Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) – not a select committee, but a group of senior MPs and Peers appointed by the PM – has a “canary in the coalmine” function, to keep an eye on the security and intelligence services and reassure Westminster that all is well. But last week the canary emitted a loud squawk. The ISC raised concerns about its secretariat being under-funded and too tightly controlled by the Cabinet Office – issues that could hinder its independence and effectiveness.
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Ruth and Mark spoke with the Chair of the ISC – former Labour Defence Minister Kevan Jones, now Lord Beamish – about his efforts to ensure robust, interference-free oversight of Britain’s spooks, and the growing threats facing the UK today.
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Lord Beamish
Lord Beamish (Kevan Jones) is a Labour Member of the House of Lords and the Chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee. Before entering the House of Lords, he sat in the House of Commons for 23 years as the Member of Parliament for Durham, during which time he served as the Veterans Minister under Gordon Brown, as a Shadow Defence Minister from 2010 to 2016, and sat on a number of select committees, including the Defence Select Committee (2001-09, 2020-24), Procedure Committee (2020-24) and the Intelligence and Security Committee (2017-24).
David Hencke
David Hencke began his career on local newspapers and The Times Higher Education Supplement, before he joined The Guardian in 1976. Ten years later he became the newspaper’s Westminster lobby correspondent, winning several awards for investigations into “cash for questions” and other political scandals. In 2012 he was named Political Journalist of the Year in the British Journalism Awards. Since 2009 he has been a freelance writer, with regular investigative articles in Byline Times and on his own blog, Westminster Confidential.
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Intro: [00:00:00] You are listening to Parliament Matters, a Hansard Society production supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Learn more at hansardsociety.org.uk/pm.
Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters, the podcast about the institution at the heart of our democracy, Parliament itself. I'm Ruth Fox.
Mark D'Arcy: And I'm Mark D'Arcy. Coming up in this week's episode,
Ruth Fox: Scrutinising the spies, why the Chair of Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee has gone public with his concerns about attempts by Whitehall to control its work.
Mark D'Arcy: The mystery of the missing ombudsman.
Ruth Fox: And parliamentary shenanigans over the Royal Albert Hall. What is going on?
Mark D'Arcy: But Ruth, let's start with the spies. In a week when Parliament discussed in incredibly guarded terms, the latest series of terror arrests, and it was made very, very clear [00:01:00] that these kind of matters can't easily be discussed in open debate on the floor of the House of Commons, all eyes turned to Parliament's intelligence and security watchdog, the ISC, the Intelligence and Security Committee. It's a rather unusual parliamentary organ because it's not directly elected by MPs. It is in fact appointed by the Prime Minister and it has very much the function of a canary in a coal mine. It can give a warning if things are going really amis.
If, for example, members started to resign from that committee, you'd know that there was real trouble in spook land and last week it didn't so much trill a warning as emit an outraged squawk in the form of a press release from its chairman, Lord Beamish, the Labour former defence minister Kevan Jones, who complained in vociferous terms that its internal workings were too much under the control of civil servants in the Cabinet Office.
We talked to him in his parliamentary office.
Lord Beamish: Well, I've been on the committee now eight years, so I was the most senior person remaining on the committee. It's a strange committee, as you say. [00:02:00] It's appointed by the Prime Minister, the nominees. There's nine members of the committee. It's not a select committee of Parliament.
It's actually a committee, which is set up by statute, the Justice and Security Act 2013. And it gives us quite wide ranging powers, including being able to monitor the activities of our security services. And that's about not just ensuring that money's being spent properly, but I think one of the agency ethics says that we give it their license to operate in terms of having the confidence that they're doing things correctly.
Mark D'Arcy: And I suppose events this week, you know, there's been this case of a big set of arrests. We don't know what's going to happen in the individual case or the rights and wrongs of the individuals there, but it was very noticeable watching Dan Jarvis, the Security Minister in the Commons Chamber being very guarded about what he felt he could say.
The prime purpose of your committee is a kind of reassurance mechanism. They may not be able to tell parliamentarians on the floor of the House of Commons and the House of Lords exactly what's going on, but they can point to a group of [00:03:00] people who are to some extent in the know, and other than think it's okay.
Lord Beamish: Yeah, I'd go further than that…
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