Data Protection Bill [HL]

Baroness Hamwee Excerpts

Monday 14th May 2018 Lords Chamber

Tabled by

[Baroness Hamwee]

175A: At end insert—
“( ) Following consultation with the Commissioner and the public, the Secretary of State must, within the period of six months beginning with the day on which this paragraph comes into force, produce guidance about how, subject to sub-paragraph (2)(a)(vii) above, the provisions of Article 5 listed in paragraph 1(b) apply in relation to this paragraph.”

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, I do not think I am going to surprise the Minister but I will go through my points on Amendment 175A. The short version is that among the double negatives, paragraph 4 enables the Home Office and others to refuse a subject’s access request in respect of data relating to “effective immigration control”. I will not muse on what “effective” might mean in this context this evening. There are exceptions to the exemption, as the Minister has said, but they do not go to the heart of the problem, which is that if the Home Office uses the exemption, someone challenging a Home Office decision will not be able to check that the Home Office has the correct information about him. For instance, an application may be refused and the correct information established only if the matter goes to appeal.

I discovered during the passage of the Bill that at the start of a case solicitors routinely put in a request to the Home Office to ensure that there is not a crucial error in the information it holds about their client. That must save time and effort—and, indeed, money and anxiety—on both sides. It seems a matter of common sense to be able to do so. I have been puzzled throughout as to why the Government consider this exemption necessary. If it is because there may be an issue of criminality, paragraph 3 provides for this, including “the prevention … of crime”, if the Home Office believes that someone might be about to commit an immigration offence.

I understand from a discussion with the Minister last week, for which I am grateful to her and her officials, that the Government do not want to characterise all applicants to the Home Office for immigration leave as criminals, but I really do not think that that is an answer. As the Minister knows, and the House will know, I would like to see this paragraph out of the Bill altogether or, at a poor second best, not brought into effect until work has been done with practitioners—lawyers and the relevant NGOs—as to its operation, but we all know about the procedural rules and those mean that I have to confine myself to the amendment made by the Government in the Commons.