MI5/H Branch

H Branch is a part of the UK Security Service (MI5) with responsibility for overseas liaison; finance and audit; policy and planning; and information management.

Earlier incarnations

In the 1916 War Office reorganisation which created MI5, H Branch had responsibility for the secretariat, registry and administration.

Modern version

In MI5's 1988 structure, H Branch had been recreated with responsibility for overseas liaison; training; finance and audit.

In 1990, P Branch founded by Sir Antony Duff to review the service's organisation was wound up and its policy and planning functions incorporated into H Branch. In February 1990, Duff's successor Sir Patrick Walker tasked officer H1/0 to produce a strategic review of the Service. The result a year later was greeted with little enthusiasm within the Service. Jonathan Evans, then H1B/1, recalled a 'stormy' management board meeting at which Walker clashed with the MI5 legal advisor David Bickford.

In MI5's 1994 structure S Branch and its information management functions were incorporated into H Branch.

Stephen Lander became Director of H Branch in 1994. According to official MI5 historian Christopher Andrew, Lander took the "risky but ultimately successful" decision to upgrade MI5's troubled Unix-based word processing system GIFTED CHILD, (nicknamed SPOILED BRAT) to a Microsoft-compatible system.

Authors Mark Hollingsworth and Nick Fielding offer a more critical account of the episode. They report that MI5 spent four years attempting to develop an in-house system codenamed GRANT before Lander unilaterally decided to scrap the project, which had cost £25 million, in 1995 and buy an off-the-shelf Windows system. Only 40 per cent of MI5 staff had access to the new system by early 1997.

In 1997, former MI5 officer David Shayler highlighted H Branch's role when he complained about what he considered excessive bureaucracy in obtaining warrants for telephone tapping:

You have to go through a deputy assistant director of the branch, then an assistant director, a director, over to H Branch [Corporate Affairs], back to the desk officer, back to H Branch and then the Deputy Director General would see it. Finally [after his or her approval] you could probably go ahead.

Structure

The following list is taken from the 2003 edition of Hollingsworth and Fielding's Defending the Realm: Inside MI5 and the War on Terrorism and may now be somewhat dated.

• H1 and H2: Liason with Whitehall, the police and the media, covert financial enquiries, management policy including information technology.
• H4: Finance.
• R2: Main Registry
• R5: Restricted 'Y-boxed' files.
• R10: Registry for temporary files.
• R20: Administers GCHQ material.

People

Directors

• Stephen Lander 1994-circa 1996

Others

• Jonathan Evans Former H1B/1