I thank all noble Lords who have spoken in this debate. I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Sikka for rightly sharing the Constitution Committee’s concerns that, on the face of it, it looks like this is broadening the basis for refusal of data requests. He made an important point about the costs needing to be balanced against the social costs of refusing requests and the social impact that there may be, particularly if it is to do with employment or access to public services.
At the heart of this is that we need to ensure that data controllers are not making subjective judgments about whether a request is reasonable. The Minister says that the Information Commissioner will produce guidance. This is important, as that guidance will be absolutely crucial to making a judgment about whether we think this new regime will be credible. The Minister introduced a new phrase: that the intention is to support “well-intended” requests. Well, then we need to start defining “well intended”. I think we will chase these phrases round and round before we get some proper clarification; it would have helped if it had been in the Bill.
We have also gone round and round a bit on whether the changes in the wording weaken the rights of data subjects and whether they save money. The Minister talked about the 1% saving. I am fascinated by that because it does not seem very much; if it is not very much, why are we doing it? We come back to all of this again. I do not quite know what we are hoping to achieve here.
I will need to look at what the Minister said but we need a lot more clarification on this to be reassured that data subjects will not be refused more and more access to the information they want. I was disappointed to hear the Minister say that the controller can consider resources because that seems to me to be the ultimate get-out clause: if a controller can say that they cannot afford to do the data search, does not that mean that individual rights can be ignored just on that basis? That seems too easy; if somebody does not want to do the piece of work, that is an obvious get-out clause, so I remain concerned about the Minister’s response to that amendment as well.
We have explored a lot of this in a lot of different ways and we have had a good debate. I will look again at Hansard but, for the moment, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.