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Criminal Law (Amendment) (Protection of Property) Bill

My hon. Friend makes an interesting point. The law in relation to setting a trap, as it stands, is clear. We should not do it. That is not to say that we cannot take steps physically to harden a property against intruders. Any physical hardening, in so far as it may cause injury, should be apparent. It should not be a trap. The law goes the other way, perhaps, in that it encourages people to have window locks, burglar alarms and so forth. A burglar alarm is a trap but there were the man-traps that we see in Victorian films, catching the poacher. Such traps clearly would be a trap and would be illegal. If I am wrong about that, what happens where the man-trap is in the grounds of a property rather than inside the building? We end up with a completely different set of circumstances. If the man-trap is in the grounds of the castle, it would be caught by the existing law of reasonable force and clearly would not be protected. If it is inside the building, I suspect that it would probably be protected because the response is a trap and it is not for the purposes of the Bill. An interesting question has been raised and it is one that may have to be explored in more detail in Committee, should the Bill go that far.