There is an urgent need for the activities of security services MI5 and MI6 to be monitored by an independent body, an influential committee of Parliamentarians said yesterday.
The Joint Committee on Human Rights made the controversial demand - which is sure to be opposed by the spook community - after MI5 director general Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller refused to answer the committee's questions about counter-terror laws.
It said there may need to be a new organisation to oversee the agencies and also to examine claims made by the Government based on intelligence information, although it did not make specific reference to the Iraq "dodgy dossier".
Public confidence in the quality of the security services' work plummeted after claims about weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein's Iraq proved to be wrong.
The report read: "There is an increasingly urgent need to devise new mechanisms of independent accountability and oversight of both the security and intelligence agencies and the Government's claims based on intelligence information.
"In addition to more direct Parliamentary accountability, we consider that in principle the idea of an 'arm's length' monitoring body charged with oversight of the security and intelligence agencies, independent of the Government and those agencies, and reporting to Parliament, merits consideration in this country."
