Victims of Crime: Mobile Phone Data

Lord Morris of Aberavon Excerpts

Monday 29th April 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

My Lords, I am concerned about these proposals for two reasons. First, the major cause of some of the problems is demand. We have had far more reporting of sexual offences over the past few years, there is a greater availability of devices for recording digital data and there is far more social networking. There is a huge amount of information to trawl through and, as the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, said, it is no good giving even more access to this type of material if the police do not have the skills and resources to act on it. It would have been a good idea to talk about that alongside this proposal. Although resources have been going to the police, they have not been in this particular area.

More fundamentally, I am less relaxed than some noble Lords who have spoken about whether it is okay to trawl, as that is how it will be seen, through someone’s material. It will be seen as an intrusion into the privacy of the victim, even though I am sure it is not intended in that way. We have got to the stage where a person is now entitled to withdraw consent at the point of the sexual offence. It does not matter about sexual history or what happens after the event. Many of the offences where disclosure has been an issue have been about things and communications which have been shared after the event. I wonder, as a point of principle, why it is relevant to search someone’s communications before or after. Surely it is the event and the consent. We are in danger of moving away from that fundamental principle, which has been fought for an awful lot over the past 20 years, and this seems to be a backwards step.

[Lord Morris of Aberavon (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I know the noble and learned Lord is desperate to get in, but I shall answer the question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, first. I totally take his point about demand and the different ways of communicating and therefore the new demands on the police, the training what they have on to do and the resources that they need to do it.

I have talked about the money given to PCCs and the announcement of the quite significant increase in funding to the police going forward. The noble Lord made an important point about withdrawing consent and how we have become so much more attuned to what consent means, but I take his point that the police need to have the resources in place to deal with this as well as training.