I congratulate the hon. Member for Walsall, North (Mr. Winnick) on obtaining this Adjournment Debate and on raising the important question of the accountability of the Security Service. It is clear that the hon. Gentleman has strong views on the need for oversight of the work of the Security Service. The Government entirely agree with him. In a parliamentary democracy, it is of the utmost importance to ensure that the agency which is given responsibility for protecting national security is subject to proper oversight in carrying out its necessarily secret work. The Government differ with the hon. Gentleman in his analysis of the reasons why such oversight is needed, as I shall seek to develop in a moment.

The hon. Gentleman anticipated what I might or might not say. I shall deal with some of the subjects that he raised, but I hope that he will understand that I cannot comment on individual cases, as he perhaps rightly anticipated. Nevertheless. I commend him on the interest that he has consistently maintained in this important subject.

As the House will recall, the nature and extent of the arrangements which were required for ensuring that the Security Service was properly accountable for its work were fully debated in the House a few years ago during the passage of the Security Service Bill. At that time, the House spent a full day in Committee debating the nature of the arrangements which needed to be put in place to secure the right balance.

The Opposition, no doubt including the hon. Gentleman, argued then that it would be right to place the Security Service under the scrutiny of a Select Committee of the House in the same way as ordinary Government Departments. Other hon. Members argued that, because the task of overseeing the work of the Security Service would not simply be akin to that performed by Select Committees in scrutinising other Whitehall Departments, a specially constructed Security Service review committee was needed. That suggestion, I suspect, drew heavily on the experience of the Canadians, as the hon. Gentleman said a few moments ago.

The Government took the view that, even though such a system might well suit conditions in Canada, this House needed to decide on a system of oversight which was right for this country and which reflected the responsibilities of the Security Service, the threats to our citizens from which it is the duty of the Security Service to provide protection, and the duties of Ministers in the House.

After a full debate, Parliament agreed with the view of the Government that the difficulties of principle and practice in the way of establishing an effective mechanism of direct parliamentary oversight were such that the better course was to rest on the approach which had previously been followed, by which the Security Service was accountable to Ministers for its work and Ministers were in turn accountable to Parliament. That is not to say that the Security Service Act 1989 denies any role to Parliament.

In passing the 1989 Act, Parliament set out the framework within which the Security Service operates, established the functions of the service and provided for safeguards against any abuse, whether by members of the service or by Ministers. I remind the House that Parliament also receives the annual report made to the Prime Minister by the commissioner appointed under the Act. In general, however, the House agreed in 1989 that ministerial accountability for the work of the Security Service was the right model for this country.

More recently, as the hon. Member for Walsall, North has reminded us, the question of the accountability of the service has been raised in a report by the Home Affairs Select Committee. I notice the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Mrs. Roche) in her place, and I know that she is a member of that Committee. In preparing its report, the Select Committee once again carefully reviewed all the arguments about accountability. It acknowledged the significant moves which have been made in recent years towards removing unnecessary secrecy surrounding the work of the Security Service.

The passage of the Security Service Act was an important step in that direction, and has been followed by: the announcement of the appointment of Mrs. Stella Rimington as director-general of the service; the statement made by my right hon. and learned Friend the Home Secretary on 8 May last year concerning the transfer to the service of the lead responsibility for intelligence-gathering in Great Britain in respect of Irish Republican terrorism; and the acknowledgement that Thames house, on the Embankment, was to be the service's new headquarters. I am pleased to acknowledge the Select Committee's recognition of those very positive steps.

The Select Committee also recognised, quite rightly, that, whatever arrangements may be put in place for ensuring the proper accountability of the service, they must be such as to avoid damaging in any way the effectiveness of the service, or putting lives unnecessarily at risk—the very point that the hon. Gentleman made early in his speech. However, the Select Committee went on to conclude that the work of the Security Service should be suject to parliamentary oversight in just the same way as any other aspect of the working of government, and that the Home Affairs Select Committee itself, perhaps unsurprisingly, should undertake that task.

It would not be right for me now to anticipate what the Government will say in their response to the Select Committee's report. To do so would be discourteous to the Select Committee, or to the other members of it who are not in their places. But this brief debate tonight will be of assistance to the Government as we consider the terms of our response to the report, which we hope to publish shortly after Easter.

There will, of course, be a further opportunity to debate all this when the Bill which the Government have promised to bring forward in due course, to place the Secret Intelligence Service and Government communications headquarters on a statutory basis, is presented to the House. That Bill will, as the Government have already said, be introduced in the lifetime of the present Parliament. The hon. Gentleman said that he expected that to be in the current Session, and I think that the Select Committee understood the same thing, but the Government have not said that. The Bill will be introduced as soon as the necessary parliamentary time can be made available, but I cannot promise when that will be, other than that it will be during this Parliament.

Often, it is the implicit theme in the claims made by those who criticise the Security Service that it is not subject to any form of effective oversight of the way in which it carries out its work. I have already referred to the system of safeguards established under the Security Service Act 1989. Similar safeguards exist in respect of other intrusive methods of investigation under the Interception of Communications Act 1985. Between them, those Acts create an effective system of judicial oversight of the work of the service, as partially described by the hon. Gentleman.