Clause 104 - Search warrants: premises
Serious Organised Crime and Police Bill
3:00 pm
Ms Hazel Blears (Minister of State (Crime Reduction, Policing & Community Safety), Home Office; Salford, Labour)
I shall deal with amendment No. 147 before amendment No. 287. The exercise of the power of entry on to premises is, like the power of arrest, a serious power that the police exercise. The exercise of that power is an intrusion into people's rights, so it is important that hon. Members have raised such issues. It is appropriate that there should be proper safeguards in the exercise and granting of such powers.
Amendment No. 147 proposes that when an all-premises warrant has been issued, a constable can apply to an officer of the rank of inspector or above to enter premises that he reasonably believes are occupied or controlled by the person specified in the application. Amendment No. 147, tabled by the hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield, would lower the threshold for the safeguard, because the premises would only have to be ''reasonably believed'' to be occupied or controlled by the person specified in that application.
In the way in which we framed the legislation, we are saying that the magistrate must be satisfied that there are reasonable grounds for believing that material that is likely to be of substantial value to the investigation of an indictable offence is on the premises occupied or controlled by the specified person. Under the safeguards in the Bill, if the premises are not specified in the warrant, because it was not possible to do so when it is issued, the prior written authority of an officer of the rank of inspector or above is needed when the warrant is used. The constable must satisfy the inspector that the premises that he wants to enter and search are occupied or controlled. Amendment No. 147 would lower that high threshold, so that the constable would only have to reasonably believe that the premises were occupied and controlled by the person specified, rather than satisfy the inspector that the premises were in fact occupied and controlled by that person. I ask the hon. Gentleman to consider that important issue.
Amendment No. 287, on the other hand, seeks to limit multi-premises and all-premises warrants to an application to the High Court or a circuit judge. Granting warrants has always been a matter for magistrates and justices of the peace. We need appropriate safeguards, but I do not accept that in such circumstances the matter should be for the High Court or a circuit judge only to decide. Magistrates are perfectly capable of exercising their power in a proper way, being fully cognisant of the rights of other parties.
Subsection (7), which would insert new subsection (2A) into section 15 of PACE, deals with an issue that was of concern to me. I did not want the police simply to apply for warrants in a completely open fashion, saying that they needed different premises included automatically. Under proposed new subsection (2A)(b) officers must still, even when multi-premises warrants are applied for, specify as many sets of premises as is reasonably practicable. We are bearing down on them and telling them that they cannot simply go on a fishing expedition for a set of multi-premises warrants, on the basis of a vague idea that there might be some goods worth having a look at in those premises. We are saying that where they can they must specify the premises, and that they must seek multi-premises warrants only if it is not possible to specify the premises at that time.
I think that the safeguards in the Bill are appropriate, and I see no reason why a magistrate should be considered unsuitable to authorise a multi-premises warrant when, in fact, the magistrate would simply authorise one warrant for four premises rather than have to authorise the searching of each set of premises separately. Such a view is not necessarily casting aspersions on magistrates—I am sure that the hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield does not mean to do that—but I do not think that it is necessary for someone of the calibre of a High Court or circuit judge to conduct the process.
The process is about going on a fishing expedition looking for warrants. The police need to specify premises wherever possible, but sometimes modern criminals move their goods around from place to place and in those circumstances, if the police are to be effective and efficient, they need warrants that extend to more than one premises at once. It is on those grounds that I ask the Committee to reject the amendment. I do not think that the provisions extend the powers of the police to the point of infringing people's proper right to occupy their premises peacefully, and they are effective and proportionate powers to enable the police to fight the kind of criminal activity that goes on too often.