Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill [HL]

My Lords, this amendment, spoken to so ably by my noble friend and the noble Baroness from the Liberal Front Bench, underwrites a major problem that government and bureaucracies have, which is collecting information that you do not need and, quite often, not collecting information that you do need. Some of your Lordships may have seen that brilliant German film about the Stasi—I think that it was called "People Like Us", or something like that—which illustrated the way in which a massive effort is made by a natural bureaucracy to collect a lot of wholly irrelevant information. I am a member of Sub-Committee F of the EU Select Committee. At present, we are looking at money-laundering and we have had various government agencies along to tell us about the information that they are collecting. Obviously, I shall not comment on anything that we have learnt; all I would say is that there is a real danger of overkill, which is simply not taken account of or gripped by the only two groups of people who really can get to grips with it—Ministers and Parliament.