Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)

My Lords, in moving Amendment 27, I will speak also to Amendments 29, 62 and 75, which relate to debt recovery and concerns about the proportionality, even constitutionality, of the Bill’s use of direct deduction orders. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Palmer of Childs Hill, for his support in this endeavour. The purpose of these amendments, and those in the later group starting with Amendment 102, is to transfer the powers of the Minister in Part 1 and of the Secretary of State in Part 2 to make direct deduction orders and deduction from earnings orders to relevant courts, whether the county court in England and Wales or the sheriff court in Scotland. Before I look at the substance of this issue, I note that Amendment 29 addresses Clause 19(2) and paragraph 3(2) of new Schedule 3ZA, inserted by Schedule 5 to the Bill, whereby the Minister or the Secretary of State are required only to believe that a person holds the bank account in question. Other provisions require such belief to be reasonable, so inserting the word “reasonably” before “believes” would impose a reasonableness test. Not having such a test removes the balance of proper scrutiny and any threshold for a belief. This needs to be addressed to prevent unscrupulous intrusion. Meanwhile, Amendment 62 probes the circumstances in which orders can be restarted where they have been suspended, because I am confused about why that is necessary. To return to the fundamental principles at stake in Amendments 27 and 75 in particular, and the broad theme, for centuries the rule of law and the separation of powers have ensured that a person is innocent until proven guilty and cannot be punished by political diktat. The Executive cannot arbitrarily take action against a person, even a debtor, in the manner that the Bill gives the relevant Minister. The Bill allows the Minister to order a bank to supply sensitive information for the purposes of debt recovery, without either judicial oversight or individual knowledge. On our first day in Committee, we heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Finn, the shocking details of how Clause 7 allows relatively junior civil servants in the Cabinet Office to apply for a warrant to enter and search premises and seize anything they have reasonable grounds to believe has been obtained in the commission of fraud. If handing police powers to civil servants was not chilling enough, here are powers that facilitate the state raiding bank accounts.