Serious Crime Bill [HL]

We come back at this part in the Bill to some very important issues with which some of us are all too familiar. Those who were leading with the Identity Cards Bill on the national identity register will recall all too vividly some of the issues we debated at length. It is essential to remember that the national data register is under construction; a great deal of information is already being gathered. Many other sources of data are being put together on the citizen; not all of them are reliable. Within the past few days, we have learnt about the extraordinarily large number of passports issued on entirely false data. That must mean that on the passport register there is a remarkable quantity of entirely unreliable information. Against this background of a very large quantity of data being collected on the individual citizen, some of which may not be at all reliable—indeed some of which we know to be completely unreliable—we should take the greatest care with the powers we provide in this Bill. I am not a lawyer but I am advised that data-sharing or data-mining can be regarded as a fishing exercise and therefore possibly contrary to the European Convention on Human Rights. Certainly against the great tradition of English law it is a high-tech version of a general search warrant. Therefore we should be extremely careful about going down this road and even more careful about the way in which we share information and pass it from one organisation to another. Data-matching can be a very useful operation, particularly if you are trying to sell something, and many of us in our briefs have been given good examples of that. There are aspects of data-sharing that can benefit the citizen. It may just be a terrible nuisance for the citizen. One of the examples given in a brief that I have read is that of the TV licence. That really stirred me up because alongside my home in Wales is a cottage—I live in an old converted water mill and it was the miller’s cottage owned by my father, then by a brother and now by a nephew—which has never ever had a television set. At the moment it is empty. But of course the data-sharing operation has gone into practice and so the data have gone in from the rating organisations which have guessed that there is a property paying rates. That is checked against the data in the television records which show that there is no television set. Then all sorts of things begin to happen and in comes an endless stream of letters. I feel rather strongly about that because the cottage is frequently empty—it is only used as a holiday home—and so those letters are very often delivered to my house and I have to forward them at first to my brother and now to my nephew. Occasionally I open them and they contain language which is really appalling. They threaten the citizen in a pretty rough way. They imply that he cannot possibly have a property that does not have a television set and if he does not do something about it pretty promptly, he will be in real trouble. It may go further than that. It may not just be a nuisance, because with data-sharing you can trace who has prompted an inquiry. One could come to the conclusion that because the particular property has prompted an inquiry on 20, 30, 40 or 50 occasions, there must be a criminal there deliberately ignoring the law on holding a television licence. That is the possibility we are dealing with and it shows why we must be so careful. There may on occasion be very good reason for passing on information when one starts sharing data, but if there is not, it can be harmful to the individual. If data are passed on by the regulatory body, referred to in these provisions, to another organisation in the private sector, credit could suddenly be refused. Once credit has been refused, the individual may be in even greater difficulty. We should be extremely cautious about a casual widening of the powers of bodies to fish for data, share the results and potentially damage the rights of the citizen. Clearly, if the person has a criminal record there are very good grounds for passing on that data, as my noble friend suggested in her amendment. But if there are no grounds and one is merely putting data together because the possibility exists that they may throw up information that is useful and can be passed on to other organisations, the Government need to justify that and show what safeguards are to be provided. We shall come to some of those in amendments to later clauses and the degree of supervision that I believe is essential if we are to go down this road. The Government cannot expect to get away with changes in the law of this magnitude by saying, ““We know there is an awful lot of serious crime around and we know that serious criminals are inventive, so we have to provide blanket powers just in case, occasionally, by using them, we will prevent a crime that may not otherwise occur””. We must equally be sure that we do not cause damage to innocent citizens because we have too little regard for the protections previously provided by the law extending the powers to individuals who are casual in their use.