Figen Murray OBE and Brendan Cox gave evidence.

I welcome our first witnesses this morning. The Committee and I are delighted that you are our first witnesses and I congratulate you on all your efforts in relation to the Bill. I will be grateful if you could introduce yourselves.

Figen Murray:

My name is Figen Murray. I am the mother of Martyn Hett.

Brendan Cox:

My name is Brendan Cox. I am one of the co-founders of Survivors Against Terror and have worked with Figen on Martyn’s law.

Before calling the first Member to ask a question, I remind all Members that questions should be limited to matters within the scope of the Bill. We must stick to the timings in the programme motion that the Committee has agreed. This panel will have until 10 am, and I call the Minister to ask the first questions.

Q I extend a warm welcome to both witnesses, and I offer you the Committee’s thanks for your evidence this morning. I also take the opportunity to reiterate the tributes that I paid to you both on Second Reading. Your work has been incredibly impressive and inspiring and I know that the whole Committee and the wider House are hugely grateful for it. May I begin at the beginning and ask you both to say why you think we need this legislation and what its impact will be?

Figen Murray:

I have taken the liberty of writing something down that I would like to read out, please, if that is okay. I hope that will address some of that.

I begin by thanking absolutely every person who has had any involvement in bringing Martyn’s law to this point. It has been a long five and a half years since the campaign started, and the kindness and support people have extended to us have been quite incredible.

As I sat in Parliament on 14 October for Second Reading, I realised that the relatively long journey that still lies ahead—given all the different steps the legislation must still undergo—will not be an easy one. On Second Reading, my name was mentioned many times and many lovely words were said, but I need people to understand that I would not have progressed much without my co-campaigners, the campaign team, and the incredible support of my husband and my remaining children.

Seven and a half years ago, our life as a family was destroyed forever. I want you to note the word “forever”, as there is no coming back from this. As a family, we are damaged goods. The day Martyn died, something died inside all of us. Do not get me wrong: as a family, we are very close. Individually, however, we all carry our separate emotional scars that are now an integral part of each of us. That will be the case for every family anywhere in the world who has been hit hard by terrorism. Our numbers are growing, sadly. Outwardly, I function at a high level day in, day out, but make no mistake that my heart is in shreds—yet it is my broken heart that drives me to try to stop others from ever having to feel this way.

Coming back to Second Reading, I was buoyed that every party said that they supported the Bill. If security cannot unite us, what can? I welcome the all-party support. On Second Reading, I also heard some concerns about getting the balance right and keeping the Bill proportionate. I agree with that. Right from the start, we said that one size does not fit all, and that the Bill needs to be proportionate. It has never been intended to be burdensome.

My worry is that the increase in the capacity threshold from 100 in the draft Bill to 200 now risks getting the balance wrong. It excludes too many venues. The cost to businesses for Martyn’s law is a drop in the ocean compared with the €43 billion that the Rand Corporation estimated that terrorism cost the UK between 2004 and 2016, or even the £100,000 lost by Mr Fred Foster, a market trader at Borough market, during the attack in 2017.

However, we need to be clear that the risk from terrorism is real. Our terrorism threat level stands at “substantial”, meaning that an attack is likely. Although there have not been any successful terror attacks, it is easy to let complacency creep in. We must not forget that attack methodologies have now changed. People get radicalised and go out an use vehicles, knives, and home-made IEDs—improvised explosive devices—to kill others.

There are currently about 800 active investigations and about 2,500 subjects of interest who are being watched by the authorities as they are linked to terrorism investigations—the aforementioned 800—but there are a further 30,000 individuals who have expressed extreme views that could lead to them committing acts of terrorism. Those figures have not changed over recent years. The geopolitical situation, sadly, also means that extremists exploit the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza to recruit more people to follow their ideology. There is no sign of those figures reducing in the near future.

The director general of MI5, Ken McCallum, has also recently spoken about 43 near misses since 2017. Those are 43 planned attacks that were stopped just in time. Everyone in this room surely must appreciate that sooner or later an attack will not be stopped in time and people will yet again die or be injured or traumatised. There is no room for complacency. The threat is out there and it is real. Terrorists do not care who they kill. They aim to kill, shock and gain notoriety.

We have had attacks such as a planned knife attack on an LGBT community in Cumbria, a knife attack against an MP inside a church hall in Essex, a bomb outside Liverpool women’s hospital, another bomb at a hospital in Leeds, a knife attack in a park in Reading, a knife attack at a conference in London, a knife attack at a high street in London, a firebomb attack at an immigration centre in Dover, a letter bomb delivered to a Scottish university, a knife attack at a railway station in Manchester, and a vehicle attack at a mosque in London. If anyone thinks that where they live is too small or too rural to be targeted, they are wrong. Our experience in this country and around the world shows us that terrorists can strike anywhere.

A lot of venues are already busy preparing and implementing as much as they can. Manchester has trained over 2,500 people in free-of-charge face-to-face ACT training, and businesses and venues across Manchester are implementing the legislation as best as they can. Venues in Manchester are doing that voluntarily because the city was badly hit. People in Manchester understand the risk as they were directly affected, but we need this legislation on the statute books; without it, people will simply not take security seriously.

Security is often seen as low priority as people do not believe their venue is at risk from terrorism. A recent tabletop exercise in Manchester for the standard-tier venues resulted in most venues saying that the cost of implementing measures is either negligible or very low cost or effort, and that it enhanced customer experience as people felt safer.

At Second Reading, a few people worried about liability and the responsibility given to volunteers. Anybody who already has any responsibility for organising or managing community spaces and events already has liabilities under civil law. Martyn’s law will not create additional liabilities—they exist already. What Martyn’s law is more likely to do is to help communities know that they are discharging those responsibilities properly. Volunteers in various venues across the country already voluntarily take on responsibility for fire safety or health and safety, and this would be simply a small add-on. Martyn’s law is asking people at the standard tier to understand how to lock down, how to evacuate, how to invacuate or how to communicate with others. It is as simple as that on the standard tier.

Another concern was around churches and schools. Our children have the right to be protected from harm. Most schools already had lockdown procedures in place, anyway, long before Martyn’s law became a topic. Places of worship are places where people of all faiths should be able to worship freely and without fear. They need to be protected. We have seen attacks on places of worship in countries such as Sri Lanka, New Zealand—in Christchurch—and France. Since the Gaza conflict a lot of synagogues are currently on high alert as the threat is understood.

To sum up, Martyn’s law will save lives. Terrorism is here to stay. The public have a right to be kept as safe as possible when they are out and about enjoying the freedom our country offers. Martyn, Saffie, Nell, Sorrell, Eilidh, Megan, Olivia, Georgina, Courtney, Philip, Kelly, Elaine, Alison, Lisa, Michelle, Wendy, Jane, John, Angelika and Marcin, Chloe and Liam were all out enjoying a great evening that night and had every right to make it safely back home. I absolutely believe that had Martyn’s law been firmly established, they would still be alive now. Please consider what is the right thing to do. I will finish by saying once again that it is time to get this done. Thank you for listening.

Brendan Cox:

I would add a couple of things to that; Figen has set it out incredibly powerfully.

As I mentioned in my introduction, I am part of something called Survivors Against Terror, which is a network of about 300 survivors of terror attacks: people that have been bereaved like myself and Figen and people who have themselves been injured in attacks. What draws that network together is a desire to reduce the likelihood of future terror attacks and to reduce the harm that they do. We do that by campaigning for the rights of families to things such as mental health support and compensation, by educating the public on the role they can play in the fight against terrorism, and by campaigning for effective laws that make terror attacks less likely in the future. That is how Figen and I first started working together, right at the start of this campaign.

I got involved for two reasons. First, frankly, I was inspired by Figen and her determination to make something good come out of something that was absolutely horrific, and to make sure that no other family unnecessarily goes through what her and her family have, but also, fundamentally, because the methodology of terrorism has changed, as Figen mentioned. The age of very complex attacks, often directed by people from outside the country and involving the need to assemble a device or to work out how detonators work, gave our security services lots of opportunities to intervene and disrupt terrorism plots. We are now in an age in which people are just using knives or cars, and the way in which we respond to that terror threat has not caught up.

It is impossible for our security services to keep our country safe with this new distributed methodology. We therefore have to have much more of a partnership approach: how can we all play a little role in making each other safer? I think this comes from our experience, but as the network of survivors supporting Figen and her campaign we do not want anybody’s sympathy, we want to make people safer so that these things and the impact they have had on our lives do not happen to anyone else. There is nobody more driven in wanting to defeat terrorism than those who have been directly affected by it.

There are two ways in which terrorists can win. One is by killing and maiming people. The other is by disrupting our way of life—making us live in fear and changing our way of engaging with each other. That is why, right from the start, proportionality has been central to our thinking. We do not want this to change our way of life. We do not want terrorists to win, either by injuring people or by changing our way of life, and that is why right at the heart of this proposal, from the beginning, has been proportionality. We want everybody to be empowered to play a small role in making us all safer. We do not want airport-style security outside village halls, as some of the papers might suggest we want.

The final thing I would say is that nobody wants to have a law named after their child. What we do want to do is to make sure no-one unnecessarily goes through what Figen and her family has. We want to make sure that there is a legislative response to the clamour of action that you have had in every inquiry post-2017, whether into the Manchester attacks or into the London attacks, to say that this is a loophole that has to be closed and now is the moment to close it.

Shadow Minister, do you have any questions?

I have had the great privilege of meeting Figen and Brendan over many months on this, so I have no questions.

I reiterate your comments, Dame Siobhain, about the admiration we all hold for Figen and Brendan and for the campaigning that they have done. Figen is a constituent of mine and I know we are all very proud of her in Macclesfield. May I ask you, Figen, what you think is the most important element of this BillQ ?

Figen Murray:

I think it is that as many places as possible are covered. We as a campaign team are concerned about the threshold, if I am honest. I live in a small town —more like a village—and with the original 100 threshold, quite a few of the restaurants as well as the little theatre we have and the pubs would have been covered under the law. With the change in the threshold, my little town is now not coming into scope at all and is completely not secure under Martyn’s law. It concerns me. The change from the 100 threshold to 200 will exclude about 100,000 premises. It feels like quite a lot now no longer need to be within that scope. It worries me.

Thank you both for coming; I echo the words of everyone else this morning so far. Are Q there any recommendations from the Manchester Arena inquiry that this Bill would not address?

Figen Murray:

The Manchester Arena inquiry obviously had Martyn’s law as one of its recommendations. If I remember rightly, Sir John’s words were that it is needed as a matter of urgency. I think he referred to training, and he also recommended—which is certainly not covered in Martyn’s law under the standard tier—that people have lifesaving training. That is not for debate in Martyn’s law at the moment. But certainly the ACT training was part of the recommendation.

Brendan Cox:

To add to that, the other thing that has been amazing—I think you are hearing from Mayor Andy Burnham later—has been the extent to which Manchester has already started to operationalise some of this, so when we are having the debates about proportionality, we can consider some of the real experiences of businesses that are already implementing this. It is worth really digging into that conversation, because what it shows is that lots of businesses that fall below the threshold are voluntarily taking part in the training and starting to implement Martyn’s law, because they know what it gives them. Who does not want their venue to be safer from terror attacks? It is something that organisations in general want to do, and that is why we have been seeing the adoption of this ahead of the legislation being published, even by venues that will not be covered by the capacity legislation.

Can I ask a bit more about the reaction of organisations that do fall in scope? Can you tell us a bit about what their experience has been, any teething problems that they have had and how they have adapted in Manchester as they have implemented itQ ?

Figen Murray:

We had in Manchester a tabletop exercise that Nick Aldworth and I were allowed to witness. They invited us in and they gave us the results of that tabletop exercise. There were medium-sized businesses, small businesses, and venues and businesses even under the scope, and the feedback was that implementing Martyn’s law would actually be either no-cost or low-cost and that it would enhance, in a lot of cases, customer experience, because people would feel safer. The most onerous thing, in some people’s opinion, was to ask their staff to do the 45-minute, free-of-charge ACT e-learning training. Basically, they had to pay one hour of staff wages, but on the whole, they felt it was good and the staff felt better having that knowledge, because they felt better equipped to deal with a crisis.

In fact, some of the venues in Manchester were also saying they do regular real-life practice of lockdowns, for instance. For some reason, Manchester has really embraced it. A few years ago, I got called into a council meeting and they basically said, “We want to support you. What can we do?” I just looked at them and said, “Don’t wait for the legislation. Just do it anyway.” And Manchester did. They worked together with counter-terrorism police and put on the free-of-charge, once-a-month, three-hour, face-to-face ACT training. The sessions are always oversubscribed; they are very well attended.

Brendan Cox:

I think that the fact that it has been taken up so strongly belies some of the idea that this is a huge burden on businesses. Of course, with any methodology like this, you can come up with a costing for how much the opportunity cost of doing x, y or z is. You have the big public campaigns around “See it, say it, sorted.” Of course, there is a cost with that. You could measure that cost through the amount you spend on it, the opportunity cost of the things that people could be doing while they are listening to it, the distraction cost—there is a whole way in which you could come up with a very big figure, but the reality is that is a proportionate response to what is a very substantial threat when it happens. As Figen mentioned, our threat is substantial at the moment, and that is therefore the proportionate response that we are trying to come up with.

In the conversations on and implementation of this in Manchester, one of the reactions we got, which was a broader reaction from the public as a whole, was, “Doesn’t this already exist?” The public expect that public venues would have an obligation to keep you safe. You have an obligation on the temperature that you need to keep food at, the number of toilets that you have and to fill in your tax return, but you do not have any obligation to keep your often paying customers safe from a very substantial threat, which is judged to be substantial by the Government. That is a massive loophole, and that is what this Bill helps to fill.

Thank you.

There are no further questions, so I thank both witnesses for their contributions this morning. We will move on to our next guest, who is Andy Burnham.