Data Protection and Digital Information Bill

Lord Bishop of Southwell and Nottingham Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 19th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Southwell and Nottingham]

My Lords, on behalf of these Benches, I too welcome the noble Lord, Lord de Clifford. I pay tribute to his maiden speech and thank him for his insightful and valuable contribution to this debate. I also look forward to many future occasions on which he will contribute to the work of this House.

As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans has said, we on these Benches recognise that high-quality data is crucial to creating and sustaining a healthy and efficient society. However, it is vital to get the balance right between ownership, access, control, and legitimate use of that data. Human flourishing should be at the front of regulating how data is used and reused. As we said in our written response to the Government’s 2020 data consultation:

“Fundamentally, the church welcomes any technology that augments human dignity and worth, while staunchly resisting any application of data that undermines that dignity. Questions of efficiency and cost-effectiveness are subsidiary to questions about how the types and uses of data will promote human flourishing in society and best practice in public bodies”.


It seems that the real test of this legislation is how it will truly promote good democracy and the extent to which it will protect the safety and enhance the security of the most vulnerable in our society. I hope the House will permit me a brief seasonal reference in pointing out that it was, in fact, a comprehensive data collection exercise by Quirinius, motivated entirely by greed and an abuse of power, that first resulted in the Holy Family travelling to Bethlehem. It also meant that they would need to flee very quickly indeed when the Christ child’s identity and location came to the attention of an insecure leader with unregulated power who also had exclusive access to the data, albeit in a very ancient form.

We acknowledge that current provision for data regulation is also outdated and in urgent need of reform. We support the Government’s intention to reform the Information Commissioner’s Office while preserving its independent footing, and the introduction of an information commission. But it is interesting to compare the Bill before us today with the concerns we expressed in 2020. First, our goal then was

“to flag some of the more significant risks we foresee in using data without adequate reflection on the pitfalls and harms that hasty and ill-considered data use gives rise to”.

It is sobering, therefore, that the Bill arrives in this House substantially amended in ways the other place has had insufficient time to scrutinise. The Online Safety Act perhaps offers a valuable and recent template for how this House might examine and improve this important Bill.

Secondly, we said we acknowledged the benefits of data but also the importance of gaining and retaining public trust. Therefore, it is worrying that, with some of the measures in the Bill, the Government seem to be reducing the levers and mechanisms that public trust depends upon. The Public Law Project’s assessment is that:

“While the Bill does not outright remove any of the current protections in data protection law, it weakens many of them to the extent that they will struggle to achieve their original purposes”.


We share the concerns of many civil society groups that the Bill will reduce transparency by weakening the scope of subject access requests, although I welcome the concern to mitigate plainly vexatious complaints. In June, the chief executive of the Data Protection Officer Centre said:

“Whilst countries across the globe are implementing ever-more robust data protection legislation, the UK seems intent on going in the opposite direction and lowering standards”.


What reassurance can the Minister give the House that the Bill will retain public trust and will not diverge even from current adequacy agreements?

Thirdly, we emphasised the Nolan principles as an aid to the public use of data. On 6 December 2023, the Public Accounts Committee in the other place published a report that noted that the DWP is piloting the use of machine-learning algorithms to identify potentially fraudulent claims. We are all in favour of proportional and effective measures to counter fraud, but Big Brother Watch argues that it is

“wholly inappropriate for the UK Government to order private banks, building societies and other financial services to conduct mass, algorithmic, suspicionless surveillance and reporting of their account holders on behalf of the state”.

Will the Minister explain how the state demanding data without cause—including, as a number of Members pointed out, data on the bank accounts of recipients of the state pension that it itself says it has no intention of using—complies with the Nolan principles of openness and accountability? Is this not at risk of being an overreach of government into people’s private lives?

His Majesty’s Government made commitments at the recent AI Safety Summit to make the UK a world leader in safe and responsible AI innovation, so would we not expect that the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill would provide oversight of biometric technologies and general purpose artificial intelligence? My colleague the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford regrets that he is unable to participate in the debate today, but he will again lead for us as we scrutinise the Bill more thoroughly, including its gaps in protecting children’s data and in the regulation of data use by AI foundation or frontier models.

Regarding the latter, an important failure to interlock regulation persists. As the BBC reported over the weekend, assurances given in this House during the passage of the Online Safety Act are being threatened. The draft amendment grants access to data only where children have taken their own lives. This is not what the Government promised on the record in either the Commons or the Lords, and we will continue to press for a proper resolution. Surely we cannot simply rely on other holders of important data to disclose information that is important in order to protect children’s well-being.

I will comment briefly on death registration. The ability to move from a paper to an electronic register is commended. However, the UK Commission on Bereavement, chaired by my colleague the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London, has recommended more that could be done to reduce the administrative burden on bereaved people. The Tell Us Once system is designed so that someone reporting a death need do so only once, and the information is then shared with the relevant public services. Currently, bereaved people must still notify private companies of a death separately. Can the Government please review the system to see whether this burden could be lessened? I would be grateful if the Minister could clarify how the extended priority service register announced in the Autumn Statement will work alongside Tell Us Once. In addition, do the Government have any plans to undertake an updated equality impact assessment of Tell Us Once, given that the last one was 12 years ago?

We look forward to working with everyone in this House to carefully understand and, where appropriate, strengthen an important Bill for the future flourishing of the country and the well-being of all.