I said at the outset that I would not comment on individual cases, and I believe that the hon. Gentleman heard that. The hon. Gentleman mentioned "Spycatcher", or at least Peter Wright. Many people recall the allegation contained in "Spycatcher", to which the hon. Gentleman alluded, that the Security Service had engaged in a plot against the Labour Government of the day. Mr. Wright subsequently retracted that allegation on television, but that received far less publicity than his initial claims.

The idea that, as my right hon. Friend the Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary put it during the debates on the Security Service Act, the Security Service is rather akin to an untamed and possibly dangerous animal which has to be placed in a cage with a bright light shone upon it, and that a keeper has to be employed to go into the cage and announce to the world at every stage what the animal is doing, is quite simply not a view of the Security Service that the Government accept. Nor is it a view that we would be willing to have play any significant part in influencing the shape of any oversight mechanism in respect of the service.

If the House decides, in due course, that it is right to establish a different framework for the oversight of the service from that which has existed up till now, it is vital that the change should be made for the right reasons. Any change would have to strike the right balance. On the one hand, there is the need to ensure that the work of the service, with its undoubted potential for infringing on the civil liberties of individual people, should be carried out in a way which ensures that the service is properly accountable for all that it does; on the other, there is the need to ensure that the vital work which the service carries out in the national interest should not be rendered more difficult or impossible by the public disclosure of its operations or other matters which must remain secret if the service itself is to remain effective. There is always a balance to be struck between those two competing aspects.

It will not surprise the hon. Member for Walsall, North that I cannot say tonight whether the Government will, in due course, decide that, with the passage of time since 1989, it is appropriate to propose a change to the current arrangements. But we do recognise that this is a matter of quite proper concern to many members of the public and to hon. Members. I can assure the House that whatever view we reach on this most important matter will not be reached without the most careful consideration.