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Prevention and Suppression of Terrorism

As the Minister said, the threat level to our country remains at ““severe””, and the threat of terrorism is never far away. We are a high-profile country with high-profile events this year and next, so there cannot and should not be any room for complacency. We should congratulate and thank our security services and police for their co-ordinated work in keeping us all safe. They do a tremendous job, and we know of the plots that have been foiled in the recent period. It is our duty in the House to provide them with the tools and procedures that they need to do their job effectively. Sometimes, that means walking the difficult line of balancing individual freedom with collective safety, with the rights of the wider community sometimes outweighing the rights of the individual. Control orders have been the tool for that. As has been said, in an ideal world we would not wish to use control orders. It would be greatly preferable if our criminal justice system could deal with terrorists who wished us harm. However, as previous Home Secretaries and Ministers have said, control orders have become a necessary evil. Until an alternative comes forward that gives the same level of protection, we have to accept that. As the Minister said, this is the sixth annual review of control orders since the power was introduced in the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005. The order before us provides for the continuation of the power to make a control order against an individual when the Secretary of State has"““reasonable grounds for suspecting that the individual is or has been involved in terrorism-related activity””" and considers it necessary to impose obligations on that individual for the purpose of protecting members of the public from the risk of terrorism. That has to be the major priority for any Government. Lord Carlile, who was the independent reviewer of terrorism, said in a previous report that one person subject to a control order was"““a dangerous terrorist who would re-engage with terrorism the moment he could.””" That is the type of person we are dealing with. I add my congratulations to Lord Carlile on his nine years in the job. He did a tremendous job, and I know that it challenged his political views on control orders and other terrorism-related matters. The original intention behind control orders was to deal with foreign terrorists who could not be deported or prosecuted. As the Minister said, eight people are under control orders at the moment, and some of those orders have been made since the coalition Government came to power. As I understand it—he may be able to confirm this or otherwise—the current control orders are all on UK citizens as opposed to foreign nationals. Yesterday, the Home Secretary announced in the Protection of Freedoms Bill what we see as a weakening of anti-terror legislation. We have also seen the ridiculous situation of the order on 28-day detention being allowed to lapse without the draft emergency legislation being in place. That legislation has now been published, but as yet we do not know when we will discuss it. There may be a difficulty if it is introduced when the House is not sitting and there needs to be a recall of Parliament for us to scrutinise it. As the Minister said, the Home Secretary wants to repeal control orders, as she said in her statement to the House on 26 January following the belated counter-terrorism review. She said that too much of the 2005 Act was ““excessive and unnecessary””, but she and the Minister have admitted that for the foreseeable future there are likely to be a small number of people who pose a real threat to our security but cannot currently be prosecuted or deported. We need to know whether the replacement for control orders will be weaker and whether it will protect the country as it should. We would like to hear from the Minister what evidence came from the security services and the police about the new regime that he and the Home Secretary want to introduce. There is a suspicion on our side that it is a political fix to get the Deputy Prime Minister out of a mess, and that it has to do with the reality of being in government as opposed to the rhetoric of Opposition. I say that because the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister realised, on the advice of the security services and the police, that there are dangerous people out there, whom we must tackle. I hope that the new regime is evidence-based, and I will be interested in any evidence that the security forces and the police publish about their viewpoints. If the Minister is able to respond to the debate in the time available, will he react to the House of Lords Joint Committee report and its recommendations on the scrutiny of the new proposals?