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Counter-Terrorism Bill

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, and she is of course absolutely right, but I want to make another point. It has been said that it might be necessary to read material equivalent to one third of the contents of the US Library of Congress within the proposed legal limit of 42 days. If so, that would require 240,000 police officers working eight-hour shifts—a total equivalent to all the police officers in this country, plus 100,000 others on loan from a friendly neighbour. In fact, the tools available to the police have also increased in power so that sense can be made of large amounts of data. Clearly, search engines are available to others, as well as to Members of this House. Moreover, the Government do not seem to take the problem too seriously: they legislated in 2000 to make it an offence to withhold data encryption keys, but that offence did not come into force until 2007. So much for the sense of urgency. We have also heard that an inability to sift through data, whether encrypted or not, was not the cause even in those few cases that went close to the 28-day limit. In fact, the essential data issues were sorted out relatively quickly, as the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (David Davis) showed very effectively. Liberty has pointed out that in two of the three cases in which people were subsequently charged, the evidence relied on to bring those charges was obtained within not 27 days, or 26 days, but within four and 12 days, respectively. No other common-law country has seen the need to do such violence to its freedoms. The Government like to bog the debate down in comparisons with Roman-Dutch law, but I am leaving countries that use such law entirely aside. I am talking only about countries such as Canada, the US, Australia and New Zealand, which have legal traditions exactly parallel to our own. Canada retains a traditional 24-hour detention period without charge.