Contact Tracing: Personal Privacy

Lord Kilclooney Excerpts

Thursday 11th June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell [V]]

My Lords, the test and trace programme will publish data later today; the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, will do the No. 10 presentation. In that presentation, I hope that noble Lords will see an enormous amount of data suggesting that public trust in the test and trace programme is profound, that it has made an enormous amount of progress and that it will be an important part of our arrangements for Covid. I assure my noble friend that the Government’s approach remains that they put privacy at the heart of all of their arrangements and will continue to do so.

[Lord Kilclooney (CB)]

My Lords, will this tracing application be interconnected with the tracing applications in the other three nations of the United Kingdom? Secondly, since we have a common travel area with the Republic of Ireland, will its tracing application be interconnected with the four nations of the United Kingdom?

[Lord Bethell [V]]

The noble Lord makes an important point about Ireland. We have regular conversations with the Irish Government about the app that they are working on. It is our aspiration that the two will work together. That has not been confirmed, since neither has been launched yet, as I understand it, but it is very much at the top of our priorities.