Protection of Freedoms Bill

Bob Russell Excerpts

Tuesday 1st March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Priti Patel (Witham) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Salisbury (John Glen). I shall focus on certain aspects of the Bill, some of which have already been covered, but the pertinent point about freedom of speech has not been lost on the House or, no doubt, the Minister. My hon. Friend certainly made that point very well.

I welcome the Bill not only because of the measures that it introduces, but because it is another demonstration of the Government’s commitment to reversing the intrusiveness of Labour’s big-state, big-government approach to running the country. As right hon. and hon. Members know, the more the state does and the larger the state is, the more powers it inevitably takes away from individuals and the more control it exercises over the public. This legislation sits alongside other Government Bills in taking away powers and control from politicians and bureaucrats and restoring them to the people. I think that that is welcome. It is also a hallmark of a Government who trust people and respect the majority of the law-abiding public instead of automatically treating everyone with a degree of suspicion. By contrast, for 13 years the British people not only had to put up with the previous Government’s “nanny knows best” attitude but had to face the burdens of a Government who were prepared to ride roughshod over civil liberties.

Part 1 of the Bill deals with powers of entry. Despite their claims to support and promote human rights, the previous Government seemed to neglect the rights of individuals to enjoy a private life. It is obscene that the state can exercise some 1,200 different types of powers of entry, with an estimated 20,000—this is probably a conservative figure—unaccountable town hall officials having the right to enter private property without a warrant. There are powers to check anything from the height of hedges, to plant passports, to the energy ratings on people’s refrigerators, and even, bizarrely, households containing dancing bears without a permit. This system has been left unchecked for far too long and has expanded to erode people’s freedoms. I therefore welcome the new measures in the Bill to enable Ministers to review the powers of entry and then repeal those that are absolutely unnecessary or inappropriate, or to include the relevant safeguards. Having such powers on the statute book and open to abuse not only represents an attack on people’s privacy and freedoms but undermines the occasions when there may be a genuine need for powers of entry to be exercised.

Part 2 covers surveillance and CCTV. We hear about bin inspectors going through people’s rubbish, CCTV cameras pointing at people’s homes and being utterly intrusive, councils using powers designed to prevent terrorism to snoop on people, and other frivolous acts of espionage on the private lives of our constituents.

[Bob Russell (Colchester) (LD)]

Part of the hon. Lady’s constituency includes the borough of Colchester. Does she accept from me that there is a code of practice for the CCTV security cameras in Colchester town centre that prevents any of the intrusions that she is talking about? Only public areas and public buildings are covered, not private dwellings, which is particularly important where we have residences in town centres.

--- Later in debate ---

[Bob Russell (Colchester) (LD)]

I shall support the Second Reading of the Protection of Freedoms Bill, although I hope that some of the reservations I am about to express will be taken note of in Committee. There are at least two unintended consequences in the Bill concerning not so much the protection of freedoms for the law-abiding, as making life so much better for two categories of antisocial people. The first are those who park illegally on other people’s property, and the second are those who cause undue misery with late-night parties and so on. I cannot believe that there is a single Member here who has not had casework from constituents complaining about late-night noise or antisocial noise on summer afternoons. If the Bill passes as proposed, with its subsections and so on, I regret to say that it will be an open invitation for the antisocial noise people to up their game in the confident knowledge that local authorities will have fewer powers at their disposal to deal with them.

I will, however, begin with the wheel-clamping provision, which has been added to the Bill because—I think—it was here to have things added to it. I am not here to defend the rogue firms of wheel-clampers. I do not think that anyone in the Chamber is prepared to speak up for those cowboys, although I always think that to describe them as that is an insult to cowboys. Nevertheless, there are companies and individuals who have abused the wheel clamp, which used correctly and in the right way is a tool that helps the law-abiding.

The Minister for Equalities started this debate on 17 August last year. I have raised the matter on the Floor of the House before and spoken to her, so I am not saying anything that will come as a surprise. She announced that the freedom Bill would provide for an outright ban on clamping on private land, where it is carried out by private companies. I can just about understand that if the private land is a commercial property, but I am not sure about the idea when applied to private land owned by individual householders. At the moment, the Bill proposes that if somebody parked in the Minister’s drive, he would be restricted in the action that he could take to deal with the problem.

I want to quote the case of the Balkerne Heights residential area, which is right next to a multi-storey car park on the edge of Colchester town centre. The communal parking for the area’s housing became a magnet for illegal parking by late-night revellers, weekend shoppers and so on. The notion that polite requests not to park in people’s private parking areas will be acceded to is a little optimistic. The people causing the problem generally responded with certain words, the second of which was “off”. The only way that those parking abuses were dealt with was through the introduction of the wheel clamp. I would say that the Minister’s front drive is exactly the same as the communal parking area of people living in flats or communal housing. It is their drive: it is where they park their cars.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)]

Looking at the Bill, it is clear that people will be able to close their gates and stop somebody removing a car that way. There is implied consent to allowing a restriction under clause 54(3)(a), and if the case is broader than that, the people or the commercial organisation involved can apply to the council to come and do the clamping for them. I think the problem that my hon. Friend is worried about is covered.

[Bob Russell]

I hope that my hon. Friend is correct in his understanding, but that has to be spelt out in the Bill, because it is not my understanding. If he is right, no problem—but if I am right, there is a problem. That is exactly the sort of thing that needs to be fleshed out and firmly written down, because clause 54(3)(a) refers to cases where

“there is express or implied consent by the driver of the vehicle to restricting its movement by a fixed barrier”.

Whether the barrier is up or down is irrelevant. Currently, the local planning authority may well refuse an application to start erecting barriers in carefully designed new housing areas, with landscaped grounds and all the rest of it, but if the Bill goes ahead, they will have to erect barriers to meet the very point that has quite rightly been made. Those are the unintended consequences.

I would argue that if residents living on a private housing estate with their own private communal parking areas wish to put a wheel clamp on, why can they not do so? It is an extraordinary state of affairs when the coalition Government are putting forward a Bill with a clause that would give more rights to the illegal parker than the person who owns the land where the car is illegally parked. The notion that residents could run off to the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency or whoever else to get fines paid, and all the rest of it, is fanciful. Therefore, with the greatest of respect, what I would say is that more work needs to be done on that one.

The House of Commons Library has produced some excellent research—as ever, by the way—on the Bill. If Members who have the briefing would care to look at pages 26 through to 28, they will realise that the authors of the Bill need to dot a few i’s and cross a few t’s in Committee, because—I repeat—what we have at the moment is an opportunity for those who want to park illegally in other people’s private, communal, residential parking areas to do so almost with impunity. Under a heading entitled “The Bill’s provisions”, the research paper tells us:

“The Government had not previously indicated that there would be any parking-related measures in the Bill, or in fact that it was planning to make any changes to parking regulation at all.”

Therefore, those provisions have been bolted on. People who live in town centres have the advantages of the town centre, but sometimes one of the disadvantages is people coming into town, not parking where they should and abusing other people’s private parking areas. I ask the Minister to address that issue in Committee. I understand the need to tackle rogue wheel-clamping firms, but, with the greatest respect, I think that private home owners should have the right to use wheel clamps on vehicles parked on their private property, whether it is a private drive or a communal parking area.

The second unintended consequence of the Bill relates to those people whom we all love and who delight in causing problems for their neighbours by, among other things, having all-night parties. Chapter 2 of the Bill covers safeguards for certain surveillance under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. I am grateful to the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health for drawing my attention to the serious consequences of these provisions. There cannot be a Member here tonight who has not been contacted by constituents as a result of noisy antisocial neighbours.

As an aside, I would like to make an important observation as the former chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on noise reduction. I wish that the coalition Government would introduce regulations to require greater noise insulation in new house building. A lot of attention is paid to heat retention in such buildings, but nothing is done about noise elimination. Perhaps another Government Department could pick that one up.

It has been suggested that the Bill has been prompted by claims in the popular press of unjustified snooping by local authorities, because it contains provisions to restrict the surveillance activities of those authorities by inserting additional tests into the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. One such test would require authorisations given by senior local authority officers to be approved, in addition, by a magistrate. That would make the process of authorisation more time consuming, and it would make things harder for increasingly stretched authorities—not least at night, when most complaints of this nature are made. The likely outcome of the proposal is that many fewer noise complaints would be investigated.

[Anna Soubry]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that such matters are not the domain of local authorities? The last Government made a big mistake when they mixed up the role of the police with the civil functions of local authorities. I suggest that problems of noisy neighbours holding late-night parties are the domain of the police, not the local authority.

[Bob Russell]

I do not think that I can agree with the hon. Lady on that. We are talking about authority in its broadest sense, whether it involves the police, the local authority or whoever. The public are entitled to live in peace, and if their peace is disrupted, the matter could be dealt with by the police or by the local authority. The two working in concert would be the best way; that has always been the way in which I have approached these issues.

The Bill proposes a further test that the crime that is to be prevented or detected should carry a minimum prison sentence. Noise offences do not, however, carry custodial sentences, and the effect of the provision would be to remove that ground for authorising surveillance. This matter needs to be thrashed out in Committee, because RIPA was never intended to deal with problems such as these. At a time when local authorities are shedding significant numbers of officers, they will need to become more efficient in order to maintain services. I have no argument with that, but barriers to achieving it will need to be removed, rather than new ones being erected. When there is no evidence that noise investigations are being carried out inappropriately, additional controls are neither justified nor in the public interest. I suggest that we should take the opportunity in Committee to remove them from the ambit of RIPA altogether.

I am sure that many of us will have read the letter in The Times yesterday from Mr Howard Price, the principal policy officer of the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health—[Interruption.] Well, Members are going to hear it now. It says:

“The Protection of Freedoms Bill is about to receive its second reading. It contains provisions to amend the Regulation of Investigatory Power Act…to limit the surveillance activity of local authorities by requiring authorisations made by senior officers to be approved in addition by magistrates. Hundreds of thousands of neighbour noise complaints are made to local authorities each year. Listening to such noise in the course of investigation amounts to ‘surveillance’ under the Act and arguably requires authorisation. The Bill will make that more time-consuming and harder for authorities to obtain, especially at night when most complaints are made. Complaints will go unanswered. RIPA was never intended to apply to this activity. It will be a further unintended consequence if this Bill protects the freedom of noise-makers over that of householders wanting only a peaceful night’s sleep. Noise investigations should be excluded”—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. The hon. Gentleman may provide us with a quotation, but I do not think we need him to read out the entire letter. He can make his point quite succinctly now, as we still have a few more speakers wanting to contribute.

[Bob Russell]

I am grateful, Madam Deputy Speaker. I accept what you have said and I shall now sit down as I had only 10 more words to go.