Terrorism (Detention and Human Rights)

As I said, as soon as possible, I hope. I do not have the whole timetable to hand, nor in my head, because we are coming to the end of the review and it will duly report to the Prime Minister. Were there to be a terrorism Bill in this Session, it would need to be sooner rather than later. One would have thought that the Government would take that legislative opportunity to declare whether intercept evidence should be available, and if so, whether changes to primary legislation were necessary. I accept the points made about some of the other elements in both reports. Some of them are nothing to do with legislation. I was interested, for instance, in the dialogue about examining magistrates, and on that I think that I am on the same side as the hon. Member for Hendon. Being in the middle of things, I do not understand the notion that the Government are rushing headlong, siren-led or otherwise, to a French administrative model. The hon. Member for Beaconsfield was, I think, entirely accurate in saying that the French see justice rooted in their own system, and my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon said the same. Given the extent of the difference in the substantive and historical legal base, the worst of all worlds is probably to graft a bit from one on to the other. The point made in my hon. Friend’s report about the growing and more proactive role of the Crown Prosecution Service in the prosecution of such cases was well made. Behind that, some of the other issues that we need to examine, even if the activity level stays as it is, touch on the capacity of the courts, the CPS and others on the criminal justice side. I take umbrage at the notion that the Government, the Association of Chief Police Officers or anyone else, in a terribly lazy fashion, wanted 90 days because of resources and the notion that if we were really serious, we would give all the available resources to the Service and it could do in 14 days what we have requested to be done on the cheap in 90 days. That is not the case. By 2008, as Dame Eliza has suggested, the service’s budget will have doubled. Hon. Members drew out elements about encryption, the international dimension and the seamless nature of the threat between the domestic and the international. Translation and other elements hinted at by Peter Clarke in August are involved. In some cases, the magnitude of things, the level of expertise and the capacity of that level of expertise that are involved are such that this is nothing to do with resources in the main. There are only so many Urdu or Farsi speaking cryptologists who can sit down to try to crack the code on a mobile phone, a computer or whatever else. Doubling the resources overnight will not create another pot of such expertise. The point made about resources is not well made, and I do not accept it. We are still examining all the issues raised about 28 days—I shall be as frank as that. I do not know where the Government will alight in terms of the review, but I do know that we have a right and duty to examine such an issue. We should do so in the broader context. We should consider it in the context of whether or not to allow intercept evidence and whether to enhance the capabilities and capacities of the prosecution and all sorts of other agencies who are party to this. We should seriously review the point about post-charge questioning. I was struck by the honesty of the report by my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon, which implied, at the very least, even if it was not explicit, an adverse inference from the exercising of the right to silence. I was also grateful for the comments made by the hon. Member for Beaconsfield. It must be the case; otherwise we would have post-charge questioning with nothing about the inference from silence and, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen suggested, terror suspects would say nothing and one would not be further forward in the process. We need to bite that proverbial bullet too. In the balance of civil liberties versus our security, some will say that any negative inference on the exercising of the right to silence is a step that they do not want to take. That is a perfectly logical view, but I was grateful that the report said there could be post-charge questioning in that context and looking in that regard.