MI5 ‘is full of young graduates stuck behind a monitor’

Former terrorism reviewer says spy agency needs to become more in touch with police on the street

‘You get people in the agencies maybe not being suspicious enough, they get so much of this stuff that they become almost accustomed to it’

MI5 is a “young” organisation staffed by analysts who have come straight from university, the former reviewer of terrorism has said as he called on staff to work closer with the policeman on the street.

In a rare insight into the shadowy organisation, David Anderson QC said that there was a risk that young analysts were not suspicious enough and could become “accustomed” to reams of data, while an officer with real world experience would be able to flag up issues that could be of interest.

Mr Anderson, the independent reviewer of terrorism until 2017, last year reviewed the police and MI5’S response to the four terror attacks between March and June and found that the secret services needed to “share the fruits of their intelligence a little more widely”.

He will now monitor both services to see if the reforms are implemented before reporting to the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister in January.

Mr Anderson has said that as part of his work looking at how MI5 responded to the attacks, he decided that it was impossible to get to know an organisation through the office of the director general rather than standing in the lift or sitting in the canteen.

“It is a very impressive organisation and it works very well with the police, those things are not in doubt,” Mr Anderson said in an interview with the US blog Lawfare.

“But if you asked me to sum up in one word how I find MI5, I think I would say young. This may be my own advancing years or it may be the fact that numbers are expanding very quickly – there was a 30 per cent uplift in the intelligence budget in 2015 and that is only now feeding through into a pretty rapid increase in personnel.

“But it made me realise that when it comes to not only assessing the threat but working out how to respond to it in individual cases you really need a mix of expertise. There are brilliant young analysts in MI5. They left university, since then they have sat behind a computer screen and they are very, very good at what they do.

“But if they are dealing with a part of south Manchester where the terrorism is all mixed up with drugs and crime they need someone there who has policed that area, someone who has been to court and seen his case collapse because the evidence wasn’t believed and I think that policing perspective is really important. One of the big lessons that came out of these reviews, yes they work well together already but they have to do more to pool their expertise.

“You get people in the agencies maybe not being suspicious enough, they get so much of this stuff every day that they become almost, I won’t say blasé, but almost accustomed to it and you need someone who has been on the street who can say ‘I think that it needs a closer look’.”

MI5 runs a two-year training programme, starting on £30,000 a year, to get graduates into analyst roles. It says it “places you at the heart of MI5 investigations”. It did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr Anderson said that he was given unprecedented access to both MI5 and counter-terror policing because “everybody was shocked” by the four attacks across London and Manchester last spring, which killed 36 and wounded another 200.

He noted in his review that MI5 has already agreed to share its knowledge more widely.