Health Protection (Coronavirus, Collection of Contact Details etc and Related Requirements) Regulations 2020

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Wednesday 7th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, these regulations are excessive, intrusive, punitive and potentially discriminatory to older and poorer people. They also raise important questions about compatibility with data and privacy laws.

On data protection, collection of contact details is important, but a lot of places gather this personal data without any security. I have also visited pubs and I can say that some keep their log-books open and available for other people to take photographs of them. This would clearly infringe all sorts of privacy matters. Has the Minister issued enough guidance for places of entertainment in order for them to fulfil their obligations under the Data Protection Act?

Regulation 7 states that premises do not need to collect personal details of people who have,

“scanned the QR Code displayed”.

However, no definition of “scanned” is given. Therefore, in practical terms, what is a premises operator supposed to do to check that the QR code has been scanned properly? Should they check the person’s phone or make some other judgment call? These are important legal questions because, if a premises operator needs to check a phone to make sure that the code has been scanned properly, they would need to be sure that they can avoid a conviction and fine under Regulation 17 if the scan was not done properly.

The Minister was ingenious in calling the delay in presenting regulations such as these as “housekeeping”. This is not housekeeping but an erosion of democracy. I am delighted that he said that the regulations would be improved but when, how and how fast? There are now so many coronavirus regulations that I do not understand how people are expected to navigate and ensure that they are not breaking them. The Prime Minister and other Ministers have fallen short in many TV interviews and been unable to answer quite basic questions on what the rules require, or to distinguish between law and guidance, advice and common sense. These were not actually “gotcha” questions but straight- forward questions about what people should be doing in certain places. The Government are imposing extreme restrictions on people. I understand that they are to fight a pandemic that we have not seen for 100 years, but they must have some reasonable basis. What plans do the Government have to simplify the regulations and bring them all into one coherent framework?

I go back to the erosion of our democracy. Why are we consistently being given only a few minutes to question the Minister? I do not see any reason for the House to rise at 5.15 pm today. Why can we not carry on for longer and have a proper debate on these issues? We have so much space in our timetable at the moment. While we have big Bills to consider, there is also a lot of space, and I do not understand why we cannot take some of that space to debate these issues properly. It seems me to me that there is a clear avoidance on the part of the Government to be scrutinised about these issues.