Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill

Lord Butler of Brockwell Excerpts

Tuesday 13th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Butler of Brockwell (CB)]

My Lords, I would have liked to have started my remarks by congratulating the noble Lords, Lord Evans and Lord Green, on their maiden speeches but I cannot honestly do so because other House of Lords business prevented me from hearing them. However, I have heard enough favourable references to make me look forward warmly to reading them in the Official Report tomorrow.

Last summer I was critical of the Government’s treatment of Parliament in respect of the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act—DRIPA—which, in my view, took too long to prepare and offered unnecessarily limited time for this House to debate. In the past, I have also been critical of the quantity of legislation, particularly Home Office legislation. Even though this Bill is being fast-tracked, I am less critical of it in respect of those aspects. Like the majority of others who have spoken, I believe that the Bill contains necessary and useful provisions and that the Government are giving Parliament greater opportunity to consider it. Even so, there is evidence that parts of the Bill have not been fully thought through before presentation, and there is a regrettable and unhelpful element of political window-dressing in some parts of it. I shall return to those aspects. One feature of the debates in the other place was the large number of issues which the Government themselves identified as requiring further consideration in this House.

Nevertheless, I believe that further legislation is necessary, both to deal with the growing threat of domestic terrorism and with the particular circumstances created by the involvement of UK citizens in jihadism in Syria and Iraq. That threat has been growing and changing, and it is right that UK law should be developed and changed to deal with those new circumstances.

As many others have said, this debate takes place under the shadow of the terrible attacks in Paris, which remind us vividly of the imminent danger posed by perverted religious fanaticism. Moreover, those attacks appear to have been carried out by well armed but also well drilled and disciplined terrorists—exactly the sort of people who developed their training and discipline as jihadists in Syria and Iraq.

My knowledge of this subject has been mainly derived from my experience as one of your Lordships’ two representatives on the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament. Your Lordships will know that this committee recently published a detailed report on the mercifully more limited but similarly horrific attack on a soldier in Woolwich, Fusilier Lee Rigby. The House has not yet had an opportunity to debate that report but I have been asking myself what lessons can be drawn from it which bear on our consideration of this Bill. Much of the attention on the publication of the report focused on the performance of the intelligence agencies and the improvements needed in them—none of which in the committee’s view, I remind the House, could have prevented the attack on Lee Rigby—and on the one clue to the intentions of one of the attackers present in an internet message not available to the intelligence agencies.

There are other lessons to be learnt from the report which support the measures in the Bill before us now. One is that, although both attackers of Lee Rigby were identified by the intelligence agencies well in advance of the attack—in fact, one of them had gone abroad in an effort to make contact with a jihadist organisation—neither of them was under close scrutiny at the time of the attack and neither of them had been referred to any part of the Prevent programme. A second one is that both those potential attackers were highly security-conscious, so, although they had been subject to numerous investigations, their plot to murder a soldier was not uncovered or available to the agencies. The third is that both the attackers had other problems symbolic of alienation from our society, such as drug dealing and other criminal activity. All those three characteristics apply, mutatis mutandis, to the Paris terrorists.

What conclusions can be drawn from that case which are relevant to the present Bill? I suggest that the main one—and it is supportive of the provisions in the Bill—is that, as so often in terrorism cases, prevention is much better than cure and prevention cannot begin too early. So it is necessary to have powers to prevent people going abroad to take part in jihadism. If they do go abroad, it is necessary to have powers to monitor them on their return and to take action.

However, action directed at individuals is not enough. It may come too late. We also need action directed towards the communities from which jihadists may come. We need to ensure that locally there is a counter-narrative to jihadism, that local authorities, universities and schools have both the duty and the means to combat extremism while not infringing freedom of speech. Only finally do we need to ensure that, if people reach the point of being radicalised, the law enforcement agencies have the power to prevent them from breaking the law. In the face of the growing threat, we cannot afford to be lethargic about this. So it is welcome that the Government make the Prevent and Channel programmes into statutory obligations on those in a position to influence individuals who may be vulnerable to the propaganda of extremists.

Nevertheless there are parts of the Bill which smack of gesture politics and, as many other speakers have pointed out, which need clarification and improvement. The Government admitted in the House of Commons that judicial review of passport confiscation and supervised returns to this country needed further consideration in this House. So does parliamentary oversight of communications guidance to local and other authorities. As other speakers have pointed out, notably the noble Lord, Lord Judd, because there is such a narrow margin between free speech and censorship, there certainly should be parliamentary oversight of the guidance that is applied in these areas. However, if I may reassure the noble Lord, Lord Judd, my experience of universities suggests that those in higher education will not easily allow their academic freedom to be infringed.

There is also the vexed question of the Bill’s use of the term “temporary exclusion orders” when they are nothing of the kind. The term appears to have been adopted only to save the Prime Minister’s face when he unwisely said that,

“what we need is a targeted, discretionary power to allow us to exclude British nationals from the UK”.—[Official Report, Commons, 1/9/14; col. 26.]

Such a measure would be impracticable and contrary to international law.

I also have serious reservations about the proposed Privacy and Civil Liberties Board, which smacks of being a knee-jerk reaction to the revelations of Ed Snowden. Its purpose is nominally to support the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, but it is all too likely to be a fifth wheel on his coach—a coach which, as steered by the present reviewer and his predecessor, appears to have been running satisfactorily without that support. It may well be unwise to rush through the establishment of a body of this sort in the few weeks before a general election without more consideration. I hope that the Government will at least wait for the imminent report of the ISC on privacy and security. I was very reassured by the suggestion—I think from the noble Lord, Lord Carlile—that the Government have indicated that they will not rush this body through in order to institute it before the general election. If the Minister could confirm that tonight I would be greatly reassured.

I should like to make one other point arising from last week’s speech by the director-general of the Security Service and the Prime Minister’s statement that if he is returned to office he will want to go ahead with the Communications Data Bill. In doing that, I am greatly reinforced by what was said by the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, and the noble Baroness, Lady Shields. In all the hubbub about this matter, sight seems to have been lost of the fact that what these proposals involve is simply the retention of records of communications—not even retention by the Government, but retention by the providers. What that would allow is properly authorised access by the law enforcement agencies only to the communications of those whom they have reasonable grounds of suspecting as meaning to do us harm. When that is properly understood, it seems to me much less objectionable than some have represented.

That is a debate for another day. Meanwhile, as so many speakers have said, there is a considerable amount of work for your Lordships’ House to do on this Bill. Subject to those points, I support the Bill.