Home Secretary And The Security Service

EDM number 500 in 1991-92, proposed by Harry Cohen on 17/01/1992.

That this House deplores the Home Secretary's decision not to disclose information about staffing, financial and other matters closely associated with the Security Service; considers this inconsistent as it was a Home Office press release which announced the new head of MI5 without Parliament being officially notified; notes that subsequent press reports referred to MI5 employing an estimated 2000 full-time officers with a budget between ú300 million and ú500 million; questions where this money is in the Parliamentary estimates voted by honourable Members and is suspicious that it must be in a number of slush funds in other Votes; considers it wrong that the Security Service bureaucracy should expand without any parliamentary approval when world circumstances, particularly the demise of the Soviet Union, makes the case for its operations much less; and calls for a Select Committee, along the lines of the Public Accounts Committee, to have an oversight role over all the security services, to which they would be accountable.

This motion has been signed by a total of 24 MPs.