Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Bill

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 4th March 2025 Lords Chamber

This Bill is not only about sending a signal to all people who organise public events to carry out sensible measures, but about providing a degree of compulsion and expectation on those who do not do that already. Therefore, I hope that noble Lords will not press their amendments.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I slightly query the idea of the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, that a change of tone and consensus has broken out. We are at a stage where there is no point fighting until the last man standing. There are some fundamental philosophical disagreements about what we are doing in relation to this Bill, and I raise those because they relate to the amendments we have heard about.

I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Harris, that, for smaller venues with a capacity of, say, 50 or 100, we are establishing the notion that everybody should be sensible and take precautions. My argument is simply that we do not need new legislation at any level to encourage that, and that this could have been done through present legislation. For example, we have oodles of health and safety legislation. Councils are for ever issuing guidance on how events should be organised. This is a hammer to crack a nut, and it might have unintended consequences. That is what all of us have argued.

When I explain to people what I am doing in the House of Lords at the moment and what Bills I am following, and I explain this one, they are totally bemused that, in tackling terrorism, we are having a conversation about premises and regulators. They are more than aware that we need to tackle the problem and the threat of terrorism, and this just does not feel as though it is the most important way of dealing with that. The right reverend Prelate made a good point: it is not as though terrorists sit around and say, “That is a 500-seater”. As we know, whether it is a dance class in Southport or, in the case of Sir David Amess, an MP holding a surgery, it can be small places; or it can be the use of a vehicle as a weapon at a Christmas market. We have been through these different examples.

The question before us is whether the Bill will keep the public safe. My contention is that I am not convinced it will, but it will do a lot of damage to the public realm, and it could undermine civil society. Some of these amendments would at least help to remove the threat of legislative intervention from the smaller venues that are likely to be at the heart of community and civil society events. Of course there is a difference when there is a law. Even if you are a small venue, you might think “We do take precautions. We have 200 people. It is not as though we wander around oblivious to the protection of anyone who comes into our premises”. Once you have the threat of a regulator and a law, it is coercive and there are threats and things you need to do—I do not mean reports that have to be written—and you are answerable. As we have seen in every aspect of the evidence that has been given in consultation, people are put off; they say it is not worth running the venue or the event, and volunteers are standing down, as a number of later amendments will indicate.

We may have to make the best of what I consider to be an unnecessary and distracting law. I want to fight terrorism, but not this way; none the less, we should at least make the best of a bad job.

[Baroness Suttie (LD)]

My Lords, this has been a useful if very short debate, and many of the issues raised in Committee have been repeated.

Most of these amendments would greatly increase the number of premises and events exempt from the provisions of the Bill. In particular, I want to speak against Amendments 2, 3 and 5 from the Conservative Benches. As has been described, they would increase the threshold to 500, or 300 for standard premises, or, in the case of the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, from 800 to 1,000 for enhanced premises.

I will make two brief points, which are very much in line with what the noble Lord, Lord Harris, said. First, it is worth recalling that the Bill, to quote from the Long Title, is

“to reduce the vulnerability of the premises or event to, and the risk of physical harm to individuals arising from, acts of terrorism”.

It is not a Bill that will prevent terrorism per se; it is about protecting individuals. It is about having a plan in place for what to do in the horrific eventuality of an attack and having someone responsible for ensuring that lives can be saved, so that people can be evacuated or invacuated as quickly and as safely as possible. Having such a plan, as the noble Lord, Lord Harris, and others have said, is surely just common sense and good practice for any event or premises, no matter what its size.

Increasing the thresholds to such a degree as these amendments propose would, in our view, risk negating the very purpose and value of the Bill, as it would exempt so many additional premises or events. We cannot and should not necessarily make assumptions about the size of the venue or event that a terrorist or terrorist organisation would choose to attack. Being prepared, and having thought through an escape plan and what to do to save lives in the event of an attack, gives reassurances to the public and has to be good practice. I would even argue that it makes good business sense, if people, including potential customers, feel reassured.

Secondly, as the noble Lord, Lord Harris, said, the figure of 200 is already a compromise. The previous draft Bill produced by the former Conservative Government had a threshold of 100. My party and others, including the Home Affairs Select Committee, expressed concern that this would impact too many businesses and their premises, so the figure was raised to 200. As I said in Committee, I would have preferred 100, but I understand the reasons for the compromise.

For both these reasons, these Benches will not support any amendments this afternoon if they are pushed to a vote.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord De Mauley (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 13 and 25 in this group. Amendment 13 seeks to introduce a provision for exemptions to public protection procedures under the Bill. While I fully support the legislation’s intent to enhance security and preparedness in the face of the ongoing terrorist threat, I believe that a blanket one-size-fits-all approach is neither practical nor proportionate. This amendment introduces flexibility to ensure that obligations under the Bill are applied where they are truly necessary, without imposing undue burdens on venues where the risk is demonstrably low.

We must remember that security measures come at a cost, not only in financial terms but in administrative burden, operational complexity and resource allocation. Many smaller premises, community organisations and low-risk venues will struggle to comply with requirements that may be disproportionate to their actual risk profile. For example, a village hall hosting occasional gatherings, a small charity-run space or a low-footfall museum in a rural area does not face the same level of threat as a major city-centre venue yet, as the Bill stands, they may all be subject to the same requirements.

This amendment does not seek to weaken security; rather, it ensures that security measures are appropriately targeted. It would allow exemptions to be granted where a venue could clearly demonstrate that it does not meet a reasonable threshold of risk; that could be assessed based on factors such as size, location, historical risk data and the nature of the events that it hosts. The Government must consider whether it is justifiable to place the same regulatory demands on all premises, regardless of their individual circumstances.

The Bill must be robust, but it also must be fair. An exemption mechanism would ensure that security resources, both financial and operational, are directed where they will have the greatest impact rather than being spread thinly across venues that pose little to no realistic security concern. I urge the Government to consider the practical implications of this legislation and accept this amendment in the spirit of ensuring a proportionate, risk-based approach to public protection.

In Committee, the Minister helpfully said on 5 February that the responsible person would

“consider the appropriate procedures in the light of the cost and resources … Accordingly, no procedure is required to be put in place at unreasonable cost to the responsible person”.

His assurance is welcome, but the problem is that the Bill does not appear to allow the responsible person to consider appropriate procedures in the light of their cost. The Minister also said:

“What we are asking for in the Bill … is that he thinks … about the consequences and about whether there is a threat”.—[Official Report, 5/2/25; col. 794.]


Yet the Bill makes no allowance for the responsible person to think about the consequences and whether there is a threat—that is, assess the risk—as the Minister suggests. Instead it demands that, without consideration of the risks, the responsible person puts in place the costly rules that I am concerned about.

I am deeply concerned that, if we allow these rules to stop harmless, peaceful community events around our country like the ones that I referred to in Committee, as my noble friend Lord Murray so aptly said earlier, the terrorists will have won. The Minister’s encouragement to rely on the

“so far as is reasonably practicable”

wording is helpful—but the problem is that the term is subjective. Those enforcing the law are not the same people as those who make it, so phrases such as this are open to variations in interpretation.

Furthermore, one of the really important problems that the Bill creates is that it is, as Bills often are, very broad-brush in its drafting, especially in the public protection procedures and measures. It leaves the detailed requirements to be fleshed out in guidance and advice, so at this stage we have no way of knowing how difficult they are going to be to comply with.

On Amendment 25 and returning to the subject of thresholds, which we debated a moment or two ago, when the subject was raised in Committee there was much discussion of the level of the lower threshold—that at which premises became qualifying premises or an event becomes a qualifying event, as the case may be. This amendment approaches thresholds in another way, still seeking to address the concern that the selection of the level of the thresholds is based on very little science and, once the Bill is passed, they are set in stone effectively for ever—and they certainly cannot go up. The Bill would benefit from having an understandable framework under which the Secretary of State could vary thresholds upwards or downwards from time to time, which would also remove an element of doubt from the Bill as its stands, in that there is currently no clarity over how and when the Secretary of State may exercise his or her power to reduce thresholds.

The thing that is missing from the Government’s approach is a lack of any science to the question as to how the level of risk—for example, of a terrorist attack—changes from time to time. In Committee, the Minister mentioned the fact that the national threat level was then, as it is now, at substantial. As he knows, there are four other national threat levels—low, moderate, severe and critical. The setting of the national threat level is based on the assessment of risk by the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre. This amendment therefore seeks to allow the Secretary of State to vary the thresholds with the national threat level.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

First, it is really gratifying to hear from the Minister at the start that the Government are listening, have listened and have acted accordingly. I really do welcome the reining in of Henry VIII powers and the remarks that the Minister made. On listening, do feel free to carry on.

Some of the arguments that have already been made and which will be made in this group and others are about whether the Government are still considering the points about ensuring that the Bill does not have the unintended consequences that some of us dread. Throughout Committee, I was struck that the Government stressed that the Bill was not a one-size-fits-all measure, and they did not feel that that was appropriate. Earlier, the Minister made the point that there are exemptions for this Bill and that this House itself is not under the same requirements as other venues—and I have referenced again that there is a different approach to places of worship. That is appropriate, because we do not want it to be one size fits all.

I have put my name to Amendments 13 and 25, which respond positively to the ministerial commitment to flexibility and agility. As we have already heard, there is a constant theme and genuine worry about the unintended consequences of the Bill harming civil society and the social fabric of communities by taking an unnecessary regulatory toll on events. As I have said, it can feel as though the discussions we have here are far removed from the material threats that society faces from terrorism. I appreciate what was said earlier: if the Bill passes, nobody is claiming that it will stop terrorism. None the less, we are constantly told that lives will be saved if we pass the Bill so there is a moral onus on us to pass it. However, we need to take a broader approach.