Part of National Security Bill - Committee (5th Day) (Continued) – in the House of Lords am 8:30 pm ar 18 Ionawr 2023.
My Lords, I will speak primarily to my Amendment 120A but I thank the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, for his Amendment 112, signed by the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, which raises some extremely important points around the Russia report published by the ISC in 2020 and the frustration that many of its recommendations either have not been implemented yet or simply will not be implemented by the Government. It would be helpful for the Committee and for us all to know the Government’s intention with respect to all that. As the noble Lords, Lord Purvis and Lord Wallace, said, many important points were raised and it would be interesting to see the Government’s view on that. With respect to the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, and Amendment 113, some very important points were made about tier 1 visas, where all that has got to and what progress we have made.
Amendment 116 from my noble friend Lord Ponsonby, which has been referred to in passing by other Members of the Committee, deals with reporting on disinformation originating from foreign powers. I think it was the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, who referred to the issue of how far this country is witnessing attacks from foreign powers that wish to pollute and infect our system, whether businesses or our electoral system. It would be interesting for us to know the extent of that and what the Government are doing about it—as far as the Minister can say within the constraints of this.
It is a question worth asking, because one of the things I think the public want to know is who is responsible for co-ordinating the activity across government to ensure that our country is protected. Is it MI5? Is it GCHQ? Is it the various security parts of different departments? Who brings all that together? I think it is legitimate and does not compromise national security in any way to ask who is responsible for that. How is the activity co-ordinated between a national level, a regional level and a local level? The integrity of all our databases requires action not only in Westminster but in a rural village in the middle of nowhere. Those are legitimate questions, and I think the public would like to know about that.
What is the Government’s view of how far they can inform the public of the threat, in so far as the public can then help with respect to maintaining their own security and, by doing so, that of our country? That was the purpose of Amendment 116. It is obviously a probing amendment, but it seeks to understand something about the scale of the threat we are facing regarding this information and what can be done about it.
My Amendment 120A—which I should say at the outset is supported by my noble friend Lord West, who for personal reasons is unable to be with us, and, as I understand it, by the ISC—would require the Government to revise the memorandum of understanding between the Prime Minister and the Intelligence and Security Committee to reflect any changes to the intelligence and security activities undertaken by the Government as a result of this Bill. In other words, it seeks to update the ISC’s remit to ensure that it has the power to effectively scrutinise intelligence and security activity that will be taking place across government under this new national security regime.
Alongside the Justice and Security Act 2013, the ISC’s Mo outlines, among other areas, the ISC’s remit and the organisations that it oversees. This includes the expenditure administration policy on operations of the agencies, as well as several organisations that form part of the intelligence community. The Bill modernises the offence of espionage and creates a suite of new tools for the intelligence community and law enforcement to defend the UK against state threats.
Given the national security focus of the new regime, the ISC already has the remit to oversee much of the intelligence and security work that will take place. Nevertheless, as stated in the ISC’s most recent annual report, published in December 2022, intelligence and security activities are increasingly being undertaken by a wider collection of government departments, including those that generally do not carry out national security-related activity, such as BEIS, DCMS and DfT. Those teams are not covered by the ISC’s MoU, which therefore could be said to be out of date. It urgently needs updating, since effective oversight of intelligence and security matters has, to an extent, been eroded. If the Government continue with this trend, and establish new teams as part of this Bill that sit outside the ISC’s remit, then this amendment would ensure that the ISC’s MoU was updated accordingly.
The amendment is therefore important. It would help to reverse the increasingly large gap that has emerged in Parliament’s ability to effectively oversee intelligence and security activity. These concerns have been raised repeatedly in this Chamber and in the other place, particularly during Parliament’s considerations of the National Security and Investment Act 2021 and the Telecommunications (Security) Act of the same year. Effective oversight of intelligence and security matters can be undertaken only by the ISC, which, as the Minister will know, unlike other Select Committees has the security infrastructure to scrutinise classified material, such as intelligence, that often underpins decisions on national security. In theory, members of the Select Committee may be given sight of sensitive information but they do not have the appropriate office equipment or the cleared staff for reviewing such information, or indeed the security clearance themselves.
The Government provided a clear undertaking to Parliament during the passage of the Justice and Security Act 2013 when the then Security Minister told Parliament of
“the intention of the Government that the ISC should have oversight of substantively all of central Government’s intelligence and security activities to be realised now and in the future.”—[
The Security Minister at the time made it clear that the ISC’s MoU was designed to be a document that could be updated where necessary to reflect changes in the defence, intelligence and security architecture.
Unfortunately, the National Security and Investment Act 2021 and the Telecommunications (Security) Act 2021 showed the Government’s failure to recognise that commitment and to appreciate the importance of such oversight. There have been repeated attempts to provide the ISC with these oversight provisions to cover these recent bits of legislation, with new teams being created, but so far there has been no progress with respect to the Government. The Government have refused so far to update the committee’s MoU.
The issue of the committee’s statutory remit has been raised with the National Security Adviser on several occasions. At a meeting in January 2022 the then National Security Adviser relayed the Government’s position that they did not feel bound by the statements made by the then Security Minister during the passage of the Justice and Security Act. In its most recent annual report, the ISC said:
“We are deeply disappointed and concerned that the Government has taken this view, and is therefore actively avoiding the effective scrutiny by Parliament of national security issues across Government. The absence of proper scrutiny, which can only be carried out by the ISC, is genuinely troubling”— hence the amendment that I felt it necessary to bring to the Committee.
With that stinging criticism of the Government, I say to them: is it not the case that they should, at the very least, be considering updating the ISC’s MoU to reflect what the ISC itself has said? Should they not ensure that the body that was set up by this Parliament to give Parliament, as far as it possibly could, some sort of parliamentary oversight of the intelligence and security matters as they face our country, has the proper MoU for that to happen? I would be grateful to hear the Minister’s response to that and what he has to say on my Amendment 120A.