Committees on Arms ExportsLetter from the Chair of the Committees to the Rt Hon William Hague MP, First Secretary of State and Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, Foreign and Commonwealth Office

Thank you for your letter of 30 September with which you enclosed the Government’s answers to the CAEC’s questions as set out in Annexes A and B to my letter to you of 18 July together with the Government’s answers to the CAEC’s questions on the Quarter 3 and Quarter 4 2010 Arms Export Licensing information provided by the Government.

I am grateful to Ministers and to their officials for the work put in to provide the Committees with the information requested and by our deadline of 30 September.

I also welcome the commitment you made in your latest letter “to continuing to work closely and constructively with the Committees and to addressing the issues raised by the Committees in a transparent, comprehensive and timely manner.” I also wish to see the maximum possible transparency with as much information as possible being made accessible to Parliament and to the public at large.

Against this background, I am disappointed and concerned that the Government’s answers to the Committees’ Quarter 3 and Quarter 4 2010 questions have all been stamped “Restricted for CAEC eyes only”—both for the Section A answers relating to public material as well as for the Section B answers relating to restricted material.

I will deal with the Section A and Section B material in turn.

Section A

QUESTIONS RELATED TO PUBLIC MATERIAL

At first sight, I see nothing in the Government’s answers that would justify classifying them as Restricted. I should be grateful therefore for your agreement that all the Government’s answers to the questions related to public material for Quarter 3 and Quarter 4 2010 can be published by the Committee together with the Committee’s questions.

If you consider that any redactions need to be made for any of these answers, please could we be provided with a list of these and the reasons for each of them.

For future Quarters, I should be grateful if the answers to Section A Questions relating to public material could be sent in non-classified form. If the Government wishes to offer any supplementary information to explain its answers further, this could be sent in separate classified form.

Section B

QUESTIONS RELATED TO RESTRICTED MATERIAL

Whilst I can see that some of the information in the answers should certainly be classified, for example xxx xxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxx xx xx xxx xxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxx xxxxxxx xx xxxxxxxxx xx xxxx xx xx xxx xxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxx xxxxxxx x xxxxx x xxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxx xx xxx xxxxxxxxxxx xx xxx xxxxxxx x xxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxx xx xxxxxxx xx xx xxxxxxx xx xxxxxxxxxx.

I should be grateful therefore if the Committees could be provided with a further copy of the Government’s Section B answers for Quarter 3 and Quarter 4 2010 with the wording which you consider should be redacted square bracketed and the justification for the proposed redaction in each case. I would hope that we could rapidly reach agreement on these redactions so that the Section B answers, as redacted, could be published with the Committee’s questions at an early date.

For the future, I suggest that the Section B answers should similarly come to us in two versions, the first with the whole of the text marked “Restricted—for CAEC eyes only”, and the second with the same text and classification but with the Government’s proposed redactions square bracketed and the explanation for each redaction. The Section B answers, with the agreed redactions, would then be published in unclassified form along with the Section A answers for each quarter.

I should be grateful to know at an early date that the Government and the Committees can now proceed to handle the Government’s answers to the Committees’ questions for both Section A and Section B material as I have set out above.

24 October 2011