Serious Crime Bill [HL]

My Lords, I shall concentrate on Part 3 of the Bill, the information-sharing provisions, and try to persuade my Front Bench and the Liberal Front Bench that this continual trying to stop the tide will just not work. They are in much the same position as Canute was without showing his wisdom. There are so many good reasons to undertake data sharing. In any individual case you could persuade certainly this Government and I would imagine any Government that it is worth doing. If you are concerned about, for instance, the misuse of provision to support people when they claim that they are disabled, why not take data on people claiming disability benefit and match it, say, with camera data to see who is hopping and skipping round merrily in their town centres when they are supposed to be confined to a wheelchair? Why not look at the data from their credit cards or telephones to see whether they are ranging round the country when they are so disabled? Why not look at their medical and tax data to see what sort of income these people have and whether that is compatible with what they are saving? There is an argument in favour of this which it is possible for the Government to make when faced with substantial levels of fraud. They can say that fraud must be prevented and all that will happen is that people with suspicious patterns of data will be investigated. We will become much more effective at detecting fraud than we were before. There is no good argument before the event for preventing these sorts of activities. The process of this Government and I would imagine of any following Government will be to do this more and more as capabilities improve, because it is the most effective way of preventing fraud. What we have to do, surely, is to ensure that what is being done is within what we find acceptable. The key to that is to know what is being done. So I want to persuade my Front Bench to support the provisions in the Bill—to make a start in this Bill, anyway—that say that where the provisions of Clauses 61 and onwards are used, such use must be registered with the Information Commissioner’s office and the commissioner must have the power to find out more about what is being done in a particular case and to make reports on it. In that way we will build up a real understanding of what is being done in our name and we can consider each individual case in relation to the request that was made, what has been done with the information, and any complaints made to the commissioner about it. We can then judge whether the powers are being used reasonably. There is always an argument for such powers, but there is always a suspicion that when these powers are given they will be used unreasonably. There are many arguments for traffic wardens and for the enforcement of parking tickets. When, some 15 years ago, we passed legislation to decriminalise parking restrictions, it was done with the best of intentions. Now, some councils in this country set out to make the lives of their citizens a misery and to do so in order to generate revenue for themselves. The thing has gone beyond what is reasonable. If you do not have data to show what is going on, it is very difficult indeed to challenge that. The Government are making efforts now to row back on that by removing the incentives given to parking enforcement companies to issue ever greater numbers of tickets and by introducing measures to ensure that efforts are put into keeping the main roads clear, rather than into persecuting mums dropping off their children in the back streets. If we know what is going on, we can pick up on misuse. If misuse is going on at the level the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, talked about, we can say, ““This has gone too far and we need to do something about it””. At the moment, the public want us to do this. They like the idea of fraud being prevented and do not see the danger to themselves. That is fine, and my noble friend on the Front Bench suggested that that understanding permeates her own team. This is not a Bill that will be easy to stand up to because the public do not share in such libertarian outrage as we have. I understand it when the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd of Berwick, and others say that Part 1 of the Bill is a constitutional outrage, but it is going to be very difficult to stand up against it in the current climate. So the way to deal with our worries about data matching is to make sure that we have the information. If Part 1 is to go through, it must do so on the basis that we will record properly what serious crime prevention orders are—who they are given to, why they have been issued, what has been their effect—so that, unlike ASBOs, we know how they are being used and thus apply the proper level of scrutiny to the application of this extraordinary power. I share all the reservations expressed by the Liberal Front Bench and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd, about the direction in which this Bill is taking us, but I do not see that it is stoppable. I do not see a power in the public will to go against it. But we must ensure that we know what is happening in our name. We must understand enough about this measure to ensure that if and when it goes too far we can put a quick stop to it. I despair of this idea that we should prevent crime by penalising people. That is in the Mental Health Bill, which is going through the House at the moment. Where does this principle end? Do we stop people driving because we think they might drive too fast and kill someone? There is no logical limit to it. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd, said, it seems able to reach out to some very small crimes. We know the police’s ability to use Acts that were drawn up to deal with big crimes to deal with little crimes. There is a reference in the Bill to an offence under the Officials Secret Act being one of the serious crimes. Will these orders be issued to investigative journalists to prevent them suborning civil servants to tell the truth about what is going on in their departments? We are in difficult territory. I hope that we manage to make some amendments, but if we do not, whatever happens, this must not take place in secret. We must know what is happening so that when we grow disgusted by the results we can do something about it.