Safety of Scientists

Mr. Key : The hon. Gentleman can be sure that they will not be voting Labour at the next election.

I shall dwell on two aspects of our report. The first relates to paragraphs 180 to 182, the section is on "Planning and exercises". In it, we invite the Government to release more information to the public and to ensure that lessons learned are disseminated throughout Government. We also press for more complex, larger-scale exercises. The hon. Member for Norwich, North (Dr. Gibson) commented on the Home Office's extraordinary ability to engage in the incident that occurred this morning in Parliament square, in preparation for this debate. I, too, observed what happened from Portcullis House, and I was impressed. I compliment the three emergency services directly involved and the others who were involved behind the scenes. After watching for about half an hour, it became clear that the response was well organised, the personnel were well trained, and the procedures and clear-up were efficient. I am sure that the incident was enormously inconvenient to thousands of people throughout the capital, but there could not have been a better demonstration of the progress that has been made in this country in preparing for such incidents.

When I returned to my office, one of the first things that I did was to get on to my computer and look up London Prepared, the website established by the London emergency services. On it, I saw exactly why I was right to judge that the services had been well trained and prepared for incidents such as today's. I looked at a few more websites to see whether anything had changed since last I checked them, and I am delighted to say that a lot had changed and that they had all been updated. The terrorism pages on the Home Office website are extremely informative, as is www.ukresilience.info. The Health Protection Agency website is especially helpful: it is designed to help GPs and anyone else, including ordinary families, to understand what is going on and what they should do if they are worried or if something happens. A lot of people will be checking such websites at this time of heightened concern about terrorism. Those websites were good, but hon. Members will not be surprised to hear me say that the best one was the Wiltshire police website. It is the only website of its sort that I have seen. There are links from the Home Office, Health Protection Agency, UK Resilience and other websites to its major incident planning pages, which are a good example of what can be achieved in terms of co-ordination at a local level. I commend them strongly.

When the Minister gave evidence to the Select Committee, I asked her about some of the exercises that were taking place. I was delighted by the outcome of the exercise in London at Bank station, which obviously taught a lot of people a great deal, but I recalled the Minister saying that a lot of desktop exercises were taking place as well, so I checked them out. From the Health Protection Agency website pages on the emergency response division exercise programme, I learned that there have been five recent exercises. There was Red Scar I, a smallpox exercise on 24 March last year in Oxford; Exercise Shipshape, a SARS exercise on 6 June last year in Bristol; Red Scar II, another smallpox exercise on 7 July last year in Leeds; Green Goblin, a chlorine gas terrorist attack exercise on 10 October last year in Peterborough; and East Wind, a dirty bomb terrorist attack exercise on 23 January this year in Cambridge. I delved a little deeper and discovered that Green Goblin involved syndicates from the local and regional eastern and east midlands areas, and the HPA national area. The key action points that emerged from the exercise were that there should be a formal joint health advisory cell training exercise involving health training with the police; a review of major incident plans to include the CBRN element; an identification of alternatives in the event of mobile phone and BT networks going down, and so on.

There was considerable detail, but that was only a tabletop exercise. That is the problem that we have to come to terms with. It entails changing our attitude towards secrecy, taking the British public into the Government's confidence, and having full-scale exercises, like the London exercise at Bank tube station. Such exercises should be extended to cover not just chemical threat, which is comparatively easy to deal with because it is about containment, but biological, radiological or nuclear threat. I found a contrasting example by going to the US Department of Homeland Security website and seeing the announcement on 1 March of the deployment of the national incident management system—NIMS—which went into enormous detail. We should not be surprised, given the immense resource that US Administration has put into it, that the amount of planning, preparation and detail on that website is very impressive. We in this country should move forward more swiftly in that sort of area. Much of it depends on training and much training has been done. The Home Office is right to have concentrated on that.

The nuclear, biological and chemical centre at Winterbourne Gunner in my constituency used to be the Army's exclusively. The site is now shared with the police NBCR centre, where many thousands of policemen and women from every constabulary in the United Kingdom have now trained. As an aside, Mr. Deputy Speaker, I was interested to discover that all journalists going in theatre where the military are active now have a briefing from the defence NBC centre at Winterbourne Gunner, which is no doubt why we saw more responsible journalism during Operation Telic than we saw a decade ago. To return to my theme, tabletop exercises are all very well, but what people are doing in Peterborough, Leeds or Cambridge might not filter through to Bristol, Plymouth or Southampton. I ask the Minister to carry out more exercises—we need more effort and expenditure in that regard.

The second major area that I with to explore arises from evidence given to the Committee on 2 April 2003—question 207, in particular, which was put by the hon. Member for Bolton, South-East (Dr. Iddon). He asked Dr. Wright of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry about concerns for the safety and security of sites. Dr Wright replied that there was great concern about animal rights extremists, both on site and elsewhere. That must be a concern for British industry, and for all the people who work at such sites. I dare say, Mr. Deputy Speaker, that you noticed an item on BBC News Online on 10 March, repeated on the media generally, about scientists' neighbours being targeted. The report said:

"Scientists are being targeted by animal rights activists the University of Nottingham says."

It described how letters were being sent to scientists' neighbours, which was placing undue pressure on those communities. We are familiar with the problem—the story of Huntingdon Life Sciences comes to mind. The day before yesterday, the Secretary of State for Health made an announcement in the House about developments in respect of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and blood donations. As it happens, some of the work on blood donations has been done by scientists who also work on vaccines and the protection of military and civilian populations. To protect people, those scientists need to conduct trials on some animals. I learnt only yesterday that, as a result of that work, a family in my constituency is about to be harassed by animal rights activists because the be protected and for them to protect their staff. That cannot be done now under injunctions obtained under the Protection from Harassment Act 1997. Secondly, a special Act would provide the courts with powers to issue restraining orders against those with a proven track record of criminal or intimidatory behaviour. Thirdly, it would make illegal so-called home visits that have the sole intent of intimidating families. It is terribly important to prevent such behaviour, because it is contrary to article 8 in schedule 1 of the Human Rights Act 1998, which states the right to secure and peaceful private and family life. That is impossible if people are picketing one's front door on mothering Sunday. Finally, such legislation would provide a three-strikes-and-you're-out clause for repeat offenders. At the moment, activists say time and again that what they do on one occasion does not add up to a row of beans, but it sure amounts to a row of beans if all the beans are counted.

The time has come for us to grasp the nettle. A number of interested parties are talking to the Department of Health—I am thinking particularly of thousands of my constituents who work in this field, at Porton Down and elsewhere. They want to know that the Home Office is actively engaged with the issue, because if we cannot encourage scientists to undertake such work, two things will happen. First, the work will simply be done elsewhere, probably in the United States, and we will lose an important part of our science base in this country. Secondly, we will all be losers because we will be less safe. We will not be protected by our scientists in the way that our citizens should be able to expect from the Government. We should do what our citizens who are scientists and researchers—in my case, my constituents—expect us to do to protect them, for the sake of our nation's security. man is the owner and managing director of a very small business that provides mice. His house is to be picketed on mothering Sunday, and he and his wife will have to go, or stay and be intimidated. Such harassment is outrageous, and I do not believe that it earns anyone any friends.

What do we do about it? Is it true that there is adequate legislation to protect individual households? In the United States, there is federal and state legislation on the issue. The federal legislation, for which the reference number is HR 3448, is the Public Health

Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act 2002, section 336 of which is entitled "Animal enterprise terrorism penalties". That legislation is applicable throughout the US. I believe that, had similar legislation been applicable in this country, what happened to Huntingdon Life Sciences and the companies serving it and people working for it would not have occurred. State legislation is pending in Missouri in the form of Senate Bill No. 657 of 27 February 2003. Texas has new section 28.09 of the penal code, entitled "Animal Rights and Ecological Terrorism", which is about to be enacted. New York state has Bill A04884. There are other examples—state legislatures are taking the issue very seriously.

In this country, there has been a great deal of argument about whether it would be practical to protect civilian work forces, whether at military or civilian establishments. The Government amended the Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001, section 42 of which gives police the power of direction to stop the harassment of a person in his home, section 43 deals with malicious communications—telephone calls in the middle of the night and so on—and section 44 deals with collective harassment. However, I spoke to the police today about the case that I described, and I learned that they are diffident about using such provisions. There is not much experience of using them, and the police are not very confident that the amendments that the Government made to that Act will work. We shall see.

Bob Spink : Does my hon. Friend think that one solution might be to extend the Protection from Harassment Act 1997? That Act protects individuals, but offers no protection to corporate bodies, so it could not be used to protect Huntingdon Life Sciences, for instance. It should have been able to be used. Such an extension would be a good way to make progress, and I believe that the industry agrees.

Mr. Key : Yes, my hon. Friend makes a very practical suggestion, for which I am grateful. However, I think that it will run up against a problem that has been identified by a number of concerned groups. Obviously, the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry is concerned, but so are the Research Defence Society, the Biosciences Federation, the trade union Amicus, and others. They have been working for some time on a draft Bill, which they call the Scientific Procedures on Animals (Public Order, etc.) Bill. It is pretty wide. First, it defines harassment, which relates to the family in my constituency who will have such a horrible weekend. The Bill provides that harassment is, in certain circumstances to do with animal research, illegal and talks about how the measures would work. Clause 5 relates to the conduct of putting people in fear of violence, clause 6 is about police direction to stop the harassment of a person in his home and clause 7 relates to harassment of a person in his home. That is all entirely practical.

The Home Office argues that there would be a duplication of existing legislation, but I am not sure that that is a strong argument. There are plenty of examples of apparent duplication, such as football hooliganism legislation. It was argued for years that there was no need to bother with specific legislation because football hooliganism was already covered by public order legislation. However, that position did not stand and legislation was introduced that was effective because it was specific to the case. We need legislation, and there is no problem with duplication, because we need to facilitate the coherent approach that is sought by the police. I say "sought" because the police would do more to protect citizens if they could.

There are four arguments in favour of passing such legislation. First, it would allow organisations such as universities or companies that are regulated by the Government to