Regulation of Investigatory Powers (Investigation of Protected Electronic Information: Code of Practice) Order 2007

I shall happily give what assurances I can this afternoon, but I am more than happy to write to the noble Lord on some of the more detailed points. The noble Lord asked how the powers would operate with regard to a memorised key. In reality, it would not work that way, as even hardened paedophiles write down their passwords. They suffer from the same memory problems as all of us. The noble Lord made the point that an offender could take a two-year penalty rather than a longer one for disclosing information. I recognised that in my comments, but we shall have to see how this works in practice. If there is a problem, we will more than happily reflect on it and, if we have to, bring it back—in that case I am sure that we would want to amend the legislation to make it more effective. We can give the assurance that confidentiality is an issue for us and, where it is right, it must be respected. That is how we should operate. I shall reflect some more on at least one of the noble Lord’s other two points and write to him. With regard to bank keys, to restate the obvious, the point is to acquire data in an intelligible form, not the keys themselves. The financial services are expected to disclose intelligible data, not the keys, and the Financial Services Authority has to agree before that will happen. I made that clear in my opening comments, but I shall reiterate it because it probably answers the noble Lord’s point. I hope that the orders find favour with the Committee. On Question, Motion agreed to.