Clause 14
Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill [Lords]
4:00 pm
Damian Green (Shadow Minister, Home Affairs; Ashford, Conservative)
Welcome to the Chair, Miss Begg. I would like to pick up on the point made by the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington. It is ironic that he used the example of parking fines. Perhaps he, like me, has spent part of the past couple of hours looking at the ID card statutory instruments that we will debate next week in which the Department for Transport is specifically mentioned as one of the Departments that, if the provisions are passed, will be able to use information from ID cards for its own purposes. The Minister is right that the hon. Gentleman’s point may not be directly relevant to amendment 9, but the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington is spot on that the Government plan to collect private information about people and then use it to perhaps enforce things such as parking fines. I suspect that the Minister and I will conduct that debate next week.
The Minister has sought to reassure me about clause 14. I should point out, again in relation to the intervention by the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington, that amendment 9 specifically mentions
“officers designated under this Part to use any personal data of UK citizens”,
so the clause does not cover customs information only. Just before lunch, the Minister said that he felt my argument had a weakness because it suggested that the police could not be engaged by immigration officers. If we had not been interrupted, I would have replied that he was making an ideal argument for a unified border police force. In the case he specifically advanced of an anti-terrorist operation the police would be involved and therefore the powers would be police powers. At that point, his argument falls, inasmuch as it has validity; it is precisely an argument for a border police and for those police powers and all the police training to be available to a wider set of officers than is currently the case.
As we have said several times over the course of day, this is a debate for another time later in Committee. I am not entirely convinced and reassured by the Minister’s arguments. The powers given for using and disclosing information in this clause are potentially dangerous. Not unfairly, he pointed to other clauses where there is a prohibition on disclosure of personal customs information—for example, the next clause that we will discuss. Nevertheless, many of those are hedged around with restrictions, for instance in clause 17, that the information cannot be disclosed
“without the consent of a relevant official (which may be general or specific)”.
The intent that there can be a general permission for the disclosure and use of private information infuses a lot of the Bill. That is dangerous. We will return to similar issues, especially consent, when we discuss the next group of amendments. Although I will not withdraw the arguments that lie behind it, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.