Investigatory Powers Bill

Debate between Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers and Lord Strasburger

Wednesday 13th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers (CB)]

My Lords, that is precisely what this amendment is seeking to do.

[Lord Strasburger (LD)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 41, which seeks to remove the requirement for a judicial commissioner to apply judicial review principles when approving warrants. I do so with some trepidation as I am only the second noble Lord who is not a lawyer to venture into this very dangerous territory, but I will have a go. We heard a lot about this subject on the Joint Committee on the Bill and a large amount of both written and oral evidence was presented to us. I have reviewed it all again in preparation for today and would like to make the following points.

Surely applying any rules at all to how a person is to make a decision must have the effect of constraining how that person makes their decision. As such, constraining the judicial commissioner to judicial review rules must reduce their contribution to the decision compared to that of the Secretary of State, who has no such rules or constraints to limit how she makes her decision. If we retain the judicial review principle for the judicial commissioner, we no longer have a true double lock; we have a 1.5, or 1.4 lock, or whatever. If we want a true double lock—the phrase the Government keep using—whereby both the Secretary of State and the judicial commissioner consider the application in identical ways, as we on these Benches believe is the ideal, then we cannot constrain one of the decision-makers to special rules, whether those of judicial review or otherwise.

Several witnesses to the Joint Committee pointed out a major flaw in the case for judicial review rules to apply. Normally during a judicial review, both parties are present and have the opportunity to make their case for and against the decision being sought. In the case of a warrant application, only one party is present and the judicial commissioner has to imagine what objections the person who is the subject of the warrant might offer, so it is not possible to truly apply judicial review rules. In his oral evidence on this aspect, Matthew Ryder QC said that,

“normally in judicial review, there is an element of an adversarial process. In other words, the judge is assessing it with somebody making representations in relation to the other side. There will be no adversarial process built into this, the way it stands at the moment. You will have a judicial review, but no one putting forward the argument to the judge in a different situation. Now, that is not unheard of; you have that in other situations, but not in … a judicial review situation”.

So far, no proponent of judicial review rules has explained why the judicial commissioner should be limited in his or her consideration of the warrant application, so perhaps one or more noble Lords will do so during this debate. The Home Secretary suggested in her oral evidence, somewhat counterintuitively, that being constrained would give the judicial commissioner more flexibility, when the opposite would seem to be the case. I will listen with interest to the debate on this amendment. In the meantime, I commend it to the House.