Draft Terrorism Act 2000 (Alterations to the Search Powers Code for Northern Ireland) Order 2024

Alex Burghart Excerpts

Tuesday 19th November 2024 General Committees

[Alex Burghart (Brentwood and Ongar) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer.

Hon. Members will be disappointed to hear that I do not intend to detain them for long. We support this order. As my noble friend Lord Caine said in Grand Committee in the other place, this is essentially Conservative legacy legislation. We drafted it, we conducted the consultation earlier in the year, and we are pleased to see that the Government have continued with it.

I want to raise a couple of small points, the first of which is technical. The hon. Lady referred to how an intimate search may not be authorised or carried out under the new power. Will she give us a little more detail about why that decision was made? Secondly, looking to the future, we all hope to see this change implemented. What provision are the Government making to review the new code to ensure that it is working effectively and getting the results that we all want?

Thirdly, the hon. Lady referred to the fact that the Government have made money available in the Budget for additional security funding for Northern Ireland. There is, as she will know, quite a long-standing problem with police numbers in Northern Ireland. At the moment, I think the PSNI has 6,300, and the number agreed in New Decade, New Approach was 7,500. What is the Minister doing in conjunction with the Secretary of State and the Northern Ireland Executive to make sure that the PSNI can get up to the required figure, which obviously has implications for national security?

That said, I join the hon. Lady in thanking the PSNI for the work it does for the people of Northern Ireland, and indeed for all of us in the United Kingdom, and I congratulate it on helping to reduce the threat level from “severe” to “substantial”. I am pleased to say that my party will be supporting the order today.