Terrorist Offenders (Restriction of Early Release) Bill

Debate between Lord Garnier and Lord Beith

Committee stage & Report stage & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords & Report stage (Hansard) & Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 24th February 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Garnier (Con)]

My Lords, there was never any possibility of my becoming a member of the Court of Appeal, but had I been a member, the job I would most like to have had is that of the third member of the court who says, “I have read the judgment of my learned friend. I agree and I have nothing further to add.” I have heard what my friend the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, has said both at Second Reading and just now and I have nothing further to add save one point.

During the course of the Second Reading debate, instead of saying “two-thirds” I said “three-quarters”. I do not suppose that that made much difference to the way in which the House considered the matter, and the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, has made the points that need to be made. The one thing I have learned in politics is that it is possible to win the argument and to lose the vote, and it is possible to make winning arguments and sensibly to avoid a vote. For my part, I think that the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, has made and won the arguments, but whether he moves this issue to a vote is another matter. However, he has certainly won the moral victory.

[Lord Beith (LD)]

My Lords, I do not dissent at all from that assessment that a moral victory has been won, but that is only the beginning of the story. I simply want to address the Government’s distinctly lacking arguments against the amendment as advanced so far in a context where there was such widespread agreement on the efficacy of bringing the Parole Board into all cases but no very clear defence by the Government as to why the two-thirds provision has to be imposed on those who would otherwise have been released without the Parole Board’s involvement half way through their sentence.

The arguments produced by the Government have been very strange. One was that it would create greater confusion. It is in the essence—in the nature—of this provision that there will be confusion, because nobody can know what assessment the Parole Board is going to make of their case. The avoidance of confusion is not a primary objective of this: quite the contrary, we invite the Parole Board to make a very serious consideration of each case and only to allow release at either the halfway or two-thirds point if it is satisfied that there is not a danger to the public from doing so. The confusion argument does not really make any sense at all.

Then there is the argument that this will increase public confidence. Of all the things that might increase public confidence, I cannot see someone rushing into the pub saying, “Have you heard? Do you know that some of these offenders might spend up to another year in jail, but then they will be released?” That is not what public confidence is built on, and it is the wrong argument to use for something that involves issues of liberty.

Then I want to challenge the argument about the further period of incapacitation, because terrorists in prison are not incapacitated. They engage in grooming and recruitment activities and, as I said in the Second Reading debate, in some cases might be able to achieve more by their work among other prisoners—including prisoners who are not there for terrorist offences—than they might be able to achieve on the outside. They might recruit a larger number of people, so I do not accept the incapacitation argument.

The only argument that would be persuasive would be that it was impossible, with this amendment as drafted, to avoid the situation in which the Parole Board could not cope in a reasonable period of time with the cases at the half-time stage, but that probably could be overcome by alternative drafting if the drafting presented tonight has that problem. That would be the only argument that would persuade me: that we were letting people out without the Parole Board assessment, when the whole purpose of this is to make sure that they have that assessment.

Therefore, unless the Government produce a better argument, I do not think that they have made the case.