Data Protection and Digital Information Bill

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 22nd April 2024 Grand Committee

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, and my noble friend Lord Sikka for introducing their amendments. I also thank all noble Lords who have spoken. I will speak to Amendments 223, 299, 302 and 303 in my name. I should probably say at this point that I am late to this party but, unlike the noble Lord, Lord Vaux, I am not a data protection specialist, I am afraid. However, I am a social security nerd, so I am here for this bit right now.

Since this is the first part of the Bill on DWP powers to tackle fraud, I need to add my little statement on the “fraud is bad” move. Fraud is a problem and has been getting worse across this Government. There have been scandals in procurement, of which the infamous PPE contracts are just one example. There is tax due that goes unpaid at scale and, in social security, the percentage of benefit expenditure lost to fraud has been rising under this Government. However, as my honourable friends made clear in the Commons, a Labour Government would take fraud seriously and pursue all those who seek to take money fraudulently or illegally from the state. They would also focus on helping people to avoid inadvertent overpayments rather than just waiting for them to make mistakes then coming down hard on them at that point. This should not need saying but, in some of the discussions on this Bill elsewhere, there has been a tendency to frame the debates rather along the lines of a classical fallacy: “Fraud is really bad. This will tackle fraud. Therefore, this must be really good”. I know that we are fortunate that in the Minister we have someone who is able to have a much more nuanced debate. I look forward to having exchanges in a way that recognises the important role of this House in scrutinising the powers that the Executive want to take unto themselves, which is exactly what Committees in the House of Lords do so well.

Scrutiny particularly matters here because, as the noble Lord, Lord Vaux, and my noble friend Lord Davies pointed out, all these amendments—more than 200 amendments, 38 new clauses and two new schedules—were introduced on Report in the Commons. My honourable friend Chris Bryant tried to recommit the Bill so that the Commons could discuss it, but the Government refused. The interesting thing is that in their anti-fraud plan back in May 2022, the Government announced that they planned to boost the DWP’s powers to get information from third parties when parliamentary time allowed. The noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, made a fair point that departments have to wait for the right Bill to come along in order to use it, but the Government have known about this since 2022. They have had two years to draft the amendments, so although they might have had to wait for the Bill to come along, that does not seem a good enough reason for them to have waited until Report in the Commons to deposit them into the process. I hope the Minister will be able to explain the reasons for that.

My noble friend Lady Chakrabarti and others have asked some important questions about the scale on which these powers will be used; I am going to come back to that in our debate on the next group. It is hard to know the scale from the information we have so far, but DWP clearly does know, or has a sense of it, because paragraph 85 of the impact assessment states:

“Using our model to estimate volumes of hits for this measure, over the 10-year appraisal period, internal analysis has estimated that in total there will be an additional 74,000 prosecution cases, 2,500 custodial sentences and 23,000 applications for legal aid”.


It has modelled the volume of matching hits that would require investigation. Can the Minister tell the Committee what that number is? Also, what assurance can he give us that DWP has the resources to investigate that number of hits in a timely manner?

Paragraph 2 of new Schedule 3B says that the account information notices can only cover data going back a year and that they must be done in the week before they are given to DWP. Is there any time limit on how long DWP has to act on the results that have been handed over to it?

I turn now to the amendments in my name. Some of them are quite detailed because these powers are astonishingly wide and it is not at all clear how they could be used. I have deliberately tabled a series of amendments—in three groups in order to make sure that we have a chance to go into detail—to try to get information out of the Government and find out what this is about.

Amendment 223 is a minor probing amendment that would delete paragraph 3(1) of new Schedule 3B, which Schedule 11 to the Bill would insert into the 1992 Act. I will not rehearse it here but can the Minister explain what that provision is for and what its limits are? Neither I nor the people I have spoken to in financial services can understand why it is needed.

The noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, and others mentioned the fact that the Information Commissioner said he could not provide to Parliament his assurance that this measure is proportionate. My other amendments in this group are therefore designed to try to understand the impacts better. Amendment 302 would prevent these new powers coming into force automatically, while Amendment 303 would require the Secretary of State to fulfil several requirements before laying regulations to commence the powers. Amendment 299 is a minor consequential amendment. The effect of this is that the Secretary of State would have to issue a call for evidence, to inform the creation of the first code of practice, and consult relevant bodies. They would also have to lay before Parliament statements on key issues, of which I will highlight two.

The first would say whether and how AI will be used in exercising these powers, as well as how those proposals will take account of protected characteristics; this was touched on by my noble friend Lady Lister and others. That benefits often engage protected characteristics is in the nature of social security. Sickness and disability benefits engage disability, obviously; pensions engage age; benefits relating to children may engage age and also indirectly engage sex; and so on. The National Audit Office has warned that machine learning risks bias towards certain vulnerable groups and people with protected characteristics. So, what external governance or oversight is there to ensure that, once data are collected on the scale envisaged here, we do not end up with a mass breach of equality law?

The second issue I want to highlight concerns the provision that will be made to ensure that individuals subject to investigation do not experience hardship during it or lasting detriment afterwards. Given the comments of my noble friend Lady Lister about the cases from CPAG, can the Minister say whether a claimant’s benefits will be kept in payment while they are investigated following the data that are surfaced as a result of these trawls?

I am concerned that, given the potential scale of hits, a claimant who had, say, inadvertently breached the capital limit but then found themselves at the back of a long queue to be investigated could find themselves ending up paying back really large sums. The Minister will be aware of the recent media coverage, which others have mentioned, of how the DWP is treating people who were overpaid the carer’s allowance, a benefit that gives £81.90 a week to people providing at least 35 hours a week of unpaid care. It is a cliff-edge benefit—if your net earnings are under £150 a week, you get the lot; if they are over it, you get nothing—so a small rise in the minimum wage or a change in tax thresholds or rates can be enough to make someone entirely ineligible overnight, even if nothing changes in their circumstances.

As my noble friend Lady Lister said, apparently, DWP’s IT systems can flag when a carer’s income breaches the threshold but it does not necessarily do that, allowing them then to rack up potentially thousands of pounds’ worth of overpayments. The Guardian has investigated this issue; I shall mention two cases that it offered. First, an unpaid carer with a part-time charity job unknowingly breached the threshold by an average of £4.40 a week—£58 in total—caused by the automatic uprating of the national minimum wage. Because that left her not eligible for anything, she ended up being told to repay £1,715, including a civil penalty.

In the second example, a woman caring for her husband with dementia and Parkinson’s was told to repay nearly £4,000 for inadvertently exceeding the earnings threshold by calculating earnings from her zero-hours job on a monthly basis, as she thought the rules required, rather than a four-weekly basis, which they actually do; the rules around allowable costs and earnings are quite complicated. Crucially, according to the Guardian, she was told that, if she appealed, it could cost her even more. The Guardian quotes from a DWP letter telling her that, if she challenged the repayment order,

“the entire claim from the date it started will be looked at, which could potentially result in the overpayment increasing”.

Is that standard practice? Is DWP currently acting on all the alerts it receives of overpayments? If these powers are switched on, what safeguards will there be when that happens to protect millions of people from ending up paying back years of overpayments that DWP could have prevented?

Before embarking on investigations on this scale, we need to understand more about how this measure will work. We have had some excellent questions in Committee from the noble Lord, Lord Vaux, and others; I look forward to the Minister’s reply.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Viscount Younger of Leckie) (Con)]

My Lords, I thank all those who have spoken today. I have been made well aware of the strong views expressed about this measure in Committee. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, for her kind remarks. She is right: I take all these matters extremely seriously. I have listened carefully to all the speeches, although I might not agree with them. Many questions have been asked. I will attempt to cover them all, of course; I doubt that I will be able to but I assure noble Lords that it is likely that a long letter will be required after this. Obviously, I will reflect on all the speeches made in Committee today.

I start by talking about the timing of the introduction of this measure. The noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, said that the measure was introduced, in her words, “on the late side”. As she alluded to, the DWP published the Fraud Plan in May 2022, where it outlined a number of new powers that it would seek to secure when parliamentary time allowed. In answer to her question and others, in the parliamentary time available, the DWP has prioritised our key third-party data-gathering measure, which will help it tackle one of the largest causes of fraud and error in the welfare system. We will not sit back and ignore an opportunity to bring down these unacceptable losses and better protect taxpayers’ money. I will expand on all of that later in my remarks.

Before attending to the themes raised and addressing the amendments, it is important to set out the context for the power for which we are legislating. Fraud is a serious and damaging UK-wide issue, accounting for more than 40% of all crime. To be fair, many speeches alluded to that. The welfare system is also a target for fraudsters, and we are seeing increasingly sophisticated attacks occur on a scale that we have not seen in the past. We all have our own experiences at home of fraudsters who try completely different methods, not linked to the benefits system at all, to try to gain money through ill-gotten uses and methods.

In 2022-23, the DWP paid out more than £230 billion in benefits and payments to people across Great Britain. I very much took note of the figure that my noble friend Lady Buscombe raised. I say to the Committee that this figure is forecast to rise to nearly £300 billion by 2024-25, in quite short order, so this is a really serious issue to address. However, more than £8 billion has been overpaid in each of the past three years because of deliberate fraud against the state or because genuine errors have been made.

To assist the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, to whose speech I listened carefully, fraud, not error, is the biggest cause of welfare overpayments, totalling £6.4 billion of the £8.3 billion overpaid last year. The noble Lord, Lord Vaux, also asked about the figures. These losses are largely because people are intentionally and knowingly taking money that they are not entitled to. This is not organised fraud either; the vast majority comes from individuals who are not entitled to the money. We cannot underestimate the lengths to which some will go in order to take money they are not entitled to or promote ways to defraud us to a wider audience. This new legislation is not just about protecting the taxpayer; it will help those who make genuine mistakes in their claim, and our swift action will avoid them building up large overpayments.

Some people have said that the department has the powers that it needs to fight fraud and error—I think that was alluded to even today. However, some of the current powers that we have to ensure benefit correctness are over 20 years old—a point that I think my noble friend Lady Buscombe made. In this time, fraud has evolved and become increasingly sophisticated and we must keep pace with the fraudsters. It is for this reason that the Government are bringing these new third-party data powers, as set out, as said earlier, in the fraud plan.

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Moved by

[Baroness Sherlock]

220: Schedule 11, page 245, line 1, leave out from “only” to “relevant” in line 3 and insert “in cases where there are grounds to suspect that”
Member's explanatory statement
This amendment, alongside others to paragraph 1 of Schedule 11 in the name of Baroness Sherlock, would reframe the Secretary of State’s power to give account information notices, making clear that the power should only be used in cases where there is suspicion that benefits are not being paid in accordance with enactments and rules of law relating to those benefits.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, I will also speak to the other amendments in my name, which are designed to dig further into exactly what the Government plan to do with these powers. Amendments 220 to 222 are probing amendments which seek to establish what would happen if the powers to give account information notices were used only where there is suspicion that benefits are not being paid as the law intends. I will try to use this to find out exactly what will happen with the signal that the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, has been referring to.

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[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

My Lords, the debate on this group has focused largely on the amendments from the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, regarding using powers only where there is a suspicion of fraud, making provisions so that information collected can be used only for the narrow purpose of determining overpayment, removing pension-age benefits from the scope of the powers and requiring approval from Parliament before the power can be used on specific working-age benefits.

I was going to go over the reason behind these measures once again, but I will not delay the Committee on why we are bringing them forward. I believe I did that at some length in the previous group, so I am going to turn to the amendments raised.

Narrowing these powers as suggested by the noble Baroness, with Amendments 220, 221, 222 and 222A, will leave us exposed to those who are deliberately aiming to defraud the welfare system and undermine the policy intent of this measure. In fact, taken together, these amendments would render the power unworkable and ineffective.

To restrict the power to cases where DWP already has a suspicion of fraud, as suggested by the noble Baroness, would defeat the purpose of this measure. The intent is to enable us to use data from third parties to independently check that benefit eligibility rules are being complied with. We use data from other sources to do this already. For example, we use data from HMRC to verify earnings in UC and check that the benefit eligibility rules are being complied with. Parliament has determined that, to be eligible for a benefit, certain rules and requirements must be met, and the Government have a responsibility to ensure that taxpayers’ money is spent responsibly. Therefore, the DWP should be able to utilise information from third parties to discharge that duty. This is an appropriate and proportionate response to a significant fraud and error challenge.

The noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, also proposed that the power should be restricted such that it would not apply to persons who hold an account into which a benefit is paid on behalf of someone who cannot manage their own financial affairs—such persons are referred to as “appointees”. An appointee is a person who may be appointed by the Secretary of State to act on behalf of the benefit customer. Usually, the appointee becomes legally responsible for acting on the customer’s behalf in all matters related to the claim. It is also made clear to the appointee, in the documents that they sign, that we may get information about them or the person they are acting for from other parties, or for any other purposes that the law allows, to check the information they provide.

Under our proposed legislation, it is right to say that there may be some people who are not themselves benefit claimants but who have given a person permission to pay benefits into their bank account, who may be picked up in the data returned by third parties. Under the noble Baroness’s amendment, we would not be able to gather data on appointees, which would make the power unworkable, because third parties would not be able to distinguish between an individual managing their own benefit and an appointee. It also assumes that no fraud or error can occur in these cases, which is definitely wrong. I assure the noble Baroness that we handle such cases regularly and have robust existing processes for identifying appointees on our own database and for carefully handling cases of this nature.

The noble Baroness would also like to see the power—

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

Rather than asking all my questions at the end—I only have four—I will try to get answers as we go. On the appointees, I think that the Minister has just said that the reason the Government need these powers is that some appointees will have their benefit money paid into their own account, not into a separate second account, so that therefore needs to be the case. I am very happy to reword this amendment to make that clear. I was talking specifically about the linking arrangements; the amendment does not talk about excluding appointee accounts. It specifically says that accounts that are linked to an account into which the benefit is paid are not there. I am happy to reframe that in a way that defines it—I am sure we can find a way around this—but does the Minister accept the principle behind this: that, if there is a separate account that, say, I hold for a child who is there, this should not give a reason to look into my own accounts? Or is he saying that the Government want to look into my own accounts, or business accounts, or family accounts as well? Which is it?

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

The Government do wish to have that power. I should make it clear that an appointee could be a claimant as well, so there is a dual issue. It is important that we retain that power, to be sure that we cover the whole ground. But I will reflect on the noble Baroness’s point.

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[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

That is understood. I know that I need to provide further reassurances. Attorneys are included for the reasons that I set out for appointees.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for taking the time to try to answer the questions. I know that we have given him a hard time, but I thank him for responding so graciously.

He did not take the opportunity to explain the process simply to the Committee. It may be that it is too difficult to explain simply or that, in fact, he can explain what they intend to do, but the powers allow them to do something much wider than that. It would be helpful if he could reflect before he writes as to how best to frame this. I think I heard him trying to say to the Committee that people think that more information is being handed over than will in fact be handed over. If that is the case, it would be helpful if he could spell that out because that would at least begin to help people understand better what is going on.

Secondly, in responding to me, the Minister focused, understandably, on the content of the amendments. I was trying to explain that the reason they are probing is that it is quite hard to get a handle on this. It is a big, sprawly thing, and I am trying to find a way of nailing some jelly to the table; I am trying to find ways of containing it. I still do not know which benefits the Government can use the powers over and which ones they intend to. It is a great step forward to know where they are going to start; that is really helpful. I am also grateful for the clarity, whether people are happy or not, that the Government intend to use the powers on the state pension and make that clear because that was not the impression given in the House of Commons when the matter was debated there. That is a helpful piece of clarity for the Committee and the wider community.

I know this is hard; fraud is difficult. A case was mentioned where an organised fraud gang stole more than £50 million in social security benefits. I know it is hard, and I know it is hard for the DWP to understand precisely where these things will lead when you begin to go there. I understand that if it is too boxed in, it makes it difficult to be able to follow where the fraudsters go, who are often one step ahead of the Government. I get all of that, but there is a risk that when it has spread so widely, the level of concern gets to the point that it will not be as publicly acceptable as the Minister thinks it is. I ask him to take the opportunity, when he goes back to the department, to talk to colleagues and think about what kind of assurances the Government could try to find a way of giving to people, either staging processes or government oversight. I ask him to think about that because the kinds of concerns he has heard here will only increase as the powers start to unfold.

In the next group of amendments, which I think will now be discussed on Wednesday, I want to dig further into the question of who the data and account notice can be given to and what criteria will be used. That will be another chance to flush out some things, so I give notice now that I would like the Minister to look into those areas next. I am grateful for his efforts and to all Members of the Committee who have explored this matter. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 220 withdrawn.

Data Protection and Digital Information Bill

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 24th April 2024 Grand Committee

Moved by

[Baroness Sherlock]

225: Schedule 11, page 247, line 22, leave out “may” and insert “must”
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would make it a requirement for the Secretary of State to issue a code of practice in connection with the use of account information notices.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, in moving Amendment 225, I will speak to the other amendments in this group. They cover two issues: first, the code of practice, which features in Part 2 of new Schedule 3B, inserted by the Bill into the Social Security Administration Act 1992. Paragraph 6(1) of new Schedule 3B says:

“The Secretary of State may issue a code of practice in connection with account information notices”.


Amendment 225 would change “may” to “must”. Paragraph 6(2) mentions some matters that a code “may” include and Amendment 226 would change that “may” to “must”.

Amendment 227 would ensure that a code of practice includes the criteria to be used by the Secretary of State in determining whether to issue account information notices—I will come back to criteria shortly. Amendment 230 would require the Government to consult on the draft code of conduct with consultees including the Social Security Advisory Committee and organisations that would have to comply with account information notices. Amendment 231 would require the code of practice and any revisions to it to be approved by both Houses of Parliament. The Secretary of State would still be able to withdraw a code of practice, but the ability to issue notices would lapse if no code were in force. Amendments 228, 229 and 232 are consequential.

The other matter covered in this group is how the Government report to Parliament on these notices. Amendment 233 amends new Schedule 3B to provide for annual reporting to Parliament on the use of account information notices. As well as requiring the provision of statistics around the use of such notices during the previous financial year, the amendment would compel the Secretary of State to outline his or her views on the proportionality and effectiveness of notices. I hope that the need for these amendments is self-evident. Ministers are proposing to take new powers of astonishing breadth, which will involve the ability to search the bank accounts of tens of millions of our citizens, most of whom will have done nothing wrong. There is still very little detail about how these powers could be, or will be, used.

I will address two particular sets of issues. The first is criteria. Paragraph 2 of new Schedule 3B explains that banks have to return information about matching accounts. As well as specifying the identity of the account holders, they have to meet certain risk criteria. The Bill, the Explanatory Memorandum and briefings always talk in terms of examples of those criteria, usually around capital limits or time abroad. But my understanding, which may be wrong—I invite the Minister to correct me if I am—is that the criteria could be anything related to eligibility for the benefits in question.

For example, the eligibility for some benefits includes being a single parent. Paragraph 2(2)(a) of new Schedule 3B says that an account information notice

“may require information relating to a person who holds a matching account even if the person does not claim a relevant benefit”.

On our last day in Committee, we established that that directly related to appointees, but that made me wonder whether it could apply to anybody else. For example, we also established that a notice could cover a joint account where one of the holders is the person to whom the benefit is paid and the other is not. Would this power allow DWP to ask banks to search for any accounts linked to any single parent and to examine those accounts for evidence that they and the other holder of a joint account might be living together? Would these powers allow DWP to devise any criteria designed to identify whether a claimant was living with another adult? To be clear, I am not asking whether it intends to do that or whether it knows how to do that. I am just asking whether it would be permissible. Is this a category of thing that it could do under the powers in the Bill?

Related to that, could DWP issue notices to a bank other than that into which the benefit is paid? Again, we have heard that the intention is to go only to the bank into which the benefit is paid, but I want to know specifically: does this Bill gives DWP the power to do that or would it need additional primary legislation to do it?

Secondly, the Bill does not say that notices can be given only to banks. It says that they can be given only to a “person of prescribed description”. The Information Commissioner said:

“I have been unable to identify where such persons are prescribed and the provision itself is silent on the matter”.


It is therefore unclear which organisations will be in scope of the power or how this will be determined. Can the Minister tell us any more about who will be covered and how that will be determined? Who could be subject to a notice? A bank or a building society could be, clearly, but could a credit union, a Christmas club savings scheme or any other financial body?

Paragraph 58 of the impact assessment on this part of the Bill says:

“This measure is drafted broadly to ensure it is future-proofed against future changes and innovation, particularly in the financial services sector, i.e. in Fintech and Crypto, and enable DWP to apply this measure to non-financial organisations in future if it is deemed appropriate and proportionate”.


Can the Minister give the Committee an example of a non-financial organisation that could be appropriate? Specifically, could this apply to, for example, phone companies? Given the open-ended nature of the powers being taken, one way for Ministers to give reassurance to both the Committee and the wider public would be to ensure that DWP is constrained by a clear and transparent code of practice over which Parliament has oversight and that it reports to Parliament on the way it is using these powers. If the Minister does not like the approach in this amendment, perhaps he could offer the Committee other forms of assurance in this area. I beg to move.

[Lord Anderson of Ipswich (CB)]

My Lords, I apologise to the Committee that duties elsewhere in the House prevented me from attending the last two debates on Monday and so from speaking to the amendments that I had tabled and signed. However, I have read the Official Report with care.

I cannot pretend to be a data protection nerd, or even a social security nerd, like some speakers in those debates, but I hope that I pass muster as a surveillance nerd, having written for the Home Secretary two of the reports that informed the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 and, more recently, a report that informed the Investigatory Powers (Amendment) Bill, which I see is to be given Royal Assent tomorrow.

I support all the amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, in this group. Of course there must be a code of practice. Of course it must be consulted on and scrutinised. I would add that that of course we could not contemplate passing this schedule into law until we have seen and studied it. An annual report of the sort that accompanies the reasonable suspicion power to issue financial institution notices, exercised by HMRC under Schedule 36 to the Finance Act 2008, would also be useful. For example, it is from the last of those reports, dated January 2024, that I learned that these reasonable suspicion tax information powers were now being used to obtain location data—something that it had previously been said would not be done.

Dan Squires, one of the authors of the legal opinion that I know was referred to on Monday, is not only a King’s Counsel but a deputy High Court judge and a genuine expert in this area. He and his junior, Aidan Wills, point in that opinion to the personal nature of some of the data that could be harvested under the proposed power and advise that Schedule 11 does not come close to the safeguards required for compliance with Article 8. They refer in particular to the striking lack of clarity about the grounds on which and the circumstances in which the proposed power can be used, as well as to the absence of both independent authorisation and independent oversight. They point out that, although saving up to £600 million over five years is a very important objective, it weighs no more heavily—indeed, probably less heavily—than the normal justifications for obtaining information in bulk: protecting national security and the prevention and detection of serious crime. Their opinion is well referenced, persuasive and consistent with the view on proportionality expressed by both the Information Commissioner and the Constitution Committee, on which I sit.

On Monday, the Minister referred to the power in Schedule 23 to the Finance Act 2011 to obtain certain data items from particular classes of data holder—for example, employers and land agents. So I had a look at that schedule and the data-gathering regulations under its paragraph 1. The power would appear to apply only to certain tightly defined items, such as payments made by the employer or arising from use of land. There would appear to be a noticeable contrast with location data, personal spending habits and so on, which fall within the scope of the powers in this schedule, as they are written in the Bill. Both HMRC and the Home Office operate under powers tightly defined in legislation. Assurances that those powers will be used in a restrained way, as Justice has commented in its useful briefing on the Bill, simply do not cut it. I am afraid that the law requires the DWP to be subject to the same constraints.

I am concerned: concerned that this important new power was not subject to detailed consultation or even to scrutiny by a Commons Bill Committee, where useful evidence could have been heard; concerned that it could even have been contemplated that so vague a power might be in the Bill and not accompanied by a code of practice; concerned about the absence of an independent approval and oversight mechanism, equivalent to the Office for Communications Data Authorisations and the Investigatory Powers Commissioner’s Office; and concerned that, if we do not get this potentially valuable power right from the start, it will immediately be subject to legal challenges, which will swiftly render it unusable.

If, as I believe, Schedule 11 is currently unfit for purpose, is there time to rescue it? I have a couple of practical suggestions. First, I saw the investigatory powers unit from the Home Office when it happened to be in the House yesterday, and I wondered if there might be utility in it comparing notes with the Bill team about these types of powers and their attendant safeguards.

Secondly, I hope the Government appreciate the significance—at least to us nerds in the Committee—of the legal analysis of Dan Squires KC and Aidan Wills. If we are to be told that it is mistaken, which would certainly be unusual, I for one would like to see that backed up by an opinion from a lawyer of equivalent stature, whether at the GLD or independent counsel, explaining precisely and persuasively why Mr Squires and Mr Wills are wrong. Otherwise, and without significant change of the type identified in the opinion, I am afraid I am not inclined to give this schedule the benefit of the doubt.

I signed up to the stand part notice of the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, thinking it would at least be a platform to think about what amendments to the schedule might be needed. The more I read the schedule and the more I hear about it, the more I am driven to the conclusion that, if we do not see substantial change, opposing the schedule may be the way that we have to go at the next stage.

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[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

My understanding —with his experience, I am sure that the noble Lord will be ahead of me on this—is that this is defined. We define it pretty clearly in paragraph 1(2). In the interests of time, I will reflect on what he has asked and will be absolutely sure to add this to the letter that I pledged to write on Monday—it is getting bigger by the moment, as I fully expected.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, as I asked only four questions, I want to try to nail each one as we go. I am grateful to the Minister. Before we leave the matter of the kind of organisations to which this applies, I think that he is saying that the Bill would allow the DWP to request information from any kind of organisation, including phone companies, which I asked about specifically. The kinds of organisations are to be specified in regulations, which the Government will bring forward, initially naming financial institutions. By virtue of further regulations, could they extend that to anything—to Garmin, the people who monitor your runs, to gyms and to anyone else? Is that correct?

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

That is correct. I hope indeed that it provides some reassurance that extending it to the banks and financial institutions initially is deliberately designed to be narrow. It would be subject to both Houses to debate other areas beyond those. I am coming on to address that. The noble Baroness asked about phone companies. Simply put, we will be able to designate the third parties that fit within the provisions of this legislation where they hold information that would help us to verify whether someone meets the eligibility criteria for the benefit that they are receiving. However, ultimately, it would be for Parliament to decide whether a third party can be designated under this power, as we must bring affirmative regulations forward to do this. We have that power.

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[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

I am most grateful to the Minister. There is one question, so I apologise if he answered it and I did not quite pick it up. I specifically asked if these powers would allow the DWP to devise criteria designed to identify if a claimant was in fact living with another adult. With the appropriate regulation, would the powers allow it to do that?

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

That is one of the questions that I can now answer. The power will allow this, in so far as it pertains to helping the Secretary of State establish whether the benefits are being paid properly, as with paragraph 1(2) of new Schedule 3B. Rules around living together are relevant only to some benefits. That is a very short answer, but I could expand on it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

No, I did not, but that is something which surely we can deal with outside the Room. However, I can assure noble Lords that it is in there.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his attempts to answer my questions and those of many noble Lords. I will not detain the Committee for very long at all.

I am grateful to know that there will be a code and that it will be consulted on. Given that, it would have saved an awful lot of trouble if the Government had simply not put “may” in the Bill in the first place—that would have cut out a whole loop of this. I am very grateful to know that that is there. I agree with the Minister that we all want to know about and to clamp down on fraud and error; the question is one of proportionality.

When the Minister comes to write—I realise that this letter is turning into “War and Peace”, but it will make us all come to Report in a much better place if we can get a clearer answer to many of these questions— I still wonder whether he properly answered the question from the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, about the legality of these powers, because the point about when they engage is crucial. The Minister is still coming back to a distinction between the gathering of the data and what the DWP will do using its existing “business as usual” powers, to investigate. I think the point the noble Lord was making is that the question of legality engages at the point of that data gathering, not at the point at which it is used, if I am correct. I am not sure that the Minister answered that—I am not inviting him to do it now—but I specifically suggest that he takes advice on that point before we come back on Report.

The other issue is that, if the Government have come in so late in the day introducing these powers into the Bill, it would have been better to have draft regulations before Report at the first stage. The Minister thinks the code can be available in the summer, but the summer is fast approaching so I see no reason why the usual channels could not accommodate the date for Report to allow us to go past the date for producing a draft code if the Government wish to. I realise that they may not wish to, but it must be perfectly possible—unless the Minister knows something I do not about a likely date of a general election, presumably we should still have time to do that. So I commend that thought to him.

However, we also know that a lot of the constraints he has described will happen solely in regulations. Everybody in this Committee is aware of the limitations of the capacity of both Houses to do anything about regulations. We cannot amend them here. The Government will bring them forward, but the capacity of us to do anything about that is small, so that is not as much of an assurance as it would be in other circumstances.

Finally, what I am left with is that these powers could do anything from something that might sound very proportionate to something that might sound entirely disproportionate, and we simply have not heard anything that enables us to make a judgment early enough to know where that is contained. I therefore ask the Government to think again before Report about ways in which they might provide assurance about a more contained and proportionate approach to these measures.

Since we are in Committee, in the meantime, I thank all noble Lords for their work on this and the Minister for his response. Before I beg leave to withdraw, I see that the Minister is intervening on me now, which is a joyful change.

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

Before the noble Baroness sits down, I want to say one very important thing. As ever with Bills, there is an opportunity to engage, and I pledge right now to engage with all noble Lords who wish to, and we would like to as well, on these particular measures, to provide, I hope, further reassurances to those that I have given. I hope there is some acceptance that I have given some reassurances.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, I am sure that on behalf of the Committee I can thank the Minister for that generous offer, and we look forward to taking it up. In the meantime, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 225 withdrawn.