Criminal Justice Act 2003 (Requisite and Minimum Custodial Periods) Order 2024

Debate between Lord Beith and Lord Hope of Craighead

Monday 29th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Beith (LD)]

We have all welcomed the Minister in three debates on three successive sitting days, so he has been thrown in at the deep end of parliamentary accountability. However, he has received some pretty sound advice from all the preceding speeches, including in the well-directed questions from the noble Lord, Lord Moylan.

Today what we are faced with from a parliamentary accountability point of view is not satisfactory. We know that the Government are caught in a difficulty whereby they have had to deploy a statutory instrument without it having gone to the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments, on which I have served. That is a shame, because that committee and its excellent team of advisers go through statutory instruments in great detail and sometimes find mistakes. They occasionally find mistakes that throw into question the validity of the instrument and the ability to enforce it, so I hope that extreme and extra care has gone into the drafting of this instrument, which is quite complicated. For example, there are 54 excluded offences, and many other complications affecting various categories of prisoner. So we hope that it is looked at very carefully—and, in a defect is found, we hope that the Government will come back at a later stage with a revised instrument.

What we have today is not a policy but a response. The Minister gave some indications of how policy might be developed, but we are not there—we are not at that point. We are simply observing a government response to a desperate crisis, which any incoming Government would dread—well, it is happening. It is the result of underinvestment and delayed investment in prison building over a long period and the constant rise in the number and length of custodial sentences, as well as the large rise, to which the Minister referred, in the number of remand prisoners, which itself is largely the result of the huge backlog in serious cases coming to court, as part of the wider chaos that we find in our criminal justice system. I ask the Minister: is it in fact the case, as alleged in the press, that sentencing hearings for prisoners on bail have been deliberately delayed to avoid further sentences sending people into our already overcrowded jails?

We have a prison population that is three times the level it was when I became a Member of Parliament. The noble Lord, Lord Deben, has referred to how that contrasts with other European countries, and I share his concern about the fact that it has happened and that it is so out of line with how most countries view the same problems of crime that we face. The announced prison building programme cannot solve the problem, although it is needed. We have to remember that, when the prison building programme that we have now was announced, much of it was intended to replace unsuitable and inadequate prison accommodation—not to add to the total stock but to replace accommodation that should not continue to be used.

We have a prison system that cannot house its prisoners and cannot rehabilitate them, and we have as a result a completely unacceptable level of violence against prison staff as well as prisoner-on-prisoner violence.

Nothing we are doing today will change this. We have to review the trend of the ever-increasing use of custody. For that to happen—here I repeat what I said last week—we need to strengthen community sentencing and the services necessary to make it effective. We also need to establish a measure of crime and its seriousness which does not make custody the only means by which society can assert its abhorrence of serious and persistent crime. That is fundamental to the problem we have at the moment: the only way society knows how to recognise and deal with crime, as is reflected in the media and in ordinary conversation, is to say that we are not going to put up with these dreadful crimes and so we should put people in jail for longer, even if it is not relevant to the rehabilitation of the offender when they are eventually released. We have to face up to that problem, and that is going to require real leadership, rather than party-political leadership. The Minister has a background that makes him well suited for this; I hope he is given the scope to carry out that kind of leadership.

[Lord Hope of Craighead (CB)]

My Lords, I am intervening just to ask a question. The Minister used the word “stabilised” twice, I think, during his presentation of this instrument—he is looking forward to a stage when the Government can feel that the prison crisis has stabilised. Can the Minister explain a little more of what he means by the word “stabilised”? The point is this, as the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, made clear: we are sending too many people to prison, and therefore one of the ways of stabilising the problem is by addressing rigorously the overuse of prison as a means of punishing crime. I am sure the Minister is well-equipped to carry out that campaign.

The other feature of our present treatment of offenders, particularly serious offenders, is the length of the prison term. I was Lord Justice General in Scotland some years ago, when I had the task of reviewing the tariffs to be imposed on discretionary life prisoners. These are people who, unlike murderers, were sentenced to life imprisonment because of the gravity of the crime they had committed. The average tariff I was imposing in line with what was the current practice then—this was about 20 or 30 years ago—was something like 11 years; now, it is way above that, at 17 or 18 years, or more, and lengths of sentences are going up into the 30s. In my time as Lord Justice General, such lengths of sentences were quite unimaginable, and I am not sure it is doing any good except to keep people in prison longer than ever before. That is why the crisis has grown. There is a fundamental problem that has to be addressed, and I urge the Minister to explain what he means by “stabilise”. Perhaps the Minister could also address more closely—not today, and not even in writing to me, but later, in discussion with officials—how the problem can be corrected, so that we do not find ourselves in two years’ time facing the same crisis we are facing today.

Beyond that, I commend the drafting of the regulation. I think a great deal of thought has gone into the measure. It has been carefully thought through and, as a means of dealing with the crisis, it is exemplary. However, it is the underlying problem that must be addressed, not the particular crisis itself.

Public Order Bill

Debate between Lord Beith and Lord Hope of Craighead

Committee stage
Wednesday 16th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hope of Craighead (CB)]

My Lords, I shall speak to my Amendments 11, 30, 34, 41, 57 and 63. That may seem a bit of a mouthful but they are all in exactly the same terms. They refer to the reasonable excuse defence in Clauses 1, 3, 4, 6 and 7. Perhaps I should preface my remarks, particularly in the light of the comments made by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, by saying that I very much subscribe to the view that these measures are not needed at all. These are laws we do not need and they may cause confusion, but I have to take the Bill as it is. I am making my remarks with reference to the Bill as we find it, not as I would like it to be.

The Constitution Committee examined the phrase “reasonable excuse” and its implications, and said that it is

“constitutionally unsatisfactory to leave to the courts the task of determining what might be a ‘reasonable excuse’ without Parliament indicating what it intends the defence to cover”.

There are two points in particular: first, it invites argument over whether certain, but not other, political motivations might constitute an excuse—how serious they are and their consequences, and so forth; secondly, and perhaps even more important, is whether the defence of reasonable excuse should be available at all in cases where serious disruption has been caused. This is exactly the other side of the argument that the noble Baroness put forward a moment ago. The committee’s recommendation was that unless a precise definition of reasonable excuse is provided, the defence should be removed from Clauses 1, 3, 4 and 7 altogether.

The point is really this: if the wording remains in the Bill as it is, it opens the door to arguments that bodies such as Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil use to justify their actions. I recall the lady who was sitting up on a gantry when she was interviewed on television. With tears in her eyes, she said, “I know I’m causing terrible disruption to many people”—you could see all the cars stuck behind the police cordon—“but I’ve got no alternative. Look at the serious disruption that climate change is giving rise to; that’s my case. We’ve got to do something about it, so I don’t mind how much disruption I cause to however many people because I’ve got to get that message across.” The problem with the reasonable excuse defence is that it opens up that kind of argument.

The committee’s recommendation was, as I say, that unless a precise definition is provided it should be removed. My amendments propose that the question

“is to be determined with reference to the immediate interests or intentions of the individual, not any public interest which that person may seek to invoke”.

The immediate interest point would cover the case of the journalist Charlotte Lynch, who was arrested by the police. In her position, she could obviously say that as a journalist she was doing her job. That would undoubtedly be a reasonable excuse if she was having to defend a charge in this situation, and one could think of many other examples, so the opening words of my amendment are designed to deal with people of that kind. But they are intended to meet the very point on which the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, focused on so clearly: the position of protesters who are protesting because of climate change, for example, or other big public interests that people feel it necessary to protest about.

There are various problems with leaving the words as they are. The offences described in Clauses 1 and 6 are to be tried summarily before magistrates. I am conscious that the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, is here with his experience but I suggest that leaving it to magistrates to decide whether a particular public interest excuse is reasonable, without any guidance from Parliament, is not satisfactory. There is a risk of inconsistent decisions between one bench of magistrates and another but there is another problem, too. These arguments, if they are to be raised in a magistrates’ court, may take up a great deal of time. I have heard at second hand of a case where one of these issues was raised in a magistrates’ court and it took hours and hours as people deployed their arguments. The magistrates’ courts are not equipped for that kind of interference in their ordinary business, so one has to have regard to the consequences of leaving it to them to decide issues of this kind. That important factor needs to be borne in mind.

[Lord Beith (LD)]

Could the noble and learned Lord explain whether he thinks that phrasing the clause in this way dispenses with the proportionality issue, which was so important in the Supreme Court judgment in the Colston statue case?

[Lord Hope of Craighead (CB)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord because I am coming on to deal with exactly that. Indeed, it leads me into the next paragraph in my notes. I am just making the point that one has to consider the practical consequences for prosecutors and the police of leaving this expression as wide as it is and without qualification of some kind. Of course, I am pointing to a particular qualification that needs to be made.

The Supreme Court, in a well-known case called Ziegler in 2021, held that protesters had been rightly acquitted of obstructing a highway when protesting about an armament fair. That is not an easy judgment to read or understand, not helped by the fact that there were two dissents in a court of five, but it has been thought to support the view that invoking the public interest defence in that context is acceptable. However, a series of decisions in the Court of Appeal have narrowed the window that Ziegler left open. The point is that we are dealing now, in the offences that we are considering in the Bill, with offences that require proof of serious disruption. The Court of Appeal’s point is that that changes the balance between what is proportionate and what is not, which is at the heart of this issue. The proof of serious disruption was not a necessary element of the offence of obstructing the highway considered in Ziegler, but it is important to notice that in our offences it is a vital and essential element.

The Colston case was the subject of the most recent Court of Appeal decision, which is Attorney-General’s reference no. 1 of 2022. The court was asked to rule on what principles judges should apply when determining whether the convention rights are engaged by a potential conviction for acts of damage during a protest, and when the issue of proportionality should be withdrawn from the jury. The court held that the convention did not provide protection to those who cause criminal damage during a protest that is violent, not peaceful. That was the Colston case.

However, it went on to say that a conviction for causing significant damage to property, even if inflicted in a way that could be called peaceful, could not be held to be disproportionate either. The prosecution in the Colston case was correct, both because the toppling of the statue in that case was violent and, as a separate issue, because the damage to the statue was significant. The words “serious disruption”, which appear in these offences, seem to fall into the same category. In other words, a person who engages in criminal conduct that causes serious disruption cannot take advantage of this defence.

It has been pointed out that a case raising this issue is expected to be heard by the Supreme Court before Christmas. I think there are problems with that. The judgment is not likely to be given until well into next year because the court takes a considerable time to consider all the issues. I think one would be fortunate if the judgment were out before the early summer. This is a problem that needs to be solved now, and I will come back to the question of the magistrates’ court and the problems that could arise there.

I stress again that the offences we are dealing with here all require proof of serious disruption. That is why the reasonable grounds defence should be removed altogether or qualified in the way I am suggesting, to confine it to circumstances that affect the position of the individual on the ground at the time he or she is causing the disruption. That qualification would be welcome, and undoubtedly useful, in many cases. Without it, I suggest that the whole defence be removed.

Judicial Review and Courts Bill

Debate between Lord Beith and Lord Hope of Craighead

Committee stage
Monday 21st February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Beith (LD)]

My Lords, this is an area of complexity and difficulty and I think the difficulties are added to by the content of the Bill as the Government have brought it before us. It was not broken and it was not necessary to fix it in this respect. The noble Lord, Lord Anderson, has just explained how the previous use of common-law powers has dealt with this matter perfectly satisfactorily.

I share with the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, the dislike of anything that lessens the clear impact of the threat of judicial review on the public service. I say threat not because I am hostile to members of the public service but because it is a necessary discipline that things must be done within the law and they know that, if they are not, what they are bringing forward could well be nullified in the courts. The severity of judicial review is important to its role as the discipline for the rule of law.

There are, however, cases which do not fit easily into this pattern and which make an element of retrospection attractive. I think of licensing measures of various kinds—measures that render lawful things that would otherwise be unlawful. There are quite a lot of them in the area of game shooting, for example, and one caused quite a stir over the last couple of years: the power to shoot a predator bird if it is likely to enter an area where it would disturb the wildlife in a site of scientific interest which is subject to protection. In a recent example, there was indeed the threat of an action which did not take place in the end but which led Natural England to accept that its regulations were defective.

In those circumstances, you have people who have behaved in good faith and—they thought—lawfully, who, when the court in a judicial review determines that the action is not within the law, are left in a rather difficult position. You may say that nobody is going to prosecute them once it becomes clear that the law had been nullified. The case may already have started. However, in the real world, having been found to have acted unlawfully, even unwittingly, is not a good position to be in and not one that an employee wants to find themselves in. It presents some difficulties which I think Amendment 6, from the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede, attempts to address in so far as it affects regulations and delegated legislation. I will be interested to hear him set it out more fully and the Minister’s response to it.

That qualification—that we should remember the interests and concerns of people whose actions could unwittingly be rendered unlawful—is only a limited qualification to what, in my view, is the fundamental reason to object to what the Government are proposing, which is that the full rigour of the effects of judicial review should be something that the public service is always aware of.

[Lord Hope of Craighead (CB)]

My Lords, I find myself in the same position as my noble friend Lord Anderson and I would like to add just a few words to what he said.

One of the points made in the Explanatory Notes—and I am looking at paragraph 21—is that:

“The diverse circumstances of possible cases make it difficult to assume that any one remedy or combination of remedies would be most appropriate in all circumstances.”


My noble friend Lord Pannick invites us to address subsection (1), read together with subsection (4). If one asks oneself what these provisions are driving at, one has to bear in mind that there is a whole range of diverse circumstances, some of which may affect private individuals very much indeed; in which case, one would be very concerned that their remedies were not being cut out. Other cases deal with administration and circumstances where individuals probably are not affected at all, but the good administration or even the security of the country is very much at stake when a quashing order is made.

I hope I can be forgiven for coming back to the case of HM Treasury v Ahmed in 2010, which I was involved in. I mentioned it at Second Reading and when I was addressing this subject at an earlier stage. It is worth dwelling on that case because it is an illustration of a circumstance where the clauses that are under attack by these amendments could be valuable. It was a case where the Treasury had pronounced an order to give effect to our international obligations under the United Nations Act 1946, designed to freeze the assets of suspected terrorists. That was our international obligation and, understandably, the Treasury made the order. But when the case came before the Supreme Court, it was pointed out that there was no parliamentary authority for such an extreme measure. The Supreme Court unanimously decided that the order should be set aside.

I suggested in the course of the hearing and, indeed, at the end of my speech—the leading speech in the main case—that we should suspend the effect of the order to give time for the Government to remedy the situation in order to avoid the terrorists dissipating their assets. The risk was that the banks that were holding the assets under the order that was under attack would release them under demand from the terrorists. Clearly, that would not be desirable.

I was overruled by six to one for a reason which, I think, demonstrates why these provisions are needed. My noble and learned friend Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood was in the majority of the six against me so perhaps he can explain more fully what their reasoning was. As I understand it, they were saying that if you quash the order you are declaring what the law always was; in other words, the Treasury order was of no effect at all—that was the effect of the order—and, as I think the noble and learned Lord, Lord Phillips, said, it would indeed undermine the effect of the quashing order to suspend it because it would be suspecting that there was something wrong with the decision to quash the order.

I could not understand that and I still cannot understand the sense of it. Indeed, one of the broadsheet papers, having spotted what was going on, asked: has the Supreme Court gone mad? I remember that certain people were rather discomfited by that but it was a very strange thing to do because there was no question of the banks releasing the money. But it was just as well to suspend the order so that they would be comforted by the fact that we were not actually making the order until Parliament had come in and produced a proper remedy to sort it out.

There you are. If you look at subsection (4), the “impugned act” was this order and what I wanted to do was to, in effect, allow the impugned act to be maintained—or, as subsection (4) puts it, “upheld”—so that the matter could be corrected. I cannot see anything objectionable to exercising the power in subsection (1)(b) in a circumstance of that kind. I wish we had had that power available to us at the time. It would have made my life a good deal easier in our discussions. It was not there and any idea that the common law could do that had really been exploded by the decision of the majority.

There is a problem and it would arise time and again if people were looking at the majority decision. There are, or could be, cases where for the protection of the public and in the interests of good administration the possibility of suspending the effect of the order so that the impugned act is regarded as valid until the defect can be corrected will be valuable. I suggest, with great respect to my noble friend, that it would be unwise to remove these provisions from the Bill.

Trade Bill

Debate between Lord Beith and Lord Hope of Craighead

Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords
Wednesday 6th March 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hope of Craighead (CB)]

My Lords, we should be very grateful to the Constitution Committee for drawing our attention to this matter, which might otherwise not have been observed. I shall add just a few short points to those that have been made. The first is to stress the importance of the words in subsection (5), to which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, drew our attention:

“Regulations under subsection (1) may, among other things, make provision—”.


It is the words “among other things” that cause me concern. They appear in the Healthcare (International Arrangements) Bill as well: they seem to be a feature creeping in to this kind of legislation, which is quite disturbing. If we find that phrase, I suggest that we have to be even more exacting in setting out the qualifications to the power, otherwise the words “among other things” may be used to expand the power in a way that we have not foreseen. It is really very important, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, pointed out, that we take those words into account in what we make of this amendment.

My second point is to reinforce what the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, said about the comparison between Section 8 of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 and what we have now, in reply to the point that we do not need to be concerned about that, because express provision would be needed for a regulation that sought, for example, to create a criminal offence. These exceptions, or almost exactly the same ones, are expressly set out in Section 8(7) as,

“regulations … may not … impose or increase taxation or fees … create a relevant criminal offence … establish a public authority”.

If it was thought appropriate to put those qualifications in that very important subsection, which does not contain the words “among other things”, I should have thought it was all the more important to have them here.

My last point is made with reference to the point made about Lord Steyn’s use of Explanatory Notes. I had the privilege of sitting with Lord Steyn for a number of years and of discussing with him how Explanatory Notes might be used. I do not think that at any point in our discussion he suggested to me that Explanatory Notes could be regarded as a form of legislation or its equivalent—certainly not. He was referring to them as a means of understanding ambiguities in legislation; he thought that one could look to the Explanatory Notes to understand the legislation one was seeking to explain. That was his point, and it was made in a number of cases where I agreed with him. It would be a mistake to think that he was embarking on something outside the normal use of Explanatory Notes, which is to explain but not to legislate. For these reasons and the others mentioned, I warmly support the amendment that the noble and learned Lord has brought to our attention.

[Lord Beith (LD)]

My Lords, I do not need to add to the masterful laying out of the reasons for the amendment by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, or to what was said by the two Members who have just spoken—particularly the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope. But I will refer to the consequence of going about the matter in this way. Lord Steyn’s judgment does not place any obligation on the courts to have a habit or practice of referring to Explanatory Notes—it is entirely up to the courts whether they choose to do so—but, if the Government persist in this interpretation, which appeared to us for the first time in a letter from the noble Baroness, it says to parliamentary draftsmen and departments, “Don’t worry about ambiguity; there are the Explanatory Notes and we do not have to get those through either House”. It is an invitation to careless and sloppy drafting; it is an invitation to leaving open a possibility that the Government may not want to specify at this stage, but might be useful at a later date, when the Explanatory Notes would be relied on for a purpose that I do not think Lord Steyn intended. I was quite shocked to find this interpretation of Pepper v Hart coming into the Government’s responses to the Constitution Committee. We need to squash it pretty quickly, before it influences the habits of departments and parliamentary draftsmen any further.

Civil Jurisdiction and Judgments (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019

Debate between Lord Beith and Lord Hope of Craighead

Tuesday 29th January 2019 Grand Committee

[Lord Hope of Craighead]

Thank you. The Justice Sub-Committee prepared a detailed report drawing attention to exactly what the noble Lord has referred to. There was an impassioned debate—I do not know whether the noble Lord was present—at which these points were made. The criticism is not against us, as it were, because in this House we have been taking our responsibilities seriously. However, I understand the point the noble Lord makes about the effect of leaving the EU and the distress he feels.

[Lord Beith]

There is one thing the Government have not made clear. The impact statement, brief as it is, is structured around there being two options—the other option being not to change retained EU law. As I understood it, that option implied that in a no-deal situation, if we did not have this instrument, the courts would be left behaving as they had previously and hoping that courts in other countries would do the same. One of the things that was not explained very well in the impact statement—perhaps the Minister can clarify this later—is what the other option the Government rejected was.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Lord Beith and Lord Hope of Craighead

Committee: 7th sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Wednesday 14th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hope of Craighead (CB)]

There is a good deal to be said for the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, when one bears in mind the power given in each of Clauses 7, 8 and 9 to make any provision that could be made by an Act of Parliament under regulations made under these clauses. Of course, one can look back to an existing Act, which could be amended by the exercise of this power, for a purpose related to the Brexit arrangements. If one takes an existing Act—one can visualise all sorts of situations when that might arise—it would seem right that the same procedure should apply if the amendment is made for the purposes which one sees in Clauses 7, 8 and 9.

For future Acts I can see there is a problem, because one cannot control a future Parliament, but as far as the past is concerned I respectfully suggest that there is a lot to be said for the amendment.

[Lord Beith (LD)]

My Lords, I am sorry I missed the beginning of the speech of my noble friend Lord Sharkey as a result of unaccustomed speed breaking out on the Bill’s proceedings while I was having a cup of tea. Whether this will be repeated, I do not know.

I had discussions before with my noble friend to properly understand his amendment and its main aim, which is to embrace, within scrutiny procedures used for withdrawal Bill statutory instruments, all those statutory instruments for the same purpose that derive from other previous statutes. That is an interesting idea. When it comes to referring back to the Statutory Instruments Act 1946, it is worth recalling that the Act was surrounded by generous commitments, promises that prayers against negative instruments would always have time for debate on the Floor of the House and all sorts of undertakings that were completely unfulfilled in practice.

Whether the amendment can be made to work in precisely this form I am not quite sure, but I think that the purpose of ensuring that nothing is slipped through by anything less than at least the procedure of triage and scrutiny that we seek for statutory instruments under this Bill—if it becomes an Act—is extended to anything that does the same thing. We certainly would not want to create a perverse incentive for a Government to use the wrong legislation, or a different piece of legislation, for the statutory instrument simply because they could evade a form of scrutiny by doing so.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Lord Beith and Lord Hope of Craighead

Committee: 5th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 7th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Beith (LD)]

My Lords, if the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, is wondering why the word “appropriate” does not fit into the context of trying to limit judicial discretion, he should look at how many times it is used in this and other Bills to give Ministers the opportunity to decide one way or the other, in what are quite clearly different kinds of decisions from those you would expect judges to make.

[Lord Hope of Craighead]

My Lords, with respect to the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, what the noble Lord, Lord Pannick said in reply is in my experience absolutely right. To a judge, the word “relevant” requires him to look at the issues that need to be decided. It is a much tighter word than “appropriate”, and is used frequently. In case law, one searches for the point that is directly relevant to the point at issue. It may be that legal terminology is best adopted because that is what judges understand. It is a different kind of word from “appropriate”, which judges do not normally use. Therefore, I suggest it is a better word to use in this context.

Investigatory Powers Bill

Debate between Lord Beith and Lord Hope of Craighead

Monday 5th September 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Beith (LD)]

My Lords, before my noble friend responds, which I think he is about to do, I will take the opportunity to say that the motivation behind my noble friend’s amendment is a very sound one. The fact that you do not know whether you are being wrongly investigated is contributing to a sense of unease about the intelligence provisions in this legislation. This is a problem we have to try to address.

The Minister has put forward some genuine, practical considerations which would make it difficult to implement a clause such as my noble friend’s. This is not a new problem: throughout the history of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, we have had the problem that the only answer that could be given is that no unlawful activity has been carried out, which does not tell you whether any activity has been carried out. If it was carried out, it was lawful, but maybe it was not carried out at all. It was an infuriating answer for people who suspected that they might have been subject to investigatory powers but had no way of knowing or being certain.

It is a problem which even existing procedures sidestep. The Minister referred to ways in which notification may take place in cases where a mistake has been made. Included in the category of people to whom that might apply would be the very people he said he did not want to assist by bringing to their attention that on this occasion, they had been unsuccessfully investigated but there might well be reason to investigate them in the future. The Minister was wrong to say that the people to whom we would be imparting this information were criminals or people threatening the security of the state. If an investigation has not been successful in identifying who is involved in a radicalisation ring or in planning a kidnapping, that may well be because some of those people genuinely were not involved in any way, and some other factor—a mistaken number, for example—had drawn them into the net of the inquiry. Maybe they were known to others involved but genuinely played no part in it, and that emerges from the intelligence.

We should recognise, in considering this suggestion, that strong fears arise from uncertainty and from an inability to establish whether you have been the subject of investigation or not, when there is no reason for you to have been so subject. That of course places a very heavy burden on the commissioners, because rather like special advocates, they have to represent the concerns of people with whom they cannot check—they cannot ask, “How do you feel about this?”. At the very least, it is a salutary reminder of the importance of the processes which this Bill will introduce and of the involvement of judicial commissioners, and we may need to revisit this issue in the future.

[Lord Hope of Craighead (CB)]

My Lords, I absolutely understand the motivation behind the amendment, but I wonder whether the Minister might consider another objection. He referred to the risk of the person who was notified changing his practices in the knowledge that what he was doing was being observed by one or other of these various methods. The problem may be not the individual himself but the people with whom he is in contact. One does not know how wide the web is of the group to which he belongs, and it would be so easy for that message to be passed around to people to warn them that there is a particular mechanism in play which is tapping into what he does and that those who operate in the same way as he does will be subjected to the same kind of scrutiny. I rather suggest that the problem is more wide-ranging than the Minister was telling us in his very careful reply to the amendment.