Road Safety Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 24:"Page 5, leave out lines 9 and 10." The noble Lord said: Amendments Nos. 24 and 25 cover paragraph (e), which deals with other prescribed persons, and the subsequent subsections that would introduce it through statutory instrument. Who do the Government have in mind for that category of other prescribed persons? That could raise a real issue about the misuse of official information. Equally, as noble Lords may have realised, I do not much like secondary legislation, particularly dealing with something as important as this. We are concerned that information on driving records could be accessed relatively easily by a large number of people and, therefore, left open to abuse. Such information could be worth a lot of money to some people. It would be unhealthy if a host of fixed penalty clerks and other prescribed persons could spend their day trawling through records to see whether they could find information of worth—for example, on any of us—that they could supply to the press for profit. Why is the paragraph needed? What does the department have in mind? What steps can be taken to ensure that such sensitive information is not misused? I beg to move.