Terrorism Bill

No, I hope that the hon. Gentleman will excuse me. Amendment No. 8 is a probing amendment, and is designed to discover the reason for the decision that applications for a warrant of extended detention should no longer be made only by the police but by the Crown prosecutor. The Home Secretary may have some perfectly sensible answers, but I wanted to know the reason for the extension—it is not clear—and what role the Crown Prosecution Service and similar services in other parts of the country will play in determining applications. Hitherto, applications have made by the police. Of course, I know that the Crown Prosecution Service plays a greater part in the charging process, but I hope that we can have some explanation. We tabled amendment No. 9 because the Bill is poorly drafted and the amendment deals with one example of that. The sentence to which it applies makes no sense and I assume that the word ““a”” is missing. However, it highlights the fact that the Government have plunged into legislation in some haste. Amendment No. 10 is important. It deals with the way in which the court should regulate the process whereby extended detention takes place. The Bill provides that the police or the prosecutor can ask for an extra seven days. I cannot understand why seven days have been chosen. If someone has been in custody for 32 days, I can think of no reason why the court should not be entitled to say, even in ordinary circumstances, ““You can have another 48 hours and no more.”” Under the Bill, the court can do that only if special circumstances warrant it. Let me give a first example of our attempts to improve the Bill. If the Government are to depart from the 14-day rule, the court must play a much more proactive role in determining whether days of detention are justified. Indeed, there is an argument that that should apply to the seven-day rule before the first extension. Simply returning to court on a weekly basis and asking for another seven days is not good enough. The amendment seeks to provide a greater opportunity for the court to exercise its discretion. Amendment No. 12 deals with a point that we discussed earlier—namely, that it is quite wrong that further detention should be allowed solely to obtain evidence by questioning. Of course I appreciate that questioning is an important part of ascertaining whether an offence has been committed, but the reality is that the vast majority of those arrested for alleged terrorist offences usually decline to comment. Alternatively, they might be wholly co-operative because they believe that they will be able to exonerate themselves by providing a complete explanation. I cannot believe that 14 days is not long enough for that process to take place. If detention were to be allowed beyond 14 days merely for questioning, the courts would soon start to find such conduct oppressive.