Crime and Security Bill

I agree with the comments made by my noble friend. The points he raised are valuable and important. Suspicious activity reports are based on the suspicions of those operating in the regulated sector. The question that has been asked is what happens once those reports are received. As has just been mentioned, the Government, in various replies, have said that SOCA does not take steps to establish whether an unknown or anonymous reporter’s suspicions are unfounded before the information is recorded on this famous ELMER database. However, they also said that if a SAR had been submitted maliciously, this fact would become apparent in the course of an investigation when the information was cross-checked with other forms of intelligence. One has to ask whether that is a foolproof way of discovering whether such information has any reality in it. Each SAR, whether or not confirmed as having any real base, is assigned a deletion date of 10 years after receipt and is automatically deleted unless it has been amended or updated. The deletion date thereafter is set to a further six years. The views of the EU Select Committee have been mentioned. The Information Commissioner has also interested himself in this matter. He has said that if there are SARs meeting a particular threshold level rather than based on hard evidence of criminal activity, the prolonged retention of those records would in his view be inappropriate and disproportionate. The EU committee said: ""Although SARs are not kept indefinitely, the fact that they are routinely retained for ten years on a database to which there is wide access is a matter of concern to us, especially in those cases where it can be shown that the initial suspicion was unfounded"" Both speakers have referred to the widespread access that can be had to this information. It is extraordinarily important that, if people are to have access, some effort should be undertaken to establish whether the suspicion is founded or not, which is quite apart from the issue of how widespread that access should be. I understand that there is, ""a procedure for earlier deletion of individual SARs where all necessary activity relating to that SAR has been undertaken"." In responding, it would be helpful if the Minister could expand on this and say whether it includes removing SARs if subsequent investigation shows that they were unfounded. That is a key point. I also understand that the Information Commissioner will review the handling of SARs, which is extremely welcome. Will the Minister say when this review will start and when it will be completed? If this information is known to him, it would be helpful for the House to have this information. This independent scrutiny certainly is welcome. This serious issue deserves much more consideration than we will be able to give it tonight, given the constraints of time. It probably makes sense to wait until the outcome of the Information Commissioner’s review is known, although it is important to know the timescale. If a Conservative Government are returned to office, these are issues to which they will return.