Protection of Freedoms Bill

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend. I was grateful to her for taking my call earlier today to discuss her amendment. Since speaking to her this afternoon and rereading the notes and advice that I have had on this amendment, I hope I can provide her with more assurance than I indicated earlier, but I will not prejudge that. As I made clear in Committee, I fully share my noble friend’s concerns about the impact that intrusive noise can have, particularly when it comes from neighbouring properties. I share her concerns that in many cases noise monitoring would already fall outside the RIPA regime because there is not an expectation of privacy. However, in some cases it is possible that noise monitoring amounts to an intrusion of an individual’s expectations of privacy. In such cases it is right that steps are taken to ensure that any monitoring is both necessary and proportionate. The whole point of the RIPA safeguards of necessity and proportionality is that there needs to be an assessment on a case-by-case basis that takes into account the individual facts of the case. RIPA ensures that public authority surveillance activity meets its obligations under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Without a RIPA authorisation, a public authority that exceeds the bounds or intrudes quite significantly is at risk of an ECHR challenge. However, I share my noble friend’s view that many noise abatement investigations do not engage any private information and are therefore outside the scope of RIPA. I gave a few examples when we debated this issue in Committee; for example, the monitoring of loud music, alarms or machinery; if someone is having a row and it is causing inconvenience to other people they cannot be in a position to believe that that is private. There are occasions when obtaining a RIPA authorisation for noise abatement would clearly be superseded by the need for immediate action—for example, by the police—because the intervention is for a public order incident. Home Office officials have been discussing these matters with members of the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, Defra and London Councils. We have said that we cannot create a general exclusion for any noise abatement measurement or monitoring, especially if the steps taken to investigate it infringe privacy rights. However, I hope I can provide my noble friend with the assurance that she is seeking by saying that we will look again at the RIPA code of practice on surveillance to see whether we can make it clearer that in the circumstances that I have outlined—that is, where no private information is engaged or a where a person would normally be regarded as having forfeited any claim to privacy—a RIPA authorisation is unlikely to be required. I hope that that is sufficient to persuade my noble friend to withdraw her amendment.