Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Bill

Lord Harris of Haringey Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 12th February 2025 Lords Chamber

Finally, the Minister said that he was accepting plugs, so I will make another—it is always a mistake to open a door—concerning the police counterterrorism security advisers, who are based not only in London but in our regional police counterterrorism units. The Minister mentioned that the Government will look at resourcing for local authorities, for example. I hope that he considers this idea. They are relatively few in number. We are talking about, potentially, 180,000 venues, and perhaps not all of them will need this, but there will be a significant start-up volume. Will he at least consider that group? It is part of police funding and is the forward-facing part of the group that the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, mentioned. This idea deserves consideration, at least.

[Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)]

My Lords, I associate myself the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, about counterterrorism security advisers. They are part of this defence mechanism; they certainly need to be better resourced and could do a great deal as a consequence.

The points made by the noble Lord, Lord Udny-Lister, are extremely important and have great value; they reflect the comments that I made in my two reports on prevention of terrorism in London. A great deal can be done to design out different sorts of crime, or, as in this case, to make it more difficult for terrorists to act, or to make it easier to respond to a terrorist incident. I do not wish to prolong the discussion, because there is an issue as to whether this is the right legislation. Clearly, it needs to be considered in the context of the planning system, but I also take the point about that perhaps taking an inordinate amount of time, rather than trying to move this forward at this stage.

If I may inject a slightly partisan point at this stage, I do recall, at a lower level, the issues around designing out crime. At one stage, a whole series of recommendations were in the building regulations to make crime more difficult—for example, making it more difficult for burglars to kick in doors. The previous Government dismantled all that, which was extremely unfortunate.

[Viscount Brookeborough (CB)]

My Lords, I support this amendment. I wonder whether the Minister and the advisers have been to Northern Ireland, where, for a long time, buildings have been designed for the exact threats he is talking about. I am not sure of the system, but I do not think that those designs originated from planning control or building control; they were brought on by the organisations themselves in order to provide protection. There must be lessons to be learned there on how best to stop these sorts of attacks; after all, although I hesitate to say it, we were under them for 40 years.

On the subject of the various organisations, including the SIA, we can point people in the right direction and get advice to them, but resources will have to be put into the communications between people and those organisations. The advice may be there but currently, there is not the manpower to communicate to the extent that will ward off terrorist attacks.