Powers of Entry etc. Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 14: 14: Clause 10, page 3, line 24, leave out ““or officers of HM Revenue and Customs”” The noble Lord said: This goes to the heart of the Bill. I pay tribute to the Minister and his team, because at Second Reading I had doubts and thought that this whole concept should be swept into the long grass. I found to my amazement that the co-operation I encountered when I first joined this House was alive and well. I spoke to the Minister, who suggested that there were things that could be done together. I then learnt an amazing piece of information. Why there had been no answer to all the questions that I had asked about what powers of entry government departments had? The short answer was that government departments did not know what their powers of entry were and no-one else knew what they were. Then, to my surprise, we ended up with a joint team with the Home Office, suggested by the Minister, who could not have been more helpful. We all realised that something could be done if, first and foremost, we could identify what powers of entry existed. In the first Bill that I put forward there were some sections. In Committee, that Bill and its schedule were like this. The schedule in the Amendment lists 500 pieces of legislation, which I then broke down in a brief to ones were the responsibility of which ministry. That has been fairly defined to date, but the general feeling is that there could be as many as 1,000 powers of entry at large somewhere, hiding under some bed or other. What intrigued me was the ingenuity shown by the Home Office team. When they found that ministries did not know what their powers of entry were, they kindly used as a base the works that I have previously shown your Lordships in the book by my esteemed university professor. We then found that they had gone to the old-fashioned ideas of going to the internet. So, without any help from other government departments, the outside world has produced a pretty impressive schedule. My suggestion is therefore that this Bill proceeds to Report stage next week and is then passed. It can then be used as a base for further research and activity which could take place during the summer months. We would then discuss with the Government whether they felt able to support the introduction of legislation in the next Parliament. This is an extraordinarily topical issue and I am still amazed that, for several hundred years, people have not known what the powers were. I take great comfort from the fact that, if people did not know what the powers were, they probably were not used very much and were not necessary. I return to my noble friend’s point about foreigners. There is a worry these days that many of the powers that were in the state’s hands—you could trust government officials—have moved into the hands of private companies under privatisation. There is a lot to do and I do not wish to take the Committee’s time, but I thank the Minister for the initiatives that he has shown. I assure him of our support and I hope that we will receive support from the Home Office. I very much appreciate the fact that we have managed to squeeze our discussion into a short time, which prevents me waffling on. I beg to move.