My Lords, I rise to move Amendment 11, and speak to Amendments 22, 25 and 30. I thank the Minister for our very helpful meeting this morning, and for the detailed letter I received at 4 pm. I have carefully considered the points raised, and reread the letter to ensure I had understood it, but the basics facts remain the same—as I think the Minister realises—and I will do my best to explain them.
My comments also apply to Amendment 25, but I will focus on the three identical amendments to the three clauses. They ensure that disclosure of information by one public body to another under Part 2 of the Bill does not contravene data protection legislation. This is an incredibly important principle, yet the data sharing provisions in Part 2, as the Bill stands, would enable data protection legislation to be breached. Data protection legislation does permit information to be shared for the purposes of preventing crime, which is important too. If Amendment 11, along with identical Amendments 22 and 30, is passed, personal data could be passed to be police, but professionals could not be forced to do so against their professional judgment. That is the key principle we want to achieve.
The Minister’s letter says that the data shared under the duty is intended primarily to consist of aggregated and anonymous data, et cetera. But we have to focus on what the Bill says, rather than what our excellent Minister may intend. As I said to her this morning, if our Minister were Home Secretary, I might be content with the wording in the Bill, on this issue—I am not sure about everything else—as I have great respect for both our Ministers.
The Minister also says the duty applies to duty holders, not directly to front-line professionals, including youth and social workers. But it is these professionals who hold the information which the police may find helpful, not directors of social services, for example.
It is vital that, if we are to deal with serious violent crime, we do not undermine prevention work. It is therefore important that young people trust their teachers and youth workers. We believe these professionals must be able to exercise their professional judgment about whether it is more effective and important, in preventing serious violence, to be able to continue working with vulnerable and potentially dangerous young people to steer them away from drugs and crime, or to pass on information to the police. There will be times when the sharing of information with the police may be the first, and immediate, priority. However, if in the professional judgment of the teacher or youth worker working with the young people is the top priority, then she or he must be able to exercise that judgment, in my view.
The Minister is likely to argue that the modification of the disclosure of information legislation envisaged in the Bill is similar to that in other Bills and therefore
should be accepted. We had a lengthy discussion on that issue this morning. On checking these other Bills it appears the context is quite different, as is the nature of the information that may be shared. The closest example is the Environment Act, which uses similar wording to that in Clause 9, under which information sharing may be required. However, in the Environment Act, this relates to whether public authorities are complying with environmental legislation; it has nothing to do with personal information for law enforcement purposes, which is an entirely different matter. The Medicines and Medical Devices Act only requires information to be shared without consent in a veterinary context—you cannot really ask a cow for her consent to pass on information about her. Therefore, this is not relevant to this Bill.
It seems the Government may not have drawn the right conclusions from the criticism of the Met Police’s gangs matrix system. As the Minister knows, Corey Junior Davis was murdered after his details in the Met Police’s gangs matrix were shared and fell into the wrong hands.
The system that produced that breach is being reproduced in the Bill. Surely, we will see replicated across the country other harms generated by the Met Police’s gangs matrix: young people losing college places that would probably have given them a route out of trouble; the application of eviction notices likely to lead them on a downward spiral of drugs and crime; and endless costly and pointless stop and searches, thereby undermining young people. We could also expect a repeat across the country of the discriminatory profiling that was inherent in the Met Police’s gangs matrix.
I very much welcome the Government’s acceptance of the need to respect the professional judgment of medical and social care personnel. All that we are asking for in the amendment and, indeed, the other two in the group is that the same respect for personal judgment be applied to teachers and youth workers as the Government now recognise should be given to doctors and others. Without these amendments, the work of the key public servants to prevent serious violence will be jeopardised, an issue that I should have thought the Government would be concerned about.
The Bill also gives the police the power to monitor compliance with the duty to require other bodies to share information with them, and it gives the Secretary of State enforcement powers to back those police powers. The amendment offers vital protection for professionals in exercising their judgment on how best to reduce serious violence by their clients.
The Minister has said that the collection of data is necessary in order to identify the kinds of serious violence that occur in an area and, so far as it is possible to do so, their causes, and then prepare and implement a strategy with bespoke local solutions. I am sure that the Minister knows that no personal information is required in order to do that. It is well established that anonymous data is sufficient to develop appropriate strategies. The draft statutory guidance says that most information will be depersonalised, but it does not say in what circumstances it will not. If it were clear that it was all about professional judgment, that would be fine—and that is what we are seeking.
These are incredibly modest amendments that, added to the government amendments, would go some way towards protecting the efficacy of our public services and enable young people to benefit from preventive and therapeutic interventions. These are the best hope of preventing serious violence over many years. We are not talking just about a one-off crime here. We are talking about the culture and style of life, and these public servants are working on the front line to try to divert these young people into education, training, jobs and so on. Instead of doing that, it is a huge thing to somehow divert those people into the criminal justice system. Punitive responses are never the right answer to vulnerability and deprivation—generally the backdrop to serious violence.