Coronavirus Bill

Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard - continued) & 2nd reading (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Tuesday 24th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick (CB)]

My Lords, we are all immensely grateful for the selflessness and professionalism of everyone responding to this pandemic and for the reasonable, calm heads of those in government. I associate myself especially with the comments of the noble Lords, Lord Scriven, Lord Blunkett, Lord Robathan and Lord Alderdice, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett.

There is a need for tighter scrutiny, a shorter timeline—three months has been mentioned; I strongly support that—and reasonable balance. We need not to fall into a collective consciousness of consent. We need dissent for democracy to continue to flourish. We continue to need to ask hard questions and not be rolled over by fear but instead, with reasonable wisdom and proportion, keep this thing in balance.

I will make a few specific remarks about areas of the Bill, particularly paragraph 7(5) of Schedule 21, which refer to the powers to be given to the police and immigration officers for detaining and holding people on the basis or assumption of their ill health or of the coronavirus being present. We have had a number of warnings from Liberty; in its briefing, it rightly points out that the consequences of some aspects of the Bill are too grave and far-reaching to be simply nodded through. One dimension of paragraph 7(5) of Schedule 21 states that the police and immigration officers may detain and, if necessary, remove someone for testing and, if possible, have a health official present. I do not think “if possible” is good enough, especially coming from a community where people are very frightened of being tapped on the shoulder or even asked to their face by police to come with them. In a prospective detention or if someone fears the possibility of exposure on an immigration case, they are more likely to abscond—which now becomes an offence, according to the requirements in Schedule 21.

We all want to have the utmost regard and respect for the police and immigration officials at this time. I do not want to unnecessarily conflate two things, but I draw the attention of the Minister and the House to the comments made in this House and in another place last week. On Thursday, at the tail-end of business here, the Minister repeated a Statement on the Windrush report from the Home Secretary, who used the words:

“Ministers did not sufficiently question unintended consequences”


of their conduct, behaviour or decisions. In particular, she referred to the fact that there was institutional

“ignorance and thoughtlessness towards the issue of race and the history of the Windrush generation”.—[Official Report, 19/3/20; col. 1615.]

I have had many representations from people in the black and minority communities who still feel that nothing has changed between last Thursday and this afternoon. The very department with responsibility for police and immigration—the Home Office—will probably help to set the tone of how officials, without health professionals, will go about detaining people and holding them, even though for only short periods of detention. The presence of health officials ought to be a fundamental requirement in an amendment to this Bill: a health official must be the decider, not the police or immigration officials.

There is a need for some elements of reasonable societal caution. However, too much suspicion of people who fit into categories that are uncertain and unclear leads people towards greater fear. Liberty says that there is a real prospect that groups may be targeted on the basis that they are effectively proxies for characteristics such as income level or race and especially in light of existing patterns of discrimination in police-public interactions, as identified by the Lammy review.

I hope we do not blunder into causing further, unnecessary fear in communities all over this country where black and minority-ethnic people are or where immigrants feel they may be holding out, by adding to police powers without ensuring that health security is the decision-maker, not the individual constable—there are constant references to constables, not senior officers, in the Bill. That places too much burden on those individuals.

Coronavirus Bill

Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 25th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Anderson of Ipswich (CB)]

.My Lords, I support Amendments 11 and 12, which I think means that I support the idea of six-monthly reviews with debates in both the Commons and in the Lords. However, I rise to speak in particular to Amendment 10, tabled in my name. Regardless of how often the reviews take place or precisely who conducts them, surely one needs a degree of information from the Government. Clause 97 provides for that, but in an absolutely minimalist form. As I read it, all that is required is that the Government should explain which provisions have been switched on or switched off in the previous two-month period and that they should certify that they are content with the switching on and the switching off.

I have two points to make. The first concerns effective review in Parliament. As I said yesterday, my experience of reviewing exceptional counterterrorism powers suggests that one really needs at least some basic information from government on how the powers are being applied and how effective they are judged to be. There is also a point for the Government in this. Reports of this kind will provide them with an excellent opportunity to communicate to Parliament and to the wider public what they have done, why they have done what they have done, whether they believe that the measures are having some effect on the disease and, if so, why. I was encouraged to hear the Minister say yesterday in introducing the Bill that the Government would update Parliament regularly on how these powers have been used across the UK, but I suggest that that does not go far enough. In the Bill as written, things are not provided which go even that far.

My Amendment 10 is very modest, and deliberately so. I have sought not to invite the riposte that I am requiring some new power to collate or put forward statistics or that I would overburden an already burdened Civil Service. The Government will of course make their own assessments of whether these powers should be switched on or off and how effective they are. All I ask is that that assessment should be shared with Parliament in an appropriate way. It is a document that the Government will control, so it is very much up to them to decide in what form that communication should be made. If the amendment cannot be accepted, I ask the Minister at the very least to give an undertaking today that these reports will provide information about how the powers have been used across the United Kingdom, what measures may have been necessary to ensure compliance, and whether and why the various powers have been judged effective.

I have saved perhaps my best point until the end. Yesterday, the Minister raised by proxy the comments of my noble and learned friend Lord Judge, who sits beside me in spirit, if not physically. He contacted me this morning and has authorised me to say that if he had disregarded his own advice not to attend today, he would have supported my amendment. If I have not persuaded the Minister, I hope that the spirit of my noble and learned friend will have done so.

[Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick (CB)]

I support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Newby, in great detail. In the debate yesterday, we spoke about the seriousness of the situation that the country faces. We are all deeply conscious of it; despite that, we must not be lulled into simply abiding by the pressure of the moment and not consistently thinking our way through the detail of what we are now putting into law. In his statement to the nation the other night, the Prime Minister referred to three weeks. Whether that stands or not is to be debated, but to go from three weeks to six months, as the Bill now provides, is a very long gap. It would be wise to agree to this amendment for three months, which on their return allows this House and the other place to consider the nature of what has been applied, whether it is appropriate and whether it should be retained or removed. That would be a sensible time to allow for national consideration; let us hope we have gone through it by then.