Diolch yn fawr, Llywydd. I move amendment 30 in my name and I speak also to my amendment 31.

Amendment 30 requires the Welsh Ministers to issue guidance to enforcement authorities, constables and authorised officers about entering premises used wholly or mainly as dwellings, that is, people’s homes under the Bill. It stems from a recommendation in the Constitutional and Legislative Affairs Committee’s report on the Bill and a concern that the communication plan for the Bill will not go far enough in ensuring that human rights obligations are instilled in enforcement officers. The main human rights that are engaged in the context of people’s homes are article 8, which provides for the human right to respect for the home and private and family life, and article 1 of protocol 1, which provides the human right to peaceful enjoyment of possessions.

The amendment, therefore, makes a specific requirement for the guidance to cover those two human rights. The guidance can always include other wider guidance about powers to enter people’s homes, but it must include guidance to cover these two human rights, because they are a very real risk or there is a very real risk, rather, that these human rights might be breached when powers of entry are used.

I accept that there are certain safeguards built into the Bill. For example, a warrant to enter a dwelling must be issued by a justice of the peace, and after pressure from the committee the Minister did agree that enforcement authorities will always be public bodies. That is a significant advance. However, the amendment provides an opportunity to go further by providing for targeted guidance that enforcement authorities can easily find, read, understand and implement. That goes to the core of the amendment that they are there at hand for enforcement officers who are usually local authority employees, and may not be widely knowledgeable about the area and the obligations created by human rights law.

The amendment covers all powers of entry under the Bill, not just the powers of entry that apply to the smoking ban in Part 2 of the Bill. So, the areas covered by the amendment are powers of entry that apply to the smoking ban, the register of the retailers of tobacco and nicotine products, the licensing regime for special procedures, such as acupuncture, body piercing, tattooing and electrolysis, and the offence of performing intimate piercings on people under 18. In my view, requiring guidance to be issued in this specific context would in no way cast doubt on other legislation that does not contain a duty to issue guidance.

In her letter to the committee on 10 March, the Minister suggested that public bodies will see a duty to issue guidance and become confused about the operation of other legislation that does not include this duty to issue guidance. I suppose the Minister has visions of enforcement officers and other relevant public servants meeting occasionally to discuss the whole broad range of legislation, particularly that which pertains to human rights, observing there’s a specific call for guidance in this area because of the dangers of enforcement procedures breaching human rights, and then observing that similar stipulations are not in antecedent legislation, and therefore somehow this throws them into the most dreadful confusion. I invite her to make some sense of that incoherence that I’ve just described.

In a subsequent letter of 18 April, the Minister also commented that the amendment has the, and I quote,

‘the potential to cast doubt on the overall coherence of the law, and on the operation of specific restraints on the use of the powers.’

I do find the latter bit menacing, but I do feel the whole comment and approach by the Minister has been incredibly vague to these very specific and constructive amendments that were made by the Constitutional and Legislative Affairs Committee, and I do think that casting doubt on the coherence of the law, should the amendment pass, is very unfortunate. Perhaps I could bring to the attention of the Assembly the Supreme Court judgment issued last year in the case of the Christian Institute and others against the Lord Advocate of Scotland, where the judgment issued by the Supreme Court warned about the dangers of legislation simply relying on a public authority being aware of its human rights obligations. And in paragraph 101 of that judgment, the Supreme Court said that guidance was needed in order to reduce the risk of disproportionate interferences that breach human rights. I couldn’t think of a better definition of what entering people’s homes to ensure proper enforcement could be, in terms of a better illustration, really, of the danger that we face here.

Can I just say, then, that amendment 31 concerns the commencement of this new provision? And I’ll just explain to Members that without making any specific provision around commencement, this new section, if it’s agreed, would automatically fall within section 133(2) of the Bill, meaning that it would only come into force whenever the Welsh Ministers decide to bring it into force. The purpose of the amendment is to commence the proposed new section on guidance on the day in which the Act receives Royal Assent, there providing a clear message that the Welsh Government intends to issue the guidance within a reasonable period of time. I so move.