the way we did business and before the arrival of jtac, there were a lot of separate bits round whitehall dng terrorist assessment, but actually my service had the sort of monopoly responsibility for producing terrorist assessments and had done for many decades, and we suggested that we should give up this monopoly role and build something that was cross- departmental. i had extensive discussions with david omand, who i think has given evidence on this, on creating this new organ. several departments were anxious about this, notably the mod and the dis to begin with, but once everybody decided to go for it, departments like the mod were very supportive and i think we created something which thrives -- i don't know how big it is today -- which brought views from across the whitehall community, from within the intelligence community, from other departments, and led to a more comprehensive and richer analysis of the threat. it has also, jtac, become very helpful in guiding investigations and operations and it is much imitated. when i was director general, senior visitors to london very regul

to you last month and extolled all that you do to promote a better understanding of parliament in whitehall and i am very happy indeed to echo those sentiments. indeed, sir george and i appear to be involved in an accidental double-act on the house of commons circuit as i addressed the hansard society in early june, with him doing the same gig a week later, and it is now my turn to follow in his not inconsiderable footsteps. i hope to live up to the standard that he set. the title of my speech tonight is "new parliament, new opportunity". in a sense, i suppose every new parliament represents a new opportunity of sorts but there are compelling reasons to believe that this house of commons provides us with an opportunity that comes perhaps two or three times in a century. there is an overwhelming consensus within the government and the opposition that political reform, including parliamentary reform, is a manifest necessity. the aftermath of the expenses explosion has created an enormous incentive to demonstrate by change that the house will never again find itself lampooned as one enormous d

it is another whitehall committee. it is fallible. it produces some excellent things. it produces some less good things. reflecting back, with the wisdom of hindsight, there was an inadequate challenge. butler and david omand talked about it in terms of group- think and the psychology of everybody feeling it was going one way. i think the important thing about it is it should never -- its judgments -- it is always recognized and others must recognize that its judgments may be fallible. looking back through the jic reports, i think it was pretty good on the terrorist threat actually -- much less good on iraq. i think that the jic did try to go back and look at its past judgments and be self-critical and you will have seen papers on that. you will have also seen papers on the extent to which some of us thought it needed to be more self-critical. i don't know what it is like today. it is always going to be an imperfect way of doing things but it is right that we try and do it like that because the alternative is anarchy. >> thank you. there is one general question arising

have seen ministers at all levels much more frequently and have participated much more broadly in whitehall meetings than once was the case. that's quite understandable because -- in the days of -- of the cold war, i simplify, ministers were interested in the spies. it was when terrorism from al qaeda and its associates and sympathizers became a major political issue, then the row of direction and the participating of meetings became more extensive. >> would you have have a means of comparing the frequency of your -- of your direct access to the prime minister, would that -- with the heads of the other agencies? 12k3w4r50 him much more frequ en i did, for understandable reasons. >> my recollection, i got two points i think. first is -- we were asked to put in some -- some low-grade and we refused because we didn't think it was -- we didn't think it was reliable. because of nature of what we do we have it any. the second one really is the degree to which, if you're not an expert in the j.i.k., you need to -- your options of challenge are very limited. the people that knew about iraq and m.w.