My Lords, I put my name to these amendments. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, for the clear exposition he has given of the reasons for them, and I have listened to the anecdotal evidence provided by the noble Lord, Lord Carlile.
I think we are all agreed that proper legal professional privilege is vital to the rule of law. It is not a privilege of the legal profession but of the client, as the noble Baroness said. However, the illustrations show that some other factor may be buried in proper legal confidentiality. The example of information being passed on innocently is one such. It was not part of the legal professional privilege conversation but an adjunct to it—“Please pass this on to my girlfriend”. Another possible illustration, which I have discussed with the Minister, is that the location of the client might be mentioned incidentally. Where he happens to be is not crucial to the advice he gets or the information he gives in order to get it, which is, of course, the real reason the conversation is protected.
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For example, suppose the client indicates where he is and there is no other way of finding that out because if there is, the security services are bound to use it. If he discloses in the course of the conversation where he is at the time in question, and that has nothing whatever to do with the advice he is seeking or the information he is given about the nature of the matter between him and the solicitor, which is covered by legal professional privilege, it may be vital to the security services to know that. The consequence of not knowing where he is may be to lose the opportunity to prevent a disaster, because if they know that they may be able to take sufficiently quick action to prevent it. It seems highly likely that in most cases this kind of information will be possible to ascertain without this problem but that may not always be the case—I am not sure.
The fact is that this might be very unusual, and not many people would think it wise to burn down a house for the purpose of roasting a pig—unless they wanted the house to come down anyway. But although it happens seldom it could be a vital factor in preventing a huge disaster. I hope that the Government, with all the resources of their learned parliamentary counsel, will draft a provision which incorporates the iniquity situation as well as that of the non-iniquity of a lawyer who is unwittingly used to further some aspect of what the person consulting him wants, as in the example given. It will also be important where, for example, the location from which the conversation is taking place is vital to instant action on the part of the security services to avert disaster.