232. We asked the Home Secretary for her views on the viability of this current arrangement whereby MI5's ability to take on primacy for ERWT without additional resources only appears to have been made possible by a (presumably unexpected) reduction in ***. Acknowledging that prioritising risks was a "constant discussion", the Home Secretary noted that "We [the Home Office] will do our best always in terms of my own advocacy with Her Majesty's Treasury, but of course much of this is not straight out of the Home Office, it comes out from the wider pot of funding for the Intelligence and Security community."[1]
O. MI5 have taken on responsibility for ERWT without the commensurate resources. Taking the month of July 2020 as an example, ERWT and LASIT casework accounted for around under a fifth of all counter-terrorism investigations: that casework can only be undertaken at the expense of other MI5 work. The impact has been seen on *** casework, which is now progressed more slowly, and on MI5's inability to expand its work on other threat areas as it had intended. This situation is untenable. While MI5, rightly, allocates its resources on what it assesses to be the highest priority work based on its expert knowledge of the threat, we are concerned that MI5 has been expected simply to absorb this new responsibility. MI5 must be given additional funding to enable it to conduct these cases without other areas of work suffering as a consequence.
Behavioural Science Unit
233. The Behavioural Science Unit (BSU) is a team of behavioural and social science specialists within MI5. Their specific role is to provide support and guidance to investigative desk officers and agent handlers to help them understand their SOIS better, as well as advice on a range of approaches to agent handling issues.
234. The Committee's Report on the Intelligence Relating to the Murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby highlighted the potential offered by the BSU in the counter-terrorism space, and made a specific recommendation that the unit should be integrated more thoroughly into investigations. More recently, the Committee's Inquiry into the 2017 Terror Attacks again raised the issue of the BSU and how, if at all, its role had developed in the intervening years. MI5 confirmed in 2018 that:
I think we have developed a BSU role since that time on the extent to which we use them [to assist with] CHIS, assessment of SOIS, and actions that we take about them, and, in relation to SOIs, assessment of the risk that potentially unstable people might represent. So they have been particularly acutely used since that time in the space of, you know, 'more vulnerable individuals' and the 'lone actors' sort of the space, so I think you would find the difference between 2013 and 2017, I guess is what we are looking at today, quite a marked shift in BSU integral involvement.
The one other very quick addendum I would suggest is that, in the Operational Improvement Review, in the work we are now doing to take our methodology one stage further, the BSU again is strongly woven through that. So behavioural science informs at its core the analytical work we are looking to use as we head forwards around data.
- ↑ Oral evidence - Home Secretary, 20 May 2021.
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