Again, these are matters of genuine debate and interest. The point I make to the Home Secretary is that this is entirely in her gift. Under the model we are proposing, her model is not being deleted from the Bill. It is still there to provide the ability to say to carriers, “If Mr X or Miss X turns up at Schiphol airport, we wish you to take action against them and exercise the powers in the Bill.” I could have turned the television on at any time in the past month and seen the names of individuals that we know have travelled abroad—individuals that are publicly travelling abroad and that relatives have said have travelled abroad. It is quite possible for the Home Secretary not to make these two possibilities mutually exclusive. The issue is simply—[Interruption.] If the Minister for Security and Immigration wants to back up his boss and intervene, I am happy to allow him to do so. The debate is about the practical difficulties of the Home Secretary’s proposals, which are to have people sign to say that they will come back under managed return, to have detention or to stop carriers at ports. Are they the sole way to deal with every case that is brought before the Home Secretary’s notice? We are trying to provide at least one alternative for consideration.
8.30 pm
Before I move on, may I say to the Home Secretary: well spotted on our deliberate error? We did put terrorism prevention and investigation measures at the top of one new clause. As she has noticed, we modelled the court procedure on the basis of her own legislation on TPIMs. Taken together, new clauses 9, 10 and 11 and new schedule 1 have the effect of creating a court process through which the Secretary of State would have to go in order to place an individual on a temporary exclusion order under the proposals in the Bill. As has been said in our previous discussions, there is currently no judicial process before a TEO can be awarded.
David Anderson QC, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, gave evidence on 26 November to the Joint Committee on Human Rights. According to media reports and the transcript, he was sceptical about the imposition of the proposed temporary exclusion orders against suspected jihadist fighters. He said:
“If the Home Secretary wants to impose a TPIM she has to go to a court first and if the court says she’s got it wrong, it will say so.”
There is a mechanism and judicial oversight for that. The principle is the same in relation to temporary exclusion orders. We must look carefully to see whether the power requires the intervention of the court at any stage or whether it is envisaged as something that the Home Secretary can impose. That is a real debate for this House to have. The Home Secretary has the power
to impose an exclusion order on an individual under the Bill if it becomes law. She would also have that power under our proposals in new clause 4. Would it be better for her to have that power and have it judicially overseen by a court procedure, so that we can ensure that we have independent scrutiny of what the Home Secretary does? That is not our suggestion, but the suggestion discussed by Mr Anderson as the terrorism overseer.
The language used in new clauses 9, 10 and 11 and new schedule 1 mirrors precisely—almost too precisely—that used in the Government’s own TPIM legislation. I hope that the Government can accept—if not today, perhaps during the passage of the Bill—that the procedure to go through to award a temporary exclusion order under our clause would be sound, fair and efficient in the same way that TPIMs can be on the same legislative basis.