A rare win for scrutiny: the Intelligence and Security Committee

The government has made a concession to Parliament; it may be grudging and long overdue, but let's be gracious and take the win for oversight

I am a passionate believer in the importance of parliamentary scrutiny of the executive. As I’ve been remarking more and more recently, ministers would do well to remember—and perhaps be reminded, from time to time—that at least in theory, almost everything they do depends on the consent and authority of Parliament. Indeed, as I wrote at the beginning of June, it is only through the annually granted agreement of Parliament that the government is allowed to maintain the armed forces on a standing basis; the Bill of Rights 1689 includes the provision that:

the raising or keeping a standing Army within the Kingdome in time of Peace unlesse it be with Consent of Parlyament is against Law.

Not only that, I set out, the government relies on Parliament for its resources. It is only through the system of Estimates and Bills of Supply and Appropriations that ministers can draw on the Consolidated Fund, its account at the Bank of England. Actual, everyday parliamentary control of these process has fallen into desuetude, but there is nos reason to believe that must be forever.

It is not just financial scrutiny. Parliamentary oversight of public policy is never easy to carry out, and it is perhaps at its most challenging in the area of defence, national security and intelligence, where much must always remains secret. But it is not impossible, and when both sides, legislature and executive, recognise a balance between rights and responsibilities, and agree to do what is practical as well as they can.

No government relishes scrutiny; no government ever will. At best you can hope for ministers who grudgingly concede that Parliament’s duty is to scrutinise, and perhaps also acknowledge that sometimes, though not universally, rigorous oversight, examination and testing can actually make policy outcomes better. I fear the current government is still some long way from that view, and there seems to be especially deep-seated antipathy towards parliamentary accountability on the part of the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Pat McFadden, who is the day-to-day ministerial head of the Cabinet Office. I recently profiled McFadden for The Critic, and tried to explain the importance of his career as a behind-the-scenes party organiser and adviser.

It was a pair of disputes with scrutiny committees and involving McFadden that prompted me recently to write a paper for the British Foreign Policy Group on “Effective Parliamentary Scrutiny of Foreign, Defence and Security Policy”. Two important committees, the statutory Intelligence and Security Committee and the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy, were finding their work inhibited by bureaucratic obstructions within the Cabinet Office; the former was being denied the staff and resources its Chairman, Lord Beamish, insisted it needed; while the latter was trying to conduct an inquiry into the work of the National Security Adviser, only to be told that, because the new post-holder, Jonathan Powell, was employed a special adviser rather than a civil servant and would not therefore normally expected to give evidence to a select committee of Parliament.

I raised the issue of Powell’s accountability in The Spectator at the beginning of June and essentially argued, and still believe, that the government’s refusal to allow him to appear is extremely disappointing as well as being a difficulty entirely of its own making: someone, presumably Sir Keir Starmer, chose to appoint Powell on that basis, a departure from standard practice. Of Powell’s six predecessors since the role of National Security Adviser, four came from solid Diplomatic Service backgrounds, one began at the Foreign Office but had been a Whitehall permanent secretary too, while the sixth had been Permanent Secretary first at the Department for Energy and Climate Change then at the Ministry of Defence, but had begun his life in the private sector as a media consultant.

I had already written about the wrangling over Powell giving evidence, though I should also say that I considered Powell’s appointment when it was announced in November 2024 and in many ways welcomed it. Powell is a serious figure, extremely experienced and well-connected, and spent a decade at Sir Tony Blair’s right hand at the heart of government in 10 Downing Street as Chief of Staff. However, a number of changes to the role of National Security Adviser, some substantial, were consequential on Powell’s status as a special adviser. and there is no evidence that these were considered with any care before he was appointed; rather they seem to have dawned on ministers afterwards.

There is one small victory to record which, understandably, received virtually no coverage. On Thursday 5 June, McFadden, answering questions in the House of Commons, confirmed that the Intelligence and Security Committee will receive the increase in budgeting and resourcing Lord Beamish said it required if it was to be able to carry out its statutory duties. It there was a degree of grudging truculence in McFadden’s manner when he made and then confirmed the announcement, that can be forgiven for the sake of the right outcome. However, Lord Beamish’s second issue, that the ISC must have formal and administrative independence from the Cabinet Office, an organisation it scrutinises, has not yet been resolved. McFadden would only say that “we are also working with the ISC to identify the best operating model”.

The underlying message of the paper I wrote for the British Foreign Policy Group was that semi-secret or wholly secret agencies of government must possess public confidence and trust because in effect they make a tacit bargain with the electorate: they must often conceal or seek to obfuscate some of their activities, and it is vital to have a scrutiny régime of some kind, however constrained, not only to exercise supervision but to show the public that this supervision is taking place.

I don’t pretend any of this is easy. Governments are driven by a number of motives: the correct and inevitable need to maintain secrecy, the generalised institutional unwillingness to say anything at all of organisations which work in these challenging areas, and the reflexive dislike almost all governments have of parliamentary scrutiny and oversight. I understand them all but I do not accept them all, and any government must sooner or later realise that it has responsibilities the fulfilment of which can be uncomfortable and even damaging. Scrutiny is inconvenient, time-consuming and provides no end of opportunities for self-harm to governments and ministerial careers.

(We take the House of Commons’s system of departmental select committees almost for granted now, certainly as a settled part of the constitutional and parliamentary landscape, but they only came about in my lifetime: it was the effervescent and extraordinary Norman St John Stevas who, as Leader of the House in Margaret Thatcher’s first government from 1979 to 1981, took a 1978 Procedure Committee report and a tepid commitment in the Conservative Party’s manifesto and drove through the establishment of the first such committees in 1979/80. However, reading the papers from within Whitehall, it is astonishing to see the level of hostility towards the select committees and the range of arguments deployed to seek either to set the whole idea aside or at least dilute the proposals.)

I should also say, very briefly, that, having worked for at least six different select committees, I do not pretend that they are always the Platonic ideal of incisive, dynamic, efficient and high-minded scrutiny of the executive. They are, like any organisation, shaped by the people operating them and by their circumstances, and any number of factors can diminish their effectiveness: an overbearing, bumptious or publicity-hungry chair, a chair or members too kindly disposed towards and lenient of the government, a chair or members too reflexively critical and sniping towards the government, an inability by members to work cooperatively and to some extent to leave their party labels at the door of the committee room, and a simple lack of attention, time or intellectual capacity. But they are the best that we currently have, and at their best they are invaluable.

Scrutiny has two forms, in essence. There is the element of holding ministers and officials to account for what they have done, not only to provide some democratic input into the process but also so that decisions are made in an atmosphere in which those taking them know that they have to defend them in public at some point, perhaps under rigorous questioning. But there is another side to scrutiny, a more collaborative one, in which detailed examination can exposes weaknesses in an initial proposal and cause ministers and officials to think again, as well as allowing parliamentarians some creative input before the fact rather than simply retrospective commentary.

This all needs to happen and it all needs to be seen to happen. The Intelligence and Security Committee was established under the provisions of the Intelligence Services Act 1994, its remit and powers enhanced by the Justice and Security Act 2013. Particularly in its early days, some felt it was insufficiently independent of government and too easily absorbed into “the establishment” and part of a cosy consensus. Some of the criticisms were laid to rest by the Justice and Security Act 2013, and some have been disproved by the ISC’s work over time. Like any institution, it could be improved further, but it does perform a valuable role, and its current membership is certainly not a roll-call of the slavishly loyal or partisan.

(Ironically, one of the most public assertions of its independence came in July 2020, when the government nominated former cabinet minister and serial failure Chris Grayling to the Committee in the expectation that he would be elected its chair. Quite apart from his sustained legacy of mismanagement and blind incompetence, he was hardly especially qualified to chair the ISC, his only striking relevant experience being 18 months as Shadow Home Secretary from 2009 to 2010. However, the Conservative MP and former Chair of the House of Commons Defence Committee, Dr Julian Lewis, cooperated with the four opposition members of the committee to have himself elected as chair rather than Grayling. It was a good choice, though could hardly be a poorer one than Grayling himself.)

This concession to the ISC by the government is small but let us not scorn that. It was the right thing to, it was necessary and it will make the Committee’s oversight better and more effective. Bank this victory, then move on the next hurdle.