Data Protection Bill [Lords]

Debate between Liam Byrne and Jim Cunningham

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Wednesday 9th May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Liam Byrne]

My hon. Friend hits the nail on the head. The answer, of course, is that it is for all three of those reasons that we do not have before us an imaginative bill of digital rights, but the times do call for it.

In the early days, when we were writing great charters such as Magna Carta, the threats to ordinary citizens were from bad monarchs. We needed provisions such as Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights and the Glorious Revolution to protect the citizens of this country and their wealth from bad monarchs who would seek to steal things that were not theirs.

What we now confront is not a bad monarch—we have a fantastic monarch—but the risk of bad big tech. The big five companies now have a combined market capitalisation of some $2.5 trillion, and they are up to all sorts of things. They are often protected by the first amendment in the United States, but their business—their bad business—often hurts the data rights of citizens in this country.

That is why we need this new bill of rights. We have to accept that we are on the cusp of radical and rapid changes in legislation and regulation. I often make the point that over the course of the 19th century there was not one Factory Act but 17 Factory Acts. We had to legislate and re-legislate as technology, economics and methods of production changed, and that is the point we are at now. We will have to regulate and re-regulate, and legislate and re-legislate, again and again over the decades to come. Therefore, if we are to give people any certainty about what the new laws will look like, it would be a sensible precaution if we were to write down now the principles that will form the north star that guides us as we seek to keep legislation up to date.

[Mr Jim Cunningham]

I am sure that my right hon. Friend has received correspondence from constituents who are worried about the use of personal data. My constituents have a lot of sympathy with the views of the hon. Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston) about this. Does my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne) agree?

[Liam Byrne]

My hon. Friend is right. We have been on the receiving end of a huge number of data breaches in this country—really serious infringements of basic 21st-century rights—which is why we need a bold declaration of those rights so that the citizens of this country know what they are entitled to. Unless we get this right, we will not be able to build the environment of trust that is the basis of trade in the digital economy. At the moment, trust in the online world is extremely weak—that trust is going down, not up—so we need to put in place measures now, as legislators, to fix this, turn it around and put in place preparations for the future.

The Government’s proposal of a digital charter is a bit like the cones hotline approach to public service reform. The contents of the charter are not really rights but guidelines. There are no good methods of redress or transparency. Frankly, if we try to introduce rights and redress mechanisms in that way, they will basically fail and will not lead to any kind of change. That is why we urge the Government to follow the approach that we are setting out.

I put on record my profound thanks to Baroness Kidron and the 5Rights movement. Her work forms the basis of the bill of rights we are proposing to the House: the right to remove data, as enshrined in the GDPR—that right is very important to children—the right to know; the right to safety and support; the right to informed and conscious use; and the right to digital literacy. Those are the kinds of rights we should now be talking about as the rights of every child and every citizen.

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[Liam Byrne]

I am not sure that that is the case. British citizens have confirmed rights under the GDPR—that is safeguarded under EU legislation—but the risks I am worried about are the same ones as the right hon. Gentleman. I spent two and a half years in the Home Office. I recognised many of the errors that were made by the former Home Secretary in the situation that we inherited back in 2006, so I do not think that lessons have been learnt from Windrush, or that many lessons have been learnt from errors over the past eight to 10 years. The Home Office is a great Department of State, with tremendous strengths. It has fantastic civil servants who do an amazing job, without the resources to do it properly and very often without the level of support they need from their Ministers, but it is a human institution and such institutions make mistakes. To correct those, we have tribunals and courts through which people can test decisions made by officials without the disinfectant of sunlight. Unless we equip those individuals with everything they need to make their case effectively, we risk injustice. After our debates over the past month, we must do everything we can so that we never run that risk again.

[Mr Jim Cunningham]

To pursue those rights, people also need legal aid, and in some circumstances, they are denied legal aid. The state should not have the right to give private information about its citizens to anybody, or even to sell it to organisations.

[Liam Byrne]

Correct. In my first months at the Home Office, I spent a lot of time in immigration tribunals. I used to go to the courts up in Islington to sit, watch and listen so that I could learn the basic mechanisms of justice in this country. The thing that struck me was the inequality of arms that comes to bear in these tribunals. On the one side, there is a Home Office lawyer, who is sometimes there, sometimes not. Home Office lawyers are backed by teams and have well-constructed cases and all the information they need. On the other side of the argument are people without money or access to lawyers, but now the Government propose to deny some of them the information that they need to argue and win their cases. It is a recipe for injustice.

Police Station Closures: Solihull and West Midlands

Debate between Liam Byrne and Jim Cunningham

Tuesday 6th March 2018 Westminster Hall

[Liam Byrne]

There has been a provision for counter-terrorism policing, but, as the right hon. Gentleman knows better than I do, neighbourhood policing is the frontline of the fight against terrorism in this country. The stronger the frontline, the safer we are. In the west midlands, our frontline is being cut to shreds.

[Mr Jim Cunningham]

My right hon. Friend will notice that in an intervention earlier I mentioned Willenhall in particular, where there have been public meetings. It is strange when we talk about fighting terrorism that there is a police station in that area in which high-profile prisoners are kept. I wonder where in the west midlands they will put them if there are any further arrests.

[Liam Byrne]

Exactly. Those threats are now multiplying across the region.

I respect the task that the Police Minister has to try to perform. He has taken the time to listen to representations from west midlands MPs of all political stripes. I am afraid that he was not backed up by either the Prime Minister or the Chancellor; they did not give the Home Office in general, and him in particular, the financial settlement that we needed in order to safeguard our communities. For us in Hodge Hill, that means that we now have the proposed closure of the Shard End police base—something that both Councillor Ian Ward and I disagree with.

We need a police base in Shard End, because—as was explained to me during my own glorious fortnight as the Minister for police and counter-terrorism, before I went on to serve a further two years as a Home Office Minister—neighbourhood policing creates a different kind of relationship between the police service and the community. It unlocks a level of trust, intelligence and insight that makes it much easier to crack down on crime. When we shut down police bases, we weaken the frontline in that fight. I do not want to see crime, drug dealing and violent crime rise any further. That is why I call on the Minister today to fix the problem in the West Midlands Police finances, give us the money we deserve and let our brave men and women of the West Midlands Police service get on with the job they are so dedicated to doing.