Lord Vaux of Harrowden (CB)

My Lords, the Bill creates a wide range of unprecedented and intrusive powers for both the Cabinet Office and the DWP. Throughout the course of the Bill—and in its previous incarnation under the last Government—my focus has been on trying to ensure that these powers are restricted to what is actually required for the purposes of dealing with fraud against the public sector and that there are appropriate and strong safeguards against overreach and overuse of these powers. I recognise and acknowledge that the Government have introduced a lot of safeguards into the Bill compared to those we had when we were discussing similar measures under the aborted Data Protection and Digital Information Bill last year. This is a much better Bill, but it still introduces a wide range of new powers, and, while better, there are still areas where the safeguards should be improved. In particular, when creating powers of this nature, it is important that the safeguards should be in the Bill and not left to codes of practice or internal departmental rules, both of which can be changed without scrutiny. We will come back to that theme several times later today. These two amendments cover the police powers that the Bill would give to the Cabinet Office and the Public Sector Fraud Authority. I have serious doubts as to whether it is genuinely necessary to give search, entry and seizure police powers to civil servants anyway, but if we are to do so, it is essential that there are very robust safeguards around their use.