I think that that is certainly so; my understanding of time and practice here suggests that it is. Perhaps I may continue.
The noble Baroness, Lady Brown, made the point that the noble Lord was making on the previous amendment: that this is really rather novel. You can imagine the effect on a higher education provider if it appeared in the newspaper that, the night before, a search warrant had been issued for its headquarters. In answer to that, my noble friend Lord Younger of Leckie said that the conditions are very strict, and he read out the fairly detailed conditions. I thought it might be a simple safeguard to require a signature to say that these conditions had been met. I got a letter the day after that suggesting that this was an unheard of stipulation. As you can imagine, that slightly worked me up to see what I could do about it.
The provisions say that a search warrant must specify the name of the authorised person who applied for it and so on, and,
“state that it is issued under this Schedule”.
That is a fairly important provision. It occurred to me that all one had to do was add after that the following simple words,
“and that all the requirements for the grant specified in this Schedule are met”.
That seems very straightforward and easy.
Look at how these magistrate’s search warrants are granted. One must remember that where the conditions in a particular provision are important, the magistrate may not have in his head exactly what the conditions are. Therefore, I suggest that this amendment is a rather easy and convenient way of making sure that the magistrate’s attention is directed to the detailed requirements of the schedule, which have to be met before the warrant can be granted. That seems very straightforward and I cannot see anything wrong with it. So far, I have not heard any reason why it would not work. Therefore, I beg to move this amendment.