Counter-Terrorism and Sentencing Bill (Third sitting)

Rob Butler Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 3rd sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 30th June 2020 Public Bill Committees

[Kenny MacAskill]

Q Finally, given the importance being put upon separation centres, which do not, so far as I know, exist in the Scottish Prison Service, have you any idea how your colleagues north of the border are expected to cope if a great deal of weight is being put upon them?

Mark Fairhurst: This is the major concern from my colleagues at the only separation centre that is open, in Frankland. We have had one serious assault, and that member of staff had to be a moved away from the separation centre, because there is nowhere to transfer the prisoner. Once that prisoner goes to court, if he is convicted of that assault on the member of staff, where do we transfer him to? We do not. We keep him at Frankland.

We have got a Muslim member of staff at Frankland who is being moved from the separation centre because the terrorist offenders in that separation centre have threatened him. That is not right—staff are being penalised for doing their job because we do not have the capability to transfer violent and disruptive prisoners to another separation centre. We have funding for three, but we only have one open because of the red tape and the legalities of moving people into a separation centre, because apparently, if you have three or fewer prisoners in a separation centre, it is classed as segregation. Well, you know what? Staff on the frontline are not interested in how you term things; they are not interested in the legalities. They are interested in you keeping them safe and giving them the tools to do their job, so let us get these other two centres open and let us respect staff safety.

[Rob Butler (Aylesbury) (Con)]

Q Mr Fairhurst, let me echo the praise and the credit for your members that has already been mentioned. As a former non-executive director of Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service, I met many of your members, who do a tremendous job. What is your view of the current rehabilitation and deradicalisation programmes for terrorist offenders?

Mark Fairhurst: I think we need a full review of those two courses, simply because of the last two atrocities, where both offenders had attended one of those courses. One was, in effect, a poster boy for one of the courses. I would like to see a full review, because what do we actually class as a success? Do we class success as offenders attending and passing those courses, or do we class as success the offender who attended those courses being released and not committing further atrocities? We need to look internationally at what is on offer for terrorist offenders, certainly around Europe, if not the world. We really need to review what we class as success, because I am not sure that those two courses offer what they should.

[Rob Butler]

Q On that basis, and given that it is accepted that the courses are certainly not perfect, is that not a strong argument for having longer sentences, with the offender required to spend the entire period in custody?

Mark Fairhurst: That depends on what you are going to offer in the community. Are you going to offer them support services with charitable groups, or groups that specifically deal with terrorist offenders, which meet them at the gate, take them to accommodation, maybe get them out of the area where there is peer pressure, engage with Muslim communities—there is a lot of shame involved with terrorist offenders, who want to reform when they go back into their communities—and get imams involved? Are we going to invest in that side of things and incentivise people while they are in prison to attend these deradicalisation programmes, in the knowledge that there will be massive support systems in play for them when they are released, or do we keep going along the same path, where offenders are released with not much support in place, and if they are a risk, they are monitored? There is still a lot of work and research to do. We have some really intelligent people getting interviewed this morning, with some really positive, radical ideas that need to be taken on board.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kenny MacAskill]

Q I have one final question. Scotland does not have a regime operating polygraph tests. In your experience, how do you think Scotland could establish one, regulate it and be able to check against delivery?

Professor Acheson: I must say I am not a great fan of the polygraph solution. Polygraphs are a very good way to demonstrate a physiological response to nervousness. Most people who take polygraphs are going to be nervous, so it is a very inexact science. I think it is probably slightly better than tossing a coin.

I am much more interested in using technology—wearable technology, in particular—with released terrorist offenders that will give us biodata and geographical data to allow us to spot when somebody is starting to re-engage in terrorist offending in all sorts of ways. It would create a geo-fence that restricts their movements and give real-time information on how that person is. I am not at all suggesting that technology is not useful here. I think we need to have much more investment in that.

The particular issue that I have seen—it has been talked about before—is the issue of disguised compliance, or lying, in layman’s terms. I am very happy to tell the Committee that Staffordshire University hopes to start a piece of research on disguised compliance led by me and Professor James Treadwell. It is mostly in the realm of social work in relation to domestic violence, but we want to see if there are ways to avoid a situation in which somebody like Usman Khan goes through an apparently successful deradicalization programme without apparently recanting any of his extremist principles, which are then put into murderous effect. I think this is a very under-explored area. It touches on polygraphs, but it is much broader than that. It is about how we skill up the people who are making the decisions on questions such as, “Can I trust you? Is your change authentic and credible, or are you trying to pull the wool over our eyes?”

We cannot have a perfect system. A perfect system would destroy our civil liberties, because we would keep terrorist prisoners in jail indefinitely and achieve the very effect that terrorists hope for in creating massive disruption in a liberal democracy. However, I think that we can do a lot more in relation to skilling up people to make decisions about whether and when somebody is safe to release, and under what conditions, and for how long they can be supervised.

[Rob Butler]

Q Professor, do you agree that until we have better deradicalization and rehabilitation programmes, we need to ensure that terrorists remain behind bars for longer to keep the people of this country safer?

Professor Acheson: Yes, for the reasons that I have just mentioned. I think that our position in January, where people who were so dangerous that they had to be man-marked by armed police officers had to be released from custody, was absolutely intolerable. We need to be focused on public protection. In relation to terrorist offenders, the Prison Service needs a bit of a change of mindset. There is too much of a reclamation and rehabilitation focus. I am not saying that that is not important, but I am saying that in relation to these prisoners, there has to be a primary public protection focus and a primary national security focus. That is not to say that the regimes in which terrorist prisoners are kept should not be as full and as varied as possible, so that people do not become alienated and further full of grievance.

[Rob Butler]

Q We have heard a lot about what needs to happen in prison, but this is fundamentally a sentencing Bill. Can you expand on what additional information you think needs to be presented to the sentencing judge in cases such as these, to ensure that the right period in custody is established from the outset?

Professor Acheson: This speaks to my earlier point about making sure that experts—forensic psychologists and psychiatrists—are specially chosen and trained to produce a baseline threat assessment, after conviction but before sentencing, to allow a judge to make a more informed decision on sentencing length, duration and so on, and to establish the basis against which that person’s progress can be managed and measured through custody.

Again, I think it is exceptionally important—the Government did not accept this, but I will reiterate it, and recent events have thrown it into the light—that we should have one dedicated multi-agency specialist unit that manages terrorist offenders from their conviction until they are deemed no to longer be suitable for supervision in the community. It is the most sensible way to manage this. We have far too many hand-offs in the system at the moment.

We have this morning’s report into Joseph McCann, a manipulative psychopath who managed to disguise his dangerousness because of failures in the probation system— because of under-trained staff who were over-stressed and insufficiently curious. All those things will apply to terrorist offenders as well. Having a dedicated unit that understands in great detail the individual’s biography, their background and the antecedents, and that could help to establish a programme of treatment or intervention that is individualised to that person, seems to me to make sense in managing the risk.

[Conor McGinn (St Helens North) (Lab)]

Q Professor Acheson, I really enjoyed your Spectator article, and I agreed with a lot of it. I think it is worth the Committee hearing that its opening gambit was that opponents of the Bill were

“the usual well-heeled, left-wheeled liberal rights activists”.

Neither the Chairman nor I could ever be accused of being one of those, and I do not oppose the Bill and the measures in it per se. However, as you have identified, it is important that the Bill receives scrutiny.

I was struck by something that you said about the Government’s approach to the Bill, which was that it was “populist”. Do you think that is at the expense of longer-term strategic thinking that could be contained in the Bill, particularly around things such as the Prevent strategy? The Bill removes the statutory deadline for reviewing that strategy. I suppose what am I asking is this: are the measures in the Bill serious and strategic and will they make a difference, or are they in keeping with a populist approach to these issues, as you have alluded to?

Professor Acheson: I was being quite flippant in that article, as you have to be if you write for The Spectator. The serious point is that there is no risk-free way to deal with this very dangerous, challenging topic; every way has risk. My small expert team and I sat and looked at separation units, and we argued for weeks about which was better: separation or dispersal of highly subversive, proselytising Islamist extremists. The focus was Islamism. In the end, we came to the view that separation centres would work as the least worst way of managing this phenomenon. The reason I mention this is that we are in a period of continuous evolution, and the law will need to be able to react to that.

They are not distinct, but we have an al-Qaeda generation of terrorists, from 2005 onwards, who are serving time—sometimes extremely long sentences—for organised plots, and we have an IS generation of much more oppositional terrorists, including lots of lone actors who have come along behind. Even looking at Islamist extremism as a group is very difficult. The answer to your question is that we have a good baseline for extending the amount of time that terrorists will serve in prison. We had an intolerable situation before, when it was quite clear that the system of supervision and the sentencing framework were broken; they let people such as Sudesh Amman out of custody. But we have to look at the quality as well as the quantity of what happens. The only way to do that is relentlessly to research what works.

Sometimes I am told by people, “There’s no evidence for what you’re saying.” I sometimes react to that by thinking, “That’s a kind of code for inertia, organisationally, or for timidity.” Sometimes we have to make the evidence. The point is that we have to take some risks. I am not sure whether separation centres will work or will continue to work. Mark Fairhurst eloquently made the point that there is a great deal of reluctance in the Prison Service to use them. There is some organisational resistance to the concept, and it is not simply about not being able to find the right people. A bureaucratic structure was built around selection for separation centres, which has made it all but impossible, frankly, for anybody to get in them.

Regarding separation centres and how the legislation needs to evolve, we need to make sure, as Mark has said, that there is sufficient capability for the extreme right-wing offenders who represent the biggest threat to be removed and completely incapacitated, breaking the psychological link between the “preacher” and his adherent. We will need to be continually alert and continually changing and challenging legislation in order to arrive at the best way of managing the evolving risk.

--- Later in debate ---

[Miss Dines]

Thank you.

[Rob Butler]

Q Professor, you made the point, as have others this morning, that only about 10% of terrorist prisoners reoffend, versus a rate of perhaps 50% across the piece more generally. Do you accept that that 10% who reoffend can cause horrendous atrocities with mass murder? Surely we need to be protected from them as much as possible. The Bill will help achieve that with longer periods in custody.

Professor Silke: It stands even lower than 10%. For England and Wales, it is down to 3%. Really, when we talk about very low levels of reoffending for released terrorist prisoners, it is incredibly low. The vast majority of released terrorist prisoners will not re-engage in terrorism and will not be convicted for any future terrorist offences.

[Rob Butler]

Q But we have seen two very recent examples. Do we not need to minimise the potential of any examples?

Professor Silke: The point there is that if we are going to be concerned about the potential risk of reoffending for any prisoner, we would then end up in a scenario where we release no prisoners. Risk for any prisoner being released for any type of offence is never zero.

[Rob Butler]

Q But here we are talking specifically about terrorist offenders who, by dint of one single act, can cause mass murder and atrocity. Do they not merit a special type of sentence, as is proposed in the Bill?

Professor Silke: Sentences for terrorism can be long and, again, I am not opposed to that at all. One of the challenges we have is that we are imposing blanket long sentences across the board, when we know that the high-risk prisoners are a tiny minority of that group. One of the concerns I have with the Bill is that it does not distinguish; it is across the board. It would be nice if we could be more targeted and focused in terms of how we are identifying and managing the high-risk terrorist prisoners, as opposed to the entire group.

[Bambos Charalambous (Enfield, Southgate) (Lab)]

Q Professor Silke, I have just one question. It is about reviewing the Bill through the prism of Isis and radicalisation from Muslim extremists, and also the far right. Where do you see the threat of terrorism in the future coming from?

Professor Silke: Far-right and Islamist-inspired terrorism remain the two dominant threats in England and Wales, but many will be aware that the most active group in the UK continues to be dissident republican terrorists in Northern Ireland. Looking ahead, what are we likely to see? That will tie into a whole range of different factors. One of the concerns many people have is what are the implications of dealing with the pandemic for terrorism trends going forward. There are concerns about increased radicalisation in certain quarters, but also pressures on criminal justice and other agencies in terms of budgets going forward and what potential impact that might have over the next four to five years.