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"There has now been a comprehensive examination of the issues involved in allowing intercept material to be adduced as evidence in the UK. That it has failed to provide a viable model is unsurprising, given the complexities of the issues involved. We await the outcome of the further work now being done. We recommend that if this too fails to provide a workable solution then the issue should be considered closed."
Many of us have always hoped that a magic wand would allow intercept evidence in the British justice system to become a valuable tool for securing more convictions and appropriate evidence, but I have yet to see a single instance, in any prosecution in the world, of the intercept evidence that has been allowed in that country making any difference to the prosecution.
Mr. Mark Oaten (Winchester) (LD): Does the Minister share my concern that one of the barriers to progress in this area has been the reluctance of the telecommunications industry to engage properly in the process?
Chris Bryant: That is one of the issues that everybody has wanted to look at, but my experience of the telecommunications industry is that those involved want to be as helpful and supportive as they possibly can; obviously, they often have commercial strictures and intellectual property issues that they want to address. No, I do not accept that that is one of the major obstacles. The major obstacle relates to protecting the integrity of the intelligence that we garner as well as protecting the possibility of gathering intelligence in future. That is the matter in hand.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley, North and Sefton, East (Mr. Howarth) is a splendid person. Is he standing again? He must be.
Chris Bryant: I thought so. That is probably why my right hon. Friend asked about the integrity of the Committee after the general election. He is absolutely right that we need to ensure that there is no attempt to nobble-to use a word used by another Member-the Committee's structure or secretariat so that it is able to do less of a job after the general election than it has done beforehand.
My right hon. Friend raised a matter that is important in the debate about whether the Committee should be a Select Committee-the fact that it has to report to the Prime Minister, as an essential part of the process, whereas all other Select Committees report to the House. I am not sure that the ISC should report to the House without having reported to the Prime Minister, because a specific responsibility and a specific degree of trust come with that element of reporting.
The right hon. Member for East Hampshire-I should also refer to him as gallant; nobody else has done so, but as a Lieutenant-Colonel in, I think, the Coldstream Guards, he is undoubtedly gallant, and he certainly has the best eyebrows in Parliament now that Denis Healey has departed-pointed out that Committee is certainly not a set of patsies; the scars on the backs of several Ministers in the past few weeks are evidence of that. He made important points about the difference between torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, the fact that one is more clearly established in law than the other, and that in some areas there is a wide divergence as to what is understood by cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. He felt there was a strong argument that there was no need for a judicial inquiry, and I rather agree with him about that.
My hon. Friend the Member for Walsall, North (Mr. Winnick), who is no longer here, made the point about public sittings, on which I have already commented.
The hon. Member for posh places-the right hon. and learned Member for Kensington and Chelsea (Sir Malcolm Rifkind)-referred to the problems with record keeping. He is absolutely right. This is something that we accept, and the Committee has done an invaluable service in pursuing the matter. We believe that we have put in place much better record keeping, which should have been done before.
The right hon. and learned Gentleman said that it is not good enough merely to ask for assurances in relation to Diego Garcia. The difficulty that we have-
Sir Malcolm Rifkind: On a point of correction, it is not just about Diego Garcia, but about any situations where members of the British security services may be dealing with detainees held by another country.
Chris Bryant: I realise that; I was going to come to that point.
Specifically in relation to Diego Garcia, our relationship with the security services of the United States of America is quantitatively and qualitatively different from our relationship with some other security services. I would
say the same of Australia and Canada, for instance. That is an important element of how we need to be able to proceed, given the extensive daily, if not hourly, exchange of information between those security services. That is why many people were particularly sad about how the process rolled out in relation to Diego Garcia.
The right hon. and learned Gentleman is absolutely right that there are many other security services with which we do business that do not subscribe to the same values as we do. We have to be absolutely clear that we do not just ask somebody in a casual way, "By the way, have you tortured this person?" We must ask good questions and engage in proper investigation as to the nature of the methods by which information was obtained.
The right hon. and learned Gentleman is right that the guidelines have to be published, and we want to do that as swiftly as possible. My right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary referred to the fact that we hope there can be further meetings in the very near future, and we therefore hope to be able to publish the consolidated guidance alongside the report. The right hon. Member for East Hampshire was absolutely right about what would have to be published at the same time, and that will be done as soon as possible.
The right hon. and learned Member for Kensington and Chelsea also referred to whether the Committee is independent. Of course it needs to be independent but, as I have said, it needs to have the trust and confidence to report directly to the Prime Minister.
My hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Andrew Mackinlay) referred at one point to people getting in a white van, including all the members of the ISC. I believe that at the time he was referring to, my right hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen was the Committee's Chairman, so I am not sure whether the white van had "Murphy's" written on the side of it. My hon. Friend got rather overexcited at one point, and I was worried about whether the white van was going to turn up again.
My hon. Friend has heard what I have said about hearings in public. There is substantial- [Interruption.] If he talks while I am talking, I cannot hear him. I hope he accepts that there is substantial agreement between us on that issue. He sometimes inclines towards conspiracy theory about-
Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. I know that it is difficult as the Minister is addressing the comments of a particular hon. Member, but it is important that the Hansard writers are able to hear him and that he faces the Chair.
Chris Bryant: My hon. Friend sometimes subscribes to the conspiracy theory of life, despite not being a member of Unite, so far as I am aware. My biggest concern about him, when he retires from the House, is where he going to deliver these speeches. To his poor wife at home? [Interruption.] Maybe in the House of Lords, but he is in favour of an elected House of Lords, so there is a difficulty there.
The hon. Member for Chichester referred to extraordinary rendition, and he has rendered the House and the country a significant service by his dogged determination to follow the issue. I do not arrive at the same view as him about whether there should be a
judge-led inquiry, or particularly, to use his phrase, "a short judge-led inquiry". There is either a judge-led inquiry, with the judge allowed to go wherever he or she wishes, in which case it is almost invariably not short, or an inquiry that we determine has to be short, with rather narrow parameters.
The hon. Gentleman suggested that there should be a secret ballot for the chairmanship of the Committee, and several Members have asked whether it would be possible for the Chairman to be a member of the Opposition. I can see no ultimate reason why it would not be. We in the British system have a belief that they are not just the Opposition; they are Her Majesty's loyal Opposition. At the same time, it is important that the relationship between the Chairman of the Committee and the Prime Minister is one of frank and open dialogue and trust. In certain circumstances, that may be better provided for by the current process.
The hon. Member for Aylesbury referred to the control principle and asked whether we believe legislation is necessary. That is a fairly technical matter that I might write to him about. He also asked about the UN convention on enforced disappearance, on which the point that my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary made some months ago is still valid-we do not engage in enforced disappearances.
The hon. Member for Aylesbury asked about overseas territories. On Second Reading of the Cluster Munitions (Prohibitions) Bill yesterday, we said that the convention in the Bill would apply fully in overseas territories, but we are still looking at the precise details of the convention on enforced disappearances. It might be necessary for
us to have additional legislation in this country, but that is a matter on which the Ministry of Justice leads, and not something that we want to go into in the next couple of minutes. Consequently, I am not going to propose legislation this afternoon.
I am grateful to all who have taken part in the debate this afternoon. I shall conclude by very briefly acknowledging our enormous debt of gratitude to the security services. We in Parliament owe them that debt not only for the security that they provide, but because they are often criticised in the public domain without being able to stand up and defend themselves.
In 1986, I lived briefly in Argentina, which a few years earlier had been under a fairly vile and vicious dictatorship. One of my closest friends and I went to a bar for a drink one evening. He suddenly went off-I presumed to the toilet-but after 45 minutes he had not returned. I went to find him. He was a blubbering mess on the floor of the toilet because, as he told me, he had been systematically tortured for the best part of two years in a supposed hospital in Buenos Aires. The reason for his distress that evening was that the person who had tortured him was sitting at the bar, and had never been held to account.
It is not only that this Government will never and do never countenance using or condoning it, or being complicit in the torture that others use, but we would always want to prosecute, with the greatest vigour, wherever torture has been used.
That this House has considered the matter of the Annual Report of the Intelligence and Security Committee for 2008-09 (Cm 7807) and the Government's response (Cm 7808).
Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease
Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn. -(Lyn Brown.)
5.52 pm
Sir Paul Beresford (Mole Valley) (Con): Thank you for giving me the opportunity to have this debate, Madam Deputy Speaker, which I have been chasing for a wee while, as I suspect the Minister is aware. I apologise to the Minister that she will be the last man standing this evening-that is not a gender mistake but an old saying. I must declare an interest: I am a very part-time dentist, and this matter faintly touches on that. In fact, dentists have been affected to some degree by the recent rules introduced by the chief dental officer.
I should like to do a little scene-setting, to which I expect the Minister to add. Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is rare at the moment, but it is an incurable, fatal human disease that is caused by protein particles called prions. It causes a spongy degeneration of the brain and ultimately death. As I said, there is no cure. In contrast to the traditional forms of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, vCJD seems today to have affected younger patients. Normally, older patients are affected. That at least appears to be the fact with the original causal link with bovine spongiform encephalopathy in cattle. However, that cause seems to have been eradicated, so transmission now is predominantly from individual to individual, through blood transfusions, organs or surgical equipment. It is known that the transmission from human to human through, for example, blood transfusion, is 100 times more efficient than from species to species.
Carriers of vCJD frequently spend their whole lives as carriers without developing the disease or even knowing that they are carrying it. Unfortunately, it is currently not possible to detect carriers, many of whom are almost certainly present in the population of regular blood donors and patients who undergo different forms of surgery. Logically, that means that unless extensive preventive measures are combined with detection, the population of carriers must increase, which potentially creates a devastating hidden time bomb of vCJD in the decades ahead.
The estimate of the prevalence of individuals incubating vCJD today varies from one in 4,000 to one in 20,000. That comes from the Hilton study, which is based on tests on tonsils and appendix samples. Perhaps it is more disturbing that the UK and Ireland almost certainly have the largest per head of population reservoir of that prion in the world. That explains why UK citizens and even tourists who have visited the UK are not acceptable as blood donors in many countries. It is thought that the incubation period of vCJD is decades. Indeed, if it is like kuru, a similar disease found in Papua New Guinea, it could have an incubation period of up to 40 years from the time of exposure to onset of symptoms. Regardless of the prevalence, it is almost certain that this country will have a considerable number of cases in years to come.
To make matters worse, because vCJD is so difficult to detect, it is fairly certain that the Hilton study was not 100 per cent. accurate or effective in detecting incubating cases. Having very briefly and in simplistic terms set the scene, it is important now to turn to what the Government can and should be doing to combat this potential disaster which will hit our children and
grandchildren. Obviously, it would be absolutely fantastic if a cure could be developed tomorrow and an early step made towards a detection method. I hope that Government funding is being made available for that. However, I suspect that we are a long way off from either a cure or a detection method, and prevention of transmission is the utmost priority. Indeed, it is the only thing that we can do at the moment.
With the removal of mad cow disease, transmission now is from individual to individual via blood. The Government have a blood safety advisory body called the Advisory Committee on Safety of Blood, Tissues and Organs, or SaBTO for short. In 1998, leucodepletion was introduced by the UK blood service as a first step in reducing variant CJD infectivity. That process filters blood destined for blood transfusion and removes white blood cells. It was a very useful first step, but at best it only provided a 40 to 70 per cent. reduction in infectivity of donated blood.
In July 2009, SaBTO recommended that UK-sourced blood plasma should not be used for transfusion and should be replaced with plasma sourced from other countries with a much lower risk of variant CJD. However, in October the committee recommended the use of a recently developed prion filtration system. That has been produced by MacoPharma, a medical device technology company. The filter is called a P-Capt filter and has been designed specifically to work directly with the existing technologies used by the UK blood service. It has been CE marked since 2006, some four years ago. This means that it has passed EU safety and efficacy testing, as required for it to be legally used in the United Kingdom.
The filter has been under review by the predecessor committee to SaBTO since 2004 and also by SaBTO since its formation in January 2008. In October 2009, SaBTO recommended several changes. First, it accepted that there was a recognition that further measures to protect the UK blood supply and prevent the spread of variant CJD through blood transfusions should be introduced. Secondly, it said that there was "now sufficient evidence" that the P-Capt prion reduction filter "reduces infectivity" and successfully cleans blood to remove the infective prions that carry variant CJD.
Next and most significantly, the committee recommended that the P-Capt filter should be introduced for filtering the red cells that will be given as blood transfusions to those born since 1 January 1996, with the rider that that should be subject to the completion of the PRISM-platelet receptor inhibition for ischemic syndrome management-trials. The fourth recommendation was that the requirement for prion filtration should be reviewed in the event that further data on variant CJD prevalence or filter efficacy became available. Although I recognise that the logistics and finance need to be fully assessed, to my mind this is an absolute must and requires considerable urgency. Personally, I see it as a first step towards filtering all blood from all donors. There is absolutely no reason why these initial steps should not be implemented immediately and the PRISM trial continued alongside. Hand in hand with this approach, the Department of Health has introduced other measures in other areas, and I give it credit for doing so.
The other logical means of transmitting the prion is surgery, especially with re-used stainless steel equipment, even if it is sterilised. This concern arises from the fact
that the prion is extremely difficult to remove from stainless steel and can often survive standard autoclave sterilisation. Even so, when I discussed this with Professor Pennington, who is an expert on the subject, in October 2007, he pointed out that there was no evidence at that time of iatrogenic transmission. That, I suspect, is down to the fact that it is extremely difficult to find the prion and to get any evidence, certainly in the short term.
6 pm
Motion lapsed (Standing Order No. 9(3)).
Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.- (Lyn Brown.)
Sir Paul Beresford: I suspect that the reason for the professor's opinion is that it is extremely difficult to detect the prion. However, there is a feeling-correctly-that the precautionary principle should be applied, although hopefully in a sensible manner.
With that in mind, I draw the Minister's attention to the decision in April 2007 by the chief dental officer that dentists should not reuse endodontic reamers and files-by that, I mean single-patient use. This, I understand-I may be corrected-was derived from research on mice that were particularly susceptible to variant CJD. The basis of this thinking is that the removal of the prion from stainless steel reamers is difficult, as I think we all accept. Stainless steel reamers are cheap and so not a particular economic problem, even for dentists claiming that their fees are not large enough.
Nowadays, however, most endodontists, or those doing serious amounts of endodontics, are using nickel titanium reamers. A number of specific designs are used in different techniques. Reputable nickel titanium reamers are expensive. I also understand that cleaning the prion off nickel titanium is much easier than taking it off stainless steel. Treatment for a tooth that needs endodontic treatment is therefore made very much more expensive. It is time-consuming if done properly, especially if molar root canal is involved. The unit of dental activity award for molar root canal is small, especially when compared with the alternative treatment, which is extraction using-surprise, surprise-stainless steel forceps, where the same prion difficulty would apply. That might explain the apparent increase in NHS extractions and reduction in NHS endodontics-I expect a letter from the British Dental Association telling me I am wrong.
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