Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 (Disclosure of Information by SOCA) Order 2010

Monday 26th July 2010 Grand Committee

Considered in Grand Committee

17:12

Moved By

[Baroness Neville-Jones]

That the Grand Committee do report to the House that it has considered the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 (Disclosure of Information by SOCA) Order 2010.

Relevant Document: Sixth Report, Session 2009-10, from the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments.

[The Minister of State, Home Office (Baroness Neville-Jones)]

My Lords, the order will designate the functions of the UK’s anti-doping organisation as being of a public nature for the purposes of Section 33 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act. This will allow the Serious Organised Crime Agency to disclose information to UK Anti-Doping. The order was laid by the previous Government to help the UK prevent doping in sport. This Government are equally committed to tackling doping and are happy to take it forward. There is a strong public interest in preserving the integrity of sport, which is of particular significance in the run-up to our home Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2012. UK Anti-Doping was set up to address this interest and to protect the right of athletes to compete in drug-free sport. UK Anti-Doping also ensures that the UK Government meet their commitments under UNESCO's anti-doping convention, which include tackling the trafficking and supply of doping substances.

The traditional way of stopping athletes doping has been through education and testing; but we have learnt that rogue scientists and cheating athletes will always try to elude the system by relying on testing not always exposing them. We must keep pace with international best practice and go after those who facilitate doping by supplying the substances that are banned in sport, which are much less detectable than they used to be. This calls for a more investigative and intelligence-based approach. Experience in other countries has shown that where there are partnerships between anti-doping organisations and law enforcement agencies, trafficking and supply routes have been disrupted and perpetrators have been caught. This approach is seen as essential by the World Anti-Doping Agency, which co-ordinates the global fight against doping in sport.

UK Anti-Doping can already obtain information from a range of sources, including the UK Border Agency and the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency. Allowing SOCA to have a gateway would greatly add to those sources and would be particularly important because SOCA receives information from UK police forces as well as from Interpol. That will allow UK Anti-Doping to obtain information about the traffickers and the suppliers of these substances and will avoid it having to set up separate gateways with each of the 52 police forces in the UK, taken overall.

17:15

Information-sharing for anti-doping purposes is supported by law enforcement and the sport community. In particular, it has support from SOCA, ACPO, the Information Commissioner’s office and the British Athletes Commission. Notwithstanding the desirability of UK Anti-Doping having access to information from a wide range of sources, it is also important to ensure that the data protection and human rights considerations are properly addressed. I make no apologies for spending a moment on this, given that we know that this could turn out to be an enormous trap unless we get it right.

UK Anti-Doping and SOCA have put in place a number of measures to ensure that disclosures will be lawful and information will be handled appropriately. UK Anti-Doping has carried out a privacy impact assessment, which is available on its website. This sets out how the information-sharing will operate, how data will be handled securely by UK Anti-Doping and how disclosures will comply with the Data Protection Act.

In particular, the order will not allow SOCA to disclose all the information that it may have on an individual to UK Anti-Doping. It will be able to disclose only information that is relevant to, and will be used in connection with, UK Anti-Doping functions. SOCA will pass on relevant information only if it is necessary for UK Anti-Doping to have that information to carry out its functions and it would be proportionate to disclose it. There will therefore be no disclosure that would contravene data protection or human rights legislation or indeed jeopardise SOCA’s own investigations.

In turn, UK Anti-Doping will give SOCA information only as evidence in a case before a tribunal or will share it with a third party only if it has obtained prior permission and consent. SOCA and UK Anti-Doping will formalise how the information-sharing will operate via a memorandum of understanding. This will mirror information provided in the privacy impact assessment, which UK Anti-Doping has already published on its website, and it will be agreed by Ministers at the Home Office and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

UK Anti-Doping will also have a dedicated intelligence unit that will receive and analyse SOCA information. It will implement data security policy, setting out, for instance, how information must be labelled and stored, how long it can be retained for and how it will be safely destroyed. I am aware that the retention of data and public access to data were of interest when this issue was debated in the other place, so I shall deal briefly with the points to which that discussion gave rise.

UK Anti-Doping will retain SOCA information only for as long as it is necessary to carry out its anti-doping functions effectively. It may be necessary for UK Anti-Doping to retain some information where there is no immediate link to a doping violation—for instance, where it may help to detect future doping violations. In those cases, UK Anti-Doping’s retention policy will set out how SOCA information will be periodically reviewed to test whether it is still necessary to retain it or whether it should be securely destroyed or returned to SOCA. Initially, UK Anti-Doping will carry out these reviews every six months. It is important that these strict controls over the use, retention and, ultimately, destruction of information should be observed minutely and accurately.

UK Anti-Doping will not keep a public record of all the information disclosed to it by SOCA, because this could undermine its detection of doping violations. However, when an athlete is charged with an anti-doping violation, information will be disclosed to them as part of any case that goes to a tribunal. Information might be withheld if it is part of an ongoing investigation or if it implicates a third party. If athletes are otherwise concerned about the personal information that UK Anti-Doping holds about them, they may submit a subject-to-access request under the Data Protection Act to obtain that information. There are therefore certain recourses.

This gateway will not impose any obligation on SOCA. It will simply facilitate disclosures where SOCA already holds the information. There is no intention for SOCA to itself carry out anti-doping investigations. There is therefore no significant additional cost associated with this gateway.

Once the gateway is up and running, the Government will work with UK Anti-Doping and the cross-departmental anti-doping co-ordination group to monitor how it is working in practice, whether any changes are necessary and whether any further safeguards need to be put in place.

Doping is a problem which is not going to go away. It will require ongoing efforts as the landscape for doping continually changes. UK Anti-Doping requires the additional information afforded it by this gateway if it is to do its job properly, and this is particularly important at a time when the UK is hosting and bidding to host a number of major international sporting events.

This order was approved last Wednesday by the House of Commons Sixth Delegated Legislation Committee, and I commend it to your Lordships.

[Lord Brett]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for the background and detailed information about how we take forward this important piece of secondary legislation. The Opposition support it and I commend it to the Grand Committee.

[Baroness Hamwee]

My Lords, I, too, am grateful to the Minister, as she anticipated one or two of my questions, but I have a couple more—a little more than the noble Lord, Lord Brett. First, it was interesting that we are dealing with SOCA providing information to a non-departmental public body. I could have understood the position more easily were it the other way around, as SOCA is the organisation that really needs the information. However, I appreciate the concerns which underlie this measure.

I was interested in the Information Commissioner’s comments. The noble Baroness anticipated these to some extent, but his office emphasises that the question of whether disclosure of information to the anti-doping agency is fair and proportionate necessitates detailed consideration of what information is to be shared and why. I assume that this refers to the need for the assessment to be carried out on a case-by-case basis and that what is being said is that one cannot give global rubber-stamping to this work when dealing with confidentiality and human rights requirements.

The Explanatory Memorandum refers at paragraph 7.4 to,

“obtaining evidence to help pursue drugs cheats”.

I should like to understand whether that is part of this programme, if we are talking only about individuals. It does not immediately strike one as being serious and organised crime, although that may simply be the way that this paragraph is worded and that what we should understand by it is that an individual may be part of a serious and organised crime.

The Minister said that there would be no significant additional cost. Can she therefore confirm that the figures given in the papers attached to the impact statement on a requirement for eight extra staff at SOCA, with a budget of around £100,000, are correct? I appreciate that in government £100,000 is sometimes regarded as small beer, but the public might not always see it that way. I was a little surprised to see that eight more staff were needed. I should have thought that that sort of work might have been swept up in the work that was already being carried out, but I am probably too optimistic on that score.

[Baroness Neville-Jones]

My Lords, the noble Baroness raises a number of points. The reason that we have the arrangement of SOCA being willing to provide information to an NDPB is because the sporting community is extremely unwilling to see an extensive criminalisation of the control of doping in sporting activity and wants to try to pursue a policy where best practice, peer pressure and effective action by the sports’ regulatory bodies are the way by which it is controlled. That accounts for doing it this way. Clearly, if it was concluded that that was not effective, one would have to look again at the arrangements, but the doping that goes on at the moment is not so excessive that it is thought necessary to bring in SOCA in a big way.

On the number of people needed, unless I am mistaken, I think that the eight extra staff will not be employed by SOCA but will be acquired by UKAD, because it has to set up a unit to process the information that it gets from SOCA and to decide the action that needs to be taken. Those individuals need some security clearance, so there is a reason for needing a specialised staff. For SOCA, it is true that the information that it is able to supply is in many respects a by-product of other investigations, but it is extremely useful to the sporting regulatory agencies.

As for the question of drugs cheats, one reason why it will be increasingly necessary to go down that road is that the testing procedures have been shown to be only partially adequate, because practices have developed where either substances are used which are extraordinarily difficult to detect in tests, or they are being dosed in such small amounts that they do not show up in a test, such that one has to go to a more forensic approach to dealing with those cheats. That is why, in the end, one has to bring in an agency which might have information about suppliers. It is, in the end, the suppliers whom we need to try to choke off so that the substances never reach the performers. We are witnessing a change in the nature of the doping culture that, in turn, leads to new investigative techniques having to be employed.

[Lord Imbert]

My Lords, first, I apologise to the Minister for rising before she had had an opportunity to respond to the speech of the noble Baroness.

Your Lordships will be relieved to know that my contribution to our proceedings this afternoon will be very brief—in fact, less than three minutes. I hope that that does not diminish the impact of what I say on this most important subject. Illegal drugs have become the scourge of modern society throughout the world. Thousands of deaths are recorded annually, and national and international organised crime thrives on that disgraceful trade worldwide. In some areas of the globe, sport has been wholly corrupted by the poison of performance-improving drugs. No longer, when we see an outstanding sporting performance, can we cheer unreservedly without thinking the unthinkable: was he or she using a performance-enhancing drug? That cynicism among spectators is grossly unfair to those athletes and sportsmen and women who are honest and cast aside the temptation to cheat by the use of such substances.

I believe that, fortunately, the honest athletes and sportspeople are still in the majority, but we must be vigilant. Only by law-abiding individuals and organisations sharing intelligence about the trafficking, sale and use of illegal or performance-enhancing drugs can action be taken to prevent or reduce this evil and destructive business.

17:29

It is now recognised that the testing of athletes is not 100 per cent successful and that it does not always expose the cheats. The trade in, and use of, performance-enhancing substances not only change performances but make organised criminal gangs and individuals far richer by their evil trade. Also, tragically, they destroy trust between otherwise good people. This order will enable SOCA—or whatever it is called in future—to act as a gateway for information and intelligence to and from the police service. Over the past weekend and this morning, I have spoken to both the chairman of UK Anti-Doping, which is responsible for preventing and detecting the use of banned substances by sports people, and to Mr Bill Hughes, the director-general of SOCA. They were keen to stress that the order, for which provision is made under Section 33 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act, is essential to the fight against the use of performance-enhancing drugs.

With the London Olympic Games only two years away, we should do everything we can to reduce the chances of the Games being ruined by the use of such drugs by those who are determined to win at all costs. By sharing intelligence we stand a much better chance of catching both the users and suppliers of such substances. I fully support the order.

[Baroness Neville-Jones]

The noble Lord makes a very important point when he says that the cheats and those who connive with them destroy trust between competitors and also between competitors and the audience. That is extremely destructive, particularly of the Olympic spirit. The Government agree that we must do what we can to stamp on this. It is very much to be hoped that this move by the UK will increase our ability to contribute to the international effort that has to be made against doping in sport. There are people who make a more than adequate living out of producing ever more sophisticated performance-enhancing drugs. We must chase them as hard as we can. I am grateful for the support of the noble Lord.

Motion agreed.

Committee adjourned at 5.34 pm.