Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Bill

Debate between Lord Thomas of Gresford and Baroness Garden of Frognal

Report stage & Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords & Report: 1st sitting & Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords
Monday 11th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Thomas of Gresford (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I have little to add to what has gone before. I often wonder whether the Government are concerned about judicial review when they resist placing the test of a decision on a reasonable basis in any legislation. If the test in any case is simply the subjective belief of the official—the government agent involved—it might be hoped that a trip to the divisional court and an application for judicial review would be avoided. The noble Lord, Lord Anderson, did indeed refer to public law tests. The Wednesbury test of reasonableness is now more than 70 years old and it is sometimes forgotten that it was the local picture house that took the town’s corporation to court because the licence it gave prevented children under 15 attending the cinema on a Sunday, whether accompanied by an adult or not—one’s mind flips back to the dim and distant past. That was the factual basis of a very important principle of law.

When considering reasonableness in this context, there are two limbs. In the context the House is discussing, the question would be whether the authoriser had taken into account all the wider implications of the authorisation, including its effect on prospective victims of the crime being committed. He would obviously have to follow the code, which, as the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, has just said, is peppered with instructions, having the force of law, to act reasonably. If the authorisers get beyond the first limb of the test, the second limb is whether the decision they have taken is so outrageous and irrational that, as Lord Diplock put it in a later case, it is

“so outrageous in its defiance of logic or of accepted moral standards that no sensible person who had applied his mind to the question to be decided could have arrived at it.”

Needless to say, cases challenging a decision tend to succeed on the first limb, but I do not see why we have to go to that position. I have been trying to check Hansard, but I think that the Minister referred, in reply to the first group of amendments today, to the decision being reasonable. I cannot see any reason why it would not be reasonable to put “reasonable” on the face of the Bill. I support these amendments.

[The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, has withdrawn. I call the noble Lord, Lord Rosser.