Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Bill

Lord Frost Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 7th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, I begin by thanking the Minister for his very reasonable opening statement. I regret not being able to make his consultation meeting yesterday.

I have a dilemma with this legislation. On the one hand, it is clearly true that we all have a responsibility to consider how we as a society face up to the sickening evil of major terrorist attacks. We all have huge sympathy, of course, with the families of victims. We understand their outrage and anger at the failings, and we admire their work to try to ensure that what happened to them does not happen to others in future. On the other hand, we as legislators have a duty to take a wider perspective and to assess whether proposed measures will genuinely reduce risks without imposing disproportionate burdens.

I am not the first person to make these points; they were made a couple of years ago by the Commons Home Affairs Committee in the previous Parliament. It is striking to me that both consultations on this legislation, in 2021 and last year, produced quite a wide range of responses, with concerns about implementation and costs being just as strong as recognition of the need to act further against terrorism.

This Bill was in the manifestos of both main parties, which is unusual—although perhaps not as unusual as it should be. It will clearly pass in some form, but we still have a duty to scrutinise. History shows that, when there is wide consensus on legislation, it often ends up being quite difficult legislation to make workable in practice. That is what we have to look at.

Against this background, I welcome the rethinking for which the Government have clearly been responsible with this version of the Bill. It is clearly better and more proportionate than the one introduced by my own party when in government. Equally, I believe there is a case for further thought in some areas, as many noble Lords have already noted.

Personally, I think the case for the measures in this Bill is much stronger for major events and major venues—that is, those in the so-called enhanced tier—where there is clearly a need to respond to the IOC’s call back in 2018 to clarify the legal responsibilities, and where the size of events and premises, such as major halls, theatres, et cetera, requires a degree of co-ordination and pre-planning. If legislation can help in that, it is sensible that it should.

I cannot help echoing the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, about the exclusion of Parliaments, devolved Administrations and indeed schools from this legislation. I wonder whether we are seeing another example of the phenomenon of the Government imposing duties on others while excluding themselves—a point that we discussed in this Chamber yesterday.

I have three concerns about the standard tier. The first is a point that has been made by other noble Lords. I welcome the fact that the threshold has been increased to 200 but I still believe there is a case for increasing it further—for example, to 300, as the then shadow Security Minister proposed in the Commons last year. I agree with those who have asked the Minister to set out more fully in winding up just why this threshold has been chosen and what the Government see as the potential pressures, in either direction.

My second concern is the nature of the burden on small organisations. This Bill will produce a burden. Unless the threshold changes further, it will hit small organisations and voluntary organisations, particularly perhaps those that have events that occasionally go above the threshold and thus permanently come within the scope of the duty. Indeed, the fact that the Government have excluded certain categories reflects a recognition that there is a burden imposed by the Bill.

The cost of £330 annually for smaller voluntary organisations is not trivial. In effect, it pushes up the cost of insuring, say, a village hall by between a third and a half every year. For organisations that are under pressure, that is significant. I note that the Night Time Industries Association has similar concerns about smaller venues. I agree with it and others who have made the point about the need for clarity on the relationship between the powers in this Bill and those in the Licensing Act. Perhaps the Minister could address that point as well.

My third concern is about the consequences—perhaps unintended, but arguably foreseeable—of legislating at all. When you give something the force of law you do two things. First, you increase the risk to individuals of non-compliance. As a result, you increase the risk of risk-aversion: the pressure to do more than is necessary just in case, to make sure that the law is fulfilled. In other areas, the observed behaviour of regulators is that they often encourage this through defining and spreading so-called best practice. The Bill imposes the reasonably practicable duty on the responsible individuals, but it is a subjective test, drawn from a different, albeit related, area of legislation. I think it will be subject to mission creep, as these vague forms of words often are.

The second thing you do when you create a duty through legislation is, in effect, to create an industry that depends on that regulation, that has a potential interest in maintaining and developing it and which, in practice, often has a big influence on setting and defining the levels of standard practice and in seeing them promulgated by the regulator, industry bodies and others. I think that is foreseeable in this case too, and the Henry VIII clauses in the Bill certainly give the Government the power to support that kind of mission creep over time, and to give it the force of law over time if they are so minded.

This all means that what may be a limited and justifiable burden at first may well grow over time, and that is often hard to reverse. The problem is that none of this adds to productive activity. When you give something the force of law it has to take priority over other activities. Again, for smaller businesses and voluntary organisations this means that it must often take priority over the actual purpose of that organisation. That is what giving something legal force means. When we are adding so much to the burdens on those organisations already, we have to think very carefully about the value added.

There is a particular risk in areas of voluntary activity. For example, one in eight village halls is still apparently caught by the Bill, according to the impact assessment. The risk in voluntary areas is that people are just not ready to devote the extra personal time or take the extra risk and the burden, so facilities simply close rather than take on board the burden of compliance.

I hope, and actually I believe, that the Government will not just dismiss these concerns, which came strongly out of the consultations and the evidence sessions. I hope and suspect that we will see amendments covering them, and I hope the Government will take them seriously. As the Minister noted, if and when the Bill passes it will have a lengthy pre-implementation period in which they can be addressed too.

I note that many noble Lords have asked whether the SIA is the right regulator. I note that the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health has proposed the creation of an advisory board for the SIA for these purposes, and some form of that could be well worth the Government considering.

Let us reflect on what the Bill will do. It will mean that most businesses and organisations serving the public in any numbers need to consider the risk of a terrorist attack all the time. You may say they should, and certainly the threat, regrettably, is substantial—very high. However, even now, the risk of any individual person facing an actual terrorist attack remains extremely low. The Bill may reduce the risk slightly further as regards events or premises but, equally arguably, might only deflect it. After all, we have plenty of evidence that the risk exists in other places too, most notably on the street or in parks, both of which have been the location of serious attacks in recent years—indeed, very recently.

We cannot reduce the risk to zero through prevention measures and, as a society, we should not try. An attempt to do so may cause more harm and more problems of other kinds. To take one analogy that is perhaps imperfect but it makes the point, just as our streets have filled up over the years with street furniture, barriers, controls or whatever in a partly—but only partly—successful effort to reduce road deaths, they have also become more ugly, complex and difficult to navigate for many people as a result. The Bill may well see many public facilities go down the same route and, as we have seen from the barriers on our bridges across the Thames, once they are introduced, these measures rarely get removed.

I hope we do not have to—and I do not want to—live in a society where all our public facilities become like airports, with security checks, barriers and cordons, and with security officials barking at us if we put a foot wrong. We have already gone some way down that road. That is all the more reason to be sure that the Bill’s provisions are genuinely proportionate, reduce risks in a worthwhile way and do not take us further down a path that risks never being reversed.