Data Protection Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Lucas and Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb

Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Monday 13th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, the Minister, who is not in his place at the moment, said earlier that he could not understand what I meant by repressive measures, but paragraph 4 of the schedule is exactly what I meant and it is why this amendment would remove it.

The inclusion of an immigration control exemption in the Bill is a brazen violation of the data protection and privacy rights of migrants—both documented and undocumented—and of their families and communities in the name of immigration control. In effect, it removes all the Home Office’s data protection obligations as they relate to its activities to control immigration, as well as those of any other agency processing personal data for the same purpose or sharing data with another agency processing it for that purpose.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, mentioned, it is not the first time that the Government have tried to limit data protection rights on immigration control grounds. In 1983, Clause 28 of the then Data Protection Bill had an identical aim, setting out broad exemptions to data subjects’ rights on grounds of crime, national security and immigration control. The Data Protection Committee, then chaired by Sir Norman Lindop, said that the clause would be,

“a palpable fraud upon the public if … allowed to become law”,

because it allowed data acquired for one purpose to be processed for another; and here is another power grab by this Government.

Clause 28 was rightly removed from the 1983 Bill, but today we see it resurrected with even more breadth and even less definition of its objectives. No attempt whatever has been made to define the new objective: nowhere in the Bill or its Explanatory Notes are the notions of effective immigration control or the activities requiring its maintenance defined. I simply do not understand the colossal cheek this Government have to put something such as this into a Bill and then present it in this House—I can understand it going through the other place but certainly not here. It is virtually impossible to come up with an exhaustive list of all the activities that might be included under this, or of individuals who might be affected. The potential list, as, again, the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, pointed out, could go far beyond the immigrants themselves and could apply to almost anybody, including some in your Lordships’ House—at least, I hope that some in your Lordships’ House might be involved in shelters and food banks.

I urge the Government to think again. This is probably one of the really nasty bits that the Government have an option to take out, so I hope that they will listen to us.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I thoroughly support this amendment. I really hope that the Home Office has noticed that the Bill is starting in this House and that therefore this is a paragraph we can kill—and should, as we did in 1983. If the Home Office needs something more, it should make a case for it and we should listen, but to have a blanket provision such as this is very destructive of data collection as a whole. To take again the example of the NPD, the fact that data is passed from the NPD to the Home Office has made the bits of data that are being passed totally corrupt: one can no longer rely on that data because so many schools, not unnaturally, are unwilling to shop their parents and drop their parents into what can be extremely difficult circumstances. You destroy the purpose of the data that you pollute in this way; you make it unreliable. I suspect that you also undermine the research exemption: if data is actually being collected to give to the Home Office, how can you claim that it is for research? You start to undermine the Bill in all sorts of insidious ways by having such a broad and unjustified paragraph— unjustified in the sense that no one has made a justification for it. I really hope that the Home Office will think again.