Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill — House of Lords, 2015-02-04
Topic: Education
David Hugh Alexander Hannay (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, this is a very welcome amendment that the Minister has moved, and I would like to thank him and his colleagues in the Government for having inserted these necessary provisions. The more you look at the Bill, as far as universities and colleges are concerned—I am not talking about passports and TPIMs and so on—the heart of it is the guidance and the threat hanging over universities of directives from the Secretary of State. That is what is really going to determine whether this is workable, and whether it is or is not counterproductive The fact is that the amendment of the noble Lord basically shoots our fox by saying that they are not going to tell us what they are going to do now, but they are going to come before both Houses with the guidance. This is welcome, even if it is perhaps not too ungracious to point out that I am aware that affirmative resolutions in both Houses will no doubt be whipped, and that we will have no possibility of amending them. Having said that, the debates we have had at Second Reading, in Committee and now on Report, will have shown Ministers that the guidance on which they consulted universities and others, ending last week, was really upsetting to everyone, and would have had appalling results both in practicality and in the chilling effect, and so on. I hope we shall never again be told that because UUK produced some guidance like that, it must be okay. It is not okay to make a statutory guidance that tells people that if they are going to go to a university—as I am to Oxford tomorrow—to address a seminar, they have to produce a script two weeks in advance. It just is not going to work. I hasten to say I have not got a script yet The point I am trying make, which I hope the Minister will take on board, is that I had rather hoped that he would give us a list of the things in the guidance on which they consulted which they already know they are going to drop. He did some of that in an earlier debate, and if he could bring himself to repeat some of those things it would be good to do so now. But the lesson to be learnt is that huge care must be taken with the guidance, because that will determine whether the Act provides the kind of strengthened Prevent which we would all like to see, or whether it will have what is known as blowback. That must be avoided. So I hope that the Minister will take away from this experience, painful though it may have been, the feeling that the guidance is the heart of it, and that an awful lot of care needs to be taken, because things were not very well done in the guidance which was consulted on As for our discussion a few minutes ago, I can see that the noble Lord is pretty desperate not to concede that there should be another formal consultation, and he has avoided doing that, but I honestly think that when Ministers have cleared their minds about what they want to put in the guidance, they will be extremely well advised to contact universities—not necessarily every one of them—to see whether they have got it about right in terms of both practicality and freedom of expression and academic freedom. If they do not do that, the risks of blowback are considerable I hope that the noble Lord will draw from this experience first, the feeling that we are grateful to him for tabling the amendment but, secondly, that it is still all to play for as to whether this works.