What assessment he has made of the likely impact on (a) health service provision and (b) social services provision in Oxfordshire of the proposed closure of community hospitals in the county. [72373]

I am sure that, before I answer the hon. Gentleman's question, the whole House will want to express its sympathy to the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe) on her recent bereavement.

My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has had a number of meetings with right hon. and hon. Members from Oxfordshire, including the hon. Gentleman, local general practitioners and other interested groups to discuss Oxfordshire health authority's proposals. As the hon. Gentleman is aware, my right hon. Friend is currently considering those proposals in detail.

I thank the Minister for that reply. He will know that it has been more than a year since consideration of the future of community hospitals in my constituency began. There is huge uncertainty, which means that it is becoming impossible to recruit nurses to community hospitals, because they do not know whether they will have a job in six months' time. Does he also know that the Oxford Radcliffe said that currently 16 of its 26 patient assessment areas are blocked because it cannot get people out into community hospital beds—and that is with the three community hospitals still open? It has also said that losing 52 beds in my constituency will have a catastrophic effect on health, not only in west Oxfordshire, but in Oxfordshire as a whole.

Does the Minister accept that cuts for social services this year, under which Oxfordshire will lose £10.5 million, will create an impossible situation for those who require health care and social services? An urgent decision by Ministers on keeping open Burford, Witney and Chipping Norton community hospitals is absolutely essential.

My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State is urgently considering the proposals. As I said, we intend to discuss them and the available options in detail with all the interested parties. However, we are clear that any changes in Oxfordshire must lead to a modern and dependable health service for local people, and our priority is to ensure that. We recognise the important role that community hospitals play in delivering locally based patient care, but it is the responsibility of individual health authorities to determine the most appropriate balance of health services for their population and to ensure that those services are provided in the most clinically effective and resource efficient manner.

Does the Minister accept that the proposal to close community hospitals in Oxfordshire, which also affects Abingdon community hospital, was made at a time when the Government were sticking to Conservative spending plans, before the comprehensive spending review settlement, and before the savage cuts to social services that have been forced on Oxfordshire county council by a combination of the settlement and the crazy capping system? Will he give an undertaking that some of the money in the comprehensive spending review will be available to give Oxfordshire people what they want—good quality local care, at a level that is affordable to the health service, in their local community hospitals?

I am sure that the hon. Gentleman is aware that there is a limit on what I can say today because my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State is currently reviewing all the proposals. My right hon. Friend is doing that in an inclusive and open fashion, and I hope that the hon. Gentleman acknowledges and supports that.

On the issue of resources for Oxfordshire county council and its social services budget, I do not recognise the figures quoted by the hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Woodward). In 1998–99, total social services expenditure for Oxfordshire was £76.8 million; next year, it will be £78.2 million.

Does the Minister agree that the role of community hospitals is vital in reducing waiting lists in a legitimate way that benefits patients? The record of community hospitals in Oxfordshire and elsewhere is rather better than the hon. Gentleman's record of fiddling the figures. Why will he not admit that the total number of patients now waiting to get on the waiting list has increased by more than 220,000, and that, therefore, today's real waiting list figure is half a million more than he boasts?

None of that has anything to do with the question or the issue of hospitals in Oxfordshire. I have already tried to make clear the importance we attach to the role of community hospitals. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will have the opportunity to check Hansard tomorrow.

What assessment he has made of the performance of NHS Direct. [72375]

In March last year, we launched NHS Direct pilot schemes in Newcastle, Preston and Milton Keynes. An independent survey has shown that 97 per cent. of the callers surveyed were satisfied with the service they received from the three pilot schemes, which shows that NHS Direct is a great success. That is why we are extending that 24-hour, nurse-led helpline to cover more than 40 per cent. of the country by Easter. That coverage will include West Yorkshire NHS Direct, covering my hon. Friend's constituency. NHS Direct will be extended to cover 60 per cent. of the country by the beginning of December.

I thank my right hon. Friend for that reply. As he said, the NHS Direct initiative will be launched in West Yorkshire on 7 April and will cover some 2 million people. Does he share my hope that in my city of Leeds, the new initiative will help to reduce the number of admissions to accident and emergency units, which currently run at 12 per cent. above the national average?

Further to a conversation I had a with a nurse when I was in hospital the other week, will my right hon. Friend assure me that the new scheme will be given the maximum possible publicity campaign, so that the people of West Yorkshire will be aware of the Government's excellent initiative?

The object of NHS Direct is to provide a better 24-hour service to people. In some cases, people will be referred instantly to an accident and emergency department; in other cases, they will receive advice, help or reassurance. The object is to provide anyone who rings the service with the assistance that they need. That is the crucial point. One of the few complaints revealed by the survey of the three pilot schemes was that they were not receiving enough publicity. Therefore, I shall do my best to ensure that as each new NHS Direct scheme comes into operation in different parts of the country, it gets the publicity that it clearly deserves.

Why, when the Secretary of State delivered a statement about NHS Direct only a month ago, did he make no mention of his plans to consider replacing all contact with the family doctor and diverting people instead through a remote national call centre? That is what he told the newspapers on Sunday. He must have known of the proposal in Northumberland when he made his statement. Why did he not have the honesty to tell the House that he was looking to move NHS Direct into a whole new area?

The hon. Gentleman was present on 2 February when I announced the proposal to extend NHS Direct to 40 per cent. of the country by Easter and to 60 per cent. of the country by December. If he checks Hansard, he will note that I drew attention to the proposal advanced by local doctors from around the Newcastle centre in Northumberland to go ahead with the scheme, under which people would ring NHS Direct first rather than go straight to their doctors. That was part of the statement that the hon. Gentleman may recall he welcomed.

I have Hansard here. The Secretary of State implied that the proposal was for only out-of-hours calls. I welcome a central number—that is what I called for. It may be only a trial, but the subject requires a proper debate. It now appears that the right hon. Gentleman is not talking about only out-of-hours calls. If patients cannot call their own doctors but must go through a national centre, it becomes "NHS Indirect". Will he confirm that the Government are against centralisation and that he favours maintaining close local contact between patients and their family doctors?

All that I can say—if it is not out of order, Madam Speaker—is that it seems rather empty-headed to have listened to a statement about a 24-hour helpline and concluded that its extension would not cover a 24-hour period. That is what it will do. I emphasise that I did not provoke or encourage the scheme in Northumberland: the proposal came from the Northumbria ambulance service, the local health information service and Northern Doctors Urgent Care—a GP co-operative which provides services in that area. Those bodies want to go ahead and pilot the scheme and, if it works, I have no doubt that other doctors and people elsewhere in the country will want to introduce similar schemes. We are conducting a pilot scheme to see whether the proposal will work, but it will not prevent people in Northumberland from ringing their own doctors.

What suggestions he has received about the role of primary care groups in addressing the health consequences of fuel poverty. [72377]

One of the three key tasks for primary care groups will be the improvement of the health of their local population, and we attach great importance to that role. Fuel poverty can contribute to increased risk of heart attack, stroke and respiratory conditions such as flu, pneumonia and bronchitis. An interdepartmental group reviewing all Government policy on fuel poverty identified primary care groups as a potential way of reaching households in need of help with that problem. Work is in hand to explore that possibility further.

Will the Minister ask the interdepartmental group to pay particular attention to work being done on warm homes programmes in at least two areas? First, in Cornwall, considerable work is being done to tackle child asthma and, secondly, in Birmingham, a collaboration with the local authority allowed home insulation to be offered on prescription. Will my right hon. Friend consider the lessons to be learned from such initiatives and seek to extend them where possible so that we can ask primary care groups to tackle the causes of ill health as well as its consequences and costs?

I am delighted to take on board my hon. Friend's suggestions for good practice and to reaffirm the Government's commitment to tackle the root causes of ill health by working across Government and, in doing so, to tackle inequality in health, which blights our society.

Is the Secretary of State aware that the right hon. Member for Darlington (Mr. Milburn), when he was a Health Minister and before he became Chief Secretary to the Treasury, reassured Conservative Members that there would shortly be an announcement on the next round of hospital private finance initiatives, including the consideration of a case in my constituency relating to West Kent and East Sussex—

Order. I think that I must have called the hon. Gentleman on the wrong question. This question concerns the health consequences of fuel poverty. I call the right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth).

What is fuel poverty compared with, for example, food poverty or clothing poverty?

Fuel poverty is measured as the need to spend over 10 per cent. of one's weekly income on keeping warm.

The question demonstrates one of the many demands on the boards of the new primary care groups at this stage. If the Stafford primary care group is anything to go by, the management structures are certainly as lean as the Government would like them to be. Will the Minister assure the House that the new boards will have adequate resources and training so that they have the expertise as well as the time, which is very important, to be able to deal with conflicting demands at this important time in their establishment?

We are determined that the role of primary care groups will not be only to deliver primary care to local people, but to act as a major force in meeting the Government's targets for broader health improvement and reducing preventable deaths. We shall certainly work with primary care groups so that they are clear not only that they are in the business of ensuring that people receive treatment for ill health, but that they are a force for health improvement.

I am sure that the Minister recognises the importance of delivering the wider public health agenda and the role of primary care groups in that aim. Does she agree that local authority services are an integral part of the delivery of the wider public health agenda? Would not it be sensible to integrate, perhaps as pilot studies, a number of health and local authority services so that we can find out whether the proposals can go further? A coterminous area such as my own, an island, would welcome such an initiative.

We certainly recognise the importance of close partnership between health and local authorities in tackling health inequality and improving health. The hon. Gentleman will be aware of the many steps that the Government have taken to reduce the obstructive and artificial boundaries between health and local authorities. The Health Bill will set out a new framework, including a duty of partnership between health and local authorities, so that the people of a given area no longer have to grapple with the dreadful bureaucracy that results from a single need being met sometimes by services from the local authority, and sometimes by health authority services. Health improvement is also about making sure that we achieve closer integration of the working of health and local authorities.

What representations he has received regarding levels of funding for NHS hospital trusts. [72378]

The Department, through the NHS Executive and its regional offices, is in day-to-day contact with NHS trusts and health authorities in their role of managing the national health service. Representations are made during those contacts, including by Members of Parliament, through formal channels such as parliamentary questions.

Is the Minister aware that many of my constituents who use the West Suffolk Hospitals NHS trust believe that the Government's funding policy discriminates against trusts in rural areas, such as their's, compared with urban areas? In that respect, may I draw the Minister's attention to today's report of an inquiry into the East Anglian Ambulance NHS trust, the performance of which is giving rise to great concern among many people in Suffolk? I am aware that the Secretary of State has taken a personal interest in the report. Given that meeting the goals in that document relies on increased funding, will the Minister give an undertaking to welcome a delegation of Suffolk Members of Parliament so that they may lobby for fairer health funding for Suffolk?

I shall say two things to the hon. Gentleman. First, we will not accept any lectures from him and his hon. Friends about national health service funding. His tirade completely omitted any reference either to the 5.5 per cent. cash increase in Suffolk health authority's funding, or to next year's real-terms increase of more than £11 million for Suffolk health authority. I am rather surprised that he managed to let those figures slip through his fingers.

Secondly, the hon. Gentleman may not be aware of it, but we have already made an adjustment to the funding formula to allow additional resources to be made available to rural ambulance services.

Will my hon. Friend ensure that the very generous funding allocated to the NHS by this Government is spent wisely? Will he look at the report into the East Anglian Ambulance NHS trust, which points to deep-seated management problems, many of which I have been drawing attention to for many years? I hope that he agrees that we should concentrate on the way in which such resources are spent.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend and I very strongly agree with what she says. It might help the debate and the clarity of the issues if Conservative Members were prepared to address the reality rather than criticise the Government's record on funding. In 1996–97, the total of NHS trust and health authority deficits was nearly £460 million. By the last quarter of 1998–99, we had managed to reduce that to £80 million. That is the bottom line.

Will the hon. Gentleman confirm that most NHS acute trusts will this year receive part of their funding in the form of a performance bonus, if they meet the Secretary of State's headline waiting list targets by 31 March? Will the Minister acknowledge that few, if any, hospital trusts can afford to lose that bonus? Does not that amount to a clear invitation to NHS trusts to do the Secretary of State's dirty work for him, letting out-patient waiting lists double in order to deliver on his political target for headline waiting lists?

No, I do not accept that criticism—any part of it, or any word of it. If the hon. Gentleman were able to look at the performance of the NHS over the past few months, especially over the difficult winter period, I am sure that he would join me in congratulating the staff on their excellent work. He may well want to consider the very interesting figures on the reduction in waiting lists.

How many accident and emergency departments will receive funds for improvements this year; and if he will make a statement. [72379]

Seventy-nine accident and emergency departments in all parts of the country will be upgraded in the coming year with money from the NHS modernisation fund. That is a third of all A and E departments in England. It will mean better and quicker services for patients, and better and safer working conditions for staff. That extra investment from the modernisation fund augments the upgrading that is already being funded as part of the general increase in capital for the NHS which this Government have introduced.

I thank my right hon. Friend for that answer and welcome his massive investment of funds in our national health service. However, is he aware that many NHS trusts, including Kettering general hospital in my constituency, have already modernised their accident and emergency units and fear that, as a result, they may lose out on Government funding? Is it his intention that all future modernisation funding will be earmarked for specific purposes, or will there be some discretionary funding for local projects identified as meeting local needs?

The straight answer is that there will be a mixture. Some of the extra capital funds will be entirely at the discretion of the local trust; some of the money that comes from the ordinary allocation of funds will have some priorities given to it by me; and some of it, from the modernisation fund, will be specifically laid down from the centre.

We believe that it was right and proper, for instance, to try to bring all accident and emergency departments up to the standard that prevails in Kettering, because we believe that a good standard should apply everywhere. When that has been done, additional funds will go elsewhere.

However, I have said that the national health service management, with the extra capital that it is getting this year, must give priority to replacing unreliable equipment that goes on the blink and breaks down. That is very bad for patients. One of the most frustrating aspects of working in the national health service is to have to work with the clapped-out old equipment on which the previous Government spent no money over the past 19 years.

When will there be enough money for our accident and emergency and other hospital departments to ensure—and to employ the necessary staff—that we reduce the number of people who have seen their consultants and are waiting to get into hospital to below the level that the Government inherited; to reduce the number of those waiting to see their consultants—which is 200,000 more than when the Government came to office—below the number that they inherited; and to ensure that our A and E departments treat the recommended number of 100,000 a year, not 150,000 a year, which is the number of people expected to go through the doors of St. Thomas's hospital when Guy's hospital closes later this year, thanks to the right hon. Gentleman's decision?

Just in case the hon. Gentleman causes any more Liberal hairs to rise, Guy's hospital is not going to close. The A and E department will close because, in the opinion of the people whom we have consulted—who know more about accidents and emergencies than even the Liberal party—the alternative arrangements that we are making, as recommended by Sir Leslie Turnberg in his report, will be satisfactory. However, as the hon. Gentleman knows, and should have said if he is prepared to be straightforward about this matter, I have said that we shall keep a very close eye on that.

We must recruit more staff, and we are doing so; we must improve equipment; we must make layouts safer; and we must install closed circuit television to stop the yobbos beating up nurses. Indeed, we are doing all those things, but the management must also improve in many places.

We have insisted on getting admissions wards into every district general hospital. When we took over, almost half the district general hospitals in this country had no admissions ward to back up the accident and emergency department; now, only 20 do not have one.

As my right hon. Friend knows, one beneficiary of the improvement programme is New Cross hospital in Wolverhampton. At the cost of making him blush, may I tell him that the improvements to and upgrading of our A and E department and the provision of an extra 22 beds are most welcome? Can he confirm that that is further evidence that Labour is keeping its promises? I say on behalf of Wolverhampton, thank you very much.

My hon. Friend, with his mastery of understatement, only repeats what many doctors and nurses told me in his presence last time I was in Wolverhampton.

One thing that we are doing with the extra money for modernising A and E departments is to put an extra £600,000 into modernising that department at Whipps Cross hospital in east London, and we shall sort out its management as well. That hospital needs a better A and E department, and it needs to be better run than it is at present if we are to avoid the scandalous things that happened there this winter.

Is the Secretary of State aware that, when the Prime Minister was grinning on the steps of Basingstoke hospital while announcing the proposed investment in A and E facilities, one of my constituents, just 20 miles down the road at Yateley in Hampshire, was suffering from a lack of Government funding? That constituent had an operation in 1995 at a specialist London hospital outside his area, followed by three check-ups, but has now been denied a further appointment there. He has been told by the local health authority that, in common with many others, it is experiencing severe financial difficulties. It states:

"We are desperately trying to ensure that we continue to provide the best quality care for all our residents but, regrettably, do not have the financial resources to allow for freedom of choice for individuals."

It went on to say that, unless more taxpayers' money was made available, it would not be able to deliver the service.

Is not the truth that the Secretary of State castigated the Conservatives when he was sitting on the Opposition Benches, but has failed to deliver patient care in government?

If the hon. Gentleman sends me the details of that case, I shall look into it. From bitter experience at the Dispatch Box since I have had this job, I do not give full credence to what Tory Members read out. However, what he says may be correct.

When my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister was mobbed by delighted hospital staff, he was at Basingstoke hospital to mark the effort to bring its A and E department at Basingstoke up to the sort of level that we need for the next century, including the introduction of an X-ray machine specifically for that department, which will be better for the patients and speed up the process altogether. I should have thought that the hon. Gentleman might just have welcomed that, but of course he cannot really welcome it without a touch of hypocrisy because the shadow Chancellor says that we are spending too much on the health service.

In welcoming the announcement, may I draw my right hon. Friend's attention to the fact that although many A and E patients are children, many A and E departments make no special provision for them? Will my right hon. Friend check on the position of the 79 A and E departments and ensure that the modest changes that are necessary properly to receive and reassure children are put in place as part of the upgrading?

That is certainly the case; my hon. Friend makes a valuable point. It would be wholly reasonable for me to add that one of the changes in Basingstoke is to provide a specific area for children in the A and E department, just as the £882,000 that we are giving to the Central Manchester trust will create separate children's A and E areas in the central Manchester hospitals.

The Secretary of State will be aware that many A and E departments are used as drop-in centres, preventing the staff from doing their main work. Is there any further development in the creation of specialist trauma centres to deal with the most serious accidents, which was part of the earlier policy?

As the hon. Gentleman knows, there is almost a theological dispute among trauma experts about whether we should have trauma centres or A and E departments as we have at present, and some places are moving more towards trauma departments than others. I have some sympathy with people who use their local A and E departments as a drop-in centre if they are feeling off colour. That has certainly been a characteristic of the major inner-city teaching hospitals of all our great cities.

Although that use poses burdens, I believe that the national health service should provide what local people clearly want of their hospitals. In quite a few areas, GPs are used to provide that service as part of the accident and emergency unit. If that suits the needs of local people—usually people from a deprived area around one of the old teaching hospitals—that is probably as good a use of NHS funds as any.

What steps he is taking to ensure that age is not used as a criterion for allocating health care. [72380]

The fundamental principle of the national health service is to provide services for everybody on the basis of clinical need. We are putting in place a number of measures that should improve fair access to services, including national service frameworks, the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, local clinical governance and a new performance assessment framework. We have made it clear that access to NHS services should be based on clinical need alone.

We are taking a number of steps specifically to improve the health of older people. For example, this year for the first time all people over 75 years old have been targeted for influenza vaccination.

I thank the Minister for his positive reply. Is he aware that, from the serious research that has been undertaken in the NHS on specialisms such as cardiac rehabilitation and kidney dialysis, there is hard evidence that many NHS trusts are discriminating on the basis of age? They are, in effect, rationing health care on the basis of age. Does the Minister agree, confirming his previous reply, that that is fundamentally wrong? Will he undertake to carry out a more far-reaching review of specialisms in the NHS to ensure that age discrimination does not occur?

I repeat what I said in my previous answer about the emphasis we place on clinical need: that is the determinant and should govern what treatment a person receives. I hope that the hon. Gentleman welcomes the initiatives that we are taking. I draw his attention in particular to the proposed new national service framework for older people, which we hope will help to drive up quality and standards of care for older people.

Although I welcome the Minister's comments, does he realise that they will ring pretty hollow in the west midlands, especially in Lichfield and Burntwood? He will be aware, because I have written to him, of an elderly lady in my constituency who has been waiting for more than a year to have a metal plate removed from her shoulder. Given that the waiting lists in the west midlands are the longest in England and Wales, does he find it amazing, as I do, that none of his hon. Friends has risen to point that out? What can he do to ensure that waiting lists in Lichfield and Burntwood for this type of operation for the elderly, and for younger people, are not even longer than those in the west midlands generally because of a crazy rule that has been introduced since the Government were elected? People have to wait three times as long to go to the Good Hope hospital in Sutton Coldfield if they happen to live in Lichfield and Burntwood. If they live in Sutton Coldfield, they can get into that hospital in a third of the time, regardless of their clinical position.

I am afraid that that was one of those questions that started with a point, but I am not sure where it ended up. I do not think that the beginning and the end were connected. The hon. Gentleman may not be aware that waiting lists have come down by a further 14,000 in January. I hope that he welcomes that excellent news. I remind him that we are taking initiatives—I should be grateful to know whether he supports them—to try to ensure that we improve the range and quality of health services for older people. They make up a significant group of people who use the NHS, and we want to make sure for them, and for others, that the NHS is a first-class service.

What action he is taking to promote the spread of nicotine replacement therapy in health action zones. [72382]

Up to £60 million will be available over the next three years, initially in health action zones, to develop smoking cessation services. Part of those funds will provide for the distribution of one week's nicotine replacement therapy free of charge to those smokers least able to afford it.

I welcome the Minister's response in relation to health action zones. May I remind her that the south-east has not a single health action zone, because the region is relatively affluent? However, there are pockets of deprivation, some of which are in my constituency—one of them has a smoking cessation programme. Will she consider extending the week's free nicotine replacement therapy to people on benefit in projects such as the one at Netherfield in my constituency?

It is intended that, following assessment of the effectiveness of smoking cessation services in health action zones after the first year, there will be further cessation services and free nicotine replacement therapy in the subsequent two years. This is intended to be a national programme.

It is important to link the scheme with its original purpose. We as a Government have committed ourselves to improving the health of the worst-off at a faster rate than the rate of improvement in the health of the population as a whole. More poor people than those who are better off die prematurely of cancer and heart disease, and many of those early deaths are due to smoking. That is why our providing free nicotine replacement and tackling the problem of smoking with smoking cessation services is so important to our broader aim of tackling health inequality.

May I declare a non-financial interest as chairman of the National Asthma Campaign?

Has the Minister seen reports of research done at Oxford, showing that heart and lung disease are now major killers, and that the biggest cause of such deaths is smoking? Will she ensure that the money spent on nicotine replacement therapy is not misused or used ineffectively, in view of a major campaign by the cigarette companies, which are trying to suggest that tax on cigarettes should not be increased in the Budget? It ought to be increased, and I hope that the Minister will ensure that comes about.

As the right hon. Gentleman will recognise, tax on cigarettes is a matter for the Chancellor. We may well hear more about it next week.

As for the right hon. Gentleman's broader point, we are determined to ensure that each of the measures set out in "Smoking Kills", the tobacco White Paper, is implemented and assessed in relation to its effectiveness. We must also ensure that the money invested is invested in saving lives from smoking, and tackling the inequality in health that it causes.

How many PFI projects have been approved in the national health service. [72383]

The private finance initiative plays an important role in modernising the national health service and contributing to the biggest new hospital building programme in the history of the service.

The final decision to proceed with a major capital development in the NHS is made on the basis of an approved full business case. To date, in the NHS in England, 10 major PFI hospital schemes have been given full business case approval, and construction work has now started. In addition, a further 15 major schemes are being developed, and could be given approval as PFI projects subject to satisfactory full business cases being produced and approved.

May we have an assurance that the national health service in England will not follow the bad example of the notorious PFI deal in Scotland, whereby three Edinburgh hospital buildings on associated land were handed over to a private consortium that stands to make up to £200 million profit by developing the land for housing, and will also receive £30 million a year of public money for 30 years to build a new hospital that will never become public property? The shady deal will be financed partly by cutting the number of beds, cutting the number of nurses and cutting the number of doctors. Is that not conclusive proof that the PFI is a disaster for our national health service?

No. My hon. Friend made a number of points; let me deal with the important ones.

The PFI does not lead to a reduction in the number of beds. The number of beds required in the local health service is identified at the outset, whether a hospital is to be built with public sector funds or through the private finance initiative. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has announced and put in hand a national beds inquiry to ensure that the number of beds that is provided reflects local and national priorities properly.

As for the financing of the deal, open market value is obtained for any surplus NHS land that is included in a PFI deal. A PFI deal will go ahead only if it is affordable for the NHS and represents value for money.

Does the Minister agree that, ever since the foundation of the NHS, its effectiveness under Governments of both political parties, has been undermined by the fact that it has tried to deliver modern health care with inadequate capital investment? That is largely the result of the health service being trapped in a public sector capital model. Therefore, does he agree that the best option for the health service capital programme is a partnership between the public and private sectors to ensure that clinical staff who are employed by the NHS have the most up-to-date capital resources at their disposal?

The capital programme that is being developed by the Government includes a mixture of PFI arrangements and traditional public sector capital investment. That is absolutely right. There is a big difference between the present Administration and the previous one. They made a complete mess of the private finance initiative—numerous schemes were developed, none of which has ever begun construction. It was the present Administration who sorted it out and got the priorities right. We will build on that in due course with clear guidance on contracts to be used and the approach to be taken. We are using PFI not as a bit of political rhetoric, but to deliver new hospitals and better conditions for NHS staff and patients.

Is my hon. Friend aware of the situation in my constituency, where Royal Berkshire hospital failed in its PFI initiative, but has now received Treasury funding to provide the new hospital consolidation that is greatly needed? Is he further aware of the scandalous situation with regard to Berkshire health authority? It threatened savage cuts to health services in my constituency, but they were found not to be necessary by a recent National Audit Office investigation and, following a campaign by my hon. Friends the Members for Reading, West (Mr. Salter) and for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart), have been halted.

I congratulate my hon. Friend on the close interest that she and her colleagues took in the proposals in Berkshire. I understand that proposals that were initially made last autumn have been substantially varied. She has drawn the House's attention to the flexibility that underlies the Government's approach to capital investment, with the right vehicle for particular projects being chosen.

When is the long-awaited announcement on the next round of hospital PFIs likely to be made?

Shortly.

What proportion of dental treatment was carried out within the NHS in the last year for which figures are available. [72384]

): The number of courses of NHS dental treatments is rising. In the first 10 months of the financial year, courses of treatment for adults rose by 4.2 per cent. and courses of treatment for children, excluding basic treatments that are included in the capitation fee, rose by 2 per cent. compared with the same period in previous years. Unfortunately, we do not have the figures for the amount of private treatment, so I cannot answer the question in full.

I thank my hon. Friend for his helpful reply—things seem to be improving. I am aware of the 18 years of neglect; it is an uphill struggle. However, would he care to comment on a letter that I have received from a constituent in Ilkley, who tells me that, after being the patient of a dentist for 30 years, he has just been told that he can no longer have NHS treatment from the dentist and that, in future, it will cost him £96 for inspection and a polish?

I telephoned Airedale community health council to find out what evidence it had on what was going on. It tells me that its last survey, which was held in 1996, demonstrated that only 65 per cent. of the adult population could hope to obtain treatment on the NHS. The community health council also tells me that the situation does not seem to be improving, and that it is receiving more complaints. Consequently, in the next few months, it will probably conduct another survey.

Individual dentists may—as in the situation described by my hon. Friend—choose no longer to offer national health service treatment. My understanding of the situation in Keighley—my geography is not good enough to know whether it would apply also to my hon. Friend's constituent in Ilkley—is that some dental practices are still accepting national health service patients. Bradford health authority would be able to advise on the matter. The Administration are investing in measures to ensure that national health service registration and treatment are available. The investing in dentistry initiative, in particular, should enable about 600,000 additional patients to receive national health service dental treatment.

I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will know that in my constituency, the previous Government received much, probably justified criticism because so many dentists decided to opt out of the NHS. Labour politicians, both locally and nationally, said that they would solve the problem if they were elected. Will he tell my constituents why the situation, which was improving up until the general election, is starting again to decline—despite Labour's assurance that it would solve the problem?

If there is a developing problem in the hon. Gentleman's constituency, it certainly would be open to the health authority to make bids under the investing in dentistry scheme and to start pilots in personal dental services. I do not know—although I shall certainly look into the matter—whether such bids were made or, if they were made, whether they were successful. Initiatives have been taken by the Government which will enable proposals to be made to deal with problems in areas of great difficulty. I shall certainly investigate the case of South Dorset to see whether that effort was made, and whether full advantage has been taken of the Government's new initiatives.

What proposals he has for the modernisation of intensive care and high-dependency units in the current year. [72385]

A modern health service needs modern intensive care and high-dependency care services. We have already, since the new year, invested almost £10 million to increase capacity. We are reviewing plans for next winter and the longer term, including the need for national standards.

I thank my right hon. Friend for her answer. May I also thank the Secretary of State for recently visiting Bedford, where he thanked national health service staff for their hard work and dedication. That message went down very well and was appreciated in the area—[Interruption.] Conservative Members react to that statement, but they should realise that the British people do appreciate the commitment to the health service shown by the Secretary of State and the Government. One group of people whom the Secretary of State met at Bedford hospital were the team at the hospital's intensive care unit. Does the Minister also have a message for that intensive care unit team, as they consider necessary improvements in the unit's capacity and conditions?

Bedfordshire health authority is considering the case for providing more intensive care beds. Later this year, we expect to receive a report from the Audit Commission, which will provide national guidance in NHS planning on both the quality of intensive care services and the number of intensive care beds. The previous Government ploughed on in chaos in dealing with intensive care provision, without the faintest idea of how many intensive care beds were available. We have put that right.

Does the right hon. Lady agree that few high-dependency units fulfil a more critical function than burns units and heart-lung transplant units, as exemplified by Mount Vernon hospital and Harefield hospital in my constituency? Therefore, can the right hon. Lady put my constituents and those for many around about out of their misery by announcing that both those units will receive the modernisation that they rightly deserve, and which would be much more cost-effective than moving the facilities elsewhere?

The hon. Gentleman is right to say that there needs to be a proper assessment of the level of care that individual intensive care units are capable of providing. He will be aware that the proposals for the two specific hospitals he mentioned are currently being considered by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State.

How many nurses have phoned the nurse recruitment hotline. [72386]

At 11 am today, the number of inquiries to the national nursing recruitment campaign was 41,398. More than 3,300 of those were from qualified nurses wanting to return to nursing.

On 2 February, I tabled a question arising from a case in my constituency about the extent to which inflexible working hours deter qualified nurses from taking up NHS employment. Will my right hon. Friend publish the results of the survey referred to in the answer to that question? Has he seen the recent industrial tribunal case in which nurses successfully challenged new shift patterns which meant that they could no longer look after their children? Will my right hon. Friend encourage health trusts to provide flexibility so that qualified nurses can combine domestic and work responsibilities? Will he encourage NHS Direct to approach qualified nurses who had to retire on health grounds, perhaps because of back injuries, so that they can return to work on something that they will be able to do?

My hon. Friend has raised various points. Yes, we will publish the survey to which she referred. I am past the stage of encouraging trusts to offer family-friendly policies, and I have got round to telling some of them to do so because they are so slow. We want to ensure that we get rid of the rigid grading system that nurses in particular find so offensive. We want all staff to be offered family-friendly policies and shift rotas that suit the needs of their families. Also, we want to make working in the NHS safe. We are doing a lot within the health service to bring that about, and I am co-operating with the Lord Chancellor and my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary towards that end. All that, combined with the pay increases, will, I hope, mean that we can recruit all the nurses we need, including some of the 140,000 qualified nurses no longer working in the health service.

I welcome the number of inquiries to the nurse recruitment hotline, but is the right hon. Gentleman aware that the recent statement on nurses' pay has, no doubt, had a part to play in that? What will be important is the number of those inquiries that turn into nurses who are recruited for training or trained nurses who return to work. Will the right hon. Gentleman accept that nurses who have stayed with the health service are slightly miffed, to say the least, that their percentage pay increase does not reflect that commitment? Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that part and parcel of the problem of nurse recruitment is one of nurse retention?

There has been a major problem of nurse retention. If we had been retaining nurses over the past 18 or 19 years, we would not have the problem of having to get nurses back again. The more long-standing nurses did not get as big a pay increase as those being recruited. However, the Royal College of Nursing said constantly that the pay of newly qualified nurses starting in the health service was a national disgrace. Clearly, the pay review body agreed and gave such nurses a 12 per cent. increase. Other people on that grade who have been working in the NHS for some time received 8 per cent. The rest of the nurses and midwives received a 4.7 per cent. increase which, by April, will be about double the rate of inflation. It is a long time since nurses received a pay increase as generous as that.

What provision he is making to train increased numbers of doctors; and what progress is being made in inaugurating new medical schools. [72388]

The Government announced on 22 July 1998 that intake to medical schools in the United Kingdom would be increased to about 6,000 places by 2005—an increase of about 20 per cent. In England, the increase is being co-ordinated by a joint implementation group, which has invited universities to submit proposals for the allocation of additional places by 12 March. Proposals will be considered by the group and decisions will be announced later in the year. Numbers in postgraduate training are also growing to meet future requirements for general practitioners and consultants.

I thank my hon. Friend for that answer and I welcome the Government's commitments. Is my hon. Friend aware that many district general hospitals need new doctors and trainee staff to function properly? If the new doctors being trained are consolidated in existing centres of excellence, many district general hospitals will not have access to new doctor trainees because of the Calman report's recommendations. I hope that my hon. Friend will ensure that hospitals throughout the country, and particularly in Hemel Hempstead, have the opportunity of having trainee doctors associated with medical schools so that they can take full advantage of their expertise.

Doctors in specialist training and, to a lesser extent, medical students benefit from the experience of a range of provision, including large teaching centres, smaller acute trusts and community care trusts. How that experience is provided is for local decision.

We now come to the main business. I remind the House that the terms of the motion and the amendment before us do not cover the events on which the Foreign Secretary made a statement to the House last Wednesday—the leak of the draft report. For that reason, and because the House's settled procedure for examining and reporting on such leaks is now under way, I am prepared to permit only passing reference to those matters. I have selected the amendment in the name of the Prime Minister.

I beg to move,

That this House endorses the criticisms made of Ministers in the Second Report of Session 1998–99 (HC 116) of the Foreign Affairs Committee on Sierra Leone and the Report of the Legg Inquiry; deplores the conduct of Ministers which led to such criticism; and calls on the Ministers concerned to accept responsibility for their conduct.

It is almost two years since a military coup in Sierra Leone ousted the democratically elected Government of President Kabbah. We shared the Government's dismay at that event. Indeed, the previous Government had helped to finance the elections which led to President Kabbah's accession. We share too, as will the whole House, the dismay that the current situation in Sierra Leone evokes. Conflict in that country continues. More than 10,000 people are believed to have been killed in the wave of rebel attacks since December alone. Many more have been very seriously injured. Freetown has been left in ruins. What should be one of the richest countries in Africa is one of the poorest and most miserable. The situation has rightly been described as desperate.

The ability of the British Government to influence events in that tragic country may be limited. It is right to pay tribute to those in the diplomatic service and the armed forces, who have done what they can—and are doing what they can—to try to relieve suffering and end the conflict. But, however limited their influence, the Government are accountable to this House for their policies and action. We are here to ensure and enforce that accountability. We cannot do so unless we are told the truth—the whole truth—about the Government's policies and action. When we discover that we have not been told the whole truth, it is our duty to bring to account those responsible for that failure.

One of the ways in which we exercise such accountability is through Select Committees. I pay tribute to the Foreign Affairs Committee, under the chairmanship of the hon. Member for Swansea, East (Mr. Anderson), for its report on Sierra Leone. It is, of course, an all-party Committee; the majority of its members, however, come from the Labour party. Its report has rightly and widely been described as one of the most scathing of a Department, ever. It is certainly devastating in its criticism of officials. It is also devastating, however, in its criticism of Ministers, and it is that aspect on which I intend to concentrate. In the light of your observations, Madam Speaker, I shall not deal at all with the revelations of last week. I shall focus on the specific criticism of Ministers in the Select Committee report and in the Legg report.

If one listens to what Ministers have said, one could be forgiven for believing that there was no such criticism in either report. The Foreign Secretary said of the Legg report:

"I would perfectly happily accept any criticisms of myself in the report, but there are none."—[Official Report, 27 July 1998; Vol. 317, c. 28.]

Very, very shortly after the publication of the Select Committee report, the Prime Minister said on the Jimmy Young show:

"The criticisms are made of civil servants and not Government Ministers."

He also said that there was nothing new in the report—a claim described as "absolutely absurd" by the Chairman of the Select Committee. One reference in volume I of the Select Committee report seems to offer some succour to the Foreign Secretary. On page LXXXII, we find the following sentence:

"As far as Ministers were concerned, there is not a scintilla of evidence to suggest that they deliberately misled Parliament."

Unfortunately for Ministers, that sentence appears in a paragraph to which the Committee did not agree. It was excised from the report; not even the hon. Member for Dundee, West (Mr. Ross) was prepared to vote for it. That attempt to exculpate Ministers comprehensively failed. In fact, both reports contain serious criticism of Ministers. I shall begin with the Select Committee's criticism of the Foreign Secretary's failure to co-operate with it.

May I draw the right hon. and learned Gentleman's attention to paragraph 112 of volume I of the report—the postscript? Is he saying that the Committee did not agree to that paragraph before it was published? That paragraph, which contains the words that he is disputing, states:

"We commend the resolute support which the British Government is giving to the restoration of democracy and to the alleviation of suffering."

Is not that in the report?

I do not know what that has to do with the points that I am making. If the hon. Gentleman will bear with me for a moment, he will understand the criticisms. At paragraph 7 of the report, the Committee records how its work was impeded by the Government's refusal to release to it

"firstly telegrams concerning Sierra Leone, and secondly … information which fell within the ambit of the Legg inquiry."

At paragraph 8, the Committee sets out what it describes as further "frustrations" that it encountered. It asked to hear three of the officials involved in the affair; it was allowed to see only two. It was not allowed to see relevant intelligence reports. Its requests to take evidence in private from the head of the Secret Intelligence Service, or to be briefed by him in private, were also refused. At paragraph 101, the Committee says:

"it would be quite wrong and an unacceptable precedent for a Government in the future to be able to argue that any select committee inquiry could be superseded, or perhaps blocked for a considerable period of time, by a whistled-up departmental inquiry."

The Committee recommends

"that the Government undertake in future to respect select committees' requirements for information, irrespective of any departmental inquiry on related matters which might have been established."

At paragraph 107, the Committee says:

"We greatly regret that we were not given access to intelligence material and that we were refused the opportunity to take evidence from the Director of the SIS."

It notes:

"We cannot now say that we have had access to all the sources of information which would have allowed us to come to unequivocal conclusions."

The Committee condemns what it calls the Government's obduracy and, at paragraph 108, it contrasts

"the reluctance of the Foreign Secretary"

with the helpfulness of other Ministers, including the Defence Secretary. It recommends that the Government reflect, in

"any future inquiry like that into Sandline,"

as to the merit of what it calls

"a more mature attitude towards controlled access for the Foreign Affairs Committee to appropriate intelligence material and to witnesses from the Secret Intelligence Service."

The House will wish to take those observations and recommendations extremely seriously. In relation to the Foreign Secretary, they exemplify and underline the obstructive attitude that he took to the Select Committee's inquiry. They provide yet further evidence of the arrogance with which he and the Government treat Parliament. In my remaining remarks, I shall focus on the substantive failure on the part of Ministers to which both the Select Committee and the Legg inquiry drew attention. The Select Committee put it in this way:

"We conclude that the government policy on individual arms embargoes must never again be stated in a way which could mislead Parliament, the public and even the FCO's own staff."

The Legg inquiry concluded:

"Government has a responsibility to give citizens, and its own officials, reasonable publicity and explanation of the laws it makes under delegated powers, especially laws creating serious criminal offences. That was not done in this case."

Those are very serious charges. They are abundantly justified by the contents of the two reports. As I shall show, Ministers were directly involved.

What happened, in essence, was as follows. Ministers decided, for good reasons, to impose an arms embargo on Sierra Leone after the junta had deposed President Kabbah. For understandable reasons, they made that embargo comprehensive in scope. It had the goal of drying up arms supplies to all the parties in Sierra Leone; that was the objective of Ministers. Yet the embargo was consistently and deliberately described as a partial embargo. It was that misdescription which was misleading—to Parliament, the public and even the Foreign and Commonwealth Office's own staff—and, as we shall see, that misdescription was the responsibility of Ministers. That is the essence of the charge that we make.

The ministerial decision to impose an embargo on Sierra Leone was implemented first by a resolution of the Security Council of the United Nations and subsequently by an Order in Council.

That order made it a criminal offence, punishable by a maximum of seven years' imprisonment, to supply or deliver arms and military equipment to

"any persons connected with Sierra Leone."

As Legg and the Select Committee found, if, indeed, any such finding was necessary, it was the Government's duty to publicise and explain that law. Yet the Government wholly failed to discharge that duty. Every document that they issued which sought to explain it, every statement that they made about it, was, in the words of the Foreign Secretary himself, "plainly wrong".

Those statements included Foreign Office daily bulletins, a telegram to posts in west Africa advising them of the embargo's ambit, an answer to the House from the Minister of State, the hon. Member for Manchester, Central (Mr. Lloyd), even a reference to the embargo in the communiqué of the Commonwealth Heads of Government conference at Edinburgh, to which the Prime Minister put his name.

The statements extended it to a letter, written by a senior Foreign Office official to the Foreign Minister of Sierra Leone—I quote verbatim from the Select Committee's report—

"making it clear that the UN sanctions applied to the Junta but without disclosing that, in the British government's view, they also applied to the very government to whose Foreign Minister she was writing."

All that would be bad enough if it had been accidental, but it was deliberate. That is what the Legg inquiry concluded. It stated:

"the British framers of the October 1977 Resolution"—

the Security Council resolution—

" … did not doubt that the arms embargo imposed by the Resolution was comprehensive in its coverage."

It continued:

"However, British officials and Ministers"—

I stress "and Ministers"—

"continued to play this aspect down".

Legg goes on to explain why. It was, the inquiry says, partly because of the sensitivities about the possible role of the Economic Community of West African States, which, unlike Her Majesty's Government, had explicitly contemplated the use of force, and about the role of Nigeria within ECOWAS and the ECOWAS military observer group.

There, in a nutshell, we have it. A deliberate attempt was made to mis-state the scope and effect of the embargo, to play it down, in the words of the Legg report, because British officials and Ministers knew that those on the ground in Africa contemplated the use of force. What was the role of individual Ministers in all this? The Minister of State authorised United Nations Security Council resolutions. He saw and approved the Order in Council which created the criminal offences. He knew that its scope was comprehensive. That, after all, was his policy. Yet on 12 March 1998 he told the House that the sanctions were imposed "on the military junta".

That could have been an oversight. It could have been inadvertent. The Minister of State could have done what "Questions of Procedure for Ministers" require him to do, which is to

"correct any inadvertent error at the earliest opportunity."

But he has not done that. The Minister of State and the Foreign Secretary persisted for months in their attempt to justify their mis-statement of the effect of the embargo as

"not inconsistent with the fact that it was not only to the Junta to which the arms embargo applied."

It was that explanation to which the Select Committee referred when it gave its damning findings in paragraph 19 of its report that

"half-truths are a dangerous commodity in which to trade."

What an extraordinary thing for a Select Committee to say about the language of a Foreign Secretary and his Department.

Will the right hon. and learned Gentleman give way?

Not at the moment. As we know, even the Foreign Secretary was unable to continue with that fiction indefinitely. In the end, on 16 December, the Foreign Secretary gave up. He finally recognised and admitted the truth. The language used in telegram 277, which sought to explain to posts in west Africa, the ambit of the Security Council resolution was, he said, "plainly wrong". He had at last realised that he could no longer carry on the farce of pretending that the language used by his Department was correct but incomplete. It was not: it was plainly wrong. The language used in that telegram describing the ban as a ban on the supply of arms to the junta was the same as the language used in the Foreign Office daily bulletins, in the Commonwealth Heads of Government communiqué and in the Minister of State's answer in the House. If the telegram was plainly wrong, then so were they.

What does the Minister of State intend to do about his answer to the House on 12 March: the answer that the Foreign Secretary has told us was plainly wrong? We look forward to hearing what the Minister of State has to say about that when he winds up the debate. What of the Foreign Secretary? Did he not see the telegram that was plainly wrong, or the FCO daily bulletins? Was he unaware of the Minister's answer to the House on 12 March? Was he not consulted on the communiqué issued at the end of the Commonwealth Heads of Government conference? We know of his well-publicised aversion to finishing his paperwork. If he failed to see any of the documents itemised by the Select Committee, that, in itself, speaks volumes about the way in which he discharges his responsibilities. I call on him to answer each of the specific questions which I have put. The truth of the matter is that, in the words of the Legg report, Ministers deliberately "played down" the scope and effect of the embargo that they had imposed. They deliberately misrepresented the terms of the Order in Council, which created criminal offences that could have led to someone being sent to prison for seven years. They stated their policy in a way in which, in the words of the Select Committee's report, misled

"Parliament, the public and even the FCO's own staff."

It is difficult to imagine a more serious charge. This is the Government who the Prime Minister said must be purer than pure. This is the Foreign Secretary who purported to introduce an ethical foreign policy. This is also the Foreign Secretary who said:

"Tonight Parliament has the opportunity to insist that Ministers must accept responsibility for their conduct in office and to assert that the health of our democracy depends on the honesty of Government to Parliament."—[Official Report, 26 February 1996; Vol. 272, c. 617.]

I invite him to live up to those words today.

I beg to move, To leave out from "House" to the end of the Question, and to add instead thereof:

'welcomes the decision of the Foreign Affairs Committee in its Second Report of Session 1998–99 (HC 116) on Sierra Leone to commend the resolute support which the British Government is giving to the restoration of democracy in Sierra Leone and endorses the conclusion of the Legg Inquiry that no Minister had given encouragement or approval to any breach of the arms embargo on Sierra Leone; notes that the inquiry on Sierra Leone of the Foreign Affairs Committee has found no evidence of Ministerial encouragement or approval; and congratulates Her Majesty's Government on accepting all the recommendations of the Report of the Legg Inquiry and on the steps it has since taken to modernise management in the FCO.'.

I found myself agreeing with the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard) for one minute at the beginning of his speech. That was the one minute in which he dealt with the plight of the people of Sierra Leone. I fully share his dismay at their plight. If the House will allow me, I intend to take more than one minute to respond to that plight. The right hon. and learned Gentleman says that he wants to talk about the conduct of Ministers. All right, let us talk about the conduct of Ministers on policy towards Sierra Leone.

Last night, a special report at the top of the BBC news exposed the evil that the rebels in Sierra Leone represent. In their brief occupation of Freetown in January, the rebel forces vividly lived up to their reputation for brutality and butchery. They murdered politicians, humanitarian staff, religious workers, journalists and lawyers. They carried out repeated acts of arson, even when they knew that the consequence would be to burn alive elderly and disabled men and women.

From the first day of the rebel forces' entry into Freetown, local hospitals admitted a growing stream of civilians with arms amputated, including children as young as six. A large number of children who were abducted by the rebel forces are still missing. In at least one case, their father was forced to watch his female children raped before they were taken away.

What should concern the House most of all is how we can prevent such evil from gaining power by force of arms in Sierra Leone.

The Foreign Secretary will know that the violence has spread outside the capital, Freetown. My constituency has a link with the town of Kambia, which is north-east of the capital. I am a patron of the Kambia hospital appeal, which seeks to support doctors and nurses providing health care in the area.

At the weekend, I received unconfirmed reports that the hospital had been hit by the rebels, looted and perhaps set on fire. Has the Foreign Secretary heard any further news about what is going on in the region, and can he assure us that our Government will provide whatever assistance is necessary to get the hospital up and running again?

I can confirm that the hospital has been looted, and has been badly damaged by arson. I can also confirm that the Department for International Development will be ready to try to make good some of the damage. First, however, we must regain the territory in which the hospital is situated. We must work with ECOMOG to push the rebels further back in the country.

The right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe said that our influence in the country was limited. That is true; nevertheless, the fact is that no nation on the globe outside the region has done more than we have to prevent the rebel forces from gaining power, or more to support the legitimate Government of Sierra Leone. As my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford, South (Mr. Gapes) pointed out, the Foreign Affairs Committee itself commends

"the resolute support which the British Government is giving to the restoration of democracy and the alleviation of suffering"

in Sierra Leone.

First, we have provided a wealth of practical support for the ECOMOG forces who are doing the fighting. Since the start of this year alone, we have provided more than £1 million-worth of trucks and communication equipment. We have organised and paid for the airlift of the Ghanaian battalion to join the Nigerian forces in Sierra Leone. Even the maps used by the ECOMOG operation have been supplied by Britain. Partly as a result of that help, ECOMOG has been able successfully to clear the rebels from Freetown. The support that we gave helped to preserve the legitimate Government of Sierra Leone, and, more immediately, saved the lives of thousands who might otherwise have perished at the hands of the rebels.

Secondly, Britain is far the largest national donor of development aid to Sierra Leone. Since the restoration of President Kabbah a year ago, Britain has committed more than £20 million, which has been vital in supplying food, promoting security and providing medical aid to help the victims of the rebels' brutality. It has also helped in the longer-term task of recreating the basic institutions of government in Sierra Leone.

Thirdly, Britain has led international pressure on Liberia to end its support for the rebels. The real tragedy of Sierra Leone is that its people are among the poorest in the world, while their country is among the richest in diamonds. There are too many outside forces whose sole interest is in seizing and retaining control of the diamond fields.

The situation on the ground in Sierra Leone remains very worrying. The rebels retain control of much of the countryside, and have successfully launched counter-offensives on some provincial towns. The struggle for control of Sierra Leone is not over, and there is no guarantee that the forces of democracy and stability will prevail. We have therefore been reviewing what further support Britain can provide, and I am pleased to say that the Government have decided to commit up to an additional £10 million from the reserve to promote stability in Sierra Leone.

That substantial investment will have three objectives. The first objective is to help the ECOMOG forces to roll back the rebels. We shall use those resources to meet the most pressing needs of ECOMOG to transport its troops, communicate with them and feed them. The second objective is to encourage the rebels to lay down their arms, and to offer them a future in a civilian life. We shall use part of our funds to underwrite initiatives in demilitarisation, and to integrate the rebels into the civilian economy. The third objective is to create a professional and democratically accountable army for the Government. We shall fund a British military training team to supervise a programme for a professional army and for its civilian management.

We are asking our partners around the world to make similar contributions, and I am pleased to say that the Administrations of the United States, Canada and several of our European partners are already considering how they can follow our lead.

Britain's support is well known and well appreciated in the region. Last month, President Abubakar of Nigeria rang my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister to thank him for Britain's invaluable support for ECOMOG. Last night, I spoke to President Kabbah by telephone to inform him of our new programme of support. He also recorded his gratitude to the UK for its continued support and assistance.

President Kabbah and the people of Sierra Leone would regard with disbelief the partisan speech of the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe. They know that the conduct of Ministers has provided them with more help than any other western country. In the past two months, throughout the crisis in Freetown and the many measures that we have taken in response to it, the right hon. and learned Gentleman and his team have shown no interest in the problems of the people of Sierra Leone; nor have they made a single proposal as to how to help their plight. They remain utterly obsessed with Sandline International.

Let us at least agree on one point. Sandline International's activities from start to finish have been totally irrelevant to the military balance on the ground and even more irrelevant to the needs of the people of Sierra Leone. The main interest of Sandline International and its sister group of companies has been not democracy, but diamonds.

The first finding of the Legg report was that Sandline International's supply of arms played "little or no part" in the restoration of President Kabbah. That is not surprising as the arms did not even arrive until the rebels had been cleared out of Freetown for the first time.

The Foreign Secretary is probably correct to say that the arms were not key, but what was absolutely essential was the military advice and co-ordination of the air cell that was provided by Sandline International to ECOMOG forces. Those forces had been repulsed in December. It was President Kabbah's assessment that he needed good military advice and advisers to enable ECOMOG to succeed, which is what it did when he got them.

As I recall, the air cell to which the hon. Gentleman refers was one rather ancient eastern European helicopter, which, famously, required repair by a British naval ship. It is that sort of enormous self-obsession with what Sandline International may have contributed that creates fury in Nigeria, where thousands of troops have died fighting to restore the legitimate Government of Sierra Leone.

The Legg inquiry did find a number of misjudgments by officials and cultural failings in the Foreign Office. I accepted those findings. I accepted all the inquiry's recommendations. Since I presented the Legg report to Parliament seven months ago, I have acted on those recommendations.

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way on that point?

I will, but then I must make progress.

The right hon. Gentleman says that he has put things right by following the recommendations of the Legg report. How then can he possibly explain why he connived in the leaking of the Select Committee report? Surely that is something that he should—

Order. I do not think that the term "connive" is one that hon. Members should use. [Interruption.] Order. Please let me speak. In addition, I understand that Madam Speaker has made a ruling about the matter. The hon. Gentleman knows about it.

Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker. For what it is worth, there were two leaks of the Select Committee report, one in The Independent and one in The Times. Neither came from the Foreign Office. The source of those leaks is elsewhere, but the hon. Member for North—East Hertfordshire (Mr. Heald) said that he was rising on the point that I was addressing. Let me then tell him what we have done to put right what the Legg inquiry identified.

I have restored the central unit for the enforcement of sanctions, which the previous Government had abolished. I have taken steps to ensure that all intelligence reports are properly logged and distributed. I have issued new guidance that there should be no contact with private military firms without clearance or a written record.

I have initiated a programme of modernisation in the management of the Foreign Office, which is increasing the number of specialists and professional managers in our administration. We are able to afford that programme of modernisation only because last year's spending review produced the best settlement for the Foreign Office for half a dozen years. [Interruption.] I honestly do not know what the hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs. Gillan) finds funny about that. She belongs to a party that, in the previous Parliament, cut the Foreign Office budget by a sixth. The number of diplomatic staff dealing with Africa fell by a quarter during a decade in which her party was in office. It is no wonder that the Legg report concluded that one of the reasons that mistakes were made was that officials had an impossible overload.

In the spending increase, I have secured the Department's budget. I have doubled the number of staff in the West Africa section covering Sierra Leone—[Interruption.] It is true.

May I tell my right hon. Friend that one of the concerns I had as a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee was the appallingly long hours worked by middle and junior-ranking officials. Will he confirm that they are no longer working 70 or 80-hour-weeks?

I cannot confirm to the House that there are not officials in that section, or in other sections in the Foreign Office, who may occasionally be required in emergencies to work 70 or 80 hours a week. I am confident, however, that the pressure on the section has been greatly eased by the doubling of its numbers.

The sharp reduction—100 staff in the Africa command—in the past decade has to be placed in the context that, in the same decade, there were in Africa more conflicts and crises, which had to be handled by a dwindling number of staff. If Conservative Members wish to debate the conduct of Ministers, vital to the debate is the way in which we are repairing the damage done by their conduct of the Foreign Office.

The Legg inquiry concluded that the officials involved were "loyal and conscientious". The inquiry recognised that the officials had had to

"endure an anxious period of criticism and uncertainty",

and expressed the hope that its report would

"close the chapter as far as they are concerned."

I have never made any secret of my view that it was wrong that the same officials were then put on trial, for a second time, by the Foreign Affairs Committee. Nevertheless, contrary to the comments of the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe, the Foreign Office fully co-operated with the Select Committee inquiry. With the sole exception of secret intelligence reports, the Select Committee was given access to every document that the Legg inquiry saw.

The right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe said that we had obstructed the Select Committee's work—[Interruption.] Perhaps I should refer him to paragraph 99 of the report, in which the Committee welcomed the documents that I released. The report states:

"It was a quantum leap in extending the capacity of committees to hold the Executive to account. As the Foreign Secretary himself said, the 'committee has had more access to official documents than any of its predecessors or indeed any of its parallels.' We welcome the Government's decision to allow the Select Committee access to most of the key official documents in the Sandline affair."

That is the view of the Committee itself.

As I said, I accept all of the recommendations of the Legg report. I shall respond later formally to the Select Committee's report, but I tell the House now that it is my intention to accept many of its recommendations.

I agree with the Select Committee, for example, that any change to arms embargoes should be announced to Parliament and placed in the Library; it has already been done. I agree that all officials should be doubly careful in contacts with persons under criminal investigation, and I have instructed them to consult first with our legal advisers. I agree with the Select Committee on the need for action against arms brokering, and the Government are carefully considering responses to proposals in our recent White Paper on the subject.

I believe also that the Committee is right to be concerned about the particular sensitivities in dealing with military companies whose staff include former members of the armed forces or intelligence agencies. I also share its view that Colonel Spicer should have known more about the legal position on the supply of arms, and that he was less than frank with Foreign Office officials about his supply of arms. In its postscript, the Select Committee observes that the aim of lasting peace in Sierra Leone is "hardly likely" to be helped by the activities of mercenary forces. I could not agree more.

I also welcome what the omissions from the Select Committee's report tell us about what the Select Committee found. The report does not raise the slightest doubt about the central findings of the Legg inquiry—that there was no connivance in the Foreign Office at a breach of the arms embargo, and no conspiracy by either officials or Ministers to undermine the publicly stated policy.

The sole ministerial quote that was produced by the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe in his entire speech was that from the speech by the Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Central (Mr. Lloyd) in which he said to the House, correctly, that the embargo applied to the junta.

That speech, made in March, was utterly irrelevant to a breach of the arms embargo by Sandline which had already happened. The right hon. and learned Gentleman has never explained how he imagines that a speech in March could have caused confusion to Sandline when it signed a contract the previous December or when it supplied the arms in the previous February. Not even Colonel Spicer has used the novel line of reasoning that in December 1997 he was confused by a speech that was to be made in March 1998. Yet, after two exhaustive reports, that is the best that the right hon. and learned Gentleman can do to find fault with the conduct of Ministers.

The right hon. and learned Gentleman has spent the past year trying to unearth a political scandal over Sandline. He has not found it because it does not exist. This is not the arms to Iraq affair where Ministers in the previous Government relaxed the rules in order to arm Saddam Hussein, where the same Ministers deliberately resolved not to inform Parliament of the change in policy and where Ministers tried to cover up their own complicity by suppressing the evidence.

In the case of Sierra Leone there was no change in policy, no secret approval of the supply of arms and no cover-up. There are lessons to be learned and that is why I set up the Legg inquiry to establish what went wrong and how we put it right. We have acted on its recommendations.

I have been waiting patiently. The Foreign Secretary has been speaking for nearly 20 minutes but he has still to deal with the main charge that I made in my speech. Is he suggesting that it is perfectly all right to mislead this House, as the Minister of State did on 12 March, as long as Colonel Spicer was not misled? Will he now deal with all the other documents—every single one of them—in which the policy of Her Majesty's Government was mis-stated in a way that, as the Select Committee report says, misled Parliament, the public and the officials at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office? Will he answer that question?

There is no question of the House being misled. My hon. Friend the Minister of State said what is absolutely correct and true, which is that the embargo applied to the junta.

That is precisely the formulation that the Foreign Secretary described as being plainly wrong when he dealt with telegram 277 before the Select Committee. The words are identical.

The right hon. and learned Gentleman knows perfectly well that I was not saying that about the speech of my hon. Friend the Minister of State. [Interruption.] Colonel Spicer and anybody else seeking to supply weapons or arms to Sierra Leone would have known perfectly well, as the Select Committee said, that there was domestic legislation in place. [Interruption.]

Order. There is a lot of noise in the Chamber and it is coming particularly from the hon. Member for Buckingham (Mr. Bercow). The hon. Gentleman is trying my patience. I must hear what the Secretary of State is saying.

The right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe complains that I have been speaking for 20 minutes, but I am addressing the House on issues on which he did not address the House—the problem of Sierra Leone. If the right hon. and learned Gentleman wishes to debate the conduct of Ministers on Sierra Leone, he must be prepared to hear about the conduct of Ministers on Sierra Leone.

I go to the region next week. I will visit Nigeria where I will be one of the first Foreign Ministers to congratulate the newly elected president. My visit will be against a background of good will of the people of Nigeria for this Government because they know how strongly we condemned the repression of General Abacha and because they know that we worked harder than any other country to see their democracy restored.

I will go to Ghana and the Ivory Coast with my colleague Hubert Vedrine, the French Foreign Minister, on the first ever joint visit. In the Ivory Coast we will convene a joint conference of British and French Heads of Mission. There is no other European country with as strong a representation as Britain and France. We will be exploring how we can co-operate and use that joint strength in tackling the problems in Africa of violent conflict and the poverty that breeds it.

Avoiding the issue.

I am addressing the problems of the region, which the right hon. and learned Gentleman did not. He said nothing about what more the Foreign Office could do about the problems of the region.

I intend to meet President Kabbah while I am in the region. I expect to discuss how we can best use the resources that I have announced today to strengthen his Government and promote stability in Sierra Leone. The visit will underline the Government's commitment to the region and our fresh approach to its problems. That is the conduct of Ministers on Sierra Leone that should concern the House. I am happy to be judged on it.

By contrast, the right hon. and learned Gentleman's speech did not contain a single policy proposal towards Sierra Leone or the region. It is worth restating that, because it remains the flaw in the Conservatives' criticisms of Ministers' conduct. They wish to debate the conduct of Ministers, but not their conduct in relation to Sierra Leone. The debate is motivated not by their support for the people of Sierra Leone, but all too transparently by their desire to wring party advantage from the crisis in that country. That approach would be massively rejected by the people of Sierra Leone and it should be massively rejected by the House.

The most important conclusion of the Select Committee's report is the last one, which reminds us that the purpose of the Select Committee system is to ensure that

"officials and Ministers are aware that the beam of the select committee searchlight may one day swing in their direction, and they may have to justify their action—or inaction—when subject to intense scrutiny".

I cannot avoid making some reference to the speech of the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard) before I deal with the Committee's conclusions. He is right to be concerned about half-truths. If he remembers the Scott inquiry report, he will know that a distinguished civil servant, who has but recently left the Foreign Office, said that half a truth could still be the truth. That comment attracted some of Sir Richard Scott's most damaging criticism. The Cabinet of which the right hon. and learned Gentleman was a member declined to accept the report.

The centrepiece of the Scott inquiry report was the fact that the House had been deceived, because, while the statement of policy remained the same, the method of application of that policy had changed in a material way. The right hon. and learned Gentleman is correct to be indignant if the House has been misled, but he would also be right to remember that the Government of which he was a member did not have a distinguished record in such matters. It gives me no pleasure to say that some of the conduct of this Government has been eerily reminiscent of that of the previous Government. We were entitled to better, and we expected better.

The Foreign Secretary sought to distance the Foreign Office from Sandline. That is a legitimate argument, but it does not sit with the extent to which Colonel Spicer was in contact with the Foreign Office at material moments of the narrative with which the Select Committee is concerned. After the Legg inquiry and the report of the Select Committee, which was couched in terms as strong as any of us can remember a Select Committee using, no one is responsible, no one is at fault and no one has been disciplined.

One issue above all lay at the heart of the mismanagement of the affair: the misunderstanding or misinterpretation of the United Nations resolution limiting arms exports. The Select Committee report reveals that, for months collectively, the Foreign Office did not appreciate the contents of that resolution; for months collectively, it did not understand the effect of that resolution when it was incorporated into domestic law. In my judgment, that lack of understanding was culpable and cannot be excused.

The Select Committee report contains a catalogue of failures, outlined either expressly or by implication, including the failure of officials to brief Ministers, which is described as appalling; the failure of officials to advise Ministers of material developments, including even a raid by Customs and Excise on the Foreign Office; and the failure to advise of the possibility of the prosecution of a Foreign Office official on an indictable offence.

How often does Customs and Excise knock on the door of the Foreign Office with a warrant in its hand, that it should not rate the immediate notification of Ministers? How often are Foreign Office officials at risk of prosecution for indictable offences, that the Foreign Secretary should not be instantly advised?

There was a failure to respond to the article in the Toronto Globe and Mail of 1 August 1997, which said that Sandline was involved in plans to overthrow the junta; and a failure to respond to Colonel Tim Spicer's phone call of 5 January 1998, saying that he had signed an agreement to give $10 million of support to President Kabbah. How on earth could it be, as the Committee rightly asks, that no one thought that the support might involve the supply of arms? Was not that a reasonable inference from the size of the sum involved?

There was a failure to understand the significance of, and to act on, the letter of 5 February 1998 from my noble Friend Lord Avebury drawing attention to the Toronto Globe and Mail article and a new article in US News and World Report, which contained accurate information about the supply of arms. That failure was described by the Foreign Secretary, in his evidence to the Committee, as

"one of the gravest errors and misjudgments".

There was a failure to brief Ministers properly and, as a result, the House was misled, but still no one is responsible or at fault and no one has been disciplined.

The truth is that both Legg, in rather more sedate language, and the Select Committee report, in rather more blunt and direct language, reveal an embarrassing litany of incompetence that is all the more significant if we recall that Sierra Leone was the subject of direct prime ministerial interest, as the Prime Minister extended to the deposed President Kabbah an invitation to attend the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Edinburgh as his personal guest.

Neither Sir Thomas Legg nor the Committee held Ministers personally to blame, but Ministers should feel some sense of discomfort about the fact that such things were going on in a Department for which they had responsibility. I want to read a passage that reflects the kind of responsibility that ought to be taken on such occasions.

In the Scott report debate, the Foreign Secretary, who was then shadow Foreign Secretary, said:

"The Government are fond of lecturing the rest of the nation on its need to accept responsibility. Parents are held responsible for actions; teachers are held responsible for the performance of their pupils; local councillors are held legally and financially responsible; yet, when it comes to themselves, suddenly not a single Minister can be found to accept responsibility for what went wrong."—[Official Report, 26 February 1996; Vol. 272, c. 606.]

That was approximately three years ago—it is as apposite today as it was then.

I am bound by Madam Speaker's ruling that there can be no reference to the events with regard to the obtaining of the Select Committee draft report, except in passing. In passing, all I can say is that I would have expected Ministers to have some sense of discomfort about the sudden and unheralded appearance in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office of a draft of the report. I am bound to say that, judging by its previous performance, I am almost surprised that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office realised the significance of the document that had been sent to it.

Last week, the Foreign Secretary responded to a question from me as to why the document simply had not been sent back by saying that no one would have believed him if he had sent it back and said that he had not read it. He may, with time, care to reflect on that self-assessment of his credibility.

Following that line of logic, can the right hon. and learned Gentleman explain how it is that, with a permanent under-secretary of considerable experience, probity and efficiency—as witnessed by Ministers from the previous Government and other observers—the Foreign Office is such a toy-town organisation? I find that incredible, and it seems that the permanent under-secretary is acting as an air-raid shelter for Ministers.

Order. I remind right hon. and hon. Members that we should not debate the leak. That is for another time.

That was a timely and helpful intervention, Mr. Deputy Speaker, but the Committee addresses that matter, and has views on it. The Committee considered the evidence in detail and reached a conclusion. I was not present throughout the consideration by the Committee and, therefore, I am not willing to substitute my judgment for that of the Committee.

It is time to blow away the fog of obscurity surrounding arms exports. It is time to have a Select Committee of the House to monitor arms export policy and, if necessary, to scrutinise individual transactions. It is time to provide for an international means of dealing with arms brokering in defiance of UN resolutions. It is time to provide that a transaction involving a transfer from anywhere in the world to anywhere else in the world would be illegal if it would be illegal for those arms to be transferred from the UK.

We ought to be willing to consider extra-territorial jurisdiction in this matter, because it makes a nonsense of UN resolutions—and the way in which they are imported into our domestic law—if, as in the present case, arms transferred from Bulgaria to Sierra Leone at the instigation of a broker based in the UK would not, apparently, constitute a breach of criminal law.

The right hon. and learned Gentleman said that the reports had not directly criticised Ministers. Does he agree with the verdict of the Select Committee report that

"many of problems which occurred would not have occurred … If ministers had made their policy on dealings with mercenaries clearer to officials".

Does he agree that, in that sense, Ministers are culpable?

That is the conclusion of the Committee, and I see no reason to substitute my judgment for its judgment. I go further—one would have expected Ministers to be on their inquiry. I go back to the fact that Sierra Leone was not some country of which we knew little. It was a country in which No. 10 Downing street was taking an express interest, at the instigation, quite rightly, of the Prime Minister—all the more reason for Ministers to be on their inquiry.

All of that produced for the people of Sierra Leone nothing but the lasting horrors of a civil war of utmost brutality, which is still being visited upon the population of that benighted country. That is why I have urged the Government before today to ensure that they continue to provide logistical assistance to President Kabbah, following the statement that the Secretary of State made in the House on 19 January.

The Government should work with the Commonwealth and the United Nations to ensure that Nigeria does not become so disillusioned with its role in Sierra Leone that it pulls its personnel out of the ECOMOG forces. The recent election in Nigeria must surely throw that matter into sharp focus. The Government should bring all possible pressure to bear on the Government in Liberia to cause them to cease to interfere in the internal affairs of Sierra Leone. We should be making plans now for the rebuilding of Freetown's damaged infrastructure, and providing support for development programmes in the region and emergency relief.

Coincidentally, the Foreign Secretary came today with £10 million in his pocket. I am delighted that he brought that money. It is only a little more than the $10 million that Sandline was to gain for providing support to President Kabbah. Of course £10 million is better than nothing, but what effect will it have on the devastation from which we now know Sierra Leone is suffering?

That is a proper commitment, but we will want to see that it is fully implemented. Only if the Government fully implement the commitments announced and reinforced today by the Foreign Secretary will they have a chance to salvage something from a period in their history that has done no credit to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and even less to the Government themselves.

I have three initial reflections. First, the backcloth is the agony and suffering of the people of Sierra Leone. That should be our main concern. Against that agony and suffering, the ambit of the Foreign Affairs Committee report is relatively insignificant. The people of Sierra Leone and the friends of that Commonwealth country would be appalled if the debate turned into just another party game. That is why I welcome the £10 million which my right hon. Friend said in his statement today would be committed to Sierra Leone.

Secondly, the prospect of the debate becoming a party game is part of the problem that we face in a Select Committee in a highly partisan and personalised political structure. Select Committees act as Committees of the legislature monitoring the Executive. There is clearly great pressure on Committee members not to score own goals and to support their own side, particularly on a matter such as this. Since May last year, the debate in the Chamber has become highly partisan, and it seemed that those on the Opposition Front Bench were trying to dress it up as if it were a replay of the arms to Iraq scandal.

However, as the right hon. and learned Member for North-East Fife (Mr. Campbell) said, that was light years away. The Government at that time deliberately misled the House on a change of policy and were even prepared to countenance the imprisonment of business men to cover up their own failings.

That is not true.

It is true. I invite the hon. Gentleman to examine the history of the Scott report and the conduct of the Conservative Government at that time.

The highest the charge can be put in this case is that the Government allowed, or connived at, the action of a British company to supply a quantity of arms to an elected and internationally recognised head of state of a friendly Commonwealth country who had been ousted in a coup by a motley group of rebels.

The House hardly needs to be reminded of the arms to Iraq scandal and of the role played by my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary at that time. I suspect that the Opposition thought that they had struck gold with Sierra Leone, and that they would be able to find the Foreign Secretary's fingerprints on some form of conspiracy. Those who had not been conspicuous in their concern for Sierra Leone, either before or after the sad events and the suffering there, seized on an apparent opportunity to embarrass the Secretary of State as he sought to help to stabilise that benighted country.

My final preliminary point relates to the leak. The Select Committee on Foreign Affairs this morning agreed its first special report on the premature disclosure of the report on Sierra Leone. I congratulate the Committee's staff on ensuring that the special report is available in the Vote Office so that hon. Members may peruse it.

There is sadness that there was a leak. I trust that the Select Committee on Standards and Privileges will consider the substantial mitigation offered after the event by my hon. Friend the Member for Dundee, West (Mr. Ross). The leak is a warning to every hon. Member of the seriousness of those matters, particularly when it comes to the leaking of a draft report on which a Government who were so inclined might seek to pressurise members of a Select Committee to moderate their views.

I commend the work of the Foreign Affairs Committee's staff on the original report. They worked long and hard in difficult circumstances. Hon. Members will know that two thirds or more of the report deals with the substance of the arms to Sierra Leone affair. The last part of the report deals more generally with relations between the Executive and the legislature, which, in my judgment, are of general importance to Select Committees.

I shall outline the background of the events relating to the supply of arms. The terms of reference of the Foreign Affairs Committee were: first, to examine whether

"actions by Government personnel in relation to Sierra Leone after"

the ousting of President Kabbah on

"25 May 1997 were consistent with implementation of the Government's policy that"

President Kabbah should be restored only

"by peaceful means; and, whether deficiencies have been revealed in the arrangements in the FCO for passing information to Ministers and implementing their instructions."

Was there a conspiracy? There is not, in the phrase initially used in the report, a scintilla of evidence to suggest that the Foreign Secretary knew that there was a potential breach of the arms embargo. Try as anyone might to find the fingerprints of the Foreign Secretary, or any knowledge on his part, there is no evidence to that end.

Nor can any reasonable person conclude that the Foreign Secretary should have had such knowledge or made inquiries. Is it seriously suggested that the Foreign Secretary should scurry around the corridors of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, looking in at the doors of relevant sections to say, "Is there anything untoward in Sierra Leone that I should know about?" That is not a counsel of perfection, but an absurd proposition. However much one tries to pin blame on the Foreign Secretary, it is clear that he did not know about what was happening in Sierra Leone, and there was no reasonable way for him to have found out about it by his own means.

The hon. Gentleman may intend to develop his argument on those lines, but will he say who is to blame? As I said when I intervened on the right hon. and learned Member for North-East Fife (Mr. Campbell), the permanent under secretary at the Foreign Office is a highly efficient and competent senior official. It is to be expected that the Foreign Secretary would have asked questions about the matter, and that his officials would report to him on it. There appears to be an enormous credibility gap at the centre of the hon. Gentleman's exposition.

The hon. Gentleman asks who is to blame. Does he seriously suggest that the Foreign Secretary should go around asking people whether anything is wrong in Sierra Leone? It cannot seriously be suggested that my right hon. Friend knew what was going on. As for blaming anyone, as the Legg report and our Committee pointed out, serious deficiencies in the conduct of officials were revealed during the course of our inquiries. I invite people to read the Committee's report and to let it speak for itself in terms of the actions—or, rather, the inactions—of several key players in the machine.

I believe that I speak for all members of the Select Committee in expressing our enormous admiration for the quality and efficiency of Foreign Office personnel in our dealings with Foreign Office officials in this country and when we travel abroad. However, in this episode, we conclude that the officials concerned failed badly, and that is where the blame lies.

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way again. I do not suggest that the Foreign Secretary—to use the hon. Gentleman's emotive words—should scuttle around seeking information. However, the Foreign Secretary has senior officials, who report to him, and special advisers. Speaking as a special adviser to a previous Administration, I can say that one would immediately recognise that, if something like that was going on, one had to act as the eyes and ears of the Foreign Secretary. Indeed, I understand that, in this case, it was the special adviser—

Order. The hon. Gentleman seems to be making a speech.

The fact is that those officials did not inform the Foreign Secretary. The hon. Gentleman takes a rather classical view of ministerial responsibility. The last time that the view was taken that Ministers should be responsible for everything that happens in their Department was the Crichel Down affair in 1954 and the doctrine was obsolete even then. Given the complexity of modern government, no Minister can seriously be expected to be responsible for everything that happens in his Department. If the hon. Gentleman still holds that strict classical view of ministerial responsibility, I suggest that he has a quiet word with the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard), who has previous form on that matter from his time at the Home Office.

The $64,000 question is why the Foreign Secretary thinks that our criticism of officials is disproportionate and unfair. Unfortunately, my right hon. Friend is not in the Chamber; he should be here to listen to the speech of the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee.

I am not a psychiatrist, merely a politician. I can only suggest that the Foreign Secretary was showing an excess of misguided loyalty. Initially, he said that the Committee was unfair to civil servants. However, I invite hon. Members to read the report and let its words on the conduct of the officials speak for themselves.

Will my hon. Friend give way?

Let me first go through the Foreign Secretary's three criticisms. Secondly, he said that the Legg committee set out what went wrong and that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office had put it right. That is partially correct, but the Select Committee's recommendations went substantially beyond those of the Legg report. Indeed, the Foreign Secretary very properly said today that the Foreign Office was responding positively to a number of our recommendations—recommendations that were not part of the Legg report.

Finally, the Foreign Secretary said:

"Seven months later the Select Committee has not come up with a single significant fact that was not already in the Legg Report."

I would respond as follows. First, Sir Thomas Legg is an establishment figure—a fact reflected in his report—and he clearly pulled his punches unnecessarily in many instances. Secondly, the Legg report was conducted in private, while the Foreign Affairs Committee held meetings in the full glare of the press, television cameras and the public. We are accountable to the public and the people can draw their own conclusions.

Paragraph 72 of the report refers to a clear instance when the Committee uncovered more than the Legg report in relation to minutes of a meeting of 3 December 1997. The Legg report proceeded on the basis of a certain assumption that was revealed only in January this year to be incorrect. I am pleased that the Foreign Secretary has said that he will respond positively to a number of our recommendations.

I shall now deal with the final part of the report about Executive-legislative relations, which is of general interest to the House.

I am most grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way. My intervention is prompted by the comments of the hon. Member for Mid-Norfolk (Mr. Simpson) about the permanent under-secretary who, in my opinion, is a very fine civil servant. I remind my hon. Friend that the permanent under-secretary was astonishingly and refreshingly candid whenever he appeared before the Committee, and readily admitted that he and his officials had made mistakes. Is that not so?

Indeed. The Committee can have only the highest admiration for the permanent under-secretary in all his relations with it. The main charge against the permanent under-secretary is that, at the end of March 1998, he became aware of a raid on the Foreign Office and four weeks elapsed before he informed the Foreign Secretary about a highly sensitive matter. That information reached the Foreign Secretary only as a result of a letter from solicitors acting on behalf of Sandline. The four weeks of inaction and the failure to inform a Minister form the gravamen of the charge against the permanent under-secretary.

I am sure that my hon. Friend would not want the House to run away with the idea that he is trying to talk down our report, which was widely acclaimed in the media upon publication. Sadly, all the detailed criticisms of the internal workings of the Foreign Office fall squarely at the door of Sir John Kerr. Is that not correct?

Far from talking down the work of the Committee, I believe that it has played a major role on behalf of Parliament and enhanced the credibility of Committees as a whole. If we had rolled over and done nothing, we would have remained very limp and lame for the rest of the Parliament. The Executive—if it were so inclined—could have easily ignored Select Committees.

In our system, Select Committees are a relatively new and weak creation. We have Executive-led Government, and that is particularly true in foreign affairs, where there is the Crown prerogative. If the Government are committed to the distribution of power—I am confident that they are—they should distribute power between Parliament and the Executive with the same zeal that they have shown in distributing it within the United Kingdom to the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly. Select Committees are the main instrument available to Parliament for keeping the Executive in check.

The Foreign Secretary can claim with justification that he has appeared before the Foreign Affairs Committee more frequently than any of his predecessors. He is also justified in claiming that he has allowed greater access to official documents than did any of his predecessors, including Conservative Ministers. However, those concessions were given reluctantly, tardily and only following protracted argument. We believe that the Foreign Secretary should have been far more willing to be open with the Committee and to provide us with the tools that we needed to do our job. That is particularly true of intelligence. We believe that Committees should have controlled access to the intelligence community and must be trusted by the Executive. Why should Sir Thomas Legg have greater access than hon. Members? We point that out forcefully.

The last part of our report deals with access to information and what is relevant to the work of other Committees. That was discussed last Thursday in the Liaison Committee, which brings together the Chairmen of all Select Committees. Since the leak has been made, I can say only that there is widespread dissatisfaction among the Chairmen not only with this Government but with all Governments and their co-operation with Select Committees. A dossier will be compiled by the Chairman of the Liaison Committee, and I hope that it will be not only debated in the House but taken seriously by the Government.

I hope that the Government will take seriously all our recommendations and that the House will recognise that we have done an effective job on behalf of Parliament. We concluded our report by using the searchlight analogy mentioned by the right hon. and learned Member for North-East Fife, who speaks for the Liberal Democrats.

Had there been a simple Opposition motion asking the House to agree with the conclusions of the Foreign Affairs Committee, it would have been extremely difficult for us to oppose that motion. Of course the Opposition have tried to be too clever and could not resist the temptation to go too far. The motion has three legs. The first

"endorses the criticisms made of Ministers"

in the report. No conclusions in the report directly criticise Ministers, and many seek to strengthen Ministers in their relations with officials. The high point, as the right hon. and learned Member for North-East Fife pointed out, is paragraph 19, but that recommendation is to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office as a whole.

The motion's second leg

"deplores the conduct of Ministers which led to such criticism".

I have already covered that point in my remarks on the doctrine of ministerial responsibility. Finally, the motion

"calls on the Ministers concerned to accept responsibility for their conduct."

That fails because, in general, Ministers' conduct in substantive matters was not criticised.

On the relations between the Executive and the legislature, the criticism is mild. In paragraph 99, we welcome the increased access to documents. In paragraph 101, we urge the Government to accede to the Select Committee's request for information, irrespective of the existence of a departmental inquiry. In paragraph 109, we deal with intelligence. The Government gave more information and access than any of their predecessors, but that was not enough. It is possible, particularly because of the failure to grant access to intelligence material, that the focus of the report is not what it should have been. The Government should have been more open and co-operative.

Thus, the motion misses the point of the report: in this instance, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office machine, which is normally efficient and highly admired by the public and, indeed, by the Committee, failed to perform and to give Ministers the quality of advice that they needed. The Opposition's attempt to distil the report into criticism of individual Ministers is therefore surely a partisan distortion. I shall oppose the motion.

I am sorry that the debate is not called "The conduct of Ministers and their relationships with a Select Committee", because those are the most imperative matters to come out of the report.

I shall make, I hope, only one remark that will be viewed as incredibly political. I honestly believe that Ministers have to ask questions and that those with responsibility for dealing with Sierra Leone in Parliament had enough external evidence to make more inquiries of their officials in the equatorial African department in the Foreign Office, which is concerned with Sierra Leone. If they had done so, much of the fiasco would not have arisen. I shall deal with the relationship between the Select Committee and this House, and the Government, which the report has highlighted.

I have been concerned with Select Committees since their inception under the then Leader of the House, Lord St. John-Stevas, and have twice chaired the Procedure Committee when it has monitored the work of Select Committees—first in the 1980s, and then in the 1990s. It is important to me that the work of Select Committees should be able to proceed properly and fully. I believe that this is the first time that the Executive, by their action, have frustrated or attempted to frustrate the examination of one of their Departments. If I am to make that claim, I must substantiate it—and I shall.

I accept immediately the right of Ministers to ask certain appointees to examine an internal problem in their Department. That cannot be denied, but it should not be a means of frustrating or delaying the work of a House of Commons Select Committee. In this case, we were told time and again during the Committee's proceedings that details on matters, witnesses and papers could not be made available until the Legg inquiry had reported. That massively delayed the Committee, and extended the time that it took to produce its report. The Foreign Secretary criticised that delay but he was responsible for it.

Ministers and Departments should readily and willingly release papers that are necessary for an inquiry, when requested by a Select Committee. The Foreign Secretary claimed that never had more papers been made available to a Foreign Office inquiry. That may be so, but let it be understood that those papers had to be dragged out of the Department. A request was made, and refused; a further request was also refused. Finally, following another request, the Committee was offered the option of just three of its members being allowed to go to the Foreign Office to inspect certain of the papers. The Committee grudgingly accepted that, although, following the publication of the Legg Report, all such papers had to be made available.

When the permanent secretary was first cross-examined before the Committee on 14 May 1998, he agreed to the existence of one set of papers and promised that he would do something about the matter. We did not receive the papers until five months later. That is hardly the sort of co-operation with the Committee that the Department has suggested has occurred.

Departments should not set out actively to mislead; surely that is imperative. There were several illustrations in the giving of evidence of activities which, in the kindest terms, can only be described as deliberate obfuscation. Perhaps the prime example of that was only recently, when my hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs. Gillan) asked the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs

"who was the first person in his Department to have sight of a copy of the Foreign Affairs Committee report on Sierra Leone; and at what time and on what day it was seen."

The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office replied:

"Copies of the report were collected from the Foreign Affairs Committee office … on 9 February by the Head of Parliamentary Relations Department and the Parliamentary Clerk."—[Official Report, 16 February 1999; Vol. 325, c. 751.]

That is factually correct, but is misleading to the nth degree. The Minister must have known that the Foreign Secretary had had sight of the report at another time. Ministers and the Government must not give a Select Committee such misleading information.

Instead of misleading, the Government should ensure that the Minister volunteers all necessary information to a Select Committee engaged in an inquiry. I believed that that point had been established—I had something to do with it—when the Conservative Government were criticised by the Trade and Industry Committee, of which I was a member. Towards the end of our inquiry on Concorde we stumbled on several papers—accounts—that had not been presented to the Committee, and which considerably affected our inquiry. The outcome brought an assurance by the Leader of the House that it was the Government's job to help, not frustrate, the working of Select Committees, and that they should be willing to provide any documents that they knew about concerning a Committee's inquiry. I believe that that must be established absolutely in any consideration given by the House or any of its Committees, because that must be the proper way for the Executive to be held to account.

Lastly, I return to the subject of the Foreign Secretary's refusal to meet the request of the head of the Secret Intelligence Service to be seen by the Committee. The Foreign Secretary's constant refusal of any of the Committee's requests is in direct contrast to the behaviour of the Secretary of State for Defence, who was willing for the Committee to see the Chief of Defence Intelligence, Vice-Admiral Alan West. We did so very satisfactorily. The Foreign Office's refusal of our requests seems even stranger in light of the fact that it said that there was very little that "C", the head of the Secret Intelligence Service, could say. If that was the case, why prevent his appearance? Surely that made it more likely that people would ask, "Why, oh why?" and suggest that there must be something to hide.

Today's Foreign Affairs Committee report is before the House. I hope that, in dealing with these matters, the Standards and Privileges Committee, which will have to take up the matter, will be certain to ask the right question. If documents were in the hands of a political adviser to a Government, surely no one would believe that that official would not try to ensure that Ministers, when they were preparing to make their statements, really understood what had been in the Committee's report, although that report had not been published until a few minutes before the statements were made. If the Committee's recommendations were given to the Secretary of State's political assistant, it is beyond credibility that that had no influence on the fact that Ministers, after the report was published, set out to rubbish the report merely so as to subvert the Committee's recommendations. That must not be allowed to happen again.

I make this speech in defence of the House because if we cannot, as Select Committees of the House, hold the Executive fully to account, we are failing in our duty, and I believe that Governments, whatever their complexion, must try to ensure that we can achieve that. I believe that the Government are open to severe criticism on that basis.

I shall not follow the right hon. Member for East Devon (Sir P. Emery) in much of what he said because, in some respects, there is common ground between us on a Select Committee's role and functions and, in particular, on the powerful reaffirmation of that role which is contained in our report.

In that context, I particularly underline those conclusions and paragraphs which state that we had every right to hold an inquiry of the kind that we did. If, every time a Select Committee considered undertaking such an inquiry, it was within the gift of the Executive to set up an alternative inquiry, the Select Committee would be neutered and that would be wrong. I am sure that we have common ground in that regard, and I hope that we would gain the support of the majority of hon. Members—at least, those on the Back Benches.

However, the Opposition motion, which seeks to lay special emphasis upon ministerial responsibility, is unjustified and unjustifiable, given the totality of the Legg report and of the Select Committee's report, and the mountain of evidence that was collected. For such an emphasis to be laid by the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard) in his speech and in the Opposition motion is, in a curious way, an addition to the catalogue of misleading elements that have dogged the affair.

That is because that emphasis distracts from the most extraordinary feature that emerges from all the evidence and inquiries, which is that Ministers were kept in the dark about sensitive political issues that were going on and being discussed, initially within the bowels of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, but which gradually rose to the top, to the level of permanent secretary.

I, like everybody else, have found that one of the most mystifying and mysterious aspects of the whole affair was that, despite all the Select Committee's efforts to discover quite what had happened and why, the central feature of all the evidence that emerged, which jumps out at one, which screams at one, was that Ministers were kept completely in the dark about quite fundamental aspects. That is why I do not agree with the emphasis of the Opposition motion. However, it is a question that we must try to answer, or at least address.

I need not illustrate that too much because the Select Committee's report is a detailed catalogue, as in some respects is the Legg report—I agree with the muted criticisms of that report by my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, East (Mr. Anderson)—although it does not bring out the matter to the same extent.

The high commissioner, as a result of the most wonderful and commendable contact with President Kabbah, obtained "priceless" information about an arms contract, but did not initially effectively convey the nature of that information to officials in the Foreign Office.

However, Foreign Office officials dealing with the matter in London, in addition eventually to receiving from Mr. Penfold the minute of 2 February saying that this was a contract dealing with the purchase of arms had, by this time, also received, through their connections and contacts with Sandline, details of Operation Python—a detailed blow-by-blow account of how the contract was to be delivered and executed.

To be clear on that point, the Foreign Office officials received that critical document from the British high commissioner who had previously received it from Sandline; and the British high commissioner, Mr. Penfold, passed it to the Foreign Office the day after he received it from Sandline.

Yes, that is a factual statement. It is commendable that Foreign Office officials obtained that information with such speed.

The officials, however, did absolutely nothing. They did not inform their senior officials, and they certainly did not inform the Foreign Secretary's private office, let alone the Minister of State responsible. I hope that the Minister of State will confirm that he did not know that the document on Operation Python was available in the Department. It was an extraordinary state of affairs.

As the right hon. and learned Member for North-East Fife (Mr. Campbell) said, and as we know from the television programme, the Customs office knocked on the FCO's doors and raided the files, but the permanent under-secretary did not feel it sufficiently important to write even the simplest of minutes to tell the Foreign Secretary that he should be aware of what had occurred. This conjunction is incredible, and requires explanation.

My hon. Friend puts his finger on the bulk of our criticism. The Foreign Secretary did not tell us, but perhaps the Minister of State will, why the Government consider the Committee's criticism to be disproportionate and unfair. Why do they take that view, given the points made by my hon. Friend?

My hon. Friend asks the question, and we await an answer from the Minister.

Given the circumstances that I have described, I do not believe that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State was fair in claiming that by holding our inquiry we were putting officials in double jeopardy, and that officials could not speak for themselves. Anyone reading the burden of our evidence in the lengthy transcripts will see that many members of the Committee—it was certainly the burden of my questions—were almost pleading and begging officials to explain what had happened. We did not want to reach those conclusions: it was the last thing we wanted. We tried as hard as we could to discover why this failure to pass information through officials to Ministers had occurred.

I am not a natural critic of the FCO: one of the greatest privileges in my parliamentary and political life was to serve in that Department. I have enormous respect for the FCO, and I understand and appreciate the excitement of serving in such a post. I have tried, therefore, to search for an explanation. Initially, I thought that it might be a structural problem. There have been considerable changes in the way in which the FCO is organised and administered. There has been a growth of command structures: the autonomous, self-financing portions of the FCO. I have once or twice wondered aloud whether the decision-making process had been affected by that autonomy, and whether the chain of communication had been broken, because I had thought that information was passed on quickly. I found no evidence for that explanation, and no support for it when I asked about it. I am as mystified and as dumbfounded about what happened as are other members of the Committee and many others, including Sir Thomas Legg.

The most important thing is that this failure of communication should never happen again. We cannot write a code or a manual on ministerial-civil service relations. All the textbooks in the world cannot describe the curious chemistry of the working relationship between a Secretary of State, a Minister of State, the private office and officials. It cannot be laid down in tablets of stone. I criticise the Opposition motion, because if there is one message that should go out from the House tonight it is that we must not allow such a total breach of communication between officials and Ministers as occurred in this case to happen again.

Do not paragraphs 10.56 and 10.57 of the report imply that criticism should be levelled less at individuals in the Department—who are described as loyal and conscientious—than at the institution that had been inherited from the last Government?

I think that we all understand the incredible pressures experienced by a small, understaffed Department dealing with west Africa. We must remember that the arrival of all this vital information coincided with the beginning of the Nigerian assault—the assault by ECOMOG—on Sierra Leone. There are mitigating circumstances, which are mentioned in the Legg report; but they cannot explain, or erase, the breach of communication that our report demonstrates so vividly—and, in my view, not inaccurately, unfairly or unjustly.

Let me mention two other aspects of the matter. One is the whole issue of the use of force. I believe that the Government experienced a genuine dilemma in that regard. If they were to restore President Kabbah by some form of military means, they had two options. They could accept support from a Nigerian regime that was a pariah in the international community, including the Commonwealth; or—and this option was undoubtedly bound up with the Sandline contract—they could arm the Kamajors in Sierra Leone.

Understandably, that second option was queasily opposed by those in the Foreign Office—rightly, in my view. I believe, and document after document states, that it would have been wrong to arm, or rearm, the Kamajors, because that would have inflamed and accentuated the civil war. That is made clear by a number of statements, and by documents from the Cabinet Office. The Sandline contract, however, was designed to do precisely that: arm the Kamajors. Whether or not there was a breach of the UN embargo, the Sandline contract certainly constituted a breach of Government policy in every meaningful sense, and that is one of the saddest aspects of the affair.

In his evidence to the Committee, Mr. Spicer of Sandline pleaded ignorance of the UN arms embargo. That is curious. On 2 March, in a letter to President Kabbah describing the difficulty that he had experienced in delivering the contract, Mr. Spicer invoked the embargo as the obstacle. That was before any Customs raid had taken place. I view some of the pleas of total ignorance with a degree of incredulity.

Like everyone else, however, I feel that the issues must be seen in the broader context of the terrible tragedy of Sierra Leone itself. Diamonds and mercenaries have not proved to be Sierra Leone's best friends, in any sense. If there is another lesson that we can learn, it is that we should act on the whole question of arms brokerage and mercenary activity. It worries me that the idea that mercenaries could or should be used legitimately in certain circumstances is being mooted in fashionable quarters. Experts have said as much on television. It is being suggested that we should return to an earlier age of privatised warfare. If the privatisation of war is to be the bequest of the late 20th century to the 21st, that will constitute an horrific illustration of how little we have learned from our history.

I hope that, when the arguments are over, my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary, and the Government, will find time to promote, wherever possible, a broader international consensus on how mercenary activity should be dealt with. The position is extraordinary. How in the name of heaven did Ukrainian mercenaries manage to reach Sierra Leone? We know, or suspect, how they were paid—they were paid in diamonds, in one way or another—but how did they get there? What was the chain, and what international connivance allowed it to happen? In the answer to those questions lies one of the important lessons that can be learned from the whole affair.

I hope that my right hon. Friend will not mind my making a final observation about the mild irony of the conjunction of certain circumstances. One of his early acts in government was to commission the FCO historian to write a definitive account of an earlier Foreign Office mystery, the mystery of the Zinoviev letter; and one of the most interesting aspects of that paper, which makes fascinating reading, is the title chosen by that chief historian in the FCO to describe the 1924 mystery—"A Most Extraordinary and Mysterious Business". It is not a bad epitaph for Sierra Leone.

I am pleased to be able to follow the pertinent and experienced speech of the hon. Member for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney (Mr. Rowlands), with much of which I agreed. I shall devote most of my own speech to what I regard as the most neglected aspect of the affair: the Government's overall policy on Sierra Leone.

I want to make two observations relating to the Select Committee report. One concerns officials, the other Ministers. When the Foreign Secretary made his statement about the Legg report on 27 July last year, he said at the outset that he was making it on the first available sitting day following his receipt of the report. He is to be commended on his promptness in coming to the House.

I do not know whether the right hon. Gentleman had time to read the report from cover to cover, but I would not be surprised—I do not say this in any spirit of criticism—if he had been unable to read in full the Legg key documents, 1 to 123. The Committee, of course, had the benefit of access to those documents. I think it most unlikely that, if the Foreign Secretary had had time to read them in full, he would have chosen to single out in his statement one official in the Foreign Office, the British high commissioner Mr. Peter Penfold, and to name him in the House for public reprimand—a naming that was carried extensively in that evening's television bulletins.

A valuable aspect of the Select Committee's report is the fact that the Committee managed to rebalance, at official level, the issue of where responsibility lay. It is patent that, where there were failures, they were not exclusively the responsibility of Mr. Peter Penfold; there were serious official failures elsewhere in the Department, going right up to the permanent under-secretary. It is important to note that a greater degree of justice has been done to Mr. Penfold in that respect.

I think that the right hon. Gentleman and I will disagree on this point. What was Mr. Penfold doing when he was holding meetings with mercenaries throughout the Christmas holiday, when he was back in the United Kingdom? That is the $64,000 question: why was he negotiating, or dealing, with mercenaries?

The answer to that question will be clear when I turn to my second point—the responsibility of Ministers—but Mr. Peter Penfold was by no means alone among Foreign Office officials in having contacts with Sandline International.

It is abundantly clear, indeed indisputable, that what impaled the Foreign Office on the Sandline International affair was the decision, which was conscious and deliberate, to misdescribe the arms embargo policy. I am in no doubt that all the diplomatic service officials who have been before us are men and women of integrity, and that, if all the officials concerned had been clear that the arms embargo applied to all the parties to the Sierra Leone crisis, including the Government of President Kabbah in exile in Guinea, the Foreign Office would not have become involved in Sandline International's activities. It was the misdescription of the policy that lay at the heart of the Foreign Office's difficulties.

The misdescription started at an early stage and continued from the autumn of 1997 through the rest of that year to the time when President Kabbah was restored.

It is not adequate to say that officials were responsible for the misdescription of the policy. Ministers are responsible for policy and its presentation. It was not simply an external matter. The misdescription was carried through into the internal communications of the Foreign Office.

Three Ministers were associated with the misdescription: the Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary, and the Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the hon. Member for Manchester, Central (Mr. Lloyd). As chair of the Commonwealth Heads of Government conference in October, the Prime Minister must take responsibility to a degree for the fact that the communiqué of 27 October misdescribed the arms embargo policy. Indeed, if that communiqué had correctly described the policy—if President Kabbah had known what the real policy of the British Government was—I am certain that President Kabbah, who had attended the conference by invitation, even though he was no longer in government in Freetown, and had been delighted to be at that conference, would have been furious. As Foreign Secretary, the right hon. Gentleman must, without question, have been associated with and played a role in approving the communiqué at the end of the conference.

I found extraordinary the way in which the Foreign Secretary sought to dismiss the Minister of State's description of the arms embargo on 12 March last year. Far from being irrelevant, 12 March was a critical date in relation to making it clear to whom the arms embargo applied because, two days previously, on 10 March, President Kabbah had been restored to Freetown. The arms embargo applied to the very Government who were now in post in Freetown. Therefore, if there had been a time in Parliament when it was necessary to make it clear that the arms embargo applied to President Kabbah, it was precisely that moment on 12 March.

I find it singularly unattractive and somewhat distasteful that throughout, Ministers have sought, on the Floor of the House and in evidence before the Foreign Affairs Committee, to lay the blame for the misdescription of the policy at the door of officials. It is unacceptable that, on such a central issue, Ministers have not accepted their responsibility for the misdescription.

The right hon. Gentleman has long experience of being a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee. Indeed, he and I served on the Committee for five years in the previous Parliament. It is in that context that I want to ask him to confirm that the conclusions of the Foreign Affairs Committee report on Sierra Leone do not criticise Ministers, whereas he, my hon. Friend the Member for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney (Mr. Rowlands) and I were on the Committee in 1994, when, with a Conservative majority, it produced a report on the Pergau dam that explicitly condemned Ministers, including the former Secretary of State for Defence, for their behaviour with regard to the House and for the way in which they had dealt with that matter. Will he confirm that the latest Select Committee report does not specifically condemn Ministers?

I am delighted to agree with the hon. Gentleman that, in the previous Parliament—and I do not wish to be called out of order—the Conservative Members on the Foreign Affairs Committee, who were in a substantial majority, unshakeably did their duty to criticise the then Executive. As for Ministers and the latest report, he will see from the proceedings section that a number of amendments were tabled. They were voted down in some circumstances, but, even with the report as published, it is far from true to say that it is free of criticism of Ministers. The Select Committee makes it clear that half-truths are unacceptable and that half-truths are one of the central issues.

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

I know that other hon. Members want to speak in the debate and I am anxious to help them, but I will give way once more.

The right hon. Gentleman referred to misdescription, as has the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard), who refused to give way earlier on the same point. Following parliamentary questions that were tabled by me and by one of my colleagues, it became apparent that, from 1979 to the present, Orders in Council confirming United Nations embargoes in relation to various countries had described policy and been circulated in exactly the same manner as they have been by the present Government. Therefore, in terms of misdescription, the Government appear to be doing nothing different from previous Governments.

Based on a written answer that the Select Committee received, I agree with the hon. Gentleman. The practice had always been to circulate United Nations Security Council resolutions in toto, rather than the Orders in Council themselves. That policy has been stated by Ministers. It has, apparently, been a long-standing practice. However, I am not aware of a previous occasion when Ministers have described, as they need to do in a single sentence or two, the ambit of the criminal law on an arms embargo conspicuously inaccurately.

I move to my central point: the issue of Sierra Leone policy, which has been seriously neglected. The Foreign Secretary spoke as if the British Government's policy was the most committed of any country towards the restoration of the democratic regime of President Kabbah. The right hon. Gentleman, perhaps not for the first time, was highly selective in his description. It applied to the period from March 1998 onwards, after President Kabbah was restored to power.

The following question is central to the debate: what was the British Government's policy between May 1997, when President Kabbah was ousted, and March 1998, when he was restored to power? That is the critical period for the purposes of the report.

The policy was established within a matter of weeks of the ousting of President Kabbah. As far as I am aware, the policy was stated for the very first time in the written answer that the Minister of State gave me on 11 July 1997, at column 625. It was the first time on which it was explained that the Government's policy was based on a peaceful solution to the crisis. That policy, having been stated, became set in stone. It was, of course, reflected in the terms of the United Nations Security Council resolution, and continued to be repeated right up to the point at which President Kabbah was restored to power.

The question that I have to ask is how realistic was that policy? Military juntas—particularly an extremely nasty military junta like the one in Sierra Leone—do not have a very good track record of going peacefully out of power, and that junta was absolutely no exception. After going through all the Legg documentation, I have seen not one piece of evidence that the British Government's policy of peaceful solution had any impact on the junta's policy. I do not believe that the policy ever had any chance of success. It was doomed to failure from the outset, and fail it did. President Kabbah was restored not because of British Government policy but in spite of British Government policy.

Some officials, of course, became increasingly concerned about whether the policy could be sustained. However, it was what Ministers decided to do. It was their policy; it was a cul-de-sac, leading nowhere.

If I make those criticisms, hon. Members are perfectly entitled to come back at me and ask, "What should the policy have been?" I do not agree with the hon. Member for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney that there were only two options—either continue the policy of peaceful solution, or arm the Kamajors. The third option, which I believe is the one that should have been followed, was not to send in British troops—as I believe that there was absolutely no case for putting at risk in that particular theatre the lives of British service men and service women—but to give logistical and intelligence support to ECOMOG. It is the very policy that is now being followed.

As the hon. Member for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney made it clear, there was a significant point of difficulty in that policy. As we know, the difficulty was that ECOMOG was Nigerian-forces led. Moreover, we are talking now about the Nigeria of Abacha.

We have a Government who are committed to an ethical foreign policy. I say that with absolutely no disparagement. Ethical considerations are a very important dimension to all foreign policy, and formed part of the previous Government's foreign policy. Two ethical issues were in conflict in the matter. The Government had the option either of continuing with a policy that led nowhere, or of "swallowing the pill" in giving logistical and military support to ECOMOG and achieving their prime ethical objective: restoration of the democratically elected Government of President Kabbah. I believe that the latter option is the one that should have been followed.

Sadly beyond doubt is the fact that, in Sierra Leone, between May 1997 and March 1998, we saw—certainly not for the first time this century—something that has happened previously under both Conservative and Labour Governments: foreign policy being driven by wishful thinking, rather than by recognition of the harsh realities. Once again, it resulted in failure.

I should like to touch on what the Select Committee's report reveals about issues in the relationship between Government and Select Committees. Although the debate has so far been more about implementation of policy rather than its substance—for which we might be criticised—policy implementation is key both to government and to the reality of government. A three-hour debate spent in examining those issues is therefore warranted.

Obscured by all the sound and fury surrounding the Select Committee's report is the fact that it was a Labour report, which every Labour member of the Committee, and our Liberal Democrat colleague on it, signed. Despite all the talk about partisanship and party political interests, the fact is that it was a Labour report—making it all the more remarkable that there was such fear of it, such a need to have sight of it before the embargo was lifted, and such a need to rubbish it precipitately. It really is extraordinary that a Labour report should excite so much antagonism from a Labour Government.

There never was a golden era in the relationship between Select Committees and Government. For eight years, I served on the Treasury Committee, under the distinguished chairmanship of a series of Tory Chairmen. Let us be quite clear that the previous Government could be just as ruthless and manipulative in their relationship with Select Committees as the Government have been in the past 18 months.

There never was a golden era in the relationship. None the less, when a Government have the majority that my Government have, and when—with the greatest respect to my colleagues—an Opposition are as weak as the current one, the role of Select Committees, as part of the system of checks and balances and of scrutiny, deserves, and perhaps currently is, receiving, far greater emphasis than before.

When a Government have a large majority and a command and control attitude to governance, Select Committees should play a key role in acting as a check and a balance, and in enabling Government policy to be subject to proper scrutiny and examination.

One criticism of the Foreign Affairs Committee was that it produced its report with the benefit of hindsight. I tell Ministers that producing reports in that manner is the exact role of Select Committees. They should consider past events and draw conclusions—which is what the Foreign Affairs Committee quite correctly did in its report.

In the Treasury Committee, we had our fair share of gut-wrenchingly sycophantic Government questioners of Ministers. We had our fair share of reports containing rather bland recommendations, because party political conflicts could not be resolved. We had our fair share also of Chairmen who turned up on the "Today" programme to act as apologists for the Government. However, in that Committee, certainly in the eight years that I served on it, we were always clear about the fact that we were a Committee of the House. We were not an arm of Government.

I should add that, although some things happened in that Select Committee that should not have happened, I served under several Tory Chairmen who were scrupulous in not using their chairmanship to act as apologists for the Government. As a Committee—which included some interesting characters—we were always clear that we were our own Committee, that we were a Committee of the House and that we chose our own agenda. Although some of the recommendations in our reports were fudged, they were always—throughout the Parliaments in which we served—substantial reports in which we made clear arguments.

At the beginning of this Parliament, I was removed from the Treasury Committee. Why? I do not know. Perhaps it was felt that, as I had served on it for eight years, I might just be capable of making a speech on Treasury matters without a brief from Millbank. Of course, that would never do.

It will be the Catering Committee for you next.

Perhaps, if I am here after the next general election. However, as long as I am an hon. Member, I intend to fulfil my role as an independent Back Bencher.

I was removed from the Treasury Committee and appointed to the Foreign Affairs Committee, under the very distinguished chairmanship of my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, East (Mr. Anderson). However, as soon as I was appointed to the Foreign Affairs Committee—despite the manifold experience, expertise and brilliance of my colleagues—I sensed in the air something that was very different from the atmosphere in which the Treasury Committee had operated. It was the notion that, in some sense, the Foreign Affairs Committee was a branch of the Foreign Office. During my first few weeks on the Select Committee I was charmed and delighted that the entire Committee was called to lunch with the Foreign Secretary. In my eight years on the Treasury Committee we had never been called to lunch with a Treasury Minister. We all trooped into lunch and the Foreign Secretary gave us the benefit of his views on what we should be doing. It turned out that he thought that we should be travelling to far-flung corners of the globe and staying there and building good personal relationships with obscure Wisconsin Congressmen.

I was interested to hear the Foreign Secretary's views on what the Select Committee should be doing, but I was not entirely clear what business it was of his. I am afraid that it was my voice that piped up at that lunch, as it has at many subsequent Committee meetings, to say to the Foreign Secretary, "We are a Committee of the House and it is not clear to me why you are giving us the benefit of your thoughts on what we should be doing."

That is not a criticism of any colleagues or even of any Ministers, but I just caught in the air a sense that the Committee was some sort of branch of the Foreign Office and that we were good for entertaining 10th ranking dignitaries from obscure central European states and that was about it. Having served for eight years on a different sort of Select Committee, I came to the Foreign Affairs Committee with the clear notion that, above all, we had to struggle for our independence and to be taken seriously.

It is not enough for colleagues to wail about the Sierra Leone affair and about the fact that the Tories are making political capital out of it. What on earth are we to expect Tories to do? It is their job. Ministers must understand why they are back on the Floor of the House two years after the event having to answer for their activities.

Some unkind members on the committee—not me or my colleagues—refer to some of the Ministers' aides-de-camp as Haldeman and Erlichman. I will not do that today. If one asks Ministers—even if one were to ask Haldeman and Erlichman—they will say that this issue has run on because the Tories are making political capital. Hello, what are the Opposition supposed to do? If they are asked again, they might say that someone is a troublemaker or that someone is bitter because he or she is not a Minister. The one thing that Ministers and their aides-de-camp will not address is the very real issue about the relationship between the Executive and the legislature that has been raised in the long-running battle between the Select Committee and the Government.

For as long as they content themselves with ad hominem attacks, things will not change. I was telephoned by a journalist yesterday who told me that people at the Foreign Office have an arsenal of personal information that they want to release about me as part of a fight-back against the Foreign Affairs Committee. I must tell the House—it is no big secret—that, since having my son seven years ago, I have led a private life of stupefying dullness, but I wish them luck in their attempt. [Interruption.] My hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Mr. MacShane) may laugh.

The problem that Ministers have with the Select Committee does not concern individuals, and it is not about bad luck or about the Opposition wilfully doing what they are supposed to do, which is to oppose. It is their own unwillingness to recognise that Select Committees have a right, an obligation and a duty to act independently. They have a duty to determine their own agenda. On Sierra Leone, the Select Committee had a duty to produce the report that it did. It was wrong and provocative of Ministers to imply that we did not need to produce the report, that we discovered nothing new and that the report was in some sense worthless. That is not the way to build a constructive relationship with the Select Committee.

Much has been said about the content of the report, which is important, but my argument to the House and to Labour colleagues is that if Ministers learn nothing by having to turn up and answer for themselves so long after the event, they must learn something about the right way to conduct relationships with the legislature. Select Committees are not an arm of Government. I shall touch on some of the pressure points of the relationship between Select Committees and the Government on which it is worth my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Treasury Bench reflecting.

Under this Government—it is not a new phenomenon, but it is intensified—we have seen an attempt to make the Whips Office writ run inside Select Committee meetings. We have had undue interference—it is passed now but I want to put it on the record—about who should be the Chair of Select Committees. I served on the Treasury Committee for eight years. During every Parliament we got winks and nods about who the usual channels had agreed should be the Chair. Twice running, my Select Committee ignored those winks and nods and we made our own choice. The Whips knew that they could advise, hint and suggest, but they could not make us appoint a Chair whom we did not want. I know of a Select Committee—it was not mine—where the Labour Whips went as far as holding a meeting inside the Committee Room prior to the Committee's first meeting. They had a vote on who should be Chairman and bound Labour Members to it in order to ram through the Chair of their choice.

Another issue—I have mentioned it but I will raise it again—is the notion that the Government can determine what Select Committees can or should investigate. It is for Select Committees to decide what to investigate. It is not proper for Ministers to maintain pressure on Select Committees saying, "We do not think that you should be investigating this. Anybody who votes for investigating this is an enemy of the regime". That is not proper and it is not an aid to good government.

I am listening carefully to the hon. Lady. Does she agree that, on this occasion, the Chairmen designate of Select Committees were announced by her party before the Select Committees had even met?

I am always very careful about what I say on the Floor of the House. I was not present at the meeting of the parliamentary Labour party where that was done. Labour colleagues who were present might want to comment.

I have talked about a concerted effort to make the Whips writ run in the Select Committee. That is wholly improper and undermines the basis on which Select Committees operate. I have talked about an attempt to determine what Select Committees can inquire into. Finally, the Foreign Affairs Committee suffered ad nauseam from people, presumably loyal to their Government, seeking to advance the Government's cause not by engaging in the arguments that the Select Committee is making, but by rubbishing the work of the Select Committee and the individuals who serve on it. Where has it got people? It has meant that two years later individuals are having to account for themselves on the Floor of the House.

It was a privilege to serve on the Treasury Committee and it is a privilege to serve on the Foreign Affairs Committee. I have had the honour of serving under a number of distinguished Chairs, including the current Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee. The Government see Select Committees as an irritant, an obstacle and a problem that must somehow be brought under the command and control structure. I believe that Select Committees can enhance the work of the Government. I believe that they can help to make government more transparent and more accountable and be a factor in producing better government. After all, is not better government what we are all about?

The hon. Member for Hackney, North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Sir J. Stanley) have made clear the effective role of Select Committees under the previous Government.

Before I begin my remarks I want to follow a hare that was set running by the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, the hon. Member for Swansea, East (Mr. Anderson). He made a disgraceful allegation that has wide currency in the Scott affair and the arms to Iraq affair. He said that Ministers under the previous Government were prepared to see innocent business men go to prison. That is absolutely and totally untrue. When the defence in a criminal trial have discovery of documents, if those documents are classified, it is the duty of Ministers to sign public interest immunity certificates, in the knowledge that the judge in the case will see the documents and reach a conclusion as to whether they are pertinent to the defence. If they are, they will be given to the defence. I hope that the hon. Gentleman, who is a fair man, does not believe that Ministers for whom I worked—I have direct knowledge of the issue—would have contemplated putting themselves in such a position.

Last Wednesday, when the Foreign Secretary made his latest statement on Sierra Leone, I did not catch Madam Speaker's eye. The right hon. Gentleman challenged Ministers from the previous Government to say that they had not seen early copies of Select Committee reports.

Order. Madam Speaker has made a ruling that I have reiterated: we should not talk about the leak. It has been mentioned in passing, but we should not talk about it. We should just talk about the motion and the amendment before us.

I wanted to refer to it in passing, simply to say that under the—

Order. The hon. Gentleman should take my advice and deal with the motion. The House knows what to do.

Under the tenure of the previous Foreign Secretary, a Rolls-Royce Department performed as a Rolls-Royce. It did not stagger from one own goal to the next. The permanent under-secretary was generally happy in the discharge of his duties. There were no rumours of Sir John Coles saying that he would not go before a Committee of the House again to cover up for his ministerial masters after yet another mauling from the Foreign Affairs Committee.

There have already been two or three references during the debate to the Scott report and the Pergau dam inquiry. How can the hon. Gentleman say that under the previous Government the Foreign Office did not have problems and crises?

Let us make the comparison. The Foreign Secretary has been in office for as long as his predecessor was. Under his predecessor, the Foreign Office dealt with issues such as the Hong Kong handover, the intergovernmental conference and the Bosnia Dayton accord, to name but three. It did not stagger from one crisis to the next. There were not controversies week after week over foreign affairs.

Why has the conduct of foreign policy changed? Why has the Rolls-Royce of a Department been reduced to an old banger, in the words of the Chairman of the Select Committee? The answer is ministerial leadership. That goes to the heart of the objective of new Labour—to be all things to all men. As soon as he came to office, the Foreign Secretary launched his ethical dimension to foreign policy. The contradictions were immediately and cruelly exposed on exports to Indonesia and on Kashmir. There was no suggestion under the previous Foreign Secretary of a state visit becoming a foreign policy disaster.

Even in opposition, when the right hon. Gentleman addressed a meeting of largely Indian British citizens in Southall he told them that Kashmir was part of India. He was received with cheers. When the point was put to him afterwards, he denied it. Unfortunately—

On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I have been looking at the Select Committee report, but I cannot see any reference to Kashmir. Is it in order to have a debate on Kashmir when we are supposed to be debating Sierra Leone?

It is the responsibility of the hon. Member who is speaking to debate the motion that is before the House.

As the hon. Gentleman knows, I am debating the conduct of foreign policy that has led to this shambles over Sierra Leone and goodness knows how many others. Policy towards Kashmir is a classic example of the Government's desire to be all things to all men. That is why they are incapable of giving leadership and why a Rolls-Royce of a Department has ended up as an old banger. Kashmir is a good example. The Foreign Secretary had to backtrack from what he said to an Indian audience in Southall. The Pakistani high commissioner then had to go to the Labour party conference in Blackpool to write Labour's policy statement.

I should be grateful if the hon. Gentleman returned to the subject of Sierra Leone.

In returning to the subject of Sierra Leone, perhaps I could touch on other areas, such as the Gulf and Kosovo, on which the Government do not have means and ends aligned in a way that will result in the execution of British foreign policy. Sierra Leone is a classic example of the Government willing the ends but not the means. The Government's policy was the peaceful restoration of the Kabbah Government. My right hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge and Malling elegantly explained why that policy could not succeed. Peter Penfold knew that. Tim Spicer knew that. President Kabbah knew that. The United Nations legal secretariat knew that when it interpreted Security Council resolution 1132.

The first failure of ministerial leadership was the fact that resolution 1132 sought to be all things to all men and could be interpreted differently by United Nations legal advisers in New York and legal advisers for the Foreign Office. The problem was drafted into an international text because the Government attempted to be all things to all men.

The practitioners knew the harsh truth that only military force would remove an unpleasant military junta from rule in Sierra Leone. The Minister denied that reality. His repeatedly expressed visceral distaste for private military companies spoke volumes about his inability to face the facts about what was required to restore the situation in Sierra Leone.

The irony is that Sandline was central to President Kabbah's restoration to power in early 1998. The December attack by ECOMOG failed. Only when ECOMOG had the benefit of the decent military advice and staff planning supplied by Sandline under contract from President Kabbah was its subsequent attack on Freetown a success.

There was confusion throughout the Government about the objectives. The Under-Secretary of State for International Development is on the Front Bench at the moment. His Department gave £250,000 for communications equipment to President Kabbah during his exile. That equipment was used to broadcast invitations to the Kamajors in Sierra Leone to rise up in military revolt, in contradiction of the stated British policy of peaceful restoration of the Government. The confusion sown by ministerial leadership had the absurd result of a company that had briefed Ministers in London and the high commissioner on the ground being investigated by other officials of the Crown.

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

I do not have time.

The cavilling, confused language in Security Council resolution 1132, typical of policy pursued by the Government, started them on the road to trouble. The hand-wringing, stuttering uncertainty in dealing with that difficult, bloody situation that has been characteristic of the Minister's handling has led to the problems. The delivery of the humanitarian, democratic and British interest was obstructed by the Government's agonies over the means that they needed to adopt to secure the ends.

The Government endorsed the end, but they were not prepared to face up to the means. No wonder Peter Penfold and Sandline were confused about the Government's position. They were the heroes of the shambles—people who were prepared to act to achieve the agreed and desirable objective. The Prime Minister endorsed Peter Penfold when he first became aware of the affair.

Peter Penfold and Sandline pursued their goals through a sea of cavilling Ministers and officials, few of whom acted with courage and decisiveness, or accepted responsibility. The primary objective of Ministers and many officials has been to cover their backs. That characterised the Foreign Secretary's handling of the reports. The horrifying harshness of what was happening in Sierra Leone was accompanied by Ministers trying to face in all directions at once.

Since 1 May 1997, the Foreign Office has had disastrous personal leadership from Ministers. That is why the Rolls-Royce has been reduced to the status of an old banger. The Foreign Secretary and the Minister of State, the hon. Member for Manchester, Central (Mr. Lloyd), should consider their positions.

I in no way underestimate the cycle of violence in Sierra Leone. Some hon. Members have sought to diminish our interest in the plight of the people in that country. We say that the situation is desperate, and any effort to relieve the suffering of the people of Sierra Leone will be supported by Conservative Members.

The contributions to this debate have been well-informed and have shown care and diligence. We have heard distinguished contributions from my right hon. Friends the Members for East Devon (Sir P. Emery) and for Tonbridge and Malling (Sir J. Stanley) and from my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Mr. Blunt). My right hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge and Malling made a superb speech and went into the details of the Government's contortions and the flaws in their policy towards Sierra Leone.

Even more telling, though, were the contributions from Government Members. The hon. Members for Swansea, East (Mr. Anderson) and for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney (Mr. Rowlands)—distinguished members of the Select Committee—seemed very willing to wound the beast but not to deliver the coup de grace; but the hon. Member for Hackney, North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) proved once again her superb independence. If she will permit me, I will pay her a compliment: she is charming but lethal.

I am sorry that we did not have more time to accommodate all the hon. Members who wanted to contribute. We have spent three hours debating one of the most scathing reports ever published by a Select Committee on the workings of a Department.

The hon. Lady has not been here very long.

I have been here long enough to know a Government who are a shambles when I see one, and in the past two years my eyes have certainly been opened by the Labour Government.

The Select Committee report was compiled in what could almost be described as a hostile environment. It says:

"Our inquiry has given a unique insight into the working, or lack of working in this case, of the FCO machine."

The report goes on to say:

"It has exposed even further a story which the FCO would have preferred not to have had besmirch its reputation."

The Foreign Secretary did not want the report to see the light of day but, thanks to the Committee's determination, it has been published and the whole House can draw its conclusions on the sorry affair from both the Select Committee report and the Legg report.

The reputation of the Foreign Office has indeed been besmirched, and the Foreign Secretary and the Minister of State, the hon. Member for Manchester, Central (Mr. Lloyd) have betrayed the trust placed in them, that they would at the very least conduct the foreign affairs of this country in a competent fashion, finish the paperwork and deal in whole truths, not half-truths: a trust that we can, sadly, no longer place safely in them.

My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard) spelled out the main indictments. Like him, I will not dwell on the serious questions of integrity raised by the revelation that the Foreign Secretary, by foul means rather than fair, received four weeks' advance warning of the content of the Select Committee report—that will be investigated by others, as Madam Speaker said—but I will reiterate the specific criticisms that Ministers have sought to brush off and evade in another fine example of the "Not me, guv" society, as practised to perfection by the Government.

At first, the Government tried to frustrate the work of the Committee, as the hon. Member for Swansea, East and my right hon. Friend the Member for East Devon said. The report says:

"The Committee's interest in Sierra Leone continued, but was impeded"—

yes, impeded—

"by the refusal of the Government to release to the Committee, firstly telegrams concerning Sierra Leone and secondly … the information which fell within the ambit of the Legg inquiry."

When the Committee's persistence prevailed, Ministers yet again sought to impede its progress. The report states:

"We have again encountered some frustrations. Our original request to hear three of the officials involved in the affair was met by a proposal that we should take evidence from only one of them."

In the end, a compromise of taking evidence from two officials was agreed on.

The Committee's request to see relevant intelligence reports and take evidence—in private—from the head of the Secret Intelligence Service was refused. Is that open government, or an ethical position? No. The report says:

"This sounds very much like a Minister determined to defend his own position."

As my right hon. Friend the Member for East Devon said, the contrast with the attitudes of other Departments is striking. The Chief of Defence Intelligence was allowed to appear before the Committee, and the director general of the Security Service was allowed to brief the Home Affairs Committee. Even the hon. Member for Swansea, East condemned the lack of access afforded to his Committee. I leave the House to draw its own inevitable conclusions about the Foreign Secretary's actions and whether they were designed to help or to obstruct the inquiry.

Ministers would prefer to interpret the reports as laying the blame at the door of officials. The Foreign Secretary said:

"I would perfectly happily accept any criticisms of myself … but there are none."—[Official Report, 27 July 1998; Vol. 317, c. 28.]

That really will not wash. Even the Legg report concludes that

"the officials concerned were working hard and conscientiously, and should not be judged too harshly."

Officials made mistakes, no doubt, but so did Ministers. The Select Committee report concludes that the Government's policy on the arms embargo was stated in a way that could mislead Parliament, the public and even the Foreign Office's own staff into thinking that the arms embargo applied only to one side of the warring factions: the junta.

The Legg report lays the blame squarely at the Government's door, saying that it is the Government's responsibility to give citizens, and even their own officials, a reasonable explanation of the laws that they make under delegated powers, especially when those laws create a serious criminal offence: in this case, an offence punishable by up to seven years' imprisonment.

The Legg report says that no such explanation was given. Instead, the impression was given in communications that the embargo applied only to the junta. As Legg concludes, British officials and Ministers

"continued to play this aspect down."

Ministers patently failed to give a clear and full explanation, preferring to deal in half-truths, not whole truths.

If we need further confirmation of that, we need look only as far as the Foreign Secretary, who said, of the telegram that advised key diplomatic staff of the extent of the arms embargo, that it was

"quite plainly wrong that this telegram did not make it clearer what was the full scope of the resolution."

I hope that the Minister will deal with the point raised by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe and tell us what his response is to the Foreign Secretary telling us that his answer of 12 March was "quite plainly wrong".

The Committee report reinforces ministerial culpability when it refers to the Foreign Office's dealings with Sandline. By way of a final indictment of ministerial behaviour, it says that

"many of the problems which occurred would not have done so … If Ministers had made their policy on dealing with mercenaries clearer to officials."

What picture do we paint of Foreign Office Ministers and their competence? It is a very sorry picture of bungling and buck passing. We have a Foreign Secretary who does not finish the paperwork; a Foreign Secretary who deals in the dangerous commodity of half-truths, and is quite content to do so; a Foreign Secretary who should hang his head in shame, but who could not even come to the Dispatch Box today to utter one word of apology for the mess over which he has presided. As his own permanent under-secretary put it:

"The revelation of this mess, which is not a pretty sight, has not been a very enjoyable experience."

He is a master of understatement.

The Foreign Secretary and his Ministers are, and should be, accountable to this House for their policies and their Department's actions. The Foreign Secretary has shown today that he is too arrogant to accept that responsibility, and that "sorry" is a word sadly lacking from his vocabulary. That should be a matter of grave concern in all quarters of this House.

What a shambles—our once-proud foreign service has been brought to its knees after less than two years by a group of incompetent and arrogant Ministers. We are supposed to have an ethical foreign policy, yet by the handling of the Select Committee report and its endeavours to inquire into the facts surrounding the Sierra Leone affair, and through the lack of respect for the responsibilities of this House, the Foreign Secretary has shown that he does not know the meaning of the word ethical.

The Foreign Secretary is a man with a mindset; a man who believes that nothing is his fault; who says that if there is fault, it is not his; a man who obstructs investigation and resists all criticism so that he fails completely to see the chaos that he leaves around him. Tonight we are, first, asking Ministers to take responsibility for their actions—and I hope that the Minister will use the word "sorry" in his speech tonight—and, secondly, demonstrating our support for the Select Committee and its report. I ask all right-minded hon. Members to do the same, and to demonstrate their belief in the Select Committee system and it scrutinising role by voting with us tonight. We believe that the Select Committee was right, and its report catalogues an extended episode of incompetence by the Government. By this report, the Government stand rightly condemned.