Part 3: Enforcement of consumer protection law Chapter 6: Investigatory Powers Schedule 17: Investigatory powers Paragraph 5: Access to documents
This paragraph makes clarificatory amendments to Part 4 of Schedule 5 to the Consumer Rights Act concerning enforcers’ ability, during onsite inspections, to access material which is held remotely, off-site – in particular where it is stored electronically. These amendments cover paragraph 32 of Part 4 of Schedule 5 only, which provides the conditions for a warrant in the context of an enforcer exercising its onsite investigatory powers. Save for this provision, the Government considers that Part 4 of Schedule 5 is clear that enforcers have the appropriate powers to require the production of information held remotely, when exercising their relevant onsite investigatory powers without a warrant.
	Subparagraphs (a) and (b) to this paragraph amend paragraph 32 of Schedule 5 to make clear that the conditions for a warrant to enter premises apply where (i) documents are accessible from the premises (even if the documents are not located on the premises), and (ii) it is likely that documents accessible from the premises would be concealed or interfered with, or access to them would otherwise be restricted, if notice of entry on the premises were given to the occupier.
	The effect of these amendments is that enforcers can obtain a warrant in relation to premises on the basis that it would give them access to information which may be remotely stored in electronic form but still be accessible from the premises – for example information held in a "cloud" platform rather than saved on a physical device on the business premises. Before the rise of cloud computing, that information might previously have been held in physical files on the premises or saved on a computer hard drive on the premises.