Data Protection Bill [Lords]

Liam Byrne Excerpts

Money resolution: House of Commons & Programme motion: House of Commons
Monday 5th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Peter Heaton-Jones]

The hon. Lady is right that the Press Complaints Commission did fail, which is why it is rightly no longer there and we now have a new framework. While we are talking in general about regulation, I should say that I have some sympathy with the question marks raised over the regulation of my former employer, the BBC. We got that wrong for many years. There was the bizarre situation in which the BBC board—later, the BBC Trust—was acting as both poacher and gamekeeper, marking its own homework. The Government have rightly sought to put that right and we have moved a long way towards doing so.

I do not believe that the answer to the wrongs that still exist in the regulatory regime for newspapers lies in the amendments that have come our way from the other end of the Palace of Westminster. I do not believe that they would do the job that, as my hon. Friend the Member for North Herefordshire rightly said, the people outside this place want us to do: to make sure that they have a fair right of reply when something wrong is done to them by newspapers.

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, who is being characteristically courteous in giving way to so many Members. Can he point to another area of public policy in which as many suspicions have been aroused, but that has been improved by our collectively deciding to just move on and leave things in the dark?

[Peter Heaton-Jones]

No one is suggesting just moving on and leaving things in the dark. That is not at all what the Government intend to do. If we look carefully at the words the Secretary of State used on Thursday, we see that there is no question of our moving on and saying, “There’s nothing to see here.” We are saying that the mechanism suggested in the amendments from the other place is not the right way to proceed. I agree with the position taken by the Secretary of State.

[Liam Byrne]

With the greatest of respect, regulations are forward looking, but the inquiry that we are seeking goes into past malpractice for the simple reason that we would like justice to be done.

[Peter Heaton-Jones]

I do not believe that the inquiry that the other place seeks, through its amendment, to impose on the Bill would do the job that the right hon. Gentleman wants done. The position that the Secretary of State laid out on Thursday is the right way to proceed. Leveson 2 would simply not do the job that many Members on both sides of the House want it to do.

I am going to move on, as I am thinking about Mr Deputy Speaker’s strictures about timing.

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[Mike Wood]

I understand exactly the hon. Gentleman’s point, with which I have a little sympathy. However, when the media are behaving unfairly and something is inaccurate, distorted or misleading, it is of course right that there are proper procedures for redress. I have absolutely no problem with greater access to justice, but, on the measure’s own terms, it would fail in this regard.

Clearly, the hope is that the proposal would somehow pressure the media into signing up to a state-approved regulator, but for those who remain outside such a system, changing the basis for awarding costs would not improve access to justice. It would not prevent our libel and defamation laws from being the preserve of the already rich and powerful. All it would do is deter proper, quality investigative journalism. It would deter community and local reporting, where, shall we say, conflict within communities is not unheard of. If, when a claim is brought, there is an assumption—not quite but almost without regard to the merits of the case or who the claimant is—that the defendant will have the costs awarded against them, that is an enormous disincentive to continue with a story, even when doing so is clearly in the public interest. It must be the case, when there is criminal behaviour and when something is actionable—

[Liam Byrne]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mike Wood]

I am just concluding. When something is criminal, the full weight of the law should fall on those who break it. When something is actionable, we need streamlined procedures that actually work—an array of alternatives, not just the one-trick pony in this proposal. However, when publishers are confident that their story is accurate, fair and proportionate, the only proper response is to publish and be damned.

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[Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

This has been quite a useful debate for rehearsing the arguments and divisions that I suspect we will have when the Bill moves upstairs to Committee. Some of our debate, particularly in the speeches made by Opposition Members, has even been about data protection.

It is probably fair that I start with the note of unity that the shadow Secretary of State, my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich East (Tom Watson), set out at the beginning of his remarks. I think there is a great deal of optimism on both sides of the House about the possibilities of technology in the years to come. The philosophical difference is that we genuinely believe that the new world of trade for the years to come will be built on a world of trust. If we are to have a really robust foundation of trust in the digital economy that will take shape over the course of this century, we will need a strong regime of rights. We need rights that are comprehensive and genuinely enforceable in courts, where necessary, and those rights need to live in a democracy that has safeguards, including safeguards around the way in which elections are fought in the digital age—those elections need to be free and fair—with a press that is clean.

The problem with the Bill, as we see it, is that it is an opportunity missed. The Secretary of State argued that it was forensic; we would argue that it is a little bit more piecemeal. It is not haphazard; it is seeking to do a job by incorporating a substantive bit of legislation from Brussels into British law. However, we are troubled that the privacy provisions are not quite robust enough, and that argument was well made by a number of my right hon. and hon. Friends. In particular, the decision not to include the text of article 8 of the EU charter of fundamental rights to safeguard privacy and ensure that adequacy agreements will be there in years to come was an error. The approach is just too risky, as my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) warned.

These risks of divergence are serious because so much of our exports, in particular to Europe, are services exports. Some 70% to 80% of those services exports may be digitally enabled, so we simply cannot afford any risk whatsoever. We need to put all risk to any future adequacy agreement beyond doubt.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bristol North West (Darren Jones), our man for definitions and a great deal more, made a very effective point about this not being a one-off exercise. This process will endure, so we are trying to make sure that British and European courts interpret privacy law in a way that is continually consistent over the years to come.

We all need to recognise the juggling act that the Prime Minister is trying to perform. We all need to acknowledge with some honesty the creative ambiguity that she sometimes needs to sustain to keep everybody on the train. I think we all recognise the precariousness of her position. We know that her personal position as captain of the ship is not trouble-free, so I think that those on the Treasury Bench will forgive us for not relying on the full weight of a No. 10 press release, as terribly robust as that is, as ensuring that adequacy provisions will be secured through the commitments that she has made to protect privacy. We would much rather rely on the full weight of the law, because that feels like a much more reassuring position.

In the modern economy, there are rights that we need to take into account. Those rights are new and increasingly necessary in the modern age, such as the right not to suffer as a result of decisions made not by humans but by algorithms. My hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner) made the powerful point that the great risk of algorithms that take decisions is that they may hard-code old injustice into new injustice. That idea should trouble us all. The Bill does not include adequate safeguards against that at the moment, so we will need to address that.

We heard the troubling line of argument in the debate that we should carve out newcomers to this country from the rights and safeguards that are enjoyed by everybody else under the Bill. I have to say to the Minister that the measures on immigration are a mistake. We will seek to delete them, and I hope she accepts that initiative. I was the Immigration Minister who introduced the biggest shake-up to our immigration system for 40 years. I created the UK Border Agency, and I introduced the points system. In my two or two and a half years in the Home Office, I came to learn that our immigration system is not some celestial design—it is a human institution. The Home Office and the immigration system take decisions that are bad or wrong and that need to be corrected. If we delete the protections under the Bill for newcomers, we will put justice in jeopardy. We will genuinely risk denying justice to those newcomers who need information to fight their cases effectively.

I lost cases that were brought because people were able to draw on information through subject access requests, and justice was eventually done in those cases. However, mistakes are made, and I do not think the Minister wants a system that is so prone to error. We have to build in checks and balances to the immigration justice system, and she has perfectly adequate safeguards on crime prevention in the Bill. As a former Home Office Minister, I can recognise what is basically a gratuitous land grab by the Home Office. These powers are not needed, and I hope the Minister will ask her Home Office colleagues to look at the provisions again.

For rights to be real, there needs to be a method of enforcing them effectively, which is why the provisions for collective redress are so important. The shadow Secretary of State talked about the work that we have done with people such as Baroness Kidron in the other place on safeguarding rights for children. A third of internet users are children, and we need to ensure that their rights, along with those of everybody else, are actually enforceable. The idea that a child whose rights are violated will take Facebook to court is, frankly, fanciful. We need to allow consumer organisations and others to take what are in effect class actions, because otherwise the implementation of rights risks being weak, undermining not simply justice, but the strength of our regulatory regime.

We will want to propose other, more comprehensive rights. We are not under any illusions about the Government accepting our data Bill of rights in full, but we want to make sure that such rights are on the table because we are at the start of a process. Just as there were something like 17 Factory Acts during the 19th century, there will be many data protection and e-commerce modernisation Acts over the next 80 years. I am afraid that Members will, for better or worse, have to get used to that process. We think that putting in place a strong framework for rights and enforcement now is just a wise precaution for the future.

As we have heard in many contributions, there will be quite a lot of toing and froing about some of the amendments made in the other place. I hope that many in the House will not take the approach of the hon. Member for North Devon (Peter Heaton-Jones). I feared at times that he was anticipating that we could somehow secure justice regarding suspected historical offences by closing the door, switching off the lights and pretending that nothing had ever happened. I do not think that there are many fields of public policy in which that has proved to be a successful foundation for reform. It is important that we delve into offences that took place in the past.

My hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter) made some important points. Politicians on both sides of the House made promises to the victims of phone hacking, and it is an extremely dangerous precedent for a Secretary of State to say, “Yes, I know we made promises about an inquiry but, you know what, we don’t think that inquiry, even though it isn’t finished, really should wind its course to a conclusion.” It is not a satisfactory state of affairs when the Executive can intervene and, in effect, seek to stop inquiries in their tracks, in the teeth of opposition—in this case, from the noble Lord Leveson—setting out why they should actually continue.

I hope that many Members will, like the hon. Member for North Herefordshire (Bill Wiggin), argue for the importance of honouring promises made in the past, and indeed of making sure that we have a press regulation regime that balances the interests of a free and fair press with the need not to defame people wilfully. The Government are making an odd argument by asking us to take them seriously when they want to install a new data protection regime, while at the same time short-circuiting an inquiry into the most egregious violations of data privacy that we have ever seen in the public sphere. I am afraid that that approach does not inspire a terrific amount of confidence, so I hope that the Minister and the Secretary of State will listen again to the pleas of Lord Leveson and reconsider their support for the amendments that were carried with such force in the other place. The Government may make their own proposals, but I suspect that there will continue to be a strong body of support in the other place for those amendments.

[Stephen Timms]

May I take it from what my right hon. Friend says that the official Opposition’s position is that we will support the retention of the amendments agreed in the other place?

[Liam Byrne]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. We will support the retention of those amendments, and we will seek to offer a much more wide-ranging, comprehensive approach, which we think the Government should take. We will offer a much more comprehensive, well-rounded and thought-through system of rights for the digital age. We will offer an effective means of safeguarding those rights through the introduction of new forms of collective redress. We will offer new safeguards that help to protect our democracy and that ensure free and fair elections and press justice.

We will also seek to prompt the Government to confirm precisely when they will modernise the e-commerce directive, because many of the threats to freedom in the digital age will come from the fearsome five data giants of this age, which will need regulating in new ways. I think there is some cross-party consensus about the need for the e-commerce directive to be modernised, so we will table amendments that will encourage the Government to get their skates on. Crucially, however, we will table amendments that put beyond doubt the future of any adequacy agreement with the European Union.

As the economy changes, so must the law. There will be many more data and privacy laws to come in the years ahead. We will encourage the Government to put in statute a framework that is not merely fit for today, but fit for the future.

[The Minister of State, Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (Margot James)]

I thank all Members for their contributions to this excellent and wide-ranging debate and their lordships for the immense amount of work that they have done on the Bill thus far. Members on both sides of the House want a Bill that protects personal data and allows individuals to maintain control over what is their property and what is important to them, and we want these rights to be enforceable. That is a positive start on which we can all agree.

Various Members, including the hon. Member for Bristol North West (Darren Jones), the right hon. Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) and the shadow Minister, stressed the importance of the continuity of adequacy post Brexit. The hon. Member for Bristol North West asked what the Prime Minister meant by saying that she wanted to achieve more than adequacy. It was, I am sure, to ensure that the Information Commissioner can continue her excellent contribution to the evolution of the GDPR through her association with the European data protection board, when that comes into being.

The hon. Member for Argyll and Bute (Brendan O’Hara), the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry), the right hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Sir Edward Davey) and many others mentioned immigration. I want to reassure the House that we are seeking not a blanket exemption, but something that can be applied only when complying with a certain right would be likely to prejudice the maintenance of effective immigration control. Every request to exercise a right under the GDPR would still have to be considered on its individual merits, and the rights of appeal required by the GDPR remain in place.

There was a great deal of debate about the freedom of the press. In the short time that I have, I cannot do justice to the fantastic contributions from my hon. Friends the Members for North Devon (Peter Heaton-Jones) and for South Dorset (Richard Drax) and the hon. Members for Edinburgh West (Christine Jardine) and for Keighley (John Grogan). We heard the real show stopper from my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg), who was listened to with rapt attention as he contrasted the pretence of freedom of speech with the reality of control, which would be the result of the amendments to which we have been asked to agree. The Government have been clear that we will attempt to defeat them in this place.

We have had a very valuable debate. We have touched on various issues—children and social media, artificial intelligence and cyber-resilience—and there are others that we will address subsequently.

[Liam Byrne]

Will the Minister give way?

[Margot James]

I will have plenty of time in Committee to debate with the right hon. Gentleman. I am sure that we all agree that the Bill is important and timely.

Data Protection Bill [Lords]

Liam Byrne Excerpts

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Wednesday 9th May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

There is no recognised press regulator other than IMPRESS. As many journalists have pointed out, the truth is that these new clauses would have made it near impossible to uncover some of the stories of abuse, including the abuse of all those children in Rotherham. Another example is that of Mark Stephens, who represented phone hacking victims. He wrote today that the new clauses would

“return Britain to the legal Dark Ages and make it easier for wealthy people to suppress negative stories.”

The impact on local newspapers, too, risks being catastrophic. I say do not just take my word for it. The editor of the Express & Star, well known to the hon. Member for West Bromwich East (Tom Watson), said that the new clauses could spell the end of newspaper printing in this country on a large scale and are a

“ludicrous and patently unfair…piece of legislation.”

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

Will the Secretary of State confirm to the House that the BBC, Channel 4 and every other broadcaster operates under much more stringent rules, and yet nothing seems to have got in the way of their powers of interrogation and investigation? Does he think that they are operating second-class investigations today?

[Matt Hancock]

We have three separate systems of media regulation in this country: a separate system for broadcasters; an essentially self-regulated system under IPSO for newspapers; and then there is the issue of how we make sure that what happens online is properly regulated as well. I will come on to that last point, because it is a very important part of the debate. The impact of the new clauses on the local press should not be underestimated. Two hundred local newspapers have already closed since 2005, and these new clauses would accelerate that decline. However, there is one national newspaper that is carved out in the small print of the new clauses as it only covers newspapers run for profit. Which newspaper is exempted? It is The Guardian. If those who tabled these new clauses thought that they were making friends with The Guardian, they were wrong. The Guardian has said that

“the Data Protection Bill should not be used as a vehicle for imposing an unfair and partial system on publishers.”

It did not ask for the measures, and it, too, opposes them. Indeed, in a recent consultation, 79% of direct responses favoured full repeal of section 40, compared with just 7% who favoured full commencement.

--- Later in debate ---

[Matt Hancock]

Given that this is a Data Protection Bill, the review will consider data protection issues, but I would expect it to be as broad as necessary, to ensure that all those matters are considered.

We have listened to concerns raised during the passage of the Bill, including in this debate.

[Liam Byrne]

I am grateful to the Secretary of State for giving way just before he moves off the subject of IPSO. He has set out arguments in IPSO’s defence. It is not just MailOnline that is outside the arbitration scheme; that is also true of Newsquest and Archant, so a significant chunk of the press is outside it. Brian Leveson said that the regulator needed to have independent board members, independence of operation, fair remedy for complaints, the ability to carry out investigations, the ability to issue fines, and universal arbitration. None of those conditions is put in place by IPSO, so which of those principles does the Secretary of State think should be retired?

[Matt Hancock]

On the contrary, the scheme introduces new, compulsory, low-cost arbitration to ensure that people can have exactly the recourse to justice mentioned by the right hon. Gentleman. In order to address some of the concerns, we have tabled two new clauses. First, new clause 19 requires the Information Commissioner to publish information on how people can get redress. The point is to ensure that there is a plain English guide to help anyone with a complaint to navigate the system. Secondly, new clause 22 requires the Information Commissioner to create a statutory code of practice, setting out standards on data protection. The point is that, when investigating a breach of data protection law, the commissioner has to decide whether a journalist acted reasonably. When making that judgment, a failure to comply with the statutory code will weigh heavily against the journalist.

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[Matt Hancock]

No, that is not right. The statutory code of practice for journalists must be a consideration in the Information Commissioner’s judgments, and a failure to comply with the statutory code will weigh against the journalist in law. It has precisely the impact that we are trying to bring about.

New clause 18, tabled by the former Leader of the Opposition, the right hon. Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband), requires the Government to, in effect, reopen the Leveson inquiry, but only in relation to data protection. I want to say something specific and technical about the new clause. Even on its own terms, it would not deliver Leveson 2 as envisaged. It focuses on data protection breaches, not the broad question of the future of the press. The new clause, therefore, is not appropriate for those who want to vote for Leveson 2.

The first Leveson inquiry lasted more than a year and heard the evidence of more than 300 people, including journalists, editors and victims. The inquiry was a diligent and thorough examination of the culture, practices and ethics of our press, in response to illegal and improper press intrusion. There were far too many cases of terrible behaviour, and having met some of the victims, I understand the impact that had. The inquiry was followed by three major police investigations, leading to more than 40 criminal convictions. More than £48 million was spent on the police investigations and the inquiry.

[Liam Byrne]

This is probably a good point for the Secretary of State to remind the House about Brian Leveson’s view of the future of the inquiry. Will he set that out for us?

[Matt Hancock]

Sir Brian was very clear in his letter to me. He stated that he wanted the inquiry to continue on a different basis. I think, having considered his view and others, that the best approach is to ensure that we do the work necessary to improve the standards of the press, but we do it based on what is needed now to improve things in the future. I will come back to that.

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[Matt Hancock]

New clause 23 is about ensuring that in the future there is a review of activity from now onwards, and alongside it we will ensure that there is a named person to ensure that the issues in Northern Ireland are looked into properly.

Overall, I want to ensure that the law that applies to the press is applied fairly, and that we have a free press and one that is responsible. I therefore oppose new clauses 18, 20 and 21, which would make that more difficult, not easier, and I urge every Member of the House to do the same.

[Liam Byrne]

I rise to support in particular new clause 18, in the name of my right hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband), and indeed our new clause 20 and the consequential amendments.

The background to this is fairly well rehearsed, but it is worth remembering the level of shock we all felt when the revelations about phone hacking first became public. It is worth remembering the shock we felt when we heard that Milly Dowler’s phone had been hacked. It does not often happen in this House that Members on both sides unite to try to construct a shared way forward through an extremely difficult problem, yet that is exactly what we managed to do with the Leveson inquiry.

That was very difficult, but it was always going to be a game of two halves. There were too many cases coming to court at the time; there was too much evidence still under wraps; and there was too much that had to be left in the dark. As the Father of the House so rightly pointed out, it was never a question of opening a new inquiry; this is about letting the existing inquiry actually finish its work.

When the previous Prime Minister, Mr Cameron, having spoken to victims, made a statement, the point he wanted to impress on Members on both sides of the House was the need for Leveson to finish the job:

“One of the things that the victims have been most concerned about is that part 2 of the investigation should go ahead—because of the concerns about that first police investigation and about improper relationships between journalists and police officers. It is right that it should go ahead, and that is fully our intention.”—[Official Report, 29 November 2012; Vol. 554, c. 458.]

The then Prime Minister was not speaking simply on his own behalf; he was speaking on behalf of Government Members, including members of today’s Government Front Bench such as the Chief Whip, the right hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon (Julian Smith), who wrote not too long ago to one of his constituents:

“The Government has been clear all along that the status quo is not an option and I, personally, am determined to see Lord Justice Leveson’s principles implemented.”

Where has that commitment gone this afternoon?

[Paul Farrelly]

May I add another voice? There is no journalist more respected on these shores than Sir Harold Evans, the former editor of The Sunday Times. He wrote to everybody today in support of the previous Government’s promises:

“Whatever your party, I and many of my associates, look to you to honour that commitment. To renege would be an affront to every citizen who suffered intrusion, but also the many independently-minded journalists of talent and integrity.”

Is it not time today for fair and independently minded MPs to vote as Sir Harry advises?

[Liam Byrne]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. What strengthens his argument is the way in which the Secretary of State has sought to bring forward one argument after another, all of which have been knocked down.

When we were first told that Leveson 2 could not proceed, we were told that there had been a day, sometime in about 2010, when magically, all of a sudden, all the abuse that we had ever heard about before categorically, unequivocally and without doubt ceased. We were all quite surprised about that. We were even more surprised, therefore, when John Ford presented his evidence to the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee on 13 March. It is worth setting out what Mr Ford said, because not everyone luxuriates in membership of that Committee:

“I illegally accessed phone accounts, bank accounts, credit cards, and other personal data of public figures… My targets included politicians of all parties. In most cases, this was done without any legitimate public interest justification.”

Mr Ford goes on to reflect on whether the practice had magically ended, as the Secretary of State asserted, or whether it was ongoing. He was asked directly to reflect on the Secretary of State’s assertion that it was all over—nothing more to see; time to walk on by. Mr Ford writes in his letter:

“I am sorry to inform you that Mr Hancock is totally wrong”.

Who can imagine such a thing? He goes on to say that

“having spent 15 years in the business, it is no surprise…that I still know people in the illegal data theft industry, and specifically,”—

this is the nub of the argument—

“that I know individuals who are still engaged in these activities on behalf of newspapers.”

The idea that magically this bad behaviour suddenly stopped and is not ongoing is argument one that has been knocked down.

[Peter Heaton-Jones (North Devon) (Con)]

As reprehensible as those activities are, the fundamental point is that they are criminal acts. They are against the law. The right hon. Gentleman is wrong to conflate that point with the question of press regulation. Those are criminal acts to be dealt with by the courts.

[Liam Byrne]

Actually, it is not wrong to conflate press regulation with these matters, because the purpose of press regulation, in case the hon. Gentleman has not spotted it, is to try to stop such offences happening again. That is how public policy tends to be made in this country.

[Ian C. Lucas]

Is it not extremely relevant that one of the main aims of Leveson 2 was to investigate the relationship between the police and the press, because the police are the people who look into illegal acts and there has been evidence in the past of corruption involving the exchange of information between the police and the press, some of which has affected how Government Members have been presented? Independent-minded Members of the House should be looking into that, not suppressing it. Is it not right that that is looked into?

[Liam Byrne]

My hon. Friend is precisely right. We heard a couple of different arguments from the Secretary of State this afternoon, but they boil down to this: “Inquiries are expensive and time consuming, and officials have a lot of better work to do, unless you live in Northern Ireland, in which case we will crack on with the job now.”

[Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)]

Are not culture and criminality very closely linked in these matters and the changes proposed by Opposition Members fair and proportionate? I was disappointed to hear the Secretary of State’s very loose sense of history—of what is more recent and what is in the past. The families of Kirsty Maxwell and Julie Pearson, two of my constituents who were both killed abroad, were harassed by the press. In the case of Kirsty Maxwell, a particular tabloid harassed the family to the detriment of other good and decent journalists, because the family were too scared to speak to the press. Any fair-minded and decent journalist will support these changes.

[Liam Byrne]

That point is well put by the hon. Lady. If there is one ambition that we share in this House, it should be not only for a free press, but for a clean press. The idea that there is nothing to see and that we should all walk on by has collapsed.

[Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)]

I am following what the right hon. Gentleman is saying with great interest. I think he is saying that he appreciates that a lot of the activities that he is talking about are illegal, but that they have still been done by journalists and others. Where I am not joining the dots, as he clearly is, is on why Leveson 2, were it to reopen, would make journalists and others more cognisant of those things that are already illegal and change their behaviours.

[Liam Byrne]

For a very simple reason: we have evidence that bad behaviour is still ongoing. When the Secretary of State originally decided to cancel Leveson 2, he said that the bad behaviour was in the past. Actually, the evidence is that it is ongoing. What is more, there was much evidence that could not be considered by Lord Leveson because of the court cases that were ongoing. Crucially, that evidence included allegations of collusion between the press and the police. I would have thought that we should scrutinise that to bits in this House, not just walk on by.

[Simon Hoare]

It is obviously me; I still do not get why the reopening of Leveson—

[Simon Hoare]

Sorry, the reconvening. I do not get why the reconvening of Leveson would make things that are currently illegal any more illegal than they already are. The courts and the prosecution services have the power to bring those cases when illegality takes place. We do not need Leveson 2 to achieve that, surely.

[Liam Byrne]

The point of inquiries is to get to the nub of the truth. There was much that the first half of the Leveson inquiry could not consider because of the courts cases that were ongoing. As a Member of this House, I want to know whether the press regulation system that we are setting up takes account of what we have learned about the sins of the past. I do not think that those sins should be buried and forgotten, and that we should walk on by—unless, of course, people are lucky enough to live in Northern Ireland.

[Ian Paisley]

I know that the right hon. Gentleman thinks that people in Northern Ireland can be treated with the back of his hand with comments like that, but I should make it clear that the Northern Ireland press were exempt from proper scrutiny by Leveson. That is why people feel aggrieved. Many Members whose phones were hacked, like myself, were completely ignored by that process. Now, perhaps, we will have the chance of fairness. Quite frankly, there has been no fairness up until this point.

[Liam Byrne]

I am listening very jealously to the hon. Gentleman. I would like the privileges he has just secured for Northern Ireland for the rest of the country, because the victims who live in England and Wales deserve the same rights.

[Ian Paisley]

I understand that new clause 23 applies to the whole United Kingdom. I live in the United Kingdom.

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[Liam Byrne]

The hon. Gentleman may be assured by the process that he has been offered by the Secretary of State this afternoon, but the Opposition are not. We want Lord Leveson to be given the right to finish the job and do the work that he was commissioned to do by the last Prime Minister.

[Mr Duncan Smith]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for being so generous in giving way. I want to follow up on the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for North Dorset (Simon Hoare). What I do not understand about the Labour new clauses is what he and those in his party who want phase 2 of Leveson, if we want to call it that, think they will learn that they have not learned and could not learn from the court cases and all the evidence that is already in the open. Is there not enough evidence for us to make the necessary changes, without going through the interminable process of opening it up? Is there some specific area of the criminal law he does not understand that Lord Leveson may be able to explain to him?

[Liam Byrne]

What I want to learn is the truth. I want to learn the truth about police-press collusion and I want to know how we improve our press regulation in the future, so that we have not just a free press but a clean press.

Let me make some progress. The Secretary of State offered us a second line of argument that has now collapsed. I am not quite sure of the exact words he used when he came to the House, but most of us walked away thinking that Lord Leveson was pretty content that the whole thing was going to be shuttered. The House can therefore imagine our surprise when Sir Brian Leveson said that he “fundamentally disagreed” with the Government’s decision to end part two of the inquiry. When Lord Leveson said that he wanted the terms to be revised, he meant that he wanted them to be expanded, not cancelled all together. The Secretary of State says that malpractice is in the past and that there is nothing more to see, officials are busy, inquiries are expensive and so we must move on. He intimated that Lord Leveson agreed with him when that was not in fact the case.

A third line of attack from the Secretary of State was that the review looked to the past and ignored the challenges for the press in the future. That was a legitimate challenge and if he studies carefully the words of the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich East (Tom Watson), he will see that there is a new ambition to get into some of the challenges around fake news that were looked at by Brian Leveson. That was not enough to satisfy the Secretary of State, however. In a letter to Conservative Members—I did not receive a copy—he offered some more objections, each one of which we can knock down.

The Secretary of State, in his letter to his colleagues, says that the first half of Leveson was “full and broad” when in fact it was partial and incomplete. He says that newspaper margins are under pressure, as if economic hardship is now some sort of defence against the full glare of justice. He says that the effect of the proposals will be “chilling”, when he knows that our fine broadcasters in this country operate under far more rigorous regulation than newspapers and that does not stop them pursuing the most extraordinarily brilliant investigations. He says that Sir Joe Pilling has “cleared” the IPSO scheme, but Joe Pilling was appointed by IPSO and IPSO itself says it does not comply with Leveson. He says that IPSO now has a low-cost arbitration scheme, but as the hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone) pointed out, MailOnline, Newsquest and Archant are all outside it, so it is not a universal scheme in the way the Secretary of State has tried to present it to the House this afternoon.

The final line of argument is that officials are very busy and inquiries are very expensive, and we should therefore just walk on by. I just do not think that that is good enough.

[Matt Hancock]

rose—

[Liam Byrne]

I am happy to hear from the Secretary of State why he thinks I am wrong.

[Matt Hancock]

The right hon. Gentleman is not making much progress. He is implying that broadcasters are under regulation but there is no chilling effect. The description of a chilling effect, raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South (Chris Philp), is the expected impact of section 40, under which anybody would be able to take a newspaper to court and get costs awarded against the newspaper even if they did not have anything in their case. The broadcasters do not have to deal with anything like that. On the point about things being brought to light, will he confirm that the case of Mr Ford, which he raised and was raised in an argument for Leveson 2, was in fact raised in the original Leveson inquiry and was therefore covered?

[Liam Byrne]

Mr Ford’s activity was, but not Mr Ford’s allegations that the activity is already under way.

Let me come on to the point the Secretary of State made about the future of press regulation. The scheme he voted for—it was elegantly designed, I think, by the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin)—was a good scheme. There have been a couple of important objections to it made by many of our constituents, but more importantly by many journalists in our local media. The first objection is that a royal charter is somehow tantamount to a state authorised, state-operated regulator, which will somehow impede free speech. Royal charters have for centuries been the basis by which we have given stature to universities and learning societies like the Royal Society. None of them confront restrictions on free speech in any way whatever. That argument, frankly, is fanciful.

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[Mrs Main]

On a point of clarification, does the right hon. Gentleman know of any other scenario within the civil courts where the costs have to be paid regardless?

[Liam Byrne]

The point is that this was well debated at the time and the argument presented by those on the Treasury Bench was that there was no point in setting up a new regulator and then doing nothing to create incentives to join that regulator. That was the proposal the Secretary of State voted for the first time around.

[Joanna Cherry]

I was not in the House at the time, so correct me if I am wrong. Am I right in thinking that Brian Leveson recommended that incentivisation to encourage the publishers to sign up to an independent regulator?

[Liam Byrne]

Absolutely. It was a very delicate job. The structure put in place was designed to minimise any dangers to free speech but create incentives for the press to move to a scheme that gave low-cost arbitration and access to justice for victims. That is at the core of this debate.

I want to conclude with two points. The first is, I suppose, a plea to the House. If we have learned one thing from the scandals of the past 10 to 12 years—whether the expenses scandal, Hillsborough or Orgreave—it is that it is never the right thing to look at a scandal and decide that it is too expensive or that we are too busy to get to the bottom of what happened. That is the core of the argument to let Brian Leveson finish his job.

I want to give the last word to the father of Madeleine McCann. When Gerry McCann found out that the Government were proposing to scrap the second half of the Leveson inquiry, he said:

“This Government has abandoned its commitments to the victims of press abuse to satisfy the corporate interests of large newspaper groups… This Government has lost all integrity when it comes to policy affecting the press.”

I hope that we can reflect on those harsh words this afternoon and rescue the integrity that is currently endangered by the Government’s determination to sweep aside the lessons of history.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

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[Brendan O'Hara (Argyll and Bute) (SNP)]

Time is tight, so I will be brief. I rise to speak in support of new clause 18 because the Scottish National party has been clear throughout that all individuals should be able to seek redress when they feel they have been the victim of press malpractice. It benefits each and every one of us to have a media that is both transparent and accountable.

The Scottish National party is committed to ensuring that the practices that led to the Leveson inquiry never happen again. We have been equally clear, however, that if there is to be a second part of the Leveson inquiry, the distinct Scottish legal context must be taken into account and the Scottish Government must be consulted on the scope and scale of any future inquiry.

Both my hon. Friend the Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East (Stuart C. McDonald) and I raised that on Second Reading and again in Committee, and we put on record our dismay at the wholly inappropriate, indeed lazy, amendments made in the other place that sought to impose a blanket, one-size-fits-all, Truro-to-Thurso policy without any cognisance of the devolution settlement or of the fact that matters of press regulation and criminal justice are wholly devolved to the Parliament in Holyrood. I do not think it unreasonable to expect the House of Lords to know that both criminal justice and press regulation, and all the associated issues of the culture, practice and ethics of the press, fall under devolved competence, and that any blanket UK-wide proposal could only negatively impact on devolution.

Scottish National party Members have said repeatedly that, as long as the Scottish Government are consulted and the Scottish legal system is taken into account, we would be happy to support a Leveson inquiry.

[Liam Byrne]

I am following the hon. Gentleman’s argument closely. He is right to say that we need to ensure the sins of the past are not repeated, which is why we need new clause 20. Can he confirm whether his party’s position is to support new clause 20 today or, as I have heard, to abstain on it?

[Brendan O'Hara]

The right hon. Gentleman may push that to the vote, but new clause 20 seeks to impose on Scotland a system of press regulation from Westminster, even though this is wholly devolved. I appreciate the work that he and others in Hacked Off have tried to do to square that circle, but it has not been squared. Therefore, we cannot support a system of press regulation that will be imposed from Westminster on Holyrood. That is why I am so pleased that new clause 18 is presented in such a way that it takes on board all of our concerns. I am extremely grateful for the efforts made by the right hon. Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband) in fashioning the new clause in a way that allows the second part of the Leveson inquiry to take place while recognising the devolution settlement and the distinct position in Scotland. I commend the passion with which he put across his argument this afternoon.

There will be some who will say that part 2 of Leveson is now out of date—indeed, the Secretary of State said as much when he announced his plans to scrap it. People are right to say that much has changed since 2011, which was before Brexit or the fake news agenda dominated the newspapers, but we need to ask ourselves how much has really changed since the height of the phone hacking scandal. The Government are convinced that a step change has taken place, but I question whether it really has. The Secretary of State has pointed out that the world has changed, but these concerns are as relevant now as they were then.

We have seen how social media is now part and parcel of everyday life. Surely the time is right, with this second part of Leveson, to investigate the role of social media companies—Facebook, Twitter and others—in spreading fake news and disinformation. I would like to think that this inquiry would look to build on the outstanding work being done by the hon. Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins) and his Select Committee in pursuing fake news and the spread of disinformation.

On behalf of the Scottish National party, I am delighted to have added my name to new clause 18 because I believe any reasonable person would agree that the terms of reference for this part of the Leveson inquiry have not yet been met.

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[Margot James]

It does not rule out immigration and it does allow the restriction of certain specified rights—not wholesale restrictions—for the purpose of safeguarding

“other important objectives of general public interest”.

The purpose is to provide a derogation for member states wide enough that they can pursue an overall Government policy in the general public interest. I would conclude that immigration is one such example. It has been suggested that the provisions represent a blanket carve-out of all a data subject’s rights. That is certainly not the case. I would like to reassure the right hon. Gentleman that we are being very selective about the rights that could be disapplied. The exemption will be applied only on a case-by-case basis and only where it is necessary and proportionate.

[Liam Byrne]

Has the Minister learnt nothing from the Windrush scandal? Here we have a Department of State that is not fantastic at keeping records. The idea of selectively carving out particular rights of particular people who need this information to fight tribunal cases strikes me as lunacy, given what we have learnt about the dysfunction at the Home Office.

[Margot James]

Perhaps if I continue my remarks, I can reassure the right hon. Gentleman that of course lessons have been learnt, not least by the Home Office itself, as both the former Home Secretary and the current Home Secretary have made abundantly clear to the House.

The exemption in the amendment is to be applied only on a case-by-case basis and only where it is necessary and proportionate. It cannot and will not be used to target any group of people. Nor does the application of the exemption set aside all a data subject’s rights; it sets aside only those expressly listed. A further limitation is that it can be applied only where compliance with the relevant rights would be likely to prejudice the maintenance of effective immigration control.

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[Liam Byrne]

Effective safeguards for crime prevention are already written into the Bill, which gives the Minister the power she is seeking to fulfil the purpose she is setting out for the House. If we selectively discard rights for selected people, we come pretty close to arbitrary decision making, and it is practically impossible to do that consistently and in way make it defendable in a judicial review. These provisions will result in injustice and cases that the Home Office loses, so just dump them now!

[Margot James]

The right hon. Gentleman should know that different structures govern crime and immigration. I reiterate that we are disapplying these rights selectively—the data subjects will hang on to the majority of their rights—but it cannot be right for the Home Office to have to furnish someone who is in contravention of immigration law with information it has been given.

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[Margot James]

I shall have to write to the right hon. Lady once I have communicated with Home Office Ministers. According to my understanding, the Bill says that the exemption applies—

[Liam Byrne]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. We are being invited to pass an important piece of legislation which hands important new powers to Her Majesty’s Home Office, yet there is not a Home Office Minister on the Front Bench to respond to the points that we are making about the details of that legislation. What steps can we take to summon a Home Office Minister this afternoon, so that our questions can be answered?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

I understand the right hon. Gentleman’s point of order, but the fact is that the Minister, who is a very capable Minister, speaks for the Government, who are seamless. The Minister who is currently at the Dispatch Box is in a position to speak for all Ministers on this matter, which is why she has this responsibility and is responding to the questions that are currently being asked of her.

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[Margot James]

I commend the hon. Lady for that observation, because she has a fair point. I will raise her concern with the Information Commissioner. My right hon. Friend the Member for Hemel Hempstead said that some businesses have been advised that they should delete their data, so I can see where the hon. Lady is going on that. It raises the prospect that some organisations might use this as an excuse to delete data that it would be in the data subject’s interests to preserve.

I have not been able to address every amendment in the time available, but I am mindful of the number of colleagues who wish to contribute, and we have less than 60 minutes remaining. I have addressed most of the matters that came up in the Public Bill Committee, and the Government’s position will remain the same on many of them.

In short, we have enhanced the ICO’s enforcement powers, we have changed the way we share data, we have reached out to parish councils, we have narrowed the immigration exemption and we have responded to calls to better protect lawyer-client confidentiality. We have also dealt—effectively, I hope—with the concern expressed by my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes about the sharing of data between the Department of Health and Social Care and the Home Office.

[Liam Byrne]

May I start by welcoming the new powers for the Information Commissioner, which we called for in Committee? Nobody who observed the debacle of the investigation into Cambridge Analytica will have needed persuading that that those powers are necessary—it took the court five or six days to issue the requisite search warrants, and that time might well have been used by Cambridge Analytica to destroy evidence—so I am glad that the Minister has heeded our calls and introduced the proposals this afternoon. We are happy to give them our support.

I will speak to a number of new clauses and amendments in the group, particularly new clause 4, which is our enabling clause for creating a bold and imaginative Bill of data rights for the 21st century. I want to make the case for universal application of those rights, including their application to newcomers, who need rights in order to challenge bad decisions made by Governments, which is why our amendment 15 would strike out the immigration provisions that have so unwisely been put into the Bill. I will also say a few words about new measures that are needed in the Bill to defend the integrity of our democracy in the digital age.

The Minister took the time to make a comprehensive speech, which included an excellent explanation of the Government amendments, so I will be brief. Let me start with the argument for a Bill of data rights. Every so often we have to try to democratise both progress and protections. In this country we are the great writers of rights—we have been doing it since Magna Carta. Over the years, the universal declaration of human rights, the UN convention on the rights of the child, the charter of fundamental rights, the Human Rights Act 1998, the Equality Act 2010 and, indeed, the original Data Protection Act have all been good examples of how good and wise people in this country have enshrined into charters and other legal instruments a set of rights that we can all enjoy, that give us all a set of protections, and that help us to democratise progress.

[Chi Onwurah]

My right hon. Friend makes an excellent point. Does he share my astonishment that the Government are not taking the opportunity to update our rights for the digital age? Does he think that that is because they are too captured by the tech giants, because they are too confused by Brexit to invest in change, or because they are too ideologically constipated regarding the free market that they can do nothing about it?

[Liam Byrne]

My hon. Friend hits the nail on the head. The answer, of course, is that it is for all three of those reasons that we do not have before us an imaginative bill of digital rights, but the times do call for it.

In the early days, when we were writing great charters such as Magna Carta, the threats to ordinary citizens were from bad monarchs. We needed provisions such as Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights and the Glorious Revolution to protect the citizens of this country and their wealth from bad monarchs who would seek to steal things that were not theirs.

What we now confront is not a bad monarch—we have a fantastic monarch—but the risk of bad big tech. The big five companies now have a combined market capitalisation of some $2.5 trillion, and they are up to all sorts of things. They are often protected by the first amendment in the United States, but their business—their bad business—often hurts the data rights of citizens in this country.

That is why we need this new bill of rights. We have to accept that we are on the cusp of radical and rapid changes in legislation and regulation. I often make the point that over the course of the 19th century there was not one Factory Act but 17 Factory Acts. We had to legislate and re-legislate as technology, economics and methods of production changed, and that is the point we are at now. We will have to regulate and re-regulate, and legislate and re-legislate, again and again over the decades to come. Therefore, if we are to give people any certainty about what the new laws will look like, it would be a sensible precaution if we were to write down now the principles that will form the north star that guides us as we seek to keep legislation up to date.

[Mr Jim Cunningham]

I am sure that my right hon. Friend has received correspondence from constituents who are worried about the use of personal data. My constituents have a lot of sympathy with the views of the hon. Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston) about this. Does my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne) agree?

[Liam Byrne]

My hon. Friend is right. We have been on the receiving end of a huge number of data breaches in this country—really serious infringements of basic 21st-century rights—which is why we need a bold declaration of those rights so that the citizens of this country know what they are entitled to. Unless we get this right, we will not be able to build the environment of trust that is the basis of trade in the digital economy. At the moment, trust in the online world is extremely weak—that trust is going down, not up—so we need to put in place measures now, as legislators, to fix this, turn it around and put in place preparations for the future.

The Government’s proposal of a digital charter is a bit like the cones hotline approach to public service reform. The contents of the charter are not really rights but guidelines. There are no good methods of redress or transparency. Frankly, if we try to introduce rights and redress mechanisms in that way, they will basically fail and will not lead to any kind of change. That is why we urge the Government to follow the approach that we are setting out.

I put on record my profound thanks to Baroness Kidron and the 5Rights movement. Her work forms the basis of the bill of rights we are proposing to the House: the right to remove data, as enshrined in the GDPR—that right is very important to children—the right to know; the right to safety and support; the right to informed and conscious use; and the right to digital literacy. Those are the kinds of rights we should now be talking about as the rights of every child and every citizen.

[Margot James]

The right hon. Gentleman makes some good points. I agree with the rights he is talking about, but those rights exist under the GDPR and are intrinsic to the Bill, so I see no need for his amendment.

[Liam Byrne]

There is no right to digital literacy under the Bill, which is why we propose the five rights as the core of new schedule 1 in which, as the Minister knows, we go much further. The provision sets out rights to equality of treatment, security, free expression, access, privacy, ownership and control, the right not to be discriminated against as a result of automated decision making, and rights on participation, protection and removal.

Rights are sometimes scattered through thousands and thousands of pages of legislation, which is where we are on data protection today. That is why from time to time, as a country, we decide to make bold declaratory statements of what principles should guide us. These are methods of simplification and consolidation, and we are pretty good at that in this country. When we press our proposal to enable the creation of such a bill of rights to a Division a little later, we hope that it will be the call that the Government need to begin the process of consultation, thought, argument and debate about the digital rights that we need in this century and what they need to look like. Rights should not be imposed from the top down; they should come from the grassroots up, and the process of conversation and consultation is long overdue. To help the Government, we will accelerate that debate during this year.

The second point I wish to make is about amendment 15, which would ensure that the rights set out in the GDPR would stretch to everyone in this country. It would mean that the Government would not be permitted to knock out selective rights for certain people who just happen to be newcomers to this country. The proposal to withhold data rights from migrants and newcomers is a disgrace and does not deserve to be in the Bill. In Committee, Ministers were unable to tell us why the Bill’s crime prevention provisions could not be stretched to accommodate their ambitions for immigration control. The Minister has not been able to give us a succinct definition of “immigration control” today, and we have not been able to hear about the lessons learned from Windrush. Frankly, the debate has been left poorly informed, and we have had promises that letters will be sent to hon. Members long after tonight’s vote.

[Sir Edward Davey]

I totally agree with the right hon. Gentleman’s point. He says that this is about newcomers and immigrants, and I am sure he will agree that it also applies to British citizens’ ability to get their immigration file. Can he confirm that that is the case?

[Liam Byrne]

I am not sure that that is the case. British citizens have confirmed rights under the GDPR—that is safeguarded under EU legislation—but the risks I am worried about are the same ones as the right hon. Gentleman. I spent two and a half years in the Home Office. I recognised many of the errors that were made by the former Home Secretary in the situation that we inherited back in 2006, so I do not think that lessons have been learnt from Windrush, or that many lessons have been learnt from errors over the past eight to 10 years. The Home Office is a great Department of State, with tremendous strengths. It has fantastic civil servants who do an amazing job, without the resources to do it properly and very often without the level of support they need from their Ministers, but it is a human institution and such institutions make mistakes. To correct those, we have tribunals and courts through which people can test decisions made by officials without the disinfectant of sunlight. Unless we equip those individuals with everything they need to make their case effectively, we risk injustice. After our debates over the past month, we must do everything we can so that we never run that risk again.

[Mr Jim Cunningham]

To pursue those rights, people also need legal aid, and in some circumstances, they are denied legal aid. The state should not have the right to give private information about its citizens to anybody, or even to sell it to organisations.

[Liam Byrne]

Correct. In my first months at the Home Office, I spent a lot of time in immigration tribunals. I used to go to the courts up in Islington to sit, watch and listen so that I could learn the basic mechanisms of justice in this country. The thing that struck me was the inequality of arms that comes to bear in these tribunals. On the one side, there is a Home Office lawyer, who is sometimes there, sometimes not. Home Office lawyers are backed by teams and have well-constructed cases and all the information they need. On the other side of the argument are people without money or access to lawyers, but now the Government propose to deny some of them the information that they need to argue and win their cases. It is a recipe for injustice.

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

I very much agree with the points that the right hon. Gentleman is making. Does he agree that we ought to consider the way in which the crime exemption in the Bill will be invoked in respect of low-level offences under immigration law? Is it really acceptable for data rights to be suspended in relation to normal activities such as driving—just being here—that are currently criminalised under immigration law?

[Liam Byrne]

Those are real risks, which is why amendment 15 would delete such an important chunk of the Bill and therefore improve it.

I know that when I was a Home Office Minister, I took decisions that sometimes were wrong, and those decisions were corrected through the tribunal system. Tribunal cases were often successfully prosecuted by those who had rights that we were seeking to deny because subject access requests had been used to get the information necessary to win the argument. If we switch off that access, injustice will follow, so I urge the Government to think again and I urge Members from all parties to support amendment 15.

The last measure to which I shall speak is new clause 6, which is our proposal for a UK version of the Honest Ads Act that is currently being debated in the United States Congress. I do not want to rehearse the background to the debate for long, because for six months now a hardy group of us has been seeking to raise and unpack the new risks that we confront from countries such as Russia that are aiming at us a new panoply of active measures, including all kinds of bad behaviour online. Right now, we do not have good measures to defend the integrity of our democracy. Indeed, the most recent edition of the national security strategy did not even include the defence of the integrity of democracy among its core strategic aims.

We have to bring our election law into the 21st century as it is hopelessly out of date. We have an Electoral Commission that is unable effectively to investigate donations and money coming from abroad. The Information Commissioner has only this afternoon been given the powers that it needs. Ofcom will not investigate videos on social media and the Advertising Standards Authority does not investigate political advertising. We have a massive lacuna in which there should be good, robust legislation to police elections in the 21st century.

If we look at what is going on throughout the west, we see that we have to wake up to this risk. Giving the Electoral Commission new powers to require information about money that is used to run campaigns that try to influence votes is now a de minimis provision for a modern democracy in the digital age. We hope that the Minister will listen to us and take our ideas on board.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

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[Damian Collins]

I am grateful to the Minister for that further clarification.

Amendments 20 and 21 get to the heart of an issue that has been raised by a number of Members, which is the power of the Information Commissioner to act in data investigations. The Minister, the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne) and others have referenced the Cambridge Analytica data breach scandal, which is a very good example of why these additional powers are needed. We raised that in the Select Committee with the Secretary of State. The Information Commissioner raised it with us and it was raised on the Floor of the House on Second Reading.

The ability to fine companies for being in breach of data rules is important, but what is most significant is that we get hold of the data needed by investigators, so that we understand who is doing what, how they are doing it and how wide-ranging this is. It is crucial that the Information Commissioner has the enforcement powers she needs to complete those investigations.

In the case of Cambridge Analytica, an information notice was issued by the Information Commissioner to that company to comply with requests for data and information. Not only did Cambridge Analytica not comply, but Cambridge Analytica and Facebook knew that. That information notice expired at 5 o’clock on the evening of the day when that deadline was set; it was the beginning of the week. Before the notice had expired and a warrant could even be applied for, Facebook had sent in its own lawyers and data experts to try to recover data that was relevant to the Information Commissioner’s request.

The Information Commissioner found out about that live on “Channel 4 News” and then effectively sent a cease and desist note to Facebook, telling it to withdraw its people. She might very well not have been made aware of what Facebook was doing that evening, and data vital for her investigation could have been taken out of her grasp by parties to the investigation, which would have been completely wrong. Not only did that happen—thankfully, Facebook stood down—but a further five days expired before a warrant could be issued—before the right judge in the right court had the time to grant the warrant to enable her to complete her work. We live in a fast-moving world, and data is the fuel of that fast-moving world, so we cannot have 19th or even 20th-century legal responses. We must give our investigatory authorities the powers they need to be effective, which means seizing data on demand, without notice, as part of an investigation, and having the ability to see how data is used in the workplace or wider environment.

The Government are bringing forward amendments, which I think have the support of the House, that will give us one of the most effective enforcement regimes in the world. They will give us the power to do something we have not been able to do before, which is to go behind the curtain to see what tech companies, even major tech companies, are doing and make sure they comply with our data rules and regulations. Without that or an effective power to inspect, we would largely be in the position of having to take their word for it when they said they were complying with the GDPR. Particularly with companies such as Facebook that run closed systems—they have closed algorithms and their data is not open in any way—there are very good commercial reasons for doing so, but there are also consumer safety reasons. We must have the power to go in and check what they are doing, so the amendments are absolutely vital.

There are further concerns. The shadow Minister, the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill, was right to raise concerns about honesty and transparency in political advertising. Both the Information Commissioner and the Electoral Commission are examining the use of data in politics, as well as looking at who places the ads. It is already a breach of the law in the UK, as it is in other countries, for people outside our jurisdiction to run political advertising during election campaigns in this country.

In the case of Facebook, it is unacceptable that its ad check teams have not spotted such advertising and stopped it happening when someone is breaking the law. If this were about the financial services sector, we would not let a company say, “Well, we thought someone was breaking the law, but we weren’t told to do anything about it, so we didn’t”. We would expect such a company to spot it and to take effective action. We need to see a lot more progress on this, particularly in relation to the placement of micro-targeting ads and dark ads. The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising has called for a moratorium on the micro-targeting of political ads, which may be seen only by the person who receives an ad and the person who places it.

When the chief technology officer of Facebook, Mike Schroepfer, gave evidence to the Select Committee, I asked him whether, if someone set up a Facebook page to run ads during a campaign and micro-targeted individual voters before taking down the page at the end of the campaign and destroying the adverts, Facebook would have any record that that advertising had ever run, he said that he did not know. We have written to him and Mark Zuckerberg saying that we need to know, because unless we know, a bad actor could run ads in huge volumes, investing a huge amount of money in breach of electoral law, and if they did not declare it, there would be no record of that advertising ever having been placed.

[Liam Byrne]

The Chair of the Select Committee is doing a brilliant job with his investigation, but the argument must stretch further than simply political advertising. For example, when Voter Consultancy Ltd ran attack ads against Conservative Members, accusing some of them of being Brexit mutineers, it was running an imprint for a company that was actually filing dormant accounts at Companies House. There are real questions not just about political ads in the narrow traditional sense, but about how to get to the bottom of who is literally writing the cheques.

[Damian Collins]

The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right and that throws up two really important points.

The first point is that the Information Commissioner is also currently investigating this, which links to the right hon. Gentleman’s point about where the money comes from and who the data controllers are in these campaigns. Although Facebook is saying that it will in future change its guidelines so that people running political ads must have their identity and location verified, we know that it is very easy for bad actors to fake those things. It would be pretty easy for anyone in the House to set up a Facebook page or account using a dummy email address they have created that is not linked to a real person, but is a fake account. This is not necessarily as robust as it seems, so we need to know who is running these ads and what their motivation is for doing so.

Secondly, the Information Commissioner is also looking at the holding of political data. It is already an offence for people to harvest and collect data about people’s political opinions or to target them using it without their consent, and it is an offence for organisations that are not registered political parties even to hold such data. If political consultancies are scraping data off social media sites such as Facebook, combining it with other data that helps them to target voters and micro-targeting them with messaging during a political campaign or at any time, there is a question as to whether that is legal now, let alone under the protection of GDPR.

As a country and a society, we have been on a journey over the past few months and we now understand much more readily how much data is collected about us, how that data is used and how vulnerable that data can be to bad actors. Many Facebook users would not have understood that Facebook not only keeps information about what they do on Facebook, but gathers evidence about what non-Facebook users do on the internet and about what Facebook users do on other sites around the internet. It cannot even tell us what proportion of internet sites around the world it gathers such data from. Developers who create games and tools that people use on Facebook harvest data about those users, and it is then largely outside the control of Facebook and there is little it can do to monitor what happens to it. It can end up in the hands of a discredited and disgraced company like Cambridge Analytica.

These are serious issues. The Bill goes a long way towards providing the sort of enforcement powers we need to act against the bad actors, but they will not stop and neither will we. No doubt there will be further challenges in the future that will require a response from this House.