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Powers of Entry etc. Bill [HL]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Selsdon, on the Bill, which I wholeheartedly support. As one has come to expect, he has researched the matter with the utmost thoroughness and drafted the Bill with the greatest care and precision. I was brought up in an era when it was taken for granted that an Englishman’s home was his castle—we pitied the poor foreigner, for whom that was not believed to be the case—but times change, too often for the worse. A thoughtful writer, Allison Pearson, whom it is fair to say was broadly sympathetic towards new Labour until fairly recently, wrote in the Daily Mail two days ago that: "““The once-great thing about Britain was that it always left you alone ... Now, we are among the most spied-upon people in the world””." It has recently been revealed that the United Kingdom has more CCTV cameras than the whole of the rest of Europe lumped together. How does this country rank in terms of official intrusion into private property? Continental bureaucrats are traditionally regarded as authoritarian, pernickety and horrendously slow in their dealings with their frustrated citizens. On the other hand, they are prepared to bend or ignore the rules—particularly in southern Europe—to protect national or regional interests. I very much doubt that their Governments allow them as extensive powers of entry as is the case in Britain. For one thing, you burst in unannounced on a suspicious French peasant toting his rusty 12-bore at your peril. Admittedly, that is to some extent informed guesswork, so let us go back to the details of the Bill. Without doubt the most welcome and useful clause is Clause 6, which restricts the times within which compulsory entry can take place other than in exceptional circumstances. Most people will not realistically have the time or inclination to study the Bill in detail, should it become law, but the fact that no official will be entitled to hammer on your door before eight o’clock in the morning is something that everyone can easily grasp and welcome. One can only wish that that restriction could be extended to the police, though one can understand why it cannot be. One suspects that 6 am raids on the homes of non-violent men and women suspected of relatively minor white-collar offences have more to do with an eagerness to get into the first editions of the evening papers, or on to lunchtime television or ““The World at One””, than with any genuine operational imperative. One wishes that similar constraints could be imposed on the Revenue and Customs, which, for accidental historical reasons, has even more powers than the police. That is essentially because it was granted its powers roughly 200 years earlier, in more autocratic times. However, that may be for another day, unless we can somehow slip it into the Bill, which I doubt. Earlier, I deplored the extent to which an Englishman’s home was no longer his castle. Interestingly, the Scots and the Northern Irish are rather better off. The National Council for Civil Liberties, now known as Liberty, revealed a few years ago that the powers of compulsory entry on to private property were no less than 57 per cent fewer in Scotland and 41.5 per cent fewer in Northern Ireland than in England and Wales. This Bill is quite modest. It is far from revolutionary given that as drafted it does not seek to repeal a single power of entry, merely to make them less disturbing and disrupting to the citizen or, as I prefer to call him, subject. That being the case, the Bill deserves solid support from all quarters of your Lordships’ House.