Counter-Terrorism and Sentencing Bill

Rob Butler Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading: House of Commons
Tuesday 9th June 2020 Commons Chamber

[Rob Butler (Aylesbury) (Con)]

I rise to speak in strong support of the Bill. First, I should first declare my interests: until my election I was a magistrate member of the Sentencing Council, which was considering the sentencing guidelines for terrorism, and I was also a non-executive director of Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service.

As we have heard from the Lord Chancellor and other Members, the first duty of any Government is to protect their people. One of the most marked threats against the British people is terrorism. It is a particularly heinous offence, its perpetrators motivated by perverted ideologies, driven to cause indiscriminate carnage, demonstrating a callous distain for the loss of human life and revelling in the fear that they provoke among decent citizens. Those who contemplate committing such atrocities must be in no doubt of the revulsion that right-minded people feel towards them. They must know that the law will categorically and clearly condemn their acts.

I welcome the end-to-end provisions in the Bill that will keep us all safer: strengthened TPIMs to scrutinise potential terrorist offenders; longer prison sentences, physically served in custody in their entirety, to keep convicted terrorists off our streets and provide time for deradicalisation and rehabilitation; and stricter licence conditions for terrorists when they are released from prison, including the use of polygraphs.

First, let me focus specifically on the serious terrorism sentence. A minimum period of 14 years’ imprisonment strikes me as wholly justified, and I consider it right that the entire period should be spent in custody. I have said before in this place that I am a firm believer in rehabilitation, and I pay tribute to all those working in HMPPS who strive to engage with terrorist offenders and provide tailored interventions and programmes with the aim of promoting a fundamental change, but we must recognise that deradicalisation programmes have not enjoyed as much success as we would have hoped. I am pleased that there is to be further investment in this area of work, with the recruitment of additional staff, but where terrorist offenders are concerned there can be no room for error.

Because there can be no room for error, I wonder—and I put it no more strongly than that—whether consideration should be given to the introduction of a new sentence of indefinite detention for public protection from terrorism. I recognise that the idea will raise many legitimate concerns given the previous experience of imprisonment for public protection sentences, which resulted in a high number of people spending many years in excess of their tariff in custody through no fault of their own. Indeed, I have met a number of them, and the injustice done to them is palpable and wrong. But that does not have to mean that it would be impossible to design a different system with all the necessary safeguards in place that would ensure that terrorist prisoners, solely and specifically, would be detained without a determinate date on which their sentence would end. I would be interested to know whether Ministers believe that this could be feasible.

It will be evident from what I have said so far that I very much welcome the broad contents of this Bill. However, there are one or two areas where I would ask the Government to consider the scope for possible refinement, particularly in the area of younger offenders. I know from my time at the Youth Justice Board that, tragically, a very small number of children are ensnared into terrorism. It is therefore right for this Bill to address those offenders, but it is also right to ensure that the sentence remains very much tailored to the individual, as is the case throughout the youth justice system, and that there is appropriate provision and resource to maximise the opportunity for rehabilitation. There must remain, surely, some hope that these young people under 18 can be reformed and then lead law-abiding lives.

For young adults—those aged between 18 and 20—there is essentially no distinction between older adults in terms of the sentencing provisions in this Bill. However, it is now well established that neurological development is not complete until the early to mid-20s. Indeed, maturity based not purely on chronological age is now a factor in sentencing decisions, to reflect the science. In addition, young adults are generally seen as more likely to reform. Consequently, I would respectfully suggest that it might be expedient to give additional consideration to the sentencing regime for those aged 18 to 20, specifically, to ensure that the minimum period spent in custody is indeed commensurate with their culpability.

As the Bill progresses, it is imperative that we always ensure that the will of Parliament is unambiguously clear to those who later have to interpret this legislation, particularly the Sentencing Council in the formulation of its guidelines and any interim guidance that may be required, and judges who will ultimately pass sentence. This is in no way to say that I believe that politicians should interfere with the independence of the judiciary, but a minimum sentence of 14 years is exactly that—a minimum, from which it will often be appropriate to move up. To my mind, it is also plain that the intention of this Bill is to broaden the scope to ensure that where there is clear evidence of a terrorism connection, that can be reflected in the sentence, irrespective of the index offence, with very few exceptions. The consequence of that is that the sentence passed must reflect the link to terrorism as a prime factor.

On a similar theme, for those offences where a new maximum penalty is introduced in this Bill—namely, membership of a proscribed organisation, supporting a proscribed organisation, or attending a place used for terrorist training—it is important that the guidelines are updated promptly to ensure that the will of Parliament is quickly reflected in sentences of the court. The message must surely be that the will of Parliament is that terrorist offenders should face the harshest of sentences, that punishment for them is served only by an extremely long period in custody, and that this country, led by this Government and backed across this Parliament, will relentlessly and remorselessly take every possible action to protect the public from the horror of terrorist atrocities.