Data Protection Bill [HL]

Lord Cormack Excerpts

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

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, I appeal to the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, not to rush the House on this matter. The amendment is clearly deficient. This morning I was with the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Dr Tristram Hunt, who urged me, if I possibly could, to say something briefly this afternoon. He gave me a brief that I have not had a chance to master, but it is quite clear that all the directors of our great national museums and galleries have real misgivings about Amendment 4 and, from what I have heard, would have similar misgivings—or most of them—about Amendment 4A. There is no constitutional need for us to divide this afternoon. Shortly after I came into your Lordships’ House, I remember that the late Lord Jenkin of Roding said, “We don’t normally vote at Committee stage in our House. It’s better to air the arguments and then to come back to them on Report”. That was wise advice and the House should heed it today.

[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.