I wish to speak to amendment 1,
tabled in my name, and to some of the other clauses.
During the passage of the incomplete Trade Bill there were, as the Minister will have seared into his soul, a number of debates and amendments—I think amendments 33 and 34—relating to the requirement to collect data by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, specifically with
regard to the exclusion of protection of legal professional privilege, which in many other circumstances would have applied. The same issue to some extent arises, in terms of the disclosure of information, in clause 2(7) of the Bill. It states:
“A disclosure under this section does not breach— (a) any obligation of confidence owed by the person disclosing the information, or (b) any other restriction on the disclosure of information (however imposed).”
The explanatory notes make it very clear that
“Certain information held by specific public authorities are subject to constraints on disclosure. To enable sharing of this information, clause 2(7) provides a general disapplication of these restrictions.”
If I may, I will just remind the Minister what was said in previous debates on this matter. Legal professional privilege and confidentiality are essential to safeguard the rule of law and the administration of justice. They permit information to be communicated between a lawyer and client without the fear of it going to a third party without the clear permission of the client. In normal circumstances, that includes HMRC. Many UK statutes already give express protection of legal privilege and it is vigorously protected by the courts.
We are in a rather odd position where data can be collected and is required to be collected, and where legal professional privilege has been disregarded entirely. We are now in a position where clause 2(7) disregards legal privilege in terms of the disclosing or sharing of that information. The Minister may well pray in aid some of the limited protections that are offered in clause 2, but if I run through them I suspect we might conclude they are not quite as strong as the Minister might like to think they are. The explanatory notes state:
“Clause 2(8) confirms that nothing in this section authorises the disclosure of information which would contravene data protection legislation or which is prohibited under the Investigatory Powers Act 2016.”
So far, so good—that is helpful, but very, very narrow. Others may say that it is only specified public authorities who can disclose or share information. They are specified in clause 2(3) as: the Secretary of State, the Minister for the Cabinet Office, a strategic highways company, or a port health authority constituted in a particular way. However, clause 2(9) states:
“A Minister of the Crown may by regulations made by statutory instrument amend this section for the purpose of specifying a public authority in, or removing a public authority from, subsection (3).”
Therefore, any number of other bodies could be added to that list. The other protection one could point to would be to say, “Ah, but they can be added if they are dealing with functions relating to trade.” They include:
“the analysis of the flow of traffic, goods and services...the analysis of the impact, or likely impact, of measures or practices…the design, implementation and operation of such measures”,
and so on. Those three specifics, however, are prefaced by:
“Those functions include, among other things, functions relating to”.
That allows it to be completely open-ended. It is not a comprehensive or complete list. As anyone watching will know, trade is no longer simply about traffic flows, the number of containers, quota and tariffs. It is about a whole range of things: all sorts of regulations, security, immigration and goodness knows what.
The provision is vague and ill-defined. It strikes me as being subject to scope creep by regulation. Fundamentally, it includes clause 2(7)(a) and (b), which is a get out of jail free card insofar as it disapplies the normal protections of information being disclosed, which would be subject in many other circumstances, including in statute, to legal professional privilege. That is actually a problem in the long run, but not necessarily in the short run as it allows us to get over an immediate hurdle where data must be shared. I appreciate that but, in the long run, how on earth can we say that we are a law-abiding country and that we want to adhere to the international legal system—the rule of law internationally—when we have here the disapplication of fundamental rights and protections for people not to have their information, normally subject to legal protection, shared, collected, distributed and disseminated. When the hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller) asked whether a private body could act as a public authority, the answer seemed to be that, yes, it could. That means that we could have a private body—a private company of indeterminate origin and a very small book value—doing something on behalf of the public, acting as a public authority, where the normal protection of data, which it may be provided with to fulfil its role, has the normal protections of legal privilege disapplied in statute.
Time is short. I know that this is urgent, I am not stupid, but this is actually serious. We cannot have a Government riding roughshod over legal protection, legal privilege, in this way over such a short period of time just because they have failed to get their ducks in a row and a proper functioning Trade Bill through where everything joins up.
It is not my intention, Dame Rosie, to press amendment 1 to a vote, but I do hope that the Minister takes seriously what I have just said and understands the possible consequences, particularly if it is private bodies acting as public authorities which have disapplied from them everything in terms of protection other than data protection and whether it would breach one other piece of named legislation. That is a serious and bad place to be.