Statistics and Registration Service Bill

moved Amendment No. 176: 176: Clause 36, page 15, line 32, leave out paragraph (a) The noble Baroness said: I shall speak to Amendment No. 177 as well. Amendment No. 176 would delete paragraph (a) of Clause 36(4). This paragraph allows the board to disclose personal information that is required or permitted by any enactment. The amendment would remove that as a basis for permitted disclosure by the board or anyone else who had received it from the board. Paragraph (a) is very wide. I can see that for Acts passed after this Act is brought into effect it will be open to Parliament to authorise disclosure. I have a bigger problem with this Act permitting a completely unspecified number of disclosures or opportunities for disclosure on legislative grounds. Clearly the existing statutes do not refer to the Statistics Board, so I am struggling with what kind of Acts we are talking about. Are they referring to disclosure to the ONS? If so, why do we not see a schedule of technical amendments for that purpose? The Explanatory Notes give one solitary example. Are there any others? Can the Minister provide a comprehensive list of the statutes concerned as at today’s date? If he cannot do so today, will he undertake to do so before Report? Amendment No. 177 generously assumes that the Minister can make a case for disclosure on the basis of paragraph (a). If that paragraph remains in the Bill, we believe that it should be made plain that the information may be disclosed only if it is for statistical purposes. We have discussed the principles of this before. We believe it important that the board should not disclose personal information for non-statistical purposes, except in the most clearly defined and substantiated cases. Paragraph (a) is not clearly defined and must therefore be constrained by statistical purposes. I beg to move.