Serious Crime Bill [HL]

I wish to pick the noble Baroness up on a couple of points that I did not hear answers to. It is clear that, if an individual is identified as a resultof data-matching, their confidential data will be disclosed. It may be a case of matching benefit data with bank account data, looking for certain patterns of movements of money out of an account after it has been received as a benefit to indicate that that person is likely to have more than one identity in the benefit system. The agency taking action will need to know about those bank accounts and the data that go with them. That is fairly sensitive data. As I said previously, a current example is the licence fee and the purchase of television receivers. The authorities are notably insensitive in dealing with matches where they find a television receiver being purchased without a licence. They write extremely rude letters and can get quite harassing. People may be sent letters about the state of their bank accounts and be asked to justify what is going on. They may suddenly find that their personal details have been disclosed. Sometimes it will be a right match and there will be something there, but on other occasions someone will be left feeling extremely upset. What safeguards does the noble Baroness envisage will be imposed on an authority in possession of very private information when it undertakes an investigation? Will it have to keep its investigations private until it is assured that a fraud is being committed, or will people find themselves involved in an investigation and forced to justify perfectly innocent activities?