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Counter-Terrorism Bill

I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, for suggesting a line of argument on this. I was not on this occasion going to oppose her amendment on the basis that it was over-bureaucratic, but, to use the words that she used earlier, because it was perhaps naive. I am not quite sure how, in the course of an investigation, it will be appropriate for police officers to say exactly how a particular document might fit into a line of inquiry which may have been generated by intelligence, or something which has happened which would not otherwise be known to the person who is being investigated but might materially alter the way in which they behaved were they to know that. The amendment seems to hand somebody who may turn out to be a potential terrorist substantial information about the cause, background and how much information that the police already have. The danger of the amendment is that the reason given would be of such extraordinary generality and banality that it would be meaningless. It is clear that to state the reason as being that the constable concerned thought that it might fit in with the general line of the investigation which was taking place would not serve the purpose. If the noble Baroness is concerned that there should be the possibility of an audit after the event as to whether the powers have been exercised reasonably—I can see that that is legitimate, because there have been instances described of what sound like bizarre things having been seized—she is looking for something that is not part of a record which can be given to the person from whom the documents have been taken, but something which is required to be recorded so that, in any subsequent inquiry, it could be looked at. The danger of that is that one is creating another form of bureaucracy, whereas what is intended is something which is handed over at the time. We must be realistic about the circumstances; we must be realistic about the widespread concerns about the extent to which the police have to fill in forms. The clause contains a requirement that people receive a proper receipt for documents that have been taken from them, with a fair degree of detail about the circumstances in which it has happened. However, to suggest that, at that stage, in that document, the police should explain how their investigations are going and what they are looking at is taking it a step too far. If there is genuine concern that the police are not using the powers reasonably—I would have thought that other amendments and discussions might have covered that—what the amendment proposes will not resolve that problem because it will lead to reasons being put down which are so general as to not mean anything. If one is really concerned to do that, some other form of record is needed, but it would create a new bureaucratic process. I wonder whether that is quite what the noble Baroness intends.