Powers of Entry etc. Bill [HL]

My Lords, I, too, strongly support my noble friend Lord Selsdon. He had done an enormous amount of work on this Bill, and it is work that very much needed to be done. It is interesting that the Minister who has been selected to respond is the noble Lord, Lord West, for whom we all have not only huge respect but great hope as a new entrant into the Whitehall jungle. At ministerial level, he may be able to do a lot. It is a little surprising that a Home Office Minister should be selected to reply to the Bill, given that it excludes Home Office responsibilities—the police and security services and all that—from its provisions. That exemption is well founded. On the other hand, I feel that it is curious that there should be firm rules for the police on entering property that do not apply to other officials. The rules are centred on the need for a warrant. Frankly, I would have thought that, if it is good enough for the police to have to obtain a warrant, that requirement should be good enough for anyone else. My noble friend Lady Miller described the careful way in which magistrates assess applications for warrants. Apart from anything else, having to get a warrant makes an official, policeman or anyone else think twice or three times and consider more carefully whether or not it is appropriate and necessary to effect this power of entry. Of course there will be occasions when entry must be made in an emergency at any time of day or night by people other than the police. When I discussed this with my wife, she mentioned the importance of being concerned about the abuse of children. That would be another exemption, certainly in relation to the hours, and perhaps a warrant might not even be required. Clause 6 limits the hours during which powers of entry could be used. I hope that when we discuss this in Committee one of changes might be that anyone covered by the Bill who seeks entry outside the prescribed hours of, I think, 6 am to 8 pm should be required to get a warrant. That would be a simple and valuable change. My noble friend talked about the extent to which the Government simply do not have the information that one might expect them to have about all this. That is astonishing. It strikes me as slack management in Whitehall. It is increasingly clear that the Government do not really have a grip on Whitehall in terms of either efficiency or legislation. That is particularly important these days when the House of Commons no longer scrutinises legislation properly. One of the worst changes ever made by this Government was to introduce automatic guillotines on every Bill. In my day in the press lobby, when I wrote about politics in Britain, if a Bill was running into difficulties one wrote that the Government might have to obtain a guillotine and one talked about their particular difficulties. Now the guillotine is automatic and the legislation is not properly considered. That is an aspect of slack management. It is an important point of which the Government should be aware. This also relates to information that one would have thought the Government should have. Totally by chance, just before I came into the Chamber, I picked up a Written Answer from the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, to a Question that I asked on the number of drivers currently disqualified from driving. This is a quotation from his Answer: "““It is not possible for the information on driving disqualifications held on the police national computer to calculate the number of people currently disqualified from driving””." That is astonishing. It is just an example of the lack of efficient, effective management. You cannot manage a business or a Government without proper information and my noble friend has been clear in drawing our attention to the huge gaps in the obvious information that is needed. It might have been more appropriate for a Treasury Minister to have answered on this Bill. I point out to the Minister that the backdrop to our discussion is a serious worsening of economic outlook and certainly a looming cash crisis for the Chancellor. What is needed is less government, fewer busybodies and fewer thoughtless forms of enforcement, which ties in with this Bill. There are many wildly overstaffed enforcement departments of local authorities and quangos. Many interesting examples are given in the book Crossing the Threshold by Harry Snook, from which I enjoyed reading an extract.