£8m bill as costs soar of terror controls

The Government has run up a legal bill of more than £8m trying to maintain its controversial control order regime, it was revealed yesterday.

Details of the costs were released by the Home Office after it suffered a series of defeats in the courts by terror suspects who claimed the detention arrangements breached their human rights.

But Home Secretary Alan Johnson insisted the system remained an "important tool" to protect the public from terrorism.

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And, in a separate report, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, Lord Carlile, said that abandoning the regime entirely would have a "damaging effect on national security".

Information about spending on control orders was disclosed by the department in a memo to the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee assessing their effectiveness.

It said the system had cost the Home Office some 10.8m between April 2006 and August 2009. This included staff and administrative costs as well as legal expenses.

The memo went on: "The extensive internal and judicial scrutiny relating to control orders to ensure that they remain fair and justified, including the automatic review of all control orders by the High Court and the ongoing litigation on the control order regime, means that there are inevitably significant legal costs associated with the process (over 8m of the 10.8m total)."

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Control orders were introduced in 2005 after it was ruled that fanatics could no longer be held in prison without charge.

Originally, the orders were imposed on suspects without giving them the right to know any of the evidence held against them by the police and security services.

However, last June the Law Lords ruled that was unfair, leading Mr Johnson to revoke the orders against two unnamed men in order to avoid disclosing secret intelligence.

Earlier this month the High Court went further and decided that orders must be quashed retrospectively.