Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Bill [Lords]

I take the view, as I think the hon. Gentleman does, that judicial review should be carried out by High Court judges, and we might be able to bring in retired High Court judges to do that. We are talking about important decisions on whether the Home Office has broken the law. There is a proposal towards the end of the Bill that would allow the higher court to replace the lower court’s decision with its own. If that is to happen, there is even more reason to make sure that a judge of authority is involved. I think that the hon. Gentleman and I are arguing along the same lines; if we are to have a new regime, the higher part of the tribunal regime should include High Court judges of authority who can say whether a council, Government Department or agency of Government was wrong, who can say what should happen, and who can make the decision in the body’s stead. If that last power is to be added, there is even more reason for someone of authority to make the initial case. To return to the substantive part of the Bill, one of the things that troubles me, and that clearly troubled the hon. Members for Knowsley, South and for North-East Hertfordshire (Mr. Heald) and others, is that there have been fits and starts in getting the process right. The Government have been consulting on the measures for a long time, but we then got into a muddle. There was a draft Bill last year, and there were consultation responses to the draft Bill, but they were not published or assessed. We went from a draft Bill—draft Bills are meant to be a good new procedure for discovering what people out there think—to a final Bill before we had seen any of the information, and that is bad practice. I will defend the Department for Constitutional Affairs as an important Department, and I hope that we soon have a properly constituted ministry of justice to replace it. However, if we are to do the job properly, and if pre-legislative scrutiny is to matter, we should do more than just put Bills out for consultation in draft; we should listen to the responses, publish them, and let everybody—not least Parliament—evaluate them. Consultations are not just for Ministers; they are for Members of Parliament, too. I want to make some proposals, but like the Conservative party, we will not oppose the Bill on Second Reading. There is much that is good in the Bill, and I hope that we will work together in Committee to improve it. We will see how far we can get before Report. The Joint Committee on Human Rights made many points about the European convention on human rights, suggesting that there are rights that are not being met, and that are certainly not met under the Bill. I shall not read all its points on to the record, but the Minister will know that there are sets of proposals in the two reports, which only came out in the past two months. Indeed, the second was published last month. They include proposals about rights of entry and the right of forced entry. I would be grateful if Ministers told us whether they accept all the Committee’s proposals, recommendations and requests for the House to consider matters. Do the Government accept that there ought to be a difference between residential premises and commercial premises? It seems to me that there is all the difference in the world. Having bailiffs break into someone’s home—the hon. Member for Knowsley, South, gave a good example—is significantly different from having bailiffs break into an office where somebody works. There should be greater protection for people’s homes and for residential properties than for commercial businesses. Similarly, I have always believed that a crime against a person should, in principle, always be viewed more seriously than a crime against property, because human beings are much more vulnerable than any building.