Criminal Records Notifications Disclosure

Baroness Ludford Excerpts

Wednesday 15th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell]

The paper trail is extremely complex, and I am not in a position to give the kind of blow-by-blow account that the House would like. I sympathise with the question, and I would like to be able to give the noble Lord more detail. I am afraid that these issues are a necessary part of upgrading our technical and data arrangements. This is a complex and ongoing project, and while this mistake is extremely regrettable, at no point has there been any suggestion that those involved have not behaved with best intentions.

[Baroness Ludford (LD)]

My Lords, unfortunately this issue appears to go not only to competence—it paints a rather sorry picture of a Home Office-related database—but to trust. The question of when the police and Ministers knew about this problem, which was asked about previously, harms our reputation. Unfortunately, it comes swiftly on the heels of another revelation that is being pursued in the European Parliament, which is that the UK is being charged with the illegal copying of data from the Schengen Information System on to a national database and then sharing it with private companies. An internal report from the European Commission makes very interesting reading, but I do not know whether the Commission is pursuing infringement proceedings. However, none of that will help with the subject that we will be discussing later today —the question of seeking a data adequacy assessment from the European Commission. We are not exactly scoring 10 out of 10 on either competence or trust in our handling of European data shared under data-sharing arrangements.

[Lord Bethell]

The data arrangements that Britain is committed to are handled with great delicacy by this country. Ministers are thoroughly committed to trying to make them work, and Britain has a very good record on both technical delivery and trust. I go back to the statistic that I shared earlier: 30,000 conviction notices were sent through ECRIS to our European partners, whereas 16,000 were received. That is an indication of what a strong and energetic partner we are in these matters, and I reassure the House that that remains the commitment of the Government.