Contact Tracing: Personal Privacy

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Thursday 11th June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell [V]]

My Lords, I can confirm that the Government have been following the code of conduct, as the noble Lord suggested. I am also hungry to publish the performance data. I can confirm that, so far, there have been 73,365 users of the Isle of Wight app, 53,490 of whom were on the Isle of Wight. The user experience has been largely benign, and we look forward to publishing fuller technical and user details shortly.

[Lord Whitty (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, on timing, was the analysis of the Isle of Wight results, particularly as regards privacy, available to Ministers before we started to roll out the system across England? If so, how did that influence the rollout? On the Isle of Wight, were participants told that management of their data would be contracted out to a private company, now in the national context known to be Serco? If so, what was their reaction?

[Lord Bethell [V]]

My Lords, the greatest insight from the Isle of Wight experiment was that human contact tracing needed to be the first stage of our rollout of the test and trace programme and that, in the sequence of things, the app should come later, when people have got used to the principle of contact tracing. The use of private companies by the Government is commonplace, and we have had no adverse comment on or reaction to that usage.