Data Protection Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Knight of Weymouth and Lord Clement-Jones

Monday 30th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Clement-Jones]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for that accolade. I rise to speak to Amendment 170, which is a small contribution to perfecting Amendment 169. It struck me as rather strange that Amendment 152 has a reference to charities, but not Amendment 169. For charities, this is just as big an issue so I wanted to enlarge slightly on that. This is a huge change that is overtaking charities. How they are preparing for it and the issues that need to be addressed are of great concern to them. The Institute of Fundraising recently surveyed more than 300 charities of all sizes on how they are preparing for the GDPR, and used the results to identify a number of areas where it thought support was needed.

The majority of charities, especially the larger ones, are aware of the GDPR and are taking action to get ready for May 2018, but the survey also highlighted areas where charities need additional advice, guidance and support. Some 22% of the charities surveyed said that they have yet to do anything to prepare for the changes, and 95% of those yet to take any preparatory action are the smaller charities. Some 72% said that there was a lack of clear available guidance. Almost half the charities report that they do not feel they have the right level of skills or expertise on data protection, and 38% report that they have found limits in their administration or database systems, or the costs of upgrading these, a real challenge. That mirrors very much what small businesses are finding as well. Bodies such as the IoF have been working to increase the amount of support and guidance on offer. The IoF runs a number of events, but more support is needed.

A targeted intervention is needed to help charities as much as it is needed for small business. This needs to be supported by government—perhaps through a temporary extension of the existing subsidised fundraising skills training, including an additional training programme on how to comply with GDPR changes; or a targeted support scheme, directly funded or working with other funding bodies and foundations, to help the smallest charities most in need to upgrade their administrative or database systems. Charities welcome the recently announced telephone service from the ICO offering help on the GDPR, which they can access, but it is accessible only to organisations employing under 250 people and it is only a telephone service.

There are issues there, and I hope the Minister will be able to respond, in particular by recognising that charities are very much part of the infrastructure of smaller organisations that will certainly need support in complying with the GDPR.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I broadly support what these interesting amendments are trying to do. I declare my interest as a member of the board of the Centre for Acceleration of Social Technology. Substantially, what it does is advise normally larger charities on how to best take advantage of digital to solve some of their problems.

Clearly, I support ensuring that small businesses, small charities and parish councils, as mentioned, are advised of the implications of this Act. If she has the opportunity, I ask the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, to explain why she chose staff size as the measure. I accept that hers is a probing amendment and she may think there are reasons not to go with staff size. The cliché is that when Instagram was sold to Facebook for $1 billion it had 13 members of staff. That would not come within the scope of the amendment, but there are plenty of digital businesses that can achieve an awful lot with very few staff. As it stands, my worry is this opens up a huge loophole.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

My Lords, I will be brief on this group but I have two points to make. One is a question in respect of Amendment 51, where I congratulate the insurance industry on its lobbying. Within proposed new paragraph 15A(1)(b) it says,

“if … the controller has taken reasonable steps to obtain the data subject’s consent”.

Can the Minister clarify, or give some sense of, what “reasonable” means in this context? It would help us to understand whether that means an email, which might go into spam and not be read. Would there be a letter or a phone call to try to obtain consent? What could we as citizens reasonably expect insurance companies to do to get our consent?

Assuming that we do not have a stand part debate on Clause 4, how are the Government getting on with thinking about simplifying the language of the Bill? The noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, is temporarily not in her place, but she made some good points at Second Reading about simplification. Clause 4 is quite confusing to read. It is possible to understand it once you have read it a few times, but subsection (2) says, for example, that,

“the reference to a term’s meaning in the GDPR is to its meaning in the GDPR read with any provision of Chapter 2 which modifies the term’s meaning for the purposes of the GDPR”.

That sort of sentence is quite difficult for most people to understand, and I will be interested to hear of the Government’s progress.

[Lord Clement-Jones]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for introducing these amendments in not too heavy a style, but this is an opportunity to ask a couple of questions in relation to them. We may have had since 20 October to digest them; nevertheless, that does not make them any more digestible. We will be able to see how they really operate only once they are incorporated into the Bill. Perhaps we might have a look at how they operate on Report.

The Bill is clearly a work in progress, and this is an extraordinary number of amendments even at this stage. It begs the question as to whether the Government are still engaged in discussions with outside bodies. Personally, I welcome that there has been dialogue with the insurance industry—a very important industry for us. We obviously have to make sure that the consumer is protected while it carries out an important part of its business. I know that the industry has raised other matters relating to third parties and so on. There have also been matters raised by those in the financial services industry who are keen to ensure that fraud is prevented. Even though they are private organisations, they are also keen to ensure that they are caught under the umbrella of the exemptions in the Bill. Can the noble Baroness tell us a little about what further discussions are taking place? It is important that we make sure that when the Bill finally hits the deck, so to speak, it is right for all the different sectors that will be subject to it.