Digital Economy Bill

Debate between Baroness Hamwee and Baroness Janke

Committee: 3rd sitting Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Monday 6th February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Janke (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, shall speak to this group of amendments, having put my name to some of them. The noble Lord, Lord Collins, has already raised the issue about the permissive approach in the Bill, which we have rather rejected, and the question of inserting “complied with” rather than “had regard to”. Many of the amendments deal with that issue across the various agencies involved. When you consider that this is operated in relation to various criteria to do with improving people’s physical health, their emotional well-being, their contribution to society and their social and emotional well-being, the breadth of those areas is really rather daunting. You could justify almost anything under those four areas, and I do not really believe that the code of practice could be remotely enforceable if those were the criteria that were used.

Worse still, they could be used in a rather punitive way. For example, it could be argued that it is improving people’s well-being by making them work; and if they are disabled, pursuing people who have disabilities or difficulty in getting work could be used to penalise vulnerable groups. It would affect people who are on benefits or are pensioners—all sorts of vulnerable people. There needs to be somewhat more rigour in the Bill than criteria such as those that we see there now.

Moreover, these amendments deal with a minimum consultation period, which we support. Finally, the code of practice should be laid before Parliament, which, again, would be another safeguard. We must have much more transparency and greater rigour of application, enforceability and consistency across all the agencies and with other rules of disclosure. I would like to hear what the Minister has to say about these concerns. We believe that these matters must be answered and wish to understand the Government’s approach in order to decide whether we need to take this forward at a later stage.

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, support the various amendments in this group. “Having regard to” a matter always seems to leave some wriggle room. If there should be exceptions to compliance—because I think we are talking about compliance here, not about consistency—then those should be spelled out. I accept that having codes of practice outside primary legislation allows for flexibility, which might be useful, for a response to experience of the operation of the code and, perhaps, for changing circumstances. However, there is so much reliance on codes of practice here that an inclusive process for constructing and finalising them is very important, as well as transparency in operation.

The noble and learned Lord will probably have a better recollection than I have of the discussion during the passage of the Investigatory Powers Bill about providing transparency by way of ensuring that people who were affected by the transmission of information knew about it. This was rejected for security reasons, but that would not be the case here. The overall objective has to be transparency and inclusiveness.