National Security Bill

Lord Butler of Brockwell Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 7th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord West of Spithead (Lab)]

My Lords, I support on behalf of the ISC Amendment 193 in the name of my noble friend Lord Coaker. This amendment would update the ISC’s remit to ensure it has the power effectively to scrutinise intelligence and security activity that will be taking place across government under the new national security regime.

The ISC already has the power to oversee much of the intelligence and security activity that will take place. However, as my noble friend Lord Coaker outlined very persuasively, the ISC’s oversight has generally been eroded due to intelligence and security activities often now being undertaken by policy departments which do not generally carry out national security-related activity. He mentioned a list of them and there are many. They were not included in the ISC’s remit and they can—I have to say, they have often—excluded the ISC from looking at the material that we think we should look at. If the Government establish new teams as part of this Bill which sit outside our remit, this amendment will make sure that the memorandum of understanding is updated, and we will be able to have access to do our job for Parliament scrutinising this highly classified material.

Updating the ISC’s MoU is vital, as effective oversight of intelligence and security can be undertaken effectively only by the Intelligence and Security Committee. Unlike Select Committees, the ISC’s purpose is to oversee these highly classified matters which relate to national security on behalf of Parliament. It is therefore the only parliamentary body with the necessary security infrastructure to scrutinise the material that often underpins national security decisions. This issue of having the right material affects the staff. For example, civil servants, who are working with regular access to “top secret” have to have DV. If one looks across government at the moment, I am not sure that that is the case in some departments. They also, including Ministers, have to be read into the STRAP material, and then there is the extra physical security to store “top secret” and STRAP material. It is considerable, and I am not convinced that this is the case across government.

As my noble friend Lord Coaker mentioned, the Government understandably provided a very clear commitment to Parliament, during the passage of the Justice and Security Act 2013, that the ISC’s MoU would be kept updated. Unfortunately—we noted this in our last annual report—this has not been done. They have not stood by this commitment. I cannot understand what difficulty the Government have with this, because I would have thought it was in the interests of the Government to ensure that Parliament has an ability to do this.

I can only repeat the words of the noble Lord, Lord Coaker:

“Each piece of new legislation devolving national security matters away from bodies already overseen by the ISC should come with commensurate expansion of the ISC’s MoU”.


This has been promised by the Government and it should be done. This amendment will seek to do that if, as a result of this Bill, the Government do indeed establish new teams outside the ISC’s current remit. However, as this amendment is linked to this Bill only, it understandably has limited scope; it will not fix the lack of effective oversight in other national security legislation, such as the Telecommunications (Security) Act, where, again pretty much across this House, people argued that the ISC should have the ability to scrutinise that. But it will be a very useful start to help embed the oversight provisions, and for that reason I support this amendment.

[Lord Butler of Brockwell (CB)]

My Lords, I want to support Amendment 193, moved by the noble Lord, Lord Coaker. He said that he felt the memorandum of understanding had not been renewed and brought up to date for no good reason. I believe it is worse than that. I think it has not been revised for a bad reason: because the Government have taken a dislike to the Intelligence and Security Committee. They have tried to restrict its activities, I believe for two reasons. First, the Government were piqued when there was pressure to publish the Russia report before the 2019 election and they did not want that. I suspect the reason they did not want it was that they did not want the discussion which the report introduced about the involvement of Russian apparatchiks in London politics. Secondly, I believe the Government were piqued because the committee did not elect as its chairman the person whom the Government wanted. It seems extraordinary that one could say of a responsible Government that these were their motives; they are childish motives. But the consequence is that in recent times the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament has not been used for the purpose for which it was set up.

If the Government are not going to use the Intelligence and Security Committee properly, they should save money and abolish it. But, of course, they will not do that because Parliament set it up, Parliament thinks it is important that this House and the House of Commons should have some insight into intelligence operations, and it would be unacceptable for the Government to abolish it. But they must choose either to abolish it or to use it properly. If they are to use it properly, they must update the memorandum of understanding and, as the noble Lord, Lord West, said, use it for the purpose for which Parliament intended: to give oversight by people who are fully screened within the ring of secrecy to report to Parliament. I think this is a much more important amendment than the face of it suggests.

[Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)]

My Lords, again I thank all those who have spoken on this group of amendments, and in particular I thank the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, for his generous remarks.

In terms of the Russia report, it is simply not true that we have not implemented the report’s recommendations. As I said in my opening remarks, the Government published a full and comprehensive response to the ISC report in July 2020, which is available online and which addressed all the committee’s key themes and recommendations point by point. The Government have responded to all the recommendations that could be identified within the report. The majority of the committee’s recommendations were already being implemented by the Government before the report was published: for example, those covering co-ordination of HMG Russia’s work, close working with international partners, and continued exposition and attribution of malign Russian activity.

I would say also that, as noted in HMG’s response to the Russia report, an assessment was produced and is available at a higher classification. Noble Lords will appreciate the difficulties of producing intelligence assessments for the wider public, given the risks of putting sensitive material, including information about our capabilities and methods, into the public domain.