Prevention and Suppression of Terrorism

My hon. Friend makes a good point and, indeed, I had a list of questions that I was going to ask the Minister in order to seek clarification, of which his was one. My understanding is that the number of occasions when it has been necessary to go to 28 days, in the context of the total number of people detained, is very few. The Minister will doubtless be able to help us on that in his winding-up speech, and I have a list of questions for him. Anecdotally, it has been suggested to me that, although the police found it useful to go to the 28-day limit, it was not strictly necessary to do so because their investigations and inquiries had been effectively completed within the preceding 24 or 48-hour period. The Minister’s information on that will certainly be valuable. I would like to make one other point. We compare ourselves, rightly, with other common law jurisdictions. In the context of current events, we can read a great deal about what is happening in Australia, which appears to be taking some important steps to apprehend suspected terrorists. I understand that in Australia the outer limit of detention remains at 14 days—the Minister may be able to confirm that—which was achieved only after a rigorous debate in which many people suggested that 14 days was already a long time. The Minister will correct me if I am wrong, but in the United States, which is seen as a country that is pretty draconian in dealing with terrorism, 10 days is the maximum period for which a person can be detained. We have to compare such figures because these are common law jurisdictions operating under many of the same handicaps for the state, or at least protection for the detained person, and it is worth bearing in mind that they have felt able to confine themselves to those periods, even though when we first debated this matter the police and the Minister made a persuasive case for going beyond 14 days, however reluctant I was to do so and however much I might wish to return to the 14-day figure if possible in the future. I turn to the questions that I feel it useful to raise before the order is renewed. First, it would be useful to know how the provision is working in practice—how many times has it had to be used? Linked to that, I would be pleased if the Minister would tell the House how any detention beyond 14 days has operated in practice. Perhaps I can just flag up some of the areas that are of interest to me, which might be of interest to the House. As a result of what we did, we asked the Government to introduce a completely new set of Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 rules. It is pretty obvious that rules designed to cover the detention of a person for what is usually 24 or 48 hours are not suitable when someone is in custody for a 21-day period. Will the Minister help the House on the question of how frequently individuals have been transferred to prison from police cells during the period of detention, and on how the system has operated with regard to bringing them back to police stations for further interview? I am concerned that code H, which is the new code brought in to cover terrorist cases, still allows—at least in theory—for a person to be questioned for hour after hour over a period that could extend to 28 days. I do not think that that has happened in practice, but I am sure that the Minister will agree that having a code that allows questioning to take place almost incessantly over a 24-hour period, apart from an eight hour break for rest, is not really suitable for someone being detained for a long time. Is there not a danger, which we flagged up previously, that any statement made in that period might be challenged at a subsequent trial because of the degree not of coercion, but of sheer drudgery and the stressful experience of frequent questioning? I would be grateful for the Minister’s comments on that if he has any information that he can give the House.