Coroners and Justice Bill

As the hon. Member for North-West Norfolk (Mr. Bellingham) intimated, the most important amendment in this group is amendment 25. The hon. Gentleman gloated a little, so perhaps I will be allowed to: I was glad that one of my amendments—the one to remove clause 154—had been signed not only by the representatives of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, but by the Government. I am glad that they have promoted my modest amendment into Government amendment 25. The Government are entirely right to withdraw the data-sharing proposals, which were far too broad for the problem that they were meant to solve. As Ministers repeatedly said, some data sharing can be beneficial. No one denied that; the question was about the power that had been created to deal with that particular point. The Bill proposed—and continues to propose until amendment 25 goes through—to allow orders from the Secretary of State to permit data sharing between any people anywhere in the world, for the purposes of furthering any Government policy. The orders were capable of overriding the Data Protection Act 1998, the Human Rights Act 1998 and any other relevant legislation. That final point, especially the possibility that the data-sharing orders would override the Data Protection Act, was the key problem and the point at which the Government rightly decided to give way. Clause 154—or clause 152, as it was—was never proportionate and never had adequate safeguards. The hon. Member for North-West Norfolk is right to point to the context—one in which Governments collect vast amounts of data and then use them badly, incompetently or in many cases, as Ross Anderson from the university of Cambridge observed, illegally. The Government need to be aware of that context when they return to the data-sharing proposal. As I understand it, they intend to do that not in this Bill but at a later point. I urge them to consult properly, not only with the usual suspects but with all the organisations that felt deeply that clause 152—now clause 154—was the wrong way to go, including the British Medical Association and all the Opposition parties. Otherwise, their next attempt to write a clause to do with data sharing may well turn into a colossal waste of time, as this one has proved to be. With that small amount of gloating over, let me turn to the amendments.