Clause 152
10:15 am
David Howarth (Cambridge, Liberal Democrat)
We now come to the far more controversial clause about information-sharing orders. We must discuss it in the context of Sir David Omand’s paper for the Institute for Public Policy Research, which, at the least, revealed the breadth, scope and depth of central Government’s ambitions in the matters of data collection, data mining and invasions of the privacy of individuals.
Clause 152, either intentionally or unintentionally, is part of a bigger picture in which the state allows itself more and more powers to collect and process personal data about individuals for purposes that are not revealed to those individuals. In fact, the crucial issue in the debate will be that of purpose. What happens when data are collected by the Government for one purpose, but they want to use the information for another purpose? That is when all the violations of the principle of privacy will occur, and why it is relevant to mention Sir David Omand’s paper.
No one doubts that there are examples when data or information sharing that is technically not allowed under primary legislation would be helpful to the general public. The question facing is us is not whether there are annoying and inconvenient times for the Government, and occasionally for Parliament, when they have to pass secondary or primary legislation to allow something that is clearly advantageous to happen. We do not doubt that sometimes secondary legislation is not well scrutinised, but we are concerned about the extraordinary scope and breadth of the powers that the clause grants to the Government. It is either lazy drafting or the consequence of a habit of mind that the danger of such powers no longer occurs to officials or Ministers as the sort of thing that they should worry about.
We really ought to be worried about the breadth of these powers. They threaten to undermine, for example, the privacy of medical records, the scope of the use of the identity card database and any restrictions on the use of the DNA database.