Powers of Entry etc. Bill [HL]

My Lords, I am in a difficult position because I spent a large part of my life in the construction industry and fire protection and I wonder whether I should not perhaps have spoken on the Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, because I shall be a little repetitive. The difficulty that I face is that my family spent a large part of their life in public service; I have never been in public service, only in private service, which is perhaps why we have to have a Private Member’s Bill when the public sector has failed. There is a bit of history here. The wonderful thing about your Lordships' House is that many people will not have heard what I said before—some, such as the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, will have—and I may therefore be repetitive. I have embarked on 35-year journey. My family has a motto: Deus providebit—God will provide, although he has sometimes not been terribly helpful on political issues; but we also had a saying that there were only three things that you could do. First, you could advise people, in which case you joined the professions, although I have to say that the professions today spend more time trying to stop people doing things than protecting them. Secondly, you could take the credit for them that did it, in which case you became a politician, but politicians have become more and more impossible. The third option was, if you were a man, you did it yourself, which is what I have tried to do today and in the years past. It stems back to when I was an employee of the Midland Bank and we were concerned about the privacy of our clients. People were going into houses, seizing documents and copying things. What were the rights and what was the law? The banking rules were clear: you had to respect and know your client, and you had a duty a care towards them. We employed only 33,000 people in those days, which was the same, I think, as the British Navy, but we were concerned. Since I happened to be a Lord—the only one in the whole bank, I think—they turned to me and said, "You should do something about this politically". Of course, I could not, but we sat down and worked out what the problem was. Effectively, it was that there were numerous powers of entry which nobody knew about. We therefore sat down to prepare a list. We then thought that the best thing to do, because Ministers did not like to respond to private sector things, was to talk to the House of Commons. Over a period of many months in 1975 and 1976, Questions were tabled in the House of Commons to ask the Government what their powers of entry were. Nobody seemed to know. The most helpful Minister, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, may well have expected, was Dame Shirley Williams, who then left the Labour Party and joined the Social Democratic Party. However, there were no answers, so we went on asking questions. When I came here, I went to see the Chief Whip and asked, "What do I do?". He said, "My dear chap, you ask a question". So I asked a question and got what was not deemed to be a satisfactory answer. Over a long, long period of time, I asked more and more questions. What were the powers of entry? One of my more recent questions was to ask the noble Lord, Lord West, what powers of entry Ministers have. The answer was that Ministers do not have powers of entry. As I got used to it, I would write the answer that I expected government to give and then asked them other questions. I consulted again on what I should do. The powers that be said, "Send them a Bill". I thought that I was to ask the Government for money. I had not fully understood that a Bill can have a great advantage, because it is an instrument that is printed and you can debate and discuss it. I therefore introduced a Bill in 2006. I just introduced it; I did not do any more. I then introduced a Bill in 2007, which went through the House. Then everybody said, "Well, in order to get it any further, you must get someone in the House of Commons to take it up". Powers of entry are to me a public and a government issue and not necessarily a private issue, but they affect private individuals. I therefore introduced another Bill in 2008 which was exactly the same as that of 2007. All that the Bills have done is to say that you should not allow an official of government or of any body to enter somebody’s property and seize or search without permission or without a court order. The difficulty was that nobody knew how many permissions or powers of entry there were. We went on asking questions and could not get the answer, and then finally I was introduced to Professor Richard Stone, who wrote the authoritative book on this. When I asked questions to Ministers who were helpful, I told them that they could get the answer from the Library from Richard Stone’s book, and some did. But the answers were totally unacceptable, because the problem was that the Government did not know what their powers of entry were. In the schedule to the Bill we have put in 200 or 300, but nobody could determine it and there was not a single ministry or department that knew its powers. Worse than that, the private sector—the householder or homeowner—had no idea either. So here you have a situation in one of the best democracies in the world, where the ministries of government, officials and others, have no idea what their powers are and how they should implement them. As a result, on one side you have legislation that gives powers to the state, but the state does not know what those powers are; on the other hand, you have the private individual, with his home and household, who has no idea what the powers are. Also, he has no idea who is who. As industries have been privatised, for example, so the gasman is now employed by a private sector company and many organisations have been merged and become more and more complex. With every new piece of legislation, there tends to be another power of entry, and as we move into the electronic age, the householder or private individual feels more and more insecure. He fears the knock on the door. Before, he—or she—knew that it would be the milkman. You knew the postman’s knock. You went to the door because you wanted the milk, or the bread, or your letters; now there is a certain fear that the letters or documents that come in may bring bad news, ask you to do something or frighten you, or that it may be another bill. So the householder’s home may be his castle, but he has no idea who comes in and fails to identify themselves. I am not saying that there is much fraud, but it would be helpful if all those who had powers of entry adopted a code of conduct, which simply means that they should identify who they are, say why they are there and in a friendly manner proceed to things without knocking the door down. But doors have been beaten down, and your Lordships will have seen it in the press again and again. When I introduced the last Bill, I went to see the noble Lord, Lord West, who was very helpful but did not really want to do anything—or his further authorities did not want to do anything. So we thought that we should quietly let No. 10 know that there was a Bill. A few days later, on 25 October, the Prime Minister got up and made a "liberty" speech, as it was called, about the freedom of the individual and the need to deal with these powers of entry. That started the movement. The noble Lord, Lord West, said that we ought to meet, because I had tabled my Bill as an amendment to a regulatory reform Bill—at the end, just to make life difficult. I was advised that this might hold other things up. So the whole Bill became an amendment to another Bill, but I agreed to withdraw it, if we consulted. Being a Scot, I always like Scottish names. My family name is Thomson, without the "p". I was then introduced to Mr Brown, who is without an "e" and is therefore Scottish. Everyone needs a Mr Brown; Queen Victoria had a very helpful Mr Brown. I found that after a discussion with Mr Brown and his colleagues—and I cannot identify in which department that was—we had a surprising community of interests. We then set up together a public sector Bill team, as we called it, with Liberty, the Centre for Policy Studies and Mr Brown and his team and bothered and set out with Richard Stone to work out the pieces of legislation and regulations that gave powers, and to whom. I asked a few more questions and, naturally, the official Civil Service did not want to be bothered with too many questions. However, quietly, over the summer period, in quite a remarkable way, Mr Brown and his team produced a schedule which is terrifying but extraordinarily impressive. I cannot display big documents in your Lordships' House, as it is against the rules, although I could have held up a single piece of paper. But here we have identified 700 or 800 Acts of Parliament and secondary legislation, to a total of somewhere around 1,200 powers of entry, which no one else knows about and no government department knows about. So what do we do? My hope is that this Bill now moves to Committee and that at that stage we can amend the schedule of Acts in it, because it is wrong—it will always be wrong from time to time. To go with that, we have the code of conduct. One situation that has been made is that there should be a code of practice for all Bills in future. But the difficulty lies in communicating this to the general public. Logically, it would be done by a website or by email, but most people do not know how to do that; householders cannot find the information and get frightened by it. So we need something simpler. I thought that we should co-operate from this House—and I believe that any legislation that affects the freedom or rights of the individual should if possible start in this House in the first place and then go to the Commons, rather than the other way round. That would be one of my objectives. We got in touch with local government authorities, because every power of entry will be exercised at a property in a local authority area, and local authorities do not know their own powers of entry. So we will see whether in the course of next week we can set up some form of website, linked to the Home Office website, which will start to promote and encourage an understanding of what these powers of entry are. There are many fun ones, which people have forgotten about, and there will be many more to come. A terrifying thought is that new legislation is coming in. I was just handed a Bill about hatching of eggs. The powers of entry in that Act are four or five pages long. Somehow, we need to simplify everything—and it is a simple matter. All powers of entry should be registered and understood, and anyone who exercises them should enter only at a certain time of day and not at weekends and not in the middle of the night, and should not knock the door down, should be courteous and friendly and have a sign that says who he is—and in big letters, because some people will not have their glasses on when they go to the front door and will be frightened about who they are letting in. My proposal is to take these issues further—and I hope that we will be able to debate this here today. I would be grateful for your Lordships’ help, because at a local level this becomes particularly important and within regions there are many differences. But I have one question for the Minister. Under the dangerous Weeds Act, is cannabis, the weed of wisdom, classed as a dangerous weed? There are other pieces of legislation that you can go through—but I have said enough. I hope that your Lordships will understand that I am trying to seek good will and encourage the Government, so that when we introduce a new Bill at the end of this Session or the beginning of the next, it will work. The plan is that this Bill will go to Committee and we will put some amendments in; it will then go to Report and pass just a week before the election. Then we will introduce a new Bill, one hopes with government support—or the Government will permit a new Bill, or set up some form of pre-legislative scrutiny committee in the House to get all these things under way. I beg to move.