Passenger Name Records: EUC Report

Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts Excerpts

Thursday 17th March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts]

My Lords, I have the honour of being a member of Sub-Committee F, the home affairs sub-committee of the European Union Select Committee of your Lordships' House. We are, as your Lordships have heard, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, who marshals us so efficiently and delicately that most of the time we are not really aware that we are being marshalled at all. He has laid out the case made and the conclusions reached in our report with the skill that I have come to expect. I do not want to repeat all the comments that he made, but there are a couple of issues that I should like to raise. However, I should first say that I firmly support the conclusions that our committee reached in the report, and I shall urge my noble friend on the Front Bench to tell us that the Government intend to opt into the proposal.

I should begin by underlining, as did the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, the issue of principle. It is excellent that we are taking the first steps in creating an established procedure for enhanced scrutiny of opt-in decisions, for, whether we like it or not, there is concern in the country at large about what is often seen as encroachment by European institutions on areas of our national life. I make no judgment on whether that is right or wrong, but enhanced scrutiny, which brings with it greater transparency, gives the opportunity for more searching debate, and so to set the issue in context is an important way of defusing, for better or worse, public concern. Thereafter, the cards of public opinion must fall where they may. I add my thanks to those offered by our chairman to the Government for having made time for us to have this debate today.

Perhaps I may raise a couple of issues about the proposed directive. The first is the information that it is proposed will be collected under the PNR agreement, which is listed in Appendix 2. There are there nine categories of API data and 19 further categories of PNR data. Some of them are duplicates; for example, the name is required under both sets. The noble Lord, Lord Hannay, mentioned some of them and quite rightly picked out those that are most salient and important: the address and contact information, the billing address, the baggage information, and the number and other names of travellers on the PNR. My concern about the list, as it is printed in our report, is that it looks like a shopping list drawn up by a committee, with everyone adding their own bits, with more and more marginal ideas and marginal pieces of data being requested. Why do I worry about that? I worry about it because I think it means that there is a lack of focus. The key data get lost. We are looking for needles in haystacks and the less the amount of background information we have to sift through, the more we shall be able to focus on the intensive and important points that we need to collect about people who are travelling. I hope that my noble friend’s officials will make an effort to try to keep the data to the minimum so as to achieve the maximum effect.

The second point is the extent. The noble Lord, Lord Hannay, has pointed out the advantages of the directive applying to flights within, as well as into, the EU. I share the view of the committee that we should support the Government’s proposal to extend this, but I am less convinced about the arguments for it. I regard this as a nice-to-have, not a must-have, principle. Why do I think like that? I think that as we are going to collect yet more data, which may or may not be analysed properly, we run the danger of failing to see the wood for the trees. On the issue of cost, as the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, said, there are three times as many flights within the EU as there are coming into the EU. There may also be inconvenience for travellers, although I am not sure how the procedure will work. Finally, potential criminals and terrorists are not foolish; they will merely shift their travel patterns to reflect the way that the PNR data are collected. That is not to say that we should not try to impede them—we should—and undoubtedly the Government are right that, if this is extended to internal flights, it will make their work more difficult. However, Europe is sufficiently small and the road and rail transport networks sufficiently good that you can drive from one end of Europe to the other in 36 or 48 hours and, therefore, I am not sure that the capture of airline data will add enormously to what we are trying to achieve. Therefore, I regard it as a nice-to-have principle, not a must-have principle, and the advantages probably do not outweigh the various costs.

On costs, my major concern is the civil liberties aspect. I instinctively dislike Governments collecting information about their citizens for unspecific reasons. I refer to central government, local government or governments of whatever colour. I have a principled dislike of it. When we negotiate the details of this I hope that we shall be looking very carefully at the rules for data collection, retention and disposal. They need to be carefully prescribed and carefully enforced.

In the earlier report that we produced on the EU/US passenger name record, which applied to the US, paragraphs 160 and 161 drew attention to some of the dangers. Paragraph 160 states:

“The principal risk of error in using PNR data seems to us to arise, not from the quality of the data, but from the erroneous interpretation of the data”.

One of the problems is that we have considerable concerns about how that might be interpreted and whether individuals about whom data has been collected are able to be assured about its accuracy. Paragraph 161 states:

“It is important that intending passengers should be aware of who will receive their personal data, and subject to what conditions”.

Those two recommendations of an earlier report need to be reflected when we come to the final directive on this occasion. Nevertheless, I believe that the Government should opt in, despite those tactical reservations.

Last summer I was rather disobliging to my noble friend when we were discussing the European investigations order. I was extremely concerned about it then because I felt there were no agreed standards on evidence gathering and handling, no minimum basic procedural safeguards, no coherent data protection regime and no agreement on important areas of proportionality, extra-territoriality and double jeopardy. I suggested to my noble friend that we might have done better to stay outside until the shape of the final directive became a bit clearer. She told me very firmly then that we were going to opt in because we could better influence events and shape it if we were inside having opted in than from the outside. On this occasion we have a much better structured directive, with a final shape in place—although not the final details as the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, made clear. If she felt that we should have opted in to the much looser investigations order last summer, I cannot see the logic of why we should not opt in to this one now.