Clause 65
Serious Crime Bill [Lords]
2:00 pm
Vernon Coaker (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Home Office; Gedling, Labour)
Good afternoon, Mr. Benton. It is good to see you chairing our Committee again.
I ask the Committee to resist the amendment, which would increase the penalties in clause 65 for the clause 64 offence of making
“certain further disclosures of information”.
The existing maximum penalty of a two-year custodial sentence would be increased to four years.
Clauses 64 and 65 were included in the Bill in recognition of the fact that a specific additional safeguard is needed to protect against improper onward disclosure of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs information. That is to conform with the safeguards attached to HMRC information in other circumstances. Clause 64 allows for the same additional safeguards to be applied by order to public authorities’ information. I hope that it is evident that the penalty in clause 65 applies in a very narrow set of circumstances relating to wrongful onward disclosure of information shared by public authorities through a specified anti-fraud organisation. Currently, that applies only to HMRC information.
The maximum penalty of two years’ imprisonment is consistent with the maximum penalty for all other comparable data-sharing offences—for example, under section 19 of the Commissioners for Revenue and Customs Act 2005 and section 10 of the Official Secrets Act 1989. In addition, the Government have proposed an amendment to the Data Protection Act 1998 to include a maximum custodial penalty of two years for the offence of unlawfully obtaining personal data under section 55 of that Act; the measure is in the recently published Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill. The Government do not accept the case for doubling the penalty in the limited circumstances of clause 64.