Coroners and Justice Bill

The hon. and learned Gentleman requests more, but I am sure that that is enough for the time being. I want to speak briefly to amendments 23 and 24, which are similar to amendment 133, tabled by members of the Joint Committee on Human Rights. As the hon. Member for North-West Norfolk said, they seek to extend to the private sector the Information Commissioner's new inspection powers under the new assessment notice procedure. As things stand, assessment notices have two problems, the first of which—it was mentioned by the hon. Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore)—is that there is no enforcement mechanism for the new assessment notices. The obvious way to solve that is the application to court route, because that is more challengeable and more open than a warrant route. I therefore support amendments, such as new clause 38, which attempt to change that situation. The other problem addressed by the amendments is the coverage of the assessment notice system. For reasons that remain obscure, but which might have had something to do with the lobbying by the CBI and business interests that broke out when my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, Central (Jenny Willott) and I moved amendments in Committee, the assessment notice procedure is confined to the public sector, and even within that it is confined to directly controlled organisations and does not cover even private organisations carrying out public functions under contract. That is unacceptable. Private organisations control vast amounts of data, and there is constant concern about how they use them. The Information Commissioner is clear that there are more complaints about the use of data by private sector organisations than use of data by the public sector. Sometimes the Government's defence in response to examples of their incompetence in dealing with data such as those cited by the hon. Member for North-West Norfolk is to say, "Well, the Government are no worse than the private sector at this sort of activity." That is a somewhat feeble defence, but it illustrates the point that these problems are not confined to the public sector. As I understood it in Committee, the Government's case for leaving out the private sector is that it collects data voluntarily, which makes it different from the public sector in that regard. I cannot accept that, for three reasons. First, there are the reasons given by the hon. Member for North-West Norfolk, which are dealt with in amendments 87 and 88. There are many examples of private organisations working under contract to the Government and which have collected information from the Government that the Government got on a non-voluntary basis.