Data Protection Bill [HL]

Lord Stevenson of Balmacara Excerpts

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

Moved by

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

1: Clause 1, page 1, line 5, at end insert—
“( ) Section (Right to protection of personal data) makes provision for a general right to the protection of personal data.”

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, in moving Amendment 1 in my name I shall speak also to Amendment 4A, which I hope the Government will agree is consequential. We now commence seven days in Committee on the Bill in your Lordships’ House with a simple amendment. It sets out a principle that we think is important enough to ensure that it is at the heart of the Bill. As in all Committee debates, Her Majesty’s loyal Opposition hope to engage the Government on issues of both principle and detail, and thereby improve the Bill by the time it leaves this House. As witness to our willingness to work with the Government, we have been reading the rather florid statements that the Government put out over the weekend and have tabled an amended version of our Amendment 4 in manuscript, which I gather significantly reduces the gap between us and the Government on a number of key points. But we will not resile from ensuring that the principles which underpin this Bill are securely in place.

As we made clear at Second Reading, we broadly support the Bill but we cannot ignore the fact that if the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill receives Royal Assent as it currently stands, it will remove rights which the people of this country currently enjoy, care deeply about, and are essential to UK business going forward. We think that the status quo has worked well for the UK up until now, so if it is not broken, why change it? I hope that the noble Lord has a convincing argument to make on this point when he comes to respond.

Much has already been said in your Lordships’ House about how complicated this Bill is. It has to deal with a fast-growing and crucial part of our economy and the pace of technological change will create services that we cannot even imagine today. Legislating for this is complicated, but getting the principles right is the key here. It gets even more complicated. The Bill deals with the situation that will obtain after the general data protection regulation is implemented across Europe on 25 May 2018. It provides for the period from that date until such time as the UK leaves the EU and it covers the period after that when what is called the “applied GDPR” will become the law of the land. It has been remarked on that all this is happening without Parliament actually scrutinising the basic text. I suggest again that principles are the key.

One of the key principles which underpinned earlier data protection legislation is Article 8 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. It is indeed the basis of much of what is in the GDPR and applies to the whole of the EU, but when we try to find references in the Bill to the right to privacy and to the protection of personal data which Article 8 guarantees, they are not mentioned explicitly. We believe that the Government approach is wrong for three reasons. These principles matter and have been the subject of recent decisions in the courts, not least the one mounted by the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union when he was David Davis MP, along with Tom Watson MP. Secondly, the removal of the right to protection of personal data risks weakening, or being perceived as weakening, UK data protection post Brexit. That may have significant consequences for UK data processing businesses, a point that I want to come back to.

The third reason is a broader point, one that the Government do not seem or perhaps do not want to get: rights and specific law act together to make a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. If we were continuing in our membership of the EU, the fact that the Bill does not explicitly cover our rights to privacy and protection of our personal data might not matter because the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights would continue to be in force and individual data subjects such as Mr Davis and Mr Watson could rely on it if required. But while the EU withdrawal Bill currently in another place contains thousands of provisions that will be converted into our law, only one provision has been singled out for extinction—the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. This omission from the Data Protection Bill really does matter because as well as underpinning personal rights to privacy, the wording of Article 8 will in effect be right across the rest of Europe and underpinning the legal framework permitting the free flow of data across European borders. It is the removal of the references to Article 8 that will provide a significant and totally unnecessary risk when the time comes for the EU to assess whether our regime is essentially equivalent to the rest of the EU, because that will be the test.

It is common ground among all the parties that it is essential that immediately after Brexit, the Government should obtain an adequacy agreement from the Commission so that UK businesses can continue to exchange personal data with EU countries and vice versa. If we are unable to reach such an agreement with the EU, there will be no legal basis for the lawful operation of countless British businesses and there will also be a significant question of whether EU companies will be able to trade with us if we do not enjoy the Article 8 protections that they will have. That, in fact, is double jeopardy. The Government seem to have forgotten that the frictionless transfer of data is critical to the functioning of our economy. Roughly 70% of the UK’s trade and services is reliant on the free flow of personal data. The EU’s data economy is expected to be worth £643 billion by 2020 and millions of UK citizens regularly share their lives online. To operate, UK businesses require clarity on the legal basis for data transfer post Brexit, but so do EU companies.

The rights outlined in our Amendment 4A are at the cutting edge of global data protection law and are essential for our tech industry in the UK. Indeed, the wording of the amendment was suggested to us by techUK, which is the industry voice of the UK tech sector, representing more than 950 companies, which collectively employ more than 800,000 people. That is about half of the tech jobs in the United Kingdom. If compliance with the Charter of Fundamental Rights is required to secure regulatory harmony and thus business confidence, the Government’s commitment to jettison these references in the charter appears rather odd.

Finally, concerns have been raised as to whether the amendment, even as redrafted, cuts across the GDPR. This is not the intention. The amendment does not undermine the role of the GDPR or the derogations to the GDPR set out elsewhere in the Data Protection Bill, which we support.

We will listen very carefully to the debate. I make it clear that we hope the Government will agree that the principles we outline in these amendments are important and will offer to work with us to make sure the Bill is amended on Report to achieve the objectives I have outlined. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

My Lords, I thank all those who have contributed to this debate—at some personal cost, I understand. There are points that we will certainly reflect on as we read Hansard.

I shall start with a slightly unusual point. I want to commiserate with the Minister for the unfortunate loss of his data just before he came into the Chamber this afternoon. His speaking notes and apparently much other data were stolen from him. That just shows the sorts of difficulties that one has with data, privacy and the issues that we have been talking about. I am surprised that he did not mention it, but he did not and I can only assume that things have worked out all right. However, if he wants help in drafting the personal victim statement, we will be very happy to meet him outside the Chamber on a number of occasions if that will be of assistance.

I do not have much luck with my drafting. I seem to recall being in this place only a few months ago and being coruscatingly attacked by a Cross-Bencher who thought that I had got a lower second with an amendment that I put forward to the higher education Bill. Mind you, I had quite a good result on that Bill. It was amended on the first day in Committee and that seemed to concentrate the minds of Ministers rather effectively. Therefore, I do not agree with those who have felt that this is a constitutional absurdity. In this House we have always reserved the right to vote “inappropriately” at any point, and Committee is one of those occasions. I am not saying whether we will do that today; I am just saying that it is not barred and it often has a purpose to serve.

However, the general tenor of the responses has been that we should not rush this. I was particularly pleased that the Minister suggested that we should meet outside the Chamber to discuss this issue, possibly reach agreement on it—those were his words—and perhaps come back on Report. I should remind him that Amendment 4 was tabled three weeks ago and no invitation to such a discussion reached my ears, so I am a bit surprised. The amendment was published and was available, and it could have been discussed. The fact that we are not going to move it today is slightly irrelevant but it raises all the issues that we are now engaging with. Indeed, at the meeting only last week, we did not really get on to the discussion about what we are about—we talked about other matters.

However, I do not want to fall out with the Minister because I enjoy working with him. Six Bills may seem a lifetime to many people but it has been a time enlivened by the ability to talk inside and outside the Chamber and to reach agreement. I hope that that is a genuinely meant proposal and, if it is, I will consider it very carefully.

My noble and learned friend Lord Goldsmith pointed out a really important issue. As I said in my speech—he picked it up and exemplified it—in order to achieve what the Government want to do, we need a combination of the rights that exist and the statutes that deliver the particularities of the issues concerned. I take on board all the points that have been made about drafting and the inability to do so, and I will reflect on those. However, if we have the right objective, which is to ensure that that balance is available to the people of the United Kingdom and that it will support our businesses in the future, surely we have a duty to make sure that it is delivered to a final conclusion and, if necessary, voted on.

In passing, I observe that it is interesting that the Minister had to resort to the recitals to the GDPR to be convincing about the fact that the GDPR has the effect of bringing the rights in the charter into the discussions about data processing. That is amusing because one very striking thing about the regulation, apart from the fact that we do not have it in front of us to discuss it, is that, in the form in which it will appear in law in the United Kingdom at the end of this process, the recitals will not be part of it. Therefore, his reliance on them is ironic to the point of being rather difficult to accept, but he made points of substance, so I think we will move over that.

Despite the rightful criticisms, there is a general feeling across the Committee that we need to do a bit more work on this. I think that we are on to something that is important enough to spend time on, and we are prepared to do that. We do not think that we are in a muddle on this—we think that there is an issue—but I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 1 withdrawn.