Data Protection Bill [HL]

Debate between Earl of Lytton and Lord McNally

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 30th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord McNally (LD)]

My Lords, I suspect that this is going to be a shorter debate than perhaps was at first imagined, but I feel it is important that I add one or two words. When I was Minister at the Ministry of Justice, preceded by the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, I met a distinguished American lawyer. I said to him by way of introduction, as I regularly did, “Now, I’m not a lawyer”. He looked at me and said, “Then I’ll speak very, very slowly”.

I feel a bit like that after all the howitzers have been rolled out this afternoon—the noble Lords, Lord Faulks, Lord Lester and Lord Pannick, along with a more helpful contribution from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith. I intervened because it would be very wrong, or very misleading, if Ministers were to take this mini-debate as an escape from a real problem. I was, although the post may have been slightly misnamed, Minister for Data Protection for three and a half years. Between 2010 and 2013 I had the job of going across to Brussels for negotiations on a lot of the issues that we are now discussing. What struck me there was how much influence we had in bringing together legislation that met the concerns mainly of western Europeans about a light-touch form of regulation and the concerns mainly of eastern Europeans who had fairly recent experience of how state abuse of power could be used against the citizen and the individual.

The point that I want to leave with Ministers is that, whatever fault our legal experts have found with the amendment, it underpins a real concern, which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, picked up: the layman, the ordinary citizen, wants to be assured that by the end of the Bill’s passage, on which we are only just starting, it will very much protect civil rights, civil liberties and individual freedoms. One of the great challenges we face is that this extraordinary change in the structure of our society, brought about by this fourth industrial revolution based on data, really calls into question a lot of the protections that we thought we had.

I hope the Minister will take and grab hold of what was said in introducing this Bill. We are attempting in these amendments, particularly in Amendment 4A, to meet a real and genuine concern of ordinary people who are perhaps not as clever as the noble Lords, Lord Pannick, Lord Lester, and others, but who have a concern about the abuse of power. There has been no sense of shame or regret. I understand and have been passionate all my life about the defence of the freedom of the press, but I wish that the press did not rush so quickly to scream, “They’re trying to curb the freedom of the press”, when all that the press has done since Leveson is try to sabotage any proper press regulation. I worry about saying, “Well, it will stop various parts of our society using this new data”, without seeing and recognising the huge amount of evidence already of massive abuses of data which impinge on our very democracy. I felt it worth saying, even if I had to listen to the lawyers, that the layman also has a voice in this, and we have a real duty to make sure that this legislation is up to the task presented by the new data world.

[The Earl of Lytton (CB)]

I realise that, in rising to speak on this particular part of the Bill, I depart slightly from the purpose of the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson—but I thank him for raising the issue all the same.

Of course, we are dealing with the overview of the Bill. The noble Lord, Lord McNally, almost wrote my introduction. What has worried me for some considerable time, notwithstanding the Bill’s provisions that provide for data subject to error correction, is the manifest inclusion of data in the data processing function, which is broadly drawn—namely, the inclusion of information that is knowingly false or recklessly included in that process, and which can affect the life chances of individuals. We know of significant and high-profile circumstances in which false information has been included and has either affected a significant class of people or has seriously damaged the life prospects of individuals.

Given that the collection of data is part of the processing function, it seems to me that very little is being said about responsibility for those sorts of errors—in other words, the things that one could or should have realised were incorrect or where there was a disregard for the norms of checking information before it got into data systems. We heard at Second Reading how difficult it is to excise that information from the system once it has got in there and been round the virtual world of information technology.

Could the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, or the Minister in replying, say whether there is anything apart from the Bill—I do not see it there at the moment—that enables there to be some sort of sanction, for want of a better word, against knowingly or recklessly including data that is false and which affects the life chances and prospects of individuals because it is capable of being identified with them and can be highly damaging? That is something that we may need to look at further down the line. If I am speaking in error, I shall stand corrected.