Serious Crime Bill [HL]

My Lords, I apologise for not being in the House when the noble Baroness spoke to the earlier amendments. I was attending a memorial service to a very remarkable South African at Southwark Cathedral. These amendments give me the opportunity to make a brief point that arose from the presentation on the Audit Commission's current fraud initiative. At present, information is brought to the commission on disks, which are carefully stored and then destroyed once the information has been used so that the record is gone. I asked why the commission used disks when we are dealing with electronic information. The reply was, ““We find it easy at the moment but we might want to move on to different methods of providing information, using electronic techniques””. The risks would be different in such a situation. It is well known that, although you can remove information from computers, it is left on hard disks and there are ways of getting at it. It is important that the Information Commissioner in his exchanges with the Audit Commission ensures that, as new techniques are adopted, the commission takes the same care to destroy information and render it secure as it has done until now. We enter into a period of new vulnerability. My noble friend referred to recent incidents that showed the vulnerabilities of computer systems. I hope that the Information Commissioner will pay particular attention to that in his discussions with the Audit Commission and when the codes of practice are being drawn up.