Mark Rowe continues a short series of articles on Figen Murray’s campaign for a Martyn’s Law – in the jargon of the Home Office, a ‘Protect Duty’, a legal responsibility on premises to take steps to counter terrorism – by recapping on the political background that has prompted Figen to undertake the 190-mile walk from Manchester Arena – the scene of the May 22, 2017 suicide bomb that killed her son Martyn Hett, one of 22 – to Downing Street.
The political background is that in December 2022 the then Home Secretary Suella Braverman and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak โcommittedโ (in the PMโs words) โโฆ. To delivering this vital legislationโ. Since, the Home Office published a draft Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Bill that the Home Affairs Select Committee of MPs metaphorically tore apart as โnot fit for purposeโ. The Home Office then put out a second consultation (the first announced in spring 2020) which closed in March; the Home Office has to announce the results, and presumably re-write the draft to satisfy the MPsโ points, before it goes through Parliament.
At the recent security exhibition at the NEC the former senior counter-terror policeman and now Martyn’s Law advocate Nick Aldworth suggested that if the law doesnโt enter Parliament before July, it wonโt get passed (because, we can add, then come the summer holidays and a likely autumn general election; that the Conservatives will probably lose. As featured in the May print edition of Professional Security Magazine, Figen has a โPlan Bโ acknowledging that the Sunak regime will not bring in the law and that she must work with a Labour government; yet more meetings, putting the same points to new ministers and aides (although the same civil servants).
That the Conservatives have taken four years (so far) does beg the question of how โvitalโ the politicians believe the law is. The uncomfortable question is why it has taken so long, now that the Manchester Arena Inquiry has published its three volumes. Private security, the emergency services and the security services, that each had shortcomings forensically revealed by the Inquiry, know what they have to do (and a Martynโs Law will cover far from all of the bewilderingly many threads of work, thrown up by the Inquiry).
As featured in Professional Security over the last 18 months or so, numerous security managers โ at universities, at the 2022 Birmingham Commonwealth Games โ have acted on the Inquiry findings, in the case of the Games even before Games organisers had the Inquiry’s first report on security to hand; as if Martynโs Law were in place. Or, heads of security are at least anticipating the Protect Duty and (as responsible managers would in any function, when they can see a new law coming, that will affect their employer) advising on how and why to meet it.
Is the Home Office (and the PM in overall charge) simply not that competent (at tasks they are presumably well-paid to do, such as draft laws?). Or, were the December 2022 statements of Braverman and Sunak well-intentioned but they have other, more pressing tasks such as, ‘stop the boats’, which has prompted some commentators to ask if the Home Office has more than enough on its plate and should be split up – having been split up once to calve off the Ministry of Justice. However that did lead to a departmental split between courts and police, equally parts of the criminal justice ‘pipeline’. In other words, we can argue about the arrangements of government forever; meanwhile public policy wants carrying out. The Home Office does have a bad habit of saying it will do something to do with private security – such as in 2013, carry out licensing of private investigators – and then nothing.
Or, did Sunak and Braverman have no intention of doing what they said and at the time were they fobbing Figen Murray off and have been (although Braverman made way for current Home Secretary James Cleverley in November, who has shown every sign of prioritising illegal immigration) ever since.
