Prevention and Suppression of Terrorism

I agree. That is the point I made earlier when I was talking about the impact on families. The way the orders spill out into the wider community is completely disproportionate, because of the sense of injustice it creates. Last year, when we debated the continuation motion, my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Mr. Coaker)—now the Minister for Schools and Learners—promised to meet special advocates, as had his predecessor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Harrow, East (Mr. McNulty), before him. Neither of those meetings took place, so will my right hon. Friend the Minister for Policing, Crime and Counter-Terrorism meet the special advocates and listen to their concerns about the fairness of the process? Will he also involve the security services in the meeting so that we can try to reach consensus about what can be done to make the system fairer? My Committee recommended a forum for special advocates, the Government and the security services to discuss the issues of principle involved and see what can be done—not on specific cases, but to make the system better. Since the introduction of the control order regime in March 2005, my Committee has expressed serious reservations about renewal on all previous occasions—unless the Government were prepared to make the necessary changes to the system to render it compatible with human rights. We warned that without those changes, the use of control orders would continue to give rise to unnecessary breaches of individuals' rights to liberty and due process. Those warnings have been echoed internationally. Those many warnings have not been heeded, and as a result, the continued operation of the unreformed system has, as we feared, led to more unfairness in practice, more unjustifiable interference with people's liberty, more harm to people's mental health and to the lives of their families, even longer periods of indefinite restrictions for some individuals, more resentment in the communities affected by, or in fear of, control orders, more protracted litigation to which no end is in sight, more claims for compensation, ever-mounting costs to the public purse and untold damage to the United Kingdom's international reputation as a nation that prizes the value of fairness. For all those reasons, together with the serious reservations about the practical value of control orders in disrupting terrorism compared with other means of achieving the same end, my Committee has reached the clear view that the system of control orders is no longer sustainable. We believe that a heavy onus rests on the Government to explain to Parliament why alternatives, such as surveillance of the very small number of suspects currently subject to control orders and a more vigorous pursuit of the possibility of prosecution, are not now to be preferred. The system is unsustainable.