Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Bill

Lord King of Bridgwater Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 9th October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord King of Bridgwater (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great privilege to follow the right reverend Prelate. In her relatively brief remarks I think she impressed the whole House with the quality of her contribution. I wonder whether any of her predecessors as Bishop of Newcastle would have dreamed of standing up in your Lordships’ House and saying, “I have just had a meeting in Newcastle Central Mosque”. That drew attention to the challenges and differences that we now face in our country and in the world. I am grateful to her for carrying on what has been an extremely impressive start to this important debate.

I support my noble friend the Minister, who took exactly the right approach in her introduction to this complicated and difficult issue. I will make only one criticism. The paperwork that has come out has been outstanding, explaining all the issues involved, but there is one thing there which I do not believe for a minute: the impact assessment. Some bright gentleman has said that it will cost £49.8 million over 10 years. Who came up with that wonderful figure? If the Minister cannot answer that today, will she write and tell me who worked out this calculation and what it is meant to mean?

I was struck by the debates in the other place, in which a tribute was paid to Ben Wallace, the Minister, for the consensual approach that the Government took to this legislation. I pay tribute to the noble Lords, Lord Rosser and Lord Marks, for the approaches they took in recognising that there are issues. I agree with every one of the tasks that the noble Lord, Lord Marks, set out. We will not necessarily agree on the answers, but he is absolutely right that these tasks have to be addressed. We are very lucky to have my noble friend the Minister, who I think will carry on the tradition of Mr Wallace and take a consensual approach to these difficult issues, which are very important to our country.

When the House of Commons at Third Reading said—rather cheekily, I thought—that it had adopted a consensual approach and hoped the other place would as well, I thought that we were rather more likely to do that than the Commons in normal circumstances—and to bring it forward. The quality of the contributions in this House can be exceptional. We have already had the viewpoint of the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, who is uniquely qualified. We are going to have maiden speeches from two very distinguished former Members of the other place: my noble and learned friend Lord Garnier and the noble Lord, Lord Tyrie. It is also a great pleasure to see the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, who knows more about some of this legislation than any of us will ever know. So this House is uniquely placed to carry it through.

Looking through the legislation, I have learned a lot. Having had some years in Northern Ireland and some in defence—and having chaired the ISC for seven years—I am very conscious of how much the situation has changed. The noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, referred to the pace and scale of what is happening. That absolutely sums it up. I also noted the phrase that my noble friend used at the start: this is an enduring shift in the challenges of terrorism, not a spike. I think we would all agree with that.

At the end of its Third Reading, the other place said that it had done quite a bit of work but there was still quite a bit to do. The noble Lord, Lord Rosser, spelled out the things that were not dealt with in the other place and which we now have to take on. The advantage is that we at least start from a common understanding of the threat that we face. Take the threat assessment with which we live all the time: noble Lords will know that it is at “severe”. What does “severe” mean? It means that an attack is “highly likely” and we have no excuse for not knowing that, having been through what happened tragically on Westminster Bridge and in our own Parliament. We went right on to the tragedies in Manchester, at London Bridge and in Finsbury Park. What happened at Parsons Green could have been very bad indeed, in my understanding, if the bomb had been put together correctly; we were extremely lucky in that respect. Since then, I understand that 12 serious Islamic threats have been thwarted and, I think, four right-wing threats as well. If I have the right figures, we have had 441 terrorism-related arrests and 72 people were convicted of terrorism last year. There are 228 people in prison at this stage for terrorist-connected offences.

Against that, we now have the challenge of the pace to which the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, referred. Undoubtedly, the impact of social media is quite enormous. Some of us sat through part of the debate on the Investigatory Powers Bill, when I quickly realised that ISIS knew a lot more about WhatsApp than I ever did and was using it to great effect. The speed with which extremist propaganda and intelligence, along with the knowledge and instructions on how to make weapons and bombs, can turn up on social media is a major threat for us at this time.

Taking it on further, I see the scale of the challenge and some new complications. I understand that 74 groups are currently proscribed in this country. I have also tried to understand the phrases that turned up in the Explanatory Notes. Everybody will now know that an RTO is a “registered terrorism offender”. That is somebody at large in our community who is guilty of a terrorism offence and has to report in under certain regulations. The term SOPC means “sentences for offenders of particular concern”. The other interesting phrase is ATTROs, which refers to “antiterrorism traffic regulation orders”. We know what that means: it means putting barriers up on bridges to stop cars running into them and killing a lot of people. At the same time, there is the completely new dimension which we live with at the moment of state-sponsored terrorism. Whatever happened at the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons or in Salisbury, those are threats that we have faced in only the last week. I understand that the Islam Channel—a major UK-based TV channel—has been subjected to Russian hacking, causing considerable difficulty. So we have these occurrences weekly.

I think that the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, said that she had lost track of all the Bills and Acts of Parliament that there have been. I have written them down. We have had Acts trying to address the problems of terrorism in 2000, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2011 and 2015. We are now heading for one in 2018. The noble Lord, Lord Anderson, knows much more about some of those than I do. We know there is a need for effective action to counter terrorism. We cannot allow the protection of the public to fail for lack of effective legal power, but at the same time a challenge for this House is to ensure that when this legislation comes out we have the balance right on the proper protection of individual rights and freedom of speech. This House is uniquely placed to achieve that.

I will add two further points. One interesting suggestion has been promoted by Policy Exchange to meet the challenge of those who are betraying our country and are going out to fight and kill our forces. Australia and New Zealand have already taken action against people who are aiding the enemy by adapting the ancient law of treason to give a penalty of life imprisonment for people in that situation. I imagine that during the course of our discussions this may come up. I do not expect that I am the only person to whom Policy Exchange made this suggestion.

Although I do not agree that there should be amendments on this in the Bill, I agree about Europol and the European arrest warrant. It would be a travesty if in the negotiations between us and European Union we do not come out with a satisfactory continuing arrangement for the European arrest warrant. The figures are absolutely enormous. I think that I saw 12,000 arrests. We receive eight times as many requests to find criminals who have committed offences of one sort or another in the European Union as we make. It is almost compulsory to say something about Brexit, so I will say that whatever comes out of the Brexit negotiations must include some continuing arrangement for the European arrest warrant in the interests of all the countries around that table who have benefited from the present arrangement.

This is an important Bill, there are some very important discussions, and I hope that we can now go consensually forward.