Intelligence and Security Committee: Annual Report 2011-12

Baroness Hamwee Excerpts

Monday 21st January 2013 Grand Committee

[Baroness Hamwee]

My Lords, when I went to see the latest Bond film, “Skyfall”, there were two Members of your Lordships’ House in the audience. I think we both found that the least credible part of the film, which was a high hurdle, of course, was the active executive role taken by the chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee. That is probably the limit of my expertise on the subject, certainly compared with today’s speakers and indeed with other noble Lords in the Room, so I hope that noble Lords will forgive any naivety in my comments.

On reading the report, although this is not a criticism of the report itself, the writers or the committee, I would have been pleased if some of the gaps had been filled. I am not talking just about the redactions, although on those I did wonder about the process. Does the committee advise the Prime Minister that certain matters are for his eyes only, as it were, because as we discussed during the passage of the Justice and Security Bill, responsibility for security is a matter for more than the agencies? Indeed, much reference is made in the report to what is called the wider intelligence community. It appears from the report that the National Security Council, with a membership of Cabinet Ministers, joins things up across government. The report states:

“It is evident that the NSC has increased further its status and priority, and we are reassured that the requirements of the NSC have been assimilated by the intelligence community”.

I am intrigued that membership of the Joint Intelligence Committee is not quite aligned with that of the NSC, which includes the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change. However, DECC officials are not permanent members of the JIC. The events of the past few days have confirmed the relevance of that. Perhaps the issue will soon be water, but that could be a matter for another debate. The JIC, on the other hand, includes officials from BIS but the Secretary of State for Business is not a member of the NSC, which is interesting given the problems of cybersecurity to which the noble Marquess has just referred.

The impact of the NSC on the intelligence community—to pick up that reference—is one thing but what is important above all is its impact on outcomes. The report’s very first recommendation concerns the distinction between policy implications and analytical judgments. Again, this has already been mentioned and the Government agree with it. It cannot be easy to maintain that distinction or to avoid blurring the line between the operational and the strategic. Two of the quotations from the evidence from the Foreign Secretary which are contained in the report were particularly interesting on this. He said:

“We task them all the time”.

Then, acknowledging the importance of operational independence, he goes on to say that,

“there is a process of discussion. I mean, the weekly discussions that I have with the Security Service are about where they are focusing their resources and particular operations that require that resource and questions I can ask about the issues that I see that need to be addressed and how they are doing them. So it’s a different sort of accountability”.

Accountability is an interesting word there, because it is moving towards the Executive. I am not saying that there is anything wrong in that involvement or that I am critical of it, but I thought that this highlighted the point. The noble Marquess, Lord Lothian, has asked the Minister to confirm that resources will remain available for the front line, which in my mind raises the question of who is responsible for the allocation of resources within each agency by each agency, and how much they should be told by the Government where resources should be allocated.

As I read the report, the agencies are increasingly collaborating for operational reasons as well as for efficiency. The Government’s response stresses the importance of a tri-agency approach to conducting and supporting counterterrorism investigations. No doubt the debate about having separate agencies and the demarcation lines is a very old one, but I wonder whether the time is coming for it to be revived and for a reflection on where the demarcation lines should be, as the world changes and we become more of one global whole.

One of the changes of course is the agencies’ increasing dependence on IT. I was not surprised to read of the difficulties of retaining talented people—to whom one must pay tribute, not only in IT but across the piece. This is not a new issue in the public sector: the attractions of the private sector have taken, for example, engineers and planners out of local government for years. It means making the job attractive, not only in terms of salary but in other ways. There is talk of recruitment. I have been on to the websites and played with what is there. However, I do not get much of a sense of what the imaginative and innovative methods are to which the Government refer—without fleshing it out—which would attract possible applicants to look for jobs with the agencies and get to the point where they might try to take the intelligence test, if I have used the term correctly.

Turnover within the agencies seems high. I assume that there is an analysis, either within each agency or by the committee, of the levels of seniority where there is high turnover and the reasons for it. Is absence monitored? Sickness levels are often a very good indicator of what is going on beneath the surface. This information is in the public domain but, as regards discussing this area in public, taking evidence from those who can give it is just the sort of thing that could be considered—an issue that I raised during the passage of the Justice and Security Bill—not at one stage removed, as we are today. I readily acknowledge that there are difficulties when one moves from the general to the particular in this area but, for example, redundancy payments are indeed high, as the report mentions. This makes me wish to ask—but I cannot ask or listen to the question being asked—whether there are false economies in making high redundancy payments if that means recruiting a large number of more junior employees.

Diversity, as is also recognised, is an issue in recruitment and, perhaps, retention—I am not clear about that. Are the nationality requirements really such a problem for diversity? How much effort is being made to learn from other sectors? Is there secondment to and from the agencies and other sectors? Presumably, that is not entirely impossible? I would like to think that the committee has been told more than:

“Work is in hand to identify a sustainable package of measures to tackle the situation”.

However, I return to the “what?”. The proportion of spend on counterterrorism brings one up short. I noted, too, mention of home-grown self-starters and lone actors. The sections on the Prevent strand of the strategy reminded me of the difficulties in another area—drugs. This is all about mindsets, and I wonder whether there is any read-across that one can make. I should be interested to know whether the ISC was content with its recommendations on this. I wonder, too, if it was satisfied with the Government’s response to the section on torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. It seems that nothing is immune from being turned into an acronym. The report refers to the risk of being linked to such activities. I do not know whether it is only my reading of the Government’s response but it carefully does not address the difficult area of “condoning” such treatment—if that is the right word for not asking all the questions or ferreting away at investigations that might reveal things that one might not want to know; and yes, I have read the consolidated guidance and note the role of Ministers in this. Perhaps that is for another day.

It is clear that the committee’s oversight is continuous and vigorous. Meetings are not everything but I note that the committee met 44 times in the year—almost once a week. As the committee and the noble Marquess, Lord Lothian, has said, the real test is our response to the unexpected. Perhaps the events of the past few days remind us that behind this is the question of what is done to limit the unexpected. I pay tribute to the work of the committee as well as of the services. Scrutiny is by no means merely passive and reactive, and this report shows that.