Schedule 18
Coroners and Justice Bill
3:15 pm
David Howarth (Cambridge, Liberal Democrat)
This is a short point, although in view of the Minister’s comments about assessment notices this morning, it is worth making it more forcefully.
Amendment 108 seeks to amend a provision of schedule 18 that, in effect, provides that when the Information Commissioner has issued an assessment notice and discovers important information about whether the data controller is complying with the law, or even that there have been or may have been violations of the law, he is nevertheless not allowed to use that information when, for example, levying fines against the data controller.
That seems rather odd. It means that the enforcement process using the assessment notice will always lead to a dead end. I understood the Government’s case to be that it would encourage data controllers to comply with assessment notices; they would know that they would not be liable to fines if they volunteered information, even if that information showed them to be at fault and in violation of the law. That argument did not strike me as being particularly powerful, as it seemed to be saying that voluntary compliance with the law is the only way in which assessment notices and other measures of that sort should work.
However, the Minister’s comments this morning have slightly changed the position. In the discussion about assessment notices, she said that one reason why there is no enforcement procedure for assessment notices in the main part of the Bill is that the Information Commissioner has all those other enforcement powers. The problem is that schedule 18 seems to be designed—amendment 108 draws attention to a good example of this—to remove the use of those enforcement powers when an assessment notice process has been used. The Government are now in a contradictory position on the relationship between assessment notices and the commissioner’s other enforcement options.