My Lords, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, that I certainly did not say that I knew all there was to know on the subject. I understand the concern over the misuse of this phrase to which everyone has referred. No one in this Committee would support what happened to the
son of the noble Lord, Lord Deben, and his dog or the use of the phrase to cover embarrassment. These things are absolutely not to do with national security, which is being used as blanket cover.
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There are some issues and problems with this amendment. If the Committee will allow me, I will give a slight history lesson, and I apologise for that. When I joined the Security Service, national security meant to us something pretty narrow following the Attlee instructions at the end of the war to the intelligence community. It involved the military protecting the UK from the threat of military attack and the security and intelligence services protecting it from espionage, sabotage, terrorism and threats to parliamentary democracy from the extreme right and extreme left—fascism and communism. That understanding of national security, articulated in the Attlee declaration, informed the first tranche of legislation: the Security Service Act, the first Interception of Communications Act, the Intelligence Services Act and Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. It was an understanding which certainly was not articulated in law but was well understood within the community.
The previous Government—and I do not blame them for this—said, “Hold on, the security and safety of the citizen is much wider than these issues”. Therefore they drew up, under the previous Prime Minister, a national security strategy which was much broader and included things such as pandemics and added cyberthreats, energy security and so on and this Government have built on that early national security strategy and now have quite a long national security strategy that covers a wide range of issues.
In this Bill, it seems to me that we are talking not necessarily about the operations—the noble Lord’s definition and that of the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson— but about protecting the sources and methods of intelligence, for which the threshold needs to be very high. I know I have said this before in the House, and I hope noble Lords will excuse me for repeating it, but sources of information are vulnerable. They can be killed, and they then cannot produce intelligence that might be life-saving. Techniques can be damaged overnight, rapidly. What we are trying to do here is to protect the most sensitive sources and methods but not the picture of what has happened, the material that should be available to the court which may be sensitive. I would say that it is actually narrower than what the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, is suggesting for the purposes of this legislation. However, the difficulty with a waterproof definition, however attractive, is that this is a moving picture. At one stage, natural hazards and disasters—pandemics and so on—were never in a national security strategy. We can argue whether they should be, but successive Governments, rightly, take different interpretations of the breadth or narrowness of the subject.