Key points:

  • The Intelligence and Security Committee – the joint parliamentary committee that oversees the intelligence community – has too often been constrained and obstructed in its activities and investigations.
  • This new report makes detailed proposals for legislative and other changes to make the committee more effective, covering information gathering, whistleblowing, governance, funding, publication of reports, remit and meetings with the Prime Minister.
  • The report is authored by the founder and co-chair of the APPG on Extraordinary Rendition, Andrew Tyrie. It also features a foreword supporting the proposals from Dominic Grieve, who chaired the Committee between 2015 and 2019.

Read the report

Read Watching the Watchers: The Intelligence and Security Committee: From Form to Substance.

Access the PDF

Read a summary

Read a summary of the report on our blog by Andrew Tyrie.

Access the blog post

The Intelligence and Security Committee is made up of nine MPs and members of the House of Lords. It plays a vital role overseeing the policies, expenditure, administration and operations of the intelligence agencies and departments. This was seen recently when the Humble Address relating to the ‘Mandelson files’ relied on the committee to be an arbiter of what material should be redacted.

However, a new UCL Constitution Unit report, Watching the Watchers: The Intelligence and Security Committee: From Form to Substance by Andrew Tyrie, says that the committee finds itself thwarted from performing its role as effectively as parliament intended. The report discusses in detail how legislation, the Memorandum of Understanding between the committee and Prime Minister, and government practice and guidance limits the committee in carrying out its important role. For instance, the committee’s investigation into Britain’s role in extraordinary rendition was abandoned after its access to key witnesses was blocked.

The report structures the constraints on the committee into seven categories, and makes detailed recommendations for change:

  1. information gathering: narrowing the use of the ‘Committee Veto’ whereby the government can prevent access to documents and information, highlighting the differences between the committee and select committees, and removing the limitation that only senior officials can give oral evidence
  2. whistleblowing: establishing a whistleblowing process to the committee, and giving the committee powers to investigate ongoing operations on the basis of credible whistleblower information
  3. governance: ensuring the timely appointment of committee members, that the majority of members are not from the governing party, and a secret ballot to elect the chair
  4. funding: setting an objective that the committee be sufficiently funded, establishing a three-year budget process, and a remedy should the budget be reduced
  5. publication of reports: establishing a timetable for the Prime Minister to respond to draft reports
  6. remit: ensuring that the committee can be kept fully and promptly informed of significant matters within its remit, and expanding the committee’s remit to take account of the existing expansion of intelligence and security activities across government
  7. meetings with the Prime Minister: putting annual meetings with the Prime Minister on a formal basis.

More details about each change are discussed in the report, and proposed amendments to the law and Memorandum of Understanding are set out in full in the annexes. 

There are two ways to implement the changes: amending the law and the Memorandum of Understanding; or changing the Memorandum of Understanding alone. The report argues that just amending the Memorandum of Understanding would be a second-best solution, as it is generally not legally binding, compliance has been patchy in the past, and some changes can only be affected under law.

The report is authored by Andrew Tyrie, who founded the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Rendition in 2005. Having served as Conservative MP for Chichester between 1997 and 2017, he now sits in the House of Lords as a non-affiliated peer. It also features a foreword endorsing the report’s proposals by Dominic Grieve, the former Attorney General who chaired the Intelligence and Security Committee between 2015 and 2019.

Key links:

The Constitution Unit.