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Criminal Law (Amendment) (Protection of Property) Bill

I have an example that I was going to use later in my speech, but it is relevant to my hon. Friend’s question. I would pity the security guard in those circumstances. Let us suppose that, on a housing development, some of the houses had been finished, some had been constructed as far as the second floor and had a roof, some had only the first floor and no roof, and some were still just a wishful thought in the developer’s eye, consisting only of footings or perhaps just open land. The problem that the security guard would face as he chased the burglar from one part of the site to another would be that he would be able to use disproportionate force when he was in a finished house, but he may or may not be able to do so when he entered a half-finished house, depending on how much of it had been built, and when he chased the burglar over the open land heading for the gate, he would be back under the old rule of reasonable force. Frankly, nothing could better illustrate the anomalies that the Bill would create as a result of defining the word ““building”” insufficiently tightly. Instead, it sloppily cross-refers us to the Theft Act 1968 because its drafters could not be bothered to apply their minds to what a building should be, for the detailed and specific purposes of the proposals. The net consequence is that we should have all these amazing anomalies.