Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Bill (First sitting)

(Limited Text - Ministerial Extracts only)

Committee stage
Tuesday 29th October 2024 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

We are now sitting in public and the proceedings are being broadcast. Before we begin, I have some rules to announce. Hansard colleagues will be grateful if Members could email speaking notes to [e-mail]. Please switch electronic devices to silent. Tea and coffee are not allowed during sittings.

[The Minister for Security (Dan Jarvis)]

I beg to move,

That—

1. the Committee shall (in addition to its first meeting at 9.25 am on Tuesday 29 October) meet—

(a) at 2.00 pm on Tuesday 29 October;

(b) at 11.30 am and 2.00 pm on Thursday 31 October;

(c) at 9.25 am and 2.00 pm on Tuesday 5 November;

(d) at 9.25 am and 2.00 pm on Tuesday 12 November;

(e) at 11.30 am and 2.00 pm on Thursday 14 November;

(f) at 9.25 am and 2.00 pm on Tuesday 19 November;

2. the Committee shall hear oral evidence in accordance with the following Table:

[The Chair]

Copies of written evidence that the Committee receives will be made available in the Committee Room.

Resolved,

That, at this and any subsequent meeting at which oral evidence is to be heard, the Committee shall sit in private until the witnesses are admitted.—(Dan Jarvis.)

The Committee deliberated in private.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dan Jarvis]

Q I extend a warm welcome to both witnesses, and I offer you the Committee’s thanks for your evidence this morning. I also take the opportunity to reiterate the tributes that I paid to you both on Second Reading. Your work has been incredibly impressive and inspiring and I know that the whole Committee and the wider House are hugely grateful for it. May I begin at the beginning and ask you both to say why you think we need this legislation and what its impact will be?

Figen Murray: I have taken the liberty of writing something down that I would like to read out, please, if that is okay. I hope that will address some of that.

I begin by thanking absolutely every person who has had any involvement in bringing Martyn’s law to this point. It has been a long five and a half years since the campaign started, and the kindness and support people have extended to us have been quite incredible.

As I sat in Parliament on 14 October for Second Reading, I realised that the relatively long journey that still lies ahead—given all the different steps the legislation must still undergo—will not be an easy one. On Second Reading, my name was mentioned many times and many lovely words were said, but I need people to understand that I would not have progressed much without my co-campaigners, the campaign team, and the incredible support of my husband and my remaining children.

Seven and a half years ago, our life as a family was destroyed forever. I want you to note the word “forever”, as there is no coming back from this. As a family, we are damaged goods. The day Martyn died, something died inside all of us. Do not get me wrong: as a family, we are very close. Individually, however, we all carry our separate emotional scars that are now an integral part of each of us. That will be the case for every family anywhere in the world who has been hit hard by terrorism. Our numbers are growing, sadly. Outwardly, I function at a high level day in, day out, but make no mistake that my heart is in shreds—yet it is my broken heart that drives me to try to stop others from ever having to feel this way.

Coming back to Second Reading, I was buoyed that every party said that they supported the Bill. If security cannot unite us, what can? I welcome the all-party support. On Second Reading, I also heard some concerns about getting the balance right and keeping the Bill proportionate. I agree with that. Right from the start, we said that one size does not fit all, and that the Bill needs to be proportionate. It has never been intended to be burdensome.

My worry is that the increase in the capacity threshold from 100 in the draft Bill to 200 now risks getting the balance wrong. It excludes too many venues. The cost to businesses for Martyn’s law is a drop in the ocean compared with the €43 billion that the Rand Corporation estimated that terrorism cost the UK between 2004 and 2016, or even the £100,000 lost by Mr Fred Foster, a market trader at Borough market, during the attack in 2017.

However, we need to be clear that the risk from terrorism is real. Our terrorism threat level stands at “substantial”, meaning that an attack is likely. Although there have not been any successful terror attacks, it is easy to let complacency creep in. We must not forget that attack methodologies have now changed. People get radicalised and go out an use vehicles, knives, and home-made IEDs—improvised explosive devices—to kill others.

There are currently about 800 active investigations and about 2,500 subjects of interest who are being watched by the authorities as they are linked to terrorism investigations—the aforementioned 800—but there are a further 30,000 individuals who have expressed extreme views that could lead to them committing acts of terrorism. Those figures have not changed over recent years. The geopolitical situation, sadly, also means that extremists exploit the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza to recruit more people to follow their ideology. There is no sign of those figures reducing in the near future.

The director general of MI5, Ken McCallum, has also recently spoken about 43 near misses since 2017. Those are 43 planned attacks that were stopped just in time. Everyone in this room surely must appreciate that sooner or later an attack will not be stopped in time and people will yet again die or be injured or traumatised. There is no room for complacency. The threat is out there and it is real. Terrorists do not care who they kill. They aim to kill, shock and gain notoriety.

We have had attacks such as a planned knife attack on an LGBT community in Cumbria, a knife attack against an MP inside a church hall in Essex, a bomb outside Liverpool women’s hospital, another bomb at a hospital in Leeds, a knife attack in a park in Reading, a knife attack at a conference in London, a knife attack at a high street in London, a firebomb attack at an immigration centre in Dover, a letter bomb delivered to a Scottish university, a knife attack at a railway station in Manchester, and a vehicle attack at a mosque in London. If anyone thinks that where they live is too small or too rural to be targeted, they are wrong. Our experience in this country and around the world shows us that terrorists can strike anywhere.

A lot of venues are already busy preparing and implementing as much as they can. Manchester has trained over 2,500 people in free-of-charge face-to-face ACT training, and businesses and venues across Manchester are implementing the legislation as best as they can. Venues in Manchester are doing that voluntarily because the city was badly hit. People in Manchester understand the risk as they were directly affected, but we need this legislation on the statute books; without it, people will simply not take security seriously.

Security is often seen as low priority as people do not believe their venue is at risk from terrorism. A recent tabletop exercise in Manchester for the standard-tier venues resulted in most venues saying that the cost of implementing measures is either negligible or very low cost or effort, and that it enhanced customer experience as people felt safer.

At Second Reading, a few people worried about liability and the responsibility given to volunteers. Anybody who already has any responsibility for organising or managing community spaces and events already has liabilities under civil law. Martyn’s law will not create additional liabilities—they exist already. What Martyn’s law is more likely to do is to help communities know that they are discharging those responsibilities properly. Volunteers in various venues across the country already voluntarily take on responsibility for fire safety or health and safety, and this would be simply a small add-on. Martyn’s law is asking people at the standard tier to understand how to lock down, how to evacuate, how to invacuate or how to communicate with others. It is as simple as that on the standard tier.

Another concern was around churches and schools. Our children have the right to be protected from harm. Most schools already had lockdown procedures in place, anyway, long before Martyn’s law became a topic. Places of worship are places where people of all faiths should be able to worship freely and without fear. They need to be protected. We have seen attacks on places of worship in countries such as Sri Lanka, New Zealand—in Christchurch—and France. Since the Gaza conflict a lot of synagogues are currently on high alert as the threat is understood.

To sum up, Martyn’s law will save lives. Terrorism is here to stay. The public have a right to be kept as safe as possible when they are out and about enjoying the freedom our country offers. Martyn, Saffie, Nell, Sorrell, Eilidh, Megan, Olivia, Georgina, Courtney, Philip, Kelly, Elaine, Alison, Lisa, Michelle, Wendy, Jane, John, Angelika and Marcin, Chloe and Liam were all out enjoying a great evening that night and had every right to make it safely back home. I absolutely believe that had Martyn’s law been firmly established, they would still be alive now. Please consider what is the right thing to do. I will finish by saying once again that it is time to get this done. Thank you for listening.

Brendan Cox: I would add a couple of things to that; Figen has set it out incredibly powerfully.

As I mentioned in my introduction, I am part of something called Survivors Against Terror, which is a network of about 300 survivors of terror attacks: people that have been bereaved like myself and Figen and people who have themselves been injured in attacks. What draws that network together is a desire to reduce the likelihood of future terror attacks and to reduce the harm that they do. We do that by campaigning for the rights of families to things such as mental health support and compensation, by educating the public on the role they can play in the fight against terrorism, and by campaigning for effective laws that make terror attacks less likely in the future. That is how Figen and I first started working together, right at the start of this campaign.

I got involved for two reasons. First, frankly, I was inspired by Figen and her determination to make something good come out of something that was absolutely horrific, and to make sure that no other family unnecessarily goes through what her and her family have, but also, fundamentally, because the methodology of terrorism has changed, as Figen mentioned. The age of very complex attacks, often directed by people from outside the country and involving the need to assemble a device or to work out how detonators work, gave our security services lots of opportunities to intervene and disrupt terrorism plots. We are now in an age in which people are just using knives or cars, and the way in which we respond to that terror threat has not caught up.

It is impossible for our security services to keep our country safe with this new distributed methodology. We therefore have to have much more of a partnership approach: how can we all play a little role in making each other safer? I think this comes from our experience, but as the network of survivors supporting Figen and her campaign we do not want anybody’s sympathy, we want to make people safer so that these things and the impact they have had on our lives do not happen to anyone else. There is nobody more driven in wanting to defeat terrorism than those who have been directly affected by it.

There are two ways in which terrorists can win. One is by killing and maiming people. The other is by disrupting our way of life—making us live in fear and changing our way of engaging with each other. That is why, right from the start, proportionality has been central to our thinking. We do not want this to change our way of life. We do not want terrorists to win, either by injuring people or by changing our way of life, and that is why right at the heart of this proposal, from the beginning, has been proportionality. We want everybody to be empowered to play a small role in making us all safer. We do not want airport-style security outside village halls, as some of the papers might suggest we want.

The final thing I would say is that nobody wants to have a law named after their child. What we do want to do is to make sure no-one unnecessarily goes through what Figen and her family has. We want to make sure that there is a legislative response to the clamour of action that you have had in every inquiry post-2017, whether into the Manchester attacks or into the London attacks, to say that this is a loophole that has to be closed and now is the moment to close it.

[The Chair]

Shadow Minister, do you have any questions?

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

We have until 10.20 am for this oral evidence session. Will the witness please introduce himself for the record?

Andy Burnham: I am Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester. As colleagues will know, I left Parliament in 2017, two weeks before the attack at the Manchester Arena, so I have been closely involved with all the developments ever since.

[Dan Jarvis]

Q Good morning, Andy. It is always very good to see you. As the Mayor—perhaps I should call you “Mr Mayor”—you are uniquely well placed not only to understand the impact of the Manchester Arena bombing but, as is often the case in Greater Manchester, to be a real trailblazer in looking at what the impact of Martyn’s law might be on business. Could you say something about what you think will be the impact of the Bill on businesses, based on your experiences in Greater Manchester?

Andy Burnham: Thank you very much, Minister. Before I get to the question, I will say a little more about my background, which has led me up to what I think. I was shadow Home Secretary at the time of the Paris attacks, and those at the Bataclan in particular. If that had happened here, this legislation would already be on the statute book. Obviously, as Figen said, we have lived through the terrible events of 22 May 2017, but in the seven and a half years since, the nature of the threat has changed. I do not think we could have imagined some of the incidents that we have seen since then, such as the terrible loss of a really loved colleague in Southend and the attack in Southport. We would not have expected that. I remember asking Theresa May at the time of the Paris attacks if we were prepared for an attack in an English city—even then we were thinking only of cities; we were not thinking outside of cities. I say that because all that has shaped my thinking over the years.

When Figen first came forward with the concept of this Bill, I took time to think it through with colleagues in our city region. We are part the Resilient Cities Network, which is a group of 100 cities around the world, and we are in the Strong Cities Network, so we are constantly sharing best practice with cities around the world, and it was our view that the lack of a clear set of standards for security in our venues was a real gap. We were conscious, though, that there may be an impact on venues, hence the measures that were brought forward had to be right but proportionate, and I think care has been taken over that.

As you have just heard, Manchester city council has done an exercise working with venues and surveying venues on some of the voluntary things that have already been done in our city region. As you heard a moment ago, the impact is negligible—it is low-cost—but venues also report that they think it has raised standards generally within the organisation and improved the visitor experience. The experience that people have when they visit—their sense of safety when they are in the city—matters a lot to us as a city region and we are working to raise it. We have gone ahead and, if anything, we want to keep going further and raising the bar.

I will finish by saying that my main message to the Committee this morning is that I ask all of you to please ensure that the Bill is not watered down any further—actually, I look to the Committee to strengthen it. Again, I believe that venues with a capacity of 100 to 200 should be covered by the Bill. I do not think it is right that there is no requirement for training within the standard tier; there should be a requirement for staff to take the free ACT training. The message from Greater Manchester is that we continue to support Figen and all the families who lost loved ones on that night. In one way, we support those measures for that emotional reason, and always will, but we also do so from a Resilient Cities perspective. We believe they will only strengthen people’s experience in our city. We think it is in the interest of parents whose kids come into our city to go to the many events that take place every weekend to understand that there is a basic level of security at all the venues across our city region.

[Tim Roca]

Q How have businesses reacted as Manchester has led the way on Martyn’s law? How onerous have they found it? What is the practical experience?

Andy Burnham: That is a fair question. Of course, we have had those conversations. I have been at events—with Figen, actually—with our night-time economy adviser, Sacha Lord, where we have said, “Look, we think we should do this.” Then there have been conversations like, “Well, it’s difficult. The hospitality sector has had challenging times,” but as we have talked it through I think people have come round to the idea that security and safety is one thing that no venue should compromise on, because in some ways that is the first thing to get right. If you get that right, you will get lots of other things right. It is about raising the standard of what the industry does.

There is evidence that the Manchester visitor economy —I know Manchester is not far from your constituency and you probably know it well—has improved over the years and in many ways mirrors the offer that people can find in London, but we have a night-time economy adviser because we want to keep raising the bar. We are not complacent at all. There just has not been an outcry or backlash. People have worked with it. This attack happened in our city: we lost 22 people—young people, mainly, but people of other ages as well—on that night. It is incumbent on us to challenge ourselves about what we do as a city to respond to that, and to recognise that life is changing and the outlying towns and villages of Greater Manchester could see an incident of that kind.

There is a broader point here: speaking as police and crime commissioner for Greater Manchester, I do not believe yet that the country has all of its procedures in place to face what we are experiencing. I say that with reference to fire and rescue services. Currently, it is still not clear what the role of fire and rescue services is in relation to what is called a marauding terrorist attack. How can that be the case? That clearly needs to be addressed. We have done local things, but this legislation should be only the start, in my view, of really ensuring that there are arrangements in place that provide clarity to blue-light services and venues, as well as others, on the basics of responding to an incident. I think there is still work in progress on that point.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

Q We have until 10.50 am. Can the witnesses please introduce themselves for the record?

Helen Ball: Good morning. My name is Helen Ball. I am the town clerk of Shrewsbury town council in Shropshire and I am also the chairman of the Society of Local Council Clerks nationally.

Keith Stevens: My name is Keith Stevens and I am the chair of the National Association of Local Councils, which looks after the 10,000 parish and town councils across the country.

[Dan Jarvis]

Q Good morning to you both and thank you for giving evidence to the Committee.

My question is for Councillor Stevens. I know that you have had a long-standing interest in the process. As part of the pre-legislative scrutiny in the previous Parliament, I know that a number of concerns were raised around proportionality and thresholds, and also around the lack of clarity with regard to the regulator. I would be grateful for your view on the changes that have been made to the Bill since. Also, how receptive do you think local councillors will be to those changes?

Keith Stevens: Having heard what has gone before, as a parish councillor I was quite pleased when the threshold was lifted to 200 because that is proportionate. I will give the simple example of my own parish council. The village hall where we hold all our meetings has a capacity of, I think, 190. I have to be honest: we rarely get to 190 people at a parish council meeting. Normally, it is 20 people, including the councillors, as a maximum. That is why raising the threshold to 200 was welcomed by a lot of councils, because it meant that the rules were not quite as strict. However, I do not think that means that parish and town councils will not look at the security of any venue that any event is taking place in. Security is important and we always look at it.

Sorry, what was the second part of the question?

[Dan Jarvis]

Q It was about the extent to which local councillors will be receptive to those changes.

Keith Stevens: I think they are receptive to the changes and I think that local councils and councillors are very supportive of Martyn’s law. They have all seen the things, and most parish councils have quite good relationships with the security services. In my own area, we have regular monthly meetings to talk about the situation; actually, the police often use parish councils almost as the pulse of what is going on in the village. When there were all the problems last year, the police were in contact asking us to let them know whether we had heard any rumours that got off the ground. So, yes—very supportive.

[Sonia Kumar]

Q Do you anticipate that certain types of community events or venues may struggle to meet the requirements due to the nature of their spaces, such as historic venues with limited security options?

Helen Ball: We have had conversations with a lot of parish councils and parish clerks over the last few months. A lot of village halls are quite distinct in where they are, so there is some concern as to how they would actually be able to enact evacuation and lockdown procedures, particularly when you have just got a large room and you may only have one entrance and one exit. There is that level of concern.

A lot of the problems that we have at the moment are more about the fear of the unknown; people have read the Bill and are looking at the worst-case scenario. We have tried to advocate—as a society and also as NALC, as part of our Martyn’s law working group—that it is a bit of a “Keep calm and carry on” situation, and that we can do this. A lot of it is a common-sense approach to security. The sentiment from our society is that the legislation should be welcomed and that regardless of whether there are bandings within certain buildings, we should develop a culture of terrorism awareness.

“What price is a life?” is the other comment that a lot of clerks have said of late. Why would somebody’s life be less important if they were in a building that has 199 people as opposed to 201? It is incumbent upon our sector to try to encourage a better culture.