Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)

My Lords, I associate myself the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, about counterterrorism security advisers. They are part of this defence mechanism; they certainly need to be better resourced and could do a great deal as a consequence. The points made by the noble Lord, Lord Udny-Lister, are extremely important and have great value; they reflect the comments that I made in my two reports on prevention of terrorism in London. A great deal can be done to design out different sorts of crime, or, as in this case, to make it more difficult for terrorists to act, or to make it easier to respond to a terrorist incident. I do not wish to prolong the discussion, because there is an issue as to whether this is the right legislation. Clearly, it needs to be considered in the context of the planning system, but I also take the point about that perhaps taking an inordinate amount of time, rather than trying to move this forward at this stage. If I may inject a slightly partisan point at this stage, I do recall, at a lower level, the issues around designing out crime. At one stage, a whole series of recommendations were in the building regulations to make crime more difficult—for example, making it more difficult for burglars to kick in doors. The previous Government dismantled all that, which was extremely unfortunate.