My Lords, we should be very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Cotes, for her amendment. I listened very carefully to her line of argument and find much that we can support in the approach. In that context, we should also thank the Police Federation of England and Wales for a particularly useful and enlightening briefing paper.
We may well be suffering under the law of unintended consequences in this context; it seems to have hit quite hard and acted as a barrier to the sensible processing and transfer of data between two parts of the law enforcement machinery. It is quite interesting coming off the back of the previous debate, when we were discussing making the transfer of information and intelligence between different agencies easier and having a common approach. It is a very relevant discussion to have.
I do not think that the legislation, when it was originally drafted, could ever have been intended to work in the way the Police Federation has set out. The implementation of the Data Protection Act 2018, in so far as law enforcement agencies are concerned, is supposed to be guided by recital 4, which the noble Baroness read into the record and which makes good sense.
As the noble Baroness explained, the Police Federation’s argument that the DPA makes no provisions at all that are designed to facilitate, in effect, the free flow of information, that it should be able to hold all the relevant data prior to the charging decision being made by the CPS, and that redaction should take place only after a decision on charging has been made seems quite a sensible approach. As she argued, it would significantly lighten the burden on police investigating teams and enable the decision on charging to be more broadly informed.
So this is a piece of simplification that we can all support. The case has been made very well. If it helps speed up charging and policing processes, which I know the Government are very concerned about, as all Governments should be, it seems a sensible move—but this is the Home Office. We do not always expect the most sensible things to be delivered by that department, but we hope that they are.