Clause 48 - Use of information for, or relating to,
Employment
5:45 pm
Mr Philip Hammond (Runnymede and Weybridge, Conservative)
I am grateful for that guidance, Mr. Conway, because we were broadly debating the meat of schedule 5.
I hear what the Minister says, but I cannot see how he will be able to avoid making information from the Inland Revenue available to the contractor by way of verifying any performance-related payment the Government intend to make to them. Say the deal is that if Fred gets a job the contractor gets £300; if Fred is still in the job after one year it gets another £200; and if Fred is earning more than £20,000 a year it gets a further £200. That would be sensible. However, when the Government say to the contractor, ''Here is your £500 payment for Fred.'' the contractor might ask, ''Why is it £500? Why not £700?'' In that case, the Government must divulge the basis on which they have calculated the incentive payment, which amounts to divulging specific information about an individual that has been gathered from the Inland Revenue.
The problem is not insuperable. Individuals involved in those arrangements have engaged with the process because they want it to help them. Rather than giving a broad power to the Government to exchange information between the Inland Revenue and the Department for Work and Pensions, the Department could enter into an agreement with the individual, whereby he waives his right of confidentiality as a condition of going on to a programme. I would not have a problem with that.
Our consideration of the matter in this place will be less detailed and searching than scrutiny in another place. I suggest to the Minister that concerns will be
expressed there. His Department must give cast-iron assurances that people will not find themselves, in his words, being ''tracked'' as a result of having engaged with his Department or one of its contractors. That would give rise to human rights issues, as well as general concerns about the increasingly insecure nature of Inland Revenue data, which at one time was considered to be absolutely sacrosanct between the Inland Revenue and the individual. I cannot think of another example where Inland Revenue data is routinely divulged on a disaggregated basis. I always thought that the working assumption was that a person's position vis-à-vis the Inland Revenue was a private matter between the two of them. We seem to be embarking on a dangerous departure.