Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Lord Bishop of Manchester Excerpts

Lords Hansard - Part 2 & Report stage
Wednesday 8th December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I thank the Minister and her officials in the Home Office and the Department of Health and Social Care for meeting me, the noble Lord, Lord Ribeiro, the General Medical Council, the British Medical Association and the National Data Guardian, and for listening carefully and agreeing that a patient’s personal information should not be disclosed under regulations made under Clauses 9, 15 or 16 by a health or social care authority, which currently includes a clinical commissioning group in England and a local health board in Wales, or under regulations made under those clauses. However, I wonder whether the Minister can help me and confirm that Clause 17, where the Secretary of State can instruct the transfer of information, even if a specified authority refused, will definitely not apply to patient data.

I am entirely supportive of the amendments in the group tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester and my noble friend Lord Paddick. While I am grateful that the Government have recognised that there is something particular about a patient’s personal health data, there still remains the issue relating to staff in a specified authority being asked to hand over personal data to the police and other bodies. There are some roles, such as youth workers and children’s home workers, where trust has had to be built up with the people who come to them. Any data relating to those at-risk people, whether potentially violent or potential victims, should not do anything to harm that relationship. As the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, has said, anonymised data can be used.

As we know from doctors’ and nurses’ ethical arrangements, there are exceptional times when it is important for such information to be passed to the authorities. I believe that we can rely on the workers in other sectors to see that responsibility. Amendment 24 specifically sets out the ethical and legal rules that should apply.

Finally, I believe that the Secretary of State should not have these powers, however rarely they might be used, so I also support my noble friend Lord Paddick’s Amendment 35.

[The Lord Bishop of Manchester]

My Lords, I rise to support the amendments in my name and those of the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, and the noble Lord, Lord Paddick. I draw your Lordships’ attention to my interests in policing ethics and my work with the National Police Chiefs’ Council, as set out in the register. I trust that those interests assure your Lordships that I am a strong supporter of effective policing, not its adversary.

As an occasional statistician, I am also well aware of the power and utility of data. Good data, including on the risks of serious violence, can provide the evidence that allows the limited resources of our police forces to be directed to the particular challenges faced in different contexts and localities. Perhaps it is because I trained not as a lawyer but as a mathematician that I hold firmly to the maxim that, before one can begin to find the right solution, one has to have clearly defined the problem. I am not sure that these clauses, as presently drafted, fully pass that test.

If the problem is that there are occasions when the sharing of personal data will be necessary in order to detect or prevent serious violence, such powers already exist. Indeed, they go further than simply applying to certain public bodies. Like all of my right reverend and most reverend friends on these Benches, I am a data controller—a fancy title—handling often very sensitive personal information regarding clergy, church officers and children who are in the care of churches. I know my general duties regarding when I ought to disclose such data to police or others. When I need specific advice, I have access to my legal secretary, my diocesan safeguarding adviser and others. It is difficult to see what a new duty on some public bodies to share identifiable personal information will add to this.

Alternatively, if the problem is the need to collect and process data sets that allow the setting of more general policing priorities and interventions, it is difficult to see why that cannot be done in ways that remove all identifiable personal details and hence are entirely compliant with the GDPR and other data protection law. I struggle to see why there is a need to create an opt-out for the anonymised data that can drive better policing.

The amendments that I and others have put our names to would, I believe, strengthen the Bill, making it clear that it is seeking not to set aside data protection law but to allow anonymised data to be shared where this will produce better policing outcomes. They would reassure children, vulnerable people, victims of crime and others that their personal data will not be shared, beyond that which is already shared under existing legislation. They would allow youth workers, whether they are employed by the Church, local authorities or whomever, to continue to be trusted by those who come to them.

As has been alluded to, the noble Baroness, Lady Williams—who, were it not for the particular protocols of this place, I would be proud to refer to as my noble friend—has already accepted the principle that health bodies should not be compelled to share patient data. It is not a huge leap to extend that to other authorities.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, I have Amendments 24 and 32 to 35 in this group, and I have signed Amendments 11, 22, 25 and 30, in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester.

I start with the government amendments that effectively protect patient confidentiality on the basis that, if patients do not trust their doctors to keep sensitive personal information confidential, they will not seek healthcare when they need to. There are already protocols to deal with situations where there is a serious risk of harm to the patient or others which allow the sharing of information. In moving these amendments, the Government have accepted the principle that professionals need to keep sensitive personal information confidential in order to maintain the trust of those whom they are working with. I will return to this shortly.

Amendments 11, 22 and 30 do the bare minimum in maintaining the protection provided by data protection legislation. This is putting down a marker that specified authorities should not simply allow the duty to share information under the serious violence duty to override everything else. We will support these amendments if the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, divides the House.

But we do not believe these amendments go far enough, in that they do not address the Secretary of State’s enforcement powers. Despite government protestations to the contrary, the almost unanimous view among NGOs is that the new serious violence duty is actually a duty on specified authorities to give information to the police, so that the police can try to arrest our way out of the problem of serious violence—an enforcement-led approach, which even the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police says is not the solution. What we really need is a truly multiagency public health approach, which has worked so well in Scotland, where enforcement is only one part of the solution .