Written evidence to be reported to the House

Part of Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill – in a Public Bill Committee at 5:30 pm on 16 October 2007.

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Jan Berry: It depends on what type of premises we are talking about and where they are, but if they were in a residential area and were a substantial hall or something like that, depending on how many people were there, you would probably need in excess of 200 officers to close them down. It really depends on the nature of the premises. A couple of years ago, when we had one of the terror threats, there were lots of comments about how many police officers were either at the scene or in the vicinity. If we had literally to close off a whole area, 250 police officers would go nowhere, so we should not underestimate the resource implications. If you have to close an area or building down, you need a number of officers to protect people going in and prevent people going out. You need to have people to deal with every single person in there, so there is an audit trail of everything that takes place. When you are making these rules, these are not actions that we will take lightly, because we will need to ensure that we have got the resources to deal with them. Otherwise, we could make the situation worse by attempting to close down premises when we do not have the resources to deal with the implications of that.