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Lord Quirk: My Lords, to return to Downview prison, warts and all, is it not the case that the prison has had a quite exceptionally good record in respect of education, training and rehabilitation? First, can the Minister therefore reassure the House that, when it is rerolled as a women's prison, that culture will be preserved and, indeed, enhanced for the benefit of its new occupants? Secondly, will the males being relocated have continuity in the educational provision that they have enjoyed at Downview?

Lord Rooker: My Lords, the noble Lord is absolutely right in his latter point. Downview was a category C training prison for men and it was extremely successful. It is true that we have disrupted the training programmes of some of the inmates. I understand that most, if not all, of the prisoners have been relocated to institutions of their choice and have been able to get their programmes under way. We want to run, if you like, a successful women's prison at Downview. It would be better if we did not have to have the prisons, but we must have them. We want Downview to be a successful institution, both for the convicted prisoners and for those on remand.

New management has been put into Downview to oversee the transition. It is not easy to effect a transfer. We have recently announced that Buckley Hall near

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Rochdale is also being rerolled to become a women's prison. We have to make available greater capacity, otherwise we shall end up with overcrowding in women's prisons, which would destroy all the programmes aimed at education and so forth that need be carried out in prison.

Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Bill

3.32 p.m.

Lord Rooker My Lords, I beg to move that the House do now again resolve itself into Committee on this Bill.

Moved, That the House do now again resolve itself into Committee.—(Lord Rooker.)

On Question, Motion agreed to.

House in Committee accordingly.

[The PRINCIPAL DEPUTY CHAIRMAN OF COMMITTEES (Lord Brabazon of Tara) in the Chair.]

Clause 21 [Suspected international terrorist: certification]:

Lord Corbett of Castle Vale moved Amendment No. 103A:

Page 10, line 38, leave out Xsuspects" and insert Xbelieves"

The noble Lord said: I am pleased to find my noble friend on the Front Bench in such a robust and realistic frame of mind. I hope that that will be reflected in his response when we come to the end of the debate on the amendment.

The amendment addresses a small but important point. Under Clause 21, foreign nationals suspected of being international terrorists can be imprisoned indefinitely on the basis of a judgment made by the Home Secretary. The Bar Council and the Criminal Bar Association have argued—I agree with them and I hope that the Committee will do so as well—that suspicion is a very low threshold indeed and forms an unsuitable basis for taking such an important decision.

Although the Government have amended the clause to include the test of reasonableness, no obvious good reason has been given as to why indefinite imprisonment may be exercised by the Home Secretary in one paragraph of the subsection on the basis of belief, while in the other it will be exercised on the basis of suspicion. It may be that the Government will argue that Xbelief" and Xsuspicion" are interchangeable and mean the same. Indeed, in Clause 25(2) and Clause 26(4) concerning appeals, both words are used one after the other, in both cases. That may be due to careless drafting, but if both words are said to have the same meaning, why are both being used? Logically, it would follow that if both words mean the same thing, only one word would need to be used. However, I do not believe that that is the case. I agree with the Bar Council that suspicion can be more lightly based than belief. I invite the Government to agree with me. I beg to move.

Lord Goodhart: Two of my noble friends and I have added our names to the amendment. We support it for

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the reasons given by the noble Lord, Lord Corbett. It is a point which has been pressed by the Criminal Bar Association and I must say that I believe that the association is right. It is possible to suspect that something is true without believing it to be true. Suspicion is the stage reached before arriving at belief. It is appropriate that the test here should be one of belief rather than suspicion.

Lord Rooker: I am grateful to my noble friend and to the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, for raising the issue. It gives the Government an opportunity to put on the record the fact that there is a difference between the two words used here.

If there were a reasonable belief that someone was an international terrorist, then under the terms of the Terrorism Act, the police already have powers. For that reason, the clause as drafted is designed to cover cases where insufficient admissible evidence can be brought forward that points to a person being a terrorist. Indeed, that is the point of the clause. Our aim throughout has been that our first priority would be to prosecute alleged terrorists; secondly, if we cannot prosecute them, to remove them; and thirdly, failing the opportunity, wherewithal and appropriate circumstances to remove such people, to detain them. Those are the three routes of action. If there was a reasonable belief, then we will have in place the powers to act. It may be that in the other clause the powers are used for the same purpose, but in this respect, I should say to my noble friend that it is not the same.

I hope that I may take the opportunity in this the first debate of the day to widen my response to the amendment a little, in the hope that it may help our discussions during the remainder of the day and possibly the night. Since the publication of the Bill, the Government have continued to review it. We are keen to listen to Parliament and accept that the Government do not always know best. As Members of the Committee know, we made some changes to the Bill just as it was leaving the other place, such as the five-year sunset clause for the detention powers contained in Clauses 21 and 23. Later today I shall move amendments to the Bill to narrow the definition of people having links to international terrorists. I refer to Amendments Nos. 107 and 110.

Perhaps I may share with the Committee two further possible ways to make improvements. One will be general to the Bill while the other will be specific to the issues that we are due to debate today. At a recent meeting held in the Moses Room, during which noble Lords from all parties and the Cross Benches gathered to question the Home Secretary, the noble Lord, Lord King of Bridgwater, put forward a suggestion for a procedure to consider the operation of the Act—as I shall refer to it—after it has passed through Parliament, in light of the shortened parliamentary time given to the process through to Royal Assent. We have given some initial thought to the noble Lord's suggestion, but we have made no decisions. I am not willing to announce any decisions and that is not the point here.

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We have already placed in the Bill a review of Clauses 21 to 23 to be undertaken by a reviewer, the noble Lord, Lord Carlile of Berriew. After 15 months he will review the legislation and make a report. After that, an annual review of the operation of Clauses 21 to 23 will take place. Due to the swift passage of the Bill through Parliament, we are thinking—I seek to share thoughts with Members of the Committee for consideration over the days to come—of introducing a procedure whereby, after a period, Parliament itself could review the operation of the whole Act.

It might be suitable to institute such a review at the point of the first statutory review of Clauses 21 to 23 to be undertaken by the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, following which he will carry out that review on an annual basis until the sunset point is reached. We do not have in place any mechanism, but given the sensitive nature of some areas of the Act, as it will become, there might be a case for a reasonable-sized group of Privy Counsellors drawn from both Houses to conduct a review during the period. It would report to the Home Secretary on the operation of the entire Act. We would seek a guarantee from the business managers of both Houses that that report would be debated in a full day's debate. Clearly it would be necessary for such a group, if it was formed, to have access to all the information they would need—hence the requirement that they should be Privy Counsellors. I leave that suggestion with Members of the Committee to mull over.

We do not see a need to put forward an amendment to the Bill because I believe that, if we were to take this route, a parliamentary Statement placed on the record in Hansard should be sufficient to operate that kind of external review. The external review is purely to take account, after a period and on a one-off basis—I say after 15 months because that would tie in with the review of the noble Lord, Lord Carlile—of the fast-tracking of the Bill through Parliament.

A more specific point that I wish to raise concerns the appeal timetable for a suspected international terrorist to have his or her detention reviewed by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission. We are firmly of the belief that six months is a reasonable period in the first instance. Under Clause 26(3) it is possible to have the detention reviewed at any time due to a change of circumstances, but we believe that, after the first six months review, the detention should be reviewed automatically at three-month intervals. We will therefore bring forward an amendment to that effect at a later stage.

I hope that the Committee will accept that we are prepared to listen and to change where we can and where we can keep the aims of the legislation in the direction that we want. In that spirit, I hope that we can proceed to consider the remainder of Clause 4 in the normal constructive way of the House.

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