Serious Crime Bill [HL]

Looking at the amendment, I realised that a couple of points might apply. First, if we want to do some data mining in order to look at trends, some of the provisions on data sharing could involve anonymising the data. That would solve a lot of problems under the Data Protection Act and allay people’s concerns. Also, I can see that, if we are investigating a particular fraud, and in some other work, we would not want the data anonymised. That made me wonder whether this provision could be used for something that is lacking at the moment. There is a big problem with fraud over auction sites and sales over the internet. At the moment, the Met is trying to set up a national crime co-ordination unit, with no resourcing and staffing. Although these are level 2 frauds—very small frauds—they aggregate to many millions of pounds and individually they hit people hard. It occurred to me that this anti-fraud organisation provision could also be used to authorise auction sites to exchange data with a national fraud alert site, for instance, which could then find the trends and possibly target certain areas afterwards. Of course, that data sharing would have to be looked at carefully, and therefore data sharing and disclosure provisions would need to be looked at carefully as well. I thought that this could be extended to deal with that and not just used for the massive state databases as envisaged at the moment.