Serious Crime Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Hamwee and Lord Swinfen

Tuesday 8th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Swinfen]

I also support the amendment. In doing so, I declare an interest: I run a medical charity that does all its work online, with doctors and nurses in 74 different countries. However, I am not so much worried about that, because I hope that our confidential information is secure. I am thinking of people using cybercrime to find their rivals’ pricing information and new product designs when tendering for various projects; in other words, hacking into other people’s and firms’ computers and getting confidential information for their own pecuniary and business advantage. This is an important amendment and I hope that my noble friend on the Front Bench will consider it sympathetically.

[Baroness Hamwee]

My Lords, to pick up on the point about drugs, it does not seem to me that they are necessarily excluded. The new section of the Computer Misuse Act deals with an act creating,

“a significant risk of, serious damage of a material kind”,

which includes “damage to human welfare”, which is in turn such as to cause, among other things, “loss to human life” or “human illness or injury”. All that links up very closely with what the noble Lord has been talking about. If what he has described is not covered, we will need to go back to Clause 39—but not today.