Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 22: 22: After Clause 5, insert the following new Clause— ““Confidentiality of personal information (1) Subject to this section, personal information held by a reclaim fund in relation to the exercise of any of its functions must not be disclosed by— (a) any director or employee of the reclaim fund, (b) a member of any committee of the reclaim fund, or (c) any other person who has received it directly or indirectly from the reclaim fund. (2) In this Part ““personal information”” means information which relates to, and identifies, a particular person (including a body corporate); but it does not include information about the internal administrative arrangements of the reclaim fund (whether relating to its members, employees or other persons). (3) For the purposes of subsection (2), information identifies a particular person if the identity of that person— (a) is specified in the information, (b) can be deduced from the information, or (c) can be deduced from the information taken together with any other published information. (4) Subsection (1) does not apply to a disclosure which— (a) is required or permitted by any enactment, (b) is covered by section 12 of this Act, (c) is required by a community obligation, (d) is necessary for the purpose of enabling or assisting the reclaim fund to exercise any of its functions, (e) has already lawfully been made available to the public, (f) is made in pursuance of an order of a court, (g) is made for the purposes of a criminal investigation or criminal proceedings (whether or not in the United Kingdom), (h) is made, in the interests of national security, to an intelligence service, or (i) is made with the consent of the person to whom it relates. (5) A person who contravenes subsection (1) is guilty of an offence and liable— (a) on conviction on indictment, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years, or to a fine, or both; (b) on summary conviction, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding twelve months, or to a fine not exceeding the statutory maximum, or both. (6) Subsection (5) does not apply where the individual making the disclosure reasonably believes— (a) in the case of information which is personal information by virtue of subsection (3)(a), that the identity of the person to whom it relates is not specified in the information, (b) in the case of information which is personal information by virtue of subsection (3)(b), that the identity of that person cannot be deduced from the information, or (c) in the case of information which is personal information by virtue of subsection (3)(c), that the identity of that person cannot be deduced from the information taken together with any other published information.”” The noble Baroness said: The amendment introduces a new clause after Clause 5 and sets out the obligations of the reclaim fund in relation to personal confidential information. Importantly, it sets out the offences that will be committed if personal information is disclosed. I am sure that the Minister and the noble Lord, Lord Newby, will instantly recognise the amendment’s formulation as it is government drafting and is lifted from the Statistics and Registration Service Act which we spent many happy hours debating earlier this year. The British Bankers’ Association has suggested that as the banks will be acting as agents for the reclaim fund, the reclaim fund will need to have hardly any personal information at all. That does not seem entirely plausible given the repayment responsibilities of the reclaim fund. We heard in the Committee’s first sitting how the banks would be calculating the amounts that the reclaim fund would have to repay and that the repayment amount could easily be more than the dormant account money which was originally handed over. I cannot see how a responsible reclaim fund can take instructions on the basis of barely any underlying documentation. The Bill creates no incentives for the banks to minimise the value of repayment claims, so the reclaim fund will have to take responsibility for the quantum of repayment claims and therefore have some way of carrying out checks and controls. That will inevitably involve confidential information. The British Bankers’ Association has said that if there are disputes then the reclaim fund may need to have confidential information to settle those disputes. I rather suspect that, as we also discussed in our first sitting, disputes about charges and interest may not be that rare. I therefore believe that, in practice, the reclaim fund will decide that it has to have information, confidential personal information, simply in order to process repayments responsibly. I searched the Bill for protection for that information but, of course, found none. The reclaim fund will be subject to the Data Protection Act, which will provide limited cover where data are processed, but there is no provision in the Bill relating to the disclosure of confidential personal information and no specific offences relating to the misuse of information. As the Minister will be aware, when we think about organisations that handle personal information, we now all have in mind the horrendous loss of data at HM Revenue and Customs. The Commissioners for Revenue and Customs Act 2005 contains similar provisions to those in Amendment No. 22. The provisions of that Act did not stop HMRC staff being careless with personal information, but that is not a reason for not providing the legislative framework in my amendment. I shall briefly outline the scheme under the new clause in Amendment No. 22. Subsection (1) says that the reclaim fund must not disclose personal information, and that applies to directors, employees, members of committees—anyone who has received the information from the reclaim fund. Subsections (2) and (3) define personal information. Subsection (4) sets out the exemptions available, including exemptions for various legal purposes, exemptions to allow the reclaim fund to carry out its functions, and when an individual consents. Those are fairly standard exemptions. The crux of the clause is in subsection (5), which makes it a criminal offence to contravene the basic requirement not to disclose personal information, with only some limited defences in subsection (6). The Minister will be aware that the climate of view on what protection should be afforded to those whose personal information is held by organisations is changing. It has changed because of the actions of some government departments, but it is a fact of life that it has changed. We should not lose the opportunity to reinforce the importance of personal information in relation to this body which, while being created as a private body, as the Minister has said, is carrying out some sort of public function. It is important for the Treasury to have a power of direction over it, thereby indicating the public interest in the activities of the fund, and we ought to be treating it in the same way as we treat other bodies in the public sector that carry out public functions. I beg to move.