Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures Bill

Baroness Stern Excerpts

Wednesday 5th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stern]

My Lords, I welcome very much the way in which the Minister presented this Bill to the House and I look forward to working with him. I must declare an interest as a trustee of the Civil Liberties Trust. It is a privilege to speak after the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, who is a veteran of the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005 and its subsequent annual renewal debates. The amount of attention we have paid to this matter in this House has been very worth while and productive. As the years and the renewal debates have gone by, the regime was modified and its least palatable aspects brought more within the rule of law. The fact that the Government had to report to Parliament and Parliament had an opportunity to look at the measure in detail was very valuable and should continue. I hope very much that we will return to this issue in Committee.

As someone who occasionally visits other countries—some with rather dubious human rights records—to talk about human rights and the rule of law, I must say that I would prefer it if we were not discussing this today and if we did not have to have measures that severely restrict people’s liberty without due process. There is no doubt that the threat is very real. Certainly, the numbers controlled in this way are small. Efforts are made to ensure safeguards. But the regime still goes beyond what we as a country believe in and what we advocate to others. As the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, has said, it does reputational damage to our country in this respect. However, I accept entirely that this Bill is an improvement. In the words of the right reverend Prelate, light is better than heavy, and no compulsory relocation or daytime curfews are welcome developments.

I wish to probe the Minister a little further on the restrictions. When I first read the list of those that could be imposed under the 2005 Act, I found it very chilling. The experiences of those under control orders and, by extension, their family members, seemed to be moving well beyond prevention and protecting society from danger into the arena of punishment, but punishment without a trial or a conviction.

It was most helpful to have the reports of the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, which put into the public domain much valuable information on what a control order meant. This was a combination of electronic tagging, curfew for up to 16 hours a day, daily reporting by telephone, restrictions on visitors except for family members, getting approval to meet anyone outside the house, being forbidden to meet certain people at all, giving the police free access to enter at any time, restrictions on communications equipment, needing approval to send anything abroad apart from personal letters, not being allowed to go to a port or a railway station, daily reporting to a police station and having to get prior approval to study.

Further light on what actually happened to people was shed by the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, in 2009 when he reported that a controlee was:

“No longer required to report by telephone to a police station in the early hours of the morning; nor to obtain prior approval for female visitors to his family at home”.

Presumably before this, the controlee had to set an alarm clock for some time in the middle of the night, wake up, ring the police and then try to go back to sleep. His wife had to submit requests to the Home Office if she wanted her mother, for example, to visit her.

According to the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, another controlee was not allowed to attend AS-level science courses because,

“attendance would enable him to acquire skills and information about production of pathogens and explosives”.—[Official Report, 5/3/09; col. 858.]

One report said that women in the family went to bed fully clothed in case there was an unannounced visit from the monitoring company in the middle of the night. One controlee was not allowed to go into the garden.

Can the Minister tell the House a little more about the restrictions available under this new measure and how they will be decided? I appreciate that they are more tightly drawn than under the 2005 Act, but I have read Schedule 1 quite carefully more than once and it seems to give the Secretary of State considerable leeway to impose a wide range of requirements. They are better than those I described, but they are still very stringent. I welcome the fact that the person can have a landline, a computer with access to the internet and a mobile phone, but there are considerable powers in Schedule 1 to restrict and control their use. These include specifying the manner in which a telephone, computer or mobile phone may be used and the times when they can be used. Work and study will be allowed, which is also a welcome development, but the Secretary of State must be notified of work or study and may impose any,

“specified conditions in connection with any work or studies”.

Can the Minister tell the House a little more about how these conditions will be applied to each person subject to them? Will they be regularly reviewed, and by whom? Will there be a review group or committee that looks at each case on a regular basis? Will persons subject to these orders and their family members be able to ask for modifications? Will they, as the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, recommended, have a phone number that will always be answered if they need to talk to someone about an emergency? An example would be if a child is ill and they need to call the doctor, but the doctor is not on the list of permitted visitors.

I have no doubt that the Minister intends these measures to be more just and humane than those they are to replace; they should indeed be so. But how does he envisage ensuring that that is actually the case when it comes to the detail of what happens to each controlled person and his or her family?