Protection of Freedoms Bill

Lord Marlesford Excerpts

Monday 12th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Selsdon]

My Lords, Amendment 1 is grouped on its own. As I am on my own, I will wait for the House to evacuate before I continue.

The amendment follows on from the Private Member’s Bill which I introduced into your Lordships' House and which was passed, which said that people should not be able to go into other people’s homes and property without permission or a court order. At that time we also looked at loitering and the nervousness that was caused by people loitering outside properties, surveillance by television cameras, observance from afar and spying in general, but that was left out.

When we recently dealt with the Bill in Grand Committee, it was suggested to me that certain other areas needed to be dealt with. One related to the amendments to RIPA proposed in the Protection of Freedoms Bill which are designed to address the concern about the use of RIPA powers by public authorities to investigate minor offences. The Minister—the noble Lord, Lord Henley, whom I sometimes regard as being a little bit like “Stonewall” Jackson or Cool Hand Luke, who plays a bat and will not let things go past him—confirmed at that time that he accepted the proposals in the Bill would ban the use of covert surveillance by public bodies to gather evidence of non-serious offences and should be amended to ensure that those public bodies could not then get round the law by adopting evidence obtained by covert means by third parties.

When I introduced an amendment to deal with this loophole in Committee on 13 December, I was encouraged at the time by the words of my noble friend Lord Henley, who agreed to look at this issue to,

“see whether we might come forward with some suitable change”.—[Official Report, 13/12/11; col. GC 329.]

He has not come forward with any suitable change, but I gather that he has it still in the back of his mind. The great thing with my noble friend is to take things from the back of the mind and try to get them as near the front as possible.

It seems that my amendment was what the “pros” call too widely drawn. When it was suggested that I put down another one, I went, as always, to the Public Bill Office. I learnt that you do not put down amendments at Third Reading unless you can demonstrate that the Minister had undertaken to do something and had not done it. I had forgotten about that. We checked the matter very carefully and this amendment was the result. I hope that it can be accepted.

I would like to ask my noble friend about other issues that I raised in Committee. I asked whether, since we had the Powers of Entry Bill, he would be kind enough to take the 1,200 powers of entry that we had identified, print them and put them in the Library. He said that that was not necessary because everything could be done electronically. I have a slight conflict of interest here in that, as a member of the Information Committee, I can tell noble Lords that half your Lordships are not electronically enabled, if that is the phrase. Therefore, they like to think back to:

“Abstract nouns in -io call

Feminina one and all;

Masculine will only be

Things that you can touch or see”.

Your Lordships like to feel pieces of paper from time to time. Therefore, I asked my noble friend whether he would agree to put the list of powers of entry in the Library. He said that he might think about it.

Other matters came up. One of the difficulties with Private Members’ Bills is that Ministers are here today, gone tomorrow and back the next day. A code of conduct was proposed. The Minister said that the Bill would induce a code of conduct. I asked him why it could not be stated. I do not think that he said he would think about that. I understand fully that matters such as powers of entry were tacked on to the Protection of Freedoms Bill. However, some aspects of it seem to me that they might even reduce people’s freedom. We should debate this matter further. I beg to move.

[Lord Marlesford]

My Lords, I strongly support my noble friend. He is absolutely right to bring back points that have not been answered by the Home Office. The purpose of Parliament in general and your Lordships’ House in particular is to scrutinise legislation and ask questions—and to ask for answers to questions. It is the obligation of the Government to come back with suitable answers that give details as to why particular proposals should not be agreed, rather than to give just a blanket refusal. I am very glad that your Lordships’ House decided to pass my amendment that is now part of Clause 40 and that we now have a much better understanding of the need to constrain powers of entry.

However, my noble friend referred to RIPA, which extended the powers of the police to enter without warrant. That is probably justified in terrorist matters. I accepted that, which is why, in my amendment that the House has accepted, I excluded from the need to have a warrant those powers that RIPA had recently given to the police under subsection (5)(b). On the other hand, it is important that we should be absolutely clear and precise on the extent to which powers of entry or surveillance are used. It is not at all desirable that general powers of surveillance, particularly by non-government bodies, could be used to provide evidence, because the way in which the surveillance is constructed is quite likely not to have been properly supervised and defined.

We must realise that the object of the Bill is to extend the freedoms of this country. It is high time to do that, and I therefore hope the Minister will give a good reply to my noble friend, particularly on the code of conduct, and publish—more clearly than the information that has been published only on computers—the huge list of existing powers of entry.

[The Earl of Erroll]

My Lords, I should like to make two brief points. The first arises from something I have noticed in the way that we run our procedures, which has changed a lot over the many years I have been here. In the old days, matters often used to be pushed at Committee stage to decide in principle whether we wanted to change something; it was then tidied up on Report; and very little was therefore done at Third Reading. Unfortunately, because nothing is now pushed in Committee, it is pushed first on Report; and we are therefore relying more and more on the Minister or someone else tidying up or fulfilling an obligation at Third Reading. That is much later than used to be the case. We have a rod with which we are beating our own back. We see this happen to other Bills on which we have Committee-style debates on Report, which in reality should be an occasion for tidying up what we have pushed through in Committee. I highly recommend that we return to our old procedure, and we might then spend less time debating some of the other Bills that are going through interminably and tediously.

Secondly, the amendment is fair and it is right that it has been brought forward. It is an interesting and probably good amendment, because it will discourage local authorities or other bodies from doing one of the things that all these provisions were rightly introduced in the Bill by the Government to tackle—to discourage these bodies from using strong powers in order to enforce what we consider to be trivial offences by members of the general public. The amendment is a good generic way of dealing with the problem in principle. It is a sensible amendment that should be passed.

I should add as a minor point that we are watching the same thing happen as regards the power to fine people for littering. The other morning, I heard how a lady in her 70s was fined £80, or whatever the statutory amount is, because a thread fell out of her glove on to the ground. I listened to the local authority trying to defend its action—a thread is not meant to be on the ground and is therefore defined as litter. The case was quite horrific, and I can see exactly the same problem happening in similar cases. I therefore hope that this Government will continue to do what they have done in the Bill. They have made a good first move as regards giving citizens back some rights in certain other areas. This amendment helps in the right direction.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend on having brought forward these amendments. I was the subject of stalking for four or five months and a truly terrifying experience it is, too. I was stalked by a woman who rang me at all hours of the day and night and who I believed did not know where I lived. However, the day that I moved house and returned from the other place to my new home, I found a note through the door, saying, “I hope that you will be very happy in your new home”. Such an experience leaves you with an impression that there is somebody out there, waiting for you and watching for you. I am very pleased that the Government have moved on this because it is a very serious social problem.

My stalker was in the end revealed to be much more harmless than many, in the sense that her real name was Anita Hodgson—that is why she had appealed to me. She called herself Anita Windsor and believed that she had been married to Prince Charles and that people were denying her rights to join the Royal Family.

[Lord Marlesford]

Perhaps I may say a word on Amendments 13 and 14, Amendment 13 already having been referred to by my noble friend the Minister as a government amendment and Amendment 14 being in the name of the former Leader of the House. I support both amendments and rejoice that Amendment 13 sets out exactly the right conditions and constraints on powers of entry. In the first instance, it requires a warrant; in the second, following your Lordships’ amendment on Report, it points out that premises may be entered without the agreement of the occupier in cases where the authority using the power can demonstrate that the aim and use of the power would be frustrated if a warrant or agreement were sought. That is very neatly replicated in the government Amendment 13. I am glad that the Government are at last taking an approach that should be used for all powers of entry. I totally support the Leader of the Opposition’s Amendment 14. Again, it will ensure that the amendment proposed by your Lordships' House on Report is perfectly consistent with all matters connected with the Bill. They are worthwhile changes, as well as dealing with the serious problem of stalking.