Data (Use and Access) Bill [HL]

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 3rd December 2024 Grand Committee

Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

5: Clause 2, page 3, line 28, at end insert—
“(1A) The Secretary of State may by regulations make provision requiring a data holder to communicate (to the extent that they have the data required to do this) in a specified manner with all or a subset of the customers for whom they hold data.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment is to enable communication with customers to ascertain, for instance, whether regulations have been complied with or, for example in the case of the Student Loans Company, to enable research into the outcomes of courses that they have funded.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I apologise to the Committee for having not expected things to go quite as fast as they did. In moving Amendment 5, I will also speak to Amendments 200 and 202 in this group.

Amendment 5 is very much to do, in my mind, with the Office for Students and the Student Loans Company, but it is about a problem of more generality, in that public bodies that hold a great deal of customer data find that they are unable to use that access and understanding for the greater public good. In the particular instance of the Student Loans Company, it is in active touch with most British young people who have been through university and is in an excellent position to help us understand the quality of the university courses that they have been through and looked back on a few years later so that we can get data and information that will enable universities to improve those courses for future students. That is important feedback that we ought to have in our university system. Otherwise, universities just concentrate on students who are there now; the moment those students leave, the universities are not interested any more, until they are old enough to get donations out of.

We should have a much better and more self-improving system, which could be driven through the Student Loans Company. I have in the past asked the company whether it would feel able to participate in such a thing, and it said no, it would not be permitted by data protection regulations to communicate in this way with the students it looks after. We should give ourselves the power to consider that in this Bill, so that we can look at how we could use that data to make life better for future generations of students.

There are other examples of where the public realm has gathered data and contact information on people to do with a particular set of transactions but feels unable to communicate with them again to do something slightly wider than that, so I suggest to the Government that something along the lines of Amendment 5 would open some very interesting doors to improving the performance of the public realm.

Amendment 200 is on a completely different subject: how we properly define the data we are collecting so that across the public realm a particular dataset means the same thing. The instance I choose to illustrate this is sex. One would have thought that sex means male or female and, in fact, properly construed, there are only two sexes, and I hope the Supreme Court will agree in due course. Gender can be as wide as you like, but sex has two possible values, male or female. If we are collecting data on that in the National Health Service, the police service and other aspects of life to see whether we are treating men and women equally, it is very important that that data item should mean the same thing, but the police now routinely record rapes as being committed by women because the person convicted of rape chooses to identify as a woman because they think they will then get better treatment thereafter. If you are recording gender, it can be what you want, but if you are recording sex, it should be male or female.

It is really important within the National Health Service that we always mean male or female because male and female physiology differs, and if someone is a candidate for a particular treatment, it may well depend on their sex. For instance, in blood transfusions, it is important to know whether the donation came from a man or a woman, because people may react in different ways to the blood.

Having a data dictionary within government that defines particular terms for use in government statistics so that statistics collected across different departments are comparable and mean the same thing, so that you can work with them knowing exactly what they mean, ought to be part of the way we run government. Certainly, whenever I have been involved in collecting data within a largish business, data dictionaries have been common.

Lastly, I turn to a third entirely different subject, which is schools admissions data. There is provision in legislation for schools admissions authorities to publish admissions data. This, when it started, was quite useful. Local authorities would publish booklets and you could pick up a booklet for your local authority and see what the admissions rules were for all the schools in that local authority and what the outcomes of those rules had been in previous years. With a little work, you could understand which schools your child had a chance of getting into. That would then form the basis of the investigations you would do about which school you should be using. Over time, the quality of this data has degraded, mostly because the concept of an admissions authority has moved far beyond local authorities, which is where it used to be. Many individual schools and school groups are now their own admissions authority, and they do not share data with the local authority, which means that there is now—certainly in the local authorities I have looked at recently—no consolidated source of schools admissions information, either on the rules prospective pupils are subject to or on the outcomes in previous years.

That makes it a much longer and harder business to establish which schools your child has a right to go to, and the result is that it is only the socially advantaged who can find out what their options are. Anyone short of time or data literacy finds it difficult to know anything beyond which their nearest school is and to see all the other options that might be available to them.

That is something which we should turn around, and the way to do so is to make all admissions authorities drop their data into a common database. That is not difficult—it might take someone of medium talent about a day to design—and all schools have this data in a form that is easy to drop into a database, because that data is subject to a data dictionary. Terms are defined, and you know what they mean because they have to be interpreted in a consistent way by parents. It is a really easy thing to create.

Once the data is all in one place, it would be much easier for parents to establish which schools they could send their children to. It would be an opportunity for businesses of all sorts to help parents to make that easier. We ought to be putting ourselves in a position where we are making sure that we do not disadvantage people because they are disadvantaged. We should look after people who find it difficult to deal with differently arranged and differently stated sets of admissions criteria. We should not be disadvantaging people like that; we ought to—it is really quite simple—put them in a position where they are on a level footing with everyone else. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to the Minister for her reply and to my noble friends and others for their interventions before that. I am delighted that she considers that Clause 2(3)(a) covers my Amendment 5. If I have any further concerns about that when I have reread her reply in Hansard, I will write to her.

I am sure that we need to do something about data integrity across the piece. I will very much take into account what the Minister has said about the Sullivan review and how sex data is or might be recorded in the future. However, it is a considerable problem that there is no reliable source of it, particularly when it comes to deciding how to treat people medically but also in other circumstances, as my noble friend has said, such as prisons and sports. We have to think through how to have a reliable source of it, which is clearly not passports, while for those with a gender recognition certificate, birth certificates are not a reliable source of information. There are obviously other aspects of life, too, where one wants to know that the data being collected is accurate.

So far as schools’ admissions regulations are concerned, I am afraid the state of the matter is that local authorities are no longer publishing the data that they ought to. The previous Government, who had plenty of time to enforce it, did not and this Government have not yet picked up on that. I will read what the Minister has said and pursue her colleagues in the Department for Education to see if we can get some improvement on the current state of affairs. With thanks to the Minister, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 5 withdrawn.