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

Baroness Hamwee Excerpts

Monday 26th July 2010 Grand Committee

[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.