I can say only that I, like my right hon. and hon. Friends, am fully aware of the Committee’s views on the amount of funding that it will require. Yet again, I take note of my hon. Friend’s points on the matter, but I repeat that there is not much point in my standing here carrying out a negotiation with him or any other member of the Committee about the figure we arrive at. As someone who has been at the Treasury, I think that the Government must combine providing the right resources, which are undoubtedly going to be more than the Committee has had in the past, with doing a bit of negotiating about what is the necessary cost. Report stage is not the place to resolve the final figure.
Similarly, the status and nature of the Committee will not be resolved finally by statute or by debate on the Floor of the House. A long discussion has been going on to make sure that the Committee has the right status and structure to do its job effectively, and I think we are very near to reaching a successful agreement between the Government, the Opposition, the House authorities in both Houses of Parliament and the current members of the Intelligence and Security Committee on what its status should be. I am told that we still have to have further discussions with the House of Commons Commission and the House Committee in the House of Lords, but I think everybody is becoming satisfied that we are resolving that matter. We are also resolving the question of the accommodation, which probably will have to be on the Government’s estate rather than the
parliamentary estate, for security reasons. I will go into more details if hon. Members wish, but I realise that we still have quite a lot of the Bill to deal with. Unless hon. Members are particularly interested in knowing the precise current status of these discussions, I hope I may take it that the House is reasonably satisfied that all parties are going to reach a satisfactory conclusion. I assure the House that the Government have been anxious throughout to make this Committee powerful, properly resourced and as much of a parliamentary body—a body that is accountable and resembles the Select Committees of the House in every way possible—as it can be. I think that soon this will all be resolved.
I shall now deal with amendment (a), tabled by the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson), although she anticipated my reply. Government amendment 58 is required in order to give us the necessary authority to make the financial contributions that we are going to be arguing about. Amendment (a) seeks to oblige the Government—or at least expressly to empower them—to make an additional amount available for the payment of Committee members. That is not necessary, nor, in my opinion and that of the Government, is it wise to start putting the matter of the payment of members of Select Committees or parliamentary Committees into statute, or implicating the Government directly in that. The payment of members of this Committee, the Chairman of this Committee and members of Select Committees is a matter for the House of Commons, the House of Lords and the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority—from every point of view, it is best left there. Where the Government have to initiate all this, it is a feature of all Governments, of all political complexions, that they can get very politically embarrassed on questions about the remuneration of any Member of either House. So a process that leaves the matter with IPSA and the House of Commons is preferable to the hon. Lady’s amendment.
Finally, I shall touch on the spirit of political debate we have had on the question of whether the Chairman should be elected, and again I must say that the Wright Committee produced a splendid report. My hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Mr Tyrie) first proposed this, but he is not able to be here because he is serving on his Banking Commission, as we all realise. We worked together, when we were in opposition, with my right hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire (Sir George Young), who is now the Government Chief Whip, on a thing called the democracy taskforce, advocating the election of Chairman of Select Committees and producing proposals that were remarkably close to those of the Wright Committee. I certainly start on the same basis as my colleagues who have been drawn to this part of the debate, but we have heard all the arguments why, in this particular case, the proposal does not work. We are already making the whole thing approved by Parliament. No longer will the Prime Minister appoint the Chairman; the Chairman will be elected by those who know—or will know—him best: members of the ISC.
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One difficult hurdle that cannot be overcome by those who think such a system is not good enough and want the whole House to elect the Chairman, subject to
prime ministerial veto, is that a veto will be difficult to exercise. We are on much safer ground if the Prime Minister nominates people and invites Parliament to elect them, as we have proposed, rather than letting people put themselves forward and the Prime Minister moving in and vetoing an individual, which unfortunately could occur.
During my time in the House I have known more than one person—including Members from both sides of the House and in one case a personal friend from my party—who could not have been appointed to this Committee and would have been vetoed. That would not always have been for political reasons; I suspect that sometimes the security agencies knew something about those people’s history or private lives that would have made them totally unsuitable to sit on the Committee. I need only hint at such things to show why we cannot just let the House of Commons elect absolutely anybody, subject to prime ministerial veto.