Ms Beverley Hughes (Minister of State (Citizenship and Immigration), Home Office; Stretford & Urmston, Labour)

I understand the spirit of the probing questions and hope that I can respond to Opposition Members. The effect of their amendment would be to prevent the director general of the Security Service alone, in the list of people to whom we are proposing to give authorisation powers, from giving that authorisation. That would presumably mean that the security services would have to seek authorisation in the list and would receive that only for the purposes listed.

In relation to the question of the hon. Member for Beaconsfield, I would say two things. First, the security services have a remit in relation to crime anyway. They do not simply deal with intelligence and security, as the hon. Gentleman is aware. It is important, therefore, that they are able to give authorisations to their personnel, as other services would. There is not a neat split between criminal activity and organised terrorist activity that is core to the remit of the security services.

To give an example that we have talked about a fair bit, investigations into al-Qaeda took place to determine how such organisations communicate. It may be believed that some information pertaining to national security has been encrypted into a photograph or an image. It would be important for the security services to be able to draw down that image to decode and deconstruct the information that was in the photograph. Use of such images via the internet is one of the mechanisms that we know organisations use to communicate with their members in a secret way. That is a tangible example of why the security services need to be able to give permission to their staff to draw down certain images when they think that information is contained within.

The important point is that all the people listed in the clause—including the director general—are accountable for the way in which the authorisation will operate in their organisations. That is the key point. It may be that a particular individual at second tier may see the detail of the request to make a decision but the director general will be personally accountable. There is, therefore, no reason to make the director general of the Security Service go to a High Court judge, when we accept that other people included in the clause can be accountable in that way in law for the decisions that they make when they authorise their staff to draw down such material.

I hope that that answer satisfies the hon. Gentlemen. We are not yet satisfied with the drafting of clause 48. The numbers of people who might, with justification, seek authorisation is actually greater than we initially thought as we worked through the clause. Therefore, the clause may be too widely drawn and the system may become overloaded. We are negotiating with the police services and others and we shall table our own amendment on Report. For absolute clarification, we expect to continue to allow the Security Service to ''make'' such images in pursuit of its functions as the clause states.

See this speech in context