Clause 36
Statistics and Registration Service Bill
9:00 am
John Healey (Financial Secretary, HM Treasury; Wentworth, Labour)
We now come to the second, complementary side of arrangements for greater data sharing of administrative information and the confidentiality rather than the disclosure side of the equation. The clause is important because it sets out some of the safeguards for privacy rights that are fundamental to ensuring that people who provide their information can have confidence that the data will be held securely.
The clause specifies that personal information—information identifying individuals or businesses, whether held by the board or passed by the board to others, directly or indirectly—is confidential, with criminal sanctions for anyone found to have unlawfully passed personal information to others or to have revealed personal information.
We discussed in earlier sittings the benefits to be gained from data sharing, and we will return to it in more detail from clause 44 onwards. I shall concentrate on the protections that we need to put in place. Although there is strong public interest in the greater sharing of administrative data, there is an equally important public interest in ensuring that the confidentiality of such data is properly protected. We have attempted to ensure that the Bill strikes an appropriate balance between those two objectives.
As the Government move to a greater era of data sharing—an era, rather, of greater data sharing—to deliver better, more responsive—[Interruption.] There is a little scoff from the hon. Member for Sevenoaks. If one wants better, more responsive and more personalised public services, an element of greater personal data sharing is required and inevitable. What is important in the matter of statistics is the safeguarding and disclosure of those data.