My Lords, I have very mixed feelings about this amendment. I said in my speech at Second Reading that national security should not be so widely interpreted as to give cover for embarrassment or incompetence. I am sure that is absolutely correct. Indeed, my noble friend Lord Hodgson made that point. However, I am very worried when we begin to interpret something such as national security in terms of specific operations or departments. In passing, I make the point that the Diplomatic Service may do many things overseas that affect national security. Many embassies that I have been to have protected rooms where such matters can be discussed. It would be naive to say that because they were done by the Diplomatic Service and not the intelligence service, those matters were not, in the terms of the Bill, ones of national security.
I do not have an answer. All I can say is that you know national security when you see it. The difficulty of looking at this in terms of legislation is that you cannot see it. To give one example, we debated earlier the activities of the Intelligence and Security Committee and the process of redactions. When a suggestion to redact is made by the Prime Minister, it has to be on the basis of national security. There have been cases in which the committee has argued that national security was not affected. In the course of a practical argument you can come to an answer about what is national security and what is not. This does not help the Minister on the Front Bench. However, I feel it is somehow better to leave the definition more open and allow it to be interpreted in the context of the individual circumstances of each event than to curtail it within the definition of the activities of various departments. In the end, we might find that we are throwing the baby out with the bathwater if we proceed in that way.