Let me make a little more progress. The type of change that I want to see is fundamental to how RIPA works. I wish to have a system that retains communications data for a very short period—a week or a month—so that we can find out, say, what happened just before somebody died yesterday. It should not be available for any longer unless a preservation order is applied for. That sort of system would massively reduce the amount of evidence that is kept on people, but allows it to be available for those very serious cases that all of us want to see investigated. That is the sort of system that I would like to see, but that is not an easy thing to write down. It would take many, many months of work to try to write that into a form that we can make work.
There is another problem, which runs right at the base of this. It is what I hope to talk about when we get on to the next collection of amendments, my new clauses 3 and 4. The Home Office simply does not have evidence on how this information is used and for what
purposes. As I understand it—I am sure the Minister will correct me if I am wrong—the only information on how communications data are used is based on a two-week snapshot survey of police forces. What sort of crime is it? We know that data are used and we know of many examples. It is only that small survey that tells us exactly what sort of things they are used for. We need to have that data to make a sensible decision. The more data we retain, the more things we can do to combat crime, but the more invasive it is. We cannot set a sensible balance without that data. The Home Office urgently needs to collect that data but it will not have it in the next couple of months.
I worry—I have seriously considered and agonised over this—that what is being suggested would not put us in a better place. The alternative to having a Bill that started almost straight away would be to wait a bit longer—until November—and have a new Bill. We could use that time to get a bit of information for a review, but then we would again be forced to fast-track the legislation. We would go through exactly the same process, with not that many Members here debating it, and we would have exactly the same problems. That would not help and would not take us to where I want to be, because I am passionate about getting rid of the awful system that we have and coming up with something better. As I said earlier, we can have more security, more civil liberties and more protection, which is something that I have debated on many occasions.