Martin Partington: Spotlight on the Justice System

In 2000, Parliament enacted the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. At the time, it was acclaimed by government ministers as Human Rights Act compliant, and was presented as forward-looking legislation. The Protection of Freedoms Bill, currently before Parliament contains provisions to tighten up the use of covert investigatory techniques. And a recent report from JUSTICE makes a strongly argued case for fundamental reform of the regulation of surveillance.

The principal findings in the report are:
• Since RIPA came into force in 2000, there have been:
– more than 20,000 warrants for the interception of phone calls, emails, and Internet use;
– at least 2.7 million requests for communications data, including phone bills and location data;
– more than 4,000 authorisations for intrusive surveillance, eg, planting bugs in someone’s house
or car;
– at least 30,000 authorisations for directed surveillance, eg, following someone’s movements in
public, or watching their house.
• In total, there have been close to three million decisions taken by public bodies under RIPA in the last decade.
• This does not include the number of warrants and authorisations on behalf of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, which have never been made public.
• Of the decisions we do know about, fewer than 5,000 (about 0.16 per cent) were approved by a judge.
• The main complaints body under RIPA, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, has dealt with only 1,100 cases in the last decade and upheld only ten complaints.
• Surveillance is a necessary activity in the fight against serious crime. It is a vital part of our national
security. It has saved countless lives and helped convict hundreds of thousands of criminals.
• But unnecessary and excessive surveillance, however, destroys privacy and blights our freedoms.
• RIPA has not only failed to check a great deal of plainly excessive surveillance by public bodies over the last decade but, in many cases, inadvertently encouraged it. Its poor drafting has allowed councils to snoop, phone hacking to flourish, privileged conversations to be illegally recorded, and CCTV to spread. It is also badly out of date.
• The conclusion is that RIPA is neither forward-looking nor human rights compliant. Piecemeal amendments are no longer
enough for what is already a piecemeal Act. Root-and-branch reform of the law on surveillance is needed to provide freedom from unreasonable suspicion, and put in place truly effective safeguards against the abuse of what are necessary powers.
• This report sets out a series of recommendations to serve as the basis for a draft Surveillance Reform Bill.

The full report is at http://www.justice.org.uk/resources.php/305/freedom-from-suspicion

One of the peculiarities of the British system of Government is that the duration of the Westminster Parliament – i.e. the length of time a Government lasts following a General Election – is not fixed. At present, the maximum duration of a UK Parliament is five years. This is dictated by the Septennial Act 1715 , as amended by the Parliament Act 1911. Under those provisions,  if a Parliament is not dissolved in the period up to five years after the day on which it was summoned to meet, it automatically expires.

The formal position is that the prerogative power to dissolve Parliament before the maximum five-year period is exercised by the Queen, acting on the advice of the Prime Minister. In reality, this gives the Prime Minister of the day considerable flexibility on when he or she ‘goes to the country’ – a decision that may well be determined by the state of the public opinion polls.

A consequence of the creation of the Coalition Government has been the introduction of the Fixed-term Parliaments Bill. This provides for fixed days for polls for parliamentary general elections. The polling day for elections would ordinarily be the first Thursday in May every five years. The first such polling day would be on 7th May 2015.

The Prime Minister is given power to alter, by statutory instrument, the polling day for such parliamentary general elections but only to a day not more than two months earlier or later than the scheduled polling day.

The holding of early parliamentary general elections can be triggered  either by a vote of no confidence in the Government following which the House of Commons did not endorse a new Government within 14 days, or a vote by at least two-thirds of all MPs in favour of an early election. Where such an early election occurs, the next scheduled election after that will be five years from the previous first Thursday in May.

The Queen’s notional residual power to dissolve Parliament will be abolished.

The Fixed-Term Parliaments Bill has almost completed its passage through Parliament and should receive the Royal Assent by the end of June 2011.

After all the argument in Parliament – particularly in the House of Lords, which used unprecedented late night sittings to try and derail the bill – the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act was finally passed into law in mid-February. The Act allows for a referendum on changing to an ‘alternative vote’ system for general elections to be held on 5 May 2011 and the redrawing of constituency boundaries to reduce the size of the House of Commons from 650 seats to 600.

It cannot be said that, to date, there has been much public debate on the issue. Both the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ camps have launched their campaigns, and there has been some comment in the serious press on the arguments for and against.

What do you think? Will AV make the elected Parliament more representative of public opinion? Or will it simply dilute the individual’s voting power?

Have a look at the Electoral Reform Society site: they are strongly in favour, but this article discusses the issues clearly. Do you agree with them? See http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/article.php?id=5

It may well be that the reduction of seats in the House of Commons will ultimately have a bigger impact on its party political make-up than AV – even if AV gets the nod in the May referendum.