Counter-Terrorism and Sentencing Bill (Second sitting)

Laura Trott Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 2nd sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 25th June 2020 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

Order. I think I am going to ask you to let me move on, Mr Clancy, because a few other people are indicating that time is moving on. Is there anyone else waiting to come in? No. In that case, I call Laura Trott.

[Laura Trott (Sevenoaks) (Con)]

Q Thank you, Mr McCabe. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship.

I was pleased to see in your evidence the point that an increased sentence offers an increased opportunity for greater rehabilitation while someone is in prison. Do you have any views on what form that rehabilitation should take?

Michael Clancy: I am not a penologist. Therefore, I would rather leave that to experts in rehabilitation theory than make up some layman’s version of it, if you do not mind.

[The Chair]

Minister, I think you wanted to make another point.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ruth Cadbury]

Q My last question was about non-English speakers.

Professor Grubin: We do test with interpreters, and they seem to work just as well. Again, it does take training for the examiner to know how to work with an interpreter, and the interpreter needs training as well. Certainly, security services in other countries use it with interpreters quite regularly.

[Laura Trott]

Q Professor, you talked about a failure rate of up to 20%. What drives that failure rate? Is it the fact that people are tricking the test or that the examiner is making a mistake? What are the drivers behind that 20%?

Professor Grubin: There is a range of reasons that people can give either false positives or false negatives. Apologies for not looking at you while I am answering. Sometimes it is because the test hasn’t been set out properly, the examinee hasn’t been prepared properly in the pre-test interview or the questions haven’t been formulated well, and so on.

The examinee may have some other experience that is close enough to the way the question is being asked to cause that sort of response. For example, there was a very good study carried out in Israel. I won’t go through all the details of it, but they were able to debrief afterwards as we were with police officers who were applying for promotion. There were two false positives. The ground troops knew that these two people had been telling the truth, but they were said to be lying. One of them had said that he had previously made an insurance claim in Israel. At that time, the insurance companies in Israel would test people making insurance claims to see if they were honest or not. He said that he was being honest, but he was told that he was lying. He couldn’t get that out of his mind during the test. That causes the cognitive processing we were talking about, and it made him respond in that way.

The other person was more interesting. The experiment itself was about a test that the examinees could cheat on. You would know if they cheated or not. The second police officer said that he cheated when he took the test, but there was something wrong when he took it and the examiners had him do the test a second time. When he did it the second time, he said, “I don’t think I had better cheat again,” so he did it honestly. When he was asked if he had cheated on the test the second time, he said that he was thinking about having cheated the first time, which is why he reacted as he did.

There are other reasons as well, but it is hard to explain without going into the details about how polygraph testing works. Basically, you are comparing the relevant questions that you are interested in with so-called comparison questions. If those comparison questions are not evocative enough to elicit a response when a person is telling the truth to the relevant question, or vice versa, when they are too hot and the person is much more concerned about that question than about the relevant one, you can also get mistakes on the test.

The final reason is that sometimes we just don’t know; it just happens.

[Laura Trott]

Q I have a quick follow up to that. In terms of the formulation of questions, with the sex offender work that has been done so far, how has that worked most effectively? What lessons can be learned from that when we think about applying it in terrorism offenses?

Professor Grubin: It is very similar. In sex offender testing, the majority of questions relate to their licence conditions and they are asked specifically about those conditions. You have to remember in a polygraph test and a screening test you get, at most, three relevant questions, so if they have 15 licence conditions you are only going to be able to test three of them. You can ask about all of them during the pre-test interview and, of course, the examinee won’t know which ones he will be asked on the test, which is why you get disclosures.

By and large, they are about licence conditions, and I would think that with this group that is what they would be. The things you would be interested in are undisclosed internet devices, have they been in contact with certain individuals, have they travelled to certain places and those sorts of question. The sex offenders are also asked about fantasies, but I am not sure that you would be particularly interested in that with this group.

[Alex Cunningham]

Q My hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Isleworth talked about people with disabilities in relation to polygraph testing. You said that the success rate goes down to about 60%. Is that a fair success rate to be used as part of the evidence for a recall to prison?

Professor Grubin: Either I have either misunderstood you or you have misunderstood me. Were you referring to intellectual disability?