Prevention and Suppression of Terrorism

My hon. Friend makes an interesting and intriguing observation. I was not aware that that might be the case. Frankly, I am in the dark about precisely what the objections are. The Government seem to be not entirely of one mind. The Attorney-General has said in public, for example on a recent visit to the United States to see the use of intercept evidence there, that it could be a powerful tool in our common struggle against the contemporary terror threat. I hope that the Government will follow up their attempts to emulate the practices of France, the US and others, who find our reticence on this point very difficult to comprehend. Finally, we could use plea bargaining more actively to encourage so-called super-grasses—lower order suspects on the periphery of plots—to give evidence against more serious criminals. The Government have already passed plea-bargaining legislation to tackle organised crime. Why not use it also to thwart terror plots? Combined with essential efforts to build trust in our Muslim communities, that could help encourage individuals to testify and help us bring terrorist masterminds to court. It is not unreasonable then to conclude that the persistence of the current control order regime is proving increasingly difficult to sustain in the courts and increasingly flawed in practice. It removes, or appears to remove, the pressure to charge and prosecute the criminals whom we all want to see apprehended. It diverts energy and attention away from other important innovations that we should be examining to strengthen our criminal justice system, and it infringes the most fundamental principles of due process and human rights. We understood the exceptional circumstances facing the Government when these powers were rushed on to the statute book. We enthusiastically supported the then Home Secretary’s promises that the control orders would be comprehensively reviewed in a wider review of anti-terror legislation. We acknowledged that the 7 July bombings required a further delay in that review. Yet today we find ourselves, yet again, as we did 12 months ago, without any detailed answers to our reservations of principle and practice, without any concrete sign that control orders will be reviewed or revised in a sufficiently meaningful way.