Data Protection Bill [HL]

Lord Fowler Excerpts

Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 13th November 2017 Lords Chamber

Amendment 47A removes a new provision that presents a potential administrative minefield, did not form part of the DPA and is not needed for the purposes of the GDPR. Amendment 48A is a further amendment along the same lines, which widens paragraph 14 of Schedule 1 so that it covers all insurance business and extends the scope to cover criminal convictions. Amendment 50A is, I fear, a rather hurried bit of drafting, but is intended to allow the processing of third-party joint policyholders’ data. Properly drafted, this would allow consent to be given by one policyholder on behalf of another joint policyholder. In many cases, this is simply a pragmatic necessity and, again, I feel the amendment is consistent with not only the Government’s stated aims in the impact assessment but the GDPR. I beg to move.

[The Lord Speaker (Lord Fowler)]

I should notify the Committee that if Amendment 45B is agreed, I cannot call Amendments 46 to 50A by reason of pre-emption.

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, has clearly and knowledgeably introduced the amendment, which I strongly support. He made clear through his case studies the Bill’s potential impact on the insurance industry, and I very much hope that the Minister has taken them to heart. Processing special category data, including health data, is fundamental to calculating levels of risk, as the noble Earl explained, and to underwriting most retail insurance products. Such data is also needed for the administration of insurance policies, particularly claims handling.

The insurance industry has made the convincing case that if the implementation of the Bill does not provide a workable basis for insurers to process that data, it will interrupt the provision to UK consumers of retail insurance products such as health, life and travel insurance, and especially products with health-related consumer benefits, such as enhanced annuities. The noble Earl mentioned a number of impacts, but estimates suggest that, in the motor market alone, if this issue is not resolved, it could impact on about 27 million policies and see premiums rise by about 3% to 5%.

There is a need to process criminal conviction data for the purposes of underwriting insurance in, for instance, the motor insurance market. Insurers need to process data to assess risk and set the prices and terms for mainstream products such as motor, health and travel insurance.

The key issue of concern is that new GDPR standards for consent for special category data, including health, such as the right to withdraw consent without experiencing detriment, are incompatible with the uninterrupted provision of these products. As the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, has clearly stated, there is scope for a UK derogation represented by these amendments, which would be in the public interest, to allow processing of criminal conviction and special category data when it is necessary for arranging, underwriting and administering insurance and reinsurance policies and insurance and reinsurance policy claims. I very much hope that the Minister will take those arguments on board.