Statistics and Registration Service Bill

As we have heard, Amendment No. 190 would remove the grounds for defence against criminal prosecution if personal information was unlawfully disclosed. That means that, for example, the criminal sanction would apply even where the individual making the disclosure reasonably believed that the information did not reveal identities. Removing the reasonable belief defence would, in our view, make the criminal sanction excessively harsh. I am grateful for the intervention of my noble friend Lord Desai. The Government want to ensure that there are strong confidentiality safeguards, but we do not want to criminalise conduct where an individual makes a disclosure in the reasonable belief that the information does not identify an individual. In addition, that amendment could have the detrimental effect of inhibiting the sharing of aggregate information—something which goes on currently and which is important to the statistical system. Currently, the ONS rightly shares large amounts of aggregate information—that is, information which does not reveal individual identities because data are aggregated—after making a careful and thorough assessment of disclosure risk, leading to a reasonable belief that the information does not identify individuals. Introducing a criminal sanction without a reasonable belief defence might discourage the board from such sharing, because no matter how thorough those disclosure checks are, it is not possible to be absolutely certain that disclosure of the information does not reveal the identity of a person, particularly when considering the information disclosed together with other published information. As such, removing that defence might discourage the board from sharing when it is necessary and in the public interest; for example, to help to develop statistics elsewhere in our decentralised system. There are other examples of offences of unlawful disclosure being accompanied by a reasonable belief defence of a similar nature to the one included in Clause 36. For example, a defence exists to the offence of wrongful disclosure in the Commissioners for Revenue and Customs Act 2005, where a person charged with the offence can prove that he reasonably believed that the disclosure was lawful or that the information had already been made lawfully available to the public. I hope that my explanation reassures the noble Baroness. I, therefore, ask her to withdraw the amendment.