My Lords, I support effectively all the amendments in this group, but your Lordships will be relieved to hear that I am not going to speak to all of them. I will speak briefly to Amendments 101 and 102, introduced very ably by the noble Baroness, Lady Bertin. The essential point behind these amendments is to try to align this Bill with the clauses in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act that lay down the rules for digital disclosure.
I thought it might be helpful to try to find out what was happening with these new rules and whether they were actually working, so the Victims’ Commissioner’s office put in a request to try and find out. In true and typical form, the Government have not done any evaluation of before and after the Act came into effect specifically in this area.
However, a part of the Project Soteria programme is enacting this new code and some academics are looking at it, so we asked them for their feedback on whether the new code was working in terms of access to private data. They said they had
“seen a move towards better proportionality which they attribute to the Act. They have also seen less threats that investigations will end if the victim does not want to hand over their phone. There is also greater consideration given to alternative means of obtaining digital evidence such as screen shots”,
rather than taking everything off a phone. In conclusion —and this gives kudos to the Government—they said that
“the intentions of parliamentarians to change culture via the legislation do seem to be bearing fruit”,
which is very good news. So, since the evidence shows that it is working, it is not difficult to suggest that what was enacted through that Act should be mirrored exactly in this.
I move to Amendment 106, so ably spoken to by the noble Baroness, Lady Finn. This is personal for me. I have known Stella Creasy since before she acquired a family, during the troubles and strife of the years that went by before she was blessed with two children. To have an individual who has never met you decide to use an anonymous profile to make complaints about you on the basis that he does not like some of her views, specifically on misogyny and the behaviour of some men, and say that on that basis you are an unfit mother, is simply staggering. It is also staggering that the police decided to take this seriously; they finally admitted that that was wrong and, in doing so, said that the officer had been spoken to and that it was a time for reflection and some learning. My own view is that he should have been given a complete and utter bollocking and should probably have been asked to leave the service, or at least put on probation. That is wholly unacceptable.
So it is wrong that this can happen in the first place. When it happens, if the police decide to take the complaint seriously, having not investigated it, and pass it on to social services, social services are in a sense obliged to put on your record that an investigation is taking place on the basis of the complaint, regardless of whether it has any merit. Despite the fact that Stella’s persecutor was found to be malicious and sentenced, it remains on the record. Waltham Forest says that it can and will do nothing about getting rid of it. Perversely, it says that it will keep it on the record because she is a safeguarding risk to her children, as people in future might try to cause her harm through them. I fail to understand that logic. I do not know what the barriers to entry are to gain employment in Waltham Forest, but I suggest they might be elevated somewhat if that is the degree of logic applied in a situation such as this.
So I implore the Government to look at this seriously. As the noble Baroness, Lady Finn, said, they should sit down and talk with interested parties to understand how this happened and try to work out how to prevent it in future, or how to develop very clear guidance to enable authorities to which complaints might be made to go through a decision tree, to analyse the veracity and probity of such allegations, thinking very carefully about the implications of actions they might take without having fully thought them through.