Terrorism: Contest Strategy

Lord Anderson of Ipswich Excerpts

Monday 3rd February 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Anderson of Ipswich (CB)]

My Lords, having met a number of family members of those killed in the Manchester Arena, and having admired the remarkable strength and dedication of Figen Murray in her various interviews and public statements, I hope that I can begin to understand the devastation that terrorism causes to its victims and to those who are left behind.

After the terrorist attacks of 2017, I worked intensively with MI5 and counterterrorism policing to assess proposed improvements to their intelligence-handling models. This debate illuminates another important aspect of the picture: the Protect strand of the Contest strategy, as it relates to the physical security of venues and crowded places.

The distinguished judge Lord Goff wrote in Smith v Littlewoods of

“the general perception that we ought not to be held responsible in law for the deliberate wrongdoing of others”.

None the less, the organiser of an event may be liable under the existing law of negligence or contract should he fail to take reasonable steps to keep reasonably safe a customer for whom he has assumed responsibility. Further obligations relating to security may flow from the Health and Safety at Work Act etc. 1974, or be imposed as conditions on venues requiring a licence or safety certificate. Is there a case for imposing on the owners and operators of venues additional statutory duties, more extensive than those I have outlined, to protect their customers from the risk of terrorist attack? I offer, if not a concluded answer, three slightly scattered thoughts.

First, as in so many areas, I counsel against legislation specifically directed at terrorism. Any review of the protective security to be required of events organisers needs to have regard to all threats posed by third parties. To that exercise, the motivation of the putative attacker is irrelevant. A racially motivated killing, a random shooting spree, a mentally ill arsonist or a gangland feud at an open-air concert may be just as potentially dangerous, and just as traumatic for the victims and their families, as a terrorist attack.

Secondly, we must retain a balance. While the promoters of Martyn’s law correctly emphasise advice, training and planning, a requirement for new infrastructure and equipment seems also to be an important part of their ambition to “mitigate any vulnerability”, if I may quote from the title of the Bill introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Harris, this afternoon. In its document Martyn’s Law, the group Survivors Against Terror says:

“Things like metal detectors, CCTV cameras and security personnel are available within the reasonable cost of any business’s running cost.”


We are used to arches and metal detectors when entering the Home Office or the courts, but not, thankfully, the local cinema, town centre café or parish church. The Home Office estimates that more than 625,000 organisations operate at least one crowded place in the UK. Figen Murray is right to say that any plan must be relevant to the threat; it must also be proportionate to the threat. The strongest of reasons is required for new obligations that may impinge on stretched budgets, increase the cost of public liability insurance and frighten public-spirited persons from organising events.

In that connection, it is important to be clear-headed about the threat. Any death from terrorism is one too many but thankfully, and contrary to some predictions, terrorism over the past 20 years has killed fewer than 100 innocent people in Great Britain. Furthermore, notwithstanding the horrific slaughter of young people at the Manchester Arena and Fishmongers’ Hall more recently, the great majority of these deaths—from 7/7 to Woolwich, Borough Market and Finsbury Park—have been on public transport or the streets of London. Knowing the risks, we still prize the ability to run for a train or hop on a bus without submitting to any check or scrutiny. That is not the case everywhere in the world. It is an index of our freedom and a fitting response to the pathetic bigots who seek to change our way of life. We need to reflect long and hard before requiring checks at venues that are not required on public transport, particularly small and medium-sized venues where there is no specific threat.

My third and final point may seem off-topic at first, so please bear with me. It is addressed to those in this country and elsewhere who for sincere, but I think misguided, reasons would deprive the security services of the surveillance capabilities—subject as they are, and must be, to strong independent oversight—that derive from the targeted interrogation of data collected in bulk. I have noted in a number of reports the value of targeted data exploitation and other automated techniques, both for warning our security services of emerging threats from leads and from live and closed subjects of interest, and for enabling them to set tripwires that will notify a re-emerging threat. The use of such techniques identified the Manchester bomber in 2017 as one of the more than 20,000 former MI5 subjects of interest who posed the highest risk to the public. Tragically, the meeting that would have discussed his case had been fixed for 31 May, nine days after the attack.

The utility of the approach is clear. Faster and more sophisticated uses of artificial intelligence and behavioural analytics to extract information from bulk datasets are now being developed, as I reported in June 2019, sometimes in collaboration with the private sector. That might all seem a long way from Martyn’s law, but in reality it is the other side of the same coin. The better the information we have from covert surveillance, the more accurate will be our threat assessment and the easier it will be to resist calls to flood the streets with soldiers or routinely screen the users of transport, bars, venues and hotels. Whenever I spend time in countries like that, I am always glad to get home.

Complacency is not in order. I do not exclude the need to require scaled-up physical protection where there is insufficient inclination to provide it and where the threat, whether from terrorism or knife crime, is at its most severe. I look forward to reading the Bill introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Harris, and to hearing more about the measures that the Government will propose. But we have not yet forgotten, as the terrorists would like us to do, what a free country looks like and feels like, and I hope we never will.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Stunell]

I think that the point is that, if it contains relevant information, we should have it in preparation for the legislation that is due to be brought forward in 70 days.

[Lord Anderson of Ipswich]

If I have remembered the legislation correctly, it requires the report to be published on receipt. If it was received in October, why has it still not been published?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I am suitably chastised; I shall go back, ask that question and update both noble Lords in writing. On the independent review of Prevent, I take this opportunity to thank the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, who is very modest about his knowledge of Prevent. I understand that the next steps are being considered, but I take the point that there is an end date to this. The Government intend to look at options for taking this work forward.

The noble Lord, Lord Harris, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Southwark, asked about places of worship. The Government, of course, funded security training for mosques during Ramadan in 2019. We have committed to a fifth year of the Places of Worship Protective Security Funding Scheme and we are developing security training for places of worship of all faiths. We will also open a funding consultation on what more can, and should, be done to protect faith communities.

The noble Lord, Lord Harris, asked about schools. Through the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015, we introduced the Prevent statutory duty, which requires local authorities, schools, colleges, universities, health bodies, prisons and probation services, as part of their day-to-day work, to prevent people being drawn into terrorism. We keep the guidance issued to organisations on this duty under review to ensure that it is fit for purpose in this changing world.