Serious Crime Bill [HL]

It will be a great pleasure to be able to quieten the beating heart of anxiety. I listened with great interest, as always, to the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, exploring her fears—fishing expeditions, citizens becoming suspects, minority reports. The descriptions became ever more glamorous but I am afraid that they were not terribly accurate. I hope that I can assist the noble Baroness—we are doing nothing so dramatic. On the assertion about fishing expeditions, let me make it clear that that is not what we are doing. I know that that is the anxiety, and I hear what the noble Lord, Lord Burnett, says as well. But nothing which is proposed is prevented under the Data Protection Act. Neither the Audit Commission nor law enforcement agencies nor any other body will be given new powers indiscriminately to collect or mine data held by the public sector. The data-sharing provisions will allow the public and private sector to share information on suspected fraudsters to inform decisions on applications for services. This information will be shared on a case-by-case basis. The data-matching provisions allow the national fraud initiative, currently run every two years, to match data sets to detect fraud. The Audit Commission will continue to carry out pilot studies before any new data sets are introduced to ensure that a significant match rate occurs, such that further investigation might be warranted by the body concerned. The new provisions do not in any way release the bodies involved in data-sharing and data-matching from complying with data protection and human rights legislation. So there is no change there. The noble Baroness says that data-matching will predict fraud before it occurs and that that is what the patterns and trends imply. I assure her that that isnot so. Patterns and trends help to predict risks of actual fraud and so assist in targeting efforts on to areas where actual fraud is occurring. That is the experience.