Baroness Manningham-Buller (CB)

My Lords, like others who are going to speak in this debate, I start by acknowledging the pain of the victims whose grief and distress were compounded by the failure of the state. That is why we are here. This legislation, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen, mentioned, has had a long and difficult gestation, caused partly by the difficulty in some cases of how to maintain a duty of candour alongside a duty of confidentiality and to maintain secrets. I wish to make three points. I am afraid the first one is pretty obvious, but there has been an awful lot of ill-informed commentary on this and I cannot avoid it. As you would expect, my main concern is that national security is not damaged. There are two aspects to this: first, the vulnerability of intelligence, which can be destroyed by slight references to it. I am going to be rather vain and quote from a speech I made in the Robing Room in 2010. Excuse me doing so, but in a moment, I am going to quote the noble Lord, Lord Butler—so somebody of greater authority. I said “intelligence is vulnerable. Individuals supplying it can be exposed, interrogated and killed. Our duty is to protect them. Operations can be compromised, techniques blown, ciphers changed. The targets of intelligence learn and improve their own techniques to conceal their actions from the authorities”. This means that intelligence must be protected and safeguarded, which is why systems have been developed so that intelligence can be safely used in court cases and in public inquiries—including with special advocates, who I think have been very successful—in such a way that the material can be germane to the conclusions of the court case or the inquiry but the most sensitive aspects of it protected. So, we have closed material sessions, public interest immunity certificates, special advocates and the ability to request that an inquiry becomes statutory, which gives it those protections. The British intelligence community has lots of experience of that. There is also a second point on intelligence, which is often overlooked. Here—copyright of the noble Lord, Lord Butler, and his report into the weapons of mass destruction in 2004—this is really important, because it partly explains the way the Act is drafted, so that individual members of the services—the intelligence community—do not report externally but it goes through the head of the service. The noble Lord said: “The most important limitation on intelligence is its incompleteness. Much ingenuity and effort is spent on making secret information difficult to acquire and hard to analyse. Although the intelligence process may overcome such barriers, intelligence seldom acquires the full story. In fact, it is often … sporadic and patchy, and even after analysis may … be at best inferential”. What that means is that much is clear only with hindsight, that challenging decisions on where to focus resources are standard and that even the most knowledgeable intelligence officers and analysts may reach very different conclusions on the same material. There is also, of course, the practice of need-to-know, again to protect material internally, so that not everybody has the full picture. I believe that the safety mechanisms in the Bill for that area of our work, as it stands, are adequate. The second thing I want to talk about is ethics. I applaud what my noble friend Lord Evans of Weardale said in the debate which the noble Lord, Lord Alton, triggered earlier in the year on this subject. The Nolan principles—I used to remember them off by heart; I can usually get to six of them—are still pretty good. They date from 1995. They are not complete; there is nothing about how you behave towards other people, but they are still very important principles which I grew up on from 1995 onwards. I strongly support the view in the Bill that all public authorities should promote and actively maintain ethical standards, articulating what they are. Of course, intelligence work, as much other work, raises ethical issues—there is very little in government that does not—but we sought to maintain ethical standards. We certainly articulated them; sometimes we fell short, as organisations do. When I was there, we appointed an ethics counsellor. We had ethics built into discussions on operations, but if that was not sufficient, staff could raise issues with the ethics counsellor—the appointment still exists—and the issues raised would be brought to the board and considered. This is particularly important in an organisation which within the law has the powers to intrude into people’s privacy and do some quite interesting things. The final of my three points is that there are no extra resources to do this. Front-line staff will be taken off current work to service these demands—to service, if you like, the past rather than preventing the future. That is a real concern to me. I am, though, pleased by the involvement of the Intelligence and Security Committee. It is sometimes assumed that this was imposed on the intelligence community—I look at the noble Lord, Lord Beamish, who leads it at the moment. In fact, it was sought by my service for many years before we got it, and I see the noble Lord, Lord Butler, nodding, because we valued the idea of parliamentary scrutiny of what we were doing. The Investigatory Powers Commissioner’s Office being involved is also important. Finally, I want to thank the noble Lord, Lord Lemos, who rang me in a red stripy T-shirt in the middle of August on the hottest day and spent a good amount of time—I was equally smartly dressed—talking about the Bill and what it is trying to do. If I am ending on a flippant note, I do not mean to suggest that this is not very important legislation; I look forward to engagement at all subsequent stages of the Bill.