Data Protection Bill [HL]

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 6th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly to support this amendment and particularly what the noble Lord, Lord McNally, has just said. We are asking our children to take on a whole set of responsibilities for which we, let alone they, are not prepared. The social consequences of social media and how to handle them produce enormous stresses on friendship. As for where this amendment is directed, there are also the consequences for children in the way their data are gathered and used, which we do not understand. The House of Lords can now track where each of us was geographically over the last month. It is all on our phones. A complete record is kept unless you happen to have turned it off. When did we give permission for that? If we cannot handle it, how can we expect our children to be able to handle it?

It is also quite clear that the sort of middle-range teenagers—14 and 15 year-olds, boys in particular—are living in a world of extreme pornography, in quality and content, that is quite unprecedented. What effects we can expect that to have on relationships between the genders when they get through to university and life afterwards I do not know. We cannot abrogate our responsibility to make sure that children are looked after properly and that we are not exposing them to amoral companies—I am not aware that any of these companies have a deep moral sense, whatever they may claim. We entrust their upbringing and education to that, but we care very much about their mental health, their sense of society, their sense of relationship to each other and the qualities that they will bring to the world as young people. We ought to be doing something about it in schools. We probably need a bit of thought as to what that should be, but we absolutely should not be doing nothing.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

My Lords, I am very sorry for interrupting the noble Lord, Lord McNally, as what he had to say was very apposite and appropriate. I thought at one stage that he was going to say that he had been around for the passing of the first reform Act as well as everything else he was talking about, but I must have misheard him.

This has been a good debate, which has tended to range rather widely, mainly because it is so important we get this right. I confidently expect the Minister to respond by saying that this is a very good idea but he lacks the power to be able to give any response one way or another because it lies in the hands of one of his noble friends. That of course is the problem here, that we have another linked issue. Whitehall is useless at trying to take a broader issue that arises in one area and apply it in another. Education seems to be one of the worst departments in that respect. I mean that, as it has come up time and again: good ideas about how we need to radicalise our curriculum never get implemented because there seems to be an innate inability in the department to go along with it. It may well be that the changes to the structure of education in recent years have something to do with that. It is good to see in the second line of this amendment that this would apply to “all children” irrespective of the type of school or type of organisational structure that school is in, so that it applies to everyone. We support that.

However, two worries remain that still need to be looked at very hard, and the noble Lord who just spoke was on the point here. Do we have the skills in the schools to teach to the level of understanding that we are talking about? I suspect that we do not. If so, what are we going to do about that? Thirdly, I suspect that our kids are way ahead of us on this. They have already moved across into a knowledge and understanding of this technology that we cannot possibly match. Teaching them to go back to basics, as has been the case in previous restructuring of the curriculum, is not the right way. We need a radical rethink of the overall curriculum, something which is urgent and pressing. It is raised, interestingly enough, in a number of publications that are now appearing around the industrial strategy. If we do not get this right, we will never have a strategy for our industries that will resolve all the issues we have with improving productivity. I hope the Minister will take this away.