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Criminal Law (Amendment) (Protection of Property) Bill

That is one of the problems. My hon. Friend switched from a shop owner to a householder halfway through his analogy, but I think it would be interesting if we stayed with the shop owner. If somebody enters a shop and tries to steal goods or raid the till, they retrospectively become a trespasser for the purposes of the Theft Act, so technically would fall to be dealt with under the Bill. The problem is that the shop owner may not know that. I suspect that most shop owners do not know the law of trespass well enough to draw that distinction. Yet again, we would be in the difficult position where different rules applied in different circumstances, with a complete lack of clarity for the victim about the extent to which they are entitled to defend themselves—whether the high test in the Bill or the common-sense test in the existing law of self-defence. A further problem with trespass relates to invitees—for example, friends who visit the house, other tenants in a house of multiple occupation, squatters, a neighbour borrowing a lawnmower or a neighbour in a dispute. They might not enter a particular place as trespassers but they could all become trespassers for the reasons that I have outlined. That creates a serious situation, because most people would not know where the line was drawn, or that the status of someone who had entered the building could change. The arguments that we have been having during the debate about trespass show that the law of trespass is not as fully understood as it should be even by those who might have read ““Archbold’s Criminal Pleadings”” or ““Clerk and Lindsell on Torts””—