Mark Pritchard

As the Home Secretary will know, this is the fifth or sixth national security-related Bill in the past few years—the most Bills on national security issues that we have seen in any Parliament. She will also know that the UK intelligence community has more powers as a result of these Bills, as well as bigger budgets and more responsibilities than ever before. I commend all those serving in our agencies for their distinguished service. However, I am concerned that there are parts of Government that are currently not covered by aspects of the oversight of our intelligence community by the Intelligence and Security Committee. I commend the excellent members of that Committee; I am a former member, so I can commend them in the House today. It is absolutely vital that the intelligence services have independent oversight. Unfortunately, the legislation that oversees the ISC is 30 years old and 10 years old. We are having all these national security Bills, but we do not have commensurate Bills to improve oversight and accountability of our intelligence agencies. It needs to change, because we cannot have an echo chamber in the UK intelligence community. There needs to be parliamentary oversight with the power of sanction—summons and sanction. At the moment there is no power.