Terrorist Attacks

Debate between Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate and Earl Howe

Tuesday 5th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, yes, I agree with that. My right honourable friend the Prime Minister was clear in her statement of 4 June that “enough is enough”. We need our counterterrorism strategy, which is currently being worked up in the Home Office, to keep up with a number of fast-moving areas. One is most definitely to tackle terrorist ideology and to deny online safe spaces to terrorist communications, part of which will be to ensure that warped doctrine does not reach the internet. However, we also need to deny safe spaces in the real world so that malign and misleading published material is not promulgated.

[Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I welcome the Statement repeated by the Minister and the report. Does he agree that the report illustrates well the importance of surveillance and good intelligence in preventing—in many cases—large-scale conspiracies to commit terrorist acts? However, it is of course more difficult with lone-wolf attacks, which are probably inspired over long periods of time without the necessary ingredients of a large-scale conspiracy. It is extremely difficult to prevent those offences. Consequently, all we can hope to do—I hope the Minister agrees with me—is to minimise the damage done once one of those attacks is commenced. The answer to that is more armed response officers in the area. Is there any plan to increase the number of armed response officers on the streets of the United Kingdom?

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, I pay tribute to the noble Lord’s knowledge and experience in this area. He will know that policing requirements are assessed almost day by day, and a particular situation may well require more armed police officers to be stationed in particular locations. I cannot generalise about that, but I am sure that noble Lords will all be conscious that the Palace of Westminster has seen a much tighter degree of security from armed police in recent months, for which we should be grateful.

On the noble Lord’s general point, I agree. Surveillance is important but, as David Anderson himself acknowledges, it is impossible for the authorities to prevent every single terrorist attack. In his executive summary he says in terms that the recommendations, if accepted, would not remove the risk of a terrorist attack—to do so would be manifestly impossible in a free society. He also mentions that MI5 and CT policing have thwarted 20 Islamist terrorist plots in the past four years, resulting in 10 life sentences from the seven plots that have so far come to trial. So we can point to some signal successes achieved by MI5 and the police, but they cannot possibly be expected to pick up lone-wolf attackers.