Clause 17 - Use of information
Child Trust Funds Bill
10:15 am
Mr George Osborne (Tatton, Conservative)
Fresh from my near victory on the previous set of amendments, we move to clause 17. Clause 15, which we have just debated, is about the power of the Inland Revenue to request information from individuals and providers. Clause 17 sets out the uses to which that information may be put.
Again, the amendments would restrict the Inland Revenue to what I think would be the necessary powers. Of course, Governments always tend to take to themselves wide-ranging powers to collect and use information. Clause 17 is a classic example. It starts by saying that information held by the Revenue
''may be used, or supplied to any person providing services to the Inland Revenue, for the purposes of, or for any purposes connected with, the exercise of''
functions relating to child trust funds. I fully accept those powers. I accept that it is sensible for the Revenue to have the power to pass information around to providers and, indeed, third parties of all sorts, such as the IT contractor, in connection with administering child trust funds.
However, subsection (2) jumped out at me when I was reading the Bill and devising amendments, because it seems to give the Inland Revenue powers to pass any information held for purposes relating to child trust funds to any person providing services or any third party in connection with the exercise of functions other than the administration of child trust funds. In other words, the Revenue—the Minister may correct me—may pass personal information about child trust funds, who holds them, where they live and how much is in the funds to any third party who is not connected with the administration of the funds in any way and does not need that information to do their job in the strict sense of administering child trust funds.
The power is incredibly wide. It gives Government a blank cheque and has enormous scope for abuse. Amendment No. 182 simply proposes to leave out the subsection. I do not believe that that would affect the administration of child trust funds in any way. It is up to the Government to justify why they need the power.
If the Government do not accept amendment No. 182, they might consider amendment No. 183. The explanatory notes to the Bill explain why they need the general power to pass on information about child trust funds. They state:
''This would allow the Inland Revenue to use information about the CTF for statistical purposes in assessing the success of savings policies.''
We all want the Inland Revenue to assess the success of savings policies, and the hon. Member for Yeovil has tabled various amendments that would require assessment of the success of savings policies—particularly the one that we are considering. Amendment No. 183 would merely provide a safeguard; the passing on to third parties of the information that the Inland Revenue will hold on all of us who will hold child trust funds in our children's names would be restricted. It would be possible to pass it on to third parties only for the collection of statistical information relating to child trust funds—that is, only for the activity that the Government have given as the reason why they need the power.
Amendment No. 184 offers another protection to the citizen against the ever-mighty Executive in relation to subsection (4). The explanatory notes state:
''Subsection (4) allows other government departments to provide information to the Inland Revenue or one of its contractors for purposes connected with the CTF. The Inland Revenue will need to use information provided by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) or the Northern Irish equivalent to assess the eligibility for supplementary contribution of children born after 31 August 2002 but before the launch of CTF accounts. This group will include children in households unable to claim child tax credit as this was not introduced until April 2003 and children whose parents are receiving other benefits and will only transfer to child tax credit in the tax year 2004-05.''
We have had debates in Committee about those groups, and, of course, given the fact that the Government have made the strange decision to administer the scheme through the Inland Revenue, it is sensible to obtain information from the Department for Work and Pensions. That was the subject of an early debate in this Committee.
Subsection (4), however, makes the power to take information from other Government Departments open-ended, although it deals with a specific and time-limited problem, concerning people born between 31 August 2002 and the end of the 2004 tax year. Therefore, amendment No. 184, which I tabled, would insert a safeguard into the subsection, by restricting the information that the other Departments could pass to the Inland Revenue to information held before April 2005. That would just be an extra guarantee for the citizen that the information that the Government will inevitably collect about people in relation to child trust funds would be used for a proper purpose—the efficient administration of child trust funds—and no other.
The amendments are in general probing amendments, but there is an important principle behind them. If we had been sitting in a Committee like this 100 or 200 years ago, the power of the Inland Revenue, the tax man and the excise man would have been the sort of thing that people rioted about. It is only fair that every time the Government try to extend the Inland Revenue's power and its ability to intervene in people's lives, collect information on them and pass
it round Whitehall—or even to third party contractors, these days—the Minister of the day should have to justify it.