Clause 7 - Forcible entry etc
Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill
11:30 am
David Howarth (Shadow Minister, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister; Cambridge, Liberal Democrat)
I should like to refer first to amendment No. 51, which has a similar effect to amendment No. 76. The Minister has just agreed to reflect further on that amendment and I hope that he will do the same for this one. It would remove the exemption for Law Commission recommendations when it comes to the restriction on the purpose of the Bill with regard to forcible entry, search or seizure. I would have thought that the same argument applied to amendment No. 51 as applies to amendment No. 76.
Any Law Commission report that affected forcible entry, search and seizure, which are fundamental rights, would, of necessity, be controversial, if not highly controversial. The same argument applies that it would be inappropriate to use the procedure in the Bill for such a proposal and so such proposals should be introduced only as part of primary legislation. Indeed, in so far as they are matters to do with police powers, the arguments that have been put forward about how many opportunities there are to affect such rights also apply in these circumstances.
The point that the hon. Member for Forest of Dean mentioned about the Law Commission is one that the Minister should take seriously. There is a problem with the Bill as a whole when it deals with the Law Commission. If it becomes apparent to a future Government that an easy way of getting through increases in burdens and reductions in rights of the population is to use the Law Commission route, especially remembering that that can affect the common law, unlike the legislative route in the other part of clause 1, it might well adversely affect the nature of the Law Commission and make it a more political body. Some future Government might be tempted to use the powers they have under the legislation setting up the Law Commission to choose a different sort of commissioner. It might be necessary at some point to insert further safeguards into the legislation that establishes the Law Commission against that sort of political interference if the Bill were to go forward in its present form.
Amendment No. 50 is perhaps our last opportunity to consider the question of restricting the purposes for which the Bill’s procedures can be used. It adds to the list in clause 7 about forcible entry, search, seizure and a whole list of other fundamental civil liberties—not to be arrested, not to be detained and not to have one’s property confiscated or compulsorily purchased, and a host of other rights that are covered in the Human Rights Act—and protects them from the procedure in the Bill. If there were to be a proposal that would affect those rights, primary legislation would have to be used, not the regulatory order.
The Minister has said several times that the reason why he is not tempted by the restrictions on purpose is that there are already safeguards in the Bill. When I asked him the difference between taxation and human rights he referred me to clause 3, the preconditions clause. But many of us are not satisfied with the state of that clause because it is drafted in such a subjective way. The Minister has to give way either on how clause 3 works or on the purposes to which the Bill can be put if he wants to allay our serious concerns.
In the end the Minister must answer the following questions and he cannot use clause 3 as protection against it. Under what circumstances would the Government bring forward under the Bill an order that affected arrest, detention, confiscation and Human Rights Act rights? Why does not the argument apply that any such circumstances are sure to be those in which it would be reasonable to say that the proposal was controversial? If that is the case, why cannot the Government accept the amendment?