Terrorism Bill

I am grateful to the hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr. Carmichael) for tabling what he acknowledged were probing amendments. I hope to explain why the Government do not find it possible to support them, but I am grateful for the opportunity to discuss them. The purpose of the offence of acts preparatory, which was suggested during our earlier debates on terrorism legislation, is to enable the prosecution of people known to have instigated an act of terrorism or to have been planning or preparing to commit an act of terrorism. I am delighted that there has been a general welcome for that provision. The hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland reiterated that during his comments and it has been expressed on both sides of the House. We all realise that the need to protect the public means that the police and security services must intervene early when they become aware of a terrorist cell. It may not be possible to know the precise atrocity that was being planned—indeed, the terrorists themselves might not have made up their minds about a specific target; nevertheless, the offence requires clear evidence of intent to commit a terrorist act, which is of course a serious criminal matter, as the hon. Gentleman said. The hon. Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) rightly emphasised that the key feature of the ““acts preparatory”” offence is that it can be used when terrorists’ exact plans are unknown. He asks how this will work in practice. I am sure that he well understands that preparatory acts can be proven to have taken place only when the connection is made between the specific action and the terrorist act itself. Purchasing a car on its own is not an act preparatory to terrorism, but once it has been connected to the act of terror, it becomes a preparatory act. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman appreciates that. Obviously, the offence must be drawn widely to include all the possible acts that could be preparatory acts. Attempting to create and maintain a list of all those acts that could possibly be considered as being preparatory to a terrorist attack would be, frankly, impossible, as the hon. Gentleman made it plain before. If we had a list that included buying a suit, we would have a very long list indeed. Of course that would not be a practical or feasible challenge. The second and perhaps more important point is that it is likely that any list would be reactive. In other words, we would learn about preparatory acts based on the last terrorist atrocity, rather than being able to anticipate what might come in the future. It would be possible for mischievous terrorists to work their way around that provision if we were to include it in secondary legislation, as the amendment suggests. We need an open situation where any preparatory act that can be linked to terrorism is captured by the offence. The risk of terrorists devising new methods of preparing for terrorist acts is too great to allow such an approach. We cannot give the opportunity to terrorists to evade prosecution in that way. Again, Lord Carlile has described clause 5 as"““a proportional and proper response to achieve the criminalisation of the conduct described.””" I conclude by once again thanking hon. Members on both sides of the Committee for their warm and general support for this new provision on preparatory acts. We hope that it will help us to bear down more successfully in future on those who would carry out acts of terror against innocent people.