Home secretary says powers to stop Britons returning to UK after taking part in terrorism overseas have been used only once ‘so far’

Authorities have used powers to prevent Britons from returning to the UK after they have taken part in terrorism overseas only once since they were introduced in 2015, the home secretary, Amber Rudd, has said.

Rudd had said over the weekend that the government had begun to use temporary exclusion orders (TEOs), which bar suspected jihadi fighters and others from returning to the UK for up to two years, but declined to say how often.

Following a report that this had happened only once, Rudd confirmed this was the case. Since they were put in place, TEOs had been used once “so far”, she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

“That doesn’t mean they’re not of value to the intelligence services and the police,” she said. “It’s not pointless at all.”

The home secretary continued: “They are there, they’re a tool which the law enforcement [agencies] wanted, we gave them that tool. They’ve just started to use them – they’ve found a case where it was necessary.

“The important thing is that government gives the security services the tools that are necessary to keep us safe. The numbers may be small, but it only takes one to do the sort of damage that we saw last week.”

TEOs, introduced as part of the 2015 Counter-terrorism and Security Act, allow the home secretary to ban Britons from returning home.

The excluded person’s travel documents are cancelled, and they will be allowed to return only if they agree to take part in de-radicalisation programmes, or liaise regularly with police.

Part of the investigation into the motivations of Salman Abedi, who detonated the bomb last week in Manchester that killed 22 people, will include reports he travelled to Libya during school holidays to join his father, Ramadan, in the fight against Muammar Gaddafi, and that he may also have gone to Syria.

Rudd said the limited use of TEOs did not mean people such as Abedi were not being stopped from returning when they should be.

“I think it’s wrong to conclude that,” she said. “There will be a time for finding out more about Abedi and how he became radicalised, but we have the tool there, so that the security services can use it where they need to. It’s their judgment.”

There also needed to be a focus on Britons being radicalised online, she said. “The key way, we have increasingly found – although we don’t know this about Abedi yet – that people are becoming radicalised, is often by being in their own country and being radicalised by the information that is being spouted – the false lies that are coming out from Daesh, to try to weaponise the young people in our society.

“So we’ve been focusing a lot on trying to counter that narrative, to try to protect young people from becoming radicalised.”

The home secretary said she could not say anything about reports that Abedi had been reported to authorities in the years before the attack by people worried about his views.

She said: “I know people would like me to comment more on what I did or didn’t know about Abedi. It’s an ongoing investigation. People are still being arrested, as we’ve seen, so I can’t comment any further about information on this particular issue.”