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Criminal Law (Amendment) (Protection of Property) Bill

We all admire my hon. Friend’s ability to retain the thread of his remarks despite our interventions. I want to take him back to an intervention that he did not fully deal with: my hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Mr. Khan) pointed out that under the Bill the situation would be different for someone who entered as a trespasser and for an opportunist who went into a shop and then decided to commit a burglary. A householder would not necessarily know which of those two things had occurred, so the exemption in subsection (1A)(b)—"““this was or ought to have been apparent to the person””—" relates only to the degree of force. If a householder came across someone who had appeared in the building unlawfully but did not know whether they originally intended to trespass, the householder would not know whether they could use disproportionate force.