Covid-19: Information Sharing with Police Forces

Debate between Lord Bethell and Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho

Tuesday 20th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (CB) [V]]

Understandably, this news has caused much confusion: you only need to take to social media to see people’s anxieties. As I understand it, the app keeps all data locally on your phone and only when you upload a positive test does it then become more widely available, although anonymised. What measures are the Government going to take to make sure that communications are crystal clear, so that people can totally understand the privacy implications of what they are doing? It seems there is still much anxiety about exactly what can be done.

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

I am grateful to the noble Baroness for her insight, but I reassure her that the information on the app is not covered by this memorandum of understanding. That is a principle that has been made very clear by the NHS app. This is the data held on CTAS, the Public Health England database, and it remains the property of Public Health England; the MoU is very specific about that. As the noble Baroness is aware, the app is a distributed source of information; it has extremely high privacy barriers, and this MoU does not in any way breach those barriers.

Covid-19: Contact-tracing App

Debate between Lord Bethell and Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho

Wednesday 6th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell]

My noble friend Lord O’Shaughnessy is entirely right. We all wish to move as quickly as possible back to normal, but I am afraid that travel will be one of the aspects of our former lives that will be slowest to return. That said, we are working extremely hard with other countries to make sure that interoperability can be baked into our arrangements. Of course, the app has not yet been launched and few other countries are ahead of us. We sat with the Irish Government on 24 April in order to work out interoperability protocols since that border is the most important and proximate to us.

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (CB)]

The Office for National Statistics tells us that the highest number of deaths is among the poorest communities at 55 in 100,000 versus 25 in 100,000 in other communities, yet they are also the most digitally excluded people. It is tragic that these inequalities mean that the contact-tracing app will not help those who most need it. What is the Government’s plan to address this enormous challenge?

[Lord Bethell]

The noble Baroness is entirely right to point to the importance of ensuring that the vulnerable are included. Of course, the app is not the only thing we are depending on. Manual track and trace in the conventional way of using a telephone and speaking to those who test positive will still be a core part of our track-and-trace arrangements. Efforts will be made to reach those who are vulnerable or digitally isolated to ensure that they have details of the provisions for these track-and-trace arrangements.