Terrorism Bill

My Lords, I understand the proper concerns of the noble Baroness and the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, but I really feel in this instance that they are not well founded. The Special Branch officers who have been entrusted with this work have already been doing it with the Internet industry in a challenging area, and I dispute what the noble Lord says—that the service providers’ being content with this demonstrates why they cannot be entrusted. With respect, that is a perverse argument because of what in fact has happened. We can take pornography as an example. As noble Lords know, there are pornographic and other sites where one has to differentiate between the legitimate pornography—if that is not a contradiction in terms—and what is illegitimate and unlawful, and remove the latter from the net, particularly with paedophilic material. We have demonstrated that the delicate balance between what is lawful and permissible and what is not has had to be carefully policed in that area, so we know that the Special Branch officers who are entrusted with this work are trusted to make those judgments by the Internet industry, too. It is not something that is done injudiciously or in a cavalier manner; it is done carefully by those who are trained and who develop an appropriate level of expertise. I have never stinted for one minute in giving my total admiration to the judiciary, but a practitioner who deals with material on a day-to-day basis may have a little more experience than a judge who will deal with this from time to time. If we are asking someone to chase things around the Internet rapidly, it is unrealistic and unfair to expect the judicial overseer to be able to do it with the acuity that a honed practitioner does on a daily basis. There are other opportunities, but this is simply not a practical way forward. We understand everything that people have said about freedom of speech. It is absolutely important—that goes into the training and into the balance—but the protocols we have put forward meet the needs of the case. I invite noble Lords to agree with the Commons, and reject the amendments now advocated and which went to the other place before.