Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill — House of Lords, 2021-09-14
Topic: Law and Crime
Igor Judge (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, this is indeed major legislation—298 pages, and that does not tell us the whole story anyway; it is bunged full of regulations. There are 62 regulation-making powers, and, glory be, dear old Henry VIII comes to the fore to put right all 61 of the other regulatory measures, all 177 clauses and 20 schedules, which are eternal in their length. That is not the way to legislate I am not here to argue against any measure which promotes public safety, but I want to touch on one or two aspects of constitutionality that matter. If I really had the nerve and the time, I would simply re-read to the whole House the reports from the Constitution Committee and the Delegated Powers Committee Can we just look at Clause 36 and that group, on the extraction of information from electronic devices? It is done by consent of the user, unless there is a death, in which case no consent is needed. That is fine until we remember—particularly looking around the Chamber, where I do not see many people under the age of 30—how people aged under 30 behave in a way that we do not; they use their devices to convey just about everything you can care to think of about their own lives. They send that to recipients, and they receive messages back. That information is private to the recipient. It may be very rude about the recipient; it may tell him in the nicest possible way that he is to push off and other things that people say to each other on their devices. I sometimes wonder why I should not have one myself—[Laughter.] I did not mean that The serious point is that the communications are not protected in any way, shape or form, so a constable, who is an authorised officer for the purpose of the Act, can on complying with the conditions simply extract a whole lot of information which may be immensely personal to lots of people other than the user. We need to think about that; we are talking about young people who have to have confidence in our criminal justice system. We even need to think about the convention, which the Minister has said we are compliant with; I just wonder whether that will turn out to be the case, because I do not share her conviction about it I am very concerned about the casual way in which this has been done. We are waiting for regulations. The Secretary of State has to decide about protected information and confidential information. Do we know anything about what they are going to do? No. We are waiting for it in Clause 41. And so it goes on We then turn to the provisions on demonstrations, processions and assemblies. I am not going to enter into the debate on that; others will speak on it—whether this is right or wrong or consistent—but I want us to ask this. We are accepting all this on faith. We do not know what this Act means; we literally do not know. We are waiting for a definition from the Secretary of State to tell us. I thought the words were perfectly straightforward, but, no, the Secretary of State by regulation is going to tell us what "serious disruption" means. I think we know what it means, but we are nevertheless asked to enact this measure waiting for the Secretary of State to tell us what she thinks it means. The important point is that what she thinks it means will be in a regulation and that is what it will mean. We will not have the slightest idea whether we agree with it; we may or we may not Going on with it, we turn to—no, I shall not go on with it; my time is nearly up.