Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Debate between Baroness Fox of Buckley and Lord Rosser

Lords Hansard - Part 2 & Report stage
Wednesday 8th December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I am not particularly keen on GDPR legislation as it is, so I do not want to use it to support this group of amendments. I have also been happy to consider extraordinary measures to tackle things such as knife crime and gangs, because I do not want to pretend that this is a new problem. I live in Wood Green and I have seen someone stabbed. There is a horrible atmosphere in which you fear for young people’s lives. Instead, I want to raise my fear that this could have unintended consequences. It is a question of trust. The young people who we would all like to prevent from being involved in serious violence need to turn to someone and build up relationships with people, if they are to get out of situations where they could be involved in violence.

I will give a couple of examples from youth workers who I have spoken to. A young woman who is pregnant wants to extricate herself from the gang culture, but she worries that, if she talks to people such as youth workers, she will be accused of snitching on the father of her unborn child. That might lead them to the police’s arms, and so on. You can understand the situation. The youth worker reassures them that this will not occur but, actually, you cannot reassure them if the law changes as described. Then there is the young man who considers getting or tries to get himself out of a situation in which he is involved in gangs, but he is paranoid about the police. It is understandable that certain groups would think that any approach to anyone in authority would lead them into the police’s clutches. Actually, any attempt by a youth worker to reassure them that they should not be paranoid would be incorrect in this instance—they were right to be paranoid, because they are potentially putting themselves in the police’s clutches.

I ask the Minister how we can avoid the unintended consequences of this. I know that those individual youth workers will not necessarily be affected, but they work for institutions that have to make data available. Those anecdotes will become data points and important information can therefore be shared when it should not be. I note that I have told those stories anonymously and that I was given that information without any personal data being passed on. If you want to develop new strategies to tackle serious violence, it can be done without handing names, addresses and personal details to the police.

[Lord Rosser (Lab)]

My Lords, I will endeavour to be brief. This group of amendments includes government concessions to include extra protections on doctor-patient confidentiality and healthcare data. They provide that the powers under the serious violence reduction duty do not authorise the disclosure of patient or personal information by a health or social care authority. We support the amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, which, among other things, leave out the uncertain language in brackets in the Bill.

To be a bit clearer about it—although the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, explained it extremely well, as one would expect—the serious violence reduction duty requires data sharing between bodies, and the Bill currently provides that data cannot be shared if it would breach data protection laws. It qualifies that with:

“(but in determining whether a disclosure would do so, any power conferred by the regulations is to be taken into account)”.

An amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, and others would delete the provision in brackets, so data protection law would apply as normal, as it does to medical professionals. A number of noble Lords have referred to other people or organisations who have contact and involvement with that same degree of confidentiality, and professional judgments on disclosure should apply.

The noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, referred to a meeting she had with the Minister and a letter she only very recently received. I assume that is the one dated 7 December. I appreciate the letter and thank the Minister for it but, reading the paragraph that relates to the bit in brackets that the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, seeks to delete, I struggle to understand the argument for having the part in brackets. Why is it necessary?

Why can we not simply leave it, with statements in other parts of the letter that make it clear that data can be shared, where it is lawful to do so, only under the data protection legislation? One would have thought that is surely all we needed to say—not to have something in brackets which I do not fully understand the need for, despite the letter from the Minister. I sense from what the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, is saying that she too struggles to understand why we need the bit in brackets at all. I have no doubt that the Minister will comment on that in her response.

Having said that, we welcome the concessions made by the Government on medical data and doctor-patient confidentiality. They show that the Government have accepted, up to a point, that the data-sharing powers in this chapter needed qualification. Data sharing, properly and intelligently done, with safeguards, can be absolutely key to tackling serious violence, to prevent silo working and some of the failures we have witnessed too many times. We have some concerns over the proposal to require all data shared under the duty to be anonymised, as there may be rare but crucial cases where information needs to be more specific to protect the vulnerable and pursue the criminal.

I come back to this point: in welcoming the concessions that have been made, we support what the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, is seeking to achieve, but we find the language in brackets—to which reference has been made—which appears to qualify the application of data protection law, to be unclear, and we really do not see why those words need to be there at all.