My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for his supplementary question. I apologise for having omitted to answer specifically the detailed point that he made in the course of his submission earlier—something I have been guilty of in the past in my appearances in your Lordships’ House.
Amendments 17 and 72 would insert a requirement for the authorising officer to hold a reasonable belief that conduct is both necessary and proportionate. As the noble Lord has identified, the position is that the amendment cannot be accepted as the Bill has been drafted in line with the requirements of the rest of RIPA, including that for the underlying Section 29 use and conduct authorisation. The noble Lord, Lord Anderson, identifies a conflict between the terms of the code of practice that I quoted, at 3.10, and the terms of the Bill, and, more to the point, I think, identifies a potential conflict in what was said in the other place in debating these subjects. In those circumstances, I would be very happy to engage with the noble Lord and write to him on the matter.
I am being reminded just now that we have already included wording in the updated code of practice to set out that it is expected that the belief should be a reasonable one, and that the Security Minister confirmed this during the debate in the Commons.