GORDON BROWN will this week put his personal authority behind a move to allow evidence from telephone taps to be used in court to ensure terror suspects do not escape the law.

With less than a month to go before Brown takes over as prime minister, he is determined to take a tough stance in the fight against terrorism and make it one of the priorities of his administration.

Tony Blair has hesitated over whether to endorse the use of secret phone taps, which at present is not permissible in court. While the issue has divided cabinet members, security chiefs and senior police officers, one of the chancellor’s first acts will be to launch a cross-party review of such “intercept” evidence. The panel, which will be expected to report within a few months, will be made up of Privy Council members, mostly former cabinet ministers.

A source close to Brown said: “Personally, Gordon believes the weight of argument points to using intercept evidence in court, but we want this review to build a nonpartisan consensus on the best balance between obtaining convictions of people plotting terrorist acts and preserving our sources of intelligence for the future. It is vital that the security services are closely consulted and happy with the outcome.”

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The review will consider both the police officers’ desire to bring to court more cases where terror suspects have been recorded conspiring to commit atrocities, and balance it with the need to protect intelligence sources whose safety and effectiveness may be compromised.

Ahead of the publication this week of a counter-terrorism bill, including new police powers to stop and ask suspects for their identity and movements, Brown will also signal proposals to:

- Allow the police to continue to interrogate terror suspects even after they have been charged with a criminal offence.

- Make terrorism an aggravating factor in sentencing, in a similar way to when a racist motivation in an attack on a person allows judges to give harsher sentences for offenders.

- Increase the number of days a terror suspect can be held without charge from 28 days to 90 days.

- Give MPs and peers greater powers to scrutinise the work of the security and intelligence services, allowing them to cross-examine the heads of MI5 and MI6 in public.

- Boost the national security budget, already doubled since September 11, 2001, to more than £2 billion a year in the forthcoming spending review.

Yesterday the chancellor hinted at the plans during a Labour hustings meeting in Glasgow. “We must be vigilant for the benefit of security in this country,” Brown said.

“Antiterror methods must be more sophisticated, with earlier intervention. That is why I support an increase in the length of detention to build up evidence across nations, and I support postcharge questioning with an increase in police resources.

“But because we believe in the civil liberties of the individual, we must also strengthen accountability to parliament and independent bodies overseeing the police.”

Lord Goldsmith, the attorney-general, Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan police commissioner, and Sir Ken Macdonald, the director of public prosecutions, have all called for the ban on phone tap evidence to go – pointing to America where the majority of big prosecutions against terrorist and organised crime figures are based on phone tapping.

Until now Tony Blair and John Reid, the home secretary, have been swayed by intense lobbying from intelligence figures such as Sir Stephen Lander, the former director-general of MI5 and now chairman of the Serious Organised Crime Agency, who believes the move would compromise secret intelligence techniques and expose the identity of informers.

Sir David Pepper, the director of GCHQ, the government eavesdropping agency, has complained to ministers that GCHQ would have to divert substantial resources from the war on terror into the administrative task of compiling properly audited transcripts of thousands of hours of phone conversations for court cases.

The Tories and Liberty, the human rights group, say introducing phone tap evidence would allow police to charge at least some of those terrorists who are being monitored under control orders.

At present they cannot be prosecuted in court because much of the evidence against them is held in the form of phone taps.

Brown’s proposals to reform the parliamentary intelligence and security committee will also be welcomed by reformers. The committee came in for stiff public criticism after it appeared not to hold MI5 fully to account for alleged failures of intelligence in the run-up to the July 7 London bombings.

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