Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Bill

Debate between John Hayes and Jerome Mayhew

Report stage
Monday 9th December 2024 Commons Chamber

[Mike Tapp]

I thank the right hon. Member for his intervention. Any threat that this country faces is continuously reviewed by the Ministry of Defence, MI5, the police and the Government, and we adapt our approaches to suit.

That brings me to the fact that since 2017, MI5 and the police have disrupted 43 late-stage attacks, yet we have seen 15 domestic terror attacks in this country. These incidents underline the ongoing and difficult nature of the threats. I am sure the whole House will agree that we have the finest intelligence services in the world, and we owe it to them to enable their work as much as we possibly can from this place. This Bill is another step towards achieving that. The approach it proposes is both practical and proportionate for small and large venues. I commend the Government for engaging widely in the development of the Bill and for working with businesses, local authorities and security experts to ensure that it is both effective and proportionate. It is right that we in this House support the Bill, and in doing so, we send a clear message that we will not only remember those we have lost but act decisively to protect those we serve.

[Jerome Mayhew]

Mention has been made during the course of this debate of cross-party consensus and what a good thing that is. In some senses that is absolutely right. We should have absolute cross-party consensus on honouring the memory of Martyn Hett and all those who were killed and injured in the Manchester Arena attack in May 2017, but I raise a note of caution because sometimes when we stop being adversarial in this place, we create legislation that is not as good as it could be. That is particularly the case where we have a very emotive issue such as this, and where there is a huge amount of personal sympathy across all the parties in the House. There is a risk that extreme circumstances provoke a natural reaction of saying, “Something must be done. This has to be prevented from ever happening again,” and we end up with bad law.

There is a good example of this risk in the Bill’s progression from its development under the previous Administration, through the election and out the other side. The initial intention of clause 2 was that the standard duty would apply to premises with a capacity to welcome 100-plus people. In my view, this would have had a wholly disproportionate impact on the kind of community buildings that I represent as a church warden, as well as on the village halls that we have already discussed. Pretty much every village hall has the capacity to accommodate 100 people. Every church, bar the very smallest chapels, can expect to welcome 100 people at a wedding or funeral from time to time. There is a tiny, infinitesimally small risk of terrorism in these typically rural areas, yet the previous Administration’s Bill would have imposed very significant costs and time commitments on volunteers. I have already mentioned a couple of times that I am a church warden and, again, I emphasise the risk of unintended consequences when we are all so keen to get on that we do not challenge each other.

[Sir John Hayes]

To reassure my hon. Friend on that subject, he will understand that those of us who have served on the Intelligence and Security Committee are fearless in holding Ministers to account, as this Minister will no doubt find out, and similarly fearless in challenging the agencies, which do such a wonderful job for us. He is right that the agencies need to be questioned appropriately and scrutinised fully.

On my hon. Friend’s second point, about proportionality, it is, of course, right that our response to risk measures the real character of that risk and is proportionate to it.

[Jerome Mayhew]

I am grateful for my right hon. Friend’s intervention, and I am reassured by his comments.

In a previous life, I was a barrister specialising in health and safety risk and risk management, and I was later the managing director of the leisure company Go Ape—Members might not have heard of it—and was responsible for the risk management of over 1 million customers a year. We could have killed every single one of them, so I am deeply familiar with the appropriate mechanisms for risk management. One risk that has to be taken into account is that, if the response is too great or too onerous for the assessed risk, people might not think it is reasonable, leading to omission.

Effective risk management requires mitigations to be put in place that bear some relation to the severity of the anticipated adverse event multiplied by its likelihood. I am very concerned that the previous Administration’s initial proposal that these duties should apply to premises with a capacity of as few as 100 people would have broken that association between a reasonable response and the assessed risk.

I am therefore grateful and impressed that the Government have listened and changed clause 2(2)(c) to raise the standard duty threshold to a capacity of 200. To my mind, that seems a reasonable compromise to protect smaller facilities, which are, of course, most likely to rely entirely on volunteers, and are unlikely to have the financial capacity to undertake the kind of paid-for training suggested by the Liberal Democrat new clause 2 or to have enough volunteers who are prepared to accept this additional burden on their free time. I think this strikes the right balance. However, I am concerned that paragraph (a) in clause 32 introduces a power, through regulations, to reduce the figure back down to 100 without giving a reason. Why is that?

I therefore support new clauses 25 and 26, which would set minimum thresholds of 200 for the standard duty and 500 for the enhanced duty. A cross-party approach has taken the Bill this far, and it is important that that approach is maintained.