Protection of Freedoms Bill

Baroness Randerson Excerpts

Tuesday 8th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Randerson]

My Lords, I strongly support the spirit that unites this wide-ranging Bill. This evening it has been called a Christmas pie and a mishmash. Whichever view you take of it, it certainly covers a great deal of ground. We have had a debate which has touched on virtually every aspect of this Bill and heard some very important points from all sides. I am delighted that there is so much agreement on some parts of the Bill.

In the last 15 years or so, I believe that we have been sliding almost imperceptibly into a society where we take for granted that the state has the right to look into almost every corner of our lives. We take our liberties rather too much for granted in Britain. Because they have not been threatened in a wholesale way in the adult lifetime of almost all of us, we accept that those liberties are there. We have allowed them to be eroded on a piecemeal basis. We have not really noticed it happening, but if you add up one measure after another taken under the previous Government, in total it amounts to a considerable intrusion into our lives.

These steps were of course taken with the best of motives. It is a natural human reaction that when something terrible happens we all say that something must be done to stop it ever happening again. In the name of safety and security, the previous Government eroded the concept of innocent until proven guilty by retaining the DNA of over 1 million people who have not been found guilty of a crime just in case those samples might be useful in the future. They eroded the right to liberty by extending the period of pre-charge detention. They eroded our right to trial by jury. They eroded our right to live safely in our own homes by creating hundreds of new powers of entry so that there are now more than 1,200 separate, different and therefore confusing powers of entry. Significantly, nearly 500 of them were created by secondary legislation.

The previous Government also eroded trust by their plans to introduce the draconian vetting and barring system which would have forced 11 million adults to pay for registration in order to prove that they were not abusers of children. The key issue to me on this matter is that it deters volunteers. I contend that the benefits of community volunteering greatly outweigh the benefits of vetting and barring on the draconian scale assumed by the previous Government.

The previous Government eroded our right to walk peacefully along the streets by empowering the police to stop and search us without needing reasonable grounds for suspicion. The figures on this give a very worrying picture. In 2008-09, there were 210,000 stop and searches that led to only 1,245 arrests, and of them only nine were for terrorism. There has undoubtedly been considerable damage to community relations as a result of this broad-brush approach.

I said at the outset that these steps were taken with the best of motives. Our country faces new threats and challenges. Terrorism, although not new, is newly fierce among us, and there are the old threats, the old evils, that we have been too blind to in the past, such as paedophilia. In attempting to deal with these problems, it is important all the while to keep in mind that the response has to be proportionate. For example, the previous Government legislated to keep biometric data for as long as possible in case they might be useful one day. By spreading the net wider and wider they seemed to hope that they would legislate away crime.

There has been another factor at work, which is technology. Many of the developments that I am referring to—DNA samples, CCTV or the ability to create and interrogate vast databases—would not have been possible 25 years ago. There is a human tendency to feel that if the technology exists, we need to use it, but we have been in danger of making ourselves the slaves of technology, rather than its masters.

I shall briefly tell the story of a lady who was my constituent. She was elderly, frail, very timid and of exemplary good character. She came to see me following a traumatic experience. Her husband, who suffered from Alzheimer’s, had had a stroke, fallen over and hit his head. Following that accident, she was arrested by the police on suspicion of attempted murder. She came to see me after a very traumatic episode to complain not about the arrest but about the fact that they had kept her DNA. We went to see the chief police officer and asked for that DNA to be destroyed. The answer we got was that it would be highly unlikely that that could happen, even though it fulfilled one of the two criteria for the destruction of DNA samples, which is that there was no crime in the first place. A system that ensures that that lady’s DNA is kept in perpetuity is overwhelmingly draconian and needs to be put right.

There are details in the Bill that need questioning and interrogating, and I have concerns about one or two of its provisions—in particular, as some noble Lords have already mentioned, issues in relation to university research. I also wish to probe the Minister about the provisions in relation to CCTV cameras because I have come across two serious abuses of CCTV cameras, one on university property and one on National Assembly for Wales property, and I cannot see that they are covered by the Bill. I will be pursuing those issues in future, but I believe that, in general, this Bill is a proportionate response to the threats and problems of our society.