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Terrorism Bill

A number of noble Lords have said that this is a matter of judgment. The noble Lord, Lord Condon, talked about it being a fine balance. The right reverend Prelate talked about making a judgment. When, as individual Members of your Lordships’ House, we make our judgment, we have to look at what we are weighing. On the one side, we have the professional view expressed by the police service which is involved in combating terrorism on a day-to-day basis. On the same side, we have the independent judgment of the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, who is charged with the duty of overseeing the working of terrorism legislation. He has access to all sorts of information that very few noble Lords have had access to. That is an important balance on one side of the argument. It is a question of what we are prepared to do in terms of substituting it. We have heard a variety of arguments today. Some of them have been extremely thin. I listened with some surprise to the views being expressed by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Fraser. This is not analogous to the South African pass laws. This is about holding people while investigations take place, prior to bring charges, for up to 90 days. It is not analogous. It is subject to judicial oversight, which is something the noble and learned Lord brushed aside. I thought noble and learned Lords had a precious belief in the value of judicial oversight. He brushed it aside and said that it did not matter. I believe that it does matter and that this is different. Then he talked, in trivialising words, about the police employing more 10 year-olds to decrypt data. The reality is that the data that is being seized is encrypted to an incredibly high level and it requires the best experts available. The noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, is right to say that there is an inadequate number of police officers with the necessary technical skills. The fact remains that as police officers are trained up and become useful, they are then poached by the private sector—Microsoft and other companies—with salaries three times that which the police service is able to offer. That needs to be addressed, and I am sure that it will be. The reality is that we are not just talking about police service resources that are being applied to data decryption; we are talking about the resources available to the state, and it is finding it difficult to handle this material. The noble Baroness, Lady Park, talked about the problem of sequencing. In my earlier intervention, I mentioned the bomb factory found in July and the length of time it took to get access to it, to search the property and seize the computers containing an enormous amount of encrypted data—some of it encrypted from Arabic—which then needed to be transcribed, understood, assessed and gone through. Investigation has to take place in foreign jurisdictions. The noble Lord, Lord Imbert, talked of a case that involved 26 separate jurisdictions. These are not simple matters. That is why the professional judgment of the police service was that 14 days was grotesquely inadequate and why it argued that its best professional view was that the period should be 90 days. These are fine balances and we must exercise our judgment, but fundamental to all of this is that we are talking about a type of terrorist whose objective is not political, not to persuade anyone, but is to inflict mass casualties. They have access to things that can inflict far greater casualties than we are used to in this context. It is the context of suicide bombers who are proud to give their lives as part of the exercise. That is why the police must intervene at an earlier stage in investigations than has hitherto been the case. My noble friend Lord Ahmed made much of the fact that there were 800 arrests and only 23 convictions. Of course, some of the cases are still before the courts or are yet to reach them. I put to noble Lords the extent to which some of the people who were arrested have had to be released because it was necessary to intervene at such an early stage. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Condon, and to my noble friend Lord Ahmed that if we are rightly concerned about the impact of our actions on the Muslim community—particularly on young Muslims, because we want to avoid a situation in which more young people are drawn into the net of those who would persuade them to be suicide bombers—we must rightly be concerned about whether people are held inappropriately. But the surest way of convincing those young people that something is wrong is when so many people have to be released because the correct charges cannot be brought and the evidence that could convict them in court cannot be obtained. I believe that is partly why the Government supported the professional judgment of the police service when it came forward and said that 90 days are required. This is a judgment, and we do not want to encourage martyrdom. That is why we must make clear that it is up to 90 days in exceptional circumstances in the context of a background of other measures that will reassure the Muslim community in particular, and young people from those communities, that they are part of our society and that we value them. Only if we do that can we take this forward. This is about a long-term process. It is not an easy process, but unless we take note of the serious professional judgment of the police service, we are in danger of creating a situation in which we will not be able to hold our heads up about what we have done to combat terrorism.