Statistics and Registration Service Bill

moved Amendment No. 8: 8: Before Clause 37, insert the following new Clause— ““Information Commissioner (1) The Information Commissioner may assess any aspects of the way in which the Board holds, uses, discloses or shares information. (2) The Board must provide any assistance or access that the Information Commissioner requests in connection with an assessment under subsection (1). (3) If the Information Commissioner carries out an assessment under subsection (1) he is to report his findings to the Board. (4) The Information Commissioner may publish any report he makes under subsection (3) and any such report must be laid before each House of Parliament. The noble Earl said: My Lords, because of commitments overseas which meant that I was unable to be here for the Report stage—I apologise to the House—I begin by thanking the Minister for the assurances he offered in Committee and repeated to my noble friend on Report that it is categorically not the intention of the Government that the Bill, "““should allow the board to become a general repository for raw data or to introduce the widespread sharing of confidential information throughout government””.—[Official Report,23/5/07; col. 746.]" That is most welcome. However, it is important to bear in mind the context in which these data and information-sharing provisions will operate. It is undoubtedly the case that identity management and associated issues of privacy and confidentiality are becoming an increasingly important and significant area of public debate. By the same token, and for entirely understandable and potentially beneficial reasons, I am certain that the Government have no intention whatever of abating their information-sharing agenda. To that extent, considerable pressure exists for sharing to be widened and deepened. I have no difficulty with this per se, although I am bound to confess that in respect of statistics my own preference might have been that we follow the Canadian model, generally acknowledged to be the best in the world, and disallow any sharing of raw data at all. As I sought to point out in Committee, the board will always be a secondary source of such information and I am therefore sceptical about the necessity of having the exemptions to non-disclosure listed in Clause 38(4). Be that as it may, what matters here is that we get the checks and balances right, if only because in the circumstances it is wholly conceivable that elements of ““function creep”” could worm their way into the regime as the Government’s data-sharing agenda gathers pace. No doubt the Minister will cite the existing powers afforded by Section 43 of the Data ProtectionAct 1998 as a defence against the amendment. To be fair, it would be accurate to say that that goes some way towards satisfying the intentions expressed in the amendment. However, as the noble Lord will be only too well aware, the power is constrained by Section 42 of the 1998 Act, which requires not only that the intervention of the Information Commissioner must be subject to an external request or complaint, but also that the reason for the intervention must be substantive. In other words, unlike the amendment, the existing powers do not allow the processes through which data and information sharing are conducted to be subject to independent audit. This is the crucial point. If public trust is to be fully and adequately engaged in this area, the legislation must be seen to satisfy minimum standards of privacy and confidentiality in respect of the generality of the regime rather than merely affording the individual a form of redress when things go wrong. As things stand, my understanding is that the Bill achieves only the latter. I would not want to be misunderstood. I have every faith and confidence in the probity of the board and its statisticians in this area, something I am less willing to say in respect of other elements of the public sector. Witness, for example, the data breaches at the DVLA or within the NHS at, from memory, the Leeds trust. Indeed, it could be said that as a generality the public sector in respect of privacy and confidentiality is a leaky as a sieve. Needless to say, it would be undesirable if the board were to be tarred with a similar brush. This makes it all the more important that the data protection regime of the Government Statistical Service should be made as robust as is humanly possible, even to the extent of stating the obvious in the legislation, in order that the perceptions as well as the actualities which frame public trust can be satisfied. I would add another small point to address the Minister’s previous comments about the Information Commissioner’s views on, and lack of criticism of, the Bill. The power granted by the amendment to the Information Commissioner is entirely permissive. In other words, he need only intervene in the way and to the extent that he may feel it necessary to satisfy himself that everything is operating according to the data protection principles. Indeed, we could hope that he would not envisage an occasion when he may feel that it was necessary to exercise the power, but I would emphasise that that does not obviate the need for the power to be available to him, in the interest of public trust—not as much to address his concerns or, more correctly, lack of them, but to assuage the very much wider interests and needs of public trust. All in all, I very much hope that the Government will accept the amendment. I beg to move