Streatham Incident

Diana Johnson Excerpts

Monday 3rd February 2020 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

Order. We have to have much shorter questions and answers. I appreciate that the Lord Chancellor is explaining complicated and important matters, but he has explained a lot of them, so we need short questions and short answers, otherwise most people will not have a chance at all. I call Dame Diana Johnson.

[Dame Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

With No. 10 briefing on some of the terrible decisions that have been made in the past 15 years on counter-terrorism policy, does the Lord Chancellor believe that the introduction of the regime of terrorism prevention and investigation measures, which weakened the control order regime that had been in place, was one of those terrible decisions?

[Robert Buckland]

The hon. Lady will remember the legal morass that we got into with control orders—it was not a happy experience—which faced constant challenge in the courts. Their effectiveness was undermined, I am afraid, and it was essential that we took measures to make sure that we had a regime that was invulnerable to such challenge and which would be sustainable. That is why the changes were made. The hon. Lady is somewhat misrepresenting the position, if I may say so.