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Terrorism Bill

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for tabling the amendment and for having had the courtesy to provide our office with notice of the remarks he was going to deploy in support of it. Having heard the noble Lord, I was slightly confused at the outset—and the noble Lord himself seemed highly confused—but he then went on to deploy his argument. I will try to run through the important points. Plainly, if the situation was as the noble Lord explained it, there would be an element of absurdity. The amendment makes a change to Clause 20, the interpretation section of the Bill. There are two clauses in which there is reference to the public in Part 1 of the Bill: Clauses 1 and 9. The difference in the nature of the offences is the root of the difference between the different applications of definition of ““public””. In Clause 1, it is necessary to make it clear that reference to the public includes meetings that are open to the public, or meetings that one has to pay an amount to enter or satisfy other conditions—in other words, a conditional public meeting. That is needed because Clause 1 addresses problems of extremism and radicalisation, and focuses on the way in which messages are disseminated and promulgated. The effect of committing the offence under Clause 1 can be limited to just those at a meeting as well as publishing a statement or publication freely available to the world. It is vital, therefore, for the courts to be certain that these offences are committed both where the statement is freely available and where messages are conveyed only in small meetings, which might not otherwise be considered to be covered by the term ““public””. This is specified in Clause 20(3)(b), to make it clear. References to the public in Clause 9(4)(b) are exempt from the definition of ““public”” in Clause 20(3)(b). The reason for this is that Clause 9(4)(b)(iv) is rather different, in that ““public”” here refers to creating a serious risk to the health and the safety of the public—the offence requires possession of a substance that represents a risk to the health and safety of the wider public. Such a threat could never be confined solely to those at a small gathering in the way that it could for the offence under Clause 1. A court would be clear that the possession of radioactive material or a radioactive device by those who had the intention of using that device or material in committing a terrorist act would represent a serious risk to the health or safety of the public in a general sense, not just those in a small meeting, even if the substance was intended to affect only those people there gathered. I entirely understand the intention of the noble Lord in putting forward—