Prevention and Suppression of Terrorism

I am grateful to the Minister for reintroducing this piece of legislation. The most focusing thing that he said was his reminder that the threat level is still at severe; he also reminded us of the successes of our intelligence and security agencies. May I add my congratulations to those agencies? We owe a huge debt of gratitude to the men and women who keep us safe in a hugely under-sung way on a day-to-day basis. I suggest to the Minister that, from time to time, it would be nice to hear officially, as much as we can, about those successes. They are terribly important. The Minister knows how deeply uneasy I am about the control order regime and I suspect that he shares some of that unease. A lot of his language was revealing. He talked about weaker control orders and the unsatisfactory nature of the control order regime. I understand that he has reservations, like everybody else. My personal views are based on the fact that detention without trial, which the control order regime replaced, was hugely unsatisfactory. He referred to it as perhaps a quasi-internment. I saw the effects of internment. I saw the effects of men and women who were released after months in detention without charge and the damaging influence that they had on the counter-terrorist campaign in Northern Ireland. One of my objections to control orders, among many others, is that they impose a sort of terrorist ASBO status on the individual. Those individuals cannot help but become iconic in the communities to which they return. Bearing in mind the Minister’s reservations, I think that Lord Carlile’s annual report makes many points that are deeply damaging to the system that we have at the moment. I must remind the Government that, after the collapse of their anti-terrorist measures as a result of their incompetence in dealing with their own Human Rights Act 1998, we gave them the chance to continue and to put in place a system that would work. Clearly, this system does not work and it has to be replaced by something competent. [Interruption.] I hear the Minister saying that it works, but there have been a series of shambles. First and foremost, there were the three absconders. One escaped from a hospital due to a lack of resources and surveillance. One absconded immediately after the quashing of one order, before the next order could be served. That caused Lord Carlile to say:"““In the future there should be provision for this eventuality—in the sense that there should be minimum delay””." The third person absconded after being served with orders. He entered a mosque and apparently disappeared, and yet the police did not pursue him. I am open to correction from the Minister on that point. It strikes me as particularly odd that we thought that those people posed a sufficient threat to the safety of our citizens to warrant putting them on this curious and deeply intrusive form of detention, and yet when they abscond, we get strange comments from the Home Office. For instance, the Home Secretary said:"““The individual is not believed to represent a direct threat to the public in the UK at this time.””" Why was that individual on a control order? Why bother? As my memory serves, the individual had proclaimed the fact that he intended to carry out jihad and to try to make himself into a suicide bomber elsewhere. When the Opposition suggested that the individual should be named and identified, the Home Secretary said—I repeat:"““The individual is not believed to represent a direct threat to the public in the UK at this time.””" What about the British public not in the UK: namely, our soldiers, sailors and airmen serving abroad? It is entirely possible that that individual could have directed his attacks against them. Why was it not possible to identify that man—and others in a similar position—and publish his photograph? I suggest to the Minister that that is shambolic.