Commons Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 86:"Page 11, line 14, after ““time”” insert ““after the passing of this Act””" The noble Duke said: We are dealing here with the question of inspection. The Data Protection Act 1998 was passed to enable private matters to remain private. It was passed at a time when many people and the popular press were greatly annoyed by the way in which information that should be confidential and remain so was being used by companies and authorities in a way that was of no benefit to the persons to whom the information related. The Freedom of Information Act 2000 relates to information held by officialdom in the course of its duty. It does not and should not remove the requirement of the said officialdom to observe the rules of data protection. The right of public inspection of registers should be confined to the registers and the documents referred to in them. It should not extend to other documents that were supplied before the authority was in a position to warn the owner of such documents that they would be open to public inspection. Even if some of the data in these documents may be available in another context, we do not feel that they should be handed over if the owner was not aware that that might happen at some time in future. I beg to move.