The Government's security minister said today that he thought that judges, not politicians, should decide how long a terror suspect remained in custody.

Lord West of Spithead, formerly the First Sea Lord, said that there were "great attractions" to politicians giving up their power to set a maximum detention period for suspected terrorists.

"I have to say that I tend towards not wanting to see Parliament set exactly a longer limit," said Lord West.

"It is something that is still being debated, but it is something there are attractions to."

Who are the terror suspects?

Eight suspects have been held by anti-terror police investigating the failed car bomb attacks in Glasgow and London

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Background

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• Search for the thread linking bomb suspects

• Mobile phones may have led police to arrests

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The issue of how long a suspect can be held without charge has proved so politically controversial that in November 2005 it prompted Tony Blair's first defeat in the House of Commons, when government plans to extend the maximum limit to 90 days were thrown out amid a 49-strong Labour backbench rebellion.

Parliament voted instead to set the maximum time limit to 28 days.

Police however are pressing for that time limit to be extended, saying that it left detectives "up against the buffers" in a race against time to process the evidence in complex investigations.

Ken Jones, the head of the Association of Chief Police Officers, said yesterday that police want the power to hold suspects for longer because of the global scale of terror investigations and the need for early arrests to prevent potential atrocities.

Gordon Brown has indicated that he wants to reopen the issue in the autumn, though he is yet to commit himself to any specific period before charge.

Lord Carlile, the Government's independent reviewer of counter-terror laws, today dismissed the political debate over time limits as “completely sterile”, and said it would be better to give judges the power to monitor detention periods in individual cases.

He made clear that he expected only a handful of individuals to be held for more than two or three weeks under his proposals.

“I am saying that what Parliament should do is put this in the hands of senior judges, who have a great deal of experience in analysing evidence, and that it should be subject to appeal,” Lord Carlile told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

“The fact is that the judgment on days is completely sterile. I would have thought that every civil liberties organisation in this country and every person detained would be happy for their case to be considered by a senior judge on an evidence basis."

Suspects’ rights should be paramount in their considerations and detainees should have the right to appeal against continued custody, he said.

“That would be an intelligent basis for debate, not an entirely arbitrary one of days, which provides no intelligent foundation for the discussion.”

Speaking later on the same programme Lord West agreed, saying: "There are great attractions to what Lord Carlile is saying."

Lord West said that so far there had been no need to hold any terror suspect without charge for more than 28 days, but that one incident had proved a close run thing.

"The one that went right up to the wire was the alleged airline plot," he said.

"We are victims of our own success. We are seeing the sheer complexity of data we have to trawl through. The people we are up against are cleverer and cleverer at hiding things.

"I am very open to talk to anyone about any cleverer way of dealing with this."

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