Contribution
My Lords, without making this a Second Reading debate, as we have discussed, I want to repeat the degree of scepticism that I expressed at Second Reading about the value of this Bill. Of course, the threat of terrorism is real; of course, it is important to deal with it by every possible means, but it is equally possible that this Bill will end up with a lot of bureaucracy, paperwork and assessment without doing anything to deal with the threat of terrorism whatever. However, it is the Bill that we have, and we need to do all that we can to make it workable and get the detail right. That is why I have tabled Amendment 5.
I can be quite brief, because this is a fairly simple concept and a core provision in the Bill—as to where premises are caught and affected by the standard duty. This threshold will determine the success or failure of the Bill; it is this threshold that will capture popular opinion about the Bill when it eventually comes into force, and it is this threshold that determines whether, if you are a volunteer or run a business of any kind, you can carry on as you did before, being prudent about the terrorist threat, or whether you have a new set of formal legal duties that you must pay attention to. As I said at Second Reading, when you make something law, you are telling people that they must pay attention to that above the purpose of their organisation. That is what making it law means.
This is where the Bill is going to bite. This is the area where volunteers may decide that they no longer want to continue in what they are doing. It may be the area where they give up. As the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, said, it may be the area where it takes away the fun, the point, the raison d’être of the activity from those who do it. Therefore, it is important to get the threshold right.
As I said at Second Reading, I accept that the Government have taken a step, raising the threshold from 100 to 200, which has significantly improved the Bill. However, my Amendment 5 would raise that threshold to 300. I have two points to explain why that higher threshold is worth considering.
First, I do not think that we have had a proper explanation yet of why 200 is the right number. The shadow Minister raised this question in Committee in the Commons. The responding Minister’s only explanation was that
“300 would significantly impact the outcomes of the Bill, and particularly what the standard tier seeks to achieve”.—[Official Report, Commons, Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Bill Committee, 31/10/24; col. 68.]
That is obvious, but why? We need a little more understanding of why it is 200 rather than 300 and why it is any particular figure other than the arbitrary seeking of a number. One Minister said something like that in the Commons: “We’ve got to decide a number, and this is that number”. However, it is such an important number that it deserves some proper thought.
Secondly, lots of activities are still caught by this 200 threshold. The impact assessment says that it is 154,000. That is down by nearly half from what it would have been at 100, but it is still a lot—that is one premise for one activity for every 450 people in the country. For a threshold of 200, that is quite a significant figure. An occasional capacity of 200 people is quite a small number of people. One in eight village halls are still caught by this threshold. The Music Venue Trust says that a sixth of its premises are caught between the 200 and 300 thresholds. These are not small numbers, but they are still relatively small activities. That is the point. We must try to set the threshold at a point where we are not capturing those who do not need to be caught by it.
Is the Minister confident that the threshold really must be so low? Can he give a clear explanation for why it has to be set at that level? Can he go beyond explaining that it is simply arbitrary, that it has to be set somewhere and that 200 is the right number—end of discussion? We need a little bit more debate than that and I hope that we might get it now.