Data (Use and Access) Bill [HL]

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 10th December 2024 Grand Committee

Finally, all I can say of Amendment 196, from over a decade of work on online safety, is that small is not safe.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I put my name to the amendments from the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, and will briefly support them. I state my interest as a governor of Coram, the children’s charity. One gets a strong sense of déjà vu with this Bill. It takes me back to the Online Safety Bill and the Victims and Prisoners Bill, where we spent an inordinate amount of time trying to persuade the Government that children are children and need to be treated as children, not as adults. That was hard work. They have an absolute right to be protected and to be treated differently.

I ask the Minister to spend some time, particularly when her cold is better, with some of her colleagues whom we worked alongside during the passage of those Bills in trying to persuade the then Government of the importance of children being specifically recognised and having specific safeguards. If she has time to talk to the noble Lords, Lord Ponsonby, Lord Stevenson and Lord Knight, and the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton —when she comes out of hospital, which I hope will be soon—she will have chapter, book and verse about the arguments we used, which I hope we will not have to rehearse yet again in the passage of this Bill. I ask her please to take the time to learn from that.

As the noble Baroness said, what is fundamental is not what is hinted at or implied at the Dispatch Box, but what is actually in the Bill. When it is in the Bill, you cannot wriggle out of it—it is clearly there, stating what it is there for, and it is not open to clever legal interpretation. In a sense, we are trying to future-proof the Bill by, importantly, as she said, focusing on outcomes. If you do so, you are much nearer to future-proofing than if you focus on processes, which by their very nature will be out of date by the time you have managed to understand what they are there to do.

Amendment 135 is important because the current so-called safeguard for the Information Commissioner to look after the interests of children is woefully inadequate. One proposed new section in Clause 90 talks of

“the fact that children may be less aware of the risks and consequences associated with processing of personal data and of their rights in relation to such processing”.

It is not just children; most adults do not have a clue about any of that, so to expect children to have even the remotest idea is just a non-starter. To add insult to injury, that new section begins

“the Commissioner must have regard to such of the following”—

of which the part about children is one—

“as appear to the Commissioner to be relevant in the circumstances”.

That is about as vague and weaselly as it is possible to imagine. It is not adequate in any way, shape or form.

In all conscience, I hope that will be looked at very carefully. The idea that the commissioner might in certain circumstances deem that the status and importance of children is not relevant is staggering. I cannot imagine a circumstance in which that would be the case. Again, what is in the Bill really matters.

On Amendment 94, not exempting the provision of information regarding the processing of children’s data is self-evidently extremely important. On Amendment 82, ring-fencing children’s data from being used by a controller for a different purpose again seems a no-brainer.

Amendment 196, as the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, says, is a probing amendment. It seems eminently sensible when creating Acts of Parliament that in some senses overlap, particularly in the digital and online world, that the left hand should know what the right hand is doing and how two Acts may be having an effect on one another, perhaps not in ways that had been understood or foreseen when the legislation was put forward. We are looking for consistency, clarity, future-proofing and a concentration on outputs, not processes. First and foremost, we are looking for the recognition, which we fought for so hard and finally got, that children are children and need to be recognised and treated as children.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, I think we sometimes forget, because the results are often so spectacular, the hard work that has had to happen over the years to get us to where we are, particularly in relation to the Online Safety Act. It is well exemplified by the previous speaker. He put his finger on the right spot in saying that we all owe considerable respect for the work of the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, and others. I helped a little along the way. It is extraordinary to feel that so much of this could be washed away if the Bill goes forward in its present form. I give notice that I intend to work with my colleagues on this issue because this Bill is in serious need of revision. These amendments are part of that and may need to be amplified in later stages.

I managed to sign only two of the amendments in this group. I am sorry that I did not sign the others, because they are also important. I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, for not spotting them early enough to be able to do so. I will speak to the ones I have signed, Amendments 88 and 135. I hope that the Minister will give us some hope that we will be able to see some movement on this.

The noble Lord, Lord Russell, mentioned the way in which the wording on page 113 seems not only to miss the point but to devalue the possibility of seeing protections for children well placed in the legislation. New Clause 120B(e), which talks of

“the fact that children may be less aware of the risks and consequences associated with processing of personal data and of their rights in relation to such processing”,

almost says it all for me. I do not understand how that could possibly have got through the process by which this came forward, but it seems to speak to a lack of communication between parts of government that I hoped this new Government, with their energy, would have been able to overcome. It speaks to the fact that we need to keep an eye on both sides of the equation: what is happening in the online safety world and how data that is under the control of others, not necessarily those same companies, will be processed in support or otherwise of those who might wish to behave in an improper or illegal way towards children.

At the very least, what is in these amendments needs to be brought into the Bill. In fact, other additions may need to be made. I shall certainly keep my eye on it.