Data Protection Bill [Lords]

Debate between Liam Byrne and Caroline Lucas

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

[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We have to bring our election law into the 21st century as it is hopelessly out of date.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.

Jobseekers (Back to Work Schemes) Bill

Debate between Liam Byrne and Caroline Lucas

Tuesday 19th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Lucas]

Does the right hon. Gentleman not recognise that many people in this country will be shocked to learn that the official Opposition want to vote for this Bill precisely because they want to impose sanctions on people on workfare? Let me give him the example of a 58-year-old constituent of mine who has been unemployed for seven months. She was told that she had to travel miles to work in a Scope charity shop in Worthing or lose benefits. She could not afford to get to Worthing, so she offered to work in the Scope shop in Brighton, but the jobcentre would not allow it. Should she be sanctioned?

[Mr Byrne]

The hon. Lady raises an extremely important point, and that is why we have sought to ensure that the Bill includes our safeguards, which preserve the right to appeal with good cause, and the 13-month appeal window during which people can lodge objections to the sanctions regime. To answer the hon. Lady directly, I do believe that the DWP should be equipped with the power to issue sanctions. That general foundation has been in the hands of Ministers for more than a century. The new deal programmes and the future jobs fund that Labour put in place had sanctions attached to them—indeed, they were tightened by the Welfare Reform Act 2009—and I do not believe that those powers should be empty ones. However, nor do I believe they should be in the ether—in the hands of Ministers who have no obligation to put in place genuine back-to-work programmes that are better than doing nothing, unlike today’s Work programme.