Data Protection Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Walker of Gestingthorpe and Lord Pannick

Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 13th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

Amendment 48 is in my name and the name of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Walker of Gestingthorpe. It concerns the law of trusts, and I should mention, as the noble and learned Lord is unlikely to do so, that for many years he was the leading trusts practitioner at the Bar. During his career on the Bench, including in the Appellate Committee of this House, in the Supreme Court and in the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, he gave many of the leading judgments that define the modern law of trusts.

I declare a much more modest interest as a practising barrister. I am not a specialist in the law of trusts but, as I explained in Committee, I know that the law has long recognised that a trustee is not obliged to disclose to a beneficiary the trustee’s confidential reasons for exercising or not exercising a discretionary power. The law recognises that if the trustee were to have such a duty of disclosure it would impede the trustee’s ability to perform his or her function, the effective exercise of which depends on confidentiality. The public interest is protected because the court has an inherent jurisdiction to supervise and, where appropriate, to intervene in the administration of trusts.

A recent Court of Appeal judgment, Dawson-Damer v Taylor Wessing, has prompted a concern of trust practitioners about the applicability of data protection law in this context. I have received powerful representations on this subject from the Trust Law Committee, which is a group of leading academics and practising lawyers. One of its concerns is that in other jurisdictions, such as Jersey, the data protection legislation contains express statutory restrictions on the right of a data subject to make a subject access request where that would intrude on the principle of confidentiality. Those who practise in this area are very concerned that offshore trusts, and offshore professionals providing trust services, are already actively encouraging the transfer of trusts business away from this jurisdiction because of data protection concerns. The irony in this is that data protection law may be driving trust business towards less transparent offshore jurisdictions.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Walker, and I, accompanied by other trusts lawyers, had the benefit of a very helpful meeting with the Minister—the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen—and members of the Bill team. I am extremely grateful to them for the very constructive discussions we had. I very much hope that the Minister, when he replies to this short debate—I hope it will be short—will be able to confirm three matters.

The first is that the Government understand and are sympathetic to the concerns raised by the Trust Law Committee, which I have just summarised. The second matter, which I hope the Minister can confirm, is that the Government’s view is that article 15(4) of the GDPR, which states that the right of access,

“shall not adversely affect the rights and freedoms of others”,

applies in this context to protect the confidentiality principle. The third matter, to which I hope the Minister will be able to respond, is that if that view is shown to be erroneous in future litigation—I anticipate the Government do not believe this will be the case, but if it were to occur—I hope the Government would consider using the delegated powers conferred by this Bill to enact a specific and express exemption. I recognise, of course, that the Minister will be unable to commit the Government to any future course of action. I hope that the Minister will be able to respond positively on those three matters. They would go a long way to alleviating the concerns of trusts lawyers. I beg to move.

[Lord Walker of Gestingthorpe (CB)]

I have added my name to the amendment proposed by my noble friend Lord Pannick, and I shall say a few words in support of it. I do not want to repeat any of the points my noble friend has made, but I shall say a little bit about the practicalities of the documents that are likely to be the subject of data access requests by a disappointed beneficiary who wants to circumvent by the use of these powers the traditional confidentiality of discussions between trustees, even if put down on paper, which has been established in English law for about 50 years or more.

Discretionary trusts are still very common—surprisingly, in a way, given the increasingly complex inheritance tax provisions that affect them. I am talking about trusts with English law as the proper law and trustees resident in this country, who pay all the income tax, capital gains and inheritance tax that is due from them from time to time. In my experience, trustees of long-term discretionary trusts are often not solicitors or accountants but friends or acquaintances—reliable people trusted by the settlor with important discretions. Solicitors and accountants are, of course, involved, but they get their fees for professional advice. The trustees themselves generally get no remuneration for taking on what are sometimes huge and increasingly worrying responsibilities.

Discretionary trusts commonly confer wide discretions over both the disposition of income and the eventual destination of capital—usually it is a trust over income and powers over capital, but I need not go into those technicalities. Often, there will be a large class of beneficiaries who can be the objects of the exercise of the trustees’ discretion, typically a settlor’s children and remoter issue, very often their spouses or some remoter relatives or friends—named, of course, rather than just left as “friend”—and named employees and retainers. All those beneficiaries are, in a sense, in competition with one another. They do not, of course, seek favours from the trustees, but the fact is that the trustees sometimes have to exercise very difficult decisions on how to spend resources.

It is the duty of the unremunerated trustees to keep themselves fully informed about the beneficiaries. They have to take account of births, deaths, marriages, separations and divorces; of success or failure in education, and in business or professional life; of disability or injury—and sometimes, sadly, of beneficiaries who have become addicted to drink, drugs or gambling. So let us imagine trustees of a discretionary trust who meet once or twice a year to consider how they will distribute income and whether they will distribute capital in the course of that year, or six months. In a sense, all the beneficiaries are in competition, and inevitably the confidential minutes of the trustees’ deliberations will record how the trustees approached those competing demands and how they measured up, as they have to in a sense, the claims of one beneficiary rather than another on the settlor’s bounty. It is a consideration by the trustees collectively of all the competing claims on the settlor’s bounty, yet the data subject, to use the phrase in the Bill, who will in this case typically be a disgruntled and disaffected beneficiary, is entitled to information about the data subject himself or herself alone. That is fundamental to how the provisions work, which is underlined by paragraph 14 in Part 3 of Schedule 2, which relieves the data controller, who in this case will be the solicitor or accountant who keeps the trust records,

“to the extent that doing so would involve disclosing information relating to another individual who can be identified from the information”.

If one looks at the practicalities, the likelihood is that those confidential minutes would have to be so savagely redacted with the censor’s blue pencil as to be barely comprehensible—certainly, not giving any sort of true picture of how the trustees had operated. Redaction would be troublesome and oppressive to the trustees, but even more oppressive—and I come back to the central point made by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick—is the fact that the trustees, who are typically unremunerated and doing their best to do what is sometimes a very difficult job, would be compelled to disclose what was not redacted to the disaffected beneficiary: the data subject. For those reasons, which I have briefly given, and all the reasons given by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, I support the amendment.