Terrorism Bill

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for intervening on a point of very great importance. As drafted, the Bill simply takes the old rules and extends them, with one or two very minor adjustments, to three months. One of the grounds it gives for continuing detention beyond 14 days is the need to continue questioning a suspect. If one has not found out what one wants from a suspect in 14 days of questioning, I cannot think of a conceivable legitimate reason that, on its own, can be a ground for further detention. Of course I accept that one might want to question the suspect if new evidence has been obtained or if some new matter is to be put to him, but to say that he can be detained beyond 14 days merely for questioning strikes me as a very unpleasant concept—yet that is what would result from our passing the clause as it stands. That is why I tabled an amendment that would still allow detention—one of the safeguards that I shall discuss in a moment—but would make it clear that one of the grounds for going to a judge and saying, ““We want to keep him for more than 14 days””, cannot be, ““We just want to keep him so that we can ask him some more questions.”” There must be a reason for asking those questions—for example, because fresh material has come to light.