Philip Hollobone
Main Page: Philip Hollobone (Conservative - Kettering)Department Debates - View all Philip Hollobone's debates with the Home Office
(5 years, 9 months ago)
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Sajid Javid
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Generally in the circumstances he describes, if further action is needed, such as the withdrawal of the passport—other measures are available—we would not hesitate to take it.
Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)
Nine hundred British nationals have gone to support Daesh in Syria and Iraq; just 40 have been prosecuted. This simply is not good enough. Daesh may have been defeated in theatre, but Daesh and its sympathisers are in effect tying us up in knots in our own courts, and these people are getting away with it. The Home Secretary has admitted that 360 of these individuals are still at large and likely to return to this country. My constituents do not feel safe with the Government’s response to this threat. I urge him urgently to revisit the legal advice he has been given in several areas, because we need to do better, don’t we?
Sajid Javid
My hon. Friend is right. We do need to do more to ensure that we have more tools to prosecute people who have helped or supported terrorist organisations, whether they have actually gone to Syria—some examples have been mentioned today—or whether they are in our own country, helping those organisations in other ways. Since I became Home Secretary, I have been determined to provide more of those tools. I was pleased that my hon. Friend, and indeed the whole House, supported the Bill that became the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act 2019, which will give us far more tools that can be used for law enforcement. We have increased sentences in many instances. The Act will also enable us to step up the work that we have been doing with our allies across the world to gather more battlefield evidence, because evidence is also crucial, especially if we are seeking higher sentences.
My hon. Friend is right to issue that challenge and to say we need to do more, and I agree with him.