Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Bill

Baroness Manningham-Buller Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 12th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

My Lords, with some trepidation, I find myself leading the next group as well; I hope not to try the patience of the Committee. The Committee discussed similar suites of amendments in earlier groups. Amendment 40 is designed to seek to defray some of the costs of implementing measures made necessary by the effect of the Bill. As the Committee will have noted, it requires the Secretary of State to set up a tax relief scheme for qualifying investments. Those investments are set out at subsection (2), including

“surveillance … equipment … physical barriers and access control systems … staff training on counter-terrorism measures”,

and

“cyber-security infrastructure for venue security”.

We know that the costs of the measures in the Bill are estimated in the impact assessment at somewhere between £4.8 billion and £500 million, with the best estimate being £1.7 billion. If a measure similar to this were brought in, it would make cost-neutral to businesses the implementation of the measures in the Bill. Of course, there would be a cost to the Government, but this is, after all, a government policy.

My Amendment 45 seeks to do the same sort of thing but without the creation of a tax incentive. It would require the Secretary of State to provide grants or funding schemes for voluntary and community organisations. This amendment goes to my earlier group of amendments, seeking to mitigate the impact on voluntary and community organisations. This is quite similar to the debate about general funding that the noble Baronesses, Lady Hamwee and Lady Suttie, spoke to on the last day of Committee. I will not expound at length on that now, but I would be grateful if the Minister could outline what consideration was given to providing financial support to voluntary and community organisations, whether the Home Office considered the Bill’s impact on volunteering and people wanting voluntarily to run village halls and community centres, the Home Office’s estimate of any impact on recruitment—or whether the issue was not considered at all. If the Minister does not have the answer to hand in his bundle, I would be very grateful if he wrote to me. I would also like the Minister to outline what discussions have been had, if any, with the Treasury on creating a tax scheme of the type I advocate in Amendment 40. I beg to move.

[Baroness Manningham-Buller (CB)]

My Lords, I apologise in advance. The Minister will tick me off for this being a Second Reading intervention, and I should have been here on Monday to say it, but I would like briefly to give a small plug for an organisation that has not been mentioned at all at this stage: the National Protective Security Authority. This is an arm of MI5 which gives free advice on personnel security, physical security and other forms of security. It is informed by a knowledge of terrorist and state threats. It is based not only on the understanding of those threats but on commissioned research from universities. It will give advice for free—paid for by the taxpayer—to all sizes and shapes of organisation. When we are talking about the costs of this, and in the earlier stages about the so-called cowboys giving advice, I recommend that whoever is affected by this legislation looks at this website and seeks this free advice as their first step. I am sorry for the commercial plug and apologise for intervening at this stage.

[The Lord Bishop of Manchester]

My Lords, I support the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Murray of Blidworth, in this group. As the Bishop of Manchester, I have got something like 400 churches and church halls in my diocese, but these amendments go rather wider than that. For places of worship, there are already some grant schemes for protecting against terrorism, given the particular threat that places of worship, especially Muslim and Jewish places of worship, have traditionally faced.

Back in my days as a vicar—25 years or more ago now—I seem to recall that, when I was trying to do good things to improve disabled access in my church, it was possible to do the work and then reclaim the VAT, which would not have been possible on other works. The principle that the Government fund by way of tax relief works that are important to the well-being of the community, to enable people to participate safely in events and activities, is well established in law. If small venues, particularly village halls, have to do physical work to premises, I urge that we find ways to defray not all but part of the cost, recognising that that shows this is something that is strongly supported by the state.

King’s Speech

Baroness Manningham-Buller Excerpts

Wednesday 24th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Manningham-Buller (CB)]

My Lords, I am delighted to be the first Back-Bencher to speak on this debate. I join in the chorus of approval and congratulations to the Minister. It is not just me: this morning, I went into Timpson to get a new battery for my watch in order to rehearse my speech so as to avoid the Chief Whip—he is not in his place—getting irritated with me for going over time. There, I spoke to my friend, who knows me by a different name and does not know that I am a Member of this House. He was very sad that the Minister will no longer be leading that business but thought that the greater interests of the country rested in this appointment. So I bring his congratulations as well.

I am going to talk a bit about national security. I was undecided whether to speak today or in tomorrow’s debate on defence, security and foreign affairs. I do not know how vulnerable we are—that is a good thing, because then, presumably, our enemies do not—but I am clear that the threats to our security are not diminishing; they are increasing. We need to face that reality and its implications. Despite the pressure on public expenditure, there will be some unwelcome decisions to be made. Like other noble Lords, I have confidence that the review by the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, Sir Richard Barrons and Fiona Hill, who probably knows more about Putin than most people, will come up with some good recommendations. There is urgency attached, because we need to defend ourselves robustly against these threats.

What constitutes national security is undefined and evolves. We now worry, as the Government must do, about food security, energy security, health security and water security, but in MI5, in which I was privileged to be for 33 years, the law states its responsibilities. They include—I should know this by heart, but I just need to remind myself—

“the protection of national security and, in particular, its protection against threats from espionage, terrorism and sabotage, from the activities of agents of foreign powers and from actions intended to overthrow or undermine parliamentary democracy”.

To do this work, there have to be secrets. That will not come as a surprise to your Lordships’ House, but I do have some current concerns, which I wish to flag. There is some pressure from various quarters for greater openness and transparency. There is the view that the public interest, however it is defined, trumps all. We now have—and I completely understand why—the legislation resulting from Hillsborough, with a duty of candour to prevent, if we can, repetitions of the Post Office scandal, the Hillsborough scandal and others. However, unless we maintain secrets in intelligence work, we will soon have no intelligence.

Your Lordships will remember legislation from a few years back to consider covert human intelligence sources. These are people who are not members of the organisation but who provide, often at risk to their lives, intelligence that is life-saving and important. Their identities must be protected. I welcome the legislation on the security of public places. I caution the new Minister against saying, “We must never let this happen again”. There are lots of people determined to reduce those threats and to work against them, but there is never such a thing as 100% security.

If these secrets are to be kept, it is also important that the UK intelligence community is fully accountable for its actions, the things that it gets wrong and the things that it gets right, and nobody, I hope, would argue otherwise.

I end by picking out the comment of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Stewart of Dirleton—with which I strongly agree—that, as far as possible, the approach to national security should be cross-party and not party political. It is right that this House will pick over legislation, try to improve it and amend it. But in my experience in MI5, it was really important that—with the approval of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, who is in his place, and the noble Lord, Lord Reid of Cardowan, who is not, who were among the Home Secretaries I worked for—I always briefed their opposition equivalents. We should continue to do our job properly but, where possible, we should do it in a cross-party, apolitical way.