Serious Crime Bill [Lords]

That is a very interesting suggestion. The crucial criteria should be that members of that Committee have experience and expertise, and that the Committee be balanced; it should not be capable of being controlled in any way by the Government. We await the Prime Minister’s proposal. Part 2 of the Bill deals the reform of the law relating to inchoate offences and follows Law Commission advice. In the main, it seems to us to be sensible, and we will examine proposals relating to incitement, for example, in Committee. Part 3 begins with provisions on information sharing within the public sector and between the private and public sectors, with the purpose of preventing fraud. The Government claim that this is a narrow and targeted provision to prevent fraud. However, we are concerned that extensive powers are being taken that could allow for the first time widespread data sharing between the private and public sectors, which would overturn the basic data protection principle that personal information provided to a Government Department for one purpose should not, in general, be used for another. Instead, the principle appears now to be that information will normally be shared in the public sector, provided it is in the public interest. The Bill therefore clears the way for a large-scale data-matching exercise, even though a Home Office consultation paper published last year acknowledged that many public bodies feared that such operations could be seen as fishing expeditions. We believe that such procedures can be justified only on a crime-by-crime basis. As the former chief constable of the west midlands, Lord Dear, said in another place, there is"““no problem with exchanging data on a target organisation or person””," but"““To go on a data-sharing fishing expedition infringing the privacy of millions on the off-chance of catching a few, admittedly quite big, fish would be a step too far.””—[Official Report, House of Lords, 7 February 2007; Vol. 689, c. 757.]" The Joint Committee on Human Rights has warned that, as drafted, the power of public authorities to share information with anti-fraud organisations could breach article 8 of the European convention on human rights, relating to the right to respect for private life. The Committee was also concerned about the absence of strong safeguards to ensure the proportionate use of data sharing. It proposed two limits on the powers, the first of which was to limit the width of the power, for example by specifying the information that could be disclosed and the categories of people to whom it could be disclosed, in place of the open-ended authorisation of disclosure to any person to whom disclosure happens to be permitted by the arrangements of a particular anti-fraud organisation. The Committee’s second proposed limit was to introduce additional safeguards in the Bill such as defining the threshold for reporting information on suspected fraud, limiting disclosure so that only information on those suspected of fraud would be shared. In Committee, we will need to consider these proposals and the question of the appropriate limits, to examine the code of practice that the Government promised in another place but which they have now told us will be published when we are in Committee, and to examine the extent to which the code of practice will allay concerns and mean that limits need not be placed on the operation of these provisions.