Government Under Fire From Tory MPs for Allowing Spies to Work From Home

An illustration photo of a person working on a laptop from home. Chris Delmas/AFP via Getty Images

Two senior Conservative MPs have criticised the government for continuing to allow hybrid working by intelligence agencies after a watchdog warned the practice had reduced efficiency.

Former government efficiency minister Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, who previously left notes on civil servants’ empty desks to pressure them back into office after the COVID-19 pandemic, said “the spooks have become spectres.”

The government said on Thursday that it will continue to allow remote working, suggesting it would otherwise make it more difficult to recruit new spies, in its response to a report published in July that said the UK’s response to the Chinese threat had been “completely inadequate.”

The report, published by the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC)—the parliamentary watchdog of the intelligence agencies—said the intelligence community had continued to incorporate working from home after the pandemic.

While “those working on the most critical priorities” had worked from the office full time throughout the pandemic, the adoption of hybrid working during and after the pandemic meant the responses to the ISC’s requests for information had “slowed dramatically,” the ISC said at the time.

“The ‘new normal’ for some organisations means deadlines have been missed or responses have been sanitised to enable them to be sent from home. This has had—and continues to have—an impact on the Committee’s ability to scrutinise security and intelligence issues properly and in a timely fashion,” the watchdog added.

The ISC, which scrutinises the MI5, MI6, GCHQ, Defence Intelligence, the Joint Intelligence Organisation, the National Security Secretariat, and Homeland Security Group, said different agencies had been using working from home to a variety of degrees.

The Cabinet responded on Thursday saying the intelligence community had “learned many important lessons about the benefits of hybrid working during the pandemic, and will continue to provide opportunities for staff to work from a wider range of locations where it is still possible for them to fulfil their roles.

“Much of the work involved with running such complex organisations can be done in a variety of ways, and providing flexibility allows relevant organisations to recruit and support a wide variety of staff and build a fully diverse and inclusive set of organisations,” the government said.

Speaking to The Telegraph, Sir Jacob said, “The spooks have become spectres. The modern spy may eschew the James Bond image, but at least he did some work.”

Former Conservative leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith told the publication the government was being “complacent.”

“In brutal terms, you could say productivity has fallen significantly. Can they work from other locations? Yes. Can they work effectively from them, or as effectively? No. The government response is complacent,” he said.

Elsewhere in the response, the government acknowledged that the Chinese regime had “tried to headhunt British and allied nationals in key positions and with sensitive knowledge and experience, including from government, military, industry and wider society.”

But it defended its China strategy, saying much progress had been make after the ISC took the bulk of its evidence.

The committee’s Conservative chair Julian Lewis welcomed the government’s response, but said it’s misleading to suggest the report was out of date.

“Until two months before publication, we monitored all relevant developments and noted them throughout the report. This was not difficult to do, given the glacial pace at which the government’s China policy developed,” Sky News quoted him as saying.

Conservative MP Bob Seely told The Sun that the UK needs to “take off the rose-tinted spectacles and get wise” about the Chinese regime.

“The China was hoped for is not the China we are getting,” he said.

“MPs, public servants and soldiers especially need to be wise to the threat to them and understand that our enemies seek not only to potentially recruit us as agents but to divide us.

“The UK and our allies need a more coherent and robust approach to the threat we face from China’s Communist regime,” he said.