My Lords, I have Amendments 24 and 32 to 35 in this group, and I have signed Amendments 11, 22, 25 and 30, in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester.
I start with the government amendments that effectively protect patient confidentiality on the basis that, if patients do not trust their doctors to keep sensitive personal information confidential, they will not seek healthcare when they need to. There are already protocols to deal with situations where there is a serious risk of harm to the patient or others which allow the sharing of information. In moving these amendments, the Government have accepted the principle that professionals need to keep sensitive personal information confidential in order to maintain the trust of those whom they are working with. I will return to this shortly.
Amendments 11, 22 and 30 do the bare minimum in maintaining the protection provided by data protection legislation. This is putting down a marker that specified authorities should not simply allow the duty to share information under the serious violence duty to override everything else. We will support these amendments if the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, divides the House.
But we do not believe these amendments go far enough, in that they do not address the Secretary of State’s enforcement powers. Despite government protestations to the contrary, the almost unanimous view among NGOs is that the new serious violence duty is actually a duty on specified authorities to give information to the police, so that the police can try to arrest our way out of the problem of serious violence—an enforcement-led approach, which even the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police says is not the solution. What we really need is a truly multiagency public health approach, which has worked so well in Scotland, where enforcement is only one part of the solution .
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When I went to Scotland, I met a young father whose partner had committed suicide; he realised that their son would grow up without either of his parents if he did not turn away from violence. With support from relevant authorities, he has done it. How can offenders such as this be expected to trust those in authority when specified authorities are subjected to this new duty to pass what is said to them on to the police, if they are to override existing statutory safeguards and duties of confidence? The Bill would allow the Home Secretary to force them to break that trust.
As noble Lords have already said, the Government have already conceded the principle that in certain situations, guided by existing rules and protocols, information can be kept confidential, as in the case of patient confidentiality. However, sometimes people such as youth workers, social workers or people working in youth offending teams also need to be able to use their judgment about whether to pass information to the police, if they think keeping the trust of the person they are working with is more likely to reduce serious violence than passing that information on. I will be asking noble Lords to vote against the Home Secretary being given the power to force professionals—against all existing legal obligations, implicit duties of confidence and their own professional judgment—to pass confidential information to the police, even when they believe this would be counterproductive. Leaving out Clause 17 would empower the people in the best position to make
those judgments—the professionals on the ground—rather than allowing central diktats from those in the Home Office who have little or no understanding of local circumstances or the individuals involved.
We support legislation that removes barriers to allow professionals working in the field of serious violence to share information with each other, including the police sharing their information. We even support a statutory reminder that authorities, including the police, have a duty to work together to reduce serious violence. What we cannot support is the Home Secretary forcing professionals operating in this scenario to share information that they, knowing the individuals and the local circumstances, believe would be counterproductive to reducing or preventing serious violence.
The Government are keen always to point to previous legislative precedence. When we asked judicial commissioners to give prior approval in cases where informants are being authorised by the police to commit criminal offences and are made exempt from prosecution, we were told that this was being done by the police handlers of those informants, who best knew the individuals and the scenarios in which they were to be deployed. The Government argued that local professionals on the ground should not be second-guessed by judicial commissioners. Here we are, with operational partners being second-guessed by the Home Secretary. Not only is this unacceptable but it is hypocritical for the Government to apply the principle in one situation—that professionals on the ground know best—and then reject it in another, and for the Government to argue that patients must not lose trust in their doctors but that those working to turn offenders away from serious violence can lose the trust of those they work with. I intend to seek the opinion of the House to leave out Clause 17.