Speeches by Williams.

“Yes, I think that is fair—but it is a fact of life.”

“Within central Government, in the end, the key people in other Departments who needed to be engaged were within the circle of knowledge of the super-injunction anyway. This can be quite easily overlooked, but I pay tribute to both the civil servants and members of the armed forces who worked under incredibly difficult …”

“If I broaden it out from the Triples—I will come back to the Triples at the end—part of the reason I am sitting before you today as the former permanent secretary of the Ministry of Defence, rather than the current one, is that I accept that an element of the buck for this departmental failure has to stop with me. It i…”

“Let me come back to another topic that we have discussed. When you think about data protection and information security, there is a point for me in the lesson about how the MOD is thinking about security in the round. We have had exchanges about RAF Lakenheath. That was not particularly at the forefront of my mind as I…”

“I said this to the PAC in the autumn: I do not think that when the super-injunction was granted in early September 2023 anyone expected that it would still be in place in the summer of 2025. Certainly, in those opening exchanges, the Ministers present would probably have expected scrutiny of their actions while they we…”

“The question of super-injunctions and parliamentary transparency, as I said previously—I stand by this—is unprecedented. Of course, there is a point about what level of knowledge and insight you need for effective scrutiny. It will be a matter for the Committee to take a view on whether, if we had read in only the Chai…”

“The initial focus, in terms of relocations and resettlement immediately after the breach, was to ensure that we were running the pipeline of ARAP-eligible individuals as well as we could. There is a substantial overlap, in terms of the dataset that was part of the data breach, between those who would be eligible under …”

“There is an element of that. There is also an element that goes to some of my earlier answers: my take on this data breach is that it is the result of a set of errors of judgment, or well-intended actions, taken under pressure to make rapid progress in a situation where lots of people were motivated by the need to prot…”

“Our personal reflections on the lesson are about accepting that sometimes time does not allow that luxury. But, as far as possible, you want to be really clear about the outcomes that you are trying to achieve, and therefore really clear about the respective departmental responsibilities that need to be brought to bear…”

“We got to a cross-Government SRO, albeit working out of the MOD, in spring of 2024. We have had a conversation about whether we could have got to that point either in the autumn of 2023 or at the end of 2021 or start of 2022. There may well have been some missed opportunities.”

“Recommendations around changes of policy, oversight of policy or introduction of controls were implemented, I would say, almost immediately, so within a month or two. That accounts for 25 or so of the 39 recommendations. There are also a number of recommendations that are, if you like, never really done. One of the imp…”

“I do not think that the handover between Ben Wallace and Grant Shapps particularly had a material impact on timeliness. As you will have heard from those former Ministers, we sought the injunction under Ben Wallace and it was granted two or three days later, by which time Grant Shapps was in post. But the ministerial l…”

“Yes, I think so. In the end, you can have a nice, logical civil service official model of how Departments should work together under Cabinet Office co-ordination—and you need that underpinning—but you definitely also need the political will for it to happen.”

“I have a couple of observations, and then Mr Lincoln may want to come in on this. One of the lessons about setting up for success is absolutely being clear about the roles and responsibilities of individual Government Departments in what needs to be a joined-up response, as well as being clear about where the lead sits…”

“The implementation of the DACS database, for instance, meant much greater access controls—the ability to understand who was viewing data and to control that data view. We had introduced processes by which emails outside Government systems needed a double lock; that is not particularly relevant to this data breach. Ther…”

“My direct responsibility was around whether the security culture and the system of data protection and information security were adequate to the task that we took on, as we discussed in response to Mr Bailey’s questions. Mr McIvor also says in his introduction that in his experience, most data breaches are the results …”

“There were 39 recommendations from McIvor and the majority of those were implemented pretty quickly—”

“Mr Bailey and Chair, thank you. I appreciate that we are tight for time, but if I may, I have two very brief points of contact before I come to the specific question. First, Mr Bailey, you mentioned my appearance in front of your sister Committee in the autumn. I would like to start this session by repeating the apolog…”

“And they will have had views about the capability of other bits of Government to do it.”

“Do you want to have a go on that one?”