Coroners and Justice Bill

We, too, have an amendment in this group, albeit an amendment to government Amendment 199C. I imagine that the Minister will speak to that in due course, but it might be convenient if I say a word or two about the amendments generally and our amendment at this stage. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, we are pleased that the Government had the good sense to excise the most offensive data-sharing clauses from the Bill before it even came to this place. We on this side have had ongoing discussions with the Government in the intervening period to try to reach accommodation on that which is left. The government amendments in this group, including Amendment 199C, were the subject of discussion between my honourable friend Dominic Grieve and Michael Wills and they go some way towards addressing concerns raised by colleagues in another place. We argued that it was not enough for just the public sector to be subject to assessment notices, as so much information is held and used by bodies that are not strictly public bodies. A large and, indeed, increasing amount of government data is now handled and managed by third parties in the private sector. It is the responsibility of government to ensure that such data, with a high public value, are kept safe. We accept that, in the main, the public sector sets a reasonable standard for the handling of personal information, but unfortunately many of the recent high-profile data losses have involved private sector firms. We have to balance ensuring that government data are kept safe, whoever is handling it, with protecting the privacy of individual companies. We want to make sure that all government data are properly handled and not at risk of security breaches, regardless of who is handling it. We therefore urged the Government to look at how third parties could best be subjected to regulation, without this disproportionately impacting on the rest of the private sector. That is the aim, I believe, of the government amendments. However, because we also wish to protect private companies from undue interference, we would like to have a threshold for such extensions to those companies subject to assessment notices, including on a public interest test for the data held by them, and to ensure that there is maximum scrutiny of such extensions in Parliament. We do not want to see this power overused. It is for this reason that we have tabled Amendment 199D to the Government’s Amendment 199C to seek assurance that the commissioner and the Secretary of State must explicitly consider the public function of the data in question before designating the data controller as being a body subject to assessment notices.