meetings at MI5, "just to get a sense check in terms of, you know, where the balance of threats are, the equities, are we resourced in the right way".[1]
229. Nevertheless, in September 2020, MI5 acknowledged that taking on the new responsibility for ERWT/LASIT investigations did have an impact on the resource they are able to devote to other areas:
Given that we prioritise work on the basis of risk, within G branch the impact of taking on ERWT/LASIT investigations has fallen primarily on the *** of our *** casework, with these investigations generally progressing more slowly and having less access to collection resources. We have not, as things stand, needed to adjust our thresholds for triage and the opening of investigations. Our ability to move investigative resource across to other growing threat areas *** has also been ***.
For particularly specialised collection resources (e.g. bespoke technical operations), which are in such demand that they are deployed only on the highest priority casework, the adoption of ERWT and LASIT will also have impacted on work against ***.[2]
230. In terms of the impact of its work in countering ***, the Director General of MI5 further explained:
As you know, we have for some years now held an ambition on widening our aperture on ***. The rise of Extreme Right Wing Terrorism has constrained our ability rapidly to grow what we would otherwise be doing on ***.[3]
231. In contrast, the Head of CTP highlighted the tangible benefits to CTP in resource terms of the 'threat agnostic' approach, now that the ERWT threat is treated the same as the Islamist threat, as CTP no longer have to "set up completely separate teams to deal with the right-wing; we have actually brought them in. So we are more efficient, as well as more effective in this space."[4] He confirmed that "we have got the right amount of resource which is proportionate to the current threat but, over the past five years, I would say my professional judgement is it has grown".[5] The Director General of MI5 told the Committee that:
In the Spending review last autumn [2020] we did not bid for additional people capacity to deal with the Right Wing terrorist threat; *** because of the gains that we think will be secured once that facility [CTOC] is in existence.[6]
However, this was caveated with the observation that a reduction in the volume of *** had been a key factor in enabling MI5 to absorb the increasing amount of work it is doing on ERWT terrorism investigations.[7]
89
