Counter-Terrorism and Sentencing Bill

Debate between Lord Strasburger and Lord Paddick

Committee stage & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 9th February 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Strasburger (LD) [V]]

My Lords, as we have heard, Clause 40 will allow the Secretary of State to extend the overnight curfew on a person subject to a TPIM to the maximum: every hour of every day. If the clause passes into law, it will mean that a person who has not been convicted of any offence can be condemned to full-time house arrest indefinitely, possibly until their death.

It so happens that we are all experiencing a very mild form of this regime right now during the Covid pandemic lockdown. I say a mild form because we are allowed to go to work. We can get out for exercise, to buy food, to seek medical advice or for a host of other exceptions. We know that this confinement, with all its exceptions, will last for only a few weeks, or at most months. Even so, cabin fever is rife and the increase in mental illness in the community is very real and alarming.

Imagine, if you will, how it would be if this serious constraint on our way of life and infringement of our liberties was permanent and without any of the opportunities to get out of the house that we have under lockdown. It would be unbearable. In some ways, it would be worse than a long prison sentence. In a maximum security prison, you still get some exercise outside your cell every day. But this is what the Government intend to be able to do to people who may well be innocent, whose incarceration has occurred without the Government even having to prove their guilt beyond reasonable doubt or on the balance of probabilities.

Under Clause 37, a Minister would merely need to suspect that they may be a terrorist—a truly flimsy threshold of proof, which is so insignificant as to be pointless and non-existent. Nevertheless, on this flimsy basis, Clause 40 allows a Minister to condemn a quite possibly innocent person to indefinite full-time detention in their home. Can the Minister please give a meaningful explanation or operational case for this change? In doing so, if he is going to deploy the flexibility argument again, could he explain who needs the flexibility, to do what and why? It is seriously unconvincing to me.

This change to the TPIM regime is cruel, inhumane and unfair. It must be seriously damaging to the subject’s mental health and that of those around him or her. This House must expunge this clause from the Bill.

[Lord Paddick (LD) [V]]

My Lords, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, we believe that the existing TPIMs are sufficient and are at the limits of what a country that has a reputation for upholding human rights should tolerate. The extension proposed in Clause 40 would extend the requirement to remain at or within a specified residence from “overnight” to what could amount to total house arrest. As the noble Lord, Lord Anderson of Ipswich, said, that is a requirement to remain at or within the specified residence between any hours. “As are specified” is yet another step too far, as my noble friend Lord Strasburger said.

On Amendment 31, I commend the noble Lords, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath and Lord Bach, for their relentless attempts to get police and crime commissioners more involved in operational policing decisions, including operations that may have national security implications. I accept that stop and search may be considered controversial, but it does not involve issues of national security of this nature, and I am not convinced that their amendment is necessary or desirable in this case.