Home Office: Data Breaches

Lord West of Spithead Excerpts

Tuesday 5th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

The noble Baroness raises a point that the Home Office itself acknowledges. Documents have on occasion been lost—a minute proportion of the total number of documents that it deals with, I have to say, but lost nevertheless. As I say, moving to a digitised system should help in huge part to guard against that. The reporting of data breaches in future should also help not only to highlight what has happened but, hopefully, to prevent stuff from happening in future.

[Lord West of Spithead (Lab)]

My Lords, when I was at the Home Office we were moving towards digitising all this documentation. From what the Minister says, we do not seem to have achieved that. What level of digitisation of documents and the like have we got to in the Home Office? It was very low when we started in about 2009. What level have we got to now?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

As an example, paper documents that previously had to be submitted by hand can now be scanned and sent without the need for documents to actually change hands between the individual and the office to which they are applying for whatever purpose.