National Citizen Service Bill [HL]

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 22nd November 2016 Grand Committee

[Lord Cope of Berkeley (Con)]

My Lords, I am unhappy about Clause 9 standing part of the Bill. I should make it clear straightaway that this marketing ploy—I think it was described as such by the Minister, or he may have used a similar phrase—is a brilliant idea as far as the NCS is concerned, but it is a rotten idea as far as HMRC is concerned. That is the basis of my opposition to this clause.

HMRC has for centuries guarded its data on individuals passionately and with great care. That is, after all, statutory. That is why we have to amend the law in order to allow this to happen. However, it is more than that. It believes that it is essential for the collection of tax. I was a Treasury Minister in the Commons, and I remember very clearly that sometimes there were clauses in Finance Bills which were designed to catch particular things that were happening in the tax system where a fiddle was going on or somebody was trying to do something that HMRC did not like. It would never disclose, even to me, the Minister who was going to have argue about it in the Commons, the names of the taxpayers, even if they were great companies, that might be involved in the tax arrangements. That is how carefully it guarded its data, yet they are to be used for this marketing ploy.

I am concerned, not least about the slippery slope argument. If HMRC is pushed into doing this for the NCS, there are all sorts of messages that the Government constantly want to put out to the population and to particular members of the population, such as road safety or health issues such as stopping smoking or having a flu jab. There are all sorts of matters where it is very desirable that the Government should put out those messages, but if they are all allowed to be put out by this mechanism—my goodness. When you get a letter from HMRC you will have to empty it into the waste paper basket just as you do with magazines nowadays with all the sales literature and charity appeals that fall out of some of them. That is why I am very cautious about whether we should allow this clause into the Bill. In particular, I want to put a peg in the slippery slope to try to ensure that it does not happen in other Bills for quite other purposes.

There is one other point about the drafting of the Bill. This is what I think of as the Portia point. HMRC and the NCS will be able to send messages to young people, carefully defined and, as we discovered the other day, defined more narrowly than Clause 1 and the scheme as a whole, or to their parents or carers. If HMRC sends a message of this kind to an 18 year-old, that is illegal and HMRC will be committing a crime. If it sends it to a childless couple, a grandparent or someone else, it will be going beyond what is allowed in this clause. I suggest that some consideration might be given to that by those who draft these things. However, my major point is to try to make sure that if this goes through—and I shall not oppose it, of course—it should not be a precedent for HMRC sending out messages to all sorts of groups whom the Government wish to influence or to sell something to.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, since this is HMRC and it refuses to use email, presumably this is printed material. If it is sending it out to this group of kids, that is a couple of million kids a year and their parents, at £1 a time when you include the postage and the printing. This is not cheap stuff. I read the wording of this clause to allow the National Citizen Service to include anything in here. It says what is in here. It can include advertisements for other charitable services or perhaps for a bank to raise a bit of money for itself. This seems a very widely drafted clause, and I am not at all sure that it achieves the purposes that have been set out for it.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

My Lords, I have an amendment in this group. This is one of my favourite topics. I have raised it in every Bill I have worked on, with no success at all, usually to substitute “must” for “may”. On this occasion, I noticed rather late in the day that there are two “mays” in this clause, and I have to be careful that it is not the first one, because that would play directly into the hands of the noble Lord, Lord Cope, who has made quite clear his reservations about this arrangement, which is going to provide the necessary oxygen to try to fuel the excitement that will be felt right across the country when letters drop into the houses of those who might be eligible to join. He might want to hold his choler a little longer because the Digital Economy Bill, which is coming down the track very shortly, contains swathes of permissions for data to be shared, not only within Whitehall, which is perfectly understandable, but wider, to local authorities and others. The noble Lord ain’t seen nothing yet. It is going to be quite interesting to see how that plays here.

I am sorry to have taken up the Committee’s time. My amendment deals with Clause 9(3) in the context of communicating information. I think it has probably come from the draftsman’s pen because “may” and “must” are drafted as “may” throughout. There is probably a word processor instruction to make sure that no “musts” ever appear. But surely on this occasion we are talking about information that has to be derived by the NCS from its own resources, and it must be that information that goes out. Therefore, it is right on this occasion that it should be “must”.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

46: After Clause 9, insert the following new Clause—
“Duty of care
(1) The NCS Trust has a duty of care to young people who participate in its programmes.(2) The NCS Trust may discharge this duty by—(a) assuring the quality of its programmes by—(i) setting out publicly the standards which its programmes, and those organising them, should meet,(ii) setting out publicly the process which it will follow in assuring these standards,(iii) arranging for the assurance process to take place, and(iv) publishing the results of the assurance process;(b) collecting information on the experience of every young person at the end of each programme, and making reasonable efforts to do so again several months later, and then—(i) publishing a digest of this information at programme and school level, and(ii) making the data available to researchers subject to reasonable safeguards;(c) organising and publishing biennially a longitudinal evaluation of the performance of its programmes and their long-term effects;(d) establishing a system to—(i) facilitate complaints and the raising of concerns,(ii) take effective and appropriate action in respect of each complaint or expression of concern,(iii) record the complaints or concerns and the action taken,and including a summary of this in its annual report;(e) publishing the basis on which it recommends other organisations to its alumni, or to young people who are not yet old enough for its programmes, including—(i) a list of organisations that it recommends, and(ii) the material it makes available on its website and to participants in its programmes, containing information on such organisations.”

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, this amendment is about openness. It sets out all the ways in which the National Citizen Service should be open with us and others involved, in particular parents and carers, as to what is going on, the standards that it expects and how it enforces those standards. It is set in the context of a proposed new clause that says, “If you are open in these ways, then that is enough to satisfy your duty of care to the children concerned”.

The NCS is bound to be on the end of endless lawsuits. You cannot have this number of children in odd situations without things going wrong. The NCS is the obvious organisation with money. Charities never have enough money to make them worth suing; the NCS has pots. Giving the NCS some degree of protection seems worthy to me, but the main purpose of the proposed clause is openness.

The easiest thing for me to do is to ask the Minister to reply, then I will pick up on anything he says that I disagree with. I beg to move.

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for briefly taking us through the amendment, the intention of which relates in part to the concerns raised by the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell. As I have said, the trust’s draft royal charter stipulates that the NCS Trust’s paramount concern is the well-being of young people participating in the programme. To fulfil this obligation, it must ensure a proper duty of care to those young people. The Bill leaves the trust with the operational freedom to determine how best to do this but the Government and Parliament can hold it to account for how it performs.

I am pleased to confirm to my noble friend and the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, that we support a longitudinal study as a means to evaluate the NCS and have done some work in this area, monitoring certain participants year on year to track benefits. We have, however, avoided going into this level of detail in the Bill to allow the trust scope to innovate in the future—evaluation practices and terminology might change. When I responded to the first group of amendments I made the point that we have to allow the trust as much freedom as possible to use its own expertise. We agree, though, that it is essential that it reports on the quality of the programme and Clause 6(2)(c) makes this a requirement. I hope my noble friend will be satisfied with these commitments for the time being and feel able to withdraw the amendment.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 46 withdrawn.