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Mr. Straw: I, too, receive such letters, and I reply to them as best I can. If my hon. Friend wants one paragraph to use in replies to his constituents, I offer him this one. Again it comes from the speech made on 28 November 1974 by my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull, North (Mr. McNamara)--in support of the Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act 1974--and exactly picks up the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Workington (Mr. Campbell-Savours). He said:
- "I believe that we have a prime duty to defend the liberties of our constituents, but a Bill of Rights and a whole volume of liberties are of little value to someone who is 6 feet beneath the ground or someone whose body has been dismembered by a bomb."--[Official Report, 28 November 1974; Vol. 882, c. 699.]
That seems to express exactly the dilemma that we face. Of course we are concerned about civil liberties, but we are also concerned about the safety of the public.
Mr. Campbell-Savours:
I would have no trouble at all in including that paragraph in every response that I send to my constituents. The question is simply whether this Bill should go through today. This is not a case in which we are trying to delay the legislation or in which many of us disagree fundamentally with the legislation: we simply believe that there is a lack of opportunity to scrutinise it fully.
Scrutiny is not merely for the benefit of hon. Members; it is also for the benefit of people who study Hansard. There will no doubt be students in the future who want to consider what happened in the House of Commons when this Bill was passed, particularly if the Bill has a wider impact and affects groups other than those that the Home Secretary has in mind. People in the future might say that it was wrong for us simply to treat this legislation in an abbreviated procedural form because in doing so we denied the wider population the right to know what was in hon. Members' minds when they considered it.
If it is true that there are 20-odd amendments--
Mr. Tony Banks:
There are 23 amendments.
Mr. Campbell-Savours:
If there are 23 amendments which should have been considered, surely the House could have spent 24 hours considering them. I say that as someone who is, in principle, supportive of what is going through the House. I am not opposed to what Labour Front Benchers are doing, but I am worried that we shall stand accused at some future stage of not meeting the expectations of a civil libertarian lobby outside the House, which--if I may put it bluntly--expects a little more of my hon. Friends.
The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mr. Michael Howard):
I begin by thanking my right hon. Friend the Member for Honiton (Sir P. Emery) and my hon. Friends the Members for Spelthorne (Mr. Wilshire) and for Eltham (Mr. Bottomley) for their support for this timetable motion. I am grateful to the hon. Members for Dewsbury (Mrs. Taylor) and for Blackburn (Mr. Straw) for saying that they will not stand in the way of the Bill and for their confirmation that they will not vote against the timetable motion.
The right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mr. Beith) and some other Opposition Members suggested that we should proceed at a slower pace, and he indicated why he would oppose the motion. I accept that he would like more time to consider the Bill's provisions, but there is an urgent need for them.
In his remarks, the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed managed both to minimise and to exaggerate the nature of the provisions. He minimised them when he said that they are simply technical provisions and that the police already carry out the activities provided for by the
Bill. There may be some argument about that in relation to the two provisions for which there are currently common law powers, but those common law powers--the powers to impose a cordon and to impose parking restrictions--are uncertain. The point does not apply to this legislation because it does not apply to the other three extra powers contained in the Bill.
I believe that the right hon. Gentleman for Berwick-upon-Tweed was exaggerating the proposals' significance when he embarked on his comparison between them and the original Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Bill of 1974. I endorse the analysis made by the hon. Member for Blackburn on the size of that Bill as compared to the size of this Bill and his conclusion that such an analysis would reveal that more time was available for consideration of the provisions of this Bill than there was for that Bill.
There is, however, a further point that is of infinitely greater importance. The Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Bill of 1974 was genuinely breaking new ground and really did involve new matters of principle that had not previously been considered by the House. It was put before the House as a new response to an unprecedented threat, and the House had to consider it on that basis. These powers do not fall into anything like that category and there is no new question of principle raised by this Bill.
If we examine the power that has given rise to the greatest controversy--the power to stop and search pedestrians--it is to fill a lacuna in the law whereby the police have the power, when a senior police officer has designated a particular area for a particular time, to stop and search the occupant of a vehicle or to stop a pedestrian and to search his bag, but whereby they do not have the power to search a pedestrian's jacket pocket. As we all know, it is extremely easy to fit inside that jacket pocket a device that may be small but whose effect is immensely potent and could cause enormous damage. I have said that the power to search fills a lacuna, so I believe that it is impossible for any hon. Member in any part of the House to suggest that any real question of principle is involved in the provision of that power, which represents a modest extension.
Mr. Tony Banks:
My question might be more appropriate for Second Reading, but, in the event of that power being exercised and statistics being kept, can the Home Secretary tell me whether they will be kept on the basis of ethnic origin? Will we know the skin colour of the person who has been stopped?
Mr. Howard:
All the monitoring provisions that currently apply under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 will apply under the Bill. Monitoring, including ethnic monitoring, will take place, so I believe that the hon. Gentleman's concerns are wholly met.
Dr. Godman:
I have a number of concerns about the Bill, one of which is that, at first glance, I believe that the right hon. and learned Gentleman has offered us an incorrect interpretation of the role of the procurator fiscal in criminal investigations and proceedings. That needs to be looked at again.
Mr. Howard:
I confess that I venture into Scottish law with a good deal of trepidation. If the hon. Gentleman would care to provide us with more detail of his concerns, outside the Chamber if he likes, about the role of the procurator fiscal, I assure him that we will certainly look into the matter.
Mr. Andrew Hunter (Basingstoke):
My right hon. and learned Friend has stressed that no new principle is involved in clause 1 as it relates to section 13A of the Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act 1989. Does he also agree that the substance of clause 1 can be found in the Northern Ireland (Emergency Provisions) Act 1991 and that therefore its basic principle has been debated by the House every year since the 1991 Act came into being? That confirms my right hon. and learned Friend's argument that clause 1 will implement nothing new in principle.
Mr. Howard:
My hon. Friend is right. All the powers, save one, in the Bill have been in existence in Northern Ireland for some considerable time, so they are certainly not new in any sense to the United Kingdom.
Mr. Simon Hughes:
The Home Secretary is a lawyer and he knows as well as I do that one of the most controversial matters ever to come before the courts has been the detailed legislation on stop and search and related powers. They have been the subject of a great legal argument, much controversy and many legal appeals. Instead of spending six hours in total debating a Bill of several clauses, many of which contain many subsections, and many groups of amendments, what is the argument to stop the House of Commons of the United Kingdom from taking a further 12 hours or 18 hours, if that is the will of Parliament, to complete its considerations? What is the argument against us using the time between now and the recess to the full and sitting through the night, as we have done on many occasions in the past, to make sure that the legislation is properly scrutinised?
Mr. Howard:
That question was answered by my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House when he introduced the timetable motion: it is a question of balance. We want the powers in the Bill on the statute book as soon as possible. We believe that they have a part to play in the more effective prevention of terrorism and that they have the potential to save life. In those circumstances, I believe that it is incumbent upon the House to proceed with all due dispatch and to deal with the matter expeditiously, so that it can be considered in another place before the Easter recess, and so that the police can have those powers available to them.
6.14 pm
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