Counter-Terrorism and Sentencing Bill — House of Commons, 2020-06-09
Topic: Law and Crime
Yvette Cooper (Labour, Centre-left): It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) , and he is right: this has been a thoughtful debate, often in a cross-party spirit Terrorists want to destroy our way of life, divide our communities and undermine our democracy and our values, and we can never let them succeed. We rightly pay tribute across the House to those on the frontline, fighting terrorism, preventing and tackling attacks, in our police forces and security services, those in local government and communities who work so hard on prevention, and those in faith groups and our prisons. We remember, too, those who have lost their lives or who have lost loved ones to appalling terror attacks We face threats not just from Islamist extremism and terrorism, but from far-right extremism and terrorism, where the threats have grown in recent years. We have to always be vigilant, to ensure that those extremists and terrorists can never succeed in dividing our communities and undermining the democratic values for which we have fought for so long Many of the challenges relating to this legislation are the same ones that we have addressed and dealt with for many years—how to deal with people who have such warped ideology that they are determined to wreak huge destruction, including killing children; how to deal with people who have become so dangerously radicalised that they may be hard to address through traditional criminal justice system measures; and how to ensure that while we protect our national security, we also protect our democratic values and our freedoms and sustain justice, the rule of law and community cohesion. To do so, we need strong powers to tackle terrorism but also strong safeguards and strong checks and balances I want to talk specifically about some of the Home Office measures in the Bill, particularly around TPIMs and the Prevent programme. TPIMs came in after control orders, which were introduced to deal with difficult situations where perhaps the evidence relating to dangerous terrorist suspects depended on intelligence that could not be dealt with in the same way through the courts. There were similar approaches in cases where someone had become so dangerous and still proved dangerous even after their sentence had been served. Those were very difficult circumstances that only applied to a minority of cases Control orders were not perfect, and they were applied in those limited circumstances. Long-standing Members will know that I have spent almost a decade arguing with the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) about the decision made in 2011 to end control orders and replace them with TPIMs, rather than simply amending control orders to deal with some of the areas that needed improving. I thought it was wrong to make the decision to downgrade some of the powers in the TPIMs that were introduced. It is worth briefly addressing why, because it has an impact on the decisions that Ministers are making today First, I thought it was wrong to remove the ability to relocate dangerous terror suspects and to remove any possibility of doing so, to remove them from dangerous networks. The consequence was that two people who were on TPIMs managed to abscond—something that had not happened in relocated cases. The Government’s independent reviewer, Lord Anderson, recommended that relocation be reintroduced, which eventually happened in 2015 My second concern was about preventing the ability to constrain some communications for dangerous terror suspects. Again, many of those measures have been changed since, because the Government have recognised that some restrictions need to be in place for online or phone communications where there is significant evidence that someone poses a danger to the public My third concern was about the two-year limit set for TPIMs. Control orders were set for a year but could be renewed. TPIMs were fixed at two years. I raised questions in 2011 about what that would mean for the small number of people who might still be extremely dangerous after two years and what provisions would be in place to ensure that the public were protected. Again, Ministers have now recognised that issue and are changing it back In many ways, we have had an unnecessary 10 years of administrative going round in circles and changing the burdens on the Security Service and police forces, when we could have made more sensible amendments at the beginning to address those issues. It would be interesting to know whether Ministers now recognise that those changes were wrong and that we should not have made them in the first place.