Turf war: MI5 bids for policing role
01 November 1994
MI5 is bidding to take over from the National Criminal Intelligence Service as the lead police intelligence agency. While Stella Rimington, the head of MI5, makes the case for its new role, the Special Branch are issued with new guidelines emphasising their work for MI5.
The UK's internal security and law enforcement agencies - MI5, the Special Branch, the police, and the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) - are embarked on a "turf" war. It is a battle for remits, powers and resources which threatens to change the balance between "normal" policing and the introduction of methods and techniques developed in the Cold War, counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism into policing practices and court procedures.
At the centre of this upheaval is MI5, the internal security agency founded in 1909. With the demise of the Cold War from 1989 it successfully campaigned to take over the lead role for counter-terrorism inside the UK from the Special Branch (part of the police force set up to combat Fenian "terrorism" in 1883) in 1992. Last year the then Home Secretary, Kenneth Clarke, told Tony Blair (then Shadow Home Secretary) in a letter that this development did not foreshadow MI5 taking over other policing roles such as combatting "organised crime". Mr Clarke said that MI5's job was the "protection of the national interest and the safeguarding of the UK's economic well-being against threats from overseas" in short its job was:
"to investigate any activity of a nature and a level such that it poses a threat to national security."
Although there were perhaps a number of countries where drug trafficking or organised crime did pose a threat to "national security" Mr Clarke wrote:
"Serious though criminal activity of this kind is, however, I do not consider that there is any question that it amounts at present to a threat to the security of the UK."
If, he continued, MI5 were to become involved in the fight against drugs or organised crime:
"the level of such criminal activity would have risen to such a point, and would evidently have done so, that it constituted a threat to national security... I think it most unlikely indeed that such a situation will ever arise: both the police and Customs and Excise are working hard to ensure that it does not..."
However, even as the Home Secretary was writing this letter the ground was shifting. Under the 1989 Security Service Act MI5 was extended to giving support in "the prevention or detection of serious crime" (through the Intelligence Services Act 1993 the roles of MI6, UK's overseas intelligence agency and Government Communications Headquarters, GCHQ, were also extended to cover "crime"). The ceasefire announced by the IRA on 31 August this year was the signal for MI5 to exploit both its new legal remit and its working links with the Special Branch and local police forces in its anti-terrorist role which involved not just covert operations but the preparation of evidence for court cases. Its principle target is the National Criminal Intelligence System (NCIS) of the police force. Senior police officers question the timing of Stella Rimington's speech (see box). One said:
"Why are we being offered this now? Drugs have been a massive problem for years. I don't need to tell you that peace in Northern Ireland would make MI5's budget and resources very difficult to justify."
The NCIS was set up in 1992, the same year that MI5 took over the 109 year old police Special Branch role for anti-terrorist work. From the start the NCIS was limited to the gathering of information and intelligence to combat serious crime - an operational role was denied to it because of problems of how to make it accountable without the spectre of creating a "national" police force. The limitations of NCIS's role are the subject of a secret report to the Home Office which says it should be able to conduct surveillance operations (see story on NCIS in Policing section) and MI5 has weig