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Terrorism Bill

I agree. I have worked closely with the police over the years. As the hon. Gentleman may know, I was chairman of a police authority and I have worked with the National Criminal Intelligence Service. I have a great deal of respect for the police but, equally, they have a distinctive approach to the matter. They rightly wish to secure successful prosecutions and to protect the public but they always want increased powers. It is the job of the House and, indeed, the Home Secretary to assess the balance between those proper requests for additional powers and their effect on the liberty of the subject. To return to the point made by the hon. Member for Battersea (Martin Linton) about the length of time needed for investigation, a puzzling argument has been made about the time needed to crack an encryption. I am not an expert on the subject, and do not pretend to be, but specialists tell me that it does not take 14 days but perhaps 14 years to solve an encryption without the key. People can make educated guesses to decipher an encrypted message, but their investigation will not be completed in a comfortable period of 90 days. Why, as I said earlier, has an offence that we put on the statute book with the passage of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 lain idle for five years? Why on earth have people not been prosecuted for refusing to give an encryption key? If that is not the problem, what is the argument about?