoner who was under investigation had to slop out their cell. There are many gradations of CIDT, which is what has given so many people so much difficulty.
CIDT is not legally defined, but because a case is before the courts, it has been very difficult for the Committee to say much about it-we have been unable to report or comment on it in anything like as much detail as we would have wished. Again, that has led the media to say that we are not speaking out simply because we are puppets. I know that I am not going to persuade some hon. Members, but nothing could be further from the truth, and I hope that when people look at the criticisms in both reports, they will see that when we feel we need to criticise the security services for serious failures, we do so.
Sir Malcolm Rifkind: Of course my right hon. Friend is right to distinguish between torture and CIDT, but I hope that he would also want to use this occasion to emphasise that the latter is not only about slopping out a prison cell. Cruel and inhuman treatment can amount if not to torture, then to something that is morally repugnant and counter-productive as a means of obtaining reliable truth. That must also be excluded from legitimate activity by the agencies.
Mr. Mates: My right hon. and learned Friend is absolutely right. I have simply said that there is a dilemma, and I shall come to that dilemma later in my remarks.
Before that, I shall address the other fundamental problem, which is that we are sponsored by the Cabinet Office, which provides our staff on secondment from other Departments. This arrangement was fine in 1994, when we started, but since then the development of the supervision of intelligence and the way in which it is administered in government has changed so that more and more parts of the Cabinet Office have been involved in what we oversee and we do indeed oversee some parts of what it does. Matters have come to a head this year, and that has led us to believe that the situation should change. That is why we made a formal request for a change in our sponsor Department. We put it to the Prime Minister who instructed that this should be looked at in detail and this has been followed up with exploratory talks as to how best we could achieve what should be perceived as further steps towards showing our independence.
A small group of us-we are all in our places-including the Chairman, the right hon. Member for Knowsley, North and Sefton, East (Mr. Howarth) and I, met the head of human resources in the Ministry of Justice, which seems a logical Department for us to move to. Although it has no oversight of any of the intelligence and security services, it does have a certain familiarity with what is going on and it is also used to handling several other independent bodies, such as the Supreme Court and others, on which no one could doubt its independence. Being linked to those would have helped.
All have now concluded that there are no practical difficulties that could not be overcome. That is what the Government have said. But what is needed is the political will to make the change. We have urged that it should happen this side of the general election so that the successor Committee-this has been at the forefront of our mind-can get off to the best possible start in the next Parliament without becoming involved in procedural matters and old arguments. It is to my great regret-and, I am sure, that of every other member of the Committee-
that the Government's response today to our 2009-10 report, in which we specifically made these proposals, is simply that issues must be looked at and that they will do so in the future. In other words, they are saying, "Let's kick the issue into the long grass, wait until after the election and hope it goes away." That is thoroughly unsatisfactory.
On the issue of the guidance, it seemed to me that we were going round in ever-decreasing circles and starting to dance on the head of a pin because nobody knew what its status was, and I raised that point in an intervention on the hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Mr. Davey). Let me say-because these are facts and do not need to be hidden-that the guidance was given to us in November. Yes, it took a long time, and there are some reasons for that. It was amazingly complicated. We spoke to the Attorney-General, the Foreign Secretary and the Home Secretary about it, who are all concerned with it. We also understood how difficult it had been to set out guidance for the security services that would hold water and not be subject to legal challenge, and would also be of practical use. The whole Committee worked very hard on this and we turned it around as quickly as we could. We sent the draft guidance and our response back to the Prime Minister, who had himself said that he was keen to get the guidance out and that we must not mess about any longer. There we were, not 10 days ago, in the Cabinet room with him, when he asked his staff, "Can this be done?" The Cabinet Secretary said, "Yes, it can be done." Well, it has not been done. That is a matter of great regret to us all because we cannot now debate or consider it, because it is not yet there.
I shall not say what the differences are, because that would not be right, but the fundamental reason is that the Government disagree with one of our conclusions. To be fair, the Government have said that they think that this conclusion misrepresents something that a Minister said to us. That is as maybe, and were it a matter of national security, they would have every right to say, "We're not publishing this." I can tell the House, however, that it is not a matter of national security in any way, shape or form; it is a disagreement, which is going to be there because the Committee has signed off the report, and if, as a result of further evidence, which the Foreign Secretary mentioned, we come to another conclusion, or additional conclusions, they will have to be published separately. What the Government refused to publish today will have to be published as it is, because there is no alternative-that is what the statute says.
What a shame it is that publication has been put off just because certain people think that it would be embarrassing. In my view, it would not be embarrassing. There is no harm in having a healthy disagreement with a group of parliamentarians who have looked at a subject and come to a different conclusion from the Government. The real point is that the guidance is still not in the public domain-the public are the real losers. If it gets altered as a result of what the Committee has said, we will all say, "Hallelujah!" Then the public and the House of Commons will be able to see what the original guidance was, what our comments were and what changes were made.
Mr. George Howarth: The right hon. Gentleman has described the situation accurately. However, is it not also the case that none of our essential judgments about the guidance and how it should be dealt with from hereon in have been challenged? Ours was a conclusion about how to interpret certain phrases made to us in the past. That is what it is really all about.
Mr. Mates: The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. The conclusion will not be affected, unless of course the Government choose to change the draft guidance, and if they do, our successors-it will be them now, alas-might well want to come to different conclusions. It is a mess, and it is a pity-and, I have to say to the Government, it was also absolutely unnecessary to go to these lengths to put off what is nothing more than an honest difference of opinion between people on both sides of the House doing their best to get this absolutely right.
On the case of Binyam Mohamed, the guidance, and all that goes with it, is at the heart of what some people suspect happened, what others seem to know happened and what I can tell them did not happen. In our report to the Government in response to the guidance, we included a letter that we wrote to the Prime Minister on 17 March last year. We were concerned about the delays in setting out what was going on as this case rolled on through the courts. We included that letter with our initial findings on the allegations, including in Mr. Mohamed's case the allegation of complicity in torture, and that letter has been annexed to the review, which stills awaits publication.
The Committee's letter includes some of the details of Mr. Mohamed's case in so far as it sheds light on the wider policy issues. Complaints such as Mr. Mohamed's are, of course, properly a matter for the Investigatory Powers Tribunal to investigate. We advised Mr. Mohamed's lawyers of that, and I am still surprised that he has apparently chosen not to take up that route. I would also say to all those now calling for a judicial inquiry that that is exactly what we have-a senior judge, Lord Justice Mummery, and his tribunal, which was specifically set up to look at individual cases.
Mr. Andrew Tyrie (Chichester) (Con) indicated dissent.
Mr. Mates: But if that judge is not independent, which judge is? If we are to put the matter in the hands of a judge to make a decision, we have to accept, whoever they are, that they are going to be independent. That judge is ready and willing, but he has not yet been asked.
Mr. Tyrie: Does my right hon. Friend acknowledge that public concern about rendition and the UK's involvement in it now goes far beyond one individual case?
Mr. Mates: Yes, but that does not take away from the point that if an individual says that he was mistreated by the intelligence and security services, that is a matter not for our Committee but for the tribunal. The tribunal is ready and waiting, and anyone out there who thinks that they have a complaint can put it to the tribunal.
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