Data Protection Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Knight of Weymouth and Lord Maxton

Monday 30th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I broadly support what these interesting amendments are trying to do. I declare my interest as a member of the board of the Centre for Acceleration of Social Technology. Substantially, what it does is advise normally larger charities on how to best take advantage of digital to solve some of their problems.

Clearly, I support ensuring that small businesses, small charities and parish councils, as mentioned, are advised of the implications of this Act. If she has the opportunity, I ask the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, to explain why she chose staff size as the measure. I accept that hers is a probing amendment and she may think there are reasons not to go with staff size. The cliché is that when Instagram was sold to Facebook for $1 billion it had 13 members of staff. That would not come within the scope of the amendment, but there are plenty of digital businesses that can achieve an awful lot with very few staff. As it stands, my worry is this opens up a huge loophole.

[Lord Maxton (Lab)]

I entirely agree with my noble friend. The point I was going to make is that small companies are often very wealthy. In the global digital world that is the fact: you do not need the same number of employees as in the past. Equally, would the amendment apply to five employees globally, or just in this country?

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

Certainly if the amendment were to have any legs in terms of using the number of employees as a parameter then that would have to be defined. However you chose to define the size of an organisation, you would need to explore how to work that out.