Ms Isolde Goggin:

There has been much commentary about the powers proposed in the Bill. The first point I would make is that serious crime requires serious powers to deal with it. On the criminal side, these are offences that carry a ten-year jail sentence, prosecution to the Central Criminal Court by the Director of Public Prosecutions. White-collar crime is crime. It is up there with other forms of crime in terms of the appropriate penalties. We would be very used to exercising the criminal powers that we have under the supervision of the courts. Again, we are a little bit different from some of our counterparts in Europe where they are used to doing things on the civil basis of proof. We come from the other end of the spectrum where we are used to the supervision of the courts in obtaining a search warrant, and we are used to proving our case in court to that level of proof.

In terms of the surveillance powers, they are just used in order to get one to the point where one has evidence to bring to a court or a tribunal. At the point that one uses the surveillance powers there is no certainty of guilt or otherwise but they are a very important investigative tool. We have certainly had cases in the past where we have had evidence, for instance, that a group was meeting in an hotel, that a group of businesses engaged in the same trade were meeting, we knew that meeting was going to happen and we had suspicions that it was a cartel meeting but we could not do anything in order to find out what went on at it. This was somewhat back in the day where, I think, people used to write down what they were talking about during the cartel meetings and one would be able to find stuff in the bin or whatever. Nowadays, as I mentioned, people are much more tech savvy and so on. There is a distinction between the powers that are proposed in this Bill, which are very targeted and would be exercised on foot of a warrant versus mass surveillance, which I think was the subject of the UK case that has been mentioned about communications, the retention of data and so on. We would see these powers as being exercised very narrowly and very much under the supervision of the courts. Again, I am sure that any input into the details of the legislation that make it clear that this is narrow, targeted and evidence-based would be very welcome.