Terrorism Bill

As we know from personal experience, work expands to fill the time available, which must apply to the police. Allowing the police to hold a suspect for up to three months sends them the thoroughly undesirable message that they can be slow in their work. As we said to the Home Secretary on Second Reading, I am mindful of the fact that problems may arise in a number of areas. Breaking encryption codes has been adduced as an example of something that may take longer than 14 days to achieve, but I am not sure about that point, because there is a separate offence of failing to provide an encryption key. Indeed, the Bill will make that offence punishable by five years’ imprisonment in a terrorist case, which we support, and it will certainly enable a holding charge to be brought if somebody does not provide the encryption key to their computer. I want to make it clear to the Home Secretary that I am mindful of the fact that further information sometimes needs to be obtained from abroad, which can take time. One of the problems is how suddenly we have moved from 14 days in which to do such work to 90 days, which is not a slight increase.