Lord Beamish (Lab)

My Lords, the ISC has spent many hours and days doing the task which Parliament set it. I put on record my thanks, on behalf of the committee, to the staff who have worked behind the scenes on this. I also thank the committee members, including two Members of our own House, my noble friend Admiral Lord West, and the noble Baroness, Lady Brown of Cambridge, who have worked very hard on this long task. I wrote last week to the Prime Minister raising four points: the use of WhatsApp in government; the use of low-side systems for transmitting confidential and secretive information; the lack of record-keeping, particularly within the Foreign Office, of audit trails; and the way in which security advice was handled by officials and Ministers. They are nothing new. The committee raised them with the last Government, including the Foreign Office, which had a very bad reputation for keeping records or WhatsApp messages. I understand that the Government have now committed to a review of this, but I say to my noble friend that there is an urgency in this. This needs to be done very quickly, because this is not something new. It was raised with the last Government, it was ignored by the last Government, and it now needs to be put right as a matter of urgency.