Educating Parliamentarians about Intelligence: The Role of the British Intelligence and Security Committee

Abstract

In the wake of 9/11, the war in Iraq and the terrorist attacks in London, the Westminster parliament has become increasingly involved in the scrutiny of legislation and policy related to the use of intelligence. Yet until recently parliamentary scrutiny of intelligence in the UK was limited and uninformed. The creation of a parliamentary intelligence oversight committee in 1994 for the first time allowed for parliamentary scrutiny of the intelligence agencies. This article aims to assess whether parliament has begun to understand about intelligence since the establishment of the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC). It considers whether parliament and parliamentary committees in particular have a role to play in allowing parliamentarians to develop expertise in particular policy areas, and then questions whether the ISC has, through its membership and its published output, served to generate a wider parliamentary understanding of intelligence.