Terrorism Bill

My conversations with the police have been in order to seek evidence to support any case. I will tell the hon. Gentleman as much as I can about the Privy Council briefing, which was informative, inasmuch as it demonstrated that there was no substantive case for 90 days. The suspect who ran off to Algeria was released after two days. It was intimated that the evidence material to that case was found after a few weeks, not after 90 days. On the decryption of hard disk data, we suggested using the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, which puts a four-year sentence on withholding decryption codes. We suggested increasing that sentence, and that does now appear in the Bill. Then the police said, ““If we charge them, we can’t interview them””, so we raised the possibility of interview after charge. All those things may be incursions on civil liberties, but they are much smaller incursions than those in the Bill. What worried me in my discussions with all the authorities—counter-terrorism authorities, agencies, police, the Home Office—was that they were not looking for the least harmful outcome: they were looking for a simple headline outcome. I was very unhappy about that, and I told the Home Secretary so.