Data Protection Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Stevenson of Balmacara and Lord Blencathra

Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Wednesday 13th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra]

Perhaps I may give the noble Lord some information which he may not have been aware of, as he may have left the Met by then. The reason that maybe up to 100 people were able to sue on the hacking was because their names appeared in the Mulcaire diaries, and the Met team kindly went and told every single person who had possibly been hacked, “They’re after you. You’re in Mulcaire’s diaries and you may care to contact some lawyers. Here are some lawyers who are doing a group action. If you join that, there is no great risk to yourself—you will be in there with a lot of others. The lawyers will be there on a no-win no-fee basis and you’re perfectly safe to do it”. That is why most of those people were able to go together in a joint action, but the thousands of individuals do not have a hope.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, I have been trying to search for words to explain what is going on at the moment. It seems to me that we are living in two parallel universes. My first thought was that we were back in World War I territory—the noble Lord, Lord Black, will get the reference—and that we were engaging in sniping over long pieces of dead ground over issues that nobody could understand, fought by people who did not want to be there and led by people even more stupid than that. But I have decided that this is the rerun of an acrimonious family dinner that we had before the break. We are now reflecting on that and trying to nerve ourselves up to talk again to each other and restore relationships, because relationships must go on.

Again, we have had these passionate stories, anecdotes and recollections of times when things have gone disastrously wrong. No amount of legal redress can undo that suffering. From others, we have heard a perfectly robust and understandable account of why things are perfectly all right at the moment and, given time, will be sorted out. I begin to think that Leveson, for all the great work he did and the excellence of his report—and the longevity of its recommendations—is a bit of a McGuffin here. This is about us and society; it is about Parliament. I tried to address some of that at the end of the last debate. We have to get serious about this and work out how to make progress. We have to restore the rightful balance between Parliament, which must be sovereign, and those who work within an environment in which Parliament seems at the moment to have been discounted.

If we do not get this sorted, we will continue to be like this for the rest of time. It is insufficient and ineffective. It will not be the way we want to live our lives and we will all be much the losers as a result. We must give credit to the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, and her proposals. Yes, they come from Leveson—but underneath that there is the greater truth that things are not working as they could be. They should be working better.