UK Parliament / Open data

Data Protection and Digital Information Bill

As I say, the Government do not believe that it is necessary to have a prescriptive list in the Bill. We feel that it is better that individuals make a judgment based on their assessment of the risk, with the guidance of the Information Commissioner.

Moving to the shadow Minister’s second amendment, the Government agree that controllers should not be able to refuse a request without proper thought or consideration. That is why the existing responsibilities of controllers to facilitate requests from data subjects as the default has not changed and why the new article 12A also ensures that the burden of proof for a request meeting the vexatious or excessive threshold remains with the controller. The Government believe that is sufficient, and stipulating that evidence must be provided each time a request is refused may not be appropriate in all circumstances and would likely bring further burdens for controllers. On that basis, we oppose that amendment.

On amendment 5, the safeguards set out in reformed article 22 of the UK GDPR ensure that individuals are able to seek human intervention when significant decisions about them are taken solely through automated means with no meaningful human involvement.

Partly automated decisions already involve meaningful human involvement, so there is no need to extend the safeguards in article 22 to all forms of automated decision making. In such instances, other data protection requirements continue to apply and offer relevant protections to data subjects, as set out in the broader UK data protection regime. Those protections include lawfulness, fairness, transparency and accountability.

4.15 pm

Amendment 218, which the hon. Member for Rhondda tabled along with amendments 219 and 220, gives us the opportunity to debate the democratic engagement provisions in the Bill. Amendments 218 and 219 would remove clauses 87 and 88, which give the Secretary of State a power to make exceptions to the privacy and electronic communications regulations direct marketing provisions on communications sent for the purposes of democratic engagement.

We have no immediate plans to use the regulation powers, but it is conceivable that future Governments might want to treat communications sent for the purposes of democratic engagement differently from those for commercial marketing. We would lose the option to do that if the regulation-making powers were removed. Before laying any regulations under the clause, the Secretary of State would need to consult the Information Commissioner and have specific regard to the effect that further exceptions could have.

I turn to the measure relating to the powers of the Department for Work and Pensions, raised by the hon. Member for Rhondda, the right hon. Member for East Ham (Sir Stephen Timms), who is Chair of the Work and Pensions Committee, and the hon. Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady), who speaks for the Scottish National party. We believe that this targeted and limited measure will enable us to identify fraudulent benefit claims and, as a result, will save the taxpayer a significant amount of money.

On the specific point of whether the powers should be targeted on individual benefits rather than more generally, I should say that at the moment fraud and error in state pensions, for instance, is near zero. The Government intend to target the benefits power where there is clear evidence of fraudulent activity. We are including all benefits to make sure that state pensions stay that way.

Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
741 cc911-2 
Session
2023-24
Chamber / Committee
House of Commons chamber
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