Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

I was recently privileged publicly to welcome Her Majesty the Queen to GCHQ, along with the mayor of Cheltenham. I would not like to inflate my own importance in that, given that the mayor and I were almost the only people present who could be publicly photographed. During that visit, I jokingly asked whether Her Majesty needed security clearance, and was told, I think equally in jest, that she did not, because by definition GCHQ was almost part of her household. Although that might have been said in jest, it highlights the anomalous position in which the secret agencies find themselves, which was identified by the Joint Committee on the Draft Constitutional Renewal Bill. GCHQ is a large organisation that employs thousands of people—thousands of my constituents—and we are dealing with important employment rights in terms of the right to be recruited on merit, and important procedures in terms of having the right to complain to the civil service commissioners. In his evidence to the Joint Committee, the Cabinet Secretary gave some absurdly extreme examples of how those rights might be applied, suggesting that GCHQ might have to place equal opportunities job advertisements in Pravda or that the civil service commissioners could be allowed public and unlimited access to personnel files at GCHQ, which would be equally inappropriate. It is equally possible to imagine circumstances in which a proper complaints procedure, with statutory force, to bodies such as the civil service commissioners might be helpful to GCHQ employees. Better that disgruntled staff have the right to appeal in confidence to the commissioners than that they take their complaints to the media, for instance. An intelligence agency is different from the rest of the civil service, but it cannot be beyond the wit of Government to propose amendments that might accommodate the concerns of the Cabinet Secretary and others while still bestowing on my constituency workers at GCHQ statutory rights very similar to those of other civil servants. If the Government will not accept the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (David Howarth), how do they propose to place GCHQ on a similar footing to the other secret intelligence agencies? That question must be asked. I understand that GCHQ staff would like to be treated increasingly in the same way as those at the other intelligence agencies, and I am sure that that is an appropriate desire. If they are excluded from the terms of the Bill, it is not clear how that aim will be achieved. The battle for GCHQ's trade union rights, so disgracefully denied by Mrs. Thatcher's Government, was won under this Government, and they should be rightly proud of that. In seeking to extend what are proper rights and entitlements to GCHQ employees—