Digital Economy Bill

Lord Hunt of Wirral Excerpts

Committee: 3rd sitting Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Monday 6th February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hamwee]

My Lords, I want to ask a question about government Amendments 83A and 83B, which are about water and sewerage. Will these provisions apply only where there is a water meter? I am struggling to understand how they can work if the customer does not have metered water, and whether the information would be relevant—and how it could be used—if that is not the case. I am quite prepared to be told that I have not understood this properly but if I am right, should the provision not spell out that it is confined to that situation? That would make it clearer.

[Lord Hunt of Wirral (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a partner in the global insurance law firm DAC Beachcroft and as chair of the British Insurance Brokers’ Association, along with other interests set out in the register.

In speaking to Amendment 196A, I seek to address a small but important point on the operation of the Employers’ Liability Tracing Office, or ELTO. Colleagues may recall that I also raised this when we debated the Enterprise Bill in 2015. Although it has been grouped with amendments to Clause 30—I am happy to accept the grouping—it seeks to insert a new clause after Clause 65 in Chapter 6 of the Bill, which deals with Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs.

In 2010, the Department for Work and Pensions identified the need for a tracing office, and ELTO was established in the same year. Sadly, former employees continue to contract industrial diseases, including cancer, due to workplace exposure many years earlier. All too often, the employer is no longer in existence by the time the disease is diagnosed. This was considered by our colleagues at the Department for Work and Pensions as a major obstacle to the former employees’ obtaining compensation.

ELTO was established, and the insurers are now required to provide to ELTO details of all employers’ liability policies that have been issued since April 2011. According to the information I have received, ELTO is working well. In the 11 months to the end of November last year, there were more than 178,000 successful searches of the Employers’ Liability Database, but it could be working better.

The piece of the jigsaw that is often missing is the employer’s PAYE reference number. This number is now used to identify an individual employer in the Pay as You Earn system. Each employer is given a unique reference number. If this unique reference number could be applied to the Employers’ Liability Database, it would make searches more accurate, as it would avoid problems of company names’ changing over time. Generally speaking, it would enable the correct employer to be traced.

One major obstacle is that by law ELTO is unable to gain this information under the Commissioners for Revenue and Customs Act 2005, which prevents HMRC from sharing information except in specified circumstances. Alternatives to primary legislation have already been explored with HMRC. Although we often think of employers as large companies, many are sole traders or family partnerships. For them, the reference number could well amount to personal data, which are rightly protected from general disclosure.

The measure, which I now understand is supported by ELTO and HMRC, is proportionate. HMRC has a ready-made database of these unique reference numbers to which ELTO could be given limited access. All ELTO needs is the reference number itself and the name and address of the employer as a cross check. The amendment would permit ELTO and HMRC to set up, at no cost to HMRC, a facility to share this limited information. It will help make the ELTO database fit for the future.

Many noble Lords will know that I have the honour to be an officer of a number of all-party groups, including not only the Occupational Safety and Health All-Party Group but also the All-Party Group on Insurance and Financial Services, so I should also declare those interests because this amendment is strongly supported by my colleagues on those groups.

This amendment would provide great benefit to employees, employers and insurers alike. I hope my noble friend the Minister will feel able to accept it.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Culture, Media and Sport (Lord Ashton of Hyde) (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken. It is refreshing that, after the debate that we have had on all the concerns and worries that noble Lords have on data sharing, we now hear proposals on how data sharing can benefit various groups. This is our ambition. This is why we set the Bill up as we did and also why the devolved Administrations are so supportive. The noble Lords, Lord Collins, Lord Kirkwood, Lord Storey, Lord Whitty and my noble friend Lord Hunt all made valuable suggestions. I will come to some of the reasons that we agree or disagree with them, but fundamentally the principle is exactly why we set the system up.

Amendment 81ZA, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Collins, seeks to require the effective maintenance of the electoral register to be specified as an objective in regulations under the public service delivery power. Electoral registration officers already have extensive powers to seek access to information in public records, providing it is for the purpose of ensuring that electoral registers are as complete and accurate as possible. Under current provisions, they would not be able to seek access to other public records for the purposes of identity verification if an applicant’s details cannot be matched against DWP records or local data sources.

Digital Economy Bill

Lord Hunt of Wirral Excerpts

Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Monday 20th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Keen of Elie]

My Lords, the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee made a number of recommendations on Part 5 of the Bill. The Government developed the information-sharing powers through consultation and partnership over a process that started over three years ago. These measures are about improving the way the Government operate for the public benefit. Of course, data sharing must be done with transparency, safeguards and oversight. It is in that spirit that we have accepted the bulk of the committee’s recommendations. The way in which Part 5 is structured in seven chapters to deal with different data-sharing powers has meant that it has taken nearly 100 amendments to implement the recommendations, so I will spare the House from referring to every one in turn. I believe that my noble friend Lord Ashton has written previously setting out all that detail.

Our amendments place the lists of specified persons able to disclose and use information under the public service delivery, debt and fraud powers on the face of the Bill rather than in regulations. We then also narrow the powers to amend the lists. For public service delivery, specified persons will be permitted to share information only for the purposes of an objective which has been expressly specified as applicable to that person, rather than any specified objective. We have also narrowed the ability to set and amend data-sharing objectives for public service delivery, so that any specified objective must support the delivery of a specified public authority’s functions.

For water and fuel poverty, we have restricted the powers to amend the list of support measures and to add to the list of permitted recipients of information under the clause, as the DPRRC recommended. Finally, we have adopted the committee’s recommendations to remove Henry VIII powers to make consequential amendments to primary legislation, as well as to narrow the powers to review and amend the fraud and debt powers. We have ensured that any amendments can be only to improve the operation of the fraud and debt powers and there will be no way to use these powers to undo the safeguards that the Bill provides.

In addition to the DPRRC’s recommendations, the Government have tabled amendments on the following matters. Amendments 28FE and 28FF remove repetition in Clause 60(5) relating to the criminal offences which protect personal information originating from HMRC, Revenue Scotland and the Welsh Revenue Authority. By removing this repetition, the amendments avoid any confusion which might otherwise be caused.

Amendments 28FG to 28FN correct an unintended consequence of measures that were agreed during Lords Committee stage to prevent disclosures by journalists in the public interest being caught by the anti-disclosure offences in Chapter 5. The unintended effect is that the criminal offence which protects personal information disclosed under Clause 60(1), and which originates from one of the tax authorities, now applies only to disclosures made by the person who first receives the information but not those within the accreditation system who subsequently receive the information—for example, to undertake peer review or via intermediaries. These amendments therefore restore a key safeguard to the research power, which ensures that information is protected in all parts of the process.

Amendments 28FW, 28FX, 37 and 38 provide new data-sharing powers for Scottish Revenue and the Welsh Revenue Authority. Clause 70 provides the power for HMRC to share de-identified data, allowing HMRC to share aggregate and general information more widely, for purposes in the public interest. Following discussions with the Welsh Government and the Scottish Government, as requested by them, we are providing equivalent powers for devolved tax-raising bodies.

Amendment 28FY, tabled by my noble friend Lord Hunt, is supported by the Government. There is a recognised sound public policy argument for supporting the more effective operation of the Employers’ Liability Tracing Office, referred to as ELTO. The discussions at Lords Committee sparked further conversations between HMRC and ELTO officials, resulting in an agreement to take this amendment forward. This Bill has offered a timely opportunity therefore to legislate. The current clause meets the objective of helping ELTO improve its records of employers’ liability insurance policies, making it easier to identify insurers and so enable claimants to pursue compensation. Both parties recognise that there remains some work to do and it is currently unclear as to how effective HMRC data may be in helping to populate missing data. However, an enabling provision would allow more robust testing of the possibilities, with the opportunity to take these forward.

Amendments 40 and 41 enable commencement of measures by area so that the Government can ensure that measures are not commenced for Northern Ireland in the event that the Northern Ireland Assembly has not given legislative consent. Consent from the Northern Ireland Assembly is required on a number of measures, including the extension of public lending right to e-book loans, Part 5 of the Bill on digital government, the Northern Ireland provision in relation to Ofcom and, should the government amendment be agreed, the offence of breaching limits on ticket sales.

In consequence of the potential need to commence the Bill by area, these amendments also provide the power to make necessary transitional provision. The transitional powers will also be used to define small businesses in the statistics chapter of Part 5 until definitions in the Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act 2015 come into force. I beg to move.

[Lord Hunt of Wirral (Con)]

I declare my interest as a partner in the global law firm DAC Beachcroft, and other interests set out in the register, including chairing the British Insurance Brokers’ Association and being president of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Occupational Safety and Health. Taken at face value, Amendment 28FY would appear somewhat technical, but the Employers’ Liability Tracing Office is working well, but it could work better, and this amendment would help to facilitate that.

I am so grateful to the Minister and his colleagues for the support that they have given to this amendment, which could make a substantial difference to the capacity of the office to help to secure compensation, expeditiously and effectively, for those afflicted by industrial illnesses. When someone faces a reduced quality of life and possibly an avoidably and unnecessarily early death because of an industrial illness innocently contracted, the least that we can do is to deliver compensation as quickly as possible in the hope that the individual with the illness can enjoy at least some benefit from it. I believe that in some small way the amendment will serve to make this a more civilised and compassionate country.

[Baroness Hamwee]

My Lords, we have two amendments in this group. The Minister was just a little previous in answering Amendment 25YYD on modification, so we do not need to go back to that. Amendment 33ZYD would remove several organisations from the list of specified persons for the purposes of fraud provisions, and the amendment is here to enable us to ask whether all these require the data-sharing gateway or, conversely, whether there are many other government-related organisations; I am not quite sure what the correct term might be for organisations such as the National Lottery or the British Council, but I shall use the term government-related organisations tonight. Are there not others that might use the power? What were the criteria used to select the ones that are in the schedule?