Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Bill

Debate between Baroness Fox of Buckley and Lord Frost

Committee stage
Monday 10th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

I thank the noble Lord for that clarification and I am relieved to hear it. I think it was the bit where somebody asked, “How would you answer the situation where 199 people were killed if the limit was 200?” All I am saying is there is often a conversation like this when we talk about safety, risk and responsibility.

I like this amendment because it introduces into the debate about the Bill the opportunity—some months down the line—to have a cost-benefit analysis of whether it has worked. I first came into this House at the height of the lockdown period. On a number of occasions—rather tentatively at the time, because I was new—I, along with others, called for a cost-benefit analysis. I kept asking, with lockdown and all those measures in the name of safety, whether we could just assess whether they were the only way that we should proceed. I was told that we had to be very careful because old people were going to die, and so on and so forth—you are familiar with the arguments.

The reason I mention that is that we can now look back and say that many of those old people were locked up in care homes and greatly suffered. We can say about young people—when some of us argued that we should conduct a cost-benefit analysis of closing schools—that we now have a crisis of worrying about pupils and the impact that lockdown had on them. There is a discussion that the Government are initiating about the cost and impact of lockdown on employment people’s habits as we speak.

It is sensible with a Bill such as this to introduce a review that will give us the opportunity to do a cost-benefit analysis. This is particularly important because a regulator is introduced. The noble Lord, Lord Davies, explained that we need to be able to see whether the regulator is the appropriate way of getting what we would like, which is more public protection, or whether, in fact, it undermines some of the important aspects of local regulatory interventions.

We debated a very interesting group just before the break, when the noble Baroness, Lady Suttie, raised the point about the number of regulatory regimes that each venue already apparently has to adhere to in terms of licensing, and so on. This amendment gives us an opportunity to see whether the central regulator is the appropriate way of ensuring that we keep people safe with respect to premises and terrorism.

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, I speak to Amendment 44 in my name, and I can probably be quite brief, as it covers similar ground to Amendments 33, 34 and 36, which have been spoken to by my noble friend Lord Davies. However, my amendment is complementary to the amendments already on the table. It does not replace them; it is consistent with them, but it looks at the problem slightly differently.

I think it is fair to say that those who have engaged with the SIA over the years have mixed views about its effectiveness even now, and that is when it has focused entirely on one fairly discrete industry. Now we are proposing a huge expansion of its role to cover all kinds of premises and organisations of all kinds of sizes, including voluntary and commercial organisations and so on; it is a huge expansion of the authority’s role. All these amendments really speak to the fact that there is some uncertainty about how that is going to be carried out in this very complicated and publicly sensitive area.

My Amendment 44 looks at this in a slightly different way and proposes an independent review panel. Of course, that could sit alongside the various advisory bodies that have already been spoken about, but, for two reasons, there is some value in having an independent panel when looking at these problems. First, it establishes a degree of distance. Its reports to Parliament will have a degree of independence of commentary, of not needing to ingratiate itself necessarily with the regulator and the industry. That is what is needed in this situation of a new area of work for the authority.

More important is the point that is in proposed new subsection (3) in my amendment, which is the specific risk of overreach—I have spoken about this on one or two occasions before as we have considered this Bill—and that, once you establish a bureaucracy, everybody has to pay attention to that bureaucracy; once something is in law, that has to be the priority for those who are operating it. There is a temptation for the legal authority to overreach and to lay down rules for its own convenience, rather than for the genuine good functioning of those that it is regulating; and to maybe not look sensitively at the different sizes and natures of organisations but simply to lay down one set of rules. History suggests that with these regulators the effect is that the regulatory burden goes up and is insensitive to the people being regulated. That is why there is particular value in looking at the issues of overreach and how bureaucracies work in practice and why there is particular value therefore in it being an independent body. So, to conclude, I hope the Government will be able to give serious consideration to this idea, along with others in this group.