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Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill

moved Amendment No. 74A: Page 5, line 40, at end insert- ““( ) enable the requisition, confiscation or destruction of property; ( ) prohibit, or enable the prohibition of, or require, or enable the requirement of, travel or movement to or from a specified place or places; ( ) prohibit, or enable the prohibition of, specified activities; ( ) confer jurisdiction on a court or tribunal (which may include a tribunal established by any regulations);”” The noble Lord said: I shall also speak to Amendment No. 74B. These amendments would insert more protections into Clause 8. Subsection (1) currently inserts only two prohibitions to the order-making power. An order cannot authorise any forcible entry, search or seizure or compel the giving of evidence. The Explanatory Notes are particularly unhelpful on this; when explaining why these provisions appear, they merely state: "““The restriction in clause 8(1) on making provision authorising forcible entry, search or seizure, or compelling the giving of evidence, derives from the 2001 Act (section 3(5))””." The reliance on the 2001 Act as some kind of precedent to justify the Bill has been a somewhat disingenuous tactic throughout our debates. I hope the Minister will not merely recite that justification, which is implicit in the Explanatory Notes. Just because the Government succeeded in getting their Bill passed in 2001, that does not mean we should cease to scrutinise any similar measures in this new Bill. The Minister has often referred to how the Bill will be more effective than the 2001 Act. Any protections or safeguards, therefore, have to be considered against these new powers to test whether they are sufficient. With that in mind, will the Minister explain exactly why those particular protections have been singled out in Clause 8, as opposed to anything else? The Committee will see that in AmendmentNo. 74A my noble friend has suggested a list of possible protections to be built into Clause 8, in addition to the two that were already there. She took as her starting point the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, where, in Section 22(3), the Government have provided a frankly alarming shopping list of things they would like to do by emergency regulations. I hope that transposing the powers suggested in that Act into protections in this Bill will be a useful starting point in discussing what protections are needed here in Clause 8. As always, I am not suggesting—as, I suspect, my noble friend Lord Onslow would—that this Government would use the order-making powers in Part 1 as a substitute for using the powers in the Civil Contingencies Act. My point is that if the Government believed that these types of powers were necessary only in an emergency, why can they not provide a safeguard, written into the Bill, that these types of powers will never be included in the order-making powers the Bill proposes? I turn now to Amendment No. 74B. Clause 8(2) provides for the circumvention of the protections provided by Clause 8(1), and states that subsection (1) does not prevent an order from extending any power for purposes similar to those to which the power applied before the order was made. Does that not effectively render any protection in subsection (1) redundant? In other words, so long as the purpose of the power is similar to a previous power, it can be extended, regardless of the fact that it would authorise search and seizure of property or compel the giving of evidence. No doubt the Government will again pray in aid the 2001 Act. However, that is not a satisfactory argument by itself to justify the appearance of this provision. Section 3(5) of the 2001 Act stated that an order could not do anything that would authorise forcible entry or compel the giving of evidence, "““unless a provision to that effect is contained in an enactment repealed by the order and the powers conferred by the provision to that effect contained in the order are exercisable for the same purposes as the powers conferred by the repealed enactment or for purposes of a like nature””." I accept that this has the same effect as Clause 8(2), but I would be interested to hear who decides whether the new extended powers to be granted by the order are for purposes similar to the previous powers. I imagine that in the end it would be the courts themselves. The key question is to what extent ““similar”” allows a margin of flexibility for the Minister making the order-making power. Would not ““identical”” be more appropriate, if Clause 8 is to have any point whatever? I beg to move.