My Lords, my noble friend is quite right: I feel the need to intervene on Amendment 176A. There seems to be a strong consensus among the bodies that considered the Bill in its draft stages and beforehand that there should be a commission rather than commissioners. The Joint Committee made this very clear in its recommendation 114:
“It is unclear to us why the Home Office chose to create a group of Judicial Commissioners rather than creating an Independent Intelligence and Surveillance Commission as recommended by David Anderson QC, a recommendation endorsed by the … Interception of Communications Commissioner’s Office. The benefits of having a senior independent judicial figure in the Investigatory Powers Commissioner would not be lost by putting the IPC at the head of a Commission. The evidence we have heard is that the work of the oversight body will be significantly enhanced by the creation of a Commission with a clear legal mandate”.
The Interception of Communications Commissioner’s Office commented:
“The bulk of the oversight will actually be carried out by inspectors and staff within the Commission who need a clear legal mandate to require information from public authorities, to launch and undertake audits, inspections, inquiries, investigations and react in real time when noncompliance or contraventions of the legislation are discovered during an inspection. There are examples of oversight bodies created as separate ‘Commissions’, e.g. section 9 of the Police Reform Act 2002 created the Independent Police Complaints Commission as a body corporate. We believe this legal structure provides an appropriate model for the Investigatory Powers Commission, with statutory functions vested in the body corporate as well as the Judicial Commissioners”.
The Government have elected to ignore all those recommendations. The only reason I have heard to date is the estimated additional cost of £500,000 a year of a commission, as opposed to commissioners. I have heard no substantive arguments against the proposition, so I await the Minister’s response with interest.