Justice and Security Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Henley and Baroness Manningham-Buller

Monday 9th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Henley]

The noble Baroness is right: there was that commitment. She also knows that pre-appointment hearings are a relatively new phenomenon. Since 2008, Select Committees have conducted pre-appointment hearings for a number of posts, and there is Cabinet Office guidance on the process and on who should be heard. The important thing to note about the list of pre-appointment posts is that the posts concern public bodies, such as the chair of Ofcom and the chair of the Social Security Advisory Committee. The most recent one that my department had an interest in was Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary. There is no suggestion that the pre-appointment process has been used to appoint civil servants. Indeed, the noble Baroness is not suggesting that before appointment each Permanent Secretary should go before the appropriate Select Committee.

The heads of the intelligence and security agencies are Permanent Secretary-level civil servants.

[Baroness Manningham-Buller]

They are not civil servants; they are Crown servants.

[Lord Henley]

I stand corrected by the noble Baroness, but it makes little odds; Crown servants are in fact at Permanent Secretary-level, although I accept that rebuke.

The recruitment process is therefore expected to follow the process for the appointment of Crown servants of such seniority. I could go through the details of the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act, but I can give an assurance that they are exempt from that. They will necessarily follow the spirit of the civil servant recruitment principles, which we consider to be the best process. We do not consider it to be the appropriate mechanism for recruitment to public bodies, whether the process is conducted in public or in private. It might be appropriate for the other posts that I mentioned but not for the public bodies that we are talking about.

Justice and Security Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Henley and Baroness Manningham-Buller

Monday 9th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Manningham-Buller]

I think the problem is the word “operation”. Certainly in the security and intelligence world, an operation is something finite, with a code name, that will come to an end. I think that is what the legislation is trying to get at. It certainly would not be a merged operation such as a jihadist threat or Iraq, which would not be seen in those terms. That may be the difficulty. If we can make that clear in defining it, that might be helpful to the Minister.

[Lord Henley]

I am grateful to the noble Baroness for her intervention. I am also grateful to my noble friend Lady Hamwee for her suggestion that “current” might be a better word than “ongoing”. “Ongoing” is not a word that I would necessarily have wanted to use and is not one that I have come across much before in legislation. “Current” might be a better term and might be one of the reasons why we need to look at the drafting of these matters, to make sure that we have got it absolutely right. For that reason, all I can say is that we will look again—the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, smiles—at that word “ongoing” and make sure that we have got it right. Again, as a layman and not a simple Scottish lawyer, it seems to me that “ongoing” is something that we can all understand relatively simply, so I hope we can get this right. That is the point of the processes that we are going through in this House. I hope that we can get it right in due course.

Amendment 32 is the third amendment in this group and the second in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Butler, and my noble friend Lord Lothian, and would allow the ISC to oversee an operational matter that does not meet the criteria in Clause 2(3) if the relevant Minister of the Crown agrees to consider the matter. Given that the requirement is that the Government and the ISC both need to agree, it is difficult to see circumstances in which the noble Lords’ amendment would ever need to be used. For example, we cannot presently foresee circumstances in which it would be appropriate to call on the ISC to put its resources towards examination of operational matters that were not of significant national interest.

Nor would it be appropriate for the ISC to have a role in approving future actions or decisions relating to the agencies, or to examine ongoing—again I use that word, but perhaps I ought to say current—operations. Such a role could cut across lines of ministerial accountability and could even have the potential to prejudice those operations. The amendment is therefore unnecessary.

I hope that that deals with most of the points. I am sure that it does not, but I have given a commitment that we will look again at the drafting of this part of Clause 2. I hope that the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw the amendment.