My Lords, I too welcome this amendment. Although I am speaking from the Liberal Democrat Benches, first, I will speak personally, as I have had a number of amendments in other Bills relating to the use of very personal data, whether it is medical data or data with other identifiers.
There is a very strong argument for this. I noted that the briefing which we were sent earlier today talked about the independent review of children’s social care, recommending the re-use of the NHS number for the consistent child identifier. One of my concerns is that a lot of different departments of government or agencies are trying to create their own individual number, which suddenly means that you must remember or have access to your NI number, your DVLA number, your NHS number, your school number or whatever it is. For things such as this, provided that there are the appropriate data safeguards, it is sensible to use a number that is already there. My personal view is that it would be interesting to hear the arguments about whether it should be a separate number or the NHS number, because, after all, everybody has an NHS number.
The briefing also talked about the savings to the criminal justice system from having such an approach. One of the big scandals that we have at the moment is that, because the system is failing, victims often withdraw from any criminal justice system. They do not want to appear as witnesses or they find it very difficult to do so. If we really believe that this number is going to help support victims and to help them to stay through the course and get the justice that they deserve, it will also provide many millions of pounds of cost saving over the years to offset any very minor costs and administrative irritations from adding the NHS number or the victim’s journey number to every form.
From these Benches, we welcome anything that we can debate with the Government between Committee and Report to strengthen the role of a victim and ensure that they get the right support.