Digital Economy Bill

Peter Bottomley Excerpts

3rd reading: House of Commons & Legislative Grand Committee: House of Commons & Programme motion No. 3: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Monday 28th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Kevin Brennan]

My right hon. Friend is correct. I was about to say that I wanted to praise him and, again, my hon. Friend the Member for Washington and Sunderland West for their work on that matter. We hope that the Government will support this sensible new clause.

I turn to amendment 3—our final amendment, you will be glad to know, Madam Deputy Speaker, in the group. In the aftermath of the care.data scandal, it is vital that patients are able to have trust in the confidential nature of the health service and to feel confident in sharing sensitive information with health care professionals. Part 5 of the Bill—clause 29 in particular—appears to permit an unprecedented sharing of confidential information. We are extremely concerned that if the information-sharing powers cover information held by bodies providing healthcare services, patient confidentiality could be undermined.

Amendment 3 would ensure that identifiable information held by healthcare bodies in connection with their functions would be exempt from the information-sharing powers in clause 29, thereby upholding current protections for confidentiality. We believe that the Bill should be amended to ensure that patient confidentiality is protected by clarifying that the Bill does not give power to public authorities to disclose any identifiable healthcare information. That would bring clause 29 into line with clause 56, which addresses information sharing specifically for research purposes. That was amended by the Government in Committee to prevent any erosion of the status quo for sharing healthcare data for research purposes. We believe, as does the British Medical Association, that similar protections should be extended to cover part 5. I look forward to the Minister accepting that amendment, along with all the other measures in the group.

[Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)]

This may have come up in Committee, and it might come up later on Report: the concern of the National Union of Journalists about journalists not being mentioned on private data being shared. Is that coming up now, or does it come up later?

[Kevin Brennan]

The hon. Gentleman might have missed it, but we have already had Second Reading and Committee stage, and we are now on Report, so that matter is likely to come up in the House of Lords.

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[Helen Goodman]

I am pleased to follow the right hon. Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale). I was a little unkind to him earlier this evening, so I would like to make amends by saying that he spoke a lot of good sense on illegal downloads.

I would like to speak to amendments 25 and 26. I am chair of the all-party group on the National Union of Journalists, and the arrangements for the payment of the secretariat appear under my name in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. The NUJ was extremely helpful in drawing this problem to my attention and drafting the amendments.

Part 5 of the Bill appears to put freedom of expression and journalistic rights under serious threat by criminalising onward unauthorised disclosure of information. Specifically, clauses 49 and 50 completely fail to recognise the role of journalists in providing information that is in the public interest; I think that is the point the hon. Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley) was trying to make.

[Sir Peter Bottomley]

I think that clause 32, which comes earlier, should be mentioned, too, and I hope the Government will respond on them all—not just the two amendments, but all the way through that part.

[Helen Goodman]

The hon. Gentleman is right.

Under the Bill, publications made in the media that are in the public interest are not on the list of exceptional circumstances in which information to combat fraud against the public sector and related personal information can be disclosed. For example, if a whistleblower were to leak the records of a private company to a journalist without authorisation and the journalist ran a story based on this, both parties could receive criminal sentences. This is particularly pertinent to clause 50, which states that a person who discloses personal information not in one of the stipulated excluded situations will be committing an offence.

This is quite technical and complex, so if the Minister cannot respond in this debate today, I would like him to write to me about the definition of the information covered and of the public sector here. Let me give an example to explain why. I was given information that Coutts—which is currently owned by the taxpayer; it is a subsidiarity of one of the banks we bought in 2008—was selling tax avoidance schemes in Switzerland. I spoke about that in the House, but if I had instead given the information to a journalist and it had been printed in a newspaper, it would appear that under these provisions the journalist or newspaper would be criminalised.

This cannot be the Government’s intention. I am sure the Government do not like leaks about Concentrix or about sustainability and transformation plans in the NHS, but I am equally sure the Government are not trying to clamp down on the effectiveness of the media in our country to such an extent that we cannot use these leaks about these sources.

[Helen Goodman]

I am glad that is not the Minister’s intent—I did not think that it was—but the Media Lawyers Association highlighted in its written evidence that it thought there was a problem. So if the Minister wants to avoid his colleagues in another place having to have this debate again in two months’ time, perhaps he could write to me with a full explanation of what he thinks is going on, because I think that there might be a problem with the Bill in this respect.

[Sir Peter Bottomley]

In very simple terms, the question is: where is the public interest defence for a journalist?

[Helen Goodman]

The hon. Gentleman puts it very well.

I point out that we have the Official Secrets Act and the libel laws and lots of protections; we do not need any tighter legal criminalisation on the statute book.

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[Margaret Ferrier (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (SNP)]

I rise to speak on new clause 24, which stands in my name and those of my hon. Friends and other hon. Members.

The charity Electrical Safety First is calling on the Government to legally require online retailers to report to trading standards and/or the police people consistently selling fake electrical products. This is a growing problem, and it is estimated that 64% of fake electrical goods are now being sold online. Much of the current legislation around the sale of counterfeit goods is over 20 years old, and we need to be mindful of the fact that, in this digital age, parts of it simply may not be fit for purpose.

Sales of dodgy electrical goods are rising rather rapidly. Research found that around 2.5 million adults have purchased a counterfeit electrical product in the last 12 months—double the number who reported purchasing a fake in the previous year.

Not all counterfeit electricals may be substandard, but many carry a substantial risk. People may view these fakes as harmless—perhaps in the same way they might consider a counterfeit pair of sunglasses to be—but the fact is that they can prove deadly. These products have the potential to deliver a fatal electric shock.

As well as the safety implications, we need to be mindful of the revenue that sales of these goods generate, which is thought to be worth more than £1.3 billion per year in the UK. A large portion of this—an estimated £900 million—is thought to help to fund organised crime.

Many people who buy fake electrical goods do so without realising it. Unwittingly, they are placing their families, friends and neighbours at risk. Vendors often sell through reputable online marketplaces, so they enjoy an almost implied credibility, further giving customers confidence in their purchases.

I would like to finish by asking the Government to take those points into account so that we can begin addressing this problem and perhaps placing some of the responsibility on the websites that enable this black market trade.

[Sir Peter Bottomley]

I support the Minister’s response to new clause 6, which will be useful.

New clause 8 refers to clause 76 on page 76—one of the 18 times in the Bill where the clause number is the same as the page number. Perhaps that could be a Christmas quiz for the Clerks, if they are paying attention.

The point about this is that neither the BBC nor the Government consulted Back Benchers. It was Parliament that, in 2001, agreed the concession for the over-75s. The cost of £750 million can be compared with the cost of local radio at £115 million, Radio 4 at £90 million, BBC 4 at £49 million, and CBBC and CBeebies at £97 million—a total of about £340 million. We could double that and still not have got to the cost of this so-called concession.

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[Matt Hancock]

I can confirm that any public prosecution has to be in the public interest. The public interest is not covered in this Bill, but that is because the nature of a public prosecution is that it has to be in the public interest. I hope that deals with my hon. Friend’s concern.

[Sir Peter Bottomley]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend. That may be the test of whether the prosecution is brought, but if it is brought because the prosecution is thought to be in the public interest, and the journalists want to say that the public interest defence is why it has been done, then the Government ought to think again. If I may, I ask them to do so.

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

I rise to speak to new clause 23, which would ensure that all services provided by the UK Government respect the right of the UK’s 700,000 Welsh speakers to receive those services in our language. “Digital by default” must translate as “‘digidol yn ddiofyn”—not something to request but something that is clearly available and welcoming to use. Digital language use increasingly touches every area of communications, from social media to digital government. If a language is not on the web, it can be said, in a sense, no longer to exist for 21st-century communications. The Welsh Language Commissioner has voiced criticism of the UK Government for weakening the Welsh language services on their gov.uk website since its 2012 launch, saying:

“Over the past year I have seen agencies of the Westminster government approaching us complaining about the Cabinet Office and gov.uk and saying that it is now hampering their work and they are concerned that the strong bilingual services that they have put in place have been hampered by gov.uk.”

Given the issues arising from legacy IT systems and designing bilingual platforms, I urge the Minister to consider our new clause and commit to ensuring interactive and user-friendly Government digital services for Welsh speakers on the same basis as that for English speakers.