Who guards the guardians?

Andrew Blick (London, Democratic Audit): The position of Permanent Secretary for Security, Intelligence and Resilience is to be split into two. There will now be a Head of Security, Intelligence and Resilience who is also Security Adviser to the Prime Minister; and also a Head of Intelligence Assessment who is Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee. This move seems to be a response to the argument implicit in the Butler Review that there was not sufficient collective Cabinet involvement in the consideration of intelligence assessments: in effect a prime-ministerialisation of decision-making around intelligence based issues, which brought with it a greater likelihood of mistakes. It would be interesting to see an assessment of how the new arrangement works once it is up and running. This task might be one for the Intelligence and Security Committee itself - but first this Committee has to be reformed. At present it answers directly to the Prime Minister - clearly an unsatisfactory arrangement. Gordon Brown is promising to bring the Joint Intelligence Committee in line as far as possible with parliamentary select committees: the question is, how will this be possible - how will there be the required separation from the executive for there to be effective scrutinising?