UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 488-i

HOUSE OF LORDS

HOUSE OF COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

JOINT COMMITTEE ON THE NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY

NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY

MONDAY 22 MARCH 2010

RT HON ALAN JOHNSON MP, LORD WEST OF SPITHEAD, RT HON BOB AINSWORTH MP and CHRIS BRYANT MP

Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 72

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

1. This is an uncorrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others.

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5. Transcribed by the Official Shorthand Writers to the Houses of Parliament: W B Gurney & Sons LLP, Hope House, 45 Great Peter Street, London, SW1P 3LT Telephone Number: 020 7233 1935 Oral Evidence

Taken before the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy on Monday 22 March 2010

Members present:

Margaret Beckett, in the Chair

Cope of Berkeley, L. Sir Alan Beith Fellowes, L. Des Browne Foulkes of Cumnock, L. Malcolm Bruce Harris of Haringey, L. Mike Gapes Lee of Trafford, L. Peter Luff Manningham-Buller, B. Sir Malcolm Rifkind Ramsay of Cartvale, B. Paddy Tipping Sterling of Plaistow, L. Keith Vaz Waldegrave of North Hill, L. ______

Memorandum submitted by the Cabinet Office

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Rt Hon Alan Johnson MP, Home Secretary, Lord West of Spithead, a Member of the House of Lords, Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Security and Counter-Terrorism,

Home Office; Rt Hon Bob Ainsworth MP, Secretary of State for Defence, Ministry of

Defence; and Chris Bryant MP, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Foreign and

Commonwealth Office, gave evidence.

Q1 Chair: This is the first public meeting of the Joint Committee on the National Security

Strategy. The Committee’s creation was first mentioned nearly two years ago when the first version of the Strategy was published, but it has taken a little time to get it established. We are very pleased, finally, to be in operation and to welcome our first group of witnesses, who we very much welcome. I am conscious that the Home Secretary is in the Chamber answering questions and will be with us very shortly. As everyone will be conscious, a dissolution is likely to cut short our work in the near term but we hope it will be taken up again in the new Parliament by a successor committee. Can I welcome, in particular, the

2 Defence Secretary, Lord West, Mr Bryant and, as I say, the Home Secretary very shortly. I know that some preliminary questions have been circulated in outline. Could I say to all the witnesses right at the beginning that we hope the whole session will be able to be in public, but if we get into territory where someone feels they would like to expand, but do so in private, I will suspend the Committee and we will go into a short private session at the end, not at the point when it comes up. I hope that is quite clear. I also fear we have to start on perhaps a slightly less than happy note. I think many people in the room will be aware that today we have had announced and published by way of written statement the report on progress on the National Security Strategy, along with the CONTEST annual report, an updated National Risk Register and a number of other documents, which is fine except that the Committee had been given no notice that any of these documents were to be published today. Naturally, we are quite concerned and dismayed that should have happened. I perhaps should put it on record at once that I have had a telephone call of apology from the relevant high authorities but, nevertheless, the Committee does not feel this is a very good precedent.

In particular, if I could add, it would have been more courteous as well as more efficient for us to have been given notice and it would actually have been much more useful for us to have had the documents a few days ahead so that people had the chance to look at them and absorb them so that it could inform the questioning. There are one or two things in the documents, in the brief hour or so that we have had them, that would have informed our questions. If I can place that on record. I do not know whether any of our witnesses feels moved to comment in any way.

Lord West of Spithead: Could I apologise for this. It is an error, it is not correct, and it would have been much better if you had had it in advance. I apologise for that. We will be writing to explain the situation but, to be quite honest, it is not the right way of doing things, I

3 accept that, and I should have ensured that had not happened. I do apologise to the

Committee for it.

Q2 Chair: Thank you very much. To be quite honest, Lord West, although obviously we are a bit dismayed, especially with it being our first session, what matters much more to us is that it is the last time this happens, not that it is the first time. Can I begin by asking about the definition of “national security” that is given in the National Security Strategy. It is an interesting definition. Is it felt already to be standing the test of time?

Lord West of Spithead: I think the position on the definition is I was very keen not to spend days and days trying to refine and define what exactly this definition should be. We provided more of a vision really, which was to protect the United Kingdom and its interests in order to enable its people to go about their lives freely and with confidence. Of course, this was quite a change from any way we had looked at this issue before. We have not had a National

Security Strategy in this country ever. I think it was something that was missing and that we needed. I think we have needed it for a long time. Certainly since the last war it would have been quite useful at various times. It was quite clear to the Prime Minister when he became

Prime Minister, because I had a discussion with him, that we needed to move forward and produce a National Security Strategy, but, because of all the changes and the differences between the Cold War days and now, and the various different threats, we should look at this in a different way and base it really on threats to our citizens, whether in this country or abroad. That was how we arrived at that sort of vision. The danger with it was, of course, it could encompass just about every single thing there was as a threat, so we set a threshold for that. Serious organised crime, for example, was seen as a real risk and a threat to citizens of our country whereas some minor crimes would not be and would not be encompassed by this particular Strategy. Also, that definition allowed us to look at the need for Government and looking after the Government’s capabilities to protect its people as well. We felt that vision

4 did meet the criteria. We have had talks about security and a definition of “security” since then and, as I thought, it ends up with meetings that go on for about five hours with people not coming to a proper conclusion about it, because it is a very interesting point in terms of defence or security and I think it is something we might have to bottom out further. As far as the National Security Strategy goes, that vision is quite appropriate and has enabled us to do quite a lot.

Q3 Chair: I asked if it was meeting the test of time, but also I am slightly interested in how it is evolving. You mentioned serious organised crime and I see in the reports that have been published today there is an indication that a new ministerial sub-committee has been set up specifically to focus on that. Is that because a gap was felt to have emerged?

Lord West of Spithead: That is right. First of all, in answer to your question, yes it has stood the test of time. What the National Security Strategy has done is thrown up lots of areas where we have had to develop work and look at things. There is no doubt that the NSID(OC), serious organised crime, which will be meeting later this week, is one of the things that has popped out of this. As we have looked in detail at it, it is one of the things that has come out, rather like the Cyber Security Strategy came out of this because we looked domains and threat domains for the nation, rather like the work on space and maritime security. All of those areas have been spawned by this National Security Strategy and looking at it in the way we have looked at it. It ranges from state on state, which are the classic areas we did look at, and the Secretary of State for Defence can talk about those areas, but then it goes through things like national building, fragile states, those sorts of things, to the biggest threat we have to our nation, which is terrorism at the moment, and that is the terrorism led by al-Qaeda core in the

Fatah but also the al-Qaeda inspired terrorism that we see, and then down through serious organised crime. It allows us to run right down to things like the Wicks Report, things to do with flooding, civil contingencies, national resilience, the whole issue of energy security. It

5 has enabled us to encompass all of those and these have spawned a mass of work and a lot of things we have been able to focus on and identify gaps where we are doing things.

Q4 Chair: Thank you. En passant almost, could I raise something with you that came out of the briefing the Committee had at our first meeting, which is the issue of existing legislation because, of course, existing legislation focuses on what I might call the “old” definition of national security exclusively. An indication was given to us that it was not thought there was any need to revisit or revise such legislation. Does that remain the view or is that something else that is being kept under review?

Lord West of Spithead: As with a number of other areas we keep it under review, but certainly at the moment it would appear we do not need any specific new legislation as far as I am aware. Can I just throw in an example? If one goes to, say, cyber security, for example, which is a huge area which I am sure you will want to ask more about, within that domain there are ethical and legal issues about exactly how this is done. That might, in due course, as that work is developed by the OCS spawn something where there is some need to actually do something.

Q5 Chair: I take that point. You talked about some of the differences that have come from the publication of the National Security Strategy. One of the things I would quite like to engage the Secretary of State for Defence on is there is a reference about the use of the Armed

Forces being rooted in the Strategy and so on. Has that made a difference to the way that the

Armed Forces approach these issues?

Mr Ainsworth: It has made a very useful contribution to the way that we do things whether or not it is at the strategic level, for instance the recent development of the Green Paper for which the National Security Strategy was an extremely useful jumping in point and the Green

Paper could be developed within the context of the National Security Strategy, right down to

6 individual areas like cyber security and the potential for cyber attacks. The last thing we want is the MoD, who have been doing the assessments of threats in this area for a very long time now, to be developing capability and analysis separate from a joined-up way of approaching things. The very fact that we now do that working together with other government departments is a step in the right direction and what people would expect us to be doing.

Chair: Thank you. Welcome, Home Secretary, we are pleased that you could join us. I am going to move on now to Lord Waldegrave.

Q6 Lord Waldegrave of North Hill: Lord West, I just want to pick up something you said then to explore what is not in the Strategy and how things get in and out of the Strategy. You said that action had been spawned, which I think was your word, by the Strategy on, for example, cyber threats and maritime piracy, but surely it was not the Strategy that spawned those, it was events that spawned those. Things happened and we had to respond to them.

The list has already got longer. The report today has a lot more things in it and any event that happens that represents a threat presumably will be added. The danger of this kind of exercise is that it is so wide it does not really exist and anything gets added to it if an important event comes along. If some people are kidnapped by some other kind of extremists somewhere else they will be added on too, and so on. This links in a little bit to a question I was going to explore later about your risk analysis. Is this a hurdle which really selects things that are of national security or is it going to respond, like governments always have to do, to events?

Lord West of Spithead: There are two parts to that. Clearly governments respond to events, but not always are they going to be encompassed as part of the National Security Strategy.

7 Q7 Lord Waldegrave of North Hill: If they are a serious threat, if maritime pirates come along and they are a new thing and cause us a problem and we have to respond to it then they are in the Strategy by definition, are they not?

Lord West of Spithead: If it is a serious threat then, yes, clearly it would, if it is a serious threat we have not identified which we have not seen in here. For example, let us look at counter-terrorism. Within counter-terrorism, and the Home Secretary can talk in more detail on this than me, there is the whole of the CONTEST Strategy but, for example, if you break out the CONTEST Strategy with the four Ps you will find we have just produced a CBRN

Strategy for the first time ever anywhere in the world in terms of counter-terrorist aspects of that, a Science and Technology Strategy looking at how we use science and technology in academe and things to actually tackle some of those issues. A whole raft of those things has broken out. In terms of cyber, when I came into post two and a half years ago I was in contact with the Cabinet Office straight away talking about cyber but in the context of the

National Security Strategy and looking at the domains this was a clear domain where action and threat action is taken against the nation and quite clearly we needed to have a strategy that actually tackled it within that domain, in the same way as the maritime domain was, in the same way that space was another domain. I think it was quite a good way of identifying those. I do not believe we need to knee-jerk to each little incident, although very often the

Government does have to react to what one might call a small incident. For example, the

Chandlers are very worrying and the Foreign Office are very closely engaged with trying to get them released, but that specific incident would not necessarily say that we have to have a complete strategy on small boats in the Indian Ocean or something. Piracy we had already identified and this is a little subset of that.

Q8 Lord Waldegrave of North Hill: Will things get knocked out of the Strategy because otherwise the danger is as events go rolling on it gets bigger and bigger and there is

8 practically nothing that in the recesses is not a strategy and perhaps has a committee attached to it and people working away at it, and there is a limited amount of resources?

Lord West of Spithead: There are limited resources. I can understand what you are saying but I do not think that danger is as great as you articulate. I think we can keep it constrained.

I do understand where you are coming from.

Q9 Lord Waldegrave of North Hill: It will not be any good if another crisis breaks out and you say, “I am sorry, that is not in the Strategy”. If the public says it is a crisis, it will be a crisis.

Lord West of Spithead: I agree. I would like to think that we have identified within this that these things would pop up and fit neatly into one of the areas we have looked at. One cannot be complacent, maybe there is something we have not spotted, but generally I think we have.

Q10 Sir Malcolm Rifkind: I have just a short point for the Defence Secretary, if I may.

You responded to the question the Chairman asked about the role of the Ministry of Defence in relation to the National Security Strategy, but I think where there is a particular interest is that the document at the moment refers not so much to the Ministry of Defence but their use of the Armed Forces which it says must be rooted in the National Security Strategy framework. My question is, in what way do you feel the use of the Armed Forces may be different in future compared to what it might have been but for the existence of a National

Security Strategy?

Mr Ainsworth: The whole of what we do in defence is connected with our security, which is what it is about at the end of the day. Having the ability at home to provide the necessary back-up to the Police Service as they would require it to some threat that might arise over here right through to what we do and how we do what we do and why we are doing it in

Afghanistan with 9,500 troops is all to do with our national security at the end of the day and

9 has to be linked in to what other departments are doing. One has to continue to see our operations in that light. No one would want us not to be pretty mindful of how what happens abroad can impact on what happens at home, and vice versa. Our Armed Forces have to be, and they are, thoroughly aware of that dimension of all of their activities, whether it is dealing with piracy on the high seas or with the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Q11 Sir Malcolm Rifkind: But you are not envisaging, as I understand it, and correct me if

I am wrong, that on the use of the Armed Forces, which is for ministers to decide rather than the Armed Forces themselves, the Government is contemplating a wider use of our Armed

Forces than has traditionally been the case in the past, or are you?

Mr Ainsworth: The Strategy has been particularly useful in enabling people to understand exactly how the different elements of our security fit together. It is very important for everybody to do with homeland security to know exactly what defence can provide for what duration and on what timescales when they are planning the size and shape of their own capability. That is where the Strategy is particularly useful.

Q12 Lord Waldegrave of North Hill: I am very sorry to talk too much, but the third area that the Committee wants to explore is a favourite one of mine, which is risk assessment and management, which is very important and it is good that it is at the heart of the Strategy, but it is very difficult to resist pressures of anxiety. For example, it is now clear in retrospect that risk assessment by the Department of Health over Swine Flu was wrong. It was done quite properly, and so on, but it was actually wrong and we probably spent a lot of money unnecessarily as a result. It was wrong for all the right reasons, and so on and so forth. How do you say “no” to something which is causing really profound anxiety? The most famous example of these are usually around things like civil nuclear, which has a far greater spend per safety than any other industry, but you have to spend more on nuclear because people are

10 more anxious about it and you have to respond to the public. In the end your risk assessment, which your statisticians produce for you - I do not mean you, I mean us - tends to go out of the window when public anxiety comes along. You then have the other very complicated aspect which is how do you balance a very big risk which is very remote, like a meteorite strike, which you probably cannot do anything about, against a much lesser risk which is much more probable? You will have people telling you you should put meteorite strikes in here if you are not careful.

Lord West of Spithead: First of all, I would say I disagree with you on the flu pandemic.

Alan Johnson: So do I!

Lord West of Spithead: I think what is very interesting with that is that we have produced our first National Risk Register. This was the first time this had ever been done, this was in

2008. Every year we produced a thing called an NRA, which was classified, and what we wanted to do was let out to the local resilience fora and the regional resilience fora for them to understand what the risks were as we identified them as fell out of the National Security

Strategy so they could actually see, “What are the things that are a risk to us locally?” We had a big debate, should we put in graph format what is the most likely, what would have the greatest impact and try to do that because you immediately become a sort of Aunt Sally where people throw things at you. I said, “We jolly well are going to try and do it. We are not going to cop out on this, we will try and do it”. The highest risk identified in that was that there would be a flu pandemic and, therefore, people made certain preparations for that.

Those preparations paid off. We learned more lessons and did very well in terms of handling that pandemic. We were very lucky that it was not of a more virulent type. It could easily have been an avian flu type or one of the ones we saw as being really dangerous and then thank goodness we reacted as we did. As it was, I think we reacted very well, we actually constrained it. One can argue that it was not as bad as people might have thought, but I think

11 we deserve a huge tick for that. I think it was a great success and we should be very pleased with that. It was identified as very high priority. I do not think I have got a meteorite strike, but there are some things which are much more remote with quite catastrophic impacts which are much further down the X axis. We have tried to identify that. For the first time ever, as I say, we have given some sort of risk assessment and let the public be aware of this because it is unclassified in exactly the same way as we fought so hard to make the CONTEST Strategy unclassified and in the same way as we fought with almost every publication to do it - and sometimes it has been extremely difficult to do that - so they can see the working, they can actually tackle those issues, and the local resilience forum can sit down with their local money, look at what the priorities should be there and take some action. I believe we have tried to tackle this. Is it absolutely right? We have just produced another National Risk

Register, the second one has come out this week, is it absolutely right? I would not be complacent, I do not think it is, more work will need to be done. We do horizon scanning domestically looking at civil contingencies, we do horizon scanning looking at foreign policy and external issues, and then we draw that together to try and produce these priorities and risk assessment and I think we have done quite well. If you look at the graph we produced the first time and look at this one, it is not too bad.

Q13 Lord Waldegrave of North Hill: Just one quick follow-up. The problem is where people’s anxieties are concerned your calculus gets swept away. The late Lord Rothschild famously said that there is as much chance of a nuclear explosion from a civil nuclear power station as there is from chewing chewing gum, which is more or less true but it did not convince anybody and you still have to spend a great deal more on civil nuclear safety than you do on road safety per death. In the end I am just a little anxious that you still have to respond to what the public wants on these things, whatever your calculus tells you.

12 Lord West of Spithead: I agree absolutely that perception is hugely important. Let us take nuclear safety, for example. I did a very close look at nuclear safety, I was not content, and

DECC are doing an awful lot of things to put that right and I am a lot happier than I was. You do have to spend money, you are absolutely right. That balance of resources can be quite a tricky debate sometimes, I agree. We have identified risks, we have looked at them in detail, and what we are able to do with this National Security Strategy is actually tally things across.

We are able to relate counter-terrorism to serious organised crime, we are working to see how they relate, and we are able to pull other factors together whether to do with civilian resilience, all the work that has been done by CPNI, and that has been very helpful coming out of this. As I say, we have not got a perfect answer, but it is very interesting that an awful lot of other countries are looking at the way we are doing this and seem to have been taken by it.

Q14 Peter Luff: Just on the lessons of the flu pandemic, you talked about resilience but why is it then, for example, we do not seem to have learned one lesson of the flu pandemic and are concentrating all the fire and rescue services in single regional centres which are much more exposed to the risk of a pandemic than a diverse network structure of fire control centres?

Lord West of Spithead: You have caught me flat aback on that and I am afraid I cannot answer that. I know that we have been getting lessons learned from it the whole time but I do not know the answer to that. I would have to get back to you in writing, I honestly do not know.

Chair: If you could let us have a note about it perhaps. Lord Fellowes, did you want to follow up on this?

Q15 Lord Fellowes: If I could, please. This follows naturally from the last exchange.

Perhaps I could ask the Home Secretary if he is happy with the public engagement with the

13 National Security Strategy. At the moment it seems to me that it is minimal. It is all very well making things available but you have somehow got to catch the public’s attention. It is now restricted really to the change in the threat level or maybe being told for the umpteenth time not to leave their bags unattended at an airport. I just wonder whether a little more frankness with the public would lead to more of an open channel between public and

Government as to the Strategy?

Alan Johnson: This is something that I have been thinking about since we put the threat level up to “severe” in light of the Detroit incident at Christmas. You all know the history of this. The history of this was that security alert was always something internal for the security forces and other agencies, for the police and others who guard our system, it was never made public. There was a big push to say the public have a right to know what the security alert is and in response to that we agreed to make the security alert public. If the question is, should we go a step further and actually say why we have come to that conclusion or even give some outline reason as to why we have come to that conclusion in the interests of public engagement with our security strategy I would be nervous. All I know is we were desperately worried that any conjecture about why we had done that could have damaged our ability to gain intelligence information. Indeed, there were about seven different theories running in the next Sunday’s papers of various reasons why this happened. One was supposed to be because of something that happened in India and another one was to do with another part of the world.

We could not risk damaging the intelligence upon which JTAC based that assessment. I kind of like to hold it here actually and in doing that I do realise for the public being told to be more alert means very little to them, but I think we have got as far as we need to go. The public is aware of what the security level is. If you go any further than that you are seriously putting the public at more risk by damaging the intelligence that led to that assessment.

14 Q16 Lord Fellowes: Thank you. The problem with that is you are going to get nothing back from the public. I just feel that there could be a little more openness with a consequent reward from the public. I think very often the public is better at dealing with “confidential” material than it is given credit for.

Alan Johnson: This is the kind of thing I have been thinking of. People said, “You are asking the public to be more alert because we are now on a higher level of alert, is there a number they can ring? Is there something they can do if they see something on a train that is less bureaucratic and less time consuming than chasing after a train guard who probably has difficulty understanding what he or she should do next”. Lord West and I have been thinking about that kind of aspect and you are right there. I am with you on making it mean something more realistic to the public but I would really counsel anyone against thinking that we should give more information about why we reached that decision, which was the major debate that was going on at the time and one which I think would be very dangerous.

Lord West of Spithead: As I said earlier, we made a huge advance in the sense that

CONTEST was an unclassified document. We really had to wrestle with that. The agencies worked really hard to try and ensure that they could get stuff down to effectively unclassified, and it was really nip and tuck to do it. We made a point of doing that. In the same way the

National Risk Register is unclassified, we have really tried to do this to get this out. The

Home Secretary is absolutely right on the other point. The other thing with the change in the threat alert state is below that apparent threat alert state are a whole tapestry of other alerts, all of which slightly change for certain public buildings and certain areas. All of that changes, which is all unseen, of course, and that is the other aspect.

Q17 Keith Vaz: Following on from what Lord Fellowes has said, while obviously one accepts you cannot give out confidential information I think both you, Home Secretary, and

Lord West accept that the current situation is not absolutely perfect because the public will be

15 worried when the threat level is suddenly raised and they do not know what more is expected of them. I welcome the fact that you are both looking at this to see how you can reassure the public, that is very helpful. In terms of the National Security Strategy and the impact on individual departments, the Strategy obviously expects more of departments than in the past.

Is there now an appreciation amongst the various departments that they are all expected to do something more as a result of the NSS?

Lord West of Spithead: I think the answer is yes. We have a National Security Secretariat now firmly embedded in the Cabinet Office which has that ability to reach out. I have to say, one of the things that I have found very reassuring in the two and a half years or so that I have been in Government after the Prime Minister asked me to come in was the way the OSCT -

Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism - within the Home Office has co-ordinated counter-terrorism across all government departments. I have to say my experience of 20-odd years in Whitehall when I have not been at sea is that trying to make big government departments work together has not always been the most successful thing that I have ever seen. I think it has worked really well. We are carrying this across into the National Security

Strategy. I know the Secretariat work very hard in trying to make these connections. Have we totally got there yet, the answer is no and we have to keep working at it all the time. I can see it, for example, in the cyber security area where still we are having to make sure that departments are absolutely pulling together and we need to keep working at it but, my goodness me, it is a real step change and I believe the National Security Strategy has helped that.

Q18 Keith Vaz: Do we have some figures as to how much is being spent by each department on national security? We obviously know the Home Office figures because you have given them to us before.

16 Lord West of Spithead: We have the £3.5 billion. I have got some budgets but I give a caveat on these: these are in my brief. I am always very wary when I use these sorts of things.

The security intelligence agencies, I have got £2.2 billion altogether; the Home Office £1.030 billion; the Ministry of Defence, their core budget is £34 billion and parts of that are involved in nation building, all of this sort of work, but all the other aspects as well; the FCO has £2.1 billion roughly; and DFID about £122 million. If you add all that together there is quite a lot of money involved really.

Q19 Keith Vaz: This represents a substantial increase, does it, over the last ten years?

Lord West of Spithead: Yes. The figure you will clearly recognise is the £1 billion that was spent on counter-terrorism, so to speak, back at the time of 9/11 which is now £3.5 billion. It depends how you break these figures out, of course, which is why I am always very wary of actually quoting them. The bottom line is we have spent a lot more and doubled the size of the Security Service. The Home Secretary has got all of these figures at his fingertips.

Seventy per cent more SO15 people.

Chris Bryant: Just to prove that the figures are not entirely reliable, that is the total Foreign

Office budget that was just referred to rather than the specifics. If I might just make a point in relation to that, which is there are so many areas of what the Foreign Office is engaged in that have a direct implication in relation to this, whether that is our engagement in Afghanistan, which would be obvious to everybody, or, for that matter, as we are at the moment, negotiating within the European Union on the Free Trade Agreement with the Andean countries where we have insisted on a WMD clause, not because we think Colombia and Peru are developing weapons of mass destruction but because we want to be able to insist on every other EU agreement that there may be in any other part of the world that there is a similar

WMD clause.

17 Mr Ainsworth: Just for clarification, Lord West knocked £1 billion off my budget that I would like back!

Lord West of Spithead: You can see my worry.

Chair: I think it strongly reinforces your point.

Q20 Lord Foulkes of Cumnock: It is interesting that we got disagreement once we were on to money. I want to follow up Keith’s question about cooperation between departments and ask about the cooperation with the devolved administrations, particularly in Scotland where there is a difference of emphasis, perhaps even stronger than that, in relation to nuclear power, the independent deterrent, membership of NATO. How has cooperation been with the devolved administrations, particularly Scotland?

Lord West of Spithead: As far as I am aware it has been good. Certainly the National

Security Secretariat and the departments involved in various aspects of this security do link out to the devolved administrations. Of course, there are certain things that are kept to

Whitehall but we still talk about them with those administrations.

Q21 Lord Foulkes of Cumnock: I get the impression that there is close cooperation with the police in Scotland and operational agencies but not necessarily with the government, as they call themselves, the Scottish Executive. You sound almost as if you are not fully aware, although you may be now you have got a piece of paper from the lady behind you, as to whether or not there is the kind of cooperation that you and your colleagues would consider desirable, or if there is something more that needs to be done there.

Lord West of Spithead: I am delighted to say that the paragraph I have been given says what

I said. That is really nice when that happens, it reassures one. The only little bit in there which I did not touch on was the civil emergency aspect and we work very closely in that

18 arena. This is the Civil Contingency Secretariat and those particular ones, we work very closely there. Yes, we do link and talk to them on these issues.

Q22 Lord Cope of Berkeley: I want to come back to money again because I am not clear at the moment, for instance, in the Ministry of Defence how you have spent money differently or used people differently from the Armed Forces and other people as a result of the existence of the Strategy than what was going to happen in any case.

Mr Ainsworth: Overwhelmingly the difference in the Ministry of Defence, and this is something that has been not only seen but required and cried out for over the years, is the strengthening of the co-ordinating capability of the Cabinet Office. Whether you are talking about Afghanistan, where largely that is three departments of government that need to work completely and absolutely together in order to get development capability, Foreign Office policy and defence capability as married as they can be in order to be as effective as they can be, or whether it is then including the Home Office and making sure that the Home Office dimension of our operations in Afghanistan are not left behind, there will be people in defence who have said over the years that there is a need for that to be completely and absolutely joined up. I think that the National Security Strategy, the apparatus, the committee that we call NSID, which really is a national security committee that brings all of the departments together as is appropriate, is vital to how defence does its business. The Armed Forces know that they cannot be successful on operations unless there is politics and development operating hand in glove with them. Unless that is linked back to the reasons why many of those operations exist in the first place, and that is to protect our national interests and our national security, and that is understood at home then we will not be able to maintain support for the kinds of things we do in the first place. Strengthening that central co-ordinating capability is something that is hugely welcomed in the Department and in the Armed Forces themselves.

19 Lord West of Spithead: Could I add to that because I can see your confusion there. The CSR agreement has not been changed by the National Security Strategy but, as the Secretary of

State absolutely says, the co-ordination now is much, much better and in terms of movements of money it has only been marginal little bits of money being shifted. For example, this morning I announced the formation of the NMIC which the Secretary of State for Defence allowed to be put into the maritime headquarters at Northwood which meant, of course, we got this for something like £380,000. If we had had to build somewhere for it, it would have cost millions and millions. It has been that sort of thing because of the co-ordination he is talking about. Until there is a new CSR it will not make that sort of change.

Q23 Lord Cope of Berkeley: I am sure we all welcome the additional co-ordination and more joined-up approach as you have described, but it is very interesting that not any large sums of money have been expended differently from how they would have been otherwise, only at the margin, and quite a few people in the Cabinet Office, as it were, rather than larger slabs of money or people doing different things.

Chris Bryant: I am not sure that would be true from the Foreign Office perspective. It may be that we have not decided suddenly to take people off doing job X and put them on to job

Y, but we have certainly reprioritised a lot of what we do so that, for instance, energy security and climate change are two of our key policies that we want to pursue with our neighbours.

That informs our policy in relation to Turkey, for instance, in relation to energy security, but also in relation to counter-narcotics or in relation to burden sharing with other countries around the world, not just in terms of military operations but in terms of development assistance and a whole range of other policing outcomes that we want to see.

Q24 Des Browne: Following up on this point, given my experience in the MoD, if I may just make an observation. In my time in the MoD the existence of a strategic approach to

20 national security meant that in civil contingencies we went from the test of the Government’s contribution being how quickly you could deploy our Armed Forces into that environment to a situation where the need to deploy our Armed Forces into that environment was the test of the Government’s failure to respond to a civil emergency certainly in the media’s mind. That was a focus of the ability of civil capacity to respond in a strategic sense rather than the first resort being our Armed Forces. This goes back to the point Sir Malcolm Rifkind made earlier on what are the significant changes that this strategic approach to national security is making about the use of our Armed Forces and rather than stretching them further it is concentrating them where their capabilities lie. The question I want to ask is how is this reflected in the review just concluded of the use of our Reserve Forces and how is it reflected in our preparation for the Strategic Defence Review and the building of capabilities in the future?

Does it mean effectively that we are able to preserve our Armed Forces for the sorts of environments that they are uniquely trained to deploy into?

Mr Ainsworth: The point that has just been made is a trend that has happened over a long period of time and was happening before the National Security Strategy and continues. That is that defence capability, Armed Forces capability, is seen as being something that is not automatically called upon in any given circumstance. What we have seen over a long period of time is various organisations, most particularly the police, developing their own capability so that defence is not as required as it was. This is not a job that defence has particularly wanted to do in some areas and so has wanted to see people grow their own capability and that is to be effectively held in reserve. What arises from that is the need for a very clear understanding of what we in defence can and cannot do. It is no good people planning their capability believing that in any given circumstance the Army, the Navy or the Air Force will be there instantaneously in force for such and such a period of time without knowing exactly what will be provided over what timescales, for what duration and, therefore, what capability

21 they need to develop themselves. When you ask how that plays into the Strategic Defence

Review, this is a specific question that we raised in the Green Paper because we are not sure whether that has gone too far or far enough and whether defence still ought to be considered to be a larger part of the landscape back here for resilience in the United Kingdom. It is a question that has been flagged up: have we taken that question far enough or have we taken it too far? Is defence effectively not considered in these circumstances to the extent that it should be? This is something that should be examined as part of the Strategic Defence

Review.

Lord West of Spithead: We have gone a lot further in terms of resolving some of the problems there were in our critical infrastructure resilience. Some documents produced today show how we are tackling all those areas. The police, the emergency services and all the various departments involved are far better placed now than they were in that area but, as the

Secretary of State for Defence said, it is an issue that needs to be addressed. Interestingly, in the French White Paper which was produced in 2008 after our first National Security

Strategy, and I had quite a lot of dialogue with their man who wrote that, they went a lot further down the track in terms of tying their army to départements in France. My own personal view is I do not think that is absolutely the right way of doing things, but they have their own reasons for doing it. This is an issue that we need to think about. On a specific tiny one, let us say something like the Mumbai type thing, do we want to look at use of military some more there. There is an issue that has to be addressed and the Home Secretary is addressing that at the moment. These sorts of things do have to be addressed.

Q25 Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale: What I want to ask follows on very well from what has been discussed. Do you really think that the existing arrangements for the strategic overview of the National Security Strategy are adequate? I know we are very wedded in this country to the idea of lead departments and this is the philosophy of how it is to work, but

22 there is also an argument that could be made, and do you feel that this has been strengthened by your experience of the last two or three years, for one specific point of a permanent lead department, if you like, on security. The way we think about things, for example, when the

Civil Contingency Bill was going Parliament, it was quite clear everybody was passionate to avoid looking as if we were cloning a Homeland Security department. In doing that have we not perhaps leant too far away from that? Is there not a case for having everything centred more in a department? We know there is a National Security Secretariat in Number 10 but it is not a secretariat one is really thinking about. What about a department with perhaps a senior Cabinet minister responsible for national security?

Lord West of Spithead: That is a model that could be used and it is something we have looked at. What is quite clear is that the Prime Minister sees himself as the person who is responsible for national security and takes this very seriously. I do not like the acronym

National Security, International Relations and Development Committee - NSID. NSID and its sub-committees meets pretty regularly actually, it takes a lot of time of various secretaries of state to go to these meetings. The NSID itself, the top-hamper meeting, the Prime Minister chairs it, as he chairs some of the sub-committees but not all of them, and it has secretaries of state there, the CDS there, the agency heads there and the police there as necessary. It has all the right people there. I believe that does give a proper oversight and proper direction to people to do things. I have already mentioned the OSCT in terms of counter-terrorism, which sits in the Home Office, and that works extremely well. I have to say I was surprised because before I came in I did not think that was a very good model. It was being formed at the time I joined and it has worked exceptionally well. Probably that NSID structure with all of the sub- committees that look at specifics like Afghanistan and Pakistan, for example, which the Prime

Minister chairs, and there is one that does protect and prepare areas of counter-terrorism which the Home Secretary chairs, is quite a good way of looking at it. The fact that there is

23 now this Committee is important. I know it has taken time to get it. One of those very valuable things to do will be to try to work out how one gets to grips with some of these things and I am very keen to see how the Committee gets to grips with it. I think this whole area is so important it needs that sort of look. Another thing that helps in NSID is the

National Security Forum, which I chair, which is made up of a team of the great and the good which has done a huge number of papers in terms of energy security, a whole raft of issues, which they then feed into the NSID ministers to look at. It is not half bad. I think it is quite good. I am not sure going down that other route would be easy, there would be difficulties there, but it is another model and it is something we should not shut our minds to as we develop where we are going. It is absolutely right for this Committee to have a think about that and have views on it. At the moment I believe the oversight is far better than people think. People talk about national security and the NSC, but this is very similar to the NSC. In fact, it is rather better in some ways because I think some of the advice it gets is rather better, but that is another issue. I do not think going down a DHS route would have been a good idea at all, one only needs to look at some of the aspects there. I do not think we have done badly.

Mr Ainsworth: I do not think you could ever set your face against some other structure. The most important thing is you get departments working together as well as you can and that is enormously difficult. What we are saying to you is we believe we have made a lot of progress, although no one would suggest that it is perfect. If you decide to set up another construction, effectively you are not necessarily getting people to work better together, you are moving the boundaries, and there are some dangers. Where is the other natural state for those boundaries to be? I really do worry that there is a trend and a tendency - I get it from my constituents and see it in Parliament as well - to believe that you can defend the United

Kingdom within the United Kingdom almost, at the border, so I would not want to see what happens away being divorced from what happens at home because they are intrinsically

24 attached. Our national interests stretch around the world and we have to provide national security in-depth effectively. Simply providing another government architecture would not necessarily getting us work well together. There has been some considerable improvement in getting us working together, but no one is suggesting it is perfect and we do not need to drive that further. Another construction? Where would the boundaries fall and would they be in a better place than they are at the moment?

Q26 Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale: It was not meant to be a criticism of lack of co- ordination, I am sure it is working well, we can see that, and nothing is perfect, but the advantage of having one permanent lead department, if you like, is really where the boundaries are. It is not taking over from any one department. It is full-time on the topic of national security, a senior Cabinet minister whose job is that, not the thousand and one things you all have to do as well as national security.

Alan Johnson: Can I just have a stab at defending the role of the Home Secretary as the lead minister.

Q27 Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale: It was not an attack.

Alan Johnson: I know it was not. Since 1782 the Foreign Office and Home Office, the two first ever departments of state, have worked very closely together. The reason why the Home

Office is better placed now to lead on national security is because of two things. First of all, we are responsible for crime but not punishment now, so the Dostoevsky principle.

Punishment went over to the MoJ and it was a deliberate attempt to focus the Home Office on counter-terrorism, policing and immigration, border control. That is one important development. The second is the move from the OSCT from Cabinet Office into the Home

Office and that has been a very important development. It means that you would just be moving things around virtually for the sake of it to try and create a Janet Napolitano in the

25 US, Minister for Homeland Security, when you have got the co-ordinating machinery which, as Bob says, is absolutely vital and you have got some of the stuff that the Home Office was dealing with. As Paddy knows, they used to deal with fox hunting and used to own half the pubs and clubs in Carlisle because they nationalised them in the First World War and owned them until the 1970s. Lots of things that the Home Office did they do not they do not do any more, there is a whole list of them. That is the biggest contribution to your question, which was a very valid question, how do you focus attention on national security.

Q28 Paddy Tipping: Can I return to an issue that has been talked about a time or to, which is energy policy. Most of our utilities are owned and managed, and well managed, by the private sector, but if the lights go out it is not the chief executive of E.ON who is going to be held to account, it is going to be the secretary of state. How are we ensuring that those private sector companies are hooked into the decision-making, the process of building resistance?

Lord West of Spithead: In that area of energy and numerous other areas our links with industry are exceptionally good. Maybe if I start at some at the other end first of all. Last week we had a Home Office Scientific Development Branch exhibition, which it has held now for some 20 or 30 years and which we have expanded dramatically. It had just under 400

British exhibiters, a lot of SMEs, we tied in UKTI and had over 3,000 specially invited people from around the world. We have had a series of discussions with all of our various industries in this security area. Our links now with industry are better in that area than they have ever been probably. When we move to the next step up to critical national infrastructure and

CPNI’s work, we link again very closely with firms. There are firms where they have trusted people in them who we are able to talk to at a very high classification about security issues.

Baroness Manningham-Buller will know this well from her time within the Security Service.

Again, when the Americans come over they are very impressed that we have links at this level with so many of these companies and are able to talk to them. We have had a series of

26 seminars about risk and how these things should be handled. When it comes to crowded places and shopping centres, again we have very close links with all the various shopping centres, with hotel groups and things like that, better than it has ever been. On the energy side specifically I think we do keep ourselves very locked into that. A lot of work has gone on in response to the paper about energy which is all being pulled together at the moment. The

NSF has looked at that as well. There is, of course, a foreign dimension to that and the

Foreign Office will be very happy to talk about that area. In terms of firms, we are very closely linked in. Similarly, in cyber security we are closely linked in and there is the use of

SMEs particularly and smaller groups. There is an amazing opportunity in the security area - this is an advert I am going to give - where British industry could really capture a great chunk of the market. We hold something like 19 per cent of the world defence market and we only hold four per cent of the security market, but the 3,500 people who came to that show last week were amazed at the things that are coming out of our academe and British industry, particularly at SME level, amazing technologies, and I think we could jump up and get up to that level. It is a fantastic opportunity. Overall, I do believe we work very closely.

Q29 Paddy Tipping: Perhaps I can come to the Foreign Office in a minute. Most of our energy companies are foreign owned and decisions are taken by boards in Spain, Germany and France. You say you have got good links, but does the telephone link across to Berlin and Paris? Who do you talk to at the top board level?

Lord West of Spithead: I have to say I would have to take notice on that question. I do not know exactly who because that is not really my exact focus.

Chris Bryant: It is a bit of ours. In Russia they complain that too much of the Russian energy market is owned by people living in Britain or, for that matter, Britons. That is one of the constant elements of debate that we have with our Russian counterparts. Before my visit to Moscow earlier this year, for instance, I made sure that I was speaking to the very senior

27 figures in the British energy companies working out there. We also try to ensure our energy security. Although we only got two per cent of British gas from Russia at the moment, nonetheless in the future it is likely that a greater proportion might. Also, the energy security of our European allies is just as important to us because if they collapse then the impact for us would be significant. I would say that we have been the leading country in trying to make sure that there is not another outage between Ukraine and Russia, and pretty successfully we have managed the transition from the old government to the new in Ukraine and are hopeful in future years there will be a much more secure way of maintaining that. The other thing that we have argued for a long time is that liberalisation of the energy market across Europe would be a useful step to try and ensure our energy security rather than to undermine it, because some of the ways that energy deals are constructed between Germany, for instance, and

Russia do not help the rest of Europe to get a good price; they effectively rig the market.

Again, that is another area where what would feel like ordinary Foreign Office business is actually an essential part of trying to maintain our energy security.

Lord West of Spithead: Our response to Malcolm Wicks’ review is going to come out very, very shortly with inputs from a whole raft. DECC are leading on that.

Q30 Paddy Tipping: One of the issues of the Wicks Review is that it could be the case by

2020 that 90 per cent of our electricity will be generated from gas, 80 per cent of which could be exported. That is a pretty insecure situation to be in.

Lord West of Spithead: You have highlighted some of the areas of concern. That is why we are addressing it so much. Of course there are the environmental aspects that we are looking at. Our response will be out shortly on this, but you are absolutely right and it is an area that is of great concern, and that is why we are looking at it so closely.

Chris Bryant: Politically also the European Union is absolutely essential to this. I know

Norway is not in the European Union but a significant amount of this is coming from Norway

28 into Europe and despite not being a member Norway sticks by all the rules of the Union. We also know that across Europe we have to have a much better connected grid so there is much better energy resilience in the other countries.

Q31 Paddy Tipping: Perhaps I could pursue one small point. You said earlier on that you had been anxious about our civil nuclear programme, and that you had had a good look at it and DECC were now spending, I think to quote you, a lot of money on it.

Lord West of Spithead: They are doing a lot of work to resolve this and a lot has been resolved.

Q32 Paddy Tipping: Tell us what the issues are now.

Lord West of Spithead: I do not think I want to go into those.

Q33 Malcolm Bruce: I want to follow up the conversation you have had which is somewhat fascinating but does not quite explain how the National Strategy formulates or influences policy. You were giving us an indication of some of the issues. A few years ago Gazprom indicated they wanted to take over Centrica and I never heard a word from the British

Government suggesting that it was not a reasonable market proposition. Presumably at some point you might come to a conclusion that there were good security reasons for not doing it. I am interested to know who is going to resolve those kinds of policy dilemmas. On the other side of that, we have had British energy companies investing in Russia and finding their assets effectively appropriated or certainly undermined, so we have a business strategy or an economic strategy and we have a National Security Strategy and they would appear, if you look at the last few years, to be in conflict, so how does the policy dilemma resolve? When does the National Security Strategy kick in and the normal economic or business policy succumb to that?

29 Lord West of Spithead: You are raising a very important area and it is to do with sovereign capability, what control we keep over certain aspects of our industrial base and things like that. There is a group within the Cabinet Office that does look at that, but I think it is something into which we probably need to put more effort. The Defence Secretary will be able to speak on the defence aspects of it. Let us take cyber for example. I believe we need our own ability in terms of crypto and things like which I believe we have to keep within our own nation to be able to do. A decision has been made that that should be the case. When it comes to some of these larger issues in terms of should this or that company be allowed to take over, these things are looked at by a group in the Cabinet Office and they need to be debated. There is one going on at the moment and I will not mention that one because of that, but these things are looked at and analysed. I think we maybe need to do more work overall in looking at some of these sovereign capability issues. I know for example in areas of food supply and things like that, we are now so much in a just enough/just-in-time economy that it is very easy to break this cycle and provide this stuff. If one looks at the impact of the ice storm in Canada just before 2000, when they almost lost everything in Montreal, there were things that were affected that we never thought would be. These things all relate to each other so, for example, not being able to use a cash point card, not being able to get money meant that people could not go and buy food so the next thing was they were breaking into stores and so on and so on. We look at all these things and we have a horizon scanning group that looks at domestic issues. That needs to be tallied across to some of the bigger work on sovereign capability issues.

Bob Ainsworth: These strategies are not divorced one from the other; quite the reverse.

There is a recognition in the National Security Strategy and repeated, and we attempt to stand it up in the Defence Green Paper that we cannot possibly, like it or like it not, defend ourselves on our own from the many threats that there are for the many interests that we have.

30 We have to work with others. We have to have defence capabilities that support the international rule of law because we cannot defend our energy supplies as a nation. It is not just pipes from Russia, which everybody tends to concentrate on in this Department, but a large proportion of our gas comes from the Middle East through the Strait of Hormuz pirate waters so freedom of the seas is an important part of this. We cannot and we do not do that on our own. We have neighbouring task forces dealing with piracy now that come from so many different nations working together. Configuring our defence capabilities and configuring our security capabilities so that they support the rule of law and therefore the free supply of food and energy that our country is so dependent upon is built into our strategies; it is not divorced from our strategies.

Q34 Malcolm Bruce: I accept that but I think Lord West touched on the point that through globalisation and other strategies it has left us much more vulnerable to things beyond our control. Does it not start to suggest, and will the public not come to the conclusion, that whilst we have to work internationally and we need co-operation we perhaps need to think about having more of our own national security and the resources and the communications under our own control and be less dependent on international co-operation. Without in any way disagreeing with you about international co-operation, is not that where it might lead?

Bob Ainsworth: As Lord West started to touch on this, we tried to deal with that with the

Defence Industrial Strategy, for instance to maintain sovereign capability; what exactly do we need to be able to produce in the United Kingdom and what can we trust to the world market and the free availability of defence capability. It is something we have wrestled with in that area and I think it is something that we have to wrestle with in every area. To what degree are there practical alternatives in terms of self-sufficiency in sovereign capability, and where it makes sense we ought to look to develop them. As a nation we are a very outward-looking,

31 globally dependent nation that has benefited hugely from globalisation as well as having these risks that we have to mitigate.

Chris Bryant: If I can reply specifically to the Russia issue, you are absolutely right that there have been significant problems for British and other investors in Russia in terms of their fears of expropriation. When I was there recently all the British companies were saying that they were having an effective operation now and things had improved somewhat, but there is another problem for us which is that if there is not significantly more investment in Russia then the likelihood is that the oil and gas is not going to keep on coming. There is a third- level problem for Russia itself which is being just an oil and gas economy is a very dangerous position to put yourself in. As long as prices are high you are fine, but in times when they are low, things are very dangerous for you. That is why we have also looked at other countries where there have been some problems. We have had to work hard with Venezuela around some very similar issues. For instance, you may make lots of money in hydrocarbons in

Venezuela but you might not be able to take any of the money out of Venezuela. Similarly, if there is going to be oil taken out of the Gulf of Mexico, Mexico is going to have to change its laws.

Q35 Lord Waldegrave of North Hill: I would like to follow on from what Malcolm Bruce was saying, not so specifically in relation to energy companies, although I think what he has been saying is very important. I was very glad to hear you talk about food, Lord West.

Neville Chamberlain, I think, said in 1936 that it was the “height of midsummer madness” to grow food in England when we can buy it much more cheaply from America, which did not turn out to be a very good plan.

Chris Bryant: He got quite a few things wrong!

32 Q36 Lord Waldegrave of North Hill: I think it is very good that you are thinking about these things but you are going to have some real difficulties in that the European Union does not like golden shares and the Treasury does not like golden shares. If the shareholders of

Rolls-Royce decided to sell it tomorrow you would have quite a difficulty. I know that liberal market theory will tell you that it is perfectly good that your suppliers are American or

German or Spanish and in good, easy times it is but in bad times it is not. I worked before and after I was in Parliament for one Great British firm, which now sadly does not exist any more, and two foreign firms, and I can tell you they are different kinds of things. As you very well know, the heart and soul of the GEC was led in this country and if the British

Government went to see it, it got listened to. The heart and soul of those other two great firms, one Swiss and one German, were in Germany and in Switzerland when push comes to shove. We have to think a little about this without throwing away our commitment to free markets overall. There has to be a core and I am not sure we are in a position where the legal powers are there for you. I hope you are working on it.

Lord West of Spithead: All I would say is that this is an area that we do look at. You raise some very valid points. I believe that if we make the decision that the national interest is total in doing something, it is amazing how one can ensure that one achieves that somehow. I agree it is a very difficult area and it is something we need to look at. We are looking at it and we also look at the inter-dependency between these various things.

Q37 Lord Sterling of Plaistow: I would like to continue with what Malcolm Bruce was referring to. Having been part of international trade most of my working life, plus a company where there was no way whatsoever where the control could go elsewhere, it happened to be

P&O, which some of you might have heard of, the point that Admiral West brings up about just-in-time delivery is absolutely key. The whole world is moving to that but we are still an island and what I was curious about when you were saying you were looking at a forward

33 strategy is what might happen within Europe and the European Union could be very important in the years to come. If I may address this particularly to the Foreign Office, when you are looking at the long-term national interests around this table taking a 30, 40 or 50 year view, not tomorrow, not the next election, to what extent are you asking in those scenarios who will be our allies? What would happen if the European Union did not exist and broke up in some format? Where would it come from? What would our energy situation be? Do you go as far as that in foreign policy taking a view around the world where our interests might lie?

Chris Bryant: Was it Wellington or Canning or Castlereagh, one of those three, who said

“Britain has no permanent allies; it only has permanent interests”.

Q38 Lord Waldegrave of North Hill: That was Palmerston I think.

Chris Bryant: Palmerston, sorry! It is good to have an Etonian on board just to be able to remind us. I knew somebody said it anyway. The point I was going to make was obviously we have to be absolutely focused on our interests and sometimes we have to persuade others in Europe that our interests lie in exactly the same place as theirs, but there are key elements of our security which we know are enduring and which are perfectly aligned with every single one of our European allies. I have mentioned some of them already today in relation to energy security. That is not going to go away in 30 or 40 years’ time. Likewise in relation to climate change that is why climate change has been one of the key issues that we have wanted to pursue vigorously with our European allies.

Lord West of Spithead: We have a horizon scanning unit within the Cabinet Office whose job is to look out into the future in this sort of way. I am not sure if they have looked in detail out to 50 years with alliances. I have to say I do not know whether they have done that work but they do look ahead to look at options. I am a great believer in what I call “red teaming”, which is thinking the unthinkable from other areas and then trying to work on that. So there is work that goes on specifically set up to look at the “what ifs” looking to the future.

34 Bob Ainsworth: The Ministry of Defence produced a paper alongside the Green Paper on global threat trends and that went out to 40 years but, as ever with these things, they are trends and they can never fully anticipate shocks and changes that will inevitably come about. There was a very serious attempt to analyse those trends and the potential need for changes of stance over the long term.

Q39 Lord Sterling of Plaistow: But just adding to that, when it comes to the Strategic

Defence Review, which I look forward to with deep interest, unquestionably that is going to be a key question that is foreign policy-led, but when you are going into that in depth, and it does go on a wide round of protecting the trade lanes of this country, which is what it has been all about, as to what conclusions you are going to come to on that front, I just wanted to be assured.

Lord West of Spithead: As a sailor as I am, the noble Lord will be delighted that the National

Security Secretariat, the National Security Strategy and the NSF, without any prompting from me as an Admiral, because I could not possibly have said it, came out with the statement “the sea is crucial to the wealth and security of the United Kingdom”. You can imagine how delighted I was with that statement and it did not come from me at all.

Chris Bryant: I think it has been a significant advantage to be able to bind other European nations into Operation Atalanta which we would not have been able to mount on our own.

Bob Ainsworth: It is an important point as well though to say that the Security Strategy gives us a wider framework than just foreign policy and therefore the Strategic Defence Review will be rooted in the Security Strategy, not in foreign policy, albeit foreign policy is a very important part of that.

Q40 Sir Alan Beith: While we are talking about defence may I go back to something the

Secretary of State for Defence said earlier when he expressed some concern that in the past

35 the military had been brought in and it had been assumed that they were available when their primary role in protecting national security was not of assistance to civilian activity but protecting our interests elsewhere. When foot and mouth hit us very badly and the military came to our aid in Cumbria, I think what was noticeable was that the principal benefit they brought was not what you would normally expect, which would be either guard capacity or the ability to deploy numbers of disciplined people quickly, it was the ability to draw up a plan quickly and manage it operationally which the civilian authorities seemed to lack. You seem to be expressing confidence that you are not going to be needed to provide military support in some situations in the future because we have developed that sort of capacity in other agencies. Is that really the case?

Bob Ainsworth: No. That is not what I was trying to say. The last thing the military want to be doing is to be dropped into driving Green Goddesses around the place on a regular basis.

Q41 Sir Alan Beith: I do not think we have got them any more.

Bob Ainsworth: Or filling sandbags if there is somebody else who is able to do that. The police have developed a huge level of high-end capability to the degree that the military are not going to be as required as they otherwise would be. I agree with you totally that what the military often bring, and I have seen this in my time in the Ministry of Defence, is that planning capability that can be dropped into and is regularly dropped into other organisations.

You talk about the floods in the North. I saw it in the floods in Gloucestershire where we had a Brigadier, as part of the Gold Command down there, doing assessments on what was possible. People thought that water was going to be provided largely by the private sector because they had promised and there was an intent on their part to provide water, but there was a military planner there who was pretty quickly able to see that that simply was not going to work and we had to put Army units into the field in order to ensure it was there. I think that planning capability is exactly the kind of thing that we cannot afford not to have as part

36 of this overall framework that is set up in these emergency situations. The whole issue is flagged up in the Strategic Defence Review as have we gone too far; is it something that we continue; what niche capabilities are still required; have we got enough, and I think the planning capability is an important part of that.

Lord West of Spithead: I think it is fair to say that we have made dramatic improvements in terms of that ability to do those things and have exercised them and are getting lessons learned out of those exercises. There has been a dramatic improvement in the police, the emergency services and other departments’ capability compared with where it was, say, three or four years ago.

Q42 Baroness Manningham-Buller: I take the point that there has been an improvement in three years which neatly coincides with my absence from the scene!

Lord West of Spithead: And my arrival on the scene!

Q43 Baroness Manningham-Buller: I really wanted to ask though, however good the planning may now be, we can surely all envisage situations where the scale of the problem, multiple terrorist attacks, say, across the United Kingdom or a range of other coinciding threats materialising, a flooding one coinciding with something else and coinciding with another one, where public opinion and practice would turn to the Armed Forces again, however much the Secretary of State would, quite rightly, wish to keep them focused on their prime task. I wondered whether the thinking on that has developed since the time of the last

Strategic Defence Review. The view of the Home Office was certainly that they did not want to set up arrangements in any formal sense for that engagement beyond what already existed and I wondered if that is the sensible way forward?

Bob Ainsworth: I think it has to fit in with some of the improvements that have been made and some of the sharing arrangements that there are now between police forces, and the Home

37 Secretary will understand this to a far greater degree than I do. The levels of co-operation between forces are far better embedded now with the large force principle, and there are systematic ways of connecting capability, but the other thing that is absolutely needed is that the Police Service and the Home Office understand exactly what we can do and what we cannot do. They cannot be blissfully believing that the Armed Forces are there and able to provide a particular capability in breadth and in depth and on such a timescale as is not there.

What we have tried to do and made absolutely certain is that everybody knows what can be provided, how quickly it can be provided, how long it can be sustained, so that our planning is across the piece and the police force know exactly what triggers they need to bring to bear in order to get the capability that they want.

Alan Johnson: We have had three national exercise programmes in the last year where we prepare for an event that we imagine may happen. We had one on how we would deal with it if there were a Mumbai attack here. We dealt with it very realistically. The MoD and all the different agencies were involved. If we were to look at it again as part of the Strategic

Defence Review, I suspect we would come to the same conclusion. We do not need a more formal mechanism than the mechanisms we have now to use the expertise of the MoD when it is necessary to deal with the kind of event that you spoke about.

Lord West of Spithead: For example of course we have set SF-type things in place and they are still in place. There are certain special forces-type operations that are allowed for and dealt with. For example, with the Olympics coming up, the Home Office is in debate with the

MoD talking about what extra might be required from defence to cover that because, you are absolutely right, the scale of things sometimes means one has to draw on the military.

Q44 Sir Alan Beith: I agree that there has been greatly enhanced police co-operation. I just put in the Home Secretary’s mind one point which is one of the mechanisms of achieving it is not a publicly accountable body. The dependence on ACPO and ACPO structures ought

38 perhaps to be reviewed in view of the centrality of police co-operation to the National

Security Strategy.

Alan Johnson: I think ACPO themselves are looking to examine their own structures. It is something Sir Hugh Orde is very keen on and it is a valid point.

Q45 Sir Alan Beith: On a separate point, the Strategy talks about the need to address problems early and focus on prevention. Are we really doing that? For example, what informs planning procedures about national security issues which ought to be taken into account? If you are building a power station, if you are creating any other facility which has national security issues around it, how is the planning process effectively informed?

Lord West of Spithead: We have just reinvigorated and reproduced a whole thing to do with crowded places for example, where we look at what can we do in terms of initial design and initial build. We have groups of people called NACSOs who give advice on this on various concerns. For example, one well-known firm was about to build a series of stores in the centres of towns which were beautifully designed to be a marvellous terrorist target. We were able at the stage of design to talk to them and now they are going to be changed and they are not.

Q46 Sir Alan Beith: So you talk to them but not to the planning authority?

Lord West of Spithead: One of the documents, and there is a copy available if you want to see it, is to do with planning and what we can do in terms of planning. For example, we know that in the attack on Glasgow Airport where they tried to get a 4x4 through into the airport the reason it could not get through the bollards is because it had to run parallel and turn into it.

We do not want people to design structures where they have a nice road going straight into them to be able to do that. We have given advice to planning authorities. There is the planning advice, the design and architectural advice, and this applies not just to crowded

39 places but of course to critical national infrastructure and those things as well. I never thought I would ever be excited by bollards but we actually produce the best bollards in the world in this country now. The work that is done at TRL is absolutely fantastic. When you add that to this as well this is good stuff. It is a bit depressing that I am excited by bollards but there we are!

Q47 Lord Foulkes of Cumnock: I am really reassured that we produce the best bollards in the world! I am not sure if my question can be fully answered in public but I will have a go. I was thinking back to Easter of 1982 when our intelligence did not tell us what was happening in Buenos Aires and when we sent the wrong signals through the Foreign Office to the

Government in Buenos Aires, but we managed to get a task force together with a lot of help from the private sector as well as from the MoD. I presume that we are making sure that we are not making the same mistakes again in relation either to intelligence or to Foreign Office messages to Argentina and, I presume, but maybe this is more difficult, that if the wrong thing happened, which I think is unlikely, and there was a repeat of the invasion of the Falkland

Islands, we could repel it as we did on the last occasion.

Chris Bryant: I am not going to answer every element of that obviously, but we have thought long and hard in the run-up to the Falkland Island Government deciding to go ahead with looking to see whether there is commercially viable oil and gas supplies underneath the ocean. I am very comforted by the fact that the Argentineans have made it absolutely clear that they are not talking about returning to the 1980s, but being comforted does not mean that one is complacent.

Bob Ainsworth: As you said, we were not surprised by the drilling; we knew when it was going to happen and at what location, so the necessary deterrent effect that is proportionate with not sending this into an international incident or helping people to make an issue where

40 an issue had not ought to exist, because the right to explore and the right to self-determination is clearly there, we think is being maintained.

Q48 Lord Foulkes of Cumnock: If it is not successful are we capable of repelling any attack?

Bob Ainsworth: As you indicated, this is something that you might want to explore elsewhere or in private.

Q49 Mike Gapes: The National Security Strategy gives great emphasis to international institutions, international co-operation and multi-lateralism. Can you tell us what percentage of public spending we currently spend on institutions of multi-lateral co-operation?

Chris Bryant: Figures clearly are not going very well this afternoon but I am going to risk some figures. I am afraid it is not a percentage figure, but in terms of NATO manpower, which is the manpower where it is our own personnel including the costs of their housing and allowances and salaries and all the rest of that, in 2009-10 that came to £145 million. In relation to the NATO security and investment programme and the military budget, it came to

£176,416,000, of which £50.5 million came from the reserve. In relation to that budget we pay, according to our GNI worked-out figure, 11.5478 per cent. In relation to the EU missions in which we are engaged, again for 2009-10 we spent £981,000 all of which coming out of the reserve. Again on the GNI worked-out basis we pay 13.8706 per cent.

Q50 Mike Gapes: What about international institutions, the United Nations, the IAEA? I am trying to get a sense of the totality of the spend.

Bob Ainsworth: There are those contributions that are made on formulae to the European

Union.

Q51 Mike Gapes: I know the formulae; I am trying to get the figure.

41 Bob Ainsworth: I do not know how you can divorce this and get a clear handle on a particular budget. For example, let me just say to you that we have 9,500 troops in Afghanistan, with all the air and logistic capability there is to support them, and it is supporting a United Nations- sanctioned operation in a 44-nation coalition. If you want to measure the cost of that then you need to add that on to the figures that Chris has just given you. We provide security in the

Green Zone in Cyprus. There is capability that we are providing in different parts of the world as well as paying our dues to these organisations and it is a pretty complicated formula for you to try to add up what the costs are.

Chris Bryant: The dues that we pay we have already provided to the Foreign Affairs

Committee because you have already commented on them in your charming report this weekend.

Q52 Mike Gapes: I will come on to our report in a minute. I am trying to get a sense of the government collectively. It is all very well knowing what the FCO pays or what perhaps some other department pays but to have a sense of the scope of this in totality would be really helpful. If we are going to have a clear view of the National Security Strategy bringing everybody together then it would be really helpful to have the information brought together.

Lord West of Spithead: Could we maybe have a look at this and if it is a feasible thing to do get back in writing to the Committee on that?

Q53 Mike Gapes: I am happy for that to happen.

Lord West of Spithead: I think there is a valid point in there in that when we embarked down this National Security Strategy route I had hoped that as it evolved and developed it could become something that was of great utility in terms of providing priorities and then with the

Treasury being able to work out some of this. We are a long way from that at the moment.

42 You can understand the difficulties of that within the departments, but it would be a wonderful thing looking to the future to achieve such a thing.

Chris Bryant: One ought to include the Western European Union which costs some £2.3 million a year.

Mike Gapes: Which could be spent somewhere else perhaps. Can I take you to the written statement that the Prime Minister made today.

Chair: Paragraph?

Q54 Mike Gapes: They are not numbered, on the fourth page in the middle, it is the paragraph that is talking about nuclear issues, the road to 2010. It refers specifically to the funding for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). You will be aware, certainly the Foreign Office Ministers are aware that the Foreign Affairs Select Committee in a report published yesterday was pushing very strongly for additional funding for the IAEA and that is clearly welcome. Could you give us some idea what the scope of that additional funding is?

Chris Bryant: I think I am going to have to write to you on that, I am afraid.

Q55 Mike Gapes: Okay. Mr Bryant, you referred in your earlier statement to assistance to civilian missions. One of the concerns that I have had and the Foreign Affairs Committee has had is the reduction caused by the budget pressures the FCO has had of the British contribution in the Balkans on civilian missions there. Given that the Balkans is the smuggling route for people smuggling, for narcotics, and if political inability happens again, in Bosnia Herzegovina in particular, it could be a very, very serious problem for the national security of this country, can you look at that again because clearly there is a very, very important issue here of the UK footprint being reduced and the implications that has internationally?

43 Chris Bryant: Security in the Western Balkans is best advanced not just by the UK but by all our European allies. I was struck in 2003 when I was there by the fact that there were Swiss military operating under a European Union banner with European Union epaulettes. We are keen to make sure that others bear more of the burden in the Western Balkans. I cannot in all honesty say that we are going to be spending more money there in the immediate future, no.

Q56 Mike Gapes: Do you think that FCO and DFID and other departments have adequate staffing and funding for the increasing work that they have to do internationally?

Chris Bryant: I think it is a question of how you best deploy your resources. We would love to have double our budget. Everybody would like to be able to increase their budget, but I think at a time when the Foreign Office’s tasks are very clearly delineated, some of them in relation to national security but some of them delineated in other areas as well, we do not feel that we are under-resourced to be able to tackle those issues, no.

Q57 Mike Gapes: You do not?

Chris Bryant: No. One of the issues that was raised earlier was in relation to planning but I think it equally applies to other issues around the world, which is the question of prevention.

For instance, in Somalia, it is absolutely right that we want to tackle piracy offshore but in order to do so we have to be able to return Somali to a properly functioning state. One of the things that we have been able to do through our own support of the African Union mission in

Somalia is to provide support, but in addition the European Union has provided its own development money, some many millions of pounds. On top of that there is the new mission which is going to be making sure that the Armed Forces and the security forces in Somalia are better trained, and I think it will help to deliver a better functioning state. One of the things that is absolutely essential to us, and I think will be increasingly important, is that we make sure that other countries in Europe and other allies bear more of the burden.

44 Q58 Malcolm Bruce: Can I follow that up specifically in relation to the Department for

International Development. To begin with when you were talking about money and trying to allocate what was being spent on the Strategy, I was beginning to think this would undermine what the Strategy was about, which was about joined-up government and you could not just pick out things and say what it was about. Specifically, you said £120 million was DFID’s contribution. Could you articulate what that is given that there is a significant chunk of the report back from the Cabinet Office that clearly identifies that what DFID is doing in conflict and post-conflict states is regarded as a significant part of the Strategy. One would therefore assume that if you were allocating money - and I do not think that is all that important - that

DFID was a major contributor in that context. Just backing up what Mike Gapes has said, when we as a Committee have been pursuing this over the last three or four years, even two years ago the Permanent Secretary said she was “struggling but coping”, but I think under her breath sotto voce she was saying “because that is what my job as permanent secretary is to do to deliver the Government’s policy on staffing”. However, that was before we had the White

Paper which highlighted that there was going to be much more engagement in post-conflict and fragile states. The evidence on the ground is that is a much more challenging and difficult job to do for a small department with very restricted staffing. The simple question is: who, when and where would you decide that maybe the straitjacket of staffing is not appropriate if it is not going to actually deliver the policy? This is a small department after all; it employs under 2,500 people.

Chris Bryant: You are absolutely right that the DFID contribution and the Foreign Office contribution have to go hand-in-glove and they have to work very much together, but that is not to say that DFID’s objectives, which are primarily about saving people’s lives and giving them the opportunity of an economic future and of avoiding poverty, should be permanently subjugated to the Foreign Office objectives of the UK. In Somalia for instance the figure that

45 the UK is spending generally on the AMISOM budget comes to some £16 million whereas the DFID contribution to Somalia comes to some £26 million for last year, so quite often the figures that are coming from DFID will rather dwarf the money that is being spent in other respects. In Afghanistan one of the arguments that we have won fairly successfully over the last two years is that - and this has not been a row with the MoD I should say - success could not be brought about by military success alone. I think that was always fundamentally flawed and trying to bind together the work of diplomacy, of re-engaging communities, of rebuilding the economy alongside the military effort and ensuring people’s security is three parts of an important knot that needs to be bound together.

Bob Ainsworth: There is no great divide here. The Development Secretary sits on the

National Security Committee and participates in these discussions and the three departments together control the Conflict Prevention Fund so development money is tied into our priorities, but of course we have other development priorities that are outside of just security situations.

Q59 Malcolm Bruce: I accept that and I was not suggesting that is a point of conflict. What

I was getting at nevertheless was the criticism that is directed increasingly against DFID on the ground is that in fragile states they are too tied down to the capital and have not enough time to be out and about in the field in places like the DRC, which are very difficult to get about. It is not about money; it is about staff on the ground to enable them to do that and to have the reach. What I think we are coming to the conclusion on is that the Department is under the government constraints that all departments are but there is a danger that it could actually compromise its very ability to deliver this part of the Strategy.

Chris Bryant: Ensuring security for those who work whether in non-governmental organisations or directly for DFID is an essential part of trying to make sure that they are able to deliver on the ground. One of the difficulties is that particularly in fragile states you end up

46 spending a much more significant amount of the money ensuring security rather than on delivering a new well or building a new school or whatever.

Lord West of Spithead: I think the White Paper Building on our Common Future of 2009 does identify this quite clearly as being an issue. Also the Civilian Stabilisation Group we have now formed again shows how we are focusing on trying to do this. That is 11,050 people who we can draw on to go rapidly somewhere if we feel there is a need to put an input in straight away. You are correctly identifying an area that is tricky but I think we are focusing on it.

Q60 Lord Sterling of Plaistow: In the last few days there has been huge publicity about the young boy from Pakistan who they managed to get back and the way the police forces of the world got together and how that has been handled and how that is going to be dealt with by the law, which has been extraordinary, but kidnapping is kidnapping. I want to bring up the issue of piracy. I must declare an interest of my own because one company in which I am involved two of its ships have been taken and there are 50 crew being held with quite a large ransom. I had a letter from a friend this morning saying they are withdrawing one of their small cruise ships from the Indian Ocean. It is not just Somalia any more; it is spreading and it is spreading fast. They are not going to operate anywhere in the Indian Ocean area and it is spreading to many other countries as well. He was saying even just going towards the

Seychelles is costing them an extra $50,000 a day in insurance alone, not any of the other factors, and cancelled trips and ports being cancelled are coming up all the time. It is a subject I have already brought up with Lord West and we are going to be talking about it further. It comes to the law side because in practice it is quite sad but for 300-400 years the

Navy’s main role is to protect the trade lanes of world trade. That is what it has always been about. To a degree, the world’s navies do not have the teeth they should be you allowed to have. I can assure you, as some of you probably realise or do not, the Russian, the Chinese

47 and the Koreans, who protect their own ships with convoys, if I may gently put it, if they do get any pirates I am not quite certain whether you hear about them again. That is another matter entirely but it is a factor to be taken into account. We were then told that we must not arm our ships. We have started to arm our ships and twice now the pirates have sheared off as soon as they have seen that. Now the international unions have declared that they want the ships to be armed because many thousands of their troops will not do it. The question I wanted to pose because all three are involved, is what is the possibility of international law being tightened or even piracy being added to the anti-terrorist law which will enable you to deal with this much more effectively than you can at the moment?

Chris Bryant: Not specifically about piracy but in general terms I think the international legal provisions are pretty robust. The United Nations has a large number of different protocols and treaty obligations and conventions for all its Member States. It was encouraging that in

2006 there was unanimous support for the Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy. I think a lot of different countries are trying to reach a specific answer to the piracy situation and see whether we need to reform the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. There are protocols. You started off by mentioning the young lad in Pakistan. We are conscious that sometimes there are a lot of countries that have not ratified conventions, for instance on child abduction, or have ratified them in a way in their own country which does not fully meet the consular needs that we would have had different countries, and I think there is still considerable further work to be done there, but on piracy I think that is probably a matter primarily for defence.

Bob Ainsworth: Those people, those ships, those companies, that are co-operating fully with the methodology and the advice that they are given by those who are trying to provide their protection in the Indian Ocean can massively reduce the risk to themselves. We have now advisory sea lanes and there are patrol methodologies that are advised out to people and a

48 naval capability that is kept in the adjacent area, and when people actually do what they are asked to do, as I said, the threat is reduced considerably. However, one of the consequences of that is that we are seeing pirate opportunities being taken in a far wider area of the ocean.

We are displacing the activity and because it is far harder for pirates to operate effectively in the Gulf of Aden they are tending to move further south, they are going further afield and they are operating many, many miles from the African coast, right across half of the ocean now. It is not going be possible to solve this in a maritime environment. Overwhelmingly, if not entirely, it is Somalia that is the problem. The totally lawless situation that prevails in large parts of that country means that what naval capability there is, and there are many countries who are now co-operating to a greater or lesser extent, and you can name some countries which are only on the surface protecting their own ships, they have agreed, and we have tried to draw them into a co-operative arrangement, even if they are there primarily to protect their own ships, to communicate with us, to relay information and effectively become part of the international protection that is being provided. So there are many, many nations who are providing naval capability. I do not think that we have a problem in terms of rules of engagement or the legal framework in which to operate. The big problem is that the balance of risk for people who are living in an appallingly lawless country is such that with the kind of gain that can be made that naval capability and naval deterrence is not pushing that balance of risk far enough so that people are not engaging in piracy. While we have displaced it to other parts of the ocean, the problem is continuing.

Q61 Lord Sterling of Plaistow: Secretary of State, I accept that but the point I was bringing up is that if you can use international law once you actually get hold of the pirates that would make a big difference because then if you cannot deliver the monies to it then there is no future for being in that form of business. It has become a business frankly.

49 Bob Ainsworth: We have an agreement with Kenya and we have successfully prosecuted pirates in Kenya. The Seychelles have now offered the same facilities and that is being worked out. There is the ability where there is the evidence in any case to bring these people to justice. As I said, the balance of risk there is still out of equilibrium and people really do need to stick with the advice that they are given and they can hugely reduce the risks if they do. It is about the way they load their ships, about the watch they keep, about the sea lanes they use, about the communications they use. If they do everything and stay in touch with the people who are there to protect them, the risk is massively reduced.

Chris Bryant: The United Nations Financial Action Taskforce has been pretty successful at making sure that as many countries in the world as possible have adequate measures for being able to sequester assets.

Q62 Lord Lee of Trafford: While we do have our four witnesses here I wondered if I could ask a question which to an extent links in with the type of question that Lord Foulkes asked a little earlier, and that is on what one may term scenario planning for external events which may impinge on a whole range of departments. To give a specific example, let us assume that down the track there is a serious Israeli raid on Iran. This could clearly have very serious implications for us in Afghanistan and could affect our oil supplies here and has a range of other implications as well. What I am not quite clear about is where in our existing national security structure potential scenarios like that are actually looked at and then handled across a range of departments.

Lord West of Spithead: As I said, we do have a horizon scanning unit which looks at what ifs.

A specific like that very often will rely on asking the specific question and saying to departments what are the implications of that. In the example you give I have asked that question: what does that mean in terms of our security in terms of counter-terrorism? What other effects is this likely to have? What impact might it have on other departments? I have

50 actually asked that question and people are looking at some aspects of that. I do not think one could feed into your overall National Security Strategy specific what ifs other than the horizon scanning that is going on as a backdrop to the work that leads into the National

Security Strategy when we revise it. How often it is revised is quite an interesting issue. We produced the first Strategy in the first year never having had one before. I think it was very necessary to do a revision the following year and it meant we changed some aspects of it.

The intention was to have another one this year but of course the Election adds a different factor to all of this. I think again it is something we will need to look at to an extent on an annual basis. I am sure that later this year it will be looked at again.

Bob Ainsworth: Planning for various scenarios does take place and vulnerabilities are identified and we try to mitigate the threat. I do not think it is something that we could properly discuss in an open forum. They are taking place with regard to specific scenarios that might arise.

Chris Bryant: We have research analysts who are divorced deliberately from the normal business of the Foreign Office so that they can do more of that “what if” thinking. In addition, there is one specific element within the Foreign Office which relates to consular services because British people abroad, for instance after the Bali bombing, need protection, help, advice and support and all the rest of it. We felt that we had a lot of lessons that we had to learn from that occasion and since then we have provided a great deal more training to consular staff around the world so that nobody can be deployed without having gone through specific disaster management training.

Q63 Mike Gapes: May I take you to another aspect of international law. One of the issues that certainly came to my attention, and the Foreign Affairs Committee actually went to

Guantánamo in 2006, is the inadequacy of international law and the Geneva Conventions with regard to non-state actors, what the Americans have called “unauthorised enemy combatants”.

51 I know that this is an issue where we have been told there is no need to think about changing this, it is too complicated, but this problem is not going to go away and it is a problem that affects many countries in both domestic and foreign policy. Is there any thinking going on in this area to try to get more adequate law for the 21st century?

Chris Bryant: There is constant thinking in this area, as you would expect. Obviously we would prefer prosecution through the normal courts wherever that is possible, except in certain circumstances where it might be through special international courts or whatever.

There are situations where - and this is primarily a matter for the Home Office - obviously we then pursue control orders. The third thing we try to do is on the basis of memoranda of understanding to move forward to deportations with assurance.

Q64 Mike Gapes: But you are very much dealing with the matter at the margin. The fundamental problem is that the Geneva Conventions do not adequately address this problem.

Chris Bryant: That is why there is a lot of thinking going on.

Q65 Des Browne: I suspect that the generic point that underlay Lord Sterling’s questions and that Mike Gapes has got to much more specifically is something that this Committee, in whatever manifestation it exists after the Election, will have to come back to, and that is the inadequacy of these international legal structures to address the much changed environment in terms of security that we face in the 21st century. I am not accusing anybody of complacency but the comfort with that is sometimes given a lie to by the facts on the ground, by the fact that we have to report back a significant number of pirates who have been put ashore in

Somalia not necessarily by us but by other people and not taken to Kenya. I am not asking about that generic point but I am fascinated by the bit of this document that was published today on this issue of maritime security and the progress that has been made. The EU

Operation Atalanta, the NATO contribution, the work that the Americans do, in aggregate,

52 probably provides enough ships to do credit to a First World War sea battle, but there are still serious problems down there and it looks as though the international community is beginning to get grips with this, with 100 pirates, we are told, in jail in Kenya, and the possibility of a pirate prosecution centre in the Seychelles, so a centre really where people can take the people that they detain. My question specifically from our point of view, from a strategic point of view, so we do not get into the same difficulty that we have got into before, is are we looking at the strategic engagement between our human rights structure and that international process?

In short, are we confident that we are not going to face in ten years’ time a challenge from somebody who says if these people are detained on Royal Navy ships we cannot transfer them to the Seychelles because we are not satisfied that the prosecutions in the Seychelles meet the standards that we would expect for our human rights structure? That is the sort of strategic thinking that I think a National Security Strategy really needs to engage with because it is the reality of what is happening at the moment.

Bob Ainsworth: And not just in the maritime environment.

Q66 Des Browne: Absolutely.

Bob Ainsworth: Des as former Defence Secretary knows that we are ourselves setting people free because there is not sufficient evidence to take them in front of a court of law. We do that in the maritime environment; we do that in Afghanistan but, equally, where we are seeking to detain people and co-operate with countries, whether it is Iraq or Afghanistan, it is enormously problematic and enormously controversial. It is only these one or two cases that catch the headlines but our Armed Forces are expected to operate in these ways on a regular basis on our behalf. So it something that is going to have to ---

Chris Bryant: One of the key things in any negotiations, in the United Nations or anywhere else, where there is a new Convention that is being advanced, is we want to ensure that there is not going to be legal peril for our Armed Forces.

53 Chair: I am very conscious of the fact that we are due to move on to Lord Harris’s question which is quite a major one. May we detain you for another five to ten minutes?

Q67 Lord Harris of Haringey: I wanted to talk about cyber security about which there have been several mentions during the course of the evidence we have heard. How does our state of readiness compare to other states’ and also our ability to deal with potential adversaries?

Lord West of Spithead: This is an area, as I mentioned earlier, I was concerned about when I came into post some two and a half years ago. I engaged then with a number of people in the

Cabinet Office and then of course the National Security Strategy was produced and we identified this as a threat domain that we needed to look at closely and we then produced our cyber security strategy. What has become quite clear to me is that we are well up with any other country. It is quite interesting that the Lords Committee on the EU have recently reported and they were very impressed by where we stand on this. Certainly from my visit to

EU nations we are ahead of any of those. I suspected the Americans were ahead of us - and we are linked in very closely with them and they have just appointed their cyber tsar, although

I hate that expression that is what they call him, Mr Schmidt, who is in the West Wing of the

White House with a team of six people working for him at the moment - but I believe in terms of the dot-com and the dot-gov areas they are behind us at the moment. They have identified this as being a very important area, as we have. Obama did and his election campaign saw that and I think they will start throwing the full resources, in the way the Americans always do, into this, and I am very glad that we are so closely interconnected with them in this area, and there is a constant exchange both by video conferencing and also by visits both ways in these areas. I think we are right up in the forefront of work in this but that certainly does not mean I am complacent. This is an area of real worry. Of course we have to be in this arena.

We have seen the Digital Britain work. We absolutely have to be fully involved in this area

54 but the better you are at it, the better connected you are, the quicker you can do things, the more things you can do in this way, the more vulnerable you are, in a sense, unless you take the absolute requisite and necessary precautions. We have not only to make sure that our various networks and things are looked after; we have to make sure that our industries understand the very real threat. Although we have had some quite major cases where people have gone on phishing expeditions into large industrial concerns, some of them still have not quite twigged how dangerous this threat is. However, we are engaged in a dialogue with them making sure they are aware of it. We also have to educate our population. It is quite extraordinary when people get on their laptop and they start writing they seem to think that it is just them and who they are talking to and no-one else can see it. More people will see what they are saying than if they wrote a postcard and stuck it in a letter box. That is quite a difficult thing to get across to people. People’s naivety in terms of opening up their systems to this is quite mind-boggling. One sees what serious organised crime is doing in terms of using the internet. One sees what criminals at a lower level are doing in terms of stealing people’s identities and doing things on that. Then we have the big state actors with all the threats they pose to us, and then we have the pointy-headed computer nerds who think a bit of hacking is quite fun without realising the huge impact they can have on systems and the cost to various people. Then of course we have the terrorists themselves who use the internet for radicalisation but are rapidly getting cleverer and will of course use it to try and attack our systems. We have done a lot in CPNI to look at the resilience of our systems to these sorts of attacks, which has improved dramatically in the last two years, but that is an area that is a worry. This is an area of great concern. I believe a number of nations in the world have not appreciated that. It is international and cyber space is a global thing. You cannot do this on your own and therefore there are some real issues we have got to get to grips with.

55 Q68 Lord Harris of Haringey: You mentioned the problem of companies perhaps not realising the seriousness of this and the extent to which they have been penetrated. To what extent are there concerns about key contractors, particularly contractors in the defence field or contractors in respect of the critical national infrastructure, where you have concerns about the degree of penetration that has taken place?

Lord West of Spithead: There are concerns and what we have to do is separate out amongst that what is a loss of their intellectual property rights and what actually impacts on the defence sector. We almost need to split those two out and ask how much damage has this done to the IPR of that company and damaged that company and how much has it hit our defence. We have to do that very rapid analysis. So far we have not got one that has caused real damage to defence, if you see what I mean. In terms of the critical national infrastructure, again, we have had to be quite swift on our feet, and a lot of this is done by

CPNI, to make sure we can close holes where it looks as though there might be a problem.

Q69 Lord Harris of Haringey: Are we confident that we would know?

Lord West of Spithead: That is always an issue. We have some really talented people in the

West Country who focus on this, but certainly some firms who thought they were fine, on deeper analysis, are not. The greatest danger is, and we know this from Enigma during the

Second World War, being complacent and thinking you absolutely are secure. We need to keep looking all the time. We have very good people who do this but some people are very sophisticated in terms of what they can do. It is a real issue and it would be very dangerous to assume that someone cannot do something. The only absolute certainty is if you have an air gap then no-one can get into your system, but that is the only time you can be 100 per cent secure.

Bob Ainsworth: There is no certainty.

Lord West of Spithead: Well, with an air gap you cannot connect.

56 Bob Ainsworth: There is no certainty in this area. What we have to do is harden our own systems, be aware of who else we rely on and see to it that they harden their systems. Indeed, as the world develops we need to consider our own ability to act against adversaries in the cyber world as well as in other spheres.

Lord West of Spithead: If I may just jump in on that. That raises an area that OCS are looking at which is the ethical and legal side because for example if I went and took down a power station in another country, which I could do with a cyber attack, is that the same as bombing it? If I bombed it that would be an act of war. There are issues like this that need looking at as to what is and is not an act of war, exactly how does this fit, how are we going to do this. That work is going on at the moment because we do need to look at this quite rapidly as to what the ethics and legality are of some of these things.

Q70 Lord Harris of Haringey: Presumably also there would be the question of proof of attribution.

Lord West of Spithead: That is extremely difficult.

Q71 Lord Harris of Haringey: Could I ask more specifically, we heard earlier on about sovereign capability and the issues around that. To what extent are you concerned about the fact that key components in terms of the electronic infrastructure of the country are effectively supplied overseas, in some cases by countries like China where there are many accusations about the extent to which China is interested in offensive cyber operations?

Lord West of Spithead: Could I answer this separately?

Q72 Chair: I think we have run out of time. This is a very important question and perhaps we will look for another occasion to answer it, unless you think you can answer it in five minutes if we adjourn and suspend the Committee now?

57 Lord West of Spithead: It might be worth waiting just a little longer because something is happening in that area which might make the answer a little bit easier.

Chair: That is perhaps a good point on which to end because it is a very important issue. I am very grateful to you for your patience, all of you, and for being prepared to stay. I did think it was important to flag up the fact that this is an issue in which we have an interest rather than allowing us to run out of time. You used a phrase in that conversation, Lord West, which I think is absolutely pertinent, about the need to educate our population about these risks, not least because of the way they impinge on the citizen as well as on the overall aspect of national security. I am mindful, too, and I think the Committee has had copies but may not have had a change to peruse it all, of the fact that, as you say, the Lords EU Committee report has just come out and that that will also facilitate the discussion. I have seen the evidence you gave to them. May I thank you all very much indeed for coming and for being prepared to stay. I think it has been a very useful initial discussion and I am sure these are matters that our successor committee will want to take forward.

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