Streatham Incident — House of Lords, 2020-02-03
Topic: Law and Crime
Alan Beith (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement. This was a very serious incident; our thoughts are with the victims. It could have been much worse but for the rapid action of police officers. We should also recognise, as the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, did, the contribution of members of the public who came to the aid of the injured This terrorist was released by an automatic process which falls short of what we need to do to protect the public. We agree that, in future, release of those convicted of terrorist offences before the end of their sentence should require an assessment by the Parole Board, which will need the resources to do this. The Government have given some indication that they may give these. However, that is necessarily quite a limited thing, which will not in the end make a fundamental difference to the fact that most of these people will eventually come out of prison—a point which I will come to in a moment. If, for example, we have a terrorist conviction for possessing or distributing literature, the amount by which the sentence would be extended, from half to two-thirds, would be small as a proportion of a shorter sentence. In presenting this matter to the public, we should be clear about its limits. Is the Minister telling us—this is the point about retrospection that the noble Baroness referred to—that existing sentenced prisoners currently able to get release on licence at the halfway point will have their custody extended to two-thirds even if they are given a positive review in the Parole Board assessment? That seems to be not only retrospection but punishing prisoners for what others have done while they are inside The key point is that most of those we sentence for terrorist offences will eventually be released, so we have to deal with the risks. We need more resources to go into deradicalisation programmes in prisons, using any available expertise from other countries which have also been on this path. We need far more staff in our prisons, trained to deal with these prisoners. I do not think many people in the prison system would recognise the rosy picture tucked away in the Statement of life in our prisons. They house far more prisoners than they are built or staffed to hold, mainly because of longer sentences for a range of non-terrorist offences, which make prisons virtually unmanageable. We need rigorous management of terrorist prisoners, who all too often become members of a radical subculture in prison, which provides recruitment and training for terrorism and inspires the worst kind of fanaticism. When these prisoners are released, we need to be sure that they are supervised by properly financed probation services, police monitoring and, where justified, close surveillance and the involvement of the security services. We look forward to the Jonathan Hall review of multiagency co-operation, which is essential to dealing with this problem Finally, this House will want to look carefully at the legislation referred to in the Statement, because it touches on some important civil liberties issues. We must not let the terrorists destroy liberties which we all prize.