When police can enter your home in Scotland

England and Wales has one statute — PACE 1984 — that sets out, section by section, when a constable can enter a home. Scotland does not. The Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act 2016 rebuilt arrest and custody law from the ground up, but on the specific question of entering premises it does the opposite of codifying: it expressly preserves the common law instead. Nothing in Part 1 of that Act “affects any rule of law concerning the powers of a constable to enter any premises for any purpose”, and the same is true of the power to search a person once arrested.

That is not a gap in the law — it is a deliberate structural choice, and it means a lot of what happens at a Scottish doorstep rests on case law and long-standing practice rather than a section number you can point to. Anyone quoting a “section 17” power at your door in Scotland is quoting the wrong country’s law.

A constable can arrest someone without a warrant if there are reasonable grounds for suspecting they have committed or are committing an offence. That power of arrest is set out in statute. Getting into the premises to make that arrest, though, is the common-law entry power described above — the 2016 Act creates the arrest power but does not separately create an entry power to go with it.

Where a search warrant for premises is needed, it typically comes from a specific enabling statute rather than one general code. The Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 is a working example: a warrant to search for controlled drugs can be granted “in Scotland a justice of the peace, a magistrate or a sheriff” — a wider range of authorities than the justice-of-the-peace-only route used in England and Wales — and it authorises entry, by force if necessary, for one month from the date it is granted.

Scotland has its own statutory obstruction offence, separate from the Police Act 1996 provision used south of the border. It is an offence to resist, obstruct or hinder a constable, or someone assisting a constable, acting in that capacity.

As with the common-law entry point above, this cuts both ways: because so much of the entry power itself is unwritten, there is no single section to check before deciding whether an officer at the door has a lawful basis to come in. Asking what power is being used, and on what grounds, remains a fair question — physically stopping an officer who does have a lawful basis is a different matter, and is what this offence is aimed at.