Southport Attack

David Davis Excerpts

Tuesday 21st January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. The families and all the people across Southport and the country need the truth. They need answers about what happened and what went so badly wrong in this case. That is why the information is put before the trial and then released after the trial. That is how the British justice system works. Crucially, at the heart of this, people need to see justice. There has to be an account for such a terrible, terrible, barbaric crime. All of us have to make sure that justice is delivered, because when lives have been lost in such a terrible way, justice is the minimum that they deserve.

[David Davis (Goole and Pocklington) (Con)]

I hope the Home Secretary will not take it as a discourtesy if I say to her that it should be the Prime Minister making this statement here today. This morning, he said on television that singleton terrorist attacks are a very new occurrence; they are not. They have been going on for nearly a decade. There have been many in London, including one in the yard of this House of Commons, and one that killed Sir David Amess, our colleague. In that attack on Sir David Amess, the police declared it a terrorist incident the same day. Without three Prevent references, without ricin, and without an al-Qaeda manual, they declared it a terrorist event the same day. So we all wonder why this was not the case here when there was such evidence. This is a clear mistake, is it not?

[Yvette Cooper]

The decision about the application of the Terrorism Act 2000 is one for the police and, ultimately, the CPS when it lays charges based on the operational information that it has. The prosecution will lay out more information before sentencing that they would have put before the court today had the offender not pleaded guilty initially, and that is for them to decide. But the point the Prime Minister made this morning was that this was clearly a case where someone attempted to terrorise the community. That was clearly their intention—to kill those children and to terrorise more widely. That is why we have to ensure that, even in cases where the police and the prosecution say they have not been able to prove ideology, we still have the right powers, sentencing and ability to respond with swiftness and seriousness to the kinds of cases we are facing. That is why the Prime Minister has said this needs to be reviewed—I referred to the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation looking at those issues—and also why we have this statement to the House and are doing this inquiry.

Where I disagree with the right hon. Gentleman is when he said we have had such cases for a long time. We have seen in recent years a big increase in youth violence and extremism on a disturbing scale, and that needs to be part of the inquiry as well.