Data Protection Bill [HL]

Lord Kennedy of Southwark Excerpts

Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Monday 13th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I thoroughly support this amendment. I really hope that the Home Office has noticed that the Bill is starting in this House and that therefore this is a paragraph we can kill—and should, as we did in 1983. If the Home Office needs something more, it should make a case for it and we should listen, but to have a blanket provision such as this is very destructive of data collection as a whole. To take again the example of the NPD, the fact that data is passed from the NPD to the Home Office has made the bits of data that are being passed totally corrupt: one can no longer rely on that data because so many schools, not unnaturally, are unwilling to shop their parents and drop their parents into what can be extremely difficult circumstances. You destroy the purpose of the data that you pollute in this way; you make it unreliable. I suspect that you also undermine the research exemption: if data is actually being collected to give to the Home Office, how can you claim that it is for research? You start to undermine the Bill in all sorts of insidious ways by having such a broad and unjustified paragraph— unjustified in the sense that no one has made a justification for it. I really hope that the Home Office will think again.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab (Co-op))]

My Lords, first, I welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Trafford, back to the Committee. Every time I get to the Bill I speak either to her or to the noble Lord, Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth, so I am glad we are back again in Committee.

Amendment 80, moved by the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, would delete paragraph 4 from Part 1 of Schedule 2 to the Bill, as we have heard. I have added my name to the amendment, as have the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, and the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb. The amendment deletes the whole paragraph which exempts personal data from the GDPR provisions as they relate, first, to the maintenance of effective immigration control and, secondly, to the investigation or detection of activities that would undermine the maintenance of effective immigration control. I want to be very clear that the intention of this amendment is to enable the Government to explain to us why they think the paragraph is necessary. As we have heard, it is very wide ranging and has been rejected in the past, so I hope the Minister can explain why it is so important that this paragraph gets through in the Bill. The noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, raised important points about the broad potential risks to data subjects’ rights, as did the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, and my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb.

I certainly want an effective immigration service and policy, along with proper immigration controls. Having said that, I am not happy with many aspects of the policies being pursued by the Government with respect to immigration. They are ones that I do not support and they have damaged our reputation as a generous country that has been respected around the world. Unfortunately, that is not the only area where the Government have damaged our reputation. I should like the noble Baroness to explain very carefully why she believes that there is a need for this provision and where it differs from what is already in force. As we have heard, under other provisions the Government have what they need in terms of ensuring that these matters are dealt with properly. The exemptions certainly appear to be wide ranging and I want to be convinced that they are absolutely necessary. As I said, there are provisions in other Acts that the Government can rely on. At this stage, I await the response of the noble Baroness.