Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Bill

Lord Hogan-Howe Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 7th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

My Lords, I support this legislation, which commemorates the lives of terrorist victims from the past and obviously intends to reduce the chances of more deaths and injury in the future. Therefore, for all the reasons that have been described, it has my full support. It is the latest manifestation of the UK counterterror strategy Contest, which is there to Prevent, ideally stopping people becoming terrorists; to Pursue, so that, if they do become terrorists, they are locked up and put before the courts; to Prepare, so that, in the event that terrorists get through, we make sure that we recover as quickly as possible; and to Protect—that is this strand—the targets that terrorists may find the most attractive.

For a long time, where people have gathered in large numbers, venues have tried to reduce either the likelihood of an attack getting through or, if one did get through, the damage caused. But I am afraid this has been inconsistent and has lacked an evidence base on which to operate. In my view, this is the ideal opportunity to make sure that does not happen.

I will make only five points. I will first briefly respond to some of the points raised. There is clearly a debate about where we should draw the line: it could be 200 or 100, and some people prefer 300. I would be careful about altering it from 200. In 2018, at the request of the royal commission in New Zealand, I visited to look at the terrorist attacks on the Christchurch mosques, when 51 Muslims were murdered and 84 other people were injured. They were two small mosques—small in the numbers of people who gathered but terrible in the outcome of what happened when one man with an automatic weapon swept through them. So I would be really careful. Of course, they were places of worship. Although there is an exclusion in this legislation for places of worship, the fact that they are places of worship can actually amplify the target. Thousands of people can gather at—and do visit every day—some of our national venues such as Westminster Abbey. We have to be really careful before, in trying to accommodate their difference, we leave people who visit more vulnerable.

Secondly, I raise something that is not directly relevant, although it is relevant to the issue of communication in emergencies. The Minister may want to reassure himself about the latest level of the Airwave project, which is now eight years late, running at £12.5 billion and has no procurement in place to deliver the new system. It is indirectly impacting on the ability of the emergency services to respond to these terrible events together. We all ought to take this seriously, and it is worth at least contemplating when considering this legislation.

The noble Baroness, Lady May, raised a good point about who is in charge when emergency services attend. Is it the people who are already running the venue? There is some good experience there post the Hillsborough event, and the Green Guide makes some clear recommendations about how this happens at football grounds. Rather than reinvent this, it may well be worth at least considering the advice there.

On CTSAs, the noble Lord, Lord Harris, got it right: there are very few of these people across the country, and they will need enhancing. There are tens of them throughout England and Wales, and I suspect that, given the number of premises involved here, there will have to be a significant investment to make sure that can go forward in the future.

The first of my five points is to support the point from the noble Baroness, Lady May, on design. This is about the design of new buildings, of course, but also the retrofitting of existing buildings. Design can help to reduce the number of attackers, can help to reduce the impact of attacks and can allow people who can escape to do so—or keep them safe where they choose to be. But this needs some clear thinking. Our shopping malls are open plan—they are not compartmentalised—but it is possible to design them so that they could become compartmentalised in the event of an attack. But it is not straightforward, as this place found out when PC Palmer was murdered. Do you lock down or do you open up? If you open up, where do you go and how do you communicate with people? Of course, people are in a panic and are not always able to hear you clearly. What advice will you give them when you at the time are not sure exactly what is happening? These are very difficult problems, but design can play a major part in making sure that we give the people who are operating these places a good opportunity to respond as well as they can.

Secondly, on technology, many of the venues that we are talking about—not the smaller ones, perhaps, but even some of them—have CCTV. We often have debates in this place about the horrors of AI and the terrible things that facial recognition can do, but actually it can do some pretty remarkable good things as well. If CCTV is available at some of our bigger venues—think about ExCeL and some of our big shopping malls such as Westfield in London, of which there are two—it can play an important part in spotting unusual patterns of behaviour in individuals. AI can assist with that, but I argue that the Bill is silent about how it might help. I will come back to why I think it is particularly important that it says something about this.

Facial recognition is another great opportunity. I am not necessarily talking about randomly checking people’s faces and whether they should be there or are terrorists. I am talking about checking them against lists of people who we know are dangerous: terrorists on control orders, people who have been released on parole from a terrorist sentence, or people on bail who have not yet been charged. These are significant characters, and I guess that any operator of a significant venue would like to know whether they have bought a ticket to some of these events, are strolling around their car parks or are carrying out reconnaissance in the days preceding their attacks, as we saw in New Orleans, to make sure that they are as effective as they can be.

How do we enable our CCTV to be as effective as it can be? If we cannot get this right for counterterrorist legislation, we will struggle to get it right for volume crime and general surveillance of public areas. This is a live debate, and we should not go to one end of the spectrum and say that AI and facial recognition are always bad. They can be, but they can also be incredibly effective, and we should not dismiss technology just because we occasionally have some concerns about privacy.

The third thing that I urge the Bill to say something about is different regulatory bodies. As we have heard, the venues are covered by different regulatory bodies: the Health and Safety Executive, local authorities looking after football grounds and some of the venues for alcohol licensing, and fire brigades, which inspect these places too. So there is a chance that they approach the same problem inconsistently—not intentionally, of course. We need to make sure that all our regulatory bodies approach these issues consistently and do not end up giving inconsistent advice—not least given that we have many local authorities but intend to give this to one national body, the SIA.

Of course, the methods of security are regulated by other people, too. The SIA already regulates the security operatives who work at these places. The Biometric Commissioner has interests in how data is collected, and the Data Protection Commissioner has an interest in privacy, while the Surveillance Commissioner has an interest in how all those systems come together. I would argue that we need them to consider the terrorist threat in a wide, not a narrow, way and that, when we come to things such as facial recognition or AI application, we need them to give consideration in a generous, not a narrow, way.

At the very least, we need the venue operators to know that, when they are trying to get agreement on how they operate their systems, they will get an open hearing and they do not have to approach the same problem in 172,000 ways—because there are 172,000 venues out there that will have to resolve some of these problems. Of course, the smaller ones are larger in volume, but some of the bigger ones are pretty high in numbers, too. So we need to consider at this stage how the various regulators are going to work with this legislation and make sure that it works effectively.

My fourth point is about research. We have already heard concerns about whether the SIA will be well equipped by the time this Act comes into force, and I can understand why those concerns are there. It is a relatively small organisation and there have been mistakes in the past: security operatives have had convictions for manslaughter and we have seen various things that have not gone well. But that could be said of many public organisations—so it can learn and it can improve. But the Bill is silent on where it is going to get its advice. It will of course need good research and academic support to work out how to deal with a crowd that is panicking. There is a science in this. We have had to see it through football matches and learn how to deal with large crowds, and how crowds respond. So I should like to hear a little more about how it is anticipated that the SIA will get its advice and develop research over time, because it seems to me that it should be able to develop commissions of research so that it can respond to new problems—because new terrorist attacks will come up and it will be vital that the SIA is dynamic and responds to the new threats.

My final point is about powers of search. At the meeting earlier, I said that you might think, “Well, that’s just what policemen say, isn’t it? That they need a power of search”. But my point is that all these venues often have security operatives. Sadly, in the Manchester attack we saw that the terrorist who attacked entered at the end of the event into an area that was not protected and was not being excluded, and was carrying the device that murdered so many people. But of course, if some of the security operatives had tried to approach and deal with him, they had no power of search. It is expected that security operatives are able to search as a condition of entry to the premises—you either get searched or you do not come in. But of course some of these people are trespassers—not all are terrorists—and with some people you cannot be sure whether they have a right to enter. So I wonder whether it is worth thinking about whether security operatives should have some kind of right, because the alternative is that you have to call the police, which will be inefficient; it will be slow and might be too late. So we should give some consideration to security operatives’ powers, used properly and reasonably, in a way that enhances security.

Finally, I realise that, on some of my points, the Minister might say, “Well, actually, there’s going to be advice issued and there will be secondary legislation”, so I am quite content that some of those points might have to be covered there. But I would argue that some of the regulatory issues need to be considered in the Bill because, if the regulator is faced with controlling legislation that gives it very clear direction and is then faced by secondary legislation that gives advice, it may have to go with its first statutory, primary legislation. So it is worth saying something about this in the Bill to help the other regulators. Things such as stop and search would certainly need primary legislation: in my view, it should not be the subject of secondary legislation, if it is considered applicable.

My final point is that I wish this Bill speedy progress, as the Minister said, so that we can implement it quickly. Although I agree that two years is a good period in which to implement it, in that we want to build the credibility of the SIA and make sure that the businesses are ready, I would keep an open mind that, if the businesses and the SIA achieve that more quickly, we should implement more quickly, too. Two years is quite a long time and we are already saying that the terrorist threat is high. Those two years could be a time in which we have some awful attacks that could have been prevented had we all got our act together a little earlier. So I would keep an open mind about the implementation date, should the evidence show that in fact the systems are ready and we are able to implement more quickly.