Draft Data Protection (Charges and Information) Regulations 2018

Liam Byrne Excerpts

Monday 26th March 2018 General Committees

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

It is a privilege to serve under your chairmanship for the first time, I think, Mr Bone. I want to develop the points rehearsed by my hon. Friend the Member for North Durham and the hon. Member for Windsor. The Minister needs to rethink the consultation and these regulations for three reasons. First, as the hon. Member for Windsor rightly said, they are based on a budget of about £30 million for the Information Commissioner, which is an increase of about one third. The budget was set before the events of the past couple of weeks, when the implementation of GDPR was in mind. We did not foresee that the Information Commissioner would have to struggle for literally a week to get a search warrant to get into the offices of Cambridge Analytica. The idea that the Information Commissioner can investigate companies such as Facebook with a budget of £30 million is, frankly, fanciful.

We had a debate last week about the need to empower the Information Commissioner. When the Secretary of State intervened in the House a couple of weeks ago, he gave many of us the impression that that would happen under the Data Protection Bill, but the Minister walked back from that commitment in the Bill Committee last week. If we do not equip the Information Commissioner with the powers she needs to do her job and investigate some of the biggest companies on Earth, we need to look again at the budget and resources she has to do that job.

The second issue, as my hon. Friend the Member for North Durham rightly said, is that Government have declared that there will be a series of exemptions to the regulations sometime in the future. The Minister is inviting the Committee to agree the regulations this afternoon, and yet the exemptions will be organised and implemented sometime down the track. I do not think that is the right way round. The Minister should have organised a consultation on the exemptions before the regulations came to the Committee, and the exemptions should have been hard-wired into the regulations before the Committee was asked to agree to them.

The most significant problem that I want to flag up for the Minister is the appalling lack of consultation with local authorities. Something like 40,000 different data controllers were invited to respond to the consultation that led to the regulations, and 2,000 data controllers responded, but some affected parties, including minor stakeholders such as the Local Government Association, were not invited to contribute their views. That is a serious problem, because local authorities are some of the most important data controllers in the country, and they face a 480% increase in their charges.

It is not clear to me that the consultation was well organised. Events have moved on—I have some sympathy with the Minister about the fast-moving nature of her brief. I am afraid that the basics of the consultation should have been done differently, which is why I object to these regulations.