Clause 44 - Enforcement powers in connection with pesticides
Natural Environment and Rural Communities Bill
4:00 pm
James Paice (Shadow Minister (Agriculture), Environment, Food & Rural Affairs; South East Cambridgeshire, Conservative)
I am sorry that you missed this morning’s debate, Mrs. Anderson, because it was not only interesting but was a precursor to this afternoon’s. Clause 44 is about enforcement powers in connection with pesticides. This morning I referred to my sorrow that this part of the Bill had not been the subject of widespread consultation, because I am certain that, had it been, clause 44 would not have been written as it is. The wording provides extremely wide, and in my view unacceptable, powers of enforcement for inspectors. Subsection (1)(a) allows an inspector to enter
“any premises for the purpose of ascertaining whether an offence is being committed under section 43”,
and subsection (1)(b) says that an inspector may
“require any person whom he reasonably believes has information about the formulation”
and so on to give him that information. It almost smacks of interrogation.
I have looked at legislation that might be considered analogous. The Food and Environment Protection Act 1985, which is referred to in subsection (4), refers largely to the issue of entering vessels, aircraft, containers and, particularly, dwellings. It does not, to any extent, refer to entering farm buildings, the garden sheds that we discussed so much this morning or many other places. I also looked at what is perhaps an equally analogous piece of legislation in the draft Animal Welfare Bill, and the Minister may recognise it as the source of many of the amendments. It has been published for consultation, and I hope that it will soon be a real Bill.
The powers in those Bills are much more detailed than those in this. It is pointless to go into each at this stage, but they clearly lay out the powers of inspectors and constables. They segregate the issues of premises and dwellings and mention when people require warrants if somebody is refusing to provide entry. Most important—this is common to much enforcement legislation but is missing from clause 44—is the statement that the inspector or constable must have just cause to believe that an offence is being committed.
My biggest concern about clause 44 is that it provides a complete and utter opportunity for open access. Under police legislation, even a police officer, if he enters premises, has to have justifiable reason to believe that an offence is being or is about to be committed. That is not evident in the Bill.
Amendment No. 65 seeks to remedy that; it is my de minimis proposal. It would insert the issue of the inspector having reasonable cause to enter premises and to carry out the actions listed in subsection (1). That is, I believe, the minimum alteration that should be made, but I prefer, and commend to the Government—albeit that they entail a larger and, the Minister might argue, more unwieldy change—amendments Nos. 124 and 125 and new clauses 4 to 6. They are lifted from the draft Animal Welfare Bill, and they delineate much more clearly the responsibilities and powers of inspectors who think that there is a problem, as well as the role of the constable and the issue of warrants, with a differentiation between premises.
The Minister could—I have not tabled an amendment to this effect—use the powers of the Environmental Protection Act 1990 as it applies to inspectors. My reading is that clause 44(4), which refers to schedule 2 to the Food and Environment Protection Act 1985, is too narrow to deal with my concerns. Those are that the provision will enable inspectors—we shall deal in later amendments with the question of who the inspectors might be—to enter any premises, be they land or buildings, dwellings or otherwise, on their own decision, without having to demonstrate just cause, and to search for the pesticides that we debated this morning, or any formulation or other information about them, simply to ascertain whether an offence is being committed under section 43. That is far too wide a provision.
One could say a great deal about the matter, but I am not a lawyer and I shall not go into the depths of legal language about the powers of inspectors. The point is made. I am convinced that the clause will not stand. On the advice that I have received, it will be changed at some stage during the passage of the Bill, because it would give an inspector powers out of all proportion to the offence created under clause 43. I hope that the Minister will take that on board and realise that it is necessary to set sensible limits to powers, that there should be a distinction between entry to land or ordinary premises and people’s dwellings, and that the inspector should have a justifiable reason for gaining such entry, which is not what the Bill provides.
I hope that the Minister will accept that the clause involves a fundamental problem and that the far-reaching powers that it gives to the inspector are out of all proportion to the offences and, indeed, the sentences, that we discussed earlier.